I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 688: Minato Town of Outlaws

The slope down to Minato was not a quiet road.

Nathan led the horse at a walk and let the crowd form around him — not by choice but by simple density, the path down to the town’s gate pulling everyone in the same direction the way a river pulled everything toward its mouth. Merchants with laden carts, their wheels grinding in the road’s worn tracks. Men traveling alone with the specific posture of people who had learned not to invite conversation. Women in groups moving with the practiced awareness of people who knew exactly what the road contained and had decided to move through it in numbers.

Most of them looked like they had reasons not to want to be recognized.

Nathan fit the category well enough that he should not have drawn attention.

He drew it anyway.

Eyes came to him — from the line of travelers, from figures at the road’s edges who were watching the traffic with the assessing patience of people whose business was knowing who was arriving, from a group of men further down the slope who went quiet as he passed and resumed their conversation once he was twenty feet past them. He ignored all of it and kept moving, the horse’s reins loose in his hand.

The gate appeared at the road’s bottom.

Nathan frowned.

He had been constructing an image of Minato as a place that simply existed without structure — no walls, no oversight, no one at the entrance asking questions or collecting anything. The free town. The ungoverned south. What was in front of him was not that image.

There was a line.

A genuine queue of travelers waiting to pass through a gate that was being managed — loosely, chaotically, with no insignia or official standing, but managed — by men stationed on both sides.

Not soldiers. Not guards. Not anything that had been appointed by anyone with legitimate authority.

Just men who had decided this was their gate now.

Nathan looked at the line. He looked at the gate. He looked at the men stationed at it.

He could go over. It would take less than a second and no one would be able to follow the movement well enough to describe it accurately afterward.

He didn’t.

Stealth. Ayame first. No unnecessary trail, no stories spreading ahead of him through the town before he had even begun to look. He joined the line and moved forward with it as the queue worked through its slow business.

When he reached the front, the men at the gate looked him over with the practiced speed of people who had been reading arrivals all day. One of them grinned — the grin of someone who had assessed the new arrival and found the situation comfortable.

”Can’t pass without paying,” he said.

Nathan looked past him at the town beyond the gate. People passing through on both sides, the exchange happening quickly, coins changing hands and bodies moving through without particular ceremony.

”Paying you for what?” Nathan asked.

”What did you just say?” A second man turned, the relaxed quality in his posture shifting.

The first man’s grin had changed shape. He looked Nathan over — the dark kimono, the black scabbard, and something else, something in the face and the eyes and the particular quality of someone who was not entirely explainable — and the grin found a sneer underneath itself and brought it out.

”Look at this one,” he said. ”Half filth. His mother the whore went and drenched herself in some stranger’s—”

The sentence did not finish.

Kyōmei moved.

Still sheathed — the scabbard itself swinging in the short, precise arc that covered the distance between Nathan’s hip and the man’s neck in a motion too fast to track. The sound it made was quiet. Final.

The head left the shoulders and the body remained standing for one full second by itself before it understood what had happened and went down.

The blood came up in a fountain from the stump of the neck, dark in the evening lamplight, spattering the gate’s wooden post and the ground around it in a wide radius.

Nathan lowered Kyōmei back to his side.

The silence that followed was the specific silence of several dozen people having the same thought at the same instant and none of them finding words for it quickly enough.

Then someone screamed.

Then everyone moved.

The line behind Nathan dissolved instantly — bodies going in every direction, the merchants abandoning their carts, the travelers breaking for the road’s edges, the screaming spreading back up the slope as the information traveled. The second gate man had gone white. He was turning — slowly, the way people turned when their legs had received the message before their body had made a decision — and when Nathan’s black eyes found him in the chaos he made a sound that was not a word and ran.

Nathan watched him go.

He had not intended this.

The man had spoken of his mother.

That was the beginning and the end of Nathan’s reasoning on the matter — not calculated, not strategic, simply the immediate response of a person who had a specific line and the man had found it. The aftermath was what it was.

He clicked his tongue once.

The horse, standing beside him with its reins trailing, flicked an ear and looked at the headless body with the calm philosophical expression of an animal that had decided a long time ago not to have opinions about human behavior or maybe had known what kind of man Nathan was.

Nathan let go of the reins.

His figure blurred.

He left the ground from a standstill — straight up, the movement carrying him over the gate and over the first row of buildings beyond it, the roofline passing below him as he reached the apex and came down. He landed on the tiles of a tall building a hundred meters into the town, his sandals finding the ridge without sound, his body absorbing the landing and straightening in the same motion.

He stood on the roof and looked.

Minato spread in every direction from where he stood — the harbor visible to the south, the black water beyond it catching the lamplight in moving pieces, the boats tied at the docks rocking slightly with the evening tide. In every other direction, buildings. Streets between them packed with moving people, the noise of it rising continuously, the smell of salt and fish and cooking fires and lamp oil and everything else that collected in places where large numbers of people lived without anyone telling them not to.

Extremely populated.

He was looking for a princess.

A princess who had presumably spent years making herself unfindable, who had come here specifically because here was the kind of place where people who didn’t want to be found went to not be found. She would not be using her name. She would not look like a princess — whatever that meant in a place like this, where the ordinary categories of appearance had been thoroughly scrambled by years of everyone from everywhere arriving and staying.

