Karura nearly saw the prince naked again, and it was the closest call she'd had all week.
She was at her post outside his rooms, three days out from Renge and an hour into Mizuchi, sweeping the lodging with the Byakugan the way she did in every new place. Walls. Roofs. The servants moving in the halls, the street below, the alley behind the kitchens where the night soil went out. The eyes didn't care about walls.
It was also, she found out, a problem, because one of the rooms the sweep went through without asking was the one where the prince was lowering himself into a copper tub, and the four maids who'd gone in with the towels had not kept the towels, and her all-seeing eyes caught the first half-second of that before she killed them so fast her head rang.
She slapped both hands over her face anyway. It didn't help. The half-second was already in there.
She stood with her eyes screwed shut behind her palms and her cheeks hot and her feet planted. She knew what bodies did. She was a medic. She'd put a man's intestines back inside him with her hands and healed a split femur in a plaza full of people. None of that was the problem. The problem was that it was his, and it was behind a door, and she'd gone through the door without knocking.
So she made herself a rule, right there in the hall, with her hands still over her face.
The maids were her job. Anyone who walked into the prince's bath could kill the prince in it, so every one of them got looked at on the way in, all the way through, hands and sleeves and hair and the hollows of the body where a blade could hide, with her eyes and no apology. After that door closed, she lowered her hands, wove through a short run of hand signs, and narrowed the eyes down to the one thing they did better than anything else.
His rooms were colored light. Four chakra signatures and his. That was all a guard needed, and it was all she would look at.
Her face was still warm. An attendant passing in the hall smiled and waved at her, and saw Protector's calm wooden face wearing hers, and not the red one behind it. Karura waved back and stood very straight and was a serious shinobi with nothing wrong with her.
Behind the door, somebody giggled, and then somebody else did, and the water slopped.
Karura exhaled as she looked at the far wall and counted the servants moving in the halls. She wondered if she should cover her ears too, but that'd be too much. Too dangerous.
She focused back on Mizuchi, the parts of it that weren't the bath, and there was a great deal of Mizuchi to take in.
It was the opposite of Renge in every way a town could be. Renge had scraped its best together for a guest who wouldn't look down. Mizuchi had money and wanted everyone to know it. The town climbed a shallow rise above a dry riverbed, and every street of it had been swept and hung and gilded for the Daimyo's coming, real silk where Renge had managed dyed cotton, lanterns by the hundred, turquoise set into the doorposts of even middling houses because the stone came cheap here and showing it was the whole civic religion. There were fountains, three of them on the main road alone, throwing water up into the desert air to fall and be caught in basins and sent up again, for no reason but that a town with water to waste was a town worth funding, and Mizuchi wanted the man with the purse to see exactly how much it had spent to please him.
Karura looked at the fountains for a while.
Then she looked under them and what she saw under Mizuchi did not match what Mizuchi was saying about itself.
The fountains were fed off a cistern, and the cistern sat low, lower than three fountains running day and night had any business leaving it, and the water in it was wrong. She could see that the water under Mizuchi moved sluggish and thick where it should have run clear, threaded grey with silt and bitter with salt at the bottom. The channel that should have fed the cistern fresh from the riverbed upstream was half-choked, narrowed to a trickle by years of something packing into it. The town was drinking down its store and not filling it, and it was spending what was left on three fountains and a festival, and from the street you would never know, because from the street all you saw was water in the air catching the light like the town was made of it.
One seal, and there were two of her in the corridor. The real one stayed inside Protector at the door. The other took the coin purse off her belt, because a clone's copied coins went up in smoke when the clone did, and some sweets-seller shouldn't pay for that, and went down into the festival wearing her own face. The prince's shadow could walk into any room in this town. A stranger couldn't.
…
The sweets-seller had set up at the corner where the festival crowd was thickest, a cart hung with paper flags and a flat iron griddle she worked with both hands, and a small girl underfoot tied to the cart leg by a length of cord so she couldn't wander into the crowd. The woman took one look at Karura, small and sand-colored and apparently off duty, and read her as exactly what she appeared to be, a child with a few coins, and waved her up.
"Sticky rice or the honey ones. The honey ones are better and they're two ryo more, which is how you know." She was already pressing one flat on the griddle. "You're with the Daimyo's group. The little one who shadows the young lord. I've been watching you all the way up the street, you're a little ninja and you're younger than my Tomi." She nodded at the girl on the cord. "Eat. You look like a strong wind takes you."
"The honey ones, then." Karura paid for two. "Your town is really flashy."
"Flashy, Hah!" Otoki flipped the cake. "Costly, more like it. The headwoman's spent three years' festival money in one month and called it an investment. Lanterns. Silk off the eastern caravans. She had men out painting the gate two nights ago, painting it, in the dark, by lamp, so it'd be fresh when our Daimyo's eyes landed on it." She complained. "And it'll work, probably. He'll see all this turquoise and all this water in the air and he'll think, there's a town that doesn't need a thing from me, let me give them a thing. That's how it goes with rich men. You only get given to once you look like you don't need it."
Karura ate one of her cakes. It was very good. "Is that what the festival's for? Money?"
