The Chrysanthemum Seal (The Year of the Dragon, Book 5) Read online

  “That’s your mount, boy? Your only hope to get home, eh?”

  Bran nodded slowly. He didn’t like where this was going.

  “That’s funny, I’d swear I’ve seen it somewhere before... No matter. Keep it here,” the Komtur said to Aulick. “Set up the Bomb Lance. If the boy tries anything — kill it.”

  “I know where I saw that dragon of yours,” the Komtur said, slamming his hand on the desk. “Goa, when we were all waiting for that storm to pass.”

  The ancient desk was hewn out of thick oak and decorated with peeling strips of gold leaf. It was the sort of furniture Bran had not seen since the teaching halls of the Academy. Like the heavy chairs and the tall cabinet in this strange room, it was marked with the Eagle of Rome, but the pieces did not belong to one set; rather, it seemed like they had been assembled in a hurry. Bran imagined the furniture taken from private collections of the wealthy samurai to accommodate the barbarian invaders, and chuckled at the dishonour this must have brought them.

  Everything else in the room was typical Yamato: the straw floor, the painted panels on the walls, the shallow alcove with a calligraphy scroll and a vase — which, Bran noticed, was filled with fresh flowers.

  There are Yamato in this building, he thought, even if they are just servants. He didn’t suspect the Komtur or his men to bother changing the flower composition every day.

  The room where Bran was being interrogated was part of an administrative building inside a Butsu temple complex overlooking a small fishing town on the northern edge of the crescent-shaped bay. Both the temple and the town were eerily empty, cleared of all the locals before the Black Wings had settled.

  “You were there?” Bran asked. “So you must’ve been in Fan Yu, too.”

  “Briefly,” the Komtur nodded. “Ladon was a magnificent ship. More’s the pity.”

  He knocked the frame of his spectacles repeatedly on the edge of the oak table, piercing Bran with his slightly short-sighted eyes.

  “How did you come by these clothes?”

  “I… it was a gift.”

  That was not a lie, after all.

  “Who from?”

  “From the people who helped me.”

  “Look, boy, I know you think you’re being clever, but I’m a Komtur of the Western Navy, and you’re just a kid. You’re not your father. You can’t outsmart me. So let’s drop this charade, shall we?”

  Bran said nothing. The Komtur put the spectacles back on, steepled his fingers and leaned forward.

  “All right, let’s start differently. How did you know how to find us?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Bran blinked.

  “Stop playing games with me!” He slammed his hands on the table. “How did you know that the Star of the Sea was anchored off Tamna Island?”

  “I didn’t,” Bran answered, swallowing. “It was an accident.”

  His thoughts raced. He didn’t know how the Gorllewin treated spies — or people they suspected of being spies — but he knew it would be a lot harder to defend himself against false accusations than the truth.

  The Komtur scoffed.

  “The most secret operation in the history of our nation. Months of preparations, weeks of avoiding detection. Most complex glamours ever devised. We make sure nobody – nobody, not the Dracaland, not the Varyaga, not even our own people — knows we’re here. And you, a single boy on a small dragon, stumble upon us by accident? Oh, that’s good, that’s good indeed.” He turned serious abruptly and leaned forward. “Don’t think anyone here is on your side, boy. If you don’t tell me your story, I’ll be more than glad to give you back to our Yamato friends — and something tells me you know full well what they might do to you.”

  “I’m not a spy!” Bran almost cried. The memory of the “little man” he had seen through the Firstborn’s memories still haunted him. A man who could terrify a dragon must have been either one of the Fanged, or their monstrous servants.

  “I never said you were,” said the Komtur, with a wry smile, “but you’ll admit, the idea does sound appealing in the circumstances…”

  I can’t tell him the truth. He’s making deals with the Eight-headed Serpent. But… I can make my lies more convincing.

  “I admit — I was in Yamato before,” he said. The Komtur leaned back with his hands behind his head.

  “If I tell you the truth,” Bran continued, “will you promise not to hand me over to the Yamato?”