He looked down at the street below him.

A food cart sat at the building’s base — an old man behind it, a pot of soba sending steam into the evening air, the smell of it cutting through everything else with the honest directness of good simple food.

Nathan dropped.

He landed directly in front of the cart from the roofline, the impact absorbed into a crouch that he rose from immediately, arriving at street level between one moment and the next.

”Oh — God above!” The old man stumbled back from his cart, one hand going to his chest, his face cycling rapidly through surprise and fear. ”You nearly stopped my heart! If you wanted my soba that badly you didn’t have to come down from the sky—” He laughed, shaking his head.

”I’m looking for a woman named Ayame,” Nathan said.

The old man blinked.

The laughter stopped.

”Ayame?” He turned the name over with the expression of someone genuinely searching their knowledge and not finding a match. ”Who’s that? Why are you asking me?” He frowned. ”I sell soba. I don’t keep track of names.”

Nathan looked at him.

He had expected this — or should have expected it. The woman had been here for years. Years in a free town, ungoverned and anonymous, where half the residents arrived with names they were leaving behind and left with names they had picked up. She would not be Ayame here. She would be whatever she had decided to be when she stepped through the gate for the first time and understood that no one was going to ask who she was.

Which meant he was looking for a woman whose name he didn’t know, in a town of thousands, with a description and nothing else.

He looked out across the streets of Minato spreading in every direction in the evening lamplight.

This was going to take longer than he had planned.

”Who rules this town?” Nathan asked.

The old man let out a guffaw that came from somewhere genuine — the laugh of someone who had heard something that struck him as funny without being mean about it. He kept stirring the pot, the soba moving in slow circles through the broth, the steam rising steady.

”Who rules Minato?” He shook his head with the fond exasperation of someone hearing a question that revealed exactly how new a person was. ”Nobody rules Minato, ronin. That’s the entire point of the place. Has been since before I set up this cart and I’ve been here twenty years.”

”Then who are the men at the gate taking money to let people through?” Nathan asked.

The old man’s stirring slowed.

He didn’t stop — just slowed, the rhythm becoming less automatic and more considered, as though the question had introduced a note into the evening that he didn’t entirely enjoy engaging with.

He sighed.

”Those are Morosuke’s men,” he said. ”Morosuke decided some years back that he wanted to be someone in this town, so he gathered men around him and started calling himself the leader of Minato.” He shrugged. ”He has enough men with swords that people don’t push back. So he extorts at the gates, he extorts in the market, he extorts wherever he decides to extort, and the rest of us decide it’s cheaper to pay than to argue.”

He resumed his stirring.

”Nobody calls him leader to his face without meaning it,” he added. ”And nobody calls him anything to his back that they wouldn’t want repeated.”

Nathan was quiet for a moment.

Morosuke was not Ayame — that required no consideration. But a self-proclaimed ruler of a town, however informal, however built on nothing more than the number of armed men he had managed to collect around himself — that was a man who made it his business to know who was in his territory. Who arrived, who stayed, who had been here long enough to become part of the furniture. If Ayame had been in Minato for years, Morosuke might know about her.

He would go and ask him directly.

”Where does Morosuke live?” Nathan asked.

The soba man stopped stirring.

He looked up from his pot slowly and his eyes found Nathan’s face and held there for a moment, reading it. The cold black eyes looked back at him without any trace of the question being rhetorical or the answer being for anything other than immediate use.

The old man understood very quickly that Nathan was completely serious. That the information being requested was going to be acted on, immediately, tonight, by someone who was not afraid of what the information led toward.

He exhaled.

”North end of town,” he said. ”You can’t miss it. He has the largest building in Minato by a considerable margin — built it himself over a few years with other people’s money, which is the only kind of money he has. It looks more like a fortress than an estate.” He paused. ”It is filled with men whose job is to kill anyone who walks through the gate without an invitation.”

He said the last part with a specific, deliberate weight — the weight of someone who had decided to make sure the information was received completely.

Nathan nodded.

He was already deciding to go.

”Hey.” The old man spoke again as Nathan turned. His voice had changed register — the commerce gone from it, the easy warmth of the food vendor set aside. What was left was something more direct, carrying the simple concern of an old man in a dangerous town who had looked at a young man and arrived at a feeling about what was going to happen to him. ”Be careful, boy.”

Nathan stopped.

He turned and looked at the old man.

The weathered face was genuinely worried — not performing it, not saying it because it was the polite thing to say, but actually looking at him with the concerned expression of someone who had been in Minato long enough to know exactly what Morosuke’s fortress contained and what it did to people who walked into it uninvited.

Nathan reached into his kimono.

He found a coin and held it out and flicked it.

It turned in the lamplight as it crossed the distance between them, gold catching the flame and throwing it back, the coin landing cleanly in the old man’s outstretched palm.

The old man looked at it.

His eyes went wide slowly.

A gold coin. Not Kastorian. The markings foreign, the metal pure, the denomination worth more than a week of soba sold to every traveler who came down that road.

He raised his head.

Nathan was already gone.

The old man stood at his cart in the evening noise of Minato with the gold coin in his palm and looked at the empty space where the dark-haired ronin had been standing and found nothing there.

Simply gone.

The soba bubbled quietly in the pot.

The old man closed his hand around the coin and looked north.

”Good luck boy.”