Palkin kicked his shoes off as they entered the house, and Geun followed suit. A gnome in a butler’s outfit collected the footwear and scurried off with the shoes; they looked clownishly large in his hands. A moment later the gnome returned with house slippers for both men.
The interior of the home was just as contemporary and western in style as the outside. They were in a sun room, with several couches and a rocking chair arranged around a coffee table. Clearly the room was based on what Kigen Hanmaki felt comfortable with, rather than on being intended to awe visitors. Palkin must have followed Geun’s line of thought, and explained, “This is the residence. We are just cutting through to the public part to make sure you get to the audience chamber in time.”
“You all live here?”
“You will too, if hired as a trainee officer. Miss Hanmaki wanted Lyubov and her officers here, with the Hanmaki family; enlisted have a barracks.”
Now Geun was genuinely curious. “Sounds cozy. What about dependents?”
“Dependents live here too. You are married?”
“No. I have a kid.”
Palkin grunted, and then elaborated, “There are a couple of other officers with children. Lyuba has hired tutors for them. Just ask her if arrangements can be made for your kid too.”
They left behind the very ordinary sun room, and as Palkin led them through the connecting hallway Geun felt a little tug in his heart. His blood told him they’d quite seamlessly been displaced into a different hallway. It looked the same, and the transition point was masterfully done.
“This isn’t the same building, is it?”
Palkin grinned. “You noticed that? You’re better than I thought. Most people would not realize. You have some gift that includes enhanced spatial awareness?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
Palkin opened the door at the end of the new hallway, revealing a room inspired by the collision of a Shinto temple interior with a teenager’s concept of a nightclub. Regularly spaced hard wood beams were separated by panels of mulberry paper set between sculpted wood frames, in typical shoji style. Every paper panel was painted in lovely scenes of mountains, foxes at play, people with fox-like faces in kimonos, fur seals and selkies fishing amid the waves, gnomes working industriously in fields, and other pastoral scenes. Had Geun not been paying close attention to the room, so as to remember it well enough to use his teleportation power to step into it from anywhere, he’d have missed that the painted panels seemed to shift slowly; each was playing out scenes from different stories.
There were round tables set into the floor, with half-circle booth seating at each. The booths all faced forward, toward a sunken dance floor before a slightly raised stage. Each table had a number of chairs on the opposite side, of a variety fit for all manner of different sizes of visitors from high chairs to giant scale seats.
Flanking the doors and detailed at intervals along the walls were guards. They were all gnomes, no taller than Palkin’s knee, dressed in smart looking white tunics with a strand of gold braid and crisp trousers. Each of the gnome guards was armed with a compact submachine gun. On their tiny frames the small guns seemed like scaled down rifles. It was ridiculous; gnomes weren’t known for their fighting prowess. Mostly they were known for being easy to bribe, prone to reclusiveness, and cowardly at the first sign of trouble.
Palkin followed Geun's gaze and helpfully said, "Škorpion version 68. Lyuba thought them perfect for the gnomes, you see?"
Geun said, "I'm not really a gun guy. They're the right size, but why are they perfect?"
The big Russian said, "I am happy you asked; it is because there is a recoil delaying device built into the grip, and a recoil compensator on the barrel. It makes the gun more controllable for small people and limits the effective rate of fire to something anyone can control, so it can use 9mm parabellum instead of 7.65mm Browning short. They are also light guns. We should have you fire one later for demonstration."
Geun nodded as if any of that made sense or mattered in the least. He would be long gone before Palkin could show him how to shoot a gun. He turned his attention away from the bizarre spectacle of armed gnomes.
The room was staffed by attendants besides the gnomes; mostly human-looking women in their teens, dressed in breathtakingly beautiful kimono robes. Geun spent some moments just admiring them. He didn’t have much of an eye for textiles, but he could tell the garments were quality work and a uniform besides.
There were at least two obvious ranks. The vast majority of the kimono were pearl gray and identically perfect in their tailoring. They were flawless in the way the silks shimmered in the crazy lighting. They all bore the same emblem on the back: the stylized fox face of the Hanmaki mon. The other rank of attendant appeared to be permitted to pick their own colors for the silks. Vibrant magentas, pastel pinks, powder blues, and vivid indigos were the most prevalent among the non-grays. All of the higher ranked attendants wore patterns that were distinct, possibly unique to each person. They did incorporate the same Hanmaki emblem, but it was almost an afterthought. All of the kimono were accented by white obi sashes, completing the suggestion of a uniform among the higher ranked ladies.
