Chapter Seven

Parsee was gone. The noise of the river filled my ears and mind.

I glanced over at Marisa, who sat up with her back to the bridge railing. We looked at each other in silence. The angry jealousy was gone, washed out of me like a sink with the drain stopper pulled. Horror and shame took its place.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “There’s no apology I can give that will make this okay.”

“It’s all right, Reimus.” Marisa pulled herself to her feet by the railing, limped over to my side. “That wasn’t us. ‘Sides, no matter any nasty words, you’re always gonna bees my favorite things.”

I replied with a snort and a weary smile, then looked down at us both. Our clothes were singed from Marisa’s uncontrolled spell, and her skirt had ripped on the side at some point. I ached all over. Bumps and bruises would soon show.

“We really beat the stuffing out of each other,” I said. “Let’s never do anything like that ever again. Also, if you can learn something from studying the orb, you’re absolutely welcome to.” I looked down at the base of the waterrise. “Or... you would be, if Parsee hadn’t chucked our gadgets overboard.”

“Try to control it stills,” said Marisa. “Orb and hakkeros probably not floaty in waters.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll try.”

I held a hand down to the river and tried to think at the orb. Fly back up here. Bring the hakkero with you, if that’s something you can do.

A few seconds passed, with nothing below us but the churning water. I was about to give up – but then, red-white light shone out from the river. The orb popped out of the foam, flew up and into my hand with a smack. Marisa’s reactor followed it, which she was not expecting. It arced over the railing, narrowly avoided hitting Marisa in the face, and clattered to the bridge’s planks.

“Whoa,” I said. “So not only can it fly around itself, but it can manipulate other things too. At least a little bit.”

Marisa bent over to pick up her hakkero. When she stood upright, she saw me holding the orb out to her.

“Here. You wanted to study it?”

She wrapped my hand around the orb and pushed it back to me.

“Maybe laters. Need that things to cover miko-butts while down here in danger-lands.”

---

I’m always exhausted after a fight – and it’s a tragedy that I’ve been in enough fights to know that about myself. I wanted to lie down on the bridge for a few hours, but we had to push on. There was no way to know much time our friends might have... or had.

We crossed the bridge to the path on the river’s left. I looked up the stack of switchbacks that stood over us, and I saw a big gap in the tunnel’s ceiling. The waterrise escaped up there, and that’s where the switchbacks led.

We started climbing. My body yelled at me not to keep exerting myself like this. I ignored its pleas, kept pushing forward and up.

“Ugh,” I grunted. “Kisume wasn’t kidding when she said Grand Uphill. I wonder how much higher we can go before our heads pop out of the grass in Gensokyo.”

“Just think it’s exercises,” said Marisa. “Shake out those winter cobwebs. Spring cleanings for the bodys.”

---

As we calmed down from the fight on the bridge, our bodies remembered to have the symptoms of a chest cold. Our throats and lungs were sore. We got used to planting our faces in the crooks of our elbows, so we didn’t spray coughs at each other. My stomach started to hurt from the coughing spasms.

Being unable to breathe normally made the climb a miserable task. At the end of the fifth switchback, we had to stop and catch our breath. Then again at the eighth. When we reached the top, we couldn’t have climbed more than fifty feet, but the pain in my chest and legs insisted we had just scaled a mountain.

Here at the top of the climb, we paused again and took in our surroundings. Each chamber we had seen underground was bigger than the last.

“Is this Jigoku?” I said.

We stood in a gigantic cavern. I couldn’t even tell the full size of the place from where we stood. The ceiling was so high up that it receded out of view, making it feel more like a dark sky than the top of a cave. The land sloped up away from us at a shallow grade. On our right, the waterrise mounted this slope to become a new uphill portion of the river.

The river and our path parted from each other, but both snaked up to a loose line of buildings, some hundred yards away from us. The nearest structures were the smallest, what looked like small houses or merchant stands that might line a village’s market street.