  “No,” the Komtur said. “You can’t bargain with me – you have nothing, but I might consider it — depending on what you tell me.”

  “Have you heard of a place called Satsuma?” asked Bran.

  The Komtur raised his hands in exasperation. “Heard of it? The Councillor wouldn’t shut up about it. Yes, I’ve heard of it. What of it?”

  So he is planning to use you against Nariakira…

  “After the disaster on Ladon I was washed ashore on a beach in Satsuma,” said Bran. “I was captured and kept prisoner for a few weeks.”

  “Whom have you met there?”

  Bran pretended to think. “I don’t know. Several people came to meet me in prison, but I wasn’t introduced to any of them.”

  “How did you communicate? Don’t tell me you’ve learned to speak that gibberish of theirs in a month.”

  “Oh, no!” Bran forced a laugh. “They had an interpreter — a Bataavian.”

  The Komtur tapped his spectacles on the table again. “How did you escape?”

  “I… uh…” Bran clenched and unclenched his hands under the table. His mind was coming up blank. The Komtur’s lips curled into a smirk.

  I have to think of something… If I’m caught lying again, Emrys…

  “Emrys…” he whispered.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Emrys, my dragon. It found me. It must have been lost somewhere in Yamato, and trying to locate me all those weeks. As soon as it got near enough I used dragon magic to break free. Then we simply flew away in what I thought was the direction of Qin — that’s where you found me.”

  The Komtur scratched his nose. “And the clothes…?”

  “I stole from the guards. They took my uniform in prison.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell us this sooner, because…?”

  Bran said nothing.

  “Well,” the Komtur said, standing up. “that all sounds very plausible, I admit. Should be easy to verify, too. In a few days I have the delegation from Edo coming here to finally sign the treaties. I’m sure they would have heard about a Western dragon wreaking havoc in the palaces of Satsuma.”

  “A delegation from Edo… here?” Bran asked, through clenched throat.

  A few days…that Councillor may know who I am. I must run away before he gets here.

  “Yes. In fact, I’m surprised they’re not here yet – they seem as eager to get that treaty signed as we are. But don’t worry, boy,” the Komtur stood up and walked to the door, “if your story checks out, you’ll be safe with us. I hear the chaplain of the Star has grown rather fond of you. I would hate to disappoint him.”

  He opened the door and beckoned one of the guards to take Bran away.

  “Lock him up somewhere,” he said, “and get me the Seneschal at once.”

  CHAPTER IX

  There were no prison cells in the temple, so Bran was locked up in a clay-walled hermit’s hut in a bamboo grove above the temple’s cemetery. Through a tiny window near the roof he could see a bit of the crescent-shaped beach and the turquoise waters of the bay.

  He mulled over his options. They were limited. He had his magic to rely on — Emrys, though on a ship on the other side of the bay, was still near enough to provide him with some dragon power. But he couldn’t simply fight his way through the camp. At the least sign of trouble, the men on the Star would execute Emrys — the Komtur had made it clear enough. And even if he did manage to sneak out somehow without alarming the guards, he couldn’t just fly or swim to the ship on his own... He needed help fro
m outside.

  Apart from the three guards Bran could see with True Sight outside the hut — two at the front, one at the back, where the bamboo grove grew thicker — the only other people he was allowed contact with were two Yamato servants who twice a day brought him food and cleaned out the waste pot: an older, sour-faced woman in the evening, and a young girl with a squashed face, small, spry eyes and a snub nose, in the morning. They wore no shoes, and the simplest clothes he had ever seen on a Yamato — single pieces of crude linen, thrown over one shoulder and tied with hemp rope. They were both deeply tanned, their hair uncombed, and the older woman’s skin was covered in warts and seeping lesions.

  “Please help me,” he tried the second morning. The girl jumped away, startled.

  “Oraya...” she muttered.

  “Can’t you understand me? I’m speaking Yamato!”

  “Araya,” she muttered again and retreated hastily out of the door.

  He hoped the older woman would not be as jumpy.

  “Please,” he spoke in the morning, trying to sound softer and more gentle, “save me from those barbarians.”

