The Envoy Dies in the Night

Ghosts cannot refuse a question. The Lord Bayushi. She commands there be no peace between them and the Unicorn. His previous servant has failed — though his previous servant yet lives, and may perhaps redeem himself with success.

The magistrates spent the night after the attack finding out who had sent it, and the morning finding Miya Misato dead. In between, Doji Setsuna wrote a treaty that does not require her to be alive.

Both generals were up and neither would say what each of them was thinking, which was that the other had done this. Doji Setsuna had already put it to them that neither of them would — nothing in it for either army — and they had come far enough round to work in parallel without quite working together. Asked how the magistrates could best assist, Matsu Maro gave the only answer available: are you not Emerald Magistrates? You have a crime before you. Solve it. Kakita Kazumi pointed out that none of them are Kitsuki and this is not their trade. She asked whether he was admitting there was something the great Kakita Kazumi could not do.

She also put no fewer than a dozen of her own around the envoy's tent for the night, and allowed as many Moto to stand with them — two dozen guards over one woman, a night too late. Kakita Kazumi proposed that the two commanders sleep in that tent or pitch theirs against it, so that anyone trying again would have to come through them as well. That suggestion came from him. Doji Setsuna made a point of not making it.

She ruled that the bodies stay in magistrate custody until the investigation closes, with either general free to examine them as a courtesy, and then read what was in front of her. The Moto clothes were stolen — somewhere in that camp are people missing them. And whoever wore them knew their way into the Lion camp without being challenged, which is not something learned on the night. So: an inventory on the Unicorn side and a roll call on the Lion side. The Lion know exactly who their numbers did and did not include.

Then she nearly went over. Bayushi Monban caught her and held her up, and told her she was embarrassing them in front of the Lion — what would your grandmother say — and got a look for it. I will strive to comport myself with excellence.

Shiba Midori worked the other end of it. She scried the ground for anything supernatural used nearby in the last day and found residual traces: not, so far as she could read them, a spell cast by one of the attackers, but a spell laid on one of them. Somebody had worked on these men before they came.

Then she called up their ghosts, and found somebody already there.

An imperious woman in ghostly armour was walking among them with an enormous no-dachi, chasing them and cutting them down as they fled — Matsu Tomoe, whose face Shiba Midori recognised because it is her granddaughter's. Killing them, she explained, sends them on the faster. Shiba Midori bowed and asked, if it pleased the Lady Doji, to question one first — and was corrected, coldly, on the name. She is a Matsu. She married into the Doji; she never became one.

She ran the chosen ghost down anyway, beat it, and threw it on its knees, because it amuses me that you killed one of them.

Shiba Midori asked who had sent him. He would not answer — my ancestors are smiling, and yours say the same. The Lion and the Unicorn will destroy each other — until she reminded him that the dead cannot refuse.

The Lord Bayushi. She commands there be no peace between them and the Unicorn. His previous servant has failed. Although his previous servant yet lives, perhaps he may redeem himself with success.

Asked what else walked here, Matsu Tomoe answered instead, and turned on Shiba Midori: you are part of the Isawa's conspiracy to rile the elements against us, are you not? It is far more obvious now that we are dead than it was when we were alive. The shugenja of our clan are bloody busy trying to verify how exactly your clan has turned the elements against us — and when they find out how. Then she took the ghost's head off.

Kakita Kazumi had the bodies stripped. Under the stolen Moto clothes were plain travelling clothes, the sort anybody walking with a baggage train would own — except that the Lion brought no baggage train; every man carried his own. Sewn into the linings he found the rest of it: throwing stars, blowguns and darts, and three doses of an extract of nightshade, still sealed. They never got the chance to use them. Nothing on any of them said where they came from.

Shiba Midori went to find Bayushi Monban and found him in the envoy's tent, sitting up with Ikoma Tadayoshi in the burnt-down candles, the two of them meditating in silence — the only time she has seen either of them quiet. Miya Misato slept badly beside them, twitching, whimpering, her breathing ragged.

She spoke to Bayushi Monban in Cadence, so the tent would not hear it. That she is uneasy about Ikoma Tadayoshi. That she had questioned the assassins and they claimed orders from a Bayushi lord. And that they had also said he could be turned to their cause. She told him she did not believe them, and that it was worth knowing that they did. He shrugged, and shrugged again, and said he could do no more, and she bowed and left it.

Then she told Doji Setsuna, who went white. Was she? I would have thought she of all people would be pleased by tonight — meaning her grandmother, who had instead found the evening entertaining. A Bayushi lord, Shiba Midori said, and not the one she knew. Another one.

Doji Setsuna named the question she could not chase tonight and wanted on the record anyway: what kind of peace is it that a Scorpion would go to this length to prevent? Then she told them something she had not told them before. Her own mentor was a Bayushi.

And she sat down and assembled what she knows about Bayushi Kachiko. That her mentor had once walked her through a thing Bayushi Kachiko had done which broke no Imperial law anywhere and broke the whole spirit of it — a lesson in how to bend a rule so that the bender ends up untouchable and friendless. That Bayushi Kachiko was in line to lead the Shosuro until her marriage to Bayushi Shoju required her to become Bayushi instead, and that there are Scorpion who still think that was a mistake. That her husband is Champion of the whole clan and appears entirely untroubled by her private standing with the throne. That the Emperor's sight is failing, and she reads his correspondence to him — which means she decides, in practice, what reaches him.

And that her brother is Shosuro Hametsu, who leads the Shosuro — and who is Bayushi Monban's lord, and the man Doji Setsuna has just billed fifty koku.

