Scribbler's note: I mean no offense by any comments I or the characters of the tale may make on any religion or creed. In anime, the major faiths of the world are treated shallowly; as mere sources for monsters and spells. I ask you to please accept this usage and not be offended.

The mist roared. The air was wet and cold on Raye's face and smelled of wet earth and fresh blood. Cries, the clash of weapons, the scream of a horse came from the walls of mist about her.

Raye walked silently, her white robes drifting about her like a shroud. A man staggered into view, crossed her path. He bristled with arrows and his breathing was loud and ragged. The sashimono banner projecting from the lacquered armor was as torn and bloody as the man.

Two heavy objects collided in a clanging of weapons and snorting of horses. One man fell and lay in a broken heap near Raye. He was just a boy; face pale, black hair new to the topknot.

The battle was all about her. In the enshrouding mist it seemed slow and ghastly. Horses wheeled, samurai charged. Arrows flew in whistling flocks and fell as sudden death.

Raye walked untouched, unhindered.

The castle smoldered. It lacked the thick stone footings that would follow the introduction of muskets, and it lacked sufficient defenders to put out all the fire-arrows that had fallen upon it.

Raye left the battle raging on the plain and moved into the smoky darkness of the castle. The dead lay shadowed and grotesque about the outer defenses.

To the keep Raye passed, and to the inner chambers. Within the innermost fastness ladies-in-waiting huddled with a few aged manservants. Bodies lay bloody on the floor, their lives cut out by their own hands.

The lord's wife sat pale in white kimono, her legs wrapped with cloth, her dagger in both hands and already touching her throat. Her face held duty and pride and a strength that would need the aid of no second to aid her passage to the other world.

She drew the dagger out to arm's length. Her arms tensed. Then, suddenly, her eyes fastened on Raye.

"You!" she cried.

THE SEARCH FOR THE MOON PRINCESS

Chapter Eleven : Devil-Hunter Raye

Raye held her teacup tightly in both hands, trying to draw its warmth within her. The strange cold that had come over Tokyo these last few nights was fading with the sun, as if it had completed the job it came to do and was needed no more, but inside her was a chill the heater didn't seem to touch.

The garden was green and inviting and Raye let her gaze rest on it as she sat, drinking her tea, trying to recover from her nightmare. She was still in the yukata she had worn to bed, despite the sun already high in the eastern sky. The room was warm enough for that; even the garden was on the other side of glass-paned sliding doors.

Grandpa was very concerned. Had it been up to her Raye might have pushed herself to throw off her forebodings and get out into the yard and get working. It wasn't like her to let time go to waste. But Grandpa had been at her side moments after she had woken in a cold sweat. As she came to breakfast she was met with not just pickled umeboshi and the luxury of toast and jam, but with a strong soothing tea of some obscure herbal blend as well.

Her mind went drifting back, back to another morning and the arrival of a frightened and lonely little girl. A troubled little girl who's mother had died in childbirth, and who's father would no longer put up with a daughter whose very presence put a damper on his political ambitions.

Then, the shrine had meant nothing to her. But Raye was not the sort of person who could live without something to believe in. Thus, she had begun to take a growing interest in the running and upkeep of the shrine. Soon she was in training as a Miko...a priestess-in-training. The Hikawa Shrine became her home. Grandfather become all the family she needed or wanted.

Now Grandfather Hino was getting old. He no longer had the strength that had been his when she had first came into his care. And worse, within this past year it seemed his memory might be going as well. Perhaps he had spent too much of his life wrapped in the mysticisms of Shinto. Raye sometimes wondered how much he really saw, or cared to pay attention to, the mundane world around the shrine. It worried her, greatly, when his conversation veered from what she could see and touch.

His reaction to her dream might be seen as another example of mystical hocus-pocus over rationality. But...Raye shivered, yet again...there had been too much that was far too real about that nightmare. Nor could she shake from her mind the warnings of the Tengu. For that matter, the very presence of a creature of mythology within her own home argued that other cautions should perhaps be given some scrap of credence.

