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The Medicine Seller lumbered along the road in a manner that threatened to relieve him of his shoes with every step, stooped forward as if facing a vicious headwind. So it had been for six hours, shuffling and stomping and storming as the city crowds thinned and the sun sank snugly into the tree line. Even at night, and burdened with his pack, his bearing had always been leisurely and weightless, so habituated from centuries of travel. This graceless urgency was new.
“Something wrong?” The Other had asked as the city gates receded behind them, not expecting an actionable response.
Venomous with sarcasm, the Medicine Seller had replied: “What could possibly be wrong?” Then he trained his attention on the road once more with wide, deliberate eyes, the whites of which were so great they held the irises perfectly encapsulated, like leaning over the top of a well in snow. Do not deign to speak to me, that look said. Silence after that, save for the unceasing, determined scrape of footsteps in dirt. The Other withdrew, guarded where it dispersed beneath the Medicine Seller’s skin, feeling for all the world like a cat with its little limbs tucked under it in patient and potent disdain.
The landscape took on a harrowed quality as they continued into the night. A forceful wind strafed low, and on it bursts of rain, which startled a mass of crows somewhere close yet unseen. Between fast clouds, a big moon made rare appearances like a judgmental partygoer. And all around was a tremendous clamoring of disturbed leaves, heavy and glossy with water.
A light came into view on the next rise, what appeared to be an inn; under a hulking thatch roof it looked like it was bundling itself out of the rain. Those who walked the trade routes lived cheaply if they could manage it, and this was a humble way station if there ever was one, scantly lit from within to conserve its supply of candles. But the Medicine Seller jingled with an unusual abundance of coin that night. Ochou had not been a paying assignment, but having vanquished her, only to awaken in the kitchen of her obscenely wealthy family, it had seemed entirely correct to relieve them of their coffers before slipping away. Payment, just like payback, always came in one form or another, eventually. This world had mysterious ways of offering the Medicine Seller opportunities, and it did him no good to refuse them.
The inn did not feel like a place to rest. It was merely a place to temporarily allay forward momentum, to ping off the walls like a captured moth until daylight freed him. But there would be no walking through the night, not in this weather, which had begun to find its way into his clothes and would startle him as it pressed some new, cold dampness into his skin. So stop he did, before the weight of the accumulated water he carried with him pulled him into the ground.
A new scene, then, interior; dark woods and guttering candles, presided over by the kind of wizened old man so ubiquitous they could have simply been born old, spat up from the abyss for the sole purpose of wiping counters and slowly, stiffly interrogating travelers. A small pittance of the illicit coinage and as few words as possible were exchanged for lodgings.
The innkeeper shuffled through the room to light the candles, grumbling curses over his dulled flint and his palsied hands. A shopworn interior came into view, which the Medicine Seller regarded with glazed, goatish indifference. As the old man fumbled, the Medicine Seller settled heavily onto the bed and produced from his sleeve a hooked tobacco pipe. It was not his original one; that had vanished years ago, in the way that little belongings had a peculiar way of coming and going around him, detached from any known rules of object permanence. No, this one had been pulled from a man with no face but many masks, who had haunted the doomed woman Ochou as she had doubly haunted him. When the Medicine Seller left the household of Ochou’s memories, job done, all chronological anomalies neatly tucked away, he had found it staged on the threshold like a gift. He took it with him; objects that want to be found can be lucky.
This he twirled between his fingers as he fell back upon the mattress.
After an unconscionably long time, the innkeeper bowed stiffly and took his leave. The Medicine Seller counted his steps until he was out of earshot.
“You must have noticed.” he said ponderously, so overly casual as to be decidedly rehearsed. “Did you not?”
The Other gathered itself into physicality, materializing in profile at a table across the room. A blue pall cast itself over the space, for in showing itself it had drawn them both into the realm of the not-real, the crevasses between temporalities that they could occupy at once. “That the thing we killed today looked quite a bit like us? So I did.” It answered dispassionately, its face turned away.