“See anyones?” said Marisa.

We scanned our eyes left and right, looking for signs of movement.

“Not from here. No oni, no humans, nothing.” I looked at Marisa. “I want to suggest that we keep a low profile, but we’re totally in the wild here. We can’t know how to be stealthy in this place.”

Marisa held up her hakkero. “Fox-girls did say shoot first and laters.”

“You would have done that with or without her advice.”

“In places like this? Any nasties, gotta ‘em smack fast and hards.”

“More than fair. Let’s go.”

Walking up the path from here felt like an easy stroll compared to the switchbacks at Parsee’s bridge. I could make out more detail of the town as we approached it. It seemed as big as Jinri, maybe bigger, but with the buildings more closely packed together. There was no sign of life, no people or monsters in the shop stands or walking around.

A wooden sign was planted in the ground next to one of these stands. A message was burned into it, in both the old and current languages:

旧地獄へようこそ!

ここには誰も属していません。


Welcome to Former Hell!

No one belongs here anymore.

Marisa pointed at this sign as we approached it.

“Former Hells?” she said. “Heck does that means?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it sounds like gibberish. Jigoku is an old-language word for Hell, but when people used it as the name for the oni city, I didn’t think it was meant literally.”

“Places where Suika’s big scary bros drag humans to tortures, does sound pretty hell-likes.”

“But a literal Hell would have to be a place that an afterlife judge damns you to.” I choked down a cough, then remembered something. “Then again, Kisume did say this is where the bad humans went after death.”

We passed the sign and the kiosk beside it, which felt like we had officially set foot in the city. The dirt path ended where a cobblestone road began. Our shoes made soft tap-pat noises as we walked.

“Now, same rule as back there,” I said in a hushed voice. “We don’t talk unless we have to.”

Marisa didn’t reply, which meant she agreed.

---

The streets of Jigoku were lit with torches, similar to the ones we had seen before Parsee’s bridge – sparklamps, but with no glass globe to contain the magic flame. The city was built on the upward slope of the land, with the tallest buildings far off.

This place was uncanny. Being here grated on my nerves, for three reasons I was aware of.

First, Jigoku seemed to be abandoned. Every sight and sound told me that we were walking into a ghost town. Our footsteps echoed off nearby walls. There was no voices, no yells, no laughter, no horseshoes clopping, no wagon wheels rattling, not even in the distance. I couldn’t see any movement through windows or in the alleys that we passed.

Second, the architecture was bizarre. Each building was designed in the old-Eastern aesthetic that Gensokyo’s people might have used five hundred years ago. The roofs were made of shingled tiles with pagoda-style eaves. The walls below were built of brick, stucco, and slatted panels of bamboo. Every door was too tall and wide, bigger than what any human would need to walk through. Every window was too small, portholes barely large enough to look out of. There were no flower gardens, or even box-planters where flowers might be. Instead front stoops were decorated with rock cairns, or statuettes of mystical beasts.

Third, the city was in bad disrepair. Some walls had holes knocked through them. The corners of some houses had fallen into slides of dust and rubble. Shards of glass and broken roof tiles dotted the road, and there was plenty of litter. Food wrapping papers, bones with scraps of meat left on them, empty drinking gourds. Some of the road’s cobblestones were upturned or missing.

Maybe nobody lived here now, but someone had recently. The evacuation probably hadn’t been peaceful.

Marisa and I picked our steps carefully, wary to not make any noise by stepping on debris. We didn’t know where to go, so we followed followed the road uphill, keeping our eyes and ears sharp. It would be nice if I spotted a sign that said Yukari and the others went this way! with a giant arrow to follow, but I wasn’t so lucky.

We neared a building bigger than any we had passed so far. By human standards it could be three stories tall, but I guessed it was only two floors in this place. Here we heard something.

“Where was it? Reds’re so bad at their jobs.”

