Well, this needs no introduction. Just like last time, we get a bunch of vignettes on the Betrayers of Kamigawa minisite. Let’s take a look!
A Servant’s Mission, by Jay M. Salazar
Ink-Eyes is able to hear ghosts and kami, and from these voices from beyond she has received training to become the best ninja among the Nezumi. Muzan the Ogre took her in after she was cast out by her Nezumi kin and raised/trained her in the kind of horrifically abusive way we also saw with Hidetsugu and Kobo. He sends her to kill some Nezumi camped nearby to please his oni master Kuro. But at night she returns and kills Muzan instead. She then summons Kuro, who makes her his new servant, giving her new powers, including necromancy.
This story
is quite dark. Not so much the murder and the summoning of demons, mind you, that
is par for the course with Magic stories. No. it’s the abuse Muzan puts
Ink-Eyes through at the beginning that I’m talking about. The part where he
throws a chair at her, then blames her for breaking it, and the fact that he’s
apparently a drunkard, makes it all feel much more like real domestic violence
than the insane over the top “training” Hidetsugu puts Kobo through. Not that
that wasn’t horrific, this just draws more attention to it, and makes it feel
more realistic. Your enjoyment of the story will thus depend on how much of
that you can stomach in your revenge stories.
Patron of the Akki, by Jeff Grubb
Ik-Uk the Akki finds a bottle, from which a kami emerges. It promises to protect him for a year and a day as payment for its freedom. It takes him to a cave in the Sokenzan mountains, where Ik-Uk is captured by other Akki. These summon the Patron of the Akki, a great kami who once protected their species, but since the start of the war has gone insane and hateful. The freed Kami turns out to be one of the shapes orbiting it. The Patron eats Ik-Uk, but the part of it that promised to protect him says he will not die until the year and a day are over. He just has to wait inside the Patron’s form until it is time to die.
This one might sound like another Twilight Zone-twist episode, but between the name of the story and the description of the kami Ik-Uk finds as akki-like, and the first line being “Ik-Uk the akki was damned from the moment he spotted the bottle, though he would not realize it for another week.” you can tell where it is going from the start. As such it is mainly interesting as a showcase of the Akki, their culture and the various species of Kamigawa’s relationship to their Patron Kami during the War. Oh, and it is cool to hear that those things orbiting Kami are apparently smaller Kami that are aspects of the larger one. Previously they had only been described as “energy objects”.
- One bit of squickiness: those balls of fire around the Patron of the Akki are apparently flaming Akki fetuses… that god that picture isn’t zoomed in further.
- The partron spirits were once good to their people
“Once, perhaps,” said the akki, “but now they have gone mad, and are nothing but voracious appetites incarnate. The Patron of the Orochi was once beautiful, but now is nothing more than a great worm made of woven vines. The Patron of the Nezumi was once radiant, but now stalks the swamps, a set of ravenous jaws on thin, stalking limbs. And the less said about the Patron spirit of the Moonfolk the better.”
“And your race’s patron?” said the flickering creature. “The Patron of the Akki?”
Ik-Uk suppressed a shudder and tried not to think of it. Instead he said, “No better or worse than the rest, I’d guess. The Patrons, and all the great spirits are feared now, thought of as little more than great beasts. They are to be hated and feared.”
- Ik-Uk says Kami used to be good to mortals “Long ago, in grandfather time. Now the kami war with the living, and are kept shackled by spells, or supplicated with sacrifice.” I guess Akki live short lives, and thus refer to events of 20 years ago as “grandfather time”.
- Bottle “in the style of the elder dynasties”, which is exactly the kind of world building sentence I latch on to. Of course, even if we ever return to Kamigawa I doubt we’ll hear more about this single line from a short story, but still… it’s just the kind of sentence that piques the imagination.
Personal Battles, by Rei Nakazawa
Iwamori is hunting “renegade Orochi” Shisato, but she gets away. Later Eiyo, the Kami of Honored Fallen, is spotted near his monastery. Iwamori hurts it bad enough that it flees back to the kukuriyo, but while he is lauded for this feat, he still sees this as a failure: he wanted it dead completely. He heads out to find Shisato again. Then he runs into Toshi. Sensing something is off about him, Iwamori attacks, but Toshi evades all charges and captures the monk in a summoned cage. While in the cage Iwamori thinks about a comment Toshi made about people like him having a death wish, and realizes that it is true: his family died protecting him as a child, and he has been seeking out battles, subconsciously hoping to die and be reunited with them. He returns to his master, who tells him to meditate on this revelation, rather than going back to training.
This is a good, and poignant, story. Toshi’s inclusion is a bit out of left field, but he’s fun as always and exactly the right type of character to give Iwamori some tough love.
Toshi says he’s a close personal friend of Michiko, meaning this story has to happen after Outlaw. Without spoiling too much of the next two novel reviews, Toshi does return to Jukai in them, but not on foot and not in as good a mood as he is portrayed here, so the most logical timeline placement would be between Outlaw and Heretc.
Eiyo looks like a huge samurai, not at all like the Kami of Honored Dead, despite the similar name.
Redemption Smiles, by David A. Page
The disgraced samurai Toshusai is found by Kentaro, the Smiling Cat. Kentaro has a reputation for slaying the dishonored, but instead makes Toshusai see that it had been his daimyo who was dishonorable for exiling him (for choosing to protect his innocent family against a death warrant from said daimyo) and then recruits him and three others to fight an oni. Though the oni tries to get him to turn on his fellows through mental messages, he stays strong and helps kill the monster.
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| This art was originally intended for Toshi! |
Also pretty
cool. A good character study, cool action scene… nothing much to say about it,
but it’s good. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Toshusai and Kentaro. It’s good
to see some genuine good guys after stories about abusive ogres, doomed akki
and self-destructive monks.
The Sound of Crickets, by Alexander O. Smith
The master ninja Higure has to kill a young noble, only to discover it is a woman he once felt attracted to. He’s indoctrinated into the ninja school enough to go through with the killing though.
This is the first one of the vignettes I don’t like very much. Not for the story or the characters, but for the writing style. There are a lot of difficult to read run-on sentences…
“For a moment he pauses, considering the tight-wound copper wires and cleverly placed bars of metal that bind the aged tree limbs, torturing them into shapes that at once seemed utterly natural and yet more perfect than anything found in nature.”
“With shaking hands on abacus he will subtract the calm expressions of the corpses from the obvious traces of violence and the residue of his calculations will reveal nothing but blue-gray shadows and the glint of steel in the moonlight.”
…I think this is meant to be poetic? But it doesn’t work for me at all. Take all of that out and there is just not a whole lot of story either, as you could tell from the short summary.
Temple of the Black Scroll
With the world, the war and the mysteries firmly established by the Champions stories, and the follow up of the latter two being taken up by the novels, the second batch of vignettes goes for a much more character focused approach. They feature a bunch of characters who never show up elsewhere, and thus have very little impact on the larger continuity (Okay, Toshi shows up for one scene, but you don’t miss any crucial information on him if you just read the novels), yet these are still very good reads. When dealing with previous short stories (like the various anthologies) we’ve seen that there are often quite a few duds, but somehow WotC managed to get the vast majority to be quite good for the Kamigawa vignettes. Which is good, since flavor is the main thing they were selling those sets on!
So no crucial information here, but I’m still having a lot of fun with these!
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