Pilgrim 3, p.28
Pilgrim 3, page 28
He began his explanation, how his father had shown up, which elicited a yelp of surprise from Kudzu as Danzen told them how he had taken Abbot Monpo’s form, how he even spent some time speaking to his mother back in Genshin Valley. He kept some of the details out, such as his father’s claim that they were lovers and that his mother wasn’t raped, Danzen focusing on what Tengir Gantulga had instructed him to do next, and how he had killed the kappa. By the time he had finished telling them everything, including the details of his father’s appearance in the courtyard at the nunnery and how he had instructed him to kill the demon named Shutendorji, that he would reward him for doing so, Danzen felt as if he was out of breath.
He didn’t like to speak this much.
“And that reward was your life,” Menya said, looking to Nomin. “Tengir Gantulga brought you back to our realm. How curious.”
“He did.”
“I understand that you likely have bigger concerns,” Menya told her, “but I would see it as being given a second chance. I’m not really one to offer advice, but you’ve been given something that most will never be given. Another chance at life is a rare thing indeed, and I hope that you get the most out of it. Regarding Tengir Gantulga’s interest in you,” she said, her focus shifting to Danzen, “it is clear that he will stop at nothing in grooming you to take his throne. Perhaps that’s what all these challenges are about. I have no doubt in my heart that he could’ve handled the yokai, or Shutendorji, for that matter, had he wanted to.”
“I agree.”
“By no means do I claim to understand the cunning of a demon, especially one such as him. It would seem that he is doing this for a reason, and those that have associated themselves with you should be not only aware of this fact, but ready for when he inevitably returns.”
Danzen nodded. “You’ve spoken to my mother about her ultimate plan.”
Menya paused. “Is that a question?”
“A statement, and a request for more information.”
“I wish I could help you,” she said meekly, the nun lowering her head in Danzen’s direction.
Danzen hated to do it, but it was imperative; he needed to know what Shodren had told her second-in-command. “Tell me what Shodren has said about my role in rebuilding Sunyata.”
It was a test, really, to see just how powerful Menya was. And as he had predicted, his Demon Speak ability didn’t have an effect on her, which meant she had bent her echo enough to prevent his influence. It made sense, too. Why would his mother leave someone in charge who wasn’t capable in her own right?
“That won’t work with me,” she said softly, “but I see it means a lot to you to know this information, and I will tell you all that I can. Shodren thinks that the fastest way to rebuild Sunyata would be to install you on the throne.”
“This was why she left me at the Brotherhood. I already know that. What went wrong between her and my father?”
“I can’t speak to that,” Menya said carefully. “But I can tell you that I believe that there is another way to rebuild Sunyata, if that is what you wish. If one collected enough larger remnants, they would be able to do it. Of course, this may take sacrificing their own life, but if they did it correctly, they could be reborn in Sunyata, rather than Diyu.”
“Does she believe this as well?”
“She does, but she thinks the faster way would be through your father’s power, his throne.”
“I don’t want his throne,” Danzen said, and in that moment he felt Kudzu’s eyes on him, yet another tinge of guilt bubbling to the surface. He glanced at her, but couldn’t read the look on her face.
“Then it would be pertinent for you to begin collecting remnants, preferably larger ones. There are two not so far from here, both in abandoned shrines. You and your companions could fetch them, and it would give you time to both continue to work on your practice, and decide how you want to go forward.”
“Where’s Jelmay?” Yato asked, which was something Danzen hadn’t even thought of until she gave voice to it.
“Ah, yes, Jelmay.” The pensive smile on Menya’s face thinned. “I caught him gambling with some of the nuns and I was not happy about it. He was told to behave himself while at the nunnery, and instead of doing that, he decided to head back down to Odval where there are less restrictions.”
“He thinks that he’ll be able to pretty much do away with the organized crime ring that Toku has started in Odval,” Kudzu added. “As you can imagine, he is positioning himself as a hero in the story, but really, Jelmay just wants to gamble.”
“So Jelmay is in Odval,” Danzen said.
“Allegedly,” said Kudzu. “There’s no telling if he’s there now, or in jail, for that matter.”
“I’m sure he will be fine. We will have to head back west at some point, and when we do we can seek him out. For now…” Danzen slowly turned his gaze to Menya. “I would like to visit these two shrines you mentioned and retrieve their remnants.”
“Of course. I will give you the information you need to find them. And you?” Menya asked Nomin. “What will you do?”
“I will leave after Minjin’s funeral. I would like some time to process everything that has happened, and where I should go next.”
****
Minjin had a similar funeral to the one Nomin had at the nunnery during Danzen’s last visit, the nuns all gathered around her body as it burned on the pyre, Menya uttering a string of ancient words. The nun also moved her hands in front of her body in a way that told Danzen she was bending her echo, perhaps doing something benevolent for Minjin’s soul.
Either way, and as his father had stated, the elderly woman would be going to Diyu.
