The bakeneko bared her teeth at Sekken and hissed, tail lashing back and forth. He could see the long claws curving out of her toes to dig into the earth. The thin line of rope seemed to be holding her in for now – but if she leapt for Ryōtora…
The shugenja hadn’t backed away. Not that it would make any difference if he did; the bakeneko was the size of a snow leopard, and could easily cover the small space of the enclosure in a single pounce. Sekken wished Ryōtora would duck under the rope – or would that weaken or undo whatever he’d done to her? Sekken didn’t know. Everything had seemed like a fascinating intellectual exercise until this moment, when he came face-to-face with an angry monster cat.
He’d read countless scrolls and books about yōkai. They were rather different outside the safe confines of a library.
“Let me out!” It seemed the cat could still talk, even in this form. Her voice was thinner than Aoi’s, a little higher pitched. But the complete lack of deference was still there, and made far more sense now. Of course a cat wasn’t impressed by a mere samurai.
“Not until we have more answers,” Ryōtora said steadily. If he was afraid, he showed no hint of it. “You’re the one responsible for that animated corpse, aren’t you. The one you told us about, trying to persuade us there was a mahō-tsukai in Seibo Mura.”
Her fangs were easily as long as Sekken’s little finger, and bone white. “That wasn’t my doing!”
“Why should we believe you?”
The bakeneko started to pace toward Ryōtora, and the inugami growled. It had abandoned its show of strength, allowing its head to sag once more, but at no point had it turned its attention away from the cat. The bakeneko sidled away from it, fur rising. “Get that thing away from me.”
“No, I think this one is quite useful,” Sekken said. “You haven’t answered the question.”
“I’m supposed to have a civilized conversation with people who just stripped me bare, while trapped in this spot, with a different ward telling me I’m not welcome here and should leave at once, and yet another ward binding me to stay?” She hissed again.
Ryōtora said, “Whether the conversation is civilized or not is beside the point. Why should I believe that you didn’t desecrate a corpse?”
Her tail lashed again, and then the bakeneko turned so her rump was facing first Ryōtora, then Sekken. At first Sekken assumed she was just being rude – until she said, “How many tails do I have?”
Seeing Ryōtora’s confusion, Sekken replied, “One, not two. You’re not the nekomata seen during the attacks. So what? Nekomata may be more evil than bakeneko, but that doesn’t mean you’re good.”
She lifted her lip at him in delicate contempt. “I don’t claim to be good. But I am more a creature of Chikushō-dō than Sakkaku.”
“A virtuous animal spirit,” Ryōtora mused.
The creatures that called Senkyō home had varying allegiances. Sekken said, “‘Virtuous’ might be going a little far in this case. But you at least acknowledge the Celestial Order, and hope for eventual reincarnation as a human?”
“I certainly don’t make corpses get up and dance for my entertainment. Filthy habit.” She licked briefly at one paw and rubbed it over her head. It was simultaneously an expression of disdain, and an echo of the way she’d scratched at herself before. She really was uncomfortable here.
“Then who did?” Sekken demanded.
“Someone more inclined toward Sakkaku, obviously.”
Ryōtora’s voice sank in pitch, like a warning rumble from the earth. “I don’t want to force answers out of you. But if you do not begin to cooperate, I will.”
It was the same demeanor he’d shown toward the villagers when they went after Ogano, and all the more effective because it didn’t come from a place of anger. Ryōtora’s sense of compassion extended even to an inhuman creature like a bakeneko. But when that current tried to flow in two directions at once, then Ryōtora would sacrifice whatever mercy the yōkai might deserve for the sake of the people he was duty-bound to protect.
She felt it, too. Her fur fluffed slightly, but she settled her haunches onto the ground and wrapped her tail primly around her feet. “My mother.”
A snort of disbelief escaped Sekken. The tip of the bakeneko’s tail twitched in irritation. “Yes, I have one. We start as ordinary cats, you know. With dams and sires and littermates. All the latter are long dead – they didn’t live long enough to become yōkai – and few kittens ever know their sires, but my mother became a bakeneko before me, and then in time her tail split and she became a nekomata. Before you can ask… no, she and I do not get along.”
He supposed it was plausible. The part about bakeneko starting out as normal cats was common knowledge; he’d just never thought about the possibility of familial connections among them. “Is she also in the village?”
“No.” Another twitch of her tail. “Not until the full moon.”
When the Night Parade returned. “Lord Asako’s third question,” Ryōtora said. She hadn’t told them yet what happened to Aoi, but Sekken feared that was the least urgent of the three. “How are you able to stay in the village, when the rest of the Night Parade seems to be exiled?”
Her ears flicked in what Sekken thought might be amusement. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Judging by Ryōtora’s expression, it wasn’t at all. But Sekken suppressed a groan as he saw the error in his own reasoning. “You aren’t a member of the Night Parade.”