Grandpa had returned. He poured Raye a fresh cup, then served himself. He was silent, watching the garden with her, until Raye turned to him.

"It has to do with the bow," he wheezed.

"The bow," she repeated. "You mean the Spirit Bow?"

"He was known as Hotei-no-taro; perhaps because of his great stomach, or perhaps for some other connection to the god." Grandpa was warming to his tale. "He was a traveling wrestler of such gentleness and strength that even those who lost to him in the ring had nothing but good to say of him."

"He was a sumo?"

"He is said to be one of the founders." Grandpa shrugged. "The important thing is, Hotei-no-taro went to hell."

Raye looked at him sharply. He had meant it literally. Despite herself, she felt the tickling as hairs on the back of her neck tried to stand up.

"He went to plead the release of a friend, whom he believed had been taken before his proper time. He made his way through the barriers and guardians with the aid of his great strength and his natural wit. At last he was brought before the King of Hell himself, who had been entertained and impressed by his progress. Hotei-no-taro promptly challenged King Emma for the soul of his friend."

"To a wrestling match?"

"To a drinking match. Hotei-no-taro's capacity was vast, but King Emma's capacity was not of this mortal world. He won, but so pleased was he by the entertainment it afforded him, and so near drunk and happy was he, that he let Hotei-no-taro return to the surface world...with a pouch of gold and a fine bow as gift besides."

"So it is literally the Bow from Hell," Raye said, shaking her head. She had to keep reminding herself that Grandpa's background was much wider than hers. He was by no means pure Shinto, but had studied extensively in the Buddhist arts as well.

She remembered, ruefully, why he had sent her to a Catholic school for her time in junior high. "The Christian spirits are very strong," he had said. "Someone in this family should learn how they are identified and controlled." Apparently Grandpa had gotten all he knew about Christians from watching "The Exorcist."

For that matter, your average Buddhist monk would go into a laughing fit if you tried to talk to him about the "King of Hell." Raye knew that much. But, strange as Grandpa's world-view might be, what she had seen in the past few weeks was possibly stranger yet.

It made an uncanny amount of sense that a bow could be effective in fighting spirits. There wasn't a major shrine that didn't have an annual archery competition. The talism used as a target at Atsuta was reputed to be quite potent. Certainly, the crowds fought over it at the end of the competition!

"When you took up the Spirit Bow," Grandpa wheezed unhappily, "you let the forces of evil know you had entered the fight against them. As it was with your grandmother before you, and with all the women of the Hino line before her."

"The forces of...I let what?" Raye could hardly put a question together. "Grandfather, this doesn't make any sense. And what does it mean, anyway? So I used the bow. Isn't there some ritual or something I can do to purify myself?"

"You could," Grandpa said slowly. "I said you were not ready."

"Then let's -- wait a moment. Grandpa, do you mean I would have to put down the Spirit Bow? For good? I'd never be able to wield it again?"

"I just don't think you're ready." The old man shook his head, eyes closed beneath the bushy white brows. But Raye had long learned how to read him. He meant there was a chance. Maybe a good chance.

"Okay, Grandpa," Raye said. "Out with it. Tell me what I have to do. Grandpa," she said persuasively, "The Negaverse isn't going to wait for me to achieve Enlightenment. I need that power. The fight has started already, Grandpa!"

"You must meditate. All day," Grandpa said unhappily. "And fast. And if you are properly prepared in mind and body, sometime in the night will come three visions; three challenges. If you pass, the Hino legacy will be yours."

"Got it." Raye finished her tea with a gulp. "My fast starts now." She didn't intend to waste any more time.

"Granddaughter." Grandfather could not find words. "Please be careful," he said at last. "There is more at stake than you know."

