| [Sep. 4th, 2017|11:24 pm] |
Once the rest of his team had been escorted inside the mayor’s house, Kakashi’s first stop was the breweries. The three warehouses were old but well-maintained, built of gleaming dark wood. They smelled of fermentation.
The doors had heavy locks — all old, but untampered. The roofs were whole. The windows undisturbed. The foundations sunk deep and solid, with no indication of tunneling. There was no evidence of recent chakra-work. Except for an obvious lack of sake, there was no sign anything had happened.
Inside the long, dark warehouses, vast brewing vats stood empty, waiting for the winter. Row after row of shelves were also empty, but dusty circles showed where the maturing sake casks had been.
If Kakashi didn’t know better, he might have thought Minato had Hiraishin’d in and helped himself to an early vintage.
His next step was to slip through the village, looking for signs of hidden storage. He found several root-cellars, already half-stocked with provisions for winter. A few larders with private reserves — small casks, homemade wines, nothing intended for the Daimyou. One tiny attic filled from joists to rafters with dozens of finely stitched festival costumes, carefully folded in paper and left to the dust.
The homes, for the most part, just contained families. A young couple trying to soothe a colicky baby. Laborers exhausted after a long day’s work. A fraught man attending to a bedridden elder. Ordinary people doing ordinary people things. If someone in the village was guilty, they were hiding the trail remarkably well.
The crowd was still gathered outside the mayor’s house, watching with wary concern. No one, notably, had run to defend a hidden cache — or just flat-out run for the hills. They stirred as the mayor’s front door opened.
From a rooftop, Kakashi watched the mayor lead Team Six and Kurenai to the breweries, trailed by two of the older villagers and just about everyone else. Most villagers carried belt-knives as a matter of course, but no one’s hand grasped additional weapons. They were fearful — and if news of Tsurugahama’s broken port had reached them, Kakashi didn’t blame them — but they weren’t panicking. Konoha, for all its errors, had built a solid relationship with Fire Country’s neutral neighbors. That coin was still good.
Kakashi left his team to it and went to break into the mayor’s house.
His nose found misery.
Stress clouded the air so thick it was like breathing iron. Heavy, masculine, with a sour undercurrent of old rice wine, bottled into airless rooms. The scent of brewing tea, for all that it was fresh, barely competed. Kakashi resisted the urge to clamp a hand over his face.
The downstairs had been tidy once, now sliding sideways into disorder. There wasn’t much to search. A few papers written in a labored hand — house accounts, mostly. An unexceptional kitchen. A small, traditional bath with mold flowering along the timbers. The storage trunk in the main room yielded a jumble of small tools and half-finished mending. At the bottom, Kakashi unearthed a picture in a damaged frame. It showed a pretty young woman with a strained smile. Nomiya stood behind her, one possessive hand on her shoulder. Two young children, a boy and a girl, stood very properly at her side, shoulders straight, unsmiling.
Uneasily, Kakashi put it back.
Upstairs, there were just two bedrooms. A room previously shared by Nomiya and his wife, the other containing two small, child-sized futons. And Kurenai.
Kakashi stiffened reflexively. She flicked a glance at him, then returned to investigating the dresser drawer she had eased open. Kakashi shook off his surprise — clone, or real Kurenai? He’d seen one of her go to the breweries — and padded up behind her, avoiding the moonlight slicing through the small window.
“Find anything?” he murmured.
“Mostly the absence of anything,” she said. “Which is more concerning.” |
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