“Just a poor, innocent cat caught up in this net. If you’d had the decency to take me only a little further south, past the bounds of that stupid confining ward, I would have been long gone. One less problem for you to deal with.”
One more problem unleashed on the world, Sekken thought. Even a virtuous bakeneko was often middling at best. This one certainly didn’t seem to be interested in helping anyone, any more than she had to.
Ryōtora seemed no more convinced than he was. “An innocent cat… who happens to be the offspring of a nekomata. And from the sound of it, your mother is part of the Night Parade.”
The cat sighed. “Fine. My curiosity got the better of me – will you believe that, at least? I saw everyone streaming across into the realm of mortals, and I wanted to see what was going on. So I followed them. Only then I couldn’t leave! I truly want nothing more than to get away from this, before–”
She stopped, ears flattening. “Before what?” Ryōtora prompted.
Sekken thought back to the speculation he and Ryōtora had shared. “Before Nura–”
The bakeneko yowled so loudly that Sekken clapped his hands over his ears and the inugami started barking back at her. “Don’t say that name!” she snarled.
“I already have,” Sekken said cautiously, wondering if he’d made a serious error. “When we realized that the – is it safe to name the phenomenon? – that the chaos in Seibo Mura was the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons. What did that do?”
She got up and paced a circuit around the enclosure, staring out at the surrounding forest. “If you’re lucky, nothing. He’s still confined – I think. I hope.”
Which explained why Nurarihyon hadn’t appeared during any of the outbreaks so far. “What can you tell us about him?”
“Me? Very little. He’s…” The bakeneko sat down again, but she was restless, shifting position again and again. “You humans tell stories about creatures like us to scare each other. To make children behave and travelers be wary. We yōkai? We tell each other stories of him.”
A bogeyman for yōkai. Sekken thought briefly – irrelevantly – of the reports he could write when he got back home. I’ll be Rokugan’s foremost expert on the Night Parade.
Only if he got home safely, though.
“Then tell us what you do know,” Ryōtora said.
Still the cat hesitated. Ryōtora stood for a moment, looking at Sekken, but this time Sekken couldn’t guess what he was thinking. Then Ryōtora said, “Here. As a gesture of good faith.”
Sekken took an involuntary step forward when Ryōtora went to the corner where he had tied both ends of the rope to a smaller tree. The inugami growled low in its throat. But Ryōtora held up a placating hand, then untied the rope and began coiling it up, reversing the circuit Sekken had made around the trees.
The bakeneko’s fur sleeked down again, and she washed herself vigorously. “Your ward is still telling me to go away,” she complained, but it sounded more querulous now than hostile. “Fine. Sit down – make that dog stop growling at me – and I’ll tell you what I can.”
The inugami sat with its head in Sekken’s lap again. Sekken wasn’t sure when exactly the spirit had gone from being a terrifying curse to an odd sort of companion; it was a gradual process, he thought, beginning when it appeared in daylight, and reaching a new equilibrium after it showed them the plaque bearing the name of Ingyō Jinja. He wondered if it had a name.
“Do you have a name?” he asked the bakeneko as Ryōtora finished setting the rope aside and paused to thank the kami of the hemlock for its assistance.
“Of course,” she answered. “Are we friends now, that I should tell it to you?”
“Your choice,” Sekken said with a shrug. “It depends on how much you object to being called Neko-chan.”
As he’d hoped, the cute diminutive irritated her. “You may call me Sayashi.”
Better than calling her by the name of a dead girl. Sekken assumed the real Aoi was dead. While Masa might believe his daughter Chie had only been stolen away, there was no proof he was right, nor that anyone else had been spared. Sekken still wanted to know if the bakeneko was responsible for that.
Ryōtora was right, though: getting information on Nurarihyon took priority. The shugenja settled down on the other side of the inugami’s sprawled limbs and said, “Sayashi. It’s time for you to talk.”
Her claws dug gently into the earth, as if for comfort. “He’s been imprisoned for… oh, a long time; we don’t bother to count years the way you mortals do. And time doesn’t always pass the same between the realms, regardless.”
“Imprisoned by whom?”
The flick of her ears had the air of a shrug. “Why should I know? Some mortal. A very powerful one, I presume, or they would have never captured him. No one in Senkyō knew where – well, perhaps someone did. But they have no reason to share. It isn’t as if anyone particularly mourned his loss.”
If he was a bogeyman to yōkai, that wasn’t surprising. Sekken buried his fingers in the inugami’s fur and closed his eyes, imagining what they knew and what they surmised laid out before him like the broken pieces of a pot. Trying to see how they fit together. “You say N… he has been imprisoned. What about the rest of the Night Parade?”
