No war council.
No stamped seal—just three cups of tea and a map with a thumbprint on the Kiyamachi backstreets.
"Short window," Yasaka said. "Someone's going to knock. I'd like them to knock on the wrong door."
Alaudi tapped the map where the river bled into the old service tunnels. "You want a test pattern."
"A polite one," she said. "Preferably without screaming."
Ren lifted a hand. "I can be quiet."
"You can try," Alaudi said.
Hibird preened like a conductor accepting the role. Roll sparked approval and sat on the map until Ren tickled his ears away.
---
Kiyamachi wore rain like cheap cologne—thin, everywhere, pretending to be a mood. The old tunnel mouth was half-bricked, half-ignored. The wards there were Kyoto's version of a shrug: please don't, but if you must, mind your shoes.
The knock came as promised. Not loud. Precise.
A hairline seam in the air, the kind you only see if you know where doors like to pretend they're walls. A wire slipped through first. Then a glass coin. Then the polite edge of an imported spell that asked, very gently, whether the space on the other side would like to be elsewhere.
"Don't stab it," Alaudi told Ren. "Answer it."
Ren swallowed, nodded. Mist gathered in his palms, thin as breath, settling on the coin, the wire, the question. Alaudi let Sky overlay the scene for both of them—lines, load, hinge, cost—until Ren could see the way the spell leaned.
"Like this?" Ren whispered, and he tipped the question three degrees, just enough to make the door look half a pace to the left and a bit too far down.
The coin shivered. The seam smiled the wrong way. The wire flicked like a frustrated tail.
"Good," Alaudi said. "Now give them something true, but late."
Ren pulsed. The tunnel answered with last week's weather and a heartbeat that belonged to a vent. The coin drank happily. The wire relaxed. The spell wrote down a lie it could live with.
Footsteps. Two sets. Street shoes that wanted to be soft. Voices that wanted to be local and weren't.
"Reading… drift," said one, too careful with his vowels.
"Compensate," said the other. "Anchor to the ferrite."
A small device kissed the brick. It hummed. The seam brightened.
Alaudi stepped in then—Cloud spread like lacquer, thin and everywhere, never touching the device, just bedding the ambient field until up felt pleasantly sideways.
The seam yawned. The device sighed. The polite imported spell did the math, found its numbers friendly, and swung wide—
—into a waist-high storage crawlspace full of old festival signs and a very awake raccoon dog.
The tanuki looked at them with the depthless contempt of small gods and city workers. Then he threw a sign.
It hit the anchoring device, which chirped its death rattle and shed two screws in protest.
"Excuse me," Alaudi said to the men as they recoiled. "Lost?"
They saw him. Saw Ren. Saw the way the air misbehaved around the edges and tried to decide between fight, flight, and paperwork.
"Municipal maintenance," one blurted, because panic makes cowards patriotic.
"Uniform's at the cleaners?" Alaudi asked. "Badge fell in the river?"
"Sir," said the other, and his hand went inside his jacket for something that hummed the way holy tech hums when no priest is watching it.
Alaudi tilted his head. "Don't."
The hand froze. He didn't raise his voice. He let Cloud brush the bone and show it a memory of pressure; the man flinched like he'd just remembered what a car door does to careless fingers.
Ren, to his credit, didn't wobble. He layered Mist over the pair and made them feel very seen by the wrong people. The raccoon dog contributed by juggling another sign with an air of lethal professionalism.
"Here's how this goes," Alaudi said. "You take your broken doorstop. You tell whoever taught you this trick that tunnels are rude houseguests. You stop tapping Kyoto like it's a tank at an aquarium."
The bolder one tried on bravado. "You can't police the whole city."
"I can make your next five attempts land in supply closets," Alaudi said. "Or the river. Or a noodle shop during lunch."
The braver one's mouth twitched. "That would be a hate crime."
"Against noodles?" Alaudi said. "Agreed."
A beat stretched. Rain threaded it.
The timid one said, soft: "We're not… them. We sell results. That's all."
