Scott McGough - Heretic, Betrayers of Kamigawa

Kiku stood up. “I have a feeling-” she waved her fan more vigorously-“that he’s closer than you think. It’d be like him to double back and spring something on us.”

She snapped the fan shut and smiled at the nezumi leader. “Send two up the path, now. Or I’ll send the whole lot of you, one in every direction.”

Marrow-Gnawer nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

Marrow’s scouts came back just before dawn. Kiku was awake and ready when he cleared his throat outside her tent.

“What have they found?”

“A symbol,” Marrow-Gnawer replied. “A kanji painted on the bark of a tree.”

Kiku stepped out into the frigid night. The snow and wind had stopped, and the stars were clear and brittle overhead. Kiku’s breath came in thick white clouds through the scarf covering her face.

“Painted with what?”

Marrow-Gnawer looked pained. “Didn’t say.”

Kiku rolled her eyes. “Too much to suppose you illiterate dungballs recognized the symbol?”

Marrow-Gnawer shook his head. “No, jushi. Not nezumi-tongue.”

Kiku muttered and then turned to the camp behind her. “Get ready to move out.” She stepped forward to Marrow-Gnawer. “Stay close. I want you to show me the symbol as quickly as possible.”

Under her withering gaze, the rest of the party began to break camp. Within a few minutes, one of Uramon’s hatchet men came running.

“What is it?”

The man was large and gruff, but his bluster had been dulled by living wild. “You’d better come see this, ma’am.”

He led her off the path and onto a patch of frozen scrub. He worked his way around the largest clump of brambles then stepped back,

Kiku came around the bush. She stared silently at the base of the brambles, her frosty breath flowing in a single thin stream.

Two of the hatchet men lay dead, flat on their backs, wearing expressions of wide-eyed horror. Their mouths were open. Their faces were blue. Their hair and beards were thick with ice crystals.

Each was fully dressed but disheveled, as if they had thrown their clothes on in a hurry. Kiku stretched forward and tapped her closed fan on the nearest dead man’s eye. The metal spine clinked against the frozen orb.

Kiku tapped her fan along the man’s brow, down his nose, across his lips, and under his chin. She nodded.

“Solid as a rock,” she said. She turned to where the ashen-faced thug stood, nervously thumbing the hatchet on his belt. “If you hit him with a rock, he’ll shatter.

“Come on,” she said. “I need to see this symbol the rats found.”

The party packed up the camp and strapped their heavy loads to their backs. In silence they hiked behind the nezumi scouts and Marrow-Gnawer. To the rear, the rest of the nezumi pack and Uramon’s thugs scanned both sides of the path, fearful as children.

Kiku herself kept her eyes on the path ahead. The fact that something had lured the dead men out of their tents bothered her. She’d have been more comfortable if Toshi had just murdered them in their sleep.

The sun was clear of the horizon by the time they reached the symbol. Marrow-Gnawer’s brethren chittered and gestured excitedly, skittering around the base of the trunk. He grabbed them each by the shoulder and hauled them aside as Kiku marched up to the tree.

She stared at the symbol, shaking her head in disbelief. Toshi truly was mad. The Heart of Frost was already cursed, and he decides to make this symbol, in his own blood, no less, on one of the only living things hearty enough to survive this killing cold.

“Ma’am,” one of the hatchet men called. “What’s it mean?”

She looked from one face to another, from Uramon’s grizzled and scarred disasters to the hairy, cunning animals in Marrow-Gnawer’s group. Was it worth telling them what Toshi had unleashed? Was it important for them to know that they were all a half-breath away from doom, Toshi included?

They might run. Not that it would do them any good, but they might run.

She could run. She could go back and tell Uramon that her incompetent servants all got themselves killed by one of Toshi’s traps. The boss would believe that. She would have a lower opinion of Kiku, and her jushi clan would have to make good on the failure, but Kiku would be alive.

“Where’s Uchida?” another thug said. Kiku cocked her head at the hatchet man who spoke.

“Who?” she said.

“Uchida. The one who found the bodies this morning. He was bringing up the rear, but he’s not there anymore.”

Kiku snarled. To Marrow-Gnawer, she said, “Backtrack the way we came. You’ll probably find him just off the path. When you do, get back here as fast as you can.”

Marrow nodded and made a barking noise in his throat. Two more nezumi barked back, and the three scrabbled back down the mountain, disappearing over a ridge.

The hatchet man who had asked about the kanji stepped up. “Ma’am,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Kiku ignored him.

Marrow-Gnawer and his partners soon returned. They were panting and raised huge clouds of white mist in the air around them. The others fell to their knees in the snow, but Marrow-Gnawer simply rested his hands on his knees.

“Dead,” he husked. “Hundred yards or so back.”

Kiku nodded. “Frozen, like the others.”

“Yeh.”

“How’s that possible?” one of the hatchet men called.

“Yeh, the sun’s up,” echoed a nezumi.

Kiku eyes flared. With a curse, she drew her fan and knocked Marrow-Gnawer off his feet with a wide backhand stroke.

“You feeble, pox-ridden vermin,” she growled. “This can’t be the first kanji Toshi has made like this. He’s probably been bleeding on rocks and patches of ice all the way up the mountain. This is just the first one you worthless blobs have seen.”

Marrow-Gnawer bared his horrible, jagged teeth and spat blood from his mouth. He scrabbled up on all fours and said, “What, then? What did we miss? What is it?”

Kiku paused, glaring back down the path. It was behind them now as well as in front. There was no point in running now. Alone, she’d be just another easy target. Among the rabble Uramon had saddled her with … she was the only wolf in a herd of sheep. As such, she might be able to surprise the other wolf who’d come to make a kill.

Kiku offered her closed fan to Marrow-Gnawer. The nezumi hesitated then grabbed the end. Kiku pulled forward, lifting Marrow to his feet.

“We need to stick together now,” she said. “We’re in her territory. I don’t know if Toshi summoned her here or if she was already here and he just stirred her up-but this is her mountain, and we can’t get off it without facing her.”

“Her,” Marrow-Gnawer echoed. “Who-what-is ‘her’?”

Kiku shook her head. “Not now. We’ve got to save our breath and keep moving. If we can catch Toshi before nightfall, we have a much better chance of seeing another sunrise.”

Kiku marched up the path toward the summit of the mountain without waiting for the trackers to pick up Toshi’s trail. There was only one way to go anymore, and she meant to go as quickly as she could.

She wrapped her cloak around herself and lowered her hood to shield her eyes from the rising sun. Behind Kiku, the others murmured and wondered and prayed as they struggled to pick up their packs and keep pace with her. Marrow-Gnawer was the first to fall in step just behind her, but the others were quick to join the line.

No one wanted to be left alone on the path, not even in broad daylight.

“The creature is called yuki-onna,” Kiku said. “The Snow Woman.”

Marrow-Gnawer and several of the hatchet men groaned. They had come a long distance in the short hours daylight allotted them. There had been no sign of Toshi at all. His trail and his scent had vanished completely just as the sun began to dip over the Sokenzan Range.