Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Setsura was in bad shape, but he was feeling fairly upbeat.

Takako was with Mephisto. Mephisto had vowed that no one would lay a finger on her, and he’d wager his soul to keep his word. Setsura hadn’t lost a whole lot of sleep over him becoming a vampire, and neither had he spent a whole lot of time wondering why.

Let Mephisto be Mephisto. That was enough.

However reassuring that might be, his original goals were still up in the air, and the state of affairs on the ground was not reassuring.

Two hours had passed since he’d come to this world with Princess. Not only hadn’t he escorted Prime Minister Kongodai to safety, he hadn’t even found him yet. The extent of Princess’s powers and whatever her monsters might be up to was entirely unclear, but it was no stretch to say that nothing got his goat more than that.

However, the most effective course of action was entirely different.

The young man striding across the balmy field hardly appeared—and not just on the surface—to be driven by such provocations. In the final moments that fate might inevitably deliver to him, he would shrug his shoulders and say: “Well, them’s the breaks, I guess.”

He was on a street in the village. The mist all around him was so thick it reflected only his own shadow. Now and then, deeper in, the dark shapes of the ruins rose up before his eyes, and then was swallowed in the world of white.

This time Setsura didn’t shout. Which is to say, he didn’t go scrambling around in a tizzy. More like a portrait of a young man strolling down a street in a London fog.

“If they’re going to keep their distance, no sense getting on people’s nerves bugging them about where the prime minister is.”

He sensed being passed by on the right and left. The shapes of people or birds flitted above his head. None of them spoke.

“Where is the prime minister? Come tomorrow, even this manhunter won’t know.”

Right now, a myriad of somethings surrounded Setsura. Silent, unbreathing, matching him step for step. Setsura must be aware of their existence. The tension would have driven any normal person mad.

The cordon tightened. The mist in front of him billowed up. A man’s face poked through the haze. A fearless and rugged-looking man with a splendid Fu Manchu mustache that jutted out from beneath his nose in an inverted V. The thick lips moved. He spoke.

Setsura didn’t understand a thing he said. It was ancient Chinese. Perhaps he recognized a word that meant “search.” But the grammar was indecipherable. “Looking for somebody?” was a possible guess.

Grasping that he was not being understood, the man’s face slipped back into the mist. Another appeared. A young man full of piss and vinegar. He pointed at his face with a hand decorated with gaudy rings.

Setsura understood that. “No,” he said in Cantonese, shaking his head. “I’m not searching for you.” He’d picked up a smattering of Cantonese back when a Hong Kong tour operation was headquartered in West Shinjuku, but never more than that.

The young man disappeared as well.

“Who’s doing the deciding here?” Setsura muttered without stopping. “Maybe it’ll be a woman next.”

With a quiet whoosh, a woman’s face appeared. A voluptuous, indescribably beautiful woman’s face. She indicated herself.

“Though I do appreciate the concern.” She vanished too. “Is this some kind of speed-dating sideshow? Hey—” Setsura recognized the face that appeared next, one of Kongodai’s bodyguards. He’d seen him get sucked into the ground. “You’ll do,” he said cheerfully.

The man smiled back. The hand bent as if to seize Setsura by the lapels and reached toward his throat. A hand covered with gray bristles.

Setsura didn’t move. Blood stained the mist red. The man grabbed hold of his severed wrist with an inhuman scream. At the same time, from the fog around them came the feral roars of wild animals.

“You were evicted by the Landlord?” Setsura asked the sinking form. “Where’s the prime minister?”

The man shot to his feet, a gray beast wearing a suit coat.

“So, Mr. Bear, is it?” said Setsura, in tones suggesting that even he found this a bit odd. With a growl, the big animal turned and was swallowed up by the mist.

Setsura leaned over, searching for something that had just occurred to him. His finger groped through the haze and touched a hard, ceramic-like surface. It was a mask. From the dimensions and contours and spacing of the eyes and nose, he knew it was the exact reproduction of a man’s, though containing none of the “life” he had just encountered.

It was a primitive item, made from fired, painted clay. And yet quite a piece of work.

Setsura pushed aside the fog like wading through a high surf and entered a house on the right. All the things around him whined and whimpered but gave way.

On the floor was what appeared to be a potter’s wheel. A kiln was next to it. What filled in the rest of the puzzle were the human faces arrayed on the still-standing wall. The finished masks were of men and women, the young and the old. They looked down at Setsura with hollow eyes filled with the anguish of rotting away in a place like this.

He visited the house next door and found the same thing there. “If you don’t mind,” he said, picking up one of each and going outside. He stopped and said, “What’s this?”

“Enjoying yourself?” Princess smiled, the mist wrapped around her like light.

“I gather this is a mask-making village?”

“Correct.”

“Bears are that good with clay?” Setsura asked with raised eyebrows, the image rising to his thoughts.

