Debts Unpaid

After disgracing herself by losing her first, pivotal duel, a young swordswoman named Ryna is forced to serve as a bodyguard for an unscrupulous necromancer called Sozu to pay off her own ransom.

Amidst the noise and smoke of the noodle bar, Ryna’s eyes flickered between the drunk slurring to himself near the door, the guttering of a flame above the charred brass bowl of a pipe, and the glint of gold as two teenage girls in a booth tried to discreetly slide a stack of coins to an old man with rotting teeth. 

Ryna had heard that Senkaku was a city where everyone was a living work of art, where dreams bled into reality and the living joined the dead in lavish midnight parties, but all she’d seen of Senkaku over the past three days was filth and desperation. She’d spent her evenings in beautifully furnished but tightly locked rooms, waiting for her captors to tell her what they were going to do with her.

At twenty years old, she’d spent half her life inside the walls of House Navryn’s sprawling estate, training as a vysora—a duelist skilled in the art of elegantly eviscerating the bodies and minds of her opponents without killing them. Killing was the worst trespass—the transition from life to death drove the soul mad, leaving an anguished ghost to torment its killer forever. For a vysora, killing anything, even a rat, was forbidden. Still, defeat was only slightly better than dying—it meant becoming the prisoner of the victor’s house, to be ransomed back to one’s own house for an exorbitant price. 

Or, in Ryna’s case, being told with infinite deftness and eloquence that she was not worth the ransom.

Her captors, House Demerza, had told her that if her lord would not pay, she would pay off her debt by bodyguarding another associate of theirs—a necromancer called Sozu, who hunted Senkaku’s wild ghosts at night, trapping and binding them so they could serve House Demerza. With a stern look, Demerza’s steward commanded that Ryna should tell him if Sozu did anything “outrageous”. She was supposed to meet him at the noodle bar.

Ryna took a deep breath and felt her muscles breathe in, too. Beneath her clothes, her thighs, back, and upper arms had oval-shaped sections of skin neatly excised, leaving the swelling and contracting muscles free to absorb the air through hair-thin slits. Her body had been sculpted into a graceful weapon, altering her physiology and sharpening her senses until sitting in this bar felt simultaneously dull and overwhelming.

She took another breath and covered her face to calm her restless eyes. She’d never visited a city before, let alone a foreign one—she could count the number of times she’d been permitted to leave the estate of House Navryn on two hands. Now, among these strangers and charlatans, all the instincts she’d spent a decade honing to a razor’s edge were screaming not to let down her guard. 

Ryna heard the creak of the floorboards near the entrance as someone stepped inside. Abruptly, the mumbling of the drunk fell silent. Ryna’s brow furrowed as she caught the bitter scent of something poisonous. She heard a pair of footsteps approach her table.

Ryna uncovered her face and watched someone sit down across from her. They were tall and lanky, wearing a black jacket with a high collar and a line of silver buttons down the chest—the uniform of a scholar. Their entire head was encased in an eyeless metal helmet emblazoned with a simple black triangle where the bridge of the nose would be. Two rows of yellowed, mismatched teeth were embedded in a carefully crafted facsimile of a skull’s upper and lower jaws, and fasteners on the sides of the helmet seemed to allow the lower mandible to swing open.

The person in the helmet sat there for a second, seeming to stare at her. 

“You’re Ryna?” he asked. Ryna was startled by the man’s voice—it felt like he was speaking directly in her ear.

“I am,” Ryna said.

“Then, unfortunately…” The man offered his gloved hand, and Ryna took it warily. “…we appear to be partners.”

Ryna peered at the man’s helmet. There were no holes for his ears or nose, and the lower jaw seemed tightly shut. She noticed it had a vertical seam running down the center, along with a hinge on the front that seemed designed to let the whole thing open like a clam.

He’s sealed in, she thought.

“You’re Sozu?” Ryna asked.

The man released her hand. “That name works just fine. I’m guessing House Demerza dressed you?”

Ryna was wearing an oversized green jacket embroidered with full moons, with baggy sleeves that stopped at her elbows. Beneath it, she wore a black tunic and loose pants decorated with motifs of interlinking, blood-red knots—House Demerza’s sigil.

“They wouldn’t let me keep my old clothes,” Ryna explained, feeling slightly ridiculous.

“Did they give you a collar?” Sozu asked.

Ryna’s mind turned to the enchantment wrapped around her neck, inscribed by a Demerza graphomancer. No matter where she went, her captors could track her.

“Yes,” she said flatly.

Sozu gave a barking laugh. “That must be humiliating.”

Ryna grimaced. He’s rude.  

Behind Sozu, Ryna saw the two teenage girls stand up from their booth. One of them had raven-black hair arranged in a complicated bun, while the other’s tresses were long and bone-white, flowing over her shoulders and down to her fingertips. The old man in the booth grabbed the dark-haired girl’s sleeve in a bony fist to keep her from leaving, causing her to flinch. Beneath the table, Ryna’s fingers flexed, but her eyes moved back to Sozu as he reached into his battered satchel and pulled out a thick, black leather book with silver bindings, as well as a wooden mask crudely painted to look like a sparrow.

“The mask’s for you,” Sozu said. “You’ll wear it when we’re working. Now, before you start talking, I want to make one thing clear.” His tone was friendly and patient, like he was speaking to a dog. “I didn’t ask for a bodyguard, I don’t need a bodyguard, I don’t want a bodyguard. If I complain, which I’m very good at, House Demerza will give me a new bodyguard. So do what I say, shut up when I tell you to shut up, and don’t ask me a lot of questions. Understand?”

Ryna felt her stomach turn. He doesn’t even know me and he already speaks to me like this.

Ryna forced herself to smile. “A teacher of mine once said that those who demand respect give respect.”

Sozu’s chest bucked slightly as he laughed again.

“If they were such a great teacher, why couldn’t they teach you how to win your duels?”