Marisa and I stopped, held our breath, traded wide-eyed looks. The source of the voice wasn’t in sight. I pointed down the alley where the sound had come from. I held a finger in front of my mouth and enunciated two words: quiet, slow. Marisa nodded.

We turned and went into the alley, moving forward with tip-toe steps. It was darker in here without any torches nearby. I hoped that the close walls would obscure any sounds we made.

“Gonna bust some skulls if I ever see ‘em again,” said the voice, now closer. It was followed by the clattering of rubble spilled onto the ground, then brick grinding against brick.

On my left there was a break in the alley where torchlight spilled in; the corner of a wall cast a demarcation of shadow to light. Here I stopped, then slowly peeked my eyes around the corner. Marisa crouched next to my legs so she could peek out below me.

The noises came from a square-shaped court between the backs of a few buildings. Only one of the buildings had any damage that I could see, but that damage was dramatic. Most of the rear wall of the first story was ripped out into a mess of brick and mortar. Even a divot of the ground was dug up, showing down into a cellar. We didn’t need to guess what had torn this building apart, because we were looking at her back right now.

Until this moment, the biggest and strongest-looking person I had ever seen was Ran Yakumo. This woman tearing apart masonry with her bare hands was a little taller. The word giantess came mind. Her hair hung down her back in a light earthen tone, a color similar to Suika’s hair. She wore a simple cream-colored blouse with red seams. Those seams continued down the blue floral print of her skirt, ending a sawtooth pattern at her skirt’s hem. Her wrists and ankles wore shackles with short chains trailing from them, as if having your hands and feet cuffed was a fashion statement.

I tapped Marisa on the head with one finger. She looked up at me, and I mouthed one word.

Oni.

---

“You two don’t hafta hide like that,” said the oni woman without looking back.

Sour fire poured into my gut. A bead of sweat rolled down from my hairline. I felt Marisa tense against my leg. We didn’t dare move. I hoped oni didn’t have good enough ears to hear my heart pounding.

“If ya come out where I can see ya, y’all get to keep your heads.”

Marisa looked up at me again as if to ask, Should we go out?

I shook my head. Maybe the oni was bluffing.

“All right. I’m not in a great mood, but I’ll be nice and give ya one warnin’ shot.”

She reached down into the debris of the building. With a squeal and a snap, she ripped up a long piece of wood that looked like it had been part of a wine rack’s frame. She turned in our direction, hefted the hunk of wood over her shoulder like an athlete readying a javelin toss.

With a yell of “Se-no!” the oni threw her makeshift spear. That piece of wood must have weighed as much as I do, but it sailed clean through the air like a bolt shot from a ballista. The projectile passed within inches of Marisa and me, then stabbed deep into the wall to our right. The wood shattered into splinters at half its length. An explosion of dust and masonry chips burst from the penetrated wall.

We recoiled, shielding our faces. I let out a gyhaeee! shriek. As the dust settled, the oni spoke again.

“Well? Y’all coming out, or do I hafta do that to you?”

“Okay!” I yelled around the corner. “Just please don’t throw anything else!”

“If ya mind your manners, got nothin’ to worry about.”

I pocketed my yin-yang orb, and gestured that Marisa should do the same with her hakkero. With our weapons hidden, I stepped around the corner and into the light of the courtyard. Marisa followed and stepped to my side. We walked forward with our hands up.

“Well I’ll be,” said the oni. “Two mortal human girls down here? If that happened more often, this town wouldn’t be such an empty mess right now.”

She didn’t have Suika’s two-antlers style of horns. A single red horn stood from her forehead, straight and red except for a yellow star shape on top. Her ears were pointed and her eyes were bright red. Her shoulders were broad, and her arms had the most defined muscles I had ever seen.

“We don’t want to intrude,” I said. “We’re only down here because our youkai friends were kidnapped, and we’re trying to find them.”

“Eh?” said the oni. “That’s hard t’ believe. Thought humans and youkai all hated each other up in Gensokyo.”

