by Nick Lake
As they walked, Hiro hung back, then drew close to Taro to whisper something. Taro didn’t catch it. ‘What was that?’ he said.
Hiro grimaced at him, putting a finger to his lips. He glanced ahead at Jun, who was following the curve of the hallway out of view. ‘We never told him about the first time we came here,’ he said, under his breath. ‘About the dogs.’
Cold fingers stroked Taro’s spine. ‘We must have,’ he said. ‘Or how would he know?’
Hiro shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t—’
‘Like it?’
‘No.’
Taro closed his eye, scrubbing his face with his hands. ‘No. Nor do I,’ he said. ‘But we can’t go back now.’ He reached under his cloak, taking out Kusanagi, swathed in cloth. He unwrapped the legendary sword, then let it hang easily in his hand. He pointed to where Jun had vanished round the corner. He could hear the shuffle of the vampires behind them. ‘Let’s get into a dangerous situation.’
On the other side of the corner, they almost bumped into Jun. He was standing in front of a door carved of oak, and inlaid with ivory. He nodded, then opened it with a flourish.
Jun stepped in first; Taro followed him. His blood froze in his veins.
He recognized the throne room, only this time they were entering it from the side, not from the back. It was in shadow – the shutters being closed, and no candles lit. The Three Treasures hung from the wall behind the throne – no, not the Three Treasures, but two treasures and a fake.
This, though, was not what had made his blood freeze.
Sitting on the throne was the shogun – or more accurately, what had been the shogun. His own head was cradled in his lap, his neck cut clean through, as if by a diamond-sharp samurai sword. He was drenched in blood, which even now pulsed slowly from his neck. He had been killed only minutes before. His young man’s face looked balefully, accusingly, at Taro from his waist, the whole effect sickening and horrifying.
‘Quite the scene, isn’t it?’ said a voice that Taro knew, from behind the throne. A figure stepped forward – his face for the moment obscured by the gloom of the unlit room.
Oh, no, no, no, thought Taro. Let me be mistaken...
He was not.
Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu walked into a narrow beam of light shafting from a closed shutter. He held a katana in his hand, dripping with blood, the noise tapping like a heartbeat, like a beetle behind a wall.
‘Taro,’ he said. ‘I see you’ve brought the sword.’
Taro opened his mouth, but no words came forth to his mind.
‘Speechless, I see,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘That is all right. We do not need your words. You are most welcome here, Taro.’
Lord Tokugawa paused. And then he spoke a sentence that stopped Taro’s breath in his lungs.
‘You are truly welcome... my son.’
CHAPTER 49
TARO LOOKED TO Hiro, who was staring too.
‘You— you know who I am?’
‘I have always known it,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘I know, too, that you are a vampire.’
‘But— if you knew—’
‘Why did I let you labour in the darkness? Why did I leave you to the mercy of Lord Oda?’
Taro nodded. It was all he could manage.
‘Did you not kill Lord Oda?’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘That is why I didn’t reveal what I knew.’
‘B-but— when we were here, before... Why didn’t you say anything?’
Lord Tokugawa pointed to the sword in Taro’s hand. ‘I needed you to bring me that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want you distracted by a family reunion. Speaking of which...’ He made a show of peering around the room. ‘Did you not bring the charming Hana, daughter of my greatest enemy? When I heard you had killed Lord Oda, I was overjoyed. When I heard you had fallen in love with his daughter... I asked myself if you had quite lost your senses.’
‘She left me,’ said Taro.
Lord Tokugawa nodded. ‘Good.’ Then he pushed the body in the throne. The shogun pitched forward onto the wooden floor. The head rolled away from it, drawing a high-pitched squeaking sound from the boards. Taro guessed they had been calibrated to sing when an assassin tried to creep over them, to protect the shogun.
In this case it had not worked. The killer had been behind him – all the time.
‘Why did you do it?’ said Taro.
Lord Tokugawa laughed, as if it was a stupid question. ‘He was a little in the way of the throne,’ he said. He sat down on it, ignoring the blood. ‘Of course, I couldn’t just kill him and expect the people to welcome me with open arms. But when I heard you were on your way, with Kusanagi, and with the dragon’s horn... I knew the moment had come at last.’
‘You heard?’ said Hiro. ‘How?’
Jun walked away from them then, towards the throne. Taro had known it in the heartbeat before the boy’s feet moved. ‘I sent a pigeon,’ Jun said. ‘From the road.’ He went to stand beside Lord Tokugawa, and a little behind. Just as Lord Tokugawa had stood behind the shogun. He said nothing to the daimyo, though – just stood with his hands folded. Taro thought Jun might mention the vampires outside, but he didn’t. Maybe they had already been dealt with.
