“My Lady?” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“The servant’s wing, my Lady.”
“The chamber pots in the guest wing need emptying when you’re done.”
She bowed. “Hai.”
“Go on then,” the woman waved. “And bathe tomorrow, for the Maker’s sake. There may be no Shōgun, but this is still the Shōgun’s palace. Serving here is an honor. Especially for one of your breed.”
“I will, my Lady. Thank you, my Lady.”
Bowing low, the girl waited for the mistress to retreat before continuing on her way. She shuffled to the servants’ quarters, the loose boards of the nightingale floor chirping and squeaking beneath her feet. Outside each door, a chamber pot awaited—black kiln-fired clay, a little smaller than an armful, with gifts inside just for her. She would carry each pot to a night soil drain at the rear of the grounds and dump the reeking contents. Wash them out and trudge back though the palace. Watching the slow, orchestrated chaos around her, ministers and soldiers and magistrates, scrabbling for power and gathering in tiny, muttering knots.
And she, beneath it all.
The house mistress had spoken truth—serving in the palace was an honor few lowborns ever enjoyed. Burakumin like her were the bottom of the barrel in Shima’s caste system, only employed at tasks regular citizens found unwholesome. Male clanless could join the army, of course, serve out a ten-year stint in exchange for genuine clan ink at the end of his tour. But that wasn’t an option for the Shit Girl, even if she felt the suicidal urge to serve as fodder for the gaijin lightning cannon. Besides, that plan hadn’t worked out so well for her father …
So here she was, slinging chamber pots in the Shōgun’s palace. Derided. Shunned. Constantly reminded she was unworthy of the honor. But lowborn or no, in the two years she’d worked those opulent halls, she’d learned a simple truth she’d suspected her entire life—no matter how honorable the backside producing it, shit never fails to stink.
Making her way back to the servant’s wing, she would slip the chamber pot through a slot in the bedroom doors, working her way down the row. Each room was sealed with a shiny new lock—Lady Aisha’s maidservants were all under house arrest, recently moved from Kigen jail. In fact, more than a few of the palace serving staff had been imprisoned after Shōgun Yoritomo’s death, suspected of either assisting the plot, or failing to stop it. But the Shit Girl? The clanless, worthless, bloodless mongrel wrapped in third-hand servant’s clothes? She swam as she always did. Beneath their contempt. Beneath their notice.
It had worked out well, all things considered.
She knelt by the final door in the row, reached inside her servant’s kimono and retrieved a small pad of rice-paper, a stick of charcoal. Glancing up and down the darkened corridor, she scrawled some hasty kanji on the paper, slipped it through the door slot.
“Daiyakawa,” it said.
The name of a little-known village somewhere in the northern Tora provinces, where years ago, a peasant uprising had been quietly quashed by Shōgunate troops. To most, the name would mean nothing. To the girl imprisoned within the room, everything.
Moments later, a note was slipped back through the slot, kanji marked in lipstick.
“Who are you?”
And so it began. Paper slipping into the hall, her eye scanning the notes, replies marked on the flip side. Listening for approaching footsteps as the girl imprisoned within the room scratched a new message, passed it through the space between doorframe and nightingale floor.
“Call me No One, Michi-chan. Kaori sends regards.”
“Do I know you?” came Michi’s response.
“Have served in palace two years, but you would not know me. Joined local Kagé a few weeks ago.”
“Why join now?”
“Saw Stormdancer speak in Market Square. Told me to raise my fist. So here I am.”
A small pause.
“And here I am.”
“Can you escape room?”
“Tried. Ceiling panels bolted in place. Window barred.”
“Why return here after Yoritomo died? Must have known you would be arrested.”
“Could not leave Aisha behind.”
“Brave.”
“Overheard rumors. Wedding? Lord Hiro?”
“True. Invitations sent to clanlords. Date set. Three weeks.”
“Aisha would never agree.”
“No choice.”
“Can speak to her?”
“Royal wing guarded like prison. Aisha never leaves rooms.”
“I must get out of here.”
“Magistrate Ichizo has only key.”
Another pause.
“Not for long.”
No One heard creaking footsteps, the low murmurs of two approaching bushimen.
“Must go. Light red candle in window when free to speak.”
Standing quickly, the girl scooped up the chamber pot and shuffled down the corridor, heart pounding in her chest. She forced her hands to be still, her breath to slow. But the guards gave her and her stinking armload a wide berth, neither of them sparing her a glance. Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew to ignore her. This was the fate of the clanless in Shima—to be treated as less than a person. All her life, she’d been a walking, breathing absentee. Seldom spoken to. Never touched. For all intents and purposes, invisible.
It had worked out well, all things considered.
When she was a little girl, No One thought the smokestacks made the clouds. She remembered playing around the walls of Yama refinery with her brother, watching filthy children tramp in and out of wrought-iron gates to a steam whistle tune, jealous they got to work in a place so magical. Trudging home through the wretched streets of Downside, she felt a pang of remorse for that childish ignorance.
The chi refinery grew like a tumor off Kigen Bay; a tangled briar of swollen pipes and bloated tanks, glowering over the labyrinthine alleys with grubby glass eyes. Chimneys dotted with burning floodlights spattered the sky with tar, smothering the broken-back tumbledowns about it in a blanket of choking vapor. A corroded pipeline as tall as houses wormed out of the refinery’s bowels, north across the sluggish black depths of the Junsei River. Ramshackle apartment stacks and crumbling lean-tos lined the oil-slick streets of Downside—the cheapest and meanest stretch of broken cobbles in all of Kigen. A body had to be poor or desperate to even consider hanging her hat there.
Truth was, she’d spent eighteen years being both.
A threadbare cloak was slung around her servant’s clothes, grubby kerchief over her face, a broad straw hat pulled low over her good eye, narrowed against the rising sun. As she rounded the corner to her tenement tower, a figure prowled out of the gloom to meet her, quiet as final breath. A hulking shape, almost toddler-sized, missing both ears and half its tail, blue-black as lotus smoke. It had a mangled, snaggletoothed face, patchy fur stretched over crisscrossed scars. Its kind were rare as diamonds in Kigen these nights. Its eyes were the color of piss on fresh snow.