“Some of them’s okay peoples, sometimes,” said Marisa.

“You might know one of them,” I said. “My housemate is an oni, and she’s one of the six people pulled down here. Do you know Suika Ibuki?”

The oni woman’s face hardened. Her jaw clenched.

“Oh, you poor little girl. Sayin’ that name might be the last mistake ya ever make.”

She charged forward, crossing the courtyard with a few stomping strides. I tried to step back, but she covered ground too fast. With a swipe from one arm, she knocked Marisa aside, throwing her to the ground. The oni clamped one hand on my neck and pinned me back against the nearest wall. She hadn’t broken any bones or closed my windpipe, but she could do either with almost no effort.

Marisa scrambled to her feet, pulled out her hakkero and took aim.

“Let her goes! Got magics that’ll smack you sillys!”

The oni looked sideways at Marisa, gave a tiny headshake.

“Put that away, girl. Even if ya have a spell that can hurt me, I’ll rip yer friend’s head off faster than ya can cast.”

“Marisa,” I said, barely breathing. “Do what she says.”

While not happy about it, Marisa did lower her hakkero.

“That’s good.” The oni looked back to me. Bright red eyes glared into mine. “Now, tell me how ya know that name. Convince me yer not lyin’.”

“S- Suika!” I sputtered. “She’s a short oni girl who came from down here, I think. She stole a piece of government property, the Mugen Shubin. The oni King banished her for it. She ended up in Gensokyo. That’s where the Boundary youkai, Yukari Yakumo, found her. Yukari made me take Suika into my home, which I wasn’t happy about at first, but now she’s my friend. She helped protect me from monsters a couple of times.”

Those red eyes searched mine. She didn’t seem sure if I was telling the truth. I could feel the pulse in my neck against the muscles in her hand.

“What color is Suika’s horn?” she said.

“Horns! She has two. They’re brown and shaped like antlers. She likes to wear ribbons on her horns when we go out, since women always have headwear in public in Gensokyo. She usually ties part of her hair into a ponytail, and she has chains like you do. She likes songs about oni killing human heroes.”

Her eyes narrowed, becoming ruby slits.

“And ya want me t’ believe she’d live with a human?”

“Well... it might not have been her first choice. She was homeless when Yukari found her, so sharing my roof probably beat sleeping in the woods. Besides, Suika told me about how she was treated down here. Maybe she got along with humans better than you would expect, because her own people were so awful to her.”

That had to be the stupidest topic I could bring up, but my mouth ran on its own. I was too scared to do anything but blurt out everything I knew. This would be when the oni’s face twisted into rage, and her hand would vice all the way through my neck.

To my surprise, that didn’t happen. Her face softened. She pulled her hand back, letting me go.

“That’s right,” she said, eyes down. “I loved Suika, but my brothers and sisters treated her like a knobby doorstop. She never deserved that.”

“She definitely didn’t,” I said. “If it’s any comfort, she’s seemed happier living with me.”

“That is, a lotta comfort.” She brushed some of the dust off my shoulders and out of my hair, like a parent knocking some dirt off a filthy child. “Sorry for roughin’ ya up like that. My name’s Yuugi, by the way. Yuugi Hoshiguma. I’m one of the Devas under the King.”

I gave her a shallow bow, and noticed out the corner of my eye that Marisa pocketed her hakkero.

“Reimu Hakurei, miko of the Hakurei Shrine, where Suika and I live. My friend here is Marisa Ki-Riiguhrk!”

I couldn’t finish the name as a new coughing spasm hit me. I turned and covered my face with my arm again. Marisa shuddered with a fit of her own, as if remembering to feel the itch in her chest upon seeing me cough.

“Uh oh,” said Yuugi. “Don’t like the sound of that. Did ya pass by the spider and the bridge princess on yer way down?”

I nodded, tried to catch my breath. “Ye- yeah. Yamame and Parsee.”

“That testy bug hit ya with her venom, didn’t she? Like, a salty powder that she uses on her meals.”