A few of the attendants had flawless complexions, which Geun took as proof of training to exacting standards in making themselves look like normal humans. He assumed their true natures were as yokai. Given the context, given what little he could read of their natures, Geun supposed that most of them were kitsune. Likely prize specimens that the Hanmaki family had raised and trained as show pieces.
On second glance they had the look of attendants but the pistols holstered just beneath their obi sashes, while concealed, were not well hidden. Clearly Kigen Hanmaki preferred her attendants be prepared to deal with misbehaving visitors.
Some of the tables were occupied by visiting petitioners. This might be a new organization but the Yokai-Shugo understood the value of establishing a patronage system. Casually taking in the audience, Geun could pick out a gaggle of first-rate einherjar warriors drinking and enjoying themselves between fights (since such men only ever left the All-Father's court for the purpose of finding worthy fights). The table next to them hosted a disgruntled looking blue-skinned ogre standing by an entire table of short men with very shaggy red fur. Near the edge of the room a somewhat lost looking group of split tail cats were whispering at each other, overseen by a pair of men (or something pretending to be men). Not far from the cats were several giant mice and rabbits, acting as attendants to a short man dressed in the stereotypical garb of a leprechaun, complete with buckled hat and shoes.
Palkin plopped his overlarge body into a chair at one of the tables near the front, clearing away a little sign that had 'RESERVED' printed on it in nine different languages, including footprints from an anisodactyl creature forming what Geun recognized as Bird track-glyphs.
Palkin said, "Here, we can have one of the good seats while we wait for Lyuba to start receiving visitors."
A lady dressed in an indigo kimono decorated in sprays of white cherry blossoms hurried over and started pouring tea for the men. When Palkin set his bottle aside she took it and plugged it with a cork she produced from her sleeve.
Geun asked, generally, "Do you get enough visiting avians to make having signage in Bird worth the trouble?"
Palkin answered before the attendant could speak up. "Eh. It makes the tengu happy. And it is a good default option. Lots of people who might not keep up on other languages know it. Dragons all seem to know it. Anything old enough and not entirely stupid learns it at some point."
As soon as the attendant on waitressing duty poured the tea, a thinner man who was seated in the booth part of the table interjected, "It has the virtues of being simple and clear."
Palkin acted like it was nothing unusual for the thin man to somehow escape notice until the moment he decided to speak up. "Simple to listen to. Speaking it properly is less simple."
The thin man was bald; bizarrely so, lacking even eyebrows. His pale pate glinted in the wild lighting of the room as he half-turned in his seat to address Palkin. "You are just terrible at whistling."
"Well, you are no great shakes at it yourself, Gennady."
"Yes but I do not sound like a hayseed hick when I try it, Maxim. I have a nice accent because I learned it properly instead of letting a flying rat put it in my head."
The attendant finally interjected, "There is nothing wrong with the pigeon dialect. Lady Lyubov says it is perfectly acceptable."
Gennady leaned in toward Palkin and the attendant, looming like a telephone pole about to tip over, and said, "The boss has some fixation on pigeons, I would take whatever she says about them with a grain of salt. Trust me Maxim, to any other Bird speaker, you sound like a dolt."
Palkin decided to ignore the insult and changed the topic. "Geun, I have failed as a host; I have not introduced you to my comrade here. Gennady has been with us since the start. He is assigned as needed to different squads and tasks. Gennady, this is Geun. He is here for a job. A freelancer now."
Geun politely said, "Nice to meet you. How do you do?"
Gennady squinted at Geun. Then he glanced back at Palkin and said, "Might be good. Maybe not nice, I think."
Geun frowned slightly, and said, "You think?"
"There is always some sort of sad story attached to a bloodline mage going it alone; might be good for us. We will see if it is actually nice for you to have met us."
Geun was dumbstruck. The attendant intervened and said, "Mister Geun’s review will likely be fine."
Gennady dryly said, "The review where the boss does her in-depth background check? Where she has one of us follow up on leads about a new hire's past and chase down people to interview? Where she determines aptitudes and passively dissects how you do your tricks?"
Palkin grumbled a little, "She has never imposed on those we check. You make it sound like some impolite thing."
Gennady reached over and took Palkin’s teacup as he said, "Due diligence tends to dispense with social niceties."
Geun asked, “What does that mean?”
Gennady sipped from Palkin’s teacup. “It means if she felt someone were genuinely suspicious, she would do everything she can.”
Palkin tried to defend her,“Well, she would probably tell them to get lost before she looked too hard.”
Gennady stared dully at Palkin. “Why would she do that? She’s smart; she’d want to know more about trouble if it came looking for a job.”
