Yukiko heard glassware smashing, loud cursing. A man crashed through the doorway in a rain of splinters, nearly knocking her over. He landed face first in the dust and started bleeding the road red, broken fingers twitching. The crowd ignored him, most skirting around without a glance. The gaggle of neo-chōnin merchants stepped over him on their way to whatever it was they considered important.
“Not again,” she sighed, and stepped inside. She screwed up her nose at the reek of lotus and sweat and red saké. Pulling her goggles and kerchief down around her throat, she squinted into the gloom. She recognized the shape of a giant, sweat-slicked Akihito. Two yakuza were in headlocks under his arms. His headbutt smeared a third gangster’s nose all over his cheeks. Masaru was being held in an armlock by a fat, bloody-nosed bald man. A rat-faced fellow was punching him repeatedly in the stomach to the brittle tune of a shakuhachi flute. Masaru’s salt-and-pepper hair had come loose from his topknot, splayed across his face in dark tendrils wet with blood. As she watched, he craned his head around and sank his teeth into his captor’s forearm.
The bald man howled, released his grip, and Masaru kicked the rat-faced man square between his legs. The fellow let out a high-pitched squeal and sank to his knees. Masaru dropped a hook across the bald man’s jaw, sending him backward into the bar to land on a pile of broken beach glass. He was picking up a table to clobber the rat-man when Yukiko’s voice rang out over the chaos.
“A little early in the morning, isn’t it, father?” Masaru paused, squinting bleary-eyed in her direction. He brightened when he recognized her, and took one unsteady step forward, a grin breaking out on his face.
“Daughter! Just in—” A saké bottle sailed into the back of his head and he crashed across the upturned gaming tables, out cold. The bald man picked up his war club from the wreckage and stalked toward Masaru, wiping his bleeding nose on the back of one fat, greasy paw.
Yukiko stepped forward and held up her hand.
“Sama, please. Enough for one day, hai?”
“Not nearly,” he growled. “Get out of my way, girl.”
Yukiko’s hand drifted to the tantō hidden at the small of her back, fingers
slipping around the knife’s lacquered hilt. With her other hand, she pulled up the loose gray cotton of her uwagi’s left sleeve. Even in the guttering tungsten light, the elaborate imperial sun inked across her bicep was plainly visible. Her long, shady eyes glanced down to the identical tattoo on her father’s arm, then back up to the face of the advancing yakuza.
“Please, sama,” she repeated, the barest flicker of warning in her voice, “if this insignificant servant of Yoritomo-no-miya, Ninth Shōgun of the Kazumitsu Dynasty, has caused your house offense, we humbly beg forgiveness.”
The fat man paused, breathing heavily, drool and blood dripping down through his goatee to spatter on the floorboards. He surveyed the wreckage of the room: the unconscious bodies, broken furniture and braided iron kouka coins scattered across the floor. The serving girl peeked over the bar, squeaked and dropped back into hiding.
The fat man pouted, brow creased in thought. “We keep his winnings,” he finally grunted, motioning to her father with the business end of his tetsubo. “Call it even.”
“That is more than fair.” Yukiko gave a small bow, releasing her grip on the knife. “Amaterasu bless your kindness, sama.”
She turned to Akihito, paused mid-brawl, his arms still locked around the necks of the two smaller, rapidly suffocating men.
“Akihito, give me a hand please?”
The giant raised an eyebrow, looked back and forth between the purple faces stuffed into his armpits. Shrugging, he clobbered the men’s heads together and tossed them over the bar. The crash of shattering glass and the sound box’s tune were drowned out by the serving girl’s shriek.
Akihito stooped down and hefted Masaru over one shoulder, flashing Yukiko a broad grin. She frowned in return.
“I asked you to watch him.”
Though he towered a good foot and a half over the girl, the big man looked slightly abashed. “He’s still in one piece, isn’t he?”
She scowled and rolled her eyes. “Barely.”
“So where to, little fox?”
“The harbor.” She stalked over the broken furniture and out the door.
“Harbor?”
Akihito frowned and stumbled after her. Emerging into the blast-furnace heat, he tugged his goggles up over his eyes with his spare hand. People swarmed about them in the street, lotusflies swarmed about the people, all buzzing to and fro beneath the glare of that burning scarlet sun.
The big man pulled a gray kerchief up over his mouth, a conical straw hat onto his head.
“What the hells are we going to the harbor for?”
In answer, Yukiko produced a scroll from the inner breast pocket of her uwagi and slapped it into the big man’s palm. Akihito shifted Masaru’s bulk across his shoulders. The rice-paper made a sound like brittle bird wings as he unfurled it, scowling over the symbols painted on the page. The kanji were written in a thin, spidery hand, difficult to read through the film of grime and ash covering his goggles. It took a few seconds for the color to start draining from the big man’s face.
“This is an imperial seal,” he said.