THE FAILED MAGE
Lawrence awoke on his futon to find the room he had purchased completely dark. From the busy streets and carousing below, he could see a faint din of light. He blinked away the sleep from his eyes.
“How long have I slept?” he asked of no one.
He sat up. The failed mage felt good. He felt rested and guessed that he had slept for at least five hours.
But I stink.
He got up, his feet still sandaled with the grass fiber waraji. The floorboards creaked amid the barely audible noises of a busy common room below. The sound of a pair of shamisens and cheerful laughter could be heard.
It was time for a bath. He went downstairs, dodging a stumbling man on his way across the room. There was plenty of eating. And alcohol. It seemed this was more than a place to take a bed for the night, but also a place where local city folk came in the evenings to drink with their friends after a hard day’s work.
Lawrence liked it. The atmosphere was light and breezy with a faint draft that came in from the sliding windows and the open door. Despite the summer heat, the common room hearth was ablaze with a suckling pig roasting on a spit. It made his stomach awaken. He sat at a table and waited for the serving woman to find him. When she did, he ordered a plate of the evening meal which consisted of basted pork still sizzling from the spit atop rice, topped with tiny bamboo shoots and a light green pole bean of some kind. And of course, there was the sake rice wine.
The failed mage devoured his food, drank his wine, and when the serving girl came back to pour him more, he waved her away. Tonight was not a night to overindulge in drink. He had just recovered from an ordeal. Satisfied from the meal, he decided it was near time to go to the inn’s sentō bathhouse.
He went to the bar and tossed a coin across. It was an older man. Probably the girl’s father. She was serving customers on the other side of the common room and was moving about quickly with her work.
“What would you like to drink, sir?”
“Nothing. I just need some information.”
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The innkeeper raised an eyebrow. He was well kept, his hair tied in a tail at the back, and he wore a double breasted kimono with buttons not belonging completely to the region.
He pocketed the coin. “What kind of information would you like?”
“I’m looking for work,” Lawrence said. “I’m not sure I want to join a guild.”
The innkeeper nodded. “Do you have any talent?”
“I’m a mercenary with some small magical ability.”
“Why don’t you want to get work at a guild? You’re certain to find some.”
“I’ve recently had a bad experience with the guilds here. It seems a lot of them are involved in high criminal dealings.” He didn’t actually believe all the guilds were, he was simply trying to find out what the opinion of a local innkeeper was.
The man nodded, telling Lawrence the answer to his curiosity.
“I’ve sensed a strong air of fear here in this city,” he went on in a musing tone.
“Mmm, souda,” the innkeeper nodded. “I would say that is true. A lot of hostility has arisen recently. There’s always been contention and unease between the races, but for some reason acts of violence between them has been more common lately.”
“Why do you think that is?”
He shrugged.
“Is that everything? I sense that’s not all.”
The innkeeper looked thoughtful, surveyed the busy common room. “Strange things have been happening lately.”
“Such as?”
“Lot of disappearances. Some strange deaths.”
“Strange deaths?”
The man nodded. “Bodies have been turning up throughout the city.”
“How is that different from the violence between the races when things get out of hand and people die?”
“Violence between groups is usually loud,” he said. “This is different. These deaths feel unrelated. They’re quiet. They happen out of sight. People simply go missing.”
“And then turn up dead.”
He nodded. “But the thing that is even more frightening is that their bodies aren’t normal sometimes.”
“Aren’t normal? What do you mean?”
A man sat down at the bar and asked for some wine. The innkeeper paused, poured him his drink and took his coin. He put the wine back and then went to work at the other end of the bar.
Lawrence got up from his chair and went to the end where the innkeeper was waiting for him. “You were telling me about the bodies?”
He nodded, not looking at the failed mage.
“They’ve been dried out.”
Dried out?
“What do you mean ‘dried out’?”
“Like they’ve been drained.”
“What could it mean?”
“I don’t know,” the innkeeper said. The first sign of impatience now present. “They’re not dried out in the usual sense. But they’re like withered rice husks, like they’ve been drained of all their blood, except there’s no major wounds.”
“Interesting…”
“Now if you don’t have any more questions, I have an inn to keep. As you can see,” he said gesturing to the common room, “I have a busy establishment and my daughter can’t do all the work.”
Lawrence nodded, thanked the innkeeper for his time. He held the man up for one last moment to pay for a private sentō and left for the bathhouse adjoining the inn, thinking the innkeeper’s story to be quite strange.
And eerie.