Raye had never quite gotten the hang of zazen. The very idea of thinking furiously about nothing at all baffled her. She was an active person, normally. There was so much to do about the shrine, and the household, and so much she wanted to do in life, it was hard enough for her to merely sit still and accomplish nothing for hours at a time.

She took some pleasure in sitting still on the hard surface, ignoring the growing pains in her joints and the pressures at the contact points. Of course that wasn't the point of zazen, either. One wasn't supposed to enjoy the pain. One was supposed to rise above it.

She was deep in the shrine, behind enough wood to block most of the natural changes of light and movement of people that normally marked the hours. There was no clock to tick, and certainly no radio; nothing but the creak and pop of the bones of the building, expanding and contracting in the shifting sun.

Warmth leached away, and some other sense of Raye told her night was in the sky. The planets were rising. She had always known her family had an affinity for the planet Mars. Even castings she did in the quarter of Mars were more successful. For what other reason had she named her two ravens Deimos and Phobos?

She idly traced the patterns of the ranma above the door. Her eyes followed one curve as it twisted in and out like a snake. No, it was a snake; there was the head, there, carved in bas-relief above a spray of leaves.

Had there always been a snake in that scrollwork? Raye blinked. The room was not the same. Similar, but different in various subtle ways. Before her on the low table was the ink pot and brush and hand-made paper of a sumi-e set. Before the tokonoma a sword rest held wakizashi and katana in ebony and red lacquered lacing. She was dressed, she realized with a start, in the complete -- and heavy! -- kimonos of a court lady of the Muromachi Period. She touched her hair, wonderingly, and knew it was up in the elaborate lacquered style of the court.

Her gaze was drawn back to the scrollwork. The snake wound in, out, back again. The head pushed from the wood, a disturbing bas relief. No. It was not her eyes that moved, passing across loop and twist. It was the snake itself.

It slithered slowly free of the woodwork, growing, taking on color. A long loop of snake lowered from the ranma until belly met the tatami. The head raised further, drawing the slithering coils behind it. The jaws opened, needle fangs gleamed, and the eyes looked at her with a cold reptile amusement.

Raye leapt to her feet. She ran for the sword stand, wrenched out the longer katana, and shook it from its sheath with none of the proper preliminaries. With naked blade in hand she lunged at the snake. Her ki-ai was clear and proud and the cross stroke strong enough to sever a solid timber.

The snake took the blade across iron-hard scales. A lightning flick of the tail caught her and threw her back behind the low table.

Raye cried out. The snake loomed, hissed. Venom dripped on her leg; it bubbled and hissed as it ate into the fabric.

"Granddaughter!"

"What!" Raye snapped. The cold eyes were staring into hers. "Huh?" Raye said.

There was someone else in the room. An old woman who carried herself with pride and poise. She wore the mon of the Hino clan, and on the chest of her robes a Taoist symbol was embroidered in red and gold.

"Granddaughter," the old woman said again. "In each of your three challenges you must make a choice. In this your first challenge you have already chosen wrong."

"Then help me, revered ancestor!" Raye couldn't turn to fully meet her gaze. She could not leave the snake with her eyes.

"This is your challenge, not mine."

"And that's all the help I get?" Raye's eye's burned. A single tear fell from her to splash wetly across the sumi-e paper.

The old woman turned. "One thing more may I say. Remember, granddaughter, that sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword."

"The pen is...? You want me to write an essay?" Raye jerked her eyes free from the snake. She had dropped the sword, but it was still within reach. Could she gain her feet, place the blade where it might do some damage before the snake could strike?

It seemed as hypnotized by her as she had almost been by it. No, not at all, Raye realized. The snake was merely waiting for her to make the first move. Once she committed herself, it would strike.

The venom was burning into her leg like acid. Raye bit her lip. Another tear fell on the pale sumi-e paper before her.

Funny. Raye found herself looking at the two blots. They look almost like a pair of birds. A pair of dark birds of prey, poised there in the grain of the paper. A memory came to Raye of an old story...