As the attendant finished pouring the tea Geun tried to tamp down the feeling his flimsy cover was about to be blown. Resisting the urge to bolt, he thought things through: Palkin might be a little eager to fill in a gap in his squad, and maybe a little in love with his boss. Gennady was clearly trying to needle Palkin. Worst of all, Lyubov seemed to be a little more thorough than he could deal with. She’d likely find out about his situation with Boon-Broker at the very least, and that would be enough for her to want to know more.
He half-turned in his chair, trying to think of some excuse that could give him a chance to return home without being too suspicious. Teleporting from the bathroom sprang to mind, but it was quite suspicious. Maybe a more elaborate ploy might work? Walk to the bathroom, then return to the table, then go to the bathroom again and finally beg off as being unwell? But they might offer aid if he did that. He should have heeded his instinct to run.
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As he looked around for inspiration, Geun noticed something was odd about the group of split-tail cats. Bakeneko, he distractedly remembered. They were called bakeneko in Japanese. But they were really just cats with two tails and enough magic power to use some simple spells; the bare minimum to be considered true yokai. The scruffy looks they sported suggested they were feral ones; probably a family colony. They were sitting in highchairs at the table and accompanying a pair of men presenting as human. Geun thought the men were likely either old bakeneko toms who had learned a trick for appearing human, or were actual humans who were playing some long con on the cats. Either way they were at best casually dressed. An uncharitable person would have said they were shabby, considering they were going to be petitioning a divine being for something.
One of the men was reaching into a messenger bag very similar to Geun’s own. How could they afford something like that? He nudged Palkin, who followed his gaze.
Palkin turned just as the man drew from the irregular space of the messenger bag a fist-sized whorl of shell, about as wide as it was tall. It was green, with some linear script polished into the iridescent surface. The nacre glyphs were unintelligible to Geun, but as he looked at them his blood started thumping hard in his veins. The shell had a large measure of power invested into it by someone else.
Gennady’s eyes went wide and he whispered, “Lunatica marmorata.”
“What?”
Gennady ignored Palkin. “You there, set that down now,” he yelled across the room.
The man stood and started to hurl the green shell.
Palkin finally caught on and shouted, “Grenade!”
Gennady cursed, “Сука блять.”
The man threw it right at the party of little men with shaggy red fur. It wasn’t quite a grenade but both the party of red men and the ogre seated with them reacted as if it were a real threat. The ogre, now paying quite close attention to events, thundered, “Kijimuna, scatter!”
All of the shaggy kijimuna leapt away, overturning their chairs and table, most reaching the edges of the large room in a single bound. The ogre threw a teapot at the shell instead of trying to get to cover. The green shell clacked against the white porcelain, a nearly perfect interception, and the gleaming menace was deflected into the table of einherjar warriors. It landed in their midst and came to a dead stop the moment it wasn’t in the air.
As the warriors started to push away from their table, the lacquer seal on the end of the shell bulged out until it popped, spraying some clear liquid all over the collection of Odin’s chosen. As this happened the bag man drew a short, stubby, black gun and looped a lanyard attached to it around his shoulder.
One of the einherjar warriors, apparently incensed, rose and charged the ogre. He was not quite as large as the blue bodyguard, but his sheer energy and unbridled anger more than made up for his lack of reach and before the ogre could do much more than land a single rib-cracking kick against the man’s side, the warrior was atop the ogre and viciously beating his head against the floor.
The leprechaun promptly took his hat off and turned it inside-out: an absurdly oversized iron cauldron appeared and neatly dropped over him, protecting him from the chaos. His woodland companions, unarmed as they were, cowered behind it.
Confused attendants took cover or slipped strange looking guns from their belts; slim and deadly looking things with ruby red lenses instead of normal barrels. The weird pistols crackled with each shot, sending pulses of electricity riding a beam of ionized air at the man wearing the messenger bag. Though the lightning bolts did seem to be connecting, for each successful shot one of the bakeneko taking cover would start writhing around on the ground in pain instead of the intended target.
Other kitsune took scattered pot shots at the einherjar warriors as they stalked among the non-combatants, but the large men shrugged off the stunning bolts and slowed only slightly.
The gnome guards quickly made their arms ready, and started spraying gunfire in the general direction of the two men with the bakeneko, but every single bullet somehow seemed to fail to connect. Geun could feel his blood tingle with each missed shot. He turned to Palkin and shared his conclusion, “They have some sort of good luck charm or arrow deflecting amulet, we have to get in close.”
Palkin took note of the advice and shouted an order at the guards, “Switch ammo to staballoy rounds.”
