A Mortal Song by Megan Crewe

Author:Megan Crewe [Crewe, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780993980688
Publisher: Another World Press
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

15

We reached Tokyo in the middle of the morning. Keiji stashed his books in a train station locker, and we detoured to a grocery store where we bought up all their bags of salt with his and Haru’s pocket money. The rest of us with arms purchased cheap satchels to carry our defensive materials.

Everywhere we went, I heard murmurs about the weather, the tremors; saw worried glances at the ground and sky. Browning grass mottled the park we gathered in to portion out our supplies. Scattered on it were dead crickets and beetles for whom the heat and lack of water had been too much. The sight of their fragile carcasses brought a lump to my throat. They reminded me far too sharply of Midori.

If we didn’t succeed in retrieving Amaterasu’s sacred jewel from the Imperial Palace’s shrine today, the crisis would only get worse.

I’m not sure any of us felt completely ready as we headed across the palace’s parking lot. Of the kami we’d met around Nagoya, only Sumire the violet, the oak, the monkey, and the boar had followed us here. The others Takeo had felt were more likely to be hurt or killed than able to help. He held my hand, Chiyo Haru’s, and Sumire Keiji’s, using their ki to make us invisible as we approached the two broad gates leading into the palace grounds. My pulse started skittering. We skirted the visitors dawdling on the paved bridge that crossed the still, murky water of the moat. A guard stood by the high stone wall, oblivious to our presence.

Chiyo clenched the sacred sword at her side. I sucked in a breath as we stepped past the old wooden doors onto the grounds.

No ghosts rushed to meet us. Nothing met us at all but the heat rising off the baked asphalt. A squat, modern building stood ahead of us by a branch in the road, near a lawn spotted with trees and rounded bushes. Tourists strolled by as the breeze stirred the leaves.

“Maybe the ghosts are waiting for us farther in?” I said. Surely Omori hadn’t completely failed to defend this treasure?

Takeo inclined his head. “The grounds cover acres, and only the small area around the shrine is fully protected. We can’t know where our enemies will make their stand.”

“So we’re going to just wander around until we stumble onto them?” Keiji said, his mouth slanting nervously.

I didn’t like that idea either. “Maybe there’s a kami on the grounds who can tell us what they’ve seen,” I said.

“Just got to find them,” Chiyo said. “Too bad kami don’t use cell phones!”

A small streak of cloud streaming across the sky caught my eye. There were other ways of sending a message across a distance.

“Use a kite,” I said to Takeo. “You can make it with a message on it.”

“Perfect!” Chiyo said. “Like people used to do way back during wars and stuff. I guess this is a war, isn’t it? Here, I can do it.”

Before she’d even finished speaking, she was stretching a cylinder of ki between her hands.

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