Ryna’s smile fell. She felt a rush of blood to her face as shame and anger filled her. She abruptly stood up, sending her chair scraping across the floor, then looked toward the door.

“Go ahead,” Sozu said calmly. “I won’t stop you.”

I can’t do it. I can’t work with him, Ryna thought. 

But another part of her whispered If you don’t prove you’re useful, they’ll keep you captive forever.

As she stood there, her eyes passed over the two teenage girls, who had paused in the midst of their hushed argument with the old man to look over at her. 

Get out of here while you can, Ryna wanted to say to them. 

Her gaze returned to Sozu’s eyeless helmet and the harsh, poisonous smell emanating from it. Finally, the memory of that smell solidified in her mind. Ryna leaned a hand on the back of her chair and sat down slowly, forcing herself to breathe. Sozu folded his hands.

“That’s better,” he said amicably. “You’re pretty thin-skinned. This will go more smoothly if you keep your—”

“You do need a bodyguard,” Ryna interrupted. “Your whole body smells like uruzi.”

Uruzi was a poisonous tree sap, rare and deadly. It pulled the moisture out of the flesh and coated the inside of the organs like lacquer. Ryna grew up hearing stories about old vysora that would drink tea with it to mummify themselves when they were too old to fight. 

Sozu seemed to stare back at her for a few seconds, unmoving.

“Sharp nose,”  he said evenly.

“I’m surprised you can move,” Ryna said. “How are your muscles still working?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Sozu replied. “I’m quite…flexible.”

As he spoke, he began to twist his head to the left. Ryna winced as something in his neck cracked. His head continued to twist around until it made a full circle.

“You are a very…grotesque person,” Ryna said, scowling as she tried to find the right word in the Carzaron tongue.

Sozu chuckled and rubbed his gloved hands together, as if thinking. Ryna realized that no part of his skin was exposed. 

“I’ve been called a lot worse,” he said.

Ryna narrowed her eyes and peered at Sozu’s thin frame. “What about ‘fragile’?”

Sozu folded his arms. “Is that your professional assessment …or a little threat?”

Ryna shrugged and raised her eyebrows. “A bit of both.”

Sozu leaned forward. “Let me direct your attention to my previous point: you’re replaceable. I’m the one bringing Demerza ghosts every week.”

Behind him, Ryna could hear voices getting louder—the girls and the old man were still arguing. Ryna tried to focus on Sozu.

“You seem very young,” Sozu said casually. “How many duels have you fought?”

Ryna felt her distaste toward Sozu ebb as a new wave of embarrassment washed over her.

“One,” she said.

“One? Huh. What happened?”

She still remembered the tension, the terror as she gazed across the dueling grounds at her opponent, every muscle in her body tight. Everything in her vision had been so sharp. The first seconds were crucial. Most duels were over in less than a minute, but some were settled in the blink of an eye. Ryna’s had been the latter. 

“I wasn’t fast enough,” Ryna said. 

It was a lie, but Sozu wouldn’t know that. 

Sozu rested his chin on his palm and drummed his fingers on his discolored teeth, thinking.

“A friend of mine trained to be a duelist,” he said. “She said that being able to read your opponent is what separates good duelists from bad.” 

Ryna nodded. The only way to prepare against a duelist, supposedly, was to watch the way they moved, the way they spoke and acted; all these subtle things, Ryna’s teachers said, revealed the kind of person they were, what methods suited them, what their weaknesses were.

“My friend wasn’t a very warm person,”  Sozu continued. “but I always remember her saying that fighting someone was the closest she got to making a friend.”

Ryna frowned. “Why was that?”

“She told me that when you fight, you show who you really are. It’s an intimate thing. And that’s why it hurts so much to see your opponent in pain—they’ve been honest with you.”

“I see,” Ryna said softly. She remembered watching one of her sparring partner’s panicked eyes as Ryna took control of her body’s muscles and closed her throat. It had given Ryna nightmares that had never completely gone away, even years later. 

Sozu steepled his fingers, and Ryna gazed at his white linen gloves. 

“She said you had to have a taste, an instinct for hurting people,” Sozu said. “So when the time came, you didn’t hesitate—you just struck.”

Ryna felt her heart begin to beat faster as frozen moments of the duel flashed through her mind. She could feel her muscles twitch involuntarily as her flesh recalled her stance, her clenched fists.

“I know what it means to be a vysora,” Ryna said, growing annoyed. “I don’t need you to tell me.”

Sozu seemed to gaze at her, and Ryna had the uncomfortable feeling that he could sense her discomfort. 

Finally, he spoke. “I’m just making sure you understand what I expect from you.”

“I’ll do anything to pay off the ransom,” Ryna said angrily.

Sozu pointed a finger at her. “That’s what I want to hear.”

Ryna crossed her arms, mollified to finally hear an encouraging word from Sozu’s mouth. “So why are you hunting ghosts for Demerza?”

Sozu held up his thumb and forefinger and rubbed them together. “I have debts too, and if I don’t pay them soon, certain people are going to be hunting me. Speaking of debts, why didn’t your lord or lady or whatever pay the ransom to get you back?”

Ryna tried to keep the pangs of shame out of her voice. “They could not agree on the price.”

Sozu laughed. “Isn’t that funny? You swear your undying loyalty to a house, and they still manage to put a price on that.”

Sozu leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms. “Well, I hope you had your fill of sunlight, because you’re not going to see it for the next year or so. We start work at sundown and go until sunrise. I aim to catch one ghost a night, two if I’m lucky.”

As they talked, Ryna noticed that both of the girls from the booth behind Sozu were making their way to the entrance. The old man was following close behind, and Ryna saw his head rear back, then snap forward to spit on the dark-haired girl. As she turned and her face screwed up in disgust, the old man swung out with his open palm. It whipped the girl’s head to the right, and Ryna could see her eyes widen in shock. 

“That’s all you deserve, you little whore!” the old man yelled.