“I think so?”

“You’re sick,” said Yuugi. “We gotta get ya some kingstonic or you’ll both be dead in a day. Come on over here.”

---

Yuugi walked over to the mess she had ripped out of a building. She squatted down and resumed yanking out bricks and bits of stone, each pull accompanied by bursts of dust.

“Just so happens that the Reds are completely useless,” she said. “They’re far more interested in kissin’ saggy old buns than doing their jobs right, so they forgot to load some valuable property on the evacuation wagons.”

Marisa and I stepped up behind her, but kept some distance so we didn’t get hit with a flying chunk of rubble.

“I refused to leave this stuff behind,” she went on, “so I came back for it. The numb-headed manager of this establishment locked all the doors even though no one was gonna be here, so seemed easiest just breakin’ through the back wall.”

“Easy for you,” I said. “I’m not sure there’s a point to locking doors when oni can beat through walls with your bare hands.”

Yuugi glanced back at me. “If ya really wanted to get into a human’s house, would a lock on the front door stop ya?”

I thought about that, and she had a point. Even without my orb or any spellcards, I could always throw a rock through someone’s window. A closed door wasn’t real security. It was a request from the home’s owner to the society: Please don’t enter. Respect my space.

“Got it!” yelled Yuugi. She grasped something in the excavated cellar below, then stood up and leaned back to pull it out. With an exertion grunt, hrrnng, she brought her prize up to ground level.

An entire shelf from a wine rack slid up onto the cobblestones, fully loaded with corked bottles. Glass clinked against glass as the bottles settled. I could see liquid sloshing around inside.

“Now, don’t know ‘bout you girls, but I’ve earned a break.” Yuugi kicked away some debris, clearing a place for herself to sit cross-legged on the ground. She pulled one bottle out from the shelf. She read its label, and her eyes briefly glowed.

“Hey! This one’s bottled right before the Inchling uprising. That was a good year.” She waved us over. “Come sit, if ya want. Coupla swigs of kingstonic’ll clean that cough right outta ya.”

Part of me insisted that we should ask Yuugi for directions and be on our way – but I was sweaty, dirty, tired, in pain. Even sitting on hard ground with an oni would the best chance to rest I’d yet have today.

Marisa and I plopped ourselves down, sitting with Yuugi in three points of a triangle. She pinched the bottle’s cork with two fingers, pulled it out with a pop!

“Here.” She held the bottle to me. “Good for what ails ya, literally in this case.”

I took the bottle, but I had to use both hands. It was twice the size of any liquor bottle I had seen in Gensokyo. I sniffed at the open neck. A sharp-burning vapor hit the back of my nose.

“This... this smells like cheap sake,” I said.

“Cuz it is!” said Yuugi. “Calling it kingstonic is an oni joke; none of the Royal House would touch this stuff. We used it to fix humans that got sick from Yamame’s business on the way down, since alcohol cures the toxin.”

I looked into the bottle. It seemed like mere sake, which I’ve had before. If Yuugi wanted me dead, she didn’t need to poison me. I lifted the bottle and took a mouthful.

“Two swallows,” said Yuugi. “No less, no more.”

I put down two pulls of the drink. It burned my insides like booze always does, but that burn cut through the inflamed soreness in my throat and chest. I lowered the bottle and gasped. The dry itch of my breathing faded.

“Oh- oh wow,” I said. “That is good. Here, Marisa.”

I handed the bottle over to Marisa, who took it in both hands and had two drinks of her own. Judging by her wide eyes, she got the same feeling I had. Renewed vigor, like an injured person was instantly healed.

“Wowies!” she said. “Good stuffs. Could take another gulps of thats—”

“Nope!” Yuugi reached over, yanked the bottle out of Marisa’s hands. “Like I said, only two swallows. No more.”

“Whys?” said Marisa. “Don’t want us getting drunks?”