“One of the animals that lives around here. They are all here.” Princess made a stroking gesture with her hand. Here and there sounded the growls of wild animals. “This village has been here since before the Hsia Dynasty, devoted to the making of masks. You have seen the fineness of the detail for yourself. In time, the technique surpassed mere dexterity and entered the realm of the gods.”

“Impressive.”

“Once a person dons a mask made in this village, not only the face but the physical being, down to the soul, becomes the mask, whether that of a human or a beast.”

Setsura folded his arms and nodded. “Makes sense, I guess.”

He was being perfectly serious, perhaps because Princess herself showed such intense interest in the subject.

“But the village was destroyed by a king many centuries before the Hsia. Wiped out to a man. Only the masks remained. And here are their remains.”

“Why was it destroyed?”

“For dishonoring the king’s wife. A mask maker in this village was struck by the queen’s beauty and carved a mask of her in secret. Had he stored it away and kept it to himself, all would have been well. But keeping such a work of magnificent art to himself must have driven the man mad. So he secretly delivered it to the queen. How do you think she reacted?”

“I imagine she was furious. Something like, I am the fairest one of all.”

“No, she was impressed.” Princess gazed back at Setsura, a toying smile on her lips. “It struck her that though the mere work of a man, the mask held a beauty that could not be equaled anywhere else on earth. Entranced, she gazed raptly upon it. At the beginning of the third month, she begged the king to attack the village of the mask maker and slaughter all of its inhabitants.”

“Huh,” said Setsura.

“I’m sure you understand why, her reasons and emotions. Certainly you would understand. The queen was taken by her own beauty, and frightened by it. It seemed to her altogether possible that the mask maker could also discover this perfection in the face of another woman. But no—a woman as beautiful as her could not exist elsewhere. That was not at the root of her anxiety. What if the mask maker continued to live and was asked to again pour his love and devotion into a mask of her? What if it did not equal the perfection of the first? And what if, by chance, another being were to behold it? What if only the maker beheld it? How could such a situation be tolerated?”

“And exterminating the village was the only answer?” Setsura said, as if bored with the subject already.

“That is the nature of women. Well, beautiful women.” Princess laughed a radiant laugh.

“But the village aside, she could not tolerate even one mask remaining. To her mind, she must have thought the most natural thing to do was to destroy everything, down to the last mask.”

“You can count on a woman to really think these things through.” A sly smile rose to her lips.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“The king’s army destroyed every last mask and burned the houses to the ground. After that several centuries passed. The charred remains were carried off by the wind and rain, rendering it a wasteland, visited only by the birds and beasts of the field. The king couldn’t have foreseen the miracle that happened next. It was probably a monkey that dug a mask out of the mud and put it on. The miracle was that this particular mask was that of the mask maker whose creations had so impressed the queen. The results you can see around you.”

“The monkey wearing the mask became the mask maker.”

“And so the village was revived. The new mask makers searched their memories and fashioned masks for the villagers and put them on the animals that came here.”

“Such as the bear.” Setsura gazed up at the sky. He felt a little let down. Scanning his environment he said, “A pretty sad revival.”

“Animals are animals. However they might don masks that rise to the work of the gods themselves and feign human form, after a while the true nature peeks out. More time passed, and they discarded the masks and returned to the wilds. The few that remained gradually grew deeply steeped in their underlying natures.”

“You keep dragging me off to one freak show after the other,” Setsura said, almost like an afterthought. He was pissed, but true to his own nature, didn’t let it show. “What’s your game?”

“Do you think I would tell you?”

“What the hell did you come here for anyway?” Setsura said, as if asking about the weather. “To take me on a sightseeing tour of this village? That’s not in your nature.”

“I came here to show you the way.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Keep going straight on this road for as long as it takes. On the way there, no matter what happens, ignore it. Should it stand in your way, turn to the left. Not to the right. That is where the prime minister will be.”

“And why should I believe you?”

“I have placed plenty of traps laid in your path, just for you. Better that you step into my snares while in a good mood.”

“You here for anything else?”

“That is all.”

“Got it. Now get lost.”

Princess took a step back. As if waiting in the wings, the thick fog draped itself around her. In a flash, she had dissolved back into it.

“Thanks but no thanks. I’ll do it my way.”

Setsura started walking. It wasn’t his way to give his enemies the benefit of the doubt either. The Setsura that was Setsura was too contrary a fellow. He hadn’t gone ten yards before the voices echoed all around him, beckoning, cajoling.

“Come over here.”

“Closer, a little closer.”

“I’ll make a mask for you.”

Setsura didn’t understand any of it. What he felt was a strong projection of will, that an average person with only a strong sense of self-denial would have found hard to resist.

He wanted to stop. He wanted to turn around. The strange emotions roiled in the depths of his chest and surged unstoppably into his throat, brimming with bitter and woeful thoughts.

Was this why Princess came here? Something deeper and deeper down, murmuring coolly in a heart stained with curious colors. This was not about snatching his prey from before his eyes. But what was this thing that lay along the path to his right, that he absolutely should not see?