As soon as he yelled, the bag man hosed an improbably long burst of suppressing fire in the general direction of Pakin, Geun, Gennady, and the attendant that had been serving them. Everyone took cover behind the booth, or behind the table that Palkin overturned as he tried to minimize just how much of himself was a target.
Again and again, Geun felt the tell-tale tug in his blood of a luck charm activating and a bullet deflected just a hair, missing Palkin but tugging at his hair as it passed. Geun counted the charm activating seven times, and then he heard Palkin grunt as a shot slapped against his face. The bullet flattened and fell to the ground, leaving Palkin with a serious looking bruise, but otherwise apparently unhurt.
Others were not so durable. Some of the shots from the automatic weapon found targets in the gnomes, to deadly effect. The bagman motioned to his partner and the two of them dashed from their position to the leprechaun’s overturned pot, where they literally kicked the mice and rabbits out of the way.
Still, the guards retained good discipline in the face of lethal fire. Behind whatever cover they could take, be it booths, tables, large chairs, or the bodies of the fallen, they opened up their belt packs and produced brightly marked magazines for their guns. Geun recognized the trefoil emblem on them, a warning that they had radioactive contents. He briefly wondered just what was in a staballoy bullet. Mostly depleted uranium. 1% titanium.
He then scrambled out of the way as one of the einherjar threw a chair past him and into one of the gnomes. The kimono clad ladies turned their lightning guns on the enraged warriors, landing a salvo of shots as they tried to buy enough room for the gnomes to maneuver.
Palkin took a moment to call out, “Ladies, concentrate fire in high power against individuals; start with Byuu.”
The petite attendant taking cover alongside Geun drew her own ruby-tipped gun and flicked a control on the side before she cautiously took aim at the warrior atop the ogre. One of the ladies counted off a quick, “Three, two, one,” and they all fired at once. The room filled with the smell of ozone as, finally, the einherjar tilted over stunned. His body was covered in delicate looking burn marks, a crackle of Lichtenberg fractals radiating from each of the twenty or so odd shots that landed.
The attendant only got a couple of shots off before she hissed in irritation. One of the shabby looking men had drawn from his friend’s bag a full-length rifle, complete with a dark wooden stock and sharp steel bayonet. The rifle was far longer than the bag, and it took him a moment to get it fully clear.
As soon as it was clear, the rifle was made ready; the man racked a round from the magazine with a deadly snick-clack and shouldered the weapon. Palkin partially rose up and made as if to leap, squatting in defiance of the seemingly infinite supply of bullets headed in his general direction. The weapon cracked loudly as a single shot was fired. The bullet squarely hit Palkin in the chest, and he fell over.
Blood seeped from his shirt as he lay on the floor. The attendant squirmed around Geun to reach Palkin and laid a hand on him. Geun felt a little flare of magic as she did something to the large Russian, and then Palkin’s eyes fluttered open. He said, groggily, “Ai? What is- oh. Oh. Shot again.”
The attendant, Ai, said, “That rifle can stopping power anyone unarmored. You are lucky it did not take your head. I could not help you then.”
Gennady corrected her dourly, “The rifle has stopping power against anyone unarmored. And the other gun can stop most of us.”
She frowned, either in concentration or irritation, but did not reply.
Palkin closed his eyes again and said to Ai, “Just get the bleeding staunched. Gianni or Lyuba can fix the rest later.”
Ai replied, “That is all I even can do for you without it taking all night. It will be moments.”
As she spoke, salvo after salvo of electricity was fired by the other attendants at each einherjar, until each stopped his berserk rampage and fell over.
Some of the surviving guard gnomes had finished switching their magazines and started to shoulder their small arms. The bag man swept his gun back and forth at them, trying to keep them pinned even as his weapon was starting to glow a dull red.
Gennady shouted, “Do not fire with staballoy unless you are certain you will not hit the leprechaun’s pot. We do not want to kill a Tuatha Dé.”
The rifleman, apparently satisfied that Palkin would remain down, turned his attention to the kijimuna cowering near the sealed exits. Each rifle shot kicked up a little smoke and a lot of blood whenever it found a target among the leaping red men, who were all leaping from cover to cover and stumbling over all the other confused, frightened, cowering, and dying visitors.
Gennady said, “I will move into position. Ai, make an opening I can exploit.”
Ai hissed, “What, how?”
But Gennady was already gone; in any other situation Geun would have been flabbergasted and annoyed at losing track of a man he was looking directly at. Right now it was only the fourth or fifth weirdest thing going on.
Ai turned to Geun and asked, “Any ideas? We can’t all slip through a firefight like Gennady.”
