Those Who Walk the Flame Road
(Book 12 of the Guardian of the Spirit Series)
Author: Uehashi Nahoko
Translator: Ainikki the Archivist
Part 3 - Ruffian
Ten days after the mysterious man had stepped in to help Hugo and Ryuan in the street, Hugo met the man again. It was when the Talsh soldiers patrolling the city were taking their evening break. Most of them stopped somewhere for dinner. Hugo was working at Tomuran’s restaurant, waiting tables.
Early evenings were a busy time. Hugo was working in the space earmarked for parties and large groups called the Warumu Room. Warumu wasn’t a family name; the space was named for a popular peach-colored flower.
Hugo pressed his back to the wall when Talsh soldiers started filing in. He’d never get used to seeing them. The mere sight of them made Hugo want to throw up.
One of the Talsh soldiers turned to Hugo, who was looking down at the floor. “Hey, you! I wanna go see the kitchen. Where’s it at?” His Yogoese was slangy and heavily accented.
“I’ll lead you there, sir,” Hugo said.
The soldier gestured to his companions, and they all followed Hugo toward the kitchen. On his way back to the Warumu Room, he noticed one of the soldiers whispering in a cook’s ear.
The cook’s name was Karl. Hugo knew him a little, but not well. He stepped out into the hallway, his thoughts troubled. What was going on? He waited in the hall until the Talsh soldiers left through the back door, then returned to the kitchen to pick up trays to deliver to the Warumu Room.
Karl’s hands shook as he chopped vegetables. He was so pale that he looked sick. The other cooks gave him a wide berth; Hugo guessed that they also knew why the soldiers had come to the kitchen.
Karl waited for all the others to be busy and looking away. He reached inside his clothes and pulled out a tiny paper pouch. He dumped the pouch’s contents into a small pot of soup and stirred.
Poison. It couldn’t be anything else.
Another waiter came to the kitchen from the direction of the Warumu Room. He was the restaurant’s newest hire, and quite young.
“Two bowls of soup for the Warumu Room, and make it fast!” Hugo called out before the new waiter could pick up any trays.
“Coming right up!” the cooks replied in unison. Karl poured out two bowls of soup from a different pot, then separated the poisoned soup into separate bowls. Hugo’s sense of unease only grew. Someone in this restaurant was being targeted, but who? And why?
“Which guest is it for?” Karl asked Hugo. “If they’ve just arrived and it’s a party of one, confirm that they wanted tazar added to their soup,” he said. “It’s too expensive to feed to the wrong person.” He set a portion of the soup he’d prepared with tazar on a tray.
Tazar was an exotic spice from the south; Hugo had never tasted it. His shoulders slumped in relief. No one was trying to poison anyone after all… but then why did Karl seem so nervous?
The restaurant’s youngest waiter, Toran, picked up the tray from in front of Karl. Hugo followed him out of the kitchen and poked him in the shoulder. Toran stopped still with his hands gripping the tray so hard that his knuckles went white.
“Oi!” Hugo said. “I can’t explain it, but I’m worried about that tray. Can you give it to me to deliver?”
Toran appeared openly relieved. He passed the tray to Hugo without making a fuss.
“Sorry for surprising you,” Hugo said. “You don’t need to worry about me picking on you ‘cuz you’re new. Most of us are too busy to think about stuff like that.”
The young man nodded. “Do you, uh, want to change places for the night? So you can keep serving my tables?”
“Yeah, let’s switch. My tables are on the other side of the room, so it won’t be too hard.”
The Warumu Room was only one of the restaurant’s specially set aside chambers, and it wasn’t as large as most of the other party rooms. Two waiters could cover all the tables there without too much trouble. Hugo took the tray of soup over to the table that the young waiter indicated to him and said, “Apologies for the wait, sir. Here is your soup.”
Hugo looked up. The man at the table was the same one who’d stepped into to help him and Ryuan. Hugo was so stunned that he walked away, serving his other tables first before returning to drop off the man’s soup. The man didn’t protest. He seemed equally surprised to see Hugo.
“The cook added something to this bowl,” Hugo whispered in the man’s ear as he sat the soup down on the table.