She also saw the other edge of it. Being the one who stands between the Emperor and his letters is an enormous advantage and it costs her deniability entirely. Nothing can happen in that correspondence without her; if the Emperor ever routes around her, it is because she has failed or because he has stopped trusting her.

Otoya sat up through what was left of the night making a clean copy of the writ — which is possible at all because Kakita Kazumi pulled the seal out of the fire, and the seal is intact enough to be used.

In the morning Doji Setsuna wrote the agreement and got it right. All four magistrates as signatories and both generals with them: the Emerald Magistrates will see Miya Misato to the front to deliver the writ, and both commanders will do everything in their power to bring about the peace the Emperor has demanded. Twelve honour staked by every party, and no loopholes in it that anyone could object to.

Then Kitsuko Ayoko found Miya Misato dead.

No sign of anyone's hand in it. She had simply lost too much blood, in the night, in her sleep, three hours after everyone else finally lay down. Doji Setsuna was woken by a servant and told the lady Shiba Midori needed her urgently in the envoy's tent, and knew before she got there.

Ikoma Tadayoshi woke into it. He had been her yojimbo, he had slept, and she was dead beside him — and his face went through grief to horror to the understanding that he owes his life for it.

Doji Setsuna had braced for this and it did not change her road. Do not disclose it until the agreement is signed and the column is moving. And then, since the document requires the magistrates to see Miya Misato to the front and says nothing whatever about her being alive when she arrives: they will take her with them.

Bayushi Monban would not have it. The charge was hers and it died with her; the magistrates should order the Lion out of Unicorn country, send both sides back to the City Of The Rich Frog to renegotiate, and let the capital send another envoy and a senior magistrate. Nobody has to accept their authority. He wanted the death used as leverage instead — an Imperial had died under two armies' care, and that alone would make them listen.

Doji Setsuna held. Cessation of conflict is not peace. The writ was for the front and the agreement is already signed by both commanders. When he asked whether she really thought his lord would pay fifty koku, she told him the Doji would cover it, since her word had been given, and that if his lord chose otherwise that was between his lord and Moto Gaheris. When he said this would inflame everything, she said that if he acted on that she would question his loyalty to her and to the Emperor. He invited her to question it.

She also gave him something. Nothing in the agreement says the road to the front has to be direct. A detour through the City Of The Rich Frog could be justified — to get a proper Imperial commission from the governor, of the standing that would give them the authority he is right that they do not have.

In the end he would not leave. If you wish to continue on this path, I will follow you. I would never abandon my family. He wanted his objection on the record, and it is: he thinks this is very bad, and dangerous, and that they are exposed. Shiba Midori reminded him whose little sister she is. Kakita Kazumi drew a captured shinobi blade rather than be embraced, and was embraced anyway.

Then the practical business of a body. She has to be burned within three days by custom. Clean her, dress her in her best, wrap her in linen, put her in a palanquin, and let the hinin carry it, because no samurai should be asked to. Lavender for the smell; riders to the Shrine of the Fortune of Wealth to buy incense, and the Unicorn can pay for it, as the least they owe a woman who died in their keeping.

Setsuna

She has a name now, and it is the Emperor's own advisor. A ghost that cannot lie said the Lord Bayushi commands there be no peace, and every hour since has made that read as Bayushi Kachiko. She called the Scorpion three weeks ago on inference; this is testimony. It is also unusable — she cannot walk into a court and say a beheaded assassin told a Phoenix shugenja.

The right question is the one she asked and could not chase. Not who, but what kind of peace is worth this much to prevent. Someone is spending assassins, a spell laid on a man, and an Imperial envoy's life to keep the Lion and the Unicorn cutting at each other. That is not spite. That is a plan with a shape, and knowing the shape would be worth more than the name.

And she has found the seam in Bayushi Kachiko. Standing between a half-blind Emperor and his letters is the whole of her power, and it leaves her nowhere to stand if anything goes wrong in that correspondence. She cannot claim not to have known. Anyone who wants to move against her does not need to prove she ordered a thing — only that something reached the throne, or failed to, while she was the one holding it.

Shosuro Hametsu is her brother. Which means the fifty-koku invoice Doji Setsuna wrote in her own hand went to the household of the woman who is very probably trying to kill this peace, and that her yojimbo's oath runs to that house. She should think hard about what Bayushi Monban is inside this, and she should do it without deciding in advance what the answer is.

Miya Misato died in her sleep and the mission did not. The agreement was signed before anyone knew, it commits four magistrates and two generals to seeing the envoy to the front, and it says nothing about her being alive when she gets there. That is not a trick; it is the document doing what a document is for. But she should be clear that she is about to carry a dead sixteen-year-old across a war zone in a palanquin so that a piece of paper stays true, and that whatever else that is, it is not what she promised the girl she was teaching to argue.

Bayushi Monban is not wrong. Nobody has to accept their authority, the writ is burnt, and the envoy is dead — and he is the one who said out loud that the death is leverage and should be used as such rather than hidden. He would go to the City Of The Rich Frog, get a real commission, and come back able to command rather than persuade. The detour she offered him is the right compromise and she should take it seriously rather than as a sop, because the version of this where they arrive at Battlemaiden Castle with no envoy, no writ and no standing is exactly the one he is describing.

And Matsu Tomoe is telling her something in the middle of all of it. Her grandmother was on that ground, cutting down assassins' ghosts for sport, and thought the night entertaining. She also thinks the Phoenix are conspiring to turn the elements against the Lion, and says her clan's shugenja are working to prove it. Shiba Midori is a Phoenix, stands beside Doji Setsuna every day, and just saved the envoy's life for as long as it could be saved. That is a second war being prepared underneath this one, and the woman who told her about it is her own dead.