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outskirts of Renshou, “To Mt. Hou! We’re going on the Shouzan!”

Chapter 5
    [1-5]  I n the center of the world was the Yellow Sea.
    The Yellow Sea was a dry sea, equal in size to any of the surrounding kingdoms. It was a land that lay outside civilized law and order, where youma roamed at will. The Yellow Sea was the domain of neither humans nor gods. The one exception were the Five Mountains in the middle of the Yellow Sea, known collectively as the Gozan.
    The Gozan was home to the gardens of the mountain wizards and Seioubo, the “Queen Mother of the West.”
    Gods and humans did not mingle together. People could only pray at the ancestral shrines, and the priests and wizards participated in the shaping of the world only by absorbing into themselves the prayers uttered there.
    Supposing that the Five Mountains were indeed the gardens of the wizards, and the Yellow Sea the province of the youma, this still remained a world unconnected to human habitation. Mt. Hou alone was not entirely divorced from mortal concerns.
    Mt. Hou, also known as Taishan, was the holy ground where those divine creatures, the kirin, were born. The kirin were magical beings of great power. Exercising affection and compassion, wise both to the Way and the reason of the world, they heard the Divine Will of Heaven as dictated by Providence.
    The human world was divided into twelve kingdoms, each ruled by a emperor or empress. They were not chosen according to their bloodline or their meritorious accomplishments. Only the Divine Will of Heaven could place a person on the throne. That meant it was up to the kirin to choose.
    The kirin were born on Mt. Hou, reared and protected there by the wizardesses. Traveling to Mt. Hou and ascertaining the Divine Will of Heaven from the kirin was known as the Shouzan.
    Of course, going on the Shouzan required making it to Mt. Hou in the middle of the Yellow Sea. The steep, towering ridges rising above the Sea of Clouds were sealed off to airborne travelers. And then there were the Kongou Mountains.
    The mountain range was steep and inaccessible, impossible to scale. There were only four routes through the Kongou Mountains, each blocked by a mighty gate. These were the four Command Gates. Each gate opened only once a year. To the northwest, the Reiken Gate abutted Ken County in the Kingdom of Kyou. It opened on the spring equinox. For one day.

    Shushou had left Renshou with the goal of arriving by the spring equinox. The moukyoku was not an adept flyer, but by air and on land he put the miles behind them at a pace three times that of a horse. It was a long way to the Reiken gate, not a distance Shushou could have covered on foot. The moukyoku reduced the hardships of the journey by a good third.
    What’s more, Shushou had left home with considerable traveling money in hand. She knew that her father had been building a rainy-day fund to cover urgent living expenses in case something happened in Renshou and they had to hurry off to a safe house.
    He would probably try to track her down, but with their numbers diminished by youma and disasters, finding a single lost child was unlikely to command the urgent attention of the constabulary. Few had a faster kijuu than the master of the Sou family, so catching up with her would be well-nigh impossible.
    The Sou family operated establishments through Kyou, though not in every city and town. They could dispatch “blue bird” carrier pigeons, but with no idea where Shushou was headed, they wouldn’t know where to have somebody waiting for her.
    Shushou had figured all along she’d simply drop in on whatever city was closest along the route and work something out along the way. She had no sense of being pursued. The evening of the sixth day after leaving Renshou, she’d made it two-thirds of the way to the Reiken Gate.

    “Well, then—”
    Shushou set Hakuto down in the deserted fields surrounding a town. It wasn’t too big and not too small. She didn’t enter