Cold determination filled Ryna. She slid out of her chair smoothly and began striding toward the old man, her eyes locked on the small of his back, near where she imagined his lumbar vertebrae to be. Unbidden thoughts raced through her mind:

Four strides until I can reach him.

Strong pressure for two seconds near the spine and he’ll collapse.

He won’t see me in his peripheral vision.

He’s between a hundred-twenty and a hundred-forty pounds. 

What if I bruise his spine?

If his bones are brittle, I could paralyze him…

What if the shock stops his heart?

Suddenly, she felt an iron grip on her left arm.

“Sit back down,” Sozu said sharply. “You’re making a mistake.” 

Ryna twisted her head around to face Sozu. He was still seated, but he had twisted his arm at an unnatural angle to grab her. Ahead of her, she could hear the girl begin to sob and her friend start yelling. Ryna reached over and grasped Sozu’s wrist.

“I can’t do nothing,” she hissed. “Let go.”

“Yes, you can. That old man’s a pimp. Hekul. If you touch him, there’s a price for that. Your old house didn’t want to pay for your mistakes. What makes you think Demerza will pay for them now?”

Ryna had heard the word hekul before—it meant some kind of gang. The word evoked no fear in her, but the idea of losing her chance at freedom did. Still, she didn’t want to admit that to Sozu.

“Why do you care?” Ryna said through gritted teeth. She knew she could snap Sozu’s wrist in an instant if she wanted to.

“Because you’re right—I do need a bodyguard,” Sozu said. “I can’t do this alone, not for long. I’ll help you pay off your debt, but you have to help me.”

Sozu’s voice was soft and reluctant, almost pleading—she hadn’t expected him to speak to her like that. Ryna looked toward the old man, still shouting at the pair of girls.

“Just let them go,” Sozu said gently. “Worry about yourself, for once.”

Ryna closed her eyes and tried to breathe deep. A vysora mantra drifted through her head, and its familiar syllables resonated with calm. But Ryna wasn’t sure if she wanted to be calm.

I could walk over, calmly tell him to leave them alone…but what if he says no? It doesn’t matter, I have to— 

When Ryna opened her eyes, she glimpsed the dark-haired girl burying her foot in the old man’s groin, sending him crashing into a nearby table and causing a trio of half-empty glasses to shatter on the floor. By the time the old man lifted his head, the girls’ flower-dappled dresses were already disappearing through the door.

They got away, Ryna thought, as relief flooded into her. Suddenly, she felt ashamed that she had only stood there.

“You made the right move,” Sozu said, suddenly sharp and business-like again. “Don’t worry about the living—your main concern should be the dead. Come on, let’s walk.”

As the afternoon slipped toward evening, Sozu and Ryna walked the circular streets of Senkaku. Sozu explained that the city had originally been a cluster of six pit mines, with circular terraces cut into the sides of the pits. Now, centuries after those mines had been abandoned, the copper still seeped into the unnervingly blue rainwater lakes that sat at the bottom of the districts—too toxic to drink, but good for growing the shoals of tezu flowers that floated on the surface.

“The tezu flowers are what make this city work,” Sozu said, striding alongside Ryna. “When the living resettled Senkaku a century ago, there were already thousands of ghosts here, and they didn’t want to serve anyone. They wanted to hunt people, possess them, and pretend they were alive for a while. During the day, they lived in the Yoshiza. During the night, they’d hunt in Senkaku.”

Of all the stories Ryna had heard about Senkaku, the ones about the Yoshiza frightened her the most. It was supposed to be a mirror image of the city that existed in dreams, where the ghosts held wild, debaucherous parties and trapped humans in nightmares for amusement.

“That ended with a deal,” Sozu continued. “They’d stop hunting, and we’d stop trying to enslave them. They opened the Yoshiza to us, and we let them make deals with the living. The tezu flower grants lucid dreaming, and that’s how the living enter the Yoshiza.”

“So if there was a deal struck, why are you still hunting ghosts?” Ryna asked.

“Because not all of them want to abide by the deal.”

Ryna tried to listen to what Sozu was saying, but passing faces kept catching her eye: a pair of dark-haired women passed by with midnight-blue robes covered with hand-stitched silk primroses while small, illusory moons orbited their heads. Trailing behind them were three translucent figures with warped heads and elongated limbs—servant ghosts.

“See something you like?” Sozu asked.

Ryna nodded toward the ghosts. “Where I come from, ghosts are not bound like slaves.”

Sozu laughed. “Too bad. Around here, people live for eighty, ninety years, then they serve their families in death. That’s the arrangement. As for the ones without families…well, they’re better off bound to someone instead of running wild.”

“An eternity of servitude,” Ryna muttered. “No wonder the ghosts in Senkaku are unruly.”

“Have you dealt with ghosts before?” Sozu asked. “Talking to them, hunting them, anything like that?”

“No,” Ryna replied. “I was trained to fight the living.”

“I see…” Sozu said. “You’re gonna have to unlearn that, or else I’m going to be scraping you out of the gutter with a spoon.”

Ryna scowled. In her homeland, binding an angry ghost was something done by the ghost’s parents, or lover. They tried to soothe the ghost, remind it of pleasant memories, until it returned to itself. Ryna had heard of foreign necromancers fighting ghosts with blades or spells, ripping them apart like butchers until they were too weak to fight back.

Sozu held up one finger. “Lesson number one: we never, ever go toe-to-toe with a ghost if we don’t have to. We use surprise, distraction, whatever we can to get the upper hand. If we can’t get that, then we run.”

“You mean you don’t fight ghosts?” Ryna asked, surprised.

“Not me,” Sozu laughed. “That’s a good way to get an arm torn off, or go mad. I knew a necromancer named Blind Ruzi, he fought a ghost called Urasho. It chipped away at Ruzi’s mind, night after night, until he bound it. When he woke up the next morning, he thought every person he saw had Urasho’s face. So he gouged his eyes out.”

