Scott McGough - Guardian, Saviors of Kamigawa

Home again for the first time in weeks, Toshi stood in the Numai district of Takenuma Swamp. No matter what the old ones said, he would never believe the fen had ever been anything but a greasy, bubbling cauldron of muck and rotten bamboo. If you wanted to build a house or a business in the swamp, you had to do it on twenty-foot stilts, high above the surface of the bog. Everything rested on sturdy bamboo legs: every building, every walkway, every structure that might conceivably be used by nontoxic, non-amphibious life forms.

Toshi hated the swamp. If the quicksand-like filth didn’t drag you down and the swamp insects didn’t infect you with bleeding fever, there were larger, crueler dangers waiting for the unwary who braved the bog. Numai’s entire human population, for one. Here, the only things more malevolent than the cursed ground were the people who thrived on it. For as long as Toshi could remember his district had been the crossroads where the criminal-minded and the bloodthirsty met and mingled. Those with shady work could sit down with those who didn’t mind doing it for cash.

There was precious little foot traffic now, which Toshi suspected was due to more than the swamp’s bad reputation. There was a heaviness in the air, the kind of damp, oppressive stillness that usually precedes a major storm. It was similar to the dread he had felt hovering over Kamitaki Falls, but the swamp’s mood was even darker, wetter, and more oppressive. After two decades of the Kami War, Toshi was all too familiar with the signs of a spirit crossing into the physical world, but that sensation was usually limited to a small area. Now, the pressure and sense of impending attack was everywhere.

He hadn’t actually seen any spirits yet, but he had seen their wake. Mangled and partially consumed corpses left hanging in trees, temples smashed and painted over in blood, and charred, smoking ruins where great manors once stood.

Toshi heard a distant scream that echoed across the surface of the swamp. He waited for a moment to listen for the sequel, but no further sound came. He resumed walking. Just as well, he thought. He had no time for new adventures. He had already mortgaged too much of his future to powerful beings and made enemies of still more, so there was simply no chance for anyone else to make demands on him. The screamer would have to save himself.

Ahead, the end of the walkway materialized through the haze. From there he had a short climb and a long wade through the swamp until he reached his goal.

Toshi smiled thinly as he strode on. His patrons and foes were all lined up to greet him. He would face them as soon as he mustered his allies.

Toshi’s smile faded. He decided not to think too far ahead with this plan for the time being. He couldn’t worry about what happened after he recruited his partners until he had actually recruited them. Just because they considered themselves oath-bound to avenge his death didn’t mean they were willing to prevent it beforehand.

He emerged onto solid ground less than an hour later. The small hill rose up out of the fen, and as he climbed it Toshi stamped mud and leeches from his feet. He was now on the outskirts of Numai district, along the western edge of Takenuma. Apart from the odd fugitive or hermit, the only humans who lived this far out were the Numai jushi , a close-knit clan of mahotsukai , or dark wizards. The mahotsukai delved more deeply into the black arts than was safe or sane, but they were powerful casters and exerted significant influence over the swamp’s criminal society.

He had never met any of the mahotsukai elders but he had heard the rumors: they drank the blood of their apprentices, they took them as wives and forced them to bear monstrous children, and they were not living men at all but vampiric spirits who corrupted human souls with black magic then consumed them like some exquisite delicacy.

None of this truly mattered to Toshi. Residents of the swamp liked to exaggerate their power and their dark reputations as much as they liked to spread pointless gossip. Whatever those twisted old men did to their charges, they also taught them powerful magic. Kiku, one of the most dangerous people he had ever met, was a mahotsukai from the Numai jushi. All Toshi had to do was find her and convince her that helping him was in her own best interest.

He broke through the hedgerow of thorn bushes and stinging nettles to a clearing at the top of the rise. The ground was dry here, almost sandy, and the hilltop was dotted with clumps of gray-green grass that swayed hypnotically in the fetid air. In the center of this field of swamp grass stood a large, one-room building made of mud bricks and straw. It was round with a circular chimney in the center of the mud-thatch roof. No smoke rose from the hardened clay pipe, and no sound came from the building’s interior.

Toshi’s gut shifted and he knew something was wrong. The mahotsukai were not gregarious folk, but they always sent someone to meet visitors. If no one had come out to greet him by now, that meant either no one was here to do so … or no one was alive to do so.

He went closer, and a clearer view of the building confirmed his fears. The front door was hanging off one hinge, the thick clay of the doorway cracked and crumbling. There was a rough hole punched through the ceiling on the south end. A pale and lifeless hand dangled from one of the front windows, a thin stream of blood dripping slowly from its index finger.

Toshi drew his jitte in one hand and his long sword in the other. As he ran to the mahotsukai dwelling, he turned over the possibilities in his mind. Kami attack? Clan warfare? Had the daimyo’s troops begun cracking down on black magicians while their lord and master was away?

He stepped up to the ruined front door and peered inside. A foul, stale odor hung in the air. Two small fires burned inside the building, one in the fireplace at the center of the room and one on a pile of debris nearer the door.

Toshi stopped when he saw the scene inside, and then he grimaced. Unlike the post-massacre scene at Minamo, the floor of the mahotsukai hut was nearly covered with broken and twisted bodies.

A young man was lying facedown just inside the doorway. From the huge slick of blood beneath him, Toshi guessed his throat had been cut. More students littered the rest of the residence, young and old alike, their torsos displaying neat, precise holes surrounded by crimson blooms. The pale hand that extended out through the window belonged to a girl, but she was too small and too slight to be Kiku.

Toshi sheathed his long sword but held onto his jitte. Whatever had happened here was long over, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t still danger. He quietly moved across the crowded floor and opened the large ornamental door at the far end of the room.

It was much worse inside. The bodies were crammed together and piled two-deep between Toshi and the altar at the center of the room. Toshi recognized sword wounds and dagger thrusts on every body he saw, the terrible evidence of a sharp blade and a skilled hand at work. Whoever did this did so with weapons of steel, not tooth and claw. Armed warriors had attacked the mahotsukai in their home and slaughtered them to a man.

Near the altar, Toshi stopped. This was more than a simple massacre-it was a message. Some of the older students had been killed and then hung from the walls. Toshi peered closer at the mangled body of a bearded man with one long, dangling earring and a tattoo that covered most of his face. His eyes were still wide-open in shock.

Correction, Toshi thought. Some had been hung from the walls and then killed. That ruled out the daimyo’s troops. He had seen Konda’s soldiers on punitive missions first-hand, and they would never have displayed such cruelty or taken the time to stage the corpses-they would have simply lined the mahotsukai up and decapitated them with swords, one by one and with great ceremony. Toshi grimaced and went on to the door that led deeper into the building.