The Night Parade of 100 Demons: A Legend of the Five Rings Novel by Marie Brennan

Author:Marie Brennan [Brennan, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: fantasy, mystery and detective, Legend of the Five Rings
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

“I don’t know if it’s literally a hundred yōkai,” Sekken said. They’d moved a little distance away from the shrine, to a spot where the sunlight came through; it was warmer there, though not so much that he hadn’t pulled his kimono back up. The inugami lay flopped with its head in Sekken’s lap, apparently deciding that, now that Sekken had found the answer, he could be treated as a human pillow. “There was a… no, not a Bayushi artist. Shosuro? Soshi? I get those two families confused more often than I should. I think it was a Shosuro–”

“Lord Asako.”

Ryōtora’s patient voice called him back from the edge of that hole. “You’re right; it doesn’t matter. Some Scorpion artist did a whole series of paintings of the Night Parade, and he did exactly one hundred of them, but that might just have been artistic tidiness. It’s sort of a catalogue of yōkai, including a few he may just have made up. Other versions show some of the same yōkai, some different. If there’s a set composition for the Night Parade, I don’t know what it is.”

He paused to let Ryōtora pull his writing kit out of his kimono, but the wad of moss in it proved to be too dry for use. Sekken scrambled up and ran to fetch his own. Once the loaned brush was wet and Ryōtora had a scrap of paper laid across a flattish rock, Sekken continued. “There isn’t much of a story to be told. The Night Parade is just a bunch of yōkai rampaging through a place – usually a town, and usually at midsummer. Some versions say it’s led by a creature called Nurarihyon, but not all of them agree on that, and even the ones that do depict Nurarihyon a bunch of different ways. Like I said, it’s a literary trope – at least I assumed it was. So people feel free to make up whatever they like.”

“What do these things say about how you defeat it?”

“You don’t,” Sekken said. “You just survive it. There’s a very old kyōgen play from Crane lands – hasn’t been performed for several hundred years, I think; it went out of fashion – that makes the Night Parade out to be this fun bit of chaos, everything topsy-turvy for a little while before order reasserts itself. But based on what’s happened here, I think the truth is closer to the versions that say it brings death and destruction. Even seeing Nurarihyon is supposedly enough to kill a person on the spot… which is why no two artists depict him the same way.”

The movement of the brush faltered. “If that’s true, then he could kill the entire village.”

The entire village was at risk anyway; plenty of the yōkai were dangerous. Sekken understood what Ryōtora meant, though. If Nurarihyon had walked through Seibo Mura when people were fleeing for their lives, there would be hardly anyone left now.

“I don’t think he’s appeared,” Sekken said. “Yet, anyway. The first round of disturbances started off small, just noises and animated objects.

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