“No,” said Yuugi. “Two swallows is all ya need to cure the toxin, and the rest is for me.”

The oni put the bottle to her lips. Over ten seconds, she downed the rest of its in one breath. She let out a satisfied paaah, then chucked the bottle over her shoulder. It shattered against a wall behind her, showering dark glass shards to the ground.

“King’s family don’t know what they’re missin’.” Yuugi pulled another bottle from the rack, pulled out the cork and started on it.

Even if Marisa and I needed this rest, I should get a new lead out of Yuugi. We didn’t know where to go after this. I tried to think of what I could ask, but Marisa beat me to it.

“Kinda surprised you’d shares at alls,” she said. “Aren’t onis supposed to capture-torture humans?”

Yuugi chuckled, hm-hm-ha-ha. “We wish. If the King was been better at doin’ that, this wouldn’tve happened.” She waved a hand up and around, gesturing to all of Jigoku. Then she sighed. “But, maybe I’m bein’ too harsh. It wasn’t all the King’s fault.”

“What wasn’t his fault?” I said. “Everyone leaving?”

“Mm-hm.” Yuugi took another swig from the bottle, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Startin’ a while back, the Yama told us she wasn’t happy with the... what’s the word she used? Resid... resido....”

“Recidivism?” I said.

Yuugi snapped her fingers, pointed at me. “That’s it. She didn’t like the results of sending the damned humans down to Jigoku for punishment. Turns out that years of captivity, torture and loneliness won’t turn a bad person into a good person. Who’da thought?”

“When you say Yama, do you mean the afterlife judge? The one past the Sanzu?”

“That’s right. Yer pretty good-informed for a human girl. The Yama wanted to start makin’ her damnations more about reform and less about punishment, but the King laughed at her. Send the human spirits down here, and we’re gonna do what we’re gonna do. That’s what he told her.”

“Judges probably didn’t appreciate thats,” said Marisa.

“That’s a polite understatement.” Yuugi finished her bottle, threw it behind her, then started on a third. “The Yama was the angriest I’ve ever seen, and she’s already one of those stiff-and-proper types. Since the King wouldn’t bend, she started handlin’ the damned humans herself in Higan. That meant no more spirits comin’ down to us.”

“I think I’m seeing the big picture,” I said. “Suika told me that the oni were already having trouble capturing live humans, because our magicians could fight off the raids. Then Suika steals the Shubin, which means the oni can’t use immaterial magic on us either. Combine that with the Yama cutting off your supply of damned human spirits....”

“That’s ‘bout the size of it. One insult, on top of another insult, on top of an injury. It was a bad triple-whammy to the King’s credibility. Got so bad that some oni groups stood up and started making demands. The King had to negotiate, or he’d get ripped off his throne.”

“Ended up decidings to just... leaves?” said Marisa.

“Not at first. Someone floated the idea that all of us, every single oni, should go up and invade Gensokyo. But we knew that wouldn’t work. That Boundary-lady is unstoppable in her own realm. She’d kick us back where we came from, no question. So if the oni couldn’t get humans from Gensokyo, we’d go lookin’ for greener pastures. We’re headin’ deeper. Maybe we can find a way past the Boundary, somewhere.”

Yukari would be interested to hear that. If we all got back to Gensokyo alive, maybe Yukari could work on breaking the King’s ward near the surface. That might be possible, now that the King was gone. Then she could explore the underground at will.

“What about you?” I said. “I’m noticing that you haven’t carried us away, so that your buddies would have two humans to torture on the road.”

Marisa glared at me as if to say: Don’t give her ideas!

Yuugi shrugged. “Eh, the fun isn’t there for me. When I catch up with ‘em, I’m gonna see if I can sway the oni to do somethin’ else. The King’s the weakest he’s ever been right now, so if one of the Devas speaks up and starts getting supporters....” Her eyes flared bright red. “Let’s just say in a few years, Gensokyo might hear about Queen Hoshiguma of the oni.”