“So how do you capture a ghost?” Ryna asked.

“Most ghosts are barely sane enough to talk,” Sozu said. “Their minds are already teetering on the edge of madness, so I give ‘em a little push.”

“Tell me,” Ryna said. 

Sozu walked in silence for a few steps. “Are you familiar with vivisection?” 

Ryna shivered. “Yes.”

She remembered lying on the smooth, cold stone table, watching her school’s physiomancers pin back the skin of her chest, then her muscle, then prodding and pressing on her organs. They had numbed her nerves, but she could still feel the dull pressure of their fingers.

“Good,” Sozu said. “I do the same thing with ghosts—I paralyze them, then peel back their layers until I get a little glimpse of the cracks in their soul.”

“I don’t understand…”

“That brings us to lesson number two: every person builds themselves, brick by brick, over a lifetime,” Sozu explained. “On the outside, most of them look nice and neat. But if you look closely, you’ll find the cracks.

“Take a look at that lady,” Sozu said, pointing at a woman seated on a bench. She was dressed in a kiwi-green robe, talking calmly with a young man seated next to her. 

“I can tell you that something deep down in her soul makes that woman terrified of falling in love,” Sozu said. “Maybe it’s the fear of being rejected. Maybe she’s afraid of losing herself in another person. But she still wants love. It’s exciting, it’s comforting.”

Ryna gazed sidelong at Sozu. I didn’t expect to hear that kind of thing from him…

“That creates a division in her soul—the part that fears love and craves it,” Sozu said. “But she doesn’t want to face that, because that means acknowledging that she isn’t a nice, neat person—she’s got a crack in her, and cracks mean she can fall apart.”

“How can you tell she’s terrified of love?” Ryna asked.

“Everything about her. The purposeful way she doesn’t look at him, the rigid way she holds herself, all of it. And when she dies, all those little tells will become more than just habits—they’ll be reflected in the form of her ghost.”

“So once you’ve found a crack…”

“All I have to do is put it into words. Most people live their lives dreading the moment when someone else sees who they really are and says it out loud. Ghosts keep that fear.”

Sozu shrugged. “So I just keep talking. Nine times out of ten, the ghost begs me to stop, tells me they’ll do anything, as long as I stop. I tell them to get in my grimoire, and that’s that.”

“So what happens one time out of ten?” Ryna asked.

Sozu chuckled. “Things get ugly. That’ll be your job to handle.”

Sozu pulled his grimoire out of his satchel and turned to one of the first pages. He dragged a finger over an inked sigil, pulling it off the page, up his fingertip, and into his gloved palm.

“Hold out your hand…” he said.

Ryna presented her palm and Sozu touched it, letting the spell spread to the back of her hand.

“Take this and put it on your weapon—a blade, a club, I don’t care. Hold onto it tight and think of the worst memory you have. Something raw, something you haven’t gotten over. When you strike a ghost with it, if they’ve ever felt something similar, it’ll hurt.”

Ryna felt a pit of dread forming in her stomach. Sozu was turning her into those stories she’d heard about—necromancers who used blades.

“What if they haven’t felt the same?”  Ryna asked.

“Try to pick something common—a broken heart, a betrayal, watching a family member die, that kind of thing.”

Ryna was disgusted at how casual Sozu was, but he wasn’t facing her—he was looking at the woman in the kiwi-green robes.

“Meet me at the noodle bar at sundown,” Sozu muttered. “Don’t be late, or I’ll tell our clients that you were drinking on the job.”

“I don’t drink,” Ryna said indignantly.

“Then I’ll come up with something better.”

Back in her appointed room in House Demerza’s stronghold, Ryna ran her fingers over the straight sword she’d requested. It was two feet long and sharp enough to cut paper. The steel was flecked with black and gold, and the handle was scarlet cloth embroidered with the Demerza sigil—knots, forever interlinking. 

When the steward handed the sheathed blade to her, he’d said, “It is more dangerous to you than to us.”

The message was clear: to use the sword against House Demerza would be a grave mistake. 

Sitting on the bed with the sword, she looked around her barren room until her eyes fell on the tightly sealed window shutters. Ryna thought about the ghosts walking behind their masters, dutifully pulling carts and serving tea. They had made a promise to serve their families, just as she had to her lord. She knew what captured duelists were supposed to do: conduct themselves with dignity and honor, obey their captors, and trust that their masters would free them.

But here, in this city, she couldn’t keep her dignity by helping Sozu pick apart ghosts’ souls and sell them for money. It didn’t matter if ghosts were hunted like animals here—they were still people.

Ryna grit her teeth and stood up, pacing the room. 

But perhaps she was being inflexible. She’d heard that the ghosts in Senkaku were predators and sadists—maybe they deserved to be shackled. Sozu was rude and callous, but in a year, she would be free of this place and these people.

Ryna sat down and ran her fingertip along the blade, allowing the glyphs from Sozu’s sigil to flow onto the metal. They wrapped around the blade like a garland. 

Try to pick something common—a broken heart, a betrayal, watching a family member die.

Ryna closed her eyes and thought back to two months ago.

The night before her duel, she had sat next to Lord Navryn in his tent, listening to him talk to his advisors about his plans for the next decade. Navryn was thirty-five years old, with sharp eyes and black hair tied back in a gold clasp. He moved slowly, purposefully, as if the world weighed on his every movement. As his advisors spoke, Navryn sketched on a vast piece of paper spread across a table, plotting the key places, people, and moments in a web that spread out from one point—Ryna’s duel against House Demerza.

Territory was no longer won through wars. Indiscriminate killing bred too many vengeful ghosts, so duels were arranged. Ryna’s duel tomorrow would determine whether House Navryn’s plans became reality. 

When all the advisors had left for dinner, Navryn stayed behind, gazing at his notes scrawled on the sprawling piece of paper. Then, to Ryna’s trepidation, he lifted his eyes to her. 