‘Traitor,’ said Hiro.
Lord Tokugawa waved the word away, as if it were an irritating insignificance. ‘Now,’ he said to Taro. ‘If you could give me Kusanagi, the dragon horn and the Buddha ball, I will ask for no more of your time.’
‘Give you...’
‘All of it, yes.’ Lord Tokugawa had a thin, hard smile on his lips.
‘You knew about the Buddha ball too?’ said Taro. He was holding it under his robe.
‘My dear boy,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘My dear boy, I planted the very idea of it in your mind. You didn’t really think you had a destiny, did you?’ He laughed that hollow laugh again.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Hiro. His voice was rough with anger.
Lord Tokugawa sighed. ‘I hate having to explain myself. Now, guards, if you could just—’
‘I’m your son,’ said Taro, and Lord Tokugawa turned back to look at him again, the expression on his face one of irritation more than anything else, as if he had dismissed Taro from his attention and had not expected to have to return him to it. ‘I think you owe it to me.’ Inside his mind was the water underneath the waves, in a windy bay – tumultuous, turbulent, turning and turning, whipping up sand and foam.
A strange expression passed over Lord Tokugawa’s face – halfway between a smile and a grimace. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Many years ago I first heard the story that only the son of an ama could claim the Buddha ball. I knew the ball was essential, the first object I would require in order to claim the empire. It would give me control over rice production, and with that, over all the money in the land.’
Taro closed his eye. He had known it himself – from the beginning. The clue was in the prize, even. Twenty thousand koku for killing the dragon... and what was a koku but a unit of wealth, made out of rice. One koku – one samurai fed – one year.
The ground began to fade beneath his feet.
‘So, I found and seduced an ama woman.’ The voice was like a pestle, like a mill wheel, grinding Taro’s existence down to nothing. ‘It took a year of my life, but I have always been patient. I waited till she gave me a son, then I left one of my bows with you as a mark of your provenance. Eventually, when you were the right age, I leaked your existence to one of Lord Oda’s spies. That man always thought he had one up on me – but in reality I had several thousand up on him.
‘He sent ninjas to kill you, of course. So predictable. But I sent one to save you – the best of them all. I sent Shusaku. He knew everything, of course. All along.’ There was a cruel barb in Lord Tokugawa’s voice as he said this, and it caught in Taro’s mind like a hook in the mouth of a fish, made him collapse to his knees.
‘Not Shusaku...’ he implored. He thought he had felt betrayal after Hiro recovered the ball, after Hana left him. He had not felt betrayal a
t all. He wanted to die at that moment. He wanted to die so that it wouldn’t be true that Shusaku betrayed him, that his friend and mentor could have treated him in this way.
‘Oh, very much Shusaku,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘He has always been a key element in my plans. It is a shame he is not here today, to witness my final victory. I believe he would be pleased.’
‘You’re crazy,’ said Hiro slowly.
‘No,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘Just very, very clever.’ He put his hand down on the arm of the throne, then lifted it, making a moue of disgust, his fingers slippery with blood. He wiped them on his silk robe.
‘The next part,’ he continued, ‘was to arrange for the prophetess to tell you about the ball. I added in the part about you being destined to be shogun, of course. A touch of genius, in my opinion.’
The whole room swayed. Jun was grinning; it made Taro feel sick. ‘You...’
Lord Tokugawa paid him no attention. ‘It may surprise you to learn,’ he said, ‘that the majority of people are good, not bad. I had an idea – which proved to be correct, by the way – that you might try to find the ball because you wanted power, but that you would be practically guaranteed to try to find it if you felt it was your destiny. People will do all sorts of things if they believe it is fate.’
‘So...’ said Taro hesitantly, ‘the story the prophetess told us... it wasn’t true?’
‘Some of it was. The bit about the ball being lost at sea, and only the son of an ama being able to find it. But the bit about you being shogun? Pure invention, I’m afraid.’
‘Why would she lie?’ asked Taro.
‘Oh, love, of course. She loved me. The poor fool.’
Taro felt a presence beside him; Hiro took him by the arm, steadying him, and then lifted him to his feet. ‘None of this changes who you are,’ he said in a low voice.
‘Yes,’ said Taro. ‘Yes, it does.’
‘What are you two muttering about?’ asked Lord Tokugawa. He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘The next part, I have to confess I didn’t plan. Originally I felt that you would go to find the ball. But I had underestimated your desire to avenge your foster father, the pathetic fisherman your mother married. When it became obvious you weren’t going to rest until you had faced Lord Oda, I contrived to send Shusaku to kill Hana.’