Geun stared for a heartbeat at the man with the messenger bag, and decided there was a clear space in the target’s blind spot that was close enough to be worthwhile. He focused on it until his blood began to whisper to him. It told him the quickest way to make that point ‘there’ his new ‘here’, and he said, “Then I will slip through the firefight like Geun,” just before he pushed enough magic into his veins to make the blood do his bidding.
He was no longer crouched behind the table; he ignored the vertigo that came with a sudden shift in perspective and quickly stood, pressing his hand against the man’s back. Now he was certain this troublemaker was not an older bakeneko tom: the man had only a limited amount of metaphysical weight to his control over his body. Geun pushed hard with his bloodline.
The man startled and was about to begin turning when his heart literally dropped out of his chest. Geun’s magic had convinced the 300 grams of meat and blood that it actually belonged to Geun, and thus needed to be anywhere but inside that particular body. Geun’s bloodline helped it out, to the nearest easy spot, a point where anything that was looking to go from one place to another might be able to roll out. It plopped near Ai with a wet splat. She looked at it with initial alarm and then recognized it was not inherently hazardous.
Geun took a step back as the dead man started to crumple. The other man turned to face him, and lunged at him with the bayonet. Geun contorted his body so the bladed end of the rifle slipped by. Gennady took the opportunity to slam a dagger into the remaining combatant’s neck, putting an end to the fight as he fell paralyzed.
Geun nodded in acknowledgement of the timely save to Gennady.
The gloomy man said, “A handy trick for an opening.”
Geun nodded again, not trusting himself to properly reply as he took in the carnage. The center of the room was a bloodbath. Bodies lay amid the overturned tables and wrecked chairs. Shell casings skittered underfoot as the attendants started tending to the wounded and dead. At the far end of the hall a pair of doors slammed open and a dark red female ogre, just as large as the blue one sitting on the floor nursing a gouged out eye, glared around the room before she angrily announced, “Clear.”
As the red ogre stalked to where Geun and Gennady stood over the bodies, Ai partially rose from her position by Palkin and called to the door, “My lady, you may enter. The fight is done.”
Geun’s breath caught for a moment as he followed Ai’s gaze. The caucasian woman that followed behind the ogre was a vision. Her features were sculpted, her eyes bright, and her body divine. That had to be his target, grim expression and all.
She wasn’t paying close attention to anything but the carnage as she entered. Her kimono restricted her to mincing steps, so there was time for Geun to think for once. Her eyes widened in alarm as she saw Palkin on the ground. Geun realized she probably would approach to check on him.
He turned and started walking back to Palkin himself, as if to also check on the downed man. He scooped up the bottle of firebird vodka as he made his way over and said, “Palkin, you are not dead? I have your booze here.”
Ai quickly said, “We do not want to make him dead. Do not give that to him now.”
The lady spoke with a slight Russian accent tinging her Japanese, “Quite. I expect you’re a friend of Palkin’s?”
“He’s Geun, ma’am,” Palkin managed to say before Ai placed her hand over his mouth.
She admonished, “You stop that, your lung is punctured.”
The lady’s expression was grim coldness touched by levity. She said, “We will need to address that. Is he stable?”
Ai teased a little, “If he keeps his mouth closed.”
“If he can’t have this, maybe you should hang on to it,” Geun said, offering the bottle to the lady as he closed to her.
She raised an eyebrow but accepted the bottle from Geun. As she took it, he stepped in closer, and quickly pressed his lips against hers. He felt the carved marble amulet light up against his chest as it did its job, borrowing power from him and his battery charm to run its spell. As soon as the essence of the kiss was caught he felt warm flesh, firm against his lips, for the all-too-brief moment before she shoved him.
He stumbled back a step and thought of being home; tried to rally his blood to take him away from the consequences of stealing a kiss. He didn’t have the energy left in his blood to do it himself, and so he tried to pull from his battery charm only to find that it didn’t want to cooperate. He couldn’t make it talk to him, couldn’t get it to untangle from the amulet Boon-Broker gave him. Alarm dug its fingers into his heart. The lady had a firm grip on the bottle of alcohol and she was swinging it in an arc toward his head.
He tried to make his blood take him anywhere. All that mattered was being not here, because he needed to escape now, before they stopped him. Again, the charm would not cooperate. The bottle clocked him alongside the head.
Lyubov said, “And that’s good enough; I know what happened to you from there.”
Geun’s blood drew back into his body under Lyubov’s hands, and she sealed his skin back together. He felt her lift the blindfold. Blinking in the bright light his eyes widened in shock: the woman interrogating him was not the woman he'd stolen a kiss from.
Lyubov seemed smug, gleefully so, as she took in his confused expression. She savored the moment and then confirmed, "Yes, she is my mother.”