“Master Kyrinas has persuaded me to take a chance on you,” Navryn said. “He said you begged him.”

“I did, sir,” Ryna replied, trying to sound confident.

“Are you that eager to taste blood?”

“No, sir,” she said sharply. “I wished for a chance to serve you.”

Lord Navryn smiled slightly. “Then show your opponent no mercy.”

Fourteen hours later, she was writhing on the dirt of the dueling ground, screaming and gasping as blood from her own intestines dripped on her face. Through the veil of tears, she could see Lord Navryn gazing at her with his blue eyes, stony and cold.

When Ryna opened her eyes, she gazed down at the blade and let her shame seep into it.

That evening, she met Sozu outside the noodle bar. He was standing in the shadow of the awning, nearly invisible except for the dull gleam of his helmet. Ryna could smell him, however—the uruzi stung her nose.

“You made it,” Sozu said, stepping out of the shadows and clapping her on the shoulder. “Come on, walk with me.”

They walked down the darkening street, watching people closing up shops and locking their windows.

“We’re hunting a ghost in the Batraza neighborhood tonight,” Sozu said.

“What has it done?” Ryna asked.

“It keeps possessing racehorses. They find the horses the next morning in other neighborhoods, all dead from exhaustion.”

“Racehorses? I didn’t know Senkaku had a racetrack.”

“We don’t. We race them in the streets.” 

An hour later, they were gazing at the gates of a run-down stable in Batraza, their shadows moving in the light cast by an old brass lantern Sozu had brought with him.

“Easy, easy, easy,” Sozu pointed. Ryna peered at the line of glyphs etched into the paving stones outside the stable’s gate and saw where chunks of the rock had chipped away, breaking the enchantment. They’d found four other places along the walls where the warding glyphs had been worn away or destroyed.

Sozu dusted off his gloved hands. “If our ghost’s looking for an easy target tonight, I’m betting it’ll try this one. Let’s find a place to watch.”

As the sun slipped below the buildings, Sozu and Ryna sat on the roof of a pawn shop across from the stable and watched the light seep away. Ryna wore the crude sparrow mask Sozu had given her. It smelled like stale alcohol.

“I just realized…” Ryna said softly. “You never told me how you actually…approach the ghost.”

Sozu grunted, reached into his satchel, pulled out his grimoire, and handed it to Ryna. 

“Turn to a page, any page,” he said.

Ryna flipped the book open in her palm and gazed at a mandala-like sigil. As she looked at it, she felt her vision narrowing until the page took up her entire vision. She heard a woman sobbing and felt a deep, icy stab in her gut. She felt something unnameable drift away, then disappear. Without thinking, she shut the book. 

“Ugh…what are these?” she asked, quickly handing the grimoire back.

“Painful memories,” Sozu said, slipping it into his bag. “Anguish, despair, guilt, horror…I’ve become something of a connoisseur.”

“These are your memories?” Ryna asked, surprised.

“No, no. I pay people to let me copy their memories into my book. You’d be surprised what people have locked up in their heads. When I’ve got a ghost in front of me, I pull a memory out of here and throw it on them.

“If I choose the right one, the pain incapacitates them. While they’re vulnerable, I hold ‘em in place with a spell so I can get to work.”

Ryna started to hear faint shrieks and laughter echo across the district, followed by sharp, echoing cracks. Colors blossomed across the sky.

“Fireworks?” Ryna whispered. “What are they celebrating…?”

“How long have you been here?” Sozu asked, amused. “They do this almost every night.”

“They keep the windows closed in my room.”

“Then you haven’t seen what comes next?”

“No…” Ryna said, confused.

As the last glow of sunset faded from the sky and night descended, Ryna saw a glimmer of green among the clouds, then little floating points of orange light. Slowly, an emerald-tinged mirage coalesced in the sky: a mirror image of the city reflected in the vast darkness hanging over their heads.

“Is that…?” Ryna whispered.

“The Yoshiza,” Sozu said bluntly. “The source of all our problems.”

Ryna didn’t take her eyes off the sky. “The one we’re looking for…why does it want horses?”

“Not sure. It runs them until they die, but it never runs in the same direction. Maybe it’s running from something, in its memories.”

Ryna lowered her gaze to the gates of the stable. She caught a faint whiff of something—rotting flesh. Then she heard a chorus of shrieks from the horses inside.

“Damn it, we missed it!” Sozu breathed. “It’s already in there…come on.”

As they climbed off the roof and onto the street, Ryna heard the cracking of splintering wood as something heavy hit the doors of the stable. As soon as her feet landed on the paving stones, she saw a horse burst through the doors and gallop toward the wrought iron gate. 

Sozu walked slowly toward the gate, opening his grimoire. The horse closed the distance between them, snorting and panting. Ryna could see a strange haze around it, like a cloud of heat.

When the horse came within fifteen feet of the gate, it leapt, its muscles bulging and coiling. Its jump carried it over the spikes of the gate, but its back legs caught on the tips. It tumbled in midair and crashed to the ground in front of Sozu. With a sickening crunch, Ryna heard the bones in its neck snap. It writhed there, kicking at the air, letting out a full-throated scream, but its voice was a man’s.

Sozu stood over the horse, unfazed by the flailing legs.

“Ryna!” he called. “It’s our lucky night. Got that sword?”

Ryna walked closer, her hand on the grip of her straight sword, until she was standing next to Sozu.

“Ghost is in the horse,” Sozu said. “I need it outside, where I can see it.”

Ryna scowled. “Pull it out, then. You’re the necromancer.”

“The horse is almost dead anyway, just cut its head off and it’ll come out—”

Her eyes widened. “No.”

“It’ll be quick, and I can catch the damn—.”

She stepped away from Sozu. Vysora did not kill. “No, pull it out.”

“You care so much about the damn horse? It’s in pain, isn’t—”

“I’m not killing it!” she said firmly.