Remembering how his father had treated Minjin caused Danzen to tense up. What was the point in being so cruel after two hundred years of slavery? Couldn’t he have let her die in peace, in the way she had hoped to die?
His father’s action reminded Danzen of who Tengir Gantulga was, and what the leader of Diyu was capable of through his sheer lack of empathy. The scary part was, there was little Danzen could do to stop his father from doing something to his companions if he wanted, and he hoped that he wasn’t going to bring up what happened to Yato again, how he had healed her. There was a very real chance that Tengir Gantulga would dangle it over Danzen’s head.
Shimaru attended the funeral as well, and after it ended, Menya introduced him to Nomin. In passing, Danzen overheard a conversation in which Nomin agreed to show the blind man a few things the next morning to help with his condition, before she set off.
Danzen was just turning into his room later that night when Kudzu appeared, the woman now in her fox form. He placed his weapons on the desk near his bed, quiet as ever, assuming that she would start the conversation.
But she never did.
Eventually, he turned to Kudzu to find her seated on her haunches and observing him, her chin held high. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Danzen sat on his bed across from her. “I didn’t want you to get involved. I realize now that it would be impossible for you not to get involved. I just didn’t know if…” But it was a lie; Danzen couldn’t get the next words out of his mouth. His father had said he would return, so saying that he didn’t know if Tengir Gantulga would appear again was false. Aside from hiding the truth as to what was going on, the real issue Danzen was facing happened to be the pull between his mother and his father, both of them wanting to use him in their own ways.
So that’s what he explained to Kudzu now that they were alone, how his mother and his father wanted him to take the throne, yet with competing reasons.
“I knew there was something off about her,” Kudzu said after Danzen finished his explanation. “I knew it the first time I saw her communicating with the three-legged raven.”
Myriad images flashed inside Danzen’s head until he remembered the black bird in question, how he had seen it once, flying away from him, and how it looked as if it had three legs. “I… I’ve seen it before as well. I didn’t know it had anything to do with her.”
“It’s a yatagarasu,” Kudzu explained, “a yokai. It has been following you for quite some time. I don’t know how long, but I noticed it sometime after our first return from Diyu. At first I thought I was hallucinating, but then I saw it again and again, and then I saw it with your mother. It is an omen.”
“You think she has been spying on me?”
“I know she has,” Kudzu said. “And it only makes me more suspicious of her. You may wonder why I have been leaving at night; I’ve been trying to see where the raven goes. It is always with her, and sometimes it flies deep into the Panchen Mountains.”
“But you don’t like traveling at night.”
“I don’t, but I have to know what she is up to. What you have told me helps shed some light on her interest in you. I never bought Shodren’s whole act of piety, but I didn’t want to say anything to you about it. What you’ve told me confirms that there is nothing motherly as to why she wants to be part of your life. Since you were born, she has been in the process of grooming you to kill your father to take his throne. But there is another choice if we, if you, want to rebuild Sunyata.”
“Remnants,” Danzen said. “It’s the only other way. But even if we were able to collect all the remnants in the kingdom, I don’t know anyone that knows how we would go about the task of rebuilding heaven. What we would say, what we would do, what would bringing all those remnants together create? I believe this is why she thinks it would be easier for me to simply take the throne. I don’t know if she knows how, Menya either.”
“Only Abbot Monpo knows, someone like him, someone who has lived a very long time. But there must be others.”
“But where?”
“We’re in the north now, and perhaps it is the right location for us to begin our search. You spent two years wandering across the other parts of the kingdom, including the south. Did anything stick out to you?”
Danzen hadn’t thought enough about those two years that he spent away from the world, not after rediscovering his life in Genshin Valley. There was an irony in the fact that the people in Suja Village called him Pilgrim, and to Danzen, that irony was that he had already finished his pilgrimage.
Arriving in Suja Village was his final stop.
The two years prior, a time in which he was completely anonymous, Danzen was just a hooded man living in the wilderness with all the time in the world to reflect but never enough time to truly process his thoughts and become who he was supposed to be—if ever there was a pilgrimage in his life, it was then.
“There’s something more,” Danzen said, skipping over the question she had asked him about anything that might have stuck out to him in his travels. Nothing had stuck out to him; his desire to escape his own life had been his only focus during those two years. “My mother claims my father raped her. My father told me that they were lovers, and that after I was born, she asked that he not see me.”
Kudzu made a sound with her throat. “Who do you believe?”
And that was the question he kept circling back to: who did Danzen believe?
Both had their own reasons for being part of his life, and he certainly didn’t put it past his father to rape a mortal. Still, there was something about the way that he told him this information that led Danzen to believe that it may be true, that his mother and father had once had a bona fide relationship. In all likelihood, it was something that was highly complicated.
“I don’t know any longer. I know not to trust my father, especially after what he did to Minjin earlier. But my mother also hasn’t been honest with me, and I get this feeling that the closer we become, or the more comfortable she becomes with me, the more she’s going to say.”