“I know.” The man was nonchalant. “I saw the Talsh soldiers leaving through the back door.”
Hugo blinked. It was true that the Talsh soldiers weren’t particularly inconspicuous. Their physical appearance was strange enough in these parts, but their armor and weapons also glinted in the darkness. They’d be easy for anyone to spot. Hugo hoped that they were gone already. If the soldiers really wanted to kill this man, they might surround the restaurant and lie in wait. He glanced out the nearest window and saw a Talsh soldier loitering at the door.
Damn it. Hugo frowned. The man was obviously no friend to Talsh, but anyone who made an enemy of a Talsh soldier in the city would be promptly arrested and taken away. The fact that the Talsh soldiers were trying to deal with this man more quietly meant that he was dangerous—someone important might notice if he disappeared. Or maybe the man was important, himself. Hugo still had no idea who he was.
Hugo left to pick up more orders from the kitchen. The situation troubled him; he kept thinking about possibilities and likely outcomes. Karl claimed that there wasn’t poison in the soup. The Talsh soldiers who’d given that packet to Karl were still hanging around as if they expected the man wouldn’t die from poison, so it was possible that Karl was telling the truth, or at least that he wasn’t complicit in whatever crime the soldiers were planning. Maybe they were trying to capture the man alive.
For his part, Hugo very much wanted the man to live. He'd helped Ryuan, and he seemed to hate Talsh. Hugo returned to the kitchen, pulled the man’s order slip and jotted down a message on the back of it. The man already knew that Karl had mixed something into his soup. If he fell sick or died, or if he was attacked outside, it would be disastrous for the restaurant.
Hugo had little time to consider. He went to the Suruha Room (suruha meant “blue sky”) and found Toran, the young waiter that he’d traded tables with. He and the young man retreated to a corner. Hugo explained what he’d seen the soldiers do, and that they were still outside. Toran was still young, but he was sharp; he listened closely to Hugo and didn’t ask too many questions. He’d noticed a few strange things going on in the kitchen himself. Hugo explained the plan, and he and Toran returned to their duties.
Hugo gave the mysterious man his order slip and turned it over so that the man could see the message. The man read it and frowned. He crumpled the order note in his fist and said quietly, “I’ll have to take a gamble on you, kid. I don’t want to, but I have no other option.”
Toran signaled Hugo from the hallway: his preparations for the plan were complete. Hugo looked toward the man, who locked eyes with him and nodded. A moment later, the man knocked the bowl of soup off the table with his elbow and groaned like he was dying. He tottered to his feet. The other customers in the Warumu Room stared at the man with expressions of alarm.
“Are you all right, sir?” Hugo asked. He offered the man his shoulder to lean on and said a few words to reassure the other customers. “I’ll get him some help, then I’ll be right back. Please enjoy your meals.”
The man leaned on Hugo until they got to the hallway, out of sight of the other customers. There were several other waiters already there ahead of Hugo, including Toran. They looked concerned. The man leaned on Hugo again, and Hugo led him toward the private toilets at the back of the restaurant. Toran and the other waiters followed them.
They had to pass the kitchens. A few cooks noticed Hugo and the man and asked what was wrong, but Hugo didn’t stop to speak to them. “Toran, keep Karl away from us,” Hugo whispered. “Tell him that the customer got sick from eating his food, and now he’s furious and doesn’t want to talk to him.”
Toran nodded. He pushed past Hugo and the man into the kitchen and started scolding Karl in a shrill tone that made Karl and the other cooks flinch.
Hugo used the distraction to get the man to the bathroom down the hall and shut the door. He poked his head out of the room and whispered, “Sagil, take off your uniform.”
“What?” Sagil blinked. He was a little shorter than the mysterious man, but they had the same build. Hugo explained the rest of the plan to him, and the other waiters shielded him from view as he undressed. Meanwhile, the mysterious man took off and folded up his clothes, then exchanged them for Sagil’s.
“Nal, get the leftovers from the kitchen and take them out on the cart. I’ll meet you by the back door soon. If the soldiers out there ask you anything, tell 'em it’s time to take out the leftovers from the kitchen.”