“Cut its head off, or I’ll find someone else!”

Sozu’s words echoed down the street, and Ryna realized the horse’s screams had stopped. Amidst the steam rising from its skin, another shape rose. The ghost’s skin was snow-white, with dozens of gold coins pressed into its flesh like brands. She could see the puckered skin closing around the edges of the coins and smell the pus leaking out. It held itself up on two unnaturally long arms, and Ryna saw that two vestigial legs hung from its torso. Its head was smooth, with no nose or ears. Instead, it had a lipless mouth and two silver studs embedded in its cheeks, linked to a crude halter made from ropes of rough hemp. Two bloodshot eyes with bar-shaped pupils stared at her. 

She could hear Sozu yelling, but his voice was muffled. She could see him flipping through pages, but the hiss of paper seemed far away as she gazed into the ghost’s eyes.

Ryna saw the ghost’s stomach split open like a ripe fruit and watched a mass of intestines slither out. Frozen, Ryna watched as they slid into the carcass of the horse, making it twitch and seize. Steaming red flesh separated from the chestnut-brown coat, wrapping the ghost in cords of muscle like a spider weaving a web around itself. 

“Ryna, stab it!”

She watched the ghost’s eyes split like egg yolks into four, then six. Beneath it, the horse’s jaw spasmed, clumsily gnashing its teeth.

Ryna felt a hand shove her aside. She watched Sozu run his finger along a page, draw the spell from it, let it spread across his glove, and then point his finger at the ghost. He whispered something, and his arm shuddered slightly.

The ghost froze. The horse flesh slipped off its form in chunks and its intestines retreated back inside its chest, until it knelt in the street on its atrophied legs, surrounded by a pile of gore. Its eyes faced straight ahead, and Ryna could see its jaws moving. It began jerking and shivering, like it was being stuck with needles.

Sozu walked up to it, wading through the carcass of the horse. With his left hand, he traced a circle and a five-pointed star in the air above the ground. The shape appeared on the paving stones in white lines, encircling the ghost and pulling it, as if by invisible hands, until it was lying on its back, with its limbs stretched far as they could reach.

Sozu slowly turned pages in his grimoire as he looked down at the ghost.

“Horses…coins…halter…” he muttered.

Sozu drew another spell from his book, and Ryna saw it sprawl across his glove. He knelt down on the edge of the circle and traced a line down the ghost’s chest. Ryna saw the spell slip off his glove and spread across the white skin. The skin split, and Sozu’s gloved hands slid into the incision. 

The ghost began shifting and moaning, as if it were asleep and fighting a fever. Sozu began lifting things out of its chest cavity: the horn of a saddle, a child’s bright blue wooden boat, then half-filled bottles of alcohol. All of it was piled on the ground. The ghost’s eyes opened, and Ryna saw it breathing heavily. Its limbs strained against the circle.

“No, don’t look…don’t look at me…” it moaned.

After a minute, Sozu pulled something else out of the ghost’s chest: a gold chain with a pendant on it.

“Oh, a married man…” Sozu muttered. He wrapped the chain around his wrist.

The ghost began fighting and straining against the circle, thrashing and bucking its chest. Sozu picked up the wooden boat and turned it over in his hands, gazing at it.

“And a father,” Sozu murmured.

The ghost groaned, twisted, then sat up from the ground and opened its mouth. It had two sets of teeth.

“Sozu!” Ryna shouted.

“I got it, I got it…” Sozu replied, still looking at the boat.

As the ghost lifted its teeth to Sozu’s helmet, he turned to look into its maw.

“Papa.” 

It was the voice of a small boy.

The ghost froze, staring at Sozu. From his helmet, Ryna could hear a young boy begin to cry, with big heaving sobs.

“N-no…shh, no, it’s okay,” the ghost whispered desperately. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry, it’s all right. I had to go away for a while.”

But the boy’s voice kept crying.

Sozu stood up. When he spoke next, it was in a woman’s voice. “You said you wouldn’t abandon me. But you weren’t strong enough.”

“No, please…” the ghost whimpered.

“You left us. You left me. You’re a liar and a selfish little coward. And we have to live with the hole you left behind. Because you weren’t strong enough to be a father, or a husband, or—”

“No! Just…stop!” the ghost yelled. “Please, just stop, just stop it! I can’t…I don’t want to…”

“You don’t deserve to be free of us,” Sozu said in the woman’s voice. “And you’ll never be free.”

“Oh god, make it stop, stop, make it stop…” the ghost whispered to itself, over and over.

Sozu stood over the ghost and opened his grimoire. His voice returned to normal. 

“I’ll make it stop,” Sozu said softly. “Just come in here.”

Immediately, the ghost recoiled in fear from the book. “What’s….? It’s…it’s a pit. A bottomless pit.”

The ghost let out a heaving sob and slammed its balled-up fists against its head, as if trying to dislodge something from its skull. 

“Oh god, I don’t want…!” the ghost screamed. “I can’t, I can’t!”

“You choose,” Sozu said. “Do you want it to stop?”

The ghost braced itself against the street and wept, letting out shuddering gasps. Finally, it lifted its head and gazed at the book. It dropped its chin, as if looking at it sapped its strength. Then, with one hand, it reached up and set its hand on the page. Its fingers slipped into the paper, and it gripped the edge of the book like a windowsill.

The ghost crawled into the grimoire, its form warping and collapsing until it disappeared into the pages.

Sozu closed the book with a clap and heaved a sigh. “There, all done…”

His shoulders dropped, and he seemed to remember Ryna was still standing here. He strode over and grabbed the front of her shirt. “When I tell you to do something, you don’t hesitate. You don’t question. You do it. Otherwise I’m dead. You don’t want to kill a horse, but you’ll kill me?”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“This isn’t just about you—I have debts, too. I’m here doing my job. You’re here to swing a sword. Otherwise, you’re no use to anyone. You understand?”