“His imprisonment was their freedom.”
The pieces flipped themselves around. Sekken opened his eyes and found Sayashi grooming herself again. Ryōtora said, “You mean… they aren’t all trapped here.”
“Not like he is,” Sayashi confirmed. “He’s been summoning them each night when the full moon rises. They have to come, and they can’t leave this place until it sets; then they go back to Senkyō. But I’m not bound to him, and I missed my opportunity to leave.”
“So why do you need me to take you across the boundary? It sounds like you came here from Senkyō; why not simply return there with the rest of them during the next full moon?”
Her tail lashed in irritation. “Do you want me here in the village when they start rampaging again? I may call myself part of Chikushō-dō instead of Sakkaku, but that’s hardly a permanent allegiance. If I see them having fun, tormenting the mortals… I might just be tempted to join in.”
It was a bluff. Not false, Sekken thought; Sayashi absolutely was willing to contemplate tossing virtue aside and aligning herself with those who took delight in causing trouble for humans. But that wasn’t her actual reason.
“You’re afraid of him,” he said. “The one you don’t want me to name.”
Sayashi’s tail puffed up involuntarily, and she licked it down again with a hasty tongue. “Not… afraid. But I have no interest in becoming part of the Night Parade. And if I ride along with them when they leave…”
“Then you might get trapped in a different way,” Ryōtora said, understanding. “I have no more interest in seeing that happen than you do. When we’re done here, I’ll do what I can for you.”
Sekken’s hand tensed. “One moment. We haven’t yet established whether this bakeneko is a murderer.”
“I’m not,” she snapped.
“Is Aoi dead?”
“Yes.” Sayashi showed no particular regret at the statement; he wouldn’t have believed it if she had. Still, her casual lack of concern felt like a slap. “But I didn’t kill her. She died trying to save some other girl – a friend of hers, I presume.”
“What girl?”
She could have taught lessons to Crane courtiers about how to look disdainful. “How should I know? It’s been tiresome enough, trying to learn the names of those who are still alive. This all happened just before dawn, when I was trying to avoid the others. I was up a tree, and I saw them dragging the girl along – a whole pack of them, with her in their midst. Aoi was stupid for running at them. The raiju shot itself through her and she dropped dead.” Sayashi sniffed. “She was lucky. The sarugami wanted to claim her as a prize, and that would have been much worse for her. But the others said no, they were only going to take the one they already had.”
The one they already had. Sekken looked at Ryōtora, and found the shugenja’s eyes wide. Could Masa have been right about Chie?
“This other girl,” Ryōtora said. “Was she about sixteen?”
“She might have been. I’m not good with human ages. Older than a child, but I think not so old that she had kittens of her own yet.”
It wasn’t proof, but it was the best they were likely to get out of Sayashi. “Why were they taking her?” Sekken asked. “If it was as food, there would be no reason for them not to take a second victim. Or even if they were just going to torment her.”
Again her ears flicked. “I don’t know. I was mostly concerned with making sure they didn’t see me – especially since my mother was among them. We don’t exactly get along. But it didn’t seem like the usual sort of amusement.”
Sekken racked his brain, trying to think what use yōkai might have for Chie, beyond the obvious. Something specific to the Night Parade? The stories didn’t mention anything along those lines… but then, the stories weren’t written as factual accounts. How long ago had Nurarihyon been imprisoned? Centuries, at the very least; maybe even before the dawn of the Empire.
“After that,” Ryōtora said. “What happened to Aoi’s body?”
“I didn’t eat it,” Sayashi said, with such a great air of dignity that Sekken suspected she had eaten corpses at some point in the past. His stomach curdled. “I dragged it off into the forest and buried it. I could tell I’d missed my chance to leave, and sooner or later someone was going to comment on the enormous black cat skulking about. My best option was to disguise myself.” Her whiskers twitched. “In hindsight, I should have taken on the appearance of the one they kidnapped. That would have been less effort.”
Ryōtora’s voice was flat and hard. “The effort you went to is not our concern. Aoi deserved proper rites. We’re fortunate she hasn’t been haunting the village.”
That was unquestionably true. A body not cremated, and her family not even aware they should be mourning? Aoi wouldn’t have been included in Ryōtora’s prayers, either. Sekken said, “You may not have killed her, but you hardly acted in accordance with the tenets of Chikushō-dō. Should we really be helping this creature?”
Sayashi surged to her feet, teeth bared. “That one promised he would aid me. If he breaks his word…”
She clearly hadn’t been paying much attention to Ryōtora’s character, if she thought that was likely. Sekken should have known better than to even suggest it himself. Ryōtora said, “I have no intention of breaking my word. But before I do anything for you, you’re going to show me where Aoi is buried.”