“Ichigo…” Yuta said.
Lifting his head, the retainer nodded, and then darted over to quell the water’s flow, though not without stealing a glare at the “sorcerer” in the room.
Suisei nodded. “I’m sorry for the delay,” he said. “Everything’s a mess like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve had nightmares that weren’t this bad.” He sighed. “But, as promised, I am here to make things clearer.”
“Make things clearer?” Yuta asked.
“To give explanations,” Horosha clarified.
The physician’s speech was odd; very informal. It made him sound like a youngster, which was certainly a curious thought, since Yuta was all but certain he was Horosha’s senior.
Yuta tugged his beddings out of the way and sat up, cross-legged. “Is there any chance my ward and I would be able to see these crises for ourselves?” he asked.
“Not quite,” Horosha replied.
Yuta looked the physician in the eyes.
“Why?”
Horosha stepped toward the bed, only for Ichigo to lurch forward, pointing his finger at him accusatively. “Don’t you take another step closer, sorcerer!”
Horosha rolled his eyes at Ichigo, and then laughed.
“You think I’m joking!?” Ichigo snarled. He reached for his katana, only to remember yet again that he no longer had his katana, and pawed at the air in frustration.
“No,” Horosha replied, pulling a stool out from underneath the counter, “I get that you’re dead serious. It’s just that… given circumstances, what you said is actually pretty darn funny.”
Yuta noticed the seat could rotate in place, and that the stool’s feet were wheeled. He’d never imagined such a thing, but now, here it was.
Remarkable, he thought.
Ichigo glared at it as Horosha sat down, which caused Horosha to glance down at the stool and then scoff. “Let me guess, the stool?” he said.
“You’d have to be crazy to sit on that contraption!” Ichigo snapped.
“What I wouldn’t give for a situ-comu with you and Dr. Houru,” Horosha said.
“A what?” Ichigo asked.
“Ichigo…?” Yuta chided.
The retainer bowed to his lord. “Yes, Lord Uramaru?”
“Please don’t antagonize Dr. Horosha,” Yuta said. “So far, other than the woman in the suit, he seems to be the only person here who can communicate with us.”
“Lord Uramaru,” Ichigo pleaded, “these devils have trapped your daughter in one of their magic windows! We need to find an onmyoji to free her—”
Dr. Horosha pointed at Yuta. “—Why are you so calm, while he’s so…”
“Do not mistake silence for calm, Horosha,” Yuta said. “It’s an error that’s not easily outlived.”
Placing his hand on his chest, Ichigo stood up tall and faced the physician. “I am the second son of the fourth son of the brother of the retainer of Emperor Yumahito’s chamberlain.”
Ichigo spoke the words as if they were a thing to be proud of.
Horosha grinned. “So… nobody important?”
Yuta did not smile at the physician’s wit, though he did acknowledge it. “Yes,” he said. He glanced at Ichigo. “And with that unimportance comes the ambitions of a thousand conquering generals, if not the wisdom, or the means,” Yuta replied. “But, I still have my hopes for him.” He smirked.
Horosha turned to Ichigo once more. The retainer’s eyes glowered beneath the peaks of his long, dark hair. “For the last time,” he said, pulling one of the windows out of the pocket of his strangely colored apron, “these aren’t magic windows. They’re… more like spyglasses, though they’re not limited to what’s in your line of sight.”
“It’s sorcery!” Ichigo hissed.
Yuta snorted humorlessly, only to cough rather harshly.
He felt… wrong.
He sighed. “You’ll have to forgive him,” Yuta muttered. “He’s an aristocrat.”
“Aren’t you an aristocrat?” Horosha asked.
“By deed, yes,” Yuta replied, “and also by blood, though only half-way, thank the gods.”
“I see,” Horosha said. He nodded. “Interesting.”
“But,” Yuta said, “enough dithering. I’m not well, and I have many questions.” He stared the physician in the eyes. “Where are we? What has happened to us?” He looked around the room and its weird, unknown contraptions. “Surely, this can’t be…—”
“Unfortunately,” Horosha said, “it is. It’s just like I told you the last time we spoke, when I was with Dr. Houru.”
Yuta shook his head. “But… that’s impossible.”
“Tell me,” Horosha said, “before you were here, where were you? And what year was it?”