Ryna saw a flash of Lord Navryn’s stony face. 

No use to anyone.

“I understand,” Ryna said quietly.

“Get yourself together, and fast,” Sozu said, turning away and walking into the shadow of the pawn shop. “Now come over here…I need to figure out where we’re headed next.”

As she walked over to Sozu, her face still spattered with blood, she could remember the way the horse screamed as it thrashed on the street.

“Who was he? The ghost,” Ryna asked.

Sozu waved a hand dismissively. “He had debts to pay, like us. But he couldn’t pay them. When you have a family, that weighs on you. He wanted to be free of that weight.”

“But why possess horses?”

“He was gambling the money he had left on horses,” Sozu said, glancing at the carcass. “From what I could tell, he threw himself in front of a race in the end. And that was that.”

Ryna felt Sozu’s earlier words trickle through her like cold water, collecting in the pit of her gut.

You weren’t strong enough.

As Ryna watched Sozu unfold a map of the city, she realized that all she wanted to do was collapse into a bed, to fall asleep, and forget. But when she woke, it would be close to night again, and she’d have to go out with Sozu. That meant facing another ghost. When the moment came, would she act? 

No one should trust me. Ryna thought. I can’t trust myself. 

On the edge of her hearing, she heard something tick against a roof tile above—claws. 

As Sozu began to step out into the street again, Ryna grabbed his shoulder.

“Wait,” she breathed.

Another set of ticks from above, and a single roof tile slid off and fell to the street. The overwhelming scent of rotting flesh enfolded Ryna. 

Above her head, something spoke. “I’ve been looking for you, No-Eyes.”

Sozu was silent for a few seconds.

Finally, he cleared his throat. “And I’ve been hiding. Not well enough, it appears.”

No-Eyes? Ryna thought, glancing at Sozu. Is that a nickname?

“Tonight, you pay your debts to us,” the voice said.

Ryna tried to ease her sword out of its sheath, but the blade scraped against the scabbard as she drew it out. Something shifted overhead.

“Is that a new bodyguard?” the voice asked, gasping with mock-excitement. “Is this the third or fourth one?”

“Third,” Sozu said.

“I still have the last two—do you want to speak to them?”

Ryna watched four sets of fingers curl around the edge of the roof. Silently, the heads of two eyeless corpses crawled into view over the edge, gazing at Ryna while upside-down. Drooping strings of muscle led from their shoulders to somewhere above them.

Puppets, Ryna thought.

“Tell your bodyguard they can go,” the voice said.

Ryna heard Sozu’s voice whisper in her ear. Stall for me.

She widened her eyes in disbelief.

Trust me. I have a plan, Sozu whispered.

Ryna took a deep, shuddering breath and adjusted her mask. She finished drawing her blade, turned around, and walked backward into the street, facing the rooftop. She fought back the fear seeping into her, forcing herself to take in the details of her surroundings: the piles of rags and broken wood in the gutter, the cool breeze flowing down the street, and the eerie, emerald-tinted light playing across the buildings. On the rooftop, she could see something huge and chitinous glinting in the dark.

“What does he owe?” she called to the rooftop. 

The shape shifted in the dark, and Ryna could see a face in the shadows—or half of one. The upper half was a mass of muscle strands radiating outwards from the skull and wrapped around a pitch-black, cast-iron metal ring that was embedded in the ghost’s head like a halo. The lower half of the face was bone-white, with a pair of glossy black lips. 

“Leave now, unless you want to be the third,” the ghost said smoothly.

Ryna watched Sozu open his grimoire and draw a memory onto his glove. He reached up slowly, silently, toward one of the corpses.

“Just tell me what he’s done,” Ryna said, her voice echoing down the empty street. Through the shadows, she could see strands of muscle snaking out of the ghost’s fingertips, leading to the corpses.

They’re part of her, Ryna realized.

Sozu’s gloved hand touched the skull of one of the corpses. Suddenly, the ghost shuddered, then seized. It let out an ear-piercing scream and reared up—Ryna could see it had a body like a spider, with smooth, folded black legs and a bulbous abdomen that ended in a barb the length of her arm.

Sozu twisted his head to look at her. “Ryna!”

Ryna knelt down, letting the muscles in her legs coil until they bulged. When the tension built into a spark of pain, she leapt, somersaulting through the air and onto the roof. She landed hard, then raised her sword over the thrashing ghost. In a split-second, her eyes took in its screaming mouth, the way the chitin glistened in the moonlight, and the dark veins running under its translucent skin. 

It’s still a person.

The sword wavered.

“Ryna!” Sozu shouted in her ear.

She felt a stab of dread and brought the sword down, slicing cleanly through the ghost’s forelegs and letting loose a gout of blood. Its screams rose an octave.

“Kick it off the roof!” Sozu yelled.

Ryna planted one foot on the roof tiles, then placed her other sandal on the ghost’s torso. With a grunt of effort, she pushed it off. It fell to the street, writhing and shrieking. Ryna dropped down after it, keeping her distance. She watched Sozu raise his hand and cast the circle and five-pointed star around the ghost, binding it in place.

“Not tonight…” Sozu muttered.

Ryna watched Sozu unfasten the knob on his helmet’s jaw and get down on his knees at the edge of the circle. He whispered a word, and Ryna watched in horror as an unseen force began to crush and compact the ghost’s body. 

“Stop it!” Ryna shouted.

With the sickening cracking of bones, the ghost’s body was dragged into Sozu’s open jaws. It warped and shrunk as it passed over his teeth, and its screams started to fade. Ryna seized his shoulder and tried to pull him to his feet, but the ghost had already disappeared down his throat. 

Ryna stepped back and pointed her sword at Sozu with a trembling grip. She watched him re-fasten his helmet and stand up.

“Why did you do that?” Ryna whispered.

“Don’t worry about it…” Sozu said, breathing heavily. “You’ll still get paid for tonight…I’ll give you a nice, big bonus.”

