5. Episode The Peacock and the Crow
“Well Killer… it seems that your discovery is going to live. You brought her here just in time as she was near death. Her fever has broken for the time being and her condition has stabilized for now. Though, she still suffers from delirium and she continues muttering in this strange tongue which I can’t discern. Thankfully, she is now resting at the moment. Though, I would recommend that she remain here for sometime. My examination of her revealed that she is malnourished and…” The physician lowered his voice slightly, reserving his low, hushed tone for the assassin as he was uncertain if the Pani woman in the adjacent room was asleep or not, “Were you aware of the extensive scarring of her body?” The physician continued to wipe his hands in the rep-cloth and set it aside the basin. His countenance was calm, but he seemed fidgety within the presence of the darkly attired man. Who could blame him, knowing the notoriety that was quintessential with the black caste? Yurei laid in, for what would be the first time in months, a warm bed with clean sheets. The change in her usual sleeping arrangement elicited discomfort, evidenced by her tormented tossing and turning, left her utterly restless. But, she wasn’t agitated simply by her arrangements, though that was only part of it. It was the unsettling dreams which refused her consolation, even in her comfortable setting. She was gradually beginning to discover that the past was not something one could easily leave behind.
——
It was the frightened shriek which assaulted her ears that caused her to abruptly awaken. The little Pani girl, now aged ten, jolted upright in her bed and allowed her eyes to adjust to the darkness of the room. She remembered how difficult it was for her to adjust to a mattress instead of a futon and the adjustment period which had followed it. The coiled springs of non-Pani mattresses just could not compare to the bean and buckwheat filled quilts of the pleasure house. How luxurious and cozy they were, compared to the white Karian slaver’s gifts and kindnesses which she never quite became inured too. It had been three years since Lord Nishida sold her mother’s contract to the Karian slaver. The cruel and often nettlesome memory remained emblazoned in her mind’s eye: the very men who were assigned to guard her and her mother turned around and snatched her and her mother away from their collective home like namahage monsters. Suyuan had been cosseted, doted upon, but still expected to maintain honor and decorum; especially when it pertained to men. She was expected to revere them… and whoever owned her mother’s contract. The Karian slaver was now her father, refuge, and from it seemed to be… her irrefutable face. His face was something she could never forget – ruddy, deeply-lined and leathery like the tarn saddles she used to observe being made in the tarn camp. His hair was close-clopped and resembled overnight snow distributed on the earth. In each ear, he sported two gold rings which mesmerized her as she had only witnessed earrings on collar-girls. His gaze was nearly a sneer of cruel intelligence and power, even though he dealt with the Pani girl very kindly and almost paternally. There was something about the white man which elicited a frisson at times; especially when he regarded her. When he looked at her, a bit of her innocence shriveled up and expired. These were moments when she pleaded with him to see her mother and many times he firmly denied her. Even in her present adulthood, she still had difficulty pronouncing his name… something S… Sam…? Smoke curtailed into the small room through the narrow slit just beneath her door and she commenced to cough and sputter quite violently, causing her to violently trash and flail about the bed which hollowed out into the present.
——
Her cracked and calloused hands gripped the sheets until her knuckles became a faint shade of white, resonating into the other room as scene played repetitively in her mind. The smoke, the fire, and her mother finding her in her bed violently coughing. She had led her to an alleyway and quickly dressed her as a she-urt and the final words which would be her legacy. “You are free… 1,000 times above me and all the more. I would rather see you die on the streets as an orphan, begging for scraps of food as opposed to living the privileged life of a collar-girl… a kajira as these white men call them. This is now your fate… only Amaterasu or the Priest-King gods can determine your destiny now. Remember that you will always have fate, but not always destiny.” She grasped the sheet as perspiration formed on her forehead and her fever began to resume. What exactly had her mother meant? Weren’t fate and destiny interwoven? Her mother was stern, insightful, clever, and most of all obedient. Suyuan had remained second to and in her mother’s shadow for the duration of her life. She was the ideal contact women… that is, until her mother’s secrets were discovered and both mother and daughter paid dearly for the mistakes. Enslavement seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back and the love that she was deprived of in the tarn camp finalized in the moment when her mother smuggled her out of the slaver house… risking her own life to ensure that her daughter could have the opportunity that Mizumi never dare risk for herself except for one being she loved most in the world.
——
Yurei continued to grunt in her discomfort just as the physician heard her unsteady and fragile voice strain for volume.
“She keeps repeating these two words… tengu-karasu. Do you have any idea what that means, Killer?” The physician affixed his concerned gaze upon the assassin, baffled by the foreign words. “She also continues to repeat the words and names, ‘Crow’, ‘my black-bird’, and ‘Ama… Ama… te… ra.. su. She is delirious, but do you know who or what she is referring to? I hear her, I should check upon her as it seems her condition has worsened.”
A few moments later, he emerged.
“Killer, I believe you should come in here…”
Crows Murder 
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