That was when he first noticed the armed man. He sat just inside the doorway leading into the building. His arms rested on his knees, and he had laid his head on them and gone to sleep. A big, brawny fellow, he had a sword slung over one shoulder and a bow and quiver of arrows over the other. Tora recognized the type. They were soldiers who served no master, but travelled from town to town looking for work which required the use of their weapons. If no such work was available, some became highway men, lying in wait for wealthy and unarmed travellers. This one was cautious enough not to take off his weapons even while he slept.
Suddenly, as if he felt Tora's scrutiny, the man raised his head slowly and looked at him. He was still young, about Tora's age, with a neatly trimmed beard and mustache, and cold steady eyes. They exchanged measuring looks. The armed man looked away first, spitting and scratching his topknot in a gesture of contempt.
Tora wished he had worn his old clothes and decided it was safer to avoid the armed man. He took the door on the opposite side instead.
It led into a large but empty guard room. Briefly, weak moonlight came through the door and a window, but a cloud extinguished even this. Tora lit his lantern; by its light he could barely make out the wooden stairs which ascended into the blackness of the second floor. A pervasive smell of dirt, rotten food, sweaty rags and, faintly, of decomposing flesh, hung in the dry, still air. From upstairs came soft rustling sounds. Hungry rats or angry spirits?
Tora shivered and touched the amulet tied around his neck. Murmuring a line from his protective spell, he started up the stairs slowly. When he was halfway up, a faint, flickering light appeared above, shifting weirdly across the dark beamed ceiling. A peculiar humming sound accompanied the light. Tora paused, feeling for the grains of rice in his sash. Suddenly a gigantic, grotesque shadow moved across the ceiling of the floor above. It belonged to a monstrous creature, misshapen and hunchbacked, with a clawlike hand that reached across the entire space, withdrew, and reappeared with a huge knife in it. Every hair on his head bristling, Tora tried to recite his spell, but his mind had become a complete blank. He tried to throw the rice, but spilled it on the steps. Then the knife above slashed downward, and Tora jerked back. Feet slipping on the spilled rice, he crashed down the stairway with a great clatter.
Above a woman's voice cursed loudly and with gusto.
Heaving a sigh of relief, Tora picked himself up. He could deal with low class females of the living variety. He rushed up the steps. When he reached the top, the light went out. At the same moment, a draft caught the candle in his own lantern, and all became dark.
Tora took a couple of steps forward into utter blackness and stumbled over a bundle, nearly falling flat on his face.
An eerie cackle from somewhere near his knee assailed his ears, and he smelled the stench of rotting gums. Whoever it was, he or she was right beside him. Tora moved aside quickly and promptly stepped on something soft and squishy. The cackle turned into a warning screech.
"Here! Watch what you're doin'! She won't holler, but you near put your big foot on me!"
"Sorry!"
He found his flint and relit his lantern. In its light, an old crone peered up at Tora. She was dressed in many layers of filthy rags, her long white hair draped crazily over hunched shoulders. In this light, her face looked like an animated skull. Gray skin clung to sharp bones, eyes disappeared in dark hollows, and a toothless mouth gaped in the rictus of a grin. She was cowering near the corpse of a naked female. Tora retreated with a curse when he realized that he had just stepped on the dead woman's arm.
The crone cackled again. "What's the matter? Afraid of the dead? Look hard, pretty boy! That's what your sweetheart'll look like soon enough!"
Tora had seen bodies before and glanced at the corpse. She was young and very slender except for her bloated face and abdomen. Short-haired and thin, she bore no resemblance to Michiko, whose every limb was plump and whose hair reached past her waist. The dead woman's eyes were open, turned up and showing only yellow-tinged whites. As Tora looked, a sluggish fly emerged from between the cracked lips. If the sweetish smell of corruption had not warned him that this one had been left here at the last possible moment, the purple discoloration in irregular splotches on the yellowing skin would have told him that she had been dead for a day or two. He shuddered and sighed.
"Pretty, ain't she?" The old crone cackled again. "If you want to lie with her, she's free. She won't give you no argument neither."
"Shut up!" Tora raised an arm as if to strike her. She scuttled away a few steps, dropping a long knife in her haste. Tora cursed and snatched it up. "What's that for, you she-devil?" he snarled, coming after her with the knife.
She backed against a wall, raising spindly arms to cover her face. "Nothing," she wailed. "There's no law against it. She'll not be needin' it."
Tora stopped. "What?"
The crone reached into her robe and stretched out a bony arm. From her fist dangled a long twist of black hair.
Tora cursed again and turned away. So she had come to rob the dead woman of the only valuable thing she had left. There was a good market for women's hair. The wealthy and noble ladies liked to augment their own thin or short tresses artificially; little did they know where their borrowed beauty came from. Glancing down at the dead woman, Tora saw that she might have been quite pretty once with her long and shining hair. His stomach twisted again with anger, but he restrained himself. The old one had to live too, and he knew well what poverty could make people do.
"I'm looking for the body of an old man," he said. The crone stuffed the hair back into her robe and picked up her lantern. "He's about a head shorter than me, skinny, big nose. A drowning victim. Have you seen anyone like that?"
"Gimme back my knife!"
He returned it to her reluctantly.
"What you want him for?" she asked slyly, shoving the knife into her belt. "Think he's got some gold on him?"
"No. He's a beggar."
Her eyes shifted past him. She muttered, "Don't know nothing. Gotta go." Kicking at Tora's lantern, she left him standing in the sudden darkness.
"Hey!" He cursed and groped his way forward, hoping he would not step on any more corpses or tumble down the stairwell. He touched a wall and moved along it cautiously. Somewhere ahead of him steps shuffled away. Then the wall ended. Tora decided to abandon his lantern rather than come in contact with the corpse again. A doorway opened into another room, dimly lit by moonlight coming through wooden shutters. Tora entered and threw the shutters wide. The room was empty except for a pile of refuse and a scurrying rat.
Back in the hallway, he found that he could see well enough now to make out several other doors opening into rooms similar to the last one. He stumbled over another body, which turned out to be still alive. He did not bother to check whether the person was drunk or dying. Checking rooms systematically while clutching his Fudo amulet, he finally found what he had come for in the fifth and last room.
A dark shape lay in the middle of the floor. When he bent to touch it, he found wet garments and went to open the shutters wide. The moon was about to disappear behind clouds again, and he quickly turned back to the corpse.
It was Umakai.
He had not been dead long when he had been fished out of the water. His face was blue; his eyes, their whites bloodshot, protruded; and his tongue showed between toothless gums. The wet rags notwithstanding, he did not look like a drowned man. Puzzled, Tora bent to check the dead man's throat the way he remembered his master doing with the girl Omaki.
At that moment the back of his head seemed to explode, and he fell into blackness.