“You can’t eat a soul!”

Sozu raised his arms up and let them fall to his sides. “Well, I just did. What are you going to do about it?”

“Tell House Demerza. They told me if you did anything outrageous—”

“What’s one ghost? I bring them so many that they don’t care.”

Ryna sighed disgustedly. “I’ll find someone who does!”

Sozu opened his grimoire and held it in his palm, shaking his head.

“Not if I take your memory…” he said quietly. “And while I’m there, why don’t I give you some new ones?”

Ryna tensed. “I’ll cut your arm off before you can cast.”

Sozu took a short step toward her, turning pages.“At the end of the day, it’s not about how fast you are, it’s about patience. Go ahead, cut my arms off and get me sent to prison. I’ve been to prison before. Several different prisons. I escaped from one of them while I was blind. Sooner or later, I’ll get out.”

Sozu took another step. Despite herself, Ryna took a step back.

“And once I get out,” Sozu said in a low voice, “I promise you: I’ll find you, alive or dead. It’s not going to be quick, like her. I’ll take my time, dig up every little thread in your soul, every painful memory. It’ll feel like an eternity.”

Sozu shrugged, taking another step.

“But you don’t want that. So how about I take the memory…and you wake up tomorrow with a chunk of your ransom paid?”

Sozu was almost within the reach of her sword.

“Stop,” Ryna said, but her words felt hollow. Sozu took another step.

“Tell yourself that I got the drop on you,” he said softly.

Ryna raised her sword so it was next to his throat. Sozu turned to look at it.

“I can feel the memory you enchanted on it. It’s a bad one.”

Ryna blinked, and suddenly the street was gone, replaced with blinding sunlight. She was standing in the dueling grounds of House Navryn again, watching her opponent sprint toward her faster than an arrow.

She could hear Sozu whispering in her ear. 

To hurt people, you have to have a taste for it.

She watched the other duelist close the distance. She could see the blood vessels spread across their naked chest, slowly pulsing. They had two hearts beneath their ribcage.

You have to tell yourself that they deserve it, because they’re pathetic, or hateful. 

“Stop it,” Ryna said, feeling the blood pound in her ears.

As her opponent lunged forward, their hand reaching for her stomach, Ryna saw her opening: their exposed throat. But her gaze moved to the woman’s eyes—bright blue.

The problem with you, Ryna, is that you can’t convince yourself they deserve it.

The opening passed.

Ryna woke up with the House Demerza duelist standing over her, steam rising from their muscles, their hand still holding her intestines. With disdain, they held the bundle of tissue over Ryna’s face and let the blood drip onto her face before tossing it aside like trash.

You don’t have the taste for it.

“Stop it, Sozu!” she yelled.

As the surgeons gathered around her, she glimpsed Lord Navryn’s stony face staring at her.

Because you are pathetic.

“Stop!”

Ryna felt the phantasmal weight of House Demerza’s sword in her hand and swung, driving it sideways. She could imagine the sweep of it, and she realized it was strong enough to cleave through a tree. For once, there was no hesitation, no holding back—it was easy.

She realized her eyes were closed. When she opened them, she was back in the cool dark of the street, looking down at the decapitated body of Sozu.

“Oh god,” she whispered. “Oh no…”

A hundred thoughts raced through her mind, hitting her like an avalanche: a lifetime in prison for murder, a lifetime being haunted by Sozu’s twisted ghost. Even if she ran away from House Demerza, his ghost would follow her forever. She sank to her knees as the despair curdled her stomach. She felt something rise in her throat and threw her head forward, but all that came out was a dry heave.

She had wanted to prove him wrong. Prove to herself she was a true vysora. Only now did she realize she didn’t want to be.

Numbness spread across her body, and she thought about the vivisections she’d undergone, the years of grafts and transplants and sparring and exams. All sculpting her into someone she didn’t recognize. 

As her thoughts unspooled, something twitched on the ground—Sozu’s body. 

In horror, Ryna watched it pick up its head and set it in its lap.

“Didn’t think you had the heart,” the helmet said.

Ryna stared at it. How could he…?

Sozu set his head back on his stump of a neck, and Ryna heard a wet, slithering sound as his flesh bound together, followed by a muffled click as his spine re-attached. When it was done, he seemed to stare at Ryna.

“Unless I’m mistaken…that was an attempt at murder,” Sozu said. “Am I wrong?”

Ryna said nothing.

Sozu laughed. “Very naughty, especially for a duelist. But…I think I can find a way to keep quiet about it, Ryna.”

Sozu reached down, picked up his grimoire from the ground, and stood. “If we make a deal.” 

Ryna gave a shuddering sigh and lowered her head. Tears sprang to the corners of her eyes. She was tired of all this.

“I couldn’t live with myself if I did,” Ryna said. “Even if you took the memory.”

Sozu’s voice was flat. “No deal, then?”

Ryna looked up at Sozu. “No.”

She got to her feet, wiped her eyes, and held her sword at her side. Her muscles tensed, waiting for Sozu to make a move. 

They stood there for a long time.

Finally, Sozu laughed. He slipped his grimoire into his satchel and sighed.

“I don’t know about you, but I remember lesson number one,” he said, raising his hands to place them on top of his helmet. Faintly, Ryna recalled Sozu’s lecture on fighting ghosts, but her mind was focused on the sword in her hand.

If he makes a move, I need to take his arm off.

She walked closer to Sozu, her blade in front of her and her eyes wide. She lifted the satchel from his shoulder and slid it off his arm.

“Start walking,” she said warily.

Sozu turned around and started striding down the darkened street. Ryna followed close behind, sweeping her eyes over the shifting shadows cast by the emerald glow of the Yoshiza, high above her head.

She didn’t see Sozu pull a memory out of his head and let it spread across his glove.

Want to learn more about the world of OROBORO? Go here.

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Those who explore hidden paths are rewarded.