And that was the answer. Raye reached gently for the brush and lightly wet the ink stone, slowly so as not to startle the great snake. Then she touched the pure black ink to the paper in swift, sure strokes. She must let the essence of the pattern she wanted form itself from eye to paper without the distraction of thought.

The shapes were true. They had to be. Deimos and Phobos were not pets. The two black ravens were friends, servants, confidants. They were warriors themselves; fierce, proud birds.

The strong lines of their feathers, the sharp edges of their beaks, the fierce intelligence of their eyes took shape on the sumi-e paper. And as they did so, so did the ravens themselves.

Deimos and Phobos stared with the gaze of predators. And the snake looked back with the hatred of a hereditary enemy.

Deimos moved first; it looked like a peck for the eyes. The snake reared back, trying to protect itself -- leaving itself open to Phobos' attack. It swung, bloodied, at this assault from the side. And Deimos reached in, came back with a satisfied look and fresh blood on his beak.

The birds were smaller than the snake, and they had less reach, but they were a bit faster, and a lot smarter. Time and time again the birds seemed to get too close, and the snake missed by a mere heartbeat, fangs slashing air, tail crashing against wood and tearing through the fragile shoji.

But the issue was never really in doubt. And in time two birds were feasting on fresh bloody meat.

Raye settled back behind the low table, tucked her feet in properly, and returned to meditation.

"May I have this dance?"

Raye shook herself. She took in the music, the couples about her, the soft drink on the table before her. There were paper lanterns against the evening sky, and a handsome young man in tuxedo and tails by her table with hand held out.

"Yes," Raye sighed dreamily. His eyes twinkled behind the white diamond mask as he helped her to her feet.

In a moment they were twirling about the floor. Raye was wearing her red silk dress with the Chinese collar, and tiny ruby button earrings. Her hair was loose, falling along her back in a luxurious black waterfall. She thought she had never felt so wonderful, or had a night so glorious.

He was an excellent dancer. One strong hand rested lightly against the small of her back, and the other clasped hers with gentleness and strength.

"You are always there when we are in danger," Raye said softly. "And we don't even know who you are."

"I don't know myself," Tuxedo Mask answered. He guided her about the floor, adjusting flawlessly to the changing tempos of the music. "My past is a mystery to me. My purpose is a mystery. All I know is that I must come to the aid of the one I love."

"The one you love," Raye sighed. Then she sighed again, even more deeply. "Am I her, Tuxedo Mask? Does this have to do with me being daughter of the Hino line?"

"Granddaughter!" The voice was peevish.

"Oh, not now!" Raye's eyes flashed. She tried to snuggle a little closer and ignore the old woman.

"Things are not always as they appear!" her grandmother warned. Then she vanished.

"It isn't always about you," Tuxedo Mask said.

There was something different in his voice, now. Raye opened her eyes, saw his had gone hard and cold.

"You're not..." she said.

"May I cut in?" another young man spoke.

"Jadeite? What are you doing in my visions?" The Negaverse General looked elegant in his dark uniform -- rather attractive, in fact. It wasn't right, Raye thought bitterly, that an enemy could look so good.

"But things aren't what they appear!" Raye said aloud. "Is this the real Tuxedo Mask, now come to rescue me?"

"Raye," the Negaverse General said formally. "Please allow me to take this dance."

"Like hell, buddy. Go cut someone else out of a date." The one who looked like Tuxedo Mask had his lips twisted in a sneer.

"Let go of me!" Raye shook herself free. Two young men were holding out a hand towards her now. One wearing the uniform of an enemy Another with the face of a friend (yet, how much did they know about Tuxedo Mask, really?)

But appearances were deceiving. That is what Grandmother had said. Tuxedo Mask looked at her with cold amusement. His fancy garb was, now that she looked carefully, stained and threadbare. "Why would Grandmother warn me, if it was this obvious?"