“To meet a traveler with the same white hair, pointed ears, and incorporeal quality? Highly unlikely.” the Medicine Seller mused acerbically. “Explain this to me. Leave nothing out.”
The Other’s eyes narrowed, and its posture stiffened warily. “You think I withhold information? We see with the same eyes. I am able to make inferences, but no truths are more known to me than they are to you.”
“Speak, then,” the Medicine Seller hissed, “should you have inferences to make.”
“Ochou, the faceless man, you, me; all the same thing,” the Other said, a seismic sort of frequency creeping into its voice. “Paired mononoke, in synergy, each dependent on the other.”
The Medicine Seller threw down the pipe and bolted to his feet, a writhing mass of seals flying from his splayed hands and affixing themselves cluelessly to the wall beyond the table. For the Other was no longer seated but instead before him in an instant, crushing his wrists in a restraining grip, its breathing hot and ozone-charged in the space between them. “Don’t try it!” It snapped, its blackened teeth bared. “I have said nothing that you have not already known.”
The Medicine Seller braced, nostrils flaring, and the Other pushed back against him, testing the tension of their grips, inhuman eyes boring holes into him from a mirror-image face. A great tension seethed within the golden glyphs it bore there, and they shook like heat mirages. “Ochou’s fear created the faceless one,” it recounted low and hoarse. “Your fear created me. We are the same.” An unnatural wind rose through the space, the seals fluttering like an agitated audience.
The Medicine Seller swung one leg forth and hooked his ankle around the Other’s, unseating their footing and bringing them both crashing to the floor. They struggled there, lysergic fabrics pooling around them. “Stop!” The Other roared, batting away the sharpened fingernails that swatted at its wrists and throat.
“Why should I?” The Medicine Seller countered. “Are you not the very thing we swore to kill?” At last he found purchase in the scrabbling of limbs; with one hand locked around the other’s corded neck, the Medicine Seller drew up a fist in a prelude to an arcing punch. But beneath him the Other phased out of solidity, withdrawing into him and pushing him into the real world just long enough for him to crumple face-first to the ground, supported by nothing.
The Other rematerialized silently at his back, a knee holding him prone. “I can draw all the power out of you in an instant. You cannot seal me. You cannot negate me,” it growled. “Now stop.”
Yet the Medicine Seller struggled still, tossing himself about. The Other seemed to weigh preternaturally more than something of its size could, and bore down upon him iron-heavy. Catching sight of a tension in his hands that foretold another barrage of talismans, the Other wrenched his wrists behind him. The Medicine Seller made a rasping sound of discomfort. He twisted, glaring, a trickle of blood from the nose mingling with the red of his tattoos.
“What?” the Other said. “Don’t tell me you thought you were still human?”
“No, I knew I couldn’t be. You made me into something else.” the Medicine Seller said in a strained croak. “But humans always subjugate those different than them. As a human I would never have to question why I kill mononoke. It would be my birthright to do so. But now, if some—” he broke off in a choked gasp, having run out of breath.
“Stop struggling and I will release you,” the Other said.
“Fine,” the Medicine Seller relented.
The weight eased, and his hands came free. At once the Medicine Seller twisted onto his back and shot off a kick, which caught the Other in the abdomen.
“Will you knock it off?” The Other scolded. “I’m no threat to you!”
“If some other mononoke was to kill us it would be justified!” The Medicine Seller dug his heel into the Other’s ribs. “We have no right to exist! I might as well kill you first!”
The Other sprang forward and caught him by the knee, pinning his legs. “I wield the sword. It will never unsheathe for such idiocy,” it sneered.
“Then kill me!” The Medicine Seller yelled, wresting himself this way and that, tangling himself in his sleeves. “Speak my form, truth and regret! We are aberrances! We must be destroyed!”
“We are not,” the Other declared, its eyes burning coals in its shadowed face. “We who patrol the barriers of this world; we are the only thing shielding it from ruin.”
“Us? Keeping the peace?” the Medicine Seller scoffed. “Everywhere we wander we leave a house full of corpses. Is that what justice looks like to you? Did we keep those people safe?”