"Then sell this," Alaudi said. He flicked a small purple slip onto the broken device. The glyph on it read LOGJAM in a dialect that only con artists and river spirits respect. "Bill me later."
They left with the kind of walk that tries to be casual and only convinces pigeons. The seam shrank to a sulk. The raccoon dog stole the glass coin and ate it like a snack.
Ren let out a breath. "That was… easier than I thought."
"That was the easy kind," Alaudi said. "Hungry, not hungry for us."
"Will the note keep them out?"
"No," Alaudi said. "It will make them complain upwards. Complaints make trails."
"And the… bigger ones?"
"They don't knock," Alaudi said. "They pry."
Ren nodded, filed it, looked quietly proud that his Mist had been the lies that the truth needed.
"Payment," said a new voice, light with amusement.
Yasaka was there like she'd always been there—umbrella, smile, and the kind of supervision that doesn't feel like a leash until you step wrong. Kunou peeked around her hip, tails tucked in against the rain.
"You said no screaming," Yasaka added. "You delivered."
Alaudi eyed the paper-wrapped bundle she held. "Is that bribe rice?"
"Wagashi," Kunou corrected, scandalized.
"Same thing with better PR," Alaudi said, but he took the bundle. Ren took one, too, and immediately got sugar on his sleeve and pretended he didn't care.
Yasaka glanced at the bricked mouth. "You felt the anchor?"
"Borrowed cross-border craft," Alaudi said. "Not proper onmyōji. Not devil, either."
Yasaka's eyes softened in that way that meant I know which names to pull later. "Noted."
Kunou handed Hibird a seed. Hibird dropped it, offended, then ate it, greedy, because principles lose to snacks.
"Mother says you may put your stamp on this area if you insist," Kunou announced, serious. "A small one. Not a billboard."
Alaudi looked at the tunnel, then at the child playing at herald. He let Cloud paint a shape only the ward-web would see: a faint crown line, half-sketched. A signature that didn't lay claim so much as promise a response.
Ren stared. "That's…"
"Yours?" he asked, hope leaking.
"Kyoto's," Alaudi said. "On loan."
Yasaka's mouth quirked. "Temporary tattoos are age-appropriate."
He grunted acceptance and tried the wagashi. He hated how much he liked it.
---
They walked back by the river because rivers file better notes than roads. Ren practiced rolling Mist over railings without frosting them. Hibird rode Alaudi's shoulder and hummed a tune that might have been triumph, might have been indigestion.
"Question," Ren said. "If they escalate… which way first?"
"Cheapest path," Alaudi said. "Stolen blessings. Rented icons. Outsourced zeal."
"And if that fails?"
"Then the expensive toys arrive," he said. "Names attached."
Ren didn't ask which names. He didn't need to yet.
Kunou, skipping backward in perfect defiance of puddles, pointed at Ren's sleeve. "You have sugar on you," she said, delighted.
Ren panicked, tried to fix it with Mist, and glued sugar to his wrist in a way that destiny would remember.
"Learning," Alaudi said, bland.
Yasaka hid a laugh in her umbrella.
The wards brushed his ribs—warm, approving, brief. The Sky Crown shifted, content with the small claim drawn and the door nudged back into becoming a wall again.
No trumpet. No banner. The map got truer where it mattered and wrong where it needed to be.
Back at the shrine, Ren bowed to the offertory box like it had signed his pay slip. Roll collapsed on the threshold with the drama of a veteran. Hibird crawled into Alaudi's hair and vanished like a smug hat.
"Again tomorrow?" Ren asked.
"Change the drill," Alaudi said. "Same lesson. New angle."
Ren considered, nodded. "I'll bring fewer sleeves."
"Bring the same sleeves," Alaudi said. "Learn to keep them clean."
Night leaned in. The rain stopped pretending it was important and left. Somewhere under the city, a report traveled up a chain, heavy with wrong numbers and a purple slip that read LOGJAM in a language an accountant would hate.
Kyoto breathed. The test pattern held.
And the man who wouldn't call himself a hero tightened a small, invisible crown and went to sweep the stones.