"The road." Otoki pointed her spatula vaguely north, toward the hills where the turquoise came from. "Hisano wants the crown to pay for widening the quarry road so the stone goes out faster. More stone out, more money in, and Mizuchi's the jewel of the south, never mind." She stopped. Reconsidered whether to say the next part to a stranger's child. "Never mind that the quarry's what's killing the wadi. All that washing the stone, all that spoil tipped in the channel. My grandmother drew sweet water from the town well her whole life. I boil mine twice now and it still tastes of the back of a spoon." She shrugged, flipped the cake onto a leaf, handed it over. "But you don't fix a well by telling the man with the purse your well is broken. You hang lanterns. Eat the other one, you're not taking it home."
Karura ate the other one. She had good info on this place for now. Otoki had given her the road, the quarry, the headwoman who'd bet the town's safety on looking unbreakable in front of power. She thanked the woman and let the festival carry her on toward the dry edge of town.
That was where she found the old man nobody was listening to.
He was standing at the lip of the wadi where the last houses gave out onto the empty riverbed, an old man gone to leather and bone, arguing with two of the headwoman's people.
"...told the council in the spring and I'll tell them through the festival and I'll tell them after!" He was shouting. "The Yoke is cracked through on the western abutment. The catchment's silted to half. One hard rain up the range and that whole dry channel runs, and what holds it back is a wall I've been patching alone with a boy and a bucket since my knees went. You put your festival in the wash below a dam that's going. That's all I'm saying. That's all I've ever said."
"Nobody's seen rain here in two years, Genzo." The taller of the headwoman's men had the patient, pleasant voice of a person who truly didn't care. "We'll look at the dam after the Daimyo's gone. Hisano doesn't want a work crew up the wadi throwing dust where the procession can see."
"After!" The old man said. "There's always an after with you people!"
"After." The man nodded, and they left him there, walking back toward the lanterns and the music with the unhurried backs of men who'd already forgotten the old man's blabbering.
The old man stood looking at the riverbed. There was a boy a few paces off, maybe eleven, with the old man's same sharp nose and none of his patience, scuffing the dust with his sandal and very plainly wishing he were anywhere else, anywhere with music and turquoise and people who weren't being laughed at.
Karura looked past both of them at the wadi, and turned the Byakugan up the dry channel, and saw that the old man was right.
She saw the dam two kilometers up where the channel narrowed between rock, an old earth-and-stone wall thick as a house, and she saw the crack run up through the western shoulder, right where the old man had just said it was, packed with the old man's patching and patched again over the patch. She saw the bowl behind it half full of grey quarry mud, which meant it held half the water it was built for, which was why the cistern ran low. And a half-full bowl spills.
She looked further, because she could. Past the dam, past the narrows, up and over the brown shoulders of the range to where the sky began on the far side of it, and there the sky was getting bad. It was stacking. Cloud piled on cloud over hills, dark at the bottom and climbing, days of weather gathering itself over rock that couldn't hold a cupful of it, with nowhere to send it when it fell but down. Down the gullies. Down the channel. Down to a wall with a crack in it and a town with lanterns in the wash. Nobody in Mizuchi could see it. The range was in the way.
She couldn't say any of that. She couldn't say how she'd know it, and a strange child telling an old man his dam was cracked exactly where he'd just said it was cracked would be a question she had no answer for. So she did the only thing she could do.
"How long have you been telling them?" She asked.
The old man turned.
"Years!" He barked.
"And they keep saying after?"
"They keep saying after." Something moved in his face, surprise mostly, at being answered instead of waved off. "You're that little ninja girl that came with the Daimyo."
"My name is Karura, nice to meet you." She looked up the dry channel again, with her plain eyes this time, so he wouldn't wonder. "If a town built its dam, somebody had to keep it. That was your family?"
"Six generations." He said it with pride. "Binders of the serpent, they used to call us, when the wadi was the most important thing in this town instead of an embarrassment behind the quarry. Now I'm the old fool who won't let them enjoy their welcome party." He jerked his chin at the boy. "And he's the next old fool, except he'd rather sell turquoise to caravans like the rest of them. Can't say I blame him. Nobody claps for the man who keeps the water in."
The boy, Mamoru, went red and yelled, "Grandfather!"
The old man let it go, and Karura looked at the two of them and thought that this was a town she would like to help.
"I think you're right about the dam." She told him.
Genzo snorted. "You and nobody."
"Me and the sky." Karura corrected him.
She gave the boy a small smile he didn't return and went back up toward the lanterns.
…
She passed the headwoman on the way back, holding court.
Hisano was easy to find. She was the center the whole festival turned around, a beautiful woman in turquoise and good cloth, moving through her own celebration touching an elbow here and a shoulder there, steering it, and everywhere she went the lanterns seemed brighter and the music a little louder, because she'd arranged for them to be. She was talking to one of the Daimyo's stewards, her lips smiling and warm, and Karura caught a piece of it in passing, the road, the stone, the future, the small fortune Mizuchi was honored, honored, to lay at the great lord's feet, and she watched the steward nod and write nothing down.
Hisano was talented at her job. She had taken a hard dry town and turned it into a jewel by sheer want.
She wasn't a bad woman. Karura was fairly sure of that. She'd just decided, somewhere along the way, that the thing you showed power was strength, and that a town with a problem was a town that got nothing, and so Mizuchi had no problems, officially, on the record, in front of the Daimyo, right up until the moment it had only problems.
In an empty alley behind the dye-houses, the clone poofed into smoke, and at the prince's door Karura had all of it.