  She didn’t look surprised; the girl must have warned her.

  “But ye’r barbarian ye’self,” she replied in a crude manner.

  “I’m not. I’m Yamato like you, trapped in this body by their foul magic.”

  She sniffed. “If ye’r Yamato, ye’d know not to talk to us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “’Cus we are Eta.”

  Bran gritted his teeth. Eta. He had heard the word before. The Untouchables, the outcasts, living even below the unhappy peasants. Of course they would be the only ones allowed to stay in the village. They Eta were fit to deal with dung, dead corpses — and foreigners. Were Gorllewin even aware of the insult?

  “Even so,” he tried again, “surely you must hate the barbarians as much as I do?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t hate them. They don’t treat us like animals. Slaves, yes — but human slaves.”

  He tried another approach.

  “See this?” he asked, showing her his ring. It may have been a copy, but it was still a well-made piece of jewellery. “It’s pure gold. If you help me, it’s yours.”

  She stared at the ring without any expression on her face.

  “If I were found with that amount of gold, I would be boiled alive as a thief.”

  “I would vouch for you. I have powerful friends. I would get you and your daughter out of here, out of this squalor — you have my word.”

  She laughed bitterly and shook her head. “Now I know ye’r no Yamato. A promise made to Eta is worth less than the contents of this pot.”

  She left, still shaking her head and laughing.

  Bran’s time was running out. Any day now the Council’s delegation was expected to arrive. The girl steadfastly refused any contact. “Oraya,” was all Bran managed to get out of her. “Araya.”

  Didn’t your mother even bother to teach you to speak?

  As she handed him his usual breakfast of a bowl of rice and shredded fish, he grabbed her hand and pulled her closer.

  “Listen to me!”

  She wriggled out of his grasp, surprisingly nimble; her skin was moist, slippery, almost snake-like, almost as if...

  A sudden thought struck him. Could it be…?

  He braced himself for the unexpected, but still what his True Sight revealed shocked him. The girl’s body was covered with thick, oily fur, brown at the back, white at the front and the ‘face’. The head was that of some cat-like animal, whiskered, blinking with tiny black eyes, darting back and forth in panic.

  “I knew it — you’re a yōkai!”

  “Araya!” the creature whelped and burst out the door, sobbing.

  Bran overheard the two guards outside, guffawing lewdly.

  “The boy’s so desperate he tried it on with a native!” said one.

  “And an ugly one, at that!” laughed the other.

  The whistles and cries of alarm were Bran’s cue. He peered through the small window and saw the bright glow of a nearby fire. His True Sight revealed the guard at the back run off to see to the trouble. The two in front remained on an uneasy watch.

  He waited for several excruciating seconds. The plan was far-fetched, but hope was all he had left.

  Somebody scratched at the wall on the side of the bamboo grove, twice. A signal Bran had been waiting for. He summoned the Soul Lance and cut through the wattle and daub wall with ease. Getting out of the hut had never been the problem.

  The dry summer bamboo burned quickly; steam trapped in the trunks hissed and exploded with deafening, gunshot-like noise; the entire grove sounded like a battlefield. There was no way anyone could spot him running away in all this chaos.

  The heat was becoming unbearable, but the bamboo trees burned quickly, and the grove was small; it would soon burn out. Bran raised his hand and with a quick shot of dragon flame set fire to the hut’s roof. The blaze shot up like a firework.

  It will take them a while to find out if I made it out alive.

  “Where’s your daughter?” he asked the older woman, who was guiding him through the blazing forest.

  “Beach,” she said. Her voice was filled with a revulsion which hurt him almost physically.

  He had no choice — he had to blackmail the old woman with revealing the truth to the Gorllewin and their Yamato hosts. The girl was a Kawauso, an Otter-demon, she’d told him. Another remnant of the Yōkai War, hiding among the Untouchables in place of the woman’s late daughter.

  “I will find you and repay you for your help,” he said, but the woman gave him a pained look which told him she didn’t believe a word of what he said.