“Yes!” The Other shot back, its nose crinkling in derision. “Guilty people always find ways to make death come to them. If they see a sword they’ll simply throw themselves upon it. It makes no difference whether it is ours. You yourself have employed this many times, to rule out suspects or to toy with them.”
“So what, then? Every stupid, rotten thing on this earth dies by our hands until there’s nothing left?”
“The world cannot be returned to the void. There is always something left. All the many Kayos and Tamakis and people who never deserved their fates. Even if there are only a few. They remain.”
The Medicine Seller ceased his thrashing at this, and was silent. “I didn’t realize you were such an idealist,” he said quietly.
“Don’t be stupid. You are too. You just haven’t thought about it until now.” If the Other was inclined to gesture, it sounded like it would have shrugged.
“You can let me go now,” the Medicine Seller said after a time.
“I don’t trust that,” the Other scowled.
“No, no, no, I’m done,” the Medicine Seller insisted.
The Other unfolded itself from the Medicine Seller with an exasperated grunt, and stood with its back turned. The curtain of hair that hung to its knees was bunched and kinked where it had been disturbed in the fray, and one sleeve had slipped off a bare shoulder. It seemed entirely more affected than it did when fighting much more powerful things, and its arms hung long at its sides with fatigue. “You do realize that nothing has changed. How could any mortal thing do this work? You must have known.”
The Medicine Seller snatched up the pipe and rose, fixing the Other with a contrary stare before slipping past it. “Hunting, like hunger or fatigue, is bodily instinct. It’s easy to live at the mercy of your impulses, like an animal. It is another thing entirely to have those impulses questioned. You risk losing what you think you are.” He plucked a candle from the nearest stand and tipped its flame into the pipe’s bowl. It still contained a burl of tobacco, which he carefully set alight before slotting the pipe between his teeth. It tasted of varnish and spit, but the smoke poured down his throat like a warm, alive thing. It was perhaps ridiculous for a mononoke to develop a smoking habit, an affectation from a life it had not lived, but he could see the appeal. It lingered like sweetness and nostalgia in his chest, and made him feel with a keenness a world he was not truly a part of. “I hid the truth of what we are in a place I could not bear to look. It was the only way to keep going. I was a person once, but am no longer; to admit it is like a death.” He could almost envision his own funerary tablet, replete with an offering of burning incense. But no one existed who would dare set such a thing upon their hearth, for in fact very few people remembered him, because very few people walked away from their encounters with their lives. He was for all purposes adrift in the world, a mote of dust in an endless stream of time.
“It’s like a life, too.” The Other watched him closely, its cinderlike gaze raking over the set of his shoulders, the way he drooped at the neck as if pushed by a troublesome weight. “Had we not struck this bargain, you would be dead in the dirt at the hands of your parents in a village with no name.”
“I know.” The Medicine Seller said in a voice mild and remote. “I haven’t ever thanked you for that.”
“But something still bothers you.”
The curling, silken breath he exhaled fluttered with an unfortunate hesitance. “Ochou wanted to know why the mononoke protected her. I told her it was because it loved her.” In the void between existence and nonexistence she had sat at his back, and behind her the Other, sword poised between her shoulder blades and thrumming with monumental resonance. In that non-space he could offer her one final consolation before the blade devoured all: something, if only once, has seen you for what you are. He had not turned to look; so swift was the killing blow that the only sound had been a quick snap of negation, a shattering of porcelain and he was awake at the beginning of the story, sitting placidly in an Ochou-shaped hole in the narrative. “Does that make us the same?”
He glanced sidelong over his shoulder and found that the Other looked practically wounded.
“Is it not obvious?” It said, uncharacteristically diffident. “Why else do you think I would stay for two hundred fifty years? You have never known me to be tolerant of things I do not abide.”
The Medicine Seller’s eyes closed, as if to physically seal the truth of things within him before they drifted away, and then he smiled incredulously. “Two hundred thirty-six. A long time to carry such a thing without speaking it.”
“I am a killing thing, with little knowledge of…kindnesses.” The Other tested the word on its tongue like a suspicious fruit. “I do not know subtlety, and I can only give you crude gifts. Still, it was enough that you took this form, and learned to move so easily in it, and came with me when I called. What a rare thing. How could I ask for anything else?”