"Why, Raye," Tuxedo Mask sneered at her. He lifted an eyebrow archly. "Why, don't you trust me?"

"Yes." Raye took his hand. "For now."

And she was in a noisy room filled with smoke and gamblers. Grandmother was smoking from a long-stem clay pipe. She gestured at a go board, where two checkers sat, one black, one white. "Choose," she said.

"Choose?" Raye looked at the simple checkers, and shivered. This would be the last challenge. And she understood what was at stake, now; it was her soul itself.

Grandmother gestured impatiently. "Choose up." She puffed at her pipe.

"Black and white." Raye was thinking aloud. "Like night and day? I'd choose day! Except. We need the night to sleep. And plants need the night to grow."

Grandmother puffed. From a corner of the room came a cry of "Mah-Jong!"

"Life and death? White meaning death, of course. But then the Christians do it backwards, don't they? That gets complicated."

"Morning is coming, Granddaughter. And the Gate of Hell is opening."

"Good and evil, of course." Raye almost had it. "I think I know what Grandpa was trying to say, now. You can see and fight the powers of Hell only if you are standing in sight of the Gates of Hell. But then, that's a Buddhist way of seeing things. I'm a Shinto Priestess."

"Choose now and get it over with! Stop this sophomoric babbling!"

"I choose..." Raye said. Grandmother froze, waited for her next word. "...I choose not to choose. I choose balance."

Grandmother relaxed. "Very good, Raye." She smiled for the first time. "Very, very good."

Raye yawned, suddenly, and passed in an instant from meditation into deep sleep.

"So you knew Grandmother was going to help?"

"Ah, he, he, he..." Grandpa held one hand to his head.

"She was quite a woman, wasn't she." Raye suddenly understood. "And she came to you, too. She convinced you I was ready to take up her legacy. And told you she would be there to help as she could."

Grandpa sighed. It wasn't just confirming her guess -- it was also him fondly remembering a remarkable woman.

"She left some things for you," he said suddenly.

The lacquered chest had been cunningly hidden. Of course. It sealed tightly and was lined with foil, like a tea chest, or the box an older person would use to store their best kimono.

"A bow case?" Raye held the leather pouch up, puzzling over the straps.

"For the Spirit Bow. It could be hidden under the clothes. Well, under the clothes of your mother's generation." Grandpa saw Raye's disbelieving look. "It turns eyes away," he insisted. "Very strong charms."

Raye picked up a divining mirror in a leather pouch. She turned it over in her hands, admiring it. "Grandmother's old mirror. I'll bet it's awfully powerful."

"This was your grandmother's working kit. She asked us to give it to you when you were ready."

"A hanafuda deck," Raye held the cards up. "So what did this do? She could cast a divination with them? Call up the spirits of birds and animals to aid her?"

"Naw. She liked to play solitaire on those long vigils."

Filling the bottom of the chest was neatly folded fabric. Raye held it up, fingers caressing the supple fabric. It had the embroidered Yin/Yang symbol Grandmother had worn in her vision.

Suddenly Raye was bowing to her Grandfather, bundles overflowing her arms. She beat feet to her own room.

The outfit fit perfectly. It was more modern, and daring, than Raye might have given her ancestor credit for. A high-collared, sleeveless sheath in red silk, slit high for movement, with a short-waisted suede jacket and low suede boots. A kit on a tasseled cord held mirror, packets of herbs, tiny tightly-rolled scrolls.

The Spirit Bow was in her room waiting for her. She fitted it into the case and found that, somehow, the length of it could vanish under her jacket. It moved with her, not hindering her moves even as she spun in a short trial kick.

She brought the bow out, pulling back the string in one smooth movement and holding it taut by her right cheek.

"Now," she said. "Now I am prepared."

Next -- A vengeful ghost stalks Juuban Junior High. Who you gonna call?

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