“Before this,” Yuta replied, “I was fleeing from my estate. It’s a several days’ journey from Erubeku, in the Trenton colonies. And… it’s the 11th year of the reign of Emperor Yumahito.”
Horosha nodded slowly.
“You’ve traveled quite far, Lord Uramaru,” he said. “You’re still in Tsurentu, and in fact, you’re in Erubeku, but… the Colonies are no more.” He glanced at the window in his hands. “It’s been 409 years since the start of Emperor Yumahito’s reign.”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Yuta’s eyebrows rose. “What?”
“You’re crazy!” Ichigo barked. “You—”
—But the retainer’s lips sealed as Yuta stuck out an arm and motioned for him to stop.
“Traveling through time,” Yuta said, softly. “That’s an extraordinary claim. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, particularly if they’re to be believed. How could that have happened?”
“I’m not really sure, myself,” Horosha answered, “but… I have some guesses.” He looked up at the ceiling. “One thing I’m certain about, though: the Holy Angel is involved.”
Somewhat troublingly, Yuta saw Horosha make the Bond-sign.
“You are Rassudaiu?” Ichigo hissed. He stepped back, as if struck. Pique rose in his eyebrows.
Horosha nodded.
“Then you really are crazy,” Ichigo said, almost growling.
Horosha gestured at his surroundings. “Believe what you wanna believe. The evidence is all around you.”
“Yeah,” Ichigo said, “evidence of your sorcery!” He grinned with confidence, as if there was an argument, and he was somehow winning—even though there wasn’t, and he wasn’t.
Yuta sighed.
Ichigo had made progress, yes, but in times such as these, he had an unfortunate habit of… regressing.
“Ichigo,” Yuta shook his head, “how many times do I have to tell you? Sorcery isn’t an explanation, it’s an absence of one. It’s an invention used to explain the inexplicable.” He turned to Horosha. “Horosha, for all our sakes, if you can explain to us the principles at work within these contraptions, it would be a great help.”
“It’s a little bit beyond you,” the physician replied.
Yuta coughed, but then smirked. “Yes, and as long as you keep it hidden,” he said, “it certainly will remain beyond me.”
Horosha huffed. “Fine, but… you asked for it,” Horosha said.
Yuta could have sworn the physician spoke his next words more quickly than his usual speed.
“Connectionless lightning-wind sent from a signal-hearer-maker in one doodad goes out in every direction. It passes through stuff without doing anything, until it hits the signal-hearer-makers in another doodad. This gets a little-river in the closed-road in the doodad-that-receives, which then sends—”
“—You are using compound words I’ve never heard before; of course I wouldn’t understand,” Yuta said, with a frown. “Don’t be flippant with me, Horosha.” He glanced at Ichigo. “I can assure you, you will regret it.”
For once, the young man’s smile was completely justified.
“Imagine a terrifically long string,” Horosha said. He spoke more slowly this time. “There’s someone at either end of the string, holding it. If one of them shakes the string, the other guy’s gonna feel it. Now, make a not-so-secret code to use with the shakes—one shake means yes, two shakes means no, and so on—and you can send messages through the string. The conusuru operates on this very principle.”
“—Conusuru?” Yuta asked.
“Yes,” Horosha answered. “That’s what the doodad’s called.”
Yuta scoffed.
Ichigo crossed his lean, muscled arms. “I don’t see any string.”
“You can’t see the wind, either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” the physician countered.
Ichigo frowned at him.
“If you really wanna know,” Horosha said, “the string is made of light. Light, like music, comes in different sounds, and we can only see a little of that. Just like how there’re some sounds you can hear from another room, there are kinds a’ light that can go through walls.”
“What does one do with this… light?” Yuta asked.
“So much stuff,” Horosha answered. “So, so much.” He stood up from the stool. “Can I show you? I’ve set time aside for this.”
Yuta nodded. “I insist.”
“But—Lord Uramaru!”
Yuta glanced over at his retainer. “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
The young man groaned—loudly—as Horosha approached Yuta’s bedside. The man of the future woke the window sleeping in the bed’s adjustable metal arm by tapping at its darkened surface while swinging the arm to bring the window close to Yuta’s chest. Like before, Yuta beheld it in awe. Glowing with an inner light, it displayed a grid of crests and insignias whose meaning eluded him.