“She did, after all, leave you as an orphan on the steps of the Brotherhood. What kind of woman would do something like that? Something is off, Danzen, and it’s why I’ve been staying away from there, why I don’t trust her.” Kudzu stood. “Just don’t leave me in the dark ever again.”
“I won’t ever again,” Danzen told her. “How concerned should I be about this three-legged raven?”
“We should all be concerned about the yatagarasu,” she said as she reached the door. “They are omens, as I said earlier, and only appear when something terrible is about to happen. The fact that it is apparently working for your mother only makes me more suspicious.”
“Does Jelmay know?”
“I haven’t spoken to him about it, but I think it’s time that I do; I guess you aren’t the only one that is keeping secrets.”
“What do you think he’ll say?”
“He’s not going to like it, I can tell you that.” Kudzu lowered her head, then looked back at Danzen. “Do you mind if I stay?”
“By all means. You can take the bed. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
This caused Kudzu to laugh. “Sometimes I think you prefer sleeping on the floor.”
“That, or my back against the wall. Something about it seems appropriate,” Danzen said, a rare hint of mirth in his voice. “I’ve just grown used to it over the years, to be honest with you.”
Danzen crossed the room and sat on the ground across from the bed, his back against the wall. Once he had done so, Kudzu got onto the bed and settled onto her side. “I’m glad you’re back. I don’t think I said that earlier. I was just so shocked to find you gone, and then for you to return with a woman who was supposed to be dead…”
“I thought you would be. I am glad I’m back too.”
“The adventure continues tomorrow.”
“It does.”
“And how do you think Yato is adjusting?”
“I think she’s just fine,” Danzen said.
“I never thought you’d be the type to take on a student.”
“Neither did I.”
.Chapter Two.
Before meeting with Yato the next morning to bend his echo, Danzen looked through his field diary, wondering if Abbot Mergen, who had once lived in the monastery outside Suja Village, had written about the yatagarasu. He was surprised to find an entry for the raven, also listing it by another name, sansokuu.
The yatagarasu, or sansokuu, is a three-legged raven whose appearance symbolizes that the end of an era is near. It was first seen by Jimmu and his clan as they made their way through the Kishu Kingdom, toward modern-day Arsi. They were looking for a better homeland, and were warring with tribes encountered along the way, always forced to escape or face certain death. Jimmu’s older brother, Itsuse, was killed in one of the skirmishes, and Jimmu came to the realization that they kept losing because they were facing eastward, which meant to him that they were fighting against the sun.
Following a three-legged raven that appeared one morning, Jimmu led his troops in the opposite direction, a westward push that eventually brought them to what is now Sainshand. The yatagarasu stopped flying once it reached the mountains outside Sainshand, and died where the main branch of the Diyu Brotherhood is located, at least at the time of this writing. The tribes that had been warring against Jimmu appeared, and were mostly destroyed given Jimmu’s vantage point in the mountains, and through the help of an army of yokai that the yatagarasu had arranged.
If this mysterious yokai signaled change, and it was currently working alongside his mother, did it mean that she was going to be on the right side of history in all this? Was there really a right side when it was eventually going to be a battle between heaven and hell, and the victors would decide the historical record? Because that’s what Danzen could see happening. In his limited view of what the future could possibly entail, he knew there would be a fight coming; that was, unless he simply laid down his arms, as it were, and agreed to take up the throne, his only focus from that point forward being to make sure he handled those who were stalking him.
But he knew this wasn’t going to be how things played out.
He had a different story to tell.
Danzen found Nomin in the courtyard bending her echo. Yato was there as well, the young assassin watching as Nomin went through the motions, clear in her form that she was an expert. Like Danzen, Yato wore fresh robes, and she also had an additional layer over her shoulders that hung down to her elbows, providing a little extra warmth. It was cold in the mountains at night and in the morning, and Danzen had noticed in the previous day that it didn’t get as warm up here as it did to the southeast.
Nomin turned to him, and Danzen bowed, the blind assassin doing the same. He produced her weapon, and prepared to give it back to her even though she had a similar blade sheathed at her waist.
“It’s yours,” she said. “The blade I have now is an exact replica. Everything in Diyu is. There is no difference between the two.”
“Are you certain? Would you like to examine it?”
“I suppose that couldn’t hurt.”
Nomin sat on the ground, her legs crossed beneath her. Danzen lowered to his knees, and before either of them could set the weapons down, Yato removed the short-sleeve jacket she was wearing and placed it between the two of them. She too sat, moving onto her knees as well, mirroring Danzen.
The blades looked exactly the same, and as Danzen selected the weapon that she had received in Diyu, he noticed that it had the exact feel as her original weapon, heavy with echo.
“You should have your original blade; I can keep the replica,” he told her.
“They are the same to me, but if you wish to give it back, then I will accept it,” she said as she continued to examine her original weapon. While Nomin was being humble, Danzen sensed that she would have preferred her original weapon, even if they were the exact same. It had been a weapon she had grown up with, the one that had cut more throats than a ravenous guillotine.