“Still,” the Medicine Seller maintained, “those must have been long years.”
“Not so long. Every time you make a humorless joke or chase a cat into some inconvenient place is a thousand more gifts than I could ever give you. So long as you exist, I have a purpose in this world.”
“Well tha—humorless?”
“Be serious. People who are about to die don’t like to hear jokes.”
“If it was me I’d appreciate the levity.”
The Other rolled its eyes. “Besides,” it continued, with perhaps some redness in its face, “I’m a part of you, and you certainly haven’t grown tired of yourself yet.”
The Medicine Seller produced a seal from his sleeve. It winked awake, color running down it like blood returning to a limb, but he kept a tight grip on it so it did not stick itself to anything. “A mononoke has a singular focus that binds it to the world, a tether that draws it into being.” He twisted it between his fingers, reducing it down to a papery thread. “A grudge or the settling of a score will give it a hateful form. But hate and love are as two sides of the same coin. To avenge a death or protect a life; they’re not so different. At the root of both, affection.” He let go and the seal and unfurled, displaying identical pictograms on either side. He brought his hands together around it to neatly snuff it out of existence.
The Other stepped forward, reaching over the Medicine Seller’s shoulders to hold aloft the mirror that hung around his neck. It framed one half of each of their faces, alike but divergent. “No other mononoke had taken the form of a man until today, only beasts and ghouls. We held onto a human instinct, and the form stayed.”
“How poetic.” He took a small step back to press into the Other’s chest, the heat it carried there. A shock ran through it like lightning before it ultimately settled, draping its arms around his shoulders. “Though I fear that means we made a mistake today.”
“They hung a family from a plum tree. Those people were oafish, maybe. Not very kind. But mostly blameless. If we cross that line we’ll deserve the same fate,” the Other said, pressed close enough that its voice resonated against the side of the Medicine Seller’s skull. “But in a different life, perhaps they could have been like us.”
“Do you think there are more, somewhere in this world?”
The Other made an equivocating sound. “If there are they’ll come to us, eventually.”
The Medicine Seller considered this, rocking on his heels. “So then…” he said glibly, “does this mean you’re going to sing and dance for my supper, the way the faceless one said he would?”
“No,” the Other grumbled, “I don’t know where he got that idea. If I sound anything like you, I can’t sing at all.”
Turning, the Medicine Seller threw his arms around the Other’s neck. “You’re mean,” he said into its cheek. Up close, it smelled like electrical storms and quick-burning incense and maybe, buried somewhere, a storehouse in a town on no map, where they had first drawn charms and constructed scales, a time when they didn’t quite exist on the same plane, at least, not yet.
“You’re not very self-aware,” the Other retorted.
“I can live with that.” the Medicine Seller ran a fingertip around the tracery of gold on the Other’s forehead, following it down the bridge of his nose. “So long as you stay with me.” When he reached the tattooed crest of its lips he replaced it with his mouth, only slowly, only demurely, and he felt the Other go very still, spilling over with fever-heat.
The Other broke away, the motion stiff and unpracticed. “Don’t press your luck,” it fumed, color very much high in its cheeks. “Go to sleep already.” With that it retreated within him, folding itself into a concentrated, radiating heat somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. Along with it it dragged the blueshifted tinge of unreality like a gossamer train, leaving the Medicine Seller alone in a very real, and very plain, interior. The storm, all but forgotten until that moment, still threw itself at the eaves.
“Oh?” The Medicine Seller said to the empty room, blinking owlishly. “I think I embarrassed it.”
Its presence bristled peevishly between his lungs as he set himself to hanging his clothes, humming a few experimental, tuneless notes as he went. Yes, it was late, yes, much had transpired, yes, though his limbs were heavy his head was full of ideas long buried, and that incendiary being he carried with him felt it all, saw it all. When sleep finally came it was as a deluge, and it was with his hand over his chest, where the Other glowed unseen as he dreamed, and watched always.