Yuta and Ichigo watched attentively as Horosha tapped one of the insignias, and then, the device’s window filled with something like a portal to another world.
For a split second, Yuta saw a man with face-lenses seated in a room of glass and cyan and blues. He spoke in Tsurento. Images moved in a large square next to his face, showing landscapes swathed in horror. Strange, dark branches spread beneath his pale brown skin, reaching up onto his face.
“What you’re seeing is a moving picture. It was recorded the day before yesterday. The man is explaining information.”
Then Horosha tapped a symbol floating in the upper corner of the rectangle, and the sight changed altogether.
Weird, pictureless canvases flickered by. Yuta saw blocks of bright color filled with Tsurento script text. High, discomfiting tones rang from the device. Many of the canvases were churning sprays of black and white. They made a sound that reminded him of the tide rushing in.
“What are you showing us?” Ichigo demanded.
“The world’s falling apart,” the physician replied, only to chuckle as another world coalesced in view. “Of course that’s still on,” he said.
Out of nowhere, a crowd of voices laughed along with him.
The device displayed two images at once. They met down the middle of the window, yet neither interfered with the other. On the right, a comely housewife of a woman; on the left, a young girl, just shy of marrying age. Both were Tsurento-jin and they wore the strangest clothes Yuta had ever seen—and he’d seen the long, skirted coats favored by Tsurento lords.
They were risqué, to say the least.
The woman was in some kind of paradise. She looked over a humming maw of some dark material filled with shelves that were stuffed to the brim with fresh produce, several of which looked entirely alien to Yuta. Behind her, he recognized Tsurento breadstuffs, wrapped in cloth that was so fine, not only could Yuta not see any trace of threads, he could see through the cloth altogether! Boxes covered in gaudy colors and big-eyed figures—people, animals—filled the shelves behind her. Yuta could have spent a lifetime lingering at the image, but it moved on its own, as if riding on a cloud.
The image on the left next to it, on the other hand, flickered back and forth between two different states. One moment, it showed the girl with one of the conusuru devices in hand; the next, it showed the conusuru’s window. Text-filled leaves sprouted in the white window beneath her clasping fingers.
The mother on the right kept glancing at her own conusuru, using her spare hand to lift produce in and out of a metal basket on wheels, growing more and more exasperated with every passing moment. The chorus of laughter kept erupting, getting a little louder each time.
“What is this?” Yuta asked.
“The woman is the girl’s mother,” Horosha explained. “The mom’s gone to the market to get food for her family.”
Yuta cursed. “That’s a market?” He pointed at the window like a monkey. “Is she nobility?”
The physician smiled. “Hardly.”
“What about all the laughter?” Ichigo demanded. “Who’s laughing? And why? What’s so funny?”
“It’s a play,” Suisei answered. “A comedy. The laughter is so that the people watching know when a joke’s happening. They don’t gather in one place to see this. They see it from the comfort of their houses, all across the country.”
The image faded to black.
“It must be a shitty comedy if the audience needs to be told when to laugh,” Ichigo said, but Yuta silenced him with a wave of his hand.
A new image appeared. It was dusk. The sky’s colors faded to black up above a kind of road that wound along a coastline. The road was made from a dark, reflective substance that reminded Yuta of fragments of volcanic glass he’d sometimes found on the beach as a child, after the earthquake.
A… thing… zoomed over the road, hovering above the ground, like a crane gliding over a lake.
“How does it move so quickly?” Ichigo asked, in a wide-eyed whisper.
It was some kind of vehicle. There was a man inside it, seated behind what seemed to be a wide pane of curved glass. Two bright spots on its front end glowed like a wolf’s eyes, spewing cones of light into the encroaching darkness. In the background scenery flickered past at speeds faster than anything Yuta had ever known. Gorgeous wilderness, rife with mountains and pines. In the distance, the sea lit up like a mirror.
And yet, the scene left Yuta feeling discomfited. Something was wrong here.
It took Yuta a moment to realize what it was. As soon as he did, he turned to Dr. Horosha and asked, “Why are there no stars in the night sky?”
The doctor sighed. “So, it is as I suspected. There are stars in your skies.”