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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