Nal nodded and dashed off to prepare the leftovers. Hugo issued orders to the other waiters, who were only too happy to comply. Their work was boring most of the time, but there was something strange and possibly dangerous going on now, and they were keen to be a part of it.
After Sagil and the mysterious man were both dressed—Sagil in a spare uniform—Hugo and some of the other waiters had the mysterious man stand between them so that he would blend in better. They led him to a small antechamber that the waiters often used during their shifts.
With the mysterious man concealed for the moment, Hugo returned to Sagil. Toran was still talking to Karl in the kitchen when he passed by. Karl caught sight of Hugo and moved to cut him off in the hallway. Hugo shook his head adamantly and told Karl that the customer was still ill and very angry.
“The customer is in the bathroom and doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Hugo said.
Karl stood up straighter. He looked perturbed. “Let me speak to him.”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Hugo said. He spoke louder. “The customer informed me that he would leave the moment he composed himself. I asked the other waiters to lead him out the back door.”
Karl stomped toward the restaurant’s back door. Hugo followed. The Talsh soldiers he’d noticed before were still there, but he feigned ignorance of their previous presence. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” He inserted a note of alarm into his tone and found that it didn’t take much acting.
The soldiers exchanged uneasy glances. Two pushed past Hugo through the back door; another rushed into the kitchen. “Oi! He’s not here!” one of the soldiers called out.
Sagil locked eyes with Hugo and nodded. The mysterious man was safe.
Hugo squeezed his shoulder as a silent gesture of thanks.
“He’s hiding in the room where we keep the leftovers,” Sagil whispered.
Hugo nodded. “Keep him there for a little while.”
Hugo turned to another waiter next to Sagil and said, “Take that man’s clothes and burn them. The soldiers can’t find them inside the restaurant.”
The waiter acknowledged the order and went back inside. Hugo followed him, returning to the kitchen. Karl had also returned by this time and was being bullied by the Talsh soldiers. Karl put his hands up defensively, gibbering and claiming that he didn’t know about anything that had happened. The Talsh soldiers pushed him aside and started searching the restaurant. Hugo noticed they were heading toward the Uma Room. Uma was the name of a purple flower.
Hugo heard the sound of the food cart that was used to bring leftovers into storage rolling down the hallway. Hugo noted where the Talsh soldiers were. None of them were at the restaurant’s back door now. He ducked into the antechamber used only by waiters and gave a signal to the others.
The waiters spilled into the hallway all at once, briefly blocking traffic. Hugo found the mysterious man in the same room as the leftovers and and guided him toward the restaurant’s back entrance, where there was an enormous empty bucket set out. Hugo told the man to crouch down inside the empty bucket, then put the lid on it to conceal him.
Nal came by with the food cart. Hugo helped him load the bucket containing the mysterious man onto the cart. Nal pushed the cart down the hall and vanished in the gathering gloom. One of the waiters approached Hugo and proffered a handful of copper coins. “That man told us to give them to you,” he said. “To pay for his meal.”
Hugo smiled and accepted the coins. The man was more strait-laced than he’d thought.
Sagil also found Hugo after rearranging his spare uniform; he’d been forced to dress in haste while the man was still in the restaurant. He gave Hugo a letter from the man written on a torn scrap of paper.
Thank you for tonight. Meet me tomorrow morning, on the street where we first met.
After reading the man’s letter, Hugo tossed it in the fire along with other food scraps that had been set aside for burning.
He had nothing but questions for this man. The Talsh soldiers hadn’t been there to kill him, presumably, but they’d certainly wanted to catch him. Why? To interrogate him? What did the man know? Getting more involved might be dangerous, but no force on earth could prevent Hugo from meeting the man again.
The Talsh soldiers continued to search the restaurant, but the mysterious man had vanished like smoke. They gave up after a while.
Hugo was pulled aside by the head waiter at the end of his shift and asked to explain the disturbance. He decided to keep the mysterious man’s secrets as best he could and was reprimanded severely, but he barely reacted. All the customers finished their meals and went home, and the restaurant closed for the night.
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