Taro frowned at that. ‘I thought we were going to kill Lord Oda.’
‘No. Always Hana. In revenge for the attempt on you. It was part of my plan, and I couldn’t let it go. It would have made Lord Oda see me as weak.’
‘And Shusaku knew...’
‘That your mission was to kill Hana, not her father? Yes. Of course he knew.’
Taro felt his knees buckling again. Hiro held him up.
‘Of course,’ went on Lord Tokugawa, ‘you didn’t kill her, and once again my plans went awry. But you were still desperate to take your revenge – even more so after that hothead Kenji Kira attacked you on Mount Hiei. I used Shusaku to deliver new guns to the Ikko-ikki, guns capable of firing in the rain. I knew that once you had the Buddha ball, you would be able to render Lord Oda’s guns useless. I waited – I thought it might take years for you to find the ball. But it didn’t. Within half a year you had it, and Lord Oda was attacking you on that mountainside, and everything I had planned came together in his death. After that?’ He pointed to Kusanagi. ‘After that I needed only the lost sword of the emperors.’
Taro held Kusanagi in his hands. ‘You could have just found it yourself,’ he said.
‘I don’t do things myself,’ said Lord Tokugawa with contempt. ‘Besides, I really did think it was at Miyajima. A daimyo cannot simply attack a monastery. Especially not such a rich one.’
‘So the dragon...’
‘Was never important. I woke it myself.’ Taro had not realized he could feel worse than he already did, but it turned out he could. It was his father’s fault that he had lost his eye, his hand. He had faced two dragons, real monsters, and neither of them was as monstrous as Lord Tokugawa appeared now, in his eyes.
Taro pointed to his stump. ‘All this,’ he said. ‘And for what? Why would you wake a dragon, of your own free will?’
‘It was only a means to an end,’ continued Lord Tokugawa. ‘A way to make you get the sword. Of course I wrote to the abbot at Mount Hiei too, to ensure that you would take up the challenge.’ Lord Tokugawa saw the expression on Taro’s face. ‘Yes. I am afraid he is one of my agents too. But now all my scheming has come to a head. You have brought me the ball and the sword. I have the power to starve or feed my peasants, and so the poor are in my grasp. I have the sword Amaterasu gave to her descendants, and so the educated rich and the religious must bow to me. I have it all.’
‘You did all this,’ said Taro, ‘so you could be shogun?’
‘No,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘I did all this so I could be emperor.’ He made a broad gesture with his two hands. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I have talked enough. Bring me the sword and the ball. The horn, too. I will say that the dragon sacrificed itself, to bring about an end to the rule of the pretenders. I will say the age of emperors is come again.’
Taro glanced back at the open door behind him. ‘No,’ he said, edging towards it.
‘I very much feared you would say that,’ said Lord Tokugawa. He clapped his hands, and samurai came pouring into the room – from the end, from behind the throne, from the door Taro had just looked at. They were all armed, and they all wore the hollyhock mon of house Tokugawa. ‘Kill them,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘Both of them.’
Taro stared at him in horror. Last time he had seen his father, he hadn’t noticed the hardness in his eyes, the wiry frame that bespoke a lifetime of sword practice and riding. This was someone with not a single soft surface about him. ‘But I’m your son,’ Taro said, as the samurai closed in.
‘No,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘You are a means to an end.’
Then the first blade met Taro’s skin.
CHAPTER 50
The home of the prophetess, foster mother to Heiko and Yukiko
Two years earlier
KENJI KIRA SWEPT one of the bowls off the table and onto the floor, where it smashed into pieces. It was a gesture meant to intimidate, and it worked – despite herself the prophetess was startled, and then she was angered to see the gratification in his eyes when he perceived her fear.
She knew she was going to die here – not because she could see it in the future, but because she knew how samurai operated. Right now she was a prophetess, but once she had been a woman in love with a samurai, and she had seen men opened up with swords, from throat to belly. She was familiar with their code, with their honour. She had seen those they killed with their honour, those they forced to kill themselves.
She still saw them, sometimes, when she slept.
Kenji Kira – she knew his name, had witnessed his barbarities on other battlefields than this one, which was her home – was sucking on something, staring at her with a look that told her he wasn’t just angry, he was mad. She hoped that Heiko and Yukiko were far away already. She hoped that Shusaku would guard them, as he had guarded her before, even if he didn’t know how she was betraying him and his young charge.
Betrayal.
The word stuck in her mind. Why was it that loyalty to one person always had to mean hurting others? She told