CHAPTER SIX
COMPLICATION
“Hiroki, what do we do if we have to be out at night?” Tetsuo pointed at the gates set into the middle of the intersection of Kita No Kōji Street and Horikawa Avenue. “Those get locked up at night, I’ll bet.” He used his uninjured arm to point. Hiroki was satisfied with the way the wound was healing, but Tetsuo apparently took no chances.
“They wouldn’t dare keep us out,” Shiro said. “Of any street we wanted to go down.”
“I really don’t know.” Hiroki hated having to admit this, but the gates were new to him, and a mystery. The inhabitants of the capital were now, Katsumi had told him, bound together in neighbourhood associations. Nobles were joined together with artisans and moneylenders and even porters and day-labourers, the poorest of the poor, in bonds of mutual protection. In some cases they had even built gates into the streets, gates they could close and guard when night fell. His previous forays into the city in the darkness hadn’t taken him through any such gates, but there were still a lot of them. And it appeared that nearly everyone still living in the city belonged to one of these neighbourhood groups.
This had not been the case when Hiroki had last been here, but it was easy to understand how it could have happened. The shōgun was responsible for protecting his city and his people, and the shōgun had not done this—not for years and in fact not for decades. The war into which Hiroki had been born was caused by the inability of the shōgun of the time to protect anything, even his own power. Now that he came to think about it, the wonder was not that it had happened but that it hadn’t happened sooner.
“We should ask our landlord about this,” he told them. “Perhaps he knows some secret that gives him access to all the neighbourhoods.”
“But we’re warriors, Hiroki. We shouldn’t have to ask for anything.”
Tetsuo growled. “Did you ever think, Shiro, that maybe it’s because of warriors that all these houses have walls or barricades? And there are gates in the streets? And half the outskirts have huge walls with moats all around them?”
“Well, that’s not our fault. We weren’t even here before this week.”
“You be sure to tell them that when the people come after you with farming tools.”
Hiroki ignored them; this was how they behaved when they were nervous, and investigating a murder was a new thing to them just as it was to him. “If you were told truly, Tetsuo, then we should be seeing his house by now.”
“It’s pretty hard to tell, though,” Tetsuo said. “It’s not like in the poorer streets where all the houses come right up to the ditches on the roadsides. How can we tell what’s behind all these walls?”
“Amida Buddha,” Shiro whispered. “Could that be it?”
He pointed at a broken-down, half-burned wall. The building behind it seemed abandoned; one end didn’t even have a roof. But the house was large, and clearly had been a mansion of some importance. At one time. Now the gate dangled from a single hinge, and while there was what looked like a gate-keeper holding a broom, the old man wasn’t sweeping; he wasn’t even standing. He was using the broom to prop up his chin while he dozed, slumped on a crude wooden stool.
“You,” Shiro called as he pulled open the gate. “Does the wakashū Togashi Shokan live in this place?”
The servant did not move.
“Stop shitting yourself and answer me!” Shiro stepped through the gateway, hand on the hilt of his katana, before Hiroki could stop him. He’s not usually this bad, Hiroki thought as he followed. He’s truly nervous today.
The clicking sound of the sword loosening in its scabbard woke the gate-keeper where shouts had not. He opened one eye, fixed his gaze on Shiro, and said, “Not here.”
“’Not here’ as in he doesn’t live in this building, or as in he has gone away?” Hiroki asked, putting a hand on Shiro’s shoulder.
“Gone away,” said the gate-keeper. “No word to me. Owes me wages too.”
“Does he do this often?” Hiroki asked. He stepped between Shiro and the servant. “Where’s he got to?”
“I said: no word to me.” The man closed his eye and shifted so his face was partially turned away.
“Hiroki,” Shiro pleaded, squirming under Hiroki’s grip on his shoulder, “that’s—”
“All we need to know for now,” Hiroki finished. “Come on, Shiro. You’ll gain nothing by killing the man, however much you have the right to. And we don’t want to be drawing attention to ourselves here, do we?”
“Any more than we already have, you mean?” Tetsuo asked from the street.
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