The oni snarled. It opened its mouth wide. Toshi could see multiple rows of slashing teeth, could smell the stink of blood and slaughter on its breath.
Kiku’s throwing axe shot across the room into the dog’s open mouth. It slammed into the brute’s upper palate, sending a jet of blackish-crimson blood across the scroll case nearby. The axe handle wedged behind the oni’s innermost row of teeth so that its killing jaw was propped open. The oni coughed and sputtered as it furiously tried to dislodge the weapon.
Without thinking, Toshi lunged to his feet and staggered toward the stricken dog. He heard Kiku’s voice calling to him, yelling something urgent, but she was so far away he couldn’t understand her words.
Toshi slammed into the scroll rack, knocking several ancient parchments to the floor. Clinging to the shelf for support, he drew his jitte and dragged the tip through a smear of the oni dog’s blood.
A sharp wooden crack came from behind him. Toshi threw himself back, swinging from the scroll rack, until his back thumped into the wall. The oni dog had succeeded in bringing its jaws together, snapping Kiku’s axe in half. The sharp head was still embedded in the roof of its mouth, and blood-flecked foam drooled from the corners of its lips, but it was far from mortally wounded. The oni shook its armored head, inhaled, and let out a huge, ragged roar.
Toshi held the jitte out in front of him. “Come on, then,” he said. “I’m not going to be the only one who dies today.”
The dog sniffed, growled again, and then turned toward Kiku. The mahotsukai already had another purple flower in hand, but she froze as the monster fixed its terrible gaze on her.
Toshi’s vision went gray. He had to save himself, and do it quickly. Kiku might defeat the dog, but she couldn’t stop the poison. He clumsily pulled a scroll from the rack and popped the seal with his jitte. He hastily scrawled a kanji on the back of the scroll (which seemed to contain a spell for sculpting crystals from sea water), clamped the parchment between his teeth, and then shoved off from the wall with all the strength he had left.
Incorrectly choosing Kiku as the more serious threat, the dog pounced at the mahotsukai before Toshi reached it. Kiku drew back to throw her flower, but the oni’s powerful legs had ensured that it would land on her no matter what she hit it with on the way. Even if her flower killed the dog quickly, it would still have a chance to tear the mahotsukai’s throat out.
Toshi fumbled for a handhold on the dog’s spiky back as it went past him. Instead, he latched on to the demon’s tail, and though his fingers were growing number by the second, Toshi clamped tight and held on.
The ochimusha’s weight spoiled the dog’s aim and momentum, dragging it to the floor well shy of Kiku. Toshi’s tackle also pulled the dog clear of Kiku’s bloom, which spun all the way across the room and bounced off of the far wall.
The oni’s lower jaw smacked painfully into the floor. Enraged, it bent its powerful body at the waist and lunged for Toshi’s face.
Toshi slapped the parchment with the paralysis kanji onto the base of the oni dog’s spine. In an instant, with its savage teeth mere inches from Toshi’s eyes, the brute went as rigid as a statue. Three malevolent eyes continued to dart in their sockets, and ghastly, choking breath still wheezed from its throat, but the oni was frozen fast.
“Wait,” Toshi said. Kiku lowered her arm, which held another camellia, and looked at Toshi questioningly.
Toshi’s legs worked, so he pulled himself up on the oni’s body, using its spiked carapace for handholds. Without explaining, Toshi wiped the dog’s blood off of his jitte and then slid the hooked truncheon across the oni’s dripping teeth. With the same venom that was killing him, Toshi cut a healing kanji over the festering bite mark on his arm.
Kiku watched him silently. When he pushed back from the paralyzed oni and the color began to return to his face, she said, “Now?”
Toshi nodded. “Now.”
Kiku tossed the delicate-seeming blossom onto the top of the dog’s bony skull. Unable to move a muscle, the brute snarled, slavered, and growled as the lush purple flower punched thorny roots through the top of its skull. The oni dog shuddered and its three eyes rolled back in its head while the camellia grew larger, more vivid, and more fragrant. By the time the oni’s skull was empty, the camellia’s petals had completely covered its head and shoulders.
Toshi coughed up something nasty and spat it alongside the dead oni. “Feeling better now,” he said, rising to his feet. “My thanks, oath-sister. I don’t think we’ll have any more problems.”
Kiku sneered and started to speak, but an arrow suddenly sprouted from her collarbone. Kiku winced but did not cry out as she staggered and fell to her knees.
Toshi turned just as a yamabushi tackled him to the ground. It was the female sentry who had stopped Toshi at the gates, and he was still too weak to resist her as she quickly relieved him of his jitte and swords. Nearby, Toshi saw her male counterpart kicking the axe from Kiku’s hand and twisting the mahotsukai’s arms behind her, not even bothering to remove the arrow first.
In the hallway outside, Toshi saw Hidetsugu kneeling to peer through the door. The ogre was too large to easily enter the room, but he was already taking hold of the doorway to widen it for his use.
“Greetings, fellow reckoners,” he said. With an ear-splitting crack, Hidetsugu tore a double handful of wall away. “Oath-sister … Toshi. Congratulations, you’ve bested a formidable foe.”
The ogre shuffled through the hole he’d made. The room’s ceiling was high enough for him to stand, and he did so. “But now,” he said, “it’s time to separate the loyal reckoners from the soon-to-be-stains on the bottom of my feet.”
Toshi tested the yamabushi’s grip, but her strength was still too much for him. He looked up into Hidetsugu’s mad, glowing eyes, as awed and helpless as he’d been years before when One-Eye had sent him out as bait.
“You talk too much,” Kiku called through her pain. “We aren’t afraid, oath-brother. You cannot harm us while the hyozan is still intact.”
Hidetsugu paused. He nodded at Kiku then turned to Toshi. “She doesn’t know?”
Toshi gritted his teeth. He was about to lose the only ally he had, and there was nothing he could do about it.
“What?” Kiku flared. “What don’t I know?”
Hidetsugu smiled patronizingly. “You’re quite right, my dear. You are completely safe from me, as are all who bear the true hyozan mark.
“But Toshi here,” he waved his arm in a grandiose arc, “quit our little brotherhood some time ago. He is no longer oath-bound to me, or you, or the nezumi. He serves the Myojin of Night’s Reach … and himself, of course … but he has no more connection to the hyozan than you did before he tricked you into joining.”
Kiku forgot her wound and stared at Toshi in open shock. “You utterly contemptible bastard.”
Toshi merely stared back at Kiku, holding her eyes as if he had nothing to hide, nothing to regret.
“Turn her loose,” Hidetsugu said. “We will discuss things, she and I. And the hyozan will decide this traitor’s fate together.”
The yamabushi holding Kiku let go. He placed a hand on her collarbone, circling his thumb and forefinger around the arrow, and it popped out in a flash of orange light and a few droplets of blood.
Kiku inspected the site of the wound, but her skin had already healed and scarred over beneath the torn purple satin. With her angry eyes fixed on Toshi, Kiku very deliberately crossed the room and stood beside Hidetsugu.
“Kiku,” Toshi husked, “don’t listen to him. He’s going to kill us all.”
The beautiful mahotsukai glared at Toshi with pitiless eyes. She snapped her fan open and covered her face, fanning herself as she turned her back. The ogre began to laugh. Toshi endured the sound easily, but only because he could not have felt more desolate and bitter.