  The grove ended abruptly before a three-foot high stone wall. Bran recognized the administrative building in which the Komtur had him interrogated: the field headquarters of the Black Wings. The lights inside were out, and judging by what True Sight revealed, the building was mostly empty.

  This is my only chance to find out what this is all about, thought Bran.

  He told the old woman to wait. He leapt over the wall, crossed the tiny, single-tree garden and entered the building, thankful for the fact that the Yamato doors rarely had locks and that the Gorllewin had trusted enough in the strength of their arms not to fix that oversight.

  The headquarters was small enough for Bran to find his way around without much hassle; only four rooms along a single corridor. There was a guard at the main entrance, but not at the back, where the compound was walled off. Bran scoffed at the lack of diligence at first, but then realized the reason: the original mission had arrived here on dragonback; it must have been formed of no more than a dozen Grey Hoods. The Komtur simply did not have enough manpower to guard every entrance. Only now were the reinforcements from the Star being discharged around the compound, and most of them must have been sent off to tackle the forest fire.

  Barefoot, Bran paced the corridor as silent as a cat and reached the interrogation room door. He closed it behind him and lit up a faint flamespark.

  He didn’t hope for much. He expected the really important documents the Komtur kept in his private room, under lock and key. But there had to be some clues in the pile of densely written papers he found in the cabinet and desk drawers. He stuffed it all under his uniform and, as quietly as he came in, he walked out, leaping the wall and landing next to the old woman, who was crouched under a bush like a frightened rabbit.

  They emerged onto the beach, at the far corner of the bay.

  “There,” the woman said, pointing at the sea.

  “Where’s the boat?”

  “No boat.”

  Bran came up closer to the waterline until he saw the young girl standing waist-deep in the waves; naked, forlorn.

  “What — ”

  The old woman forced him forward. “Quick.”

  He waded towards the girl. When he reached her, he turned back to the old woman for a second, wanting to say somethin
g. She stared back at him blankly, her features sagging and faltering. He had never before seen such resignation on a human’s face. He had to turn away.

  “I will repay you, I promise!” he said. The woman waved her hand, dismissively.

  “Oraya?”

  Before he could react, the girl wrapped her slippery arms around him tightly, pressed her lips to his and pulled him under the surface. He thrashed about in panic. He almost struck at the girl with magic, but then he realized he could still breathe. The air pushed into his lungs from the Kawauso’s mouth smelled of seaweed and mud, but was perfectly fine.

  He opened his eyes, but could see nothing in the dark, murky water. The pressure tightened on his body. He could only hope the girl was taking him in the right direction, propelling them with strong strokes of her muscular legs and coils of her slim body, with the speed and ease of a fish. He had thought Yamato could not surprise him with anything anymore, but this was the strangest experience yet.

  They emerged right by the side of the Star of the Sea. He spluttered and cleared salty water from his eyes. The fire on the shore had not yet died out. The ship, and the auxiliary vessels around it were all lit up as if on a parade, with colourful lanterns and signal lights hoisted above the deck.

  In the moonless darkness the Gorllewin watchmen still hadn’t spotted him.

  They think that they are too powerful. That the Yamato are just spears and swords.

  He felt anger bubble inside him at this recklessness. A single saboteur, like the one on Ladon, could easily wreak havoc in the flotilla. They were lucky, Bran thought, that all he really wanted was to get his dragon back and run away.

  “I’ll be fine from here,” he said. The girl vanished noiselessly into the depths.

  He swam up to the anchor chain of the Star and started climbing it, aiding himself with a little enhanced acrobatics. He leapt the last few feet to land on the deck, hoping he sounded as light as the otter-girl had in the water... The fore watchman was near; too near. Bran hid between the crates. He still hoped to sneak down to the stable decks, but it was unlikely; at some point, he would have to fight his way through.

  The watchman lit a cigar and puffed out a cloud of white smoke, looking at the dying flames on the shore. Bran slipped behind him, but a moment later found himself almost face-to-face with another guard, leaning against the barrel of a cannon. Bran dropped to the floor in the shadows, and waited, but the guard didn’t move. He, too, was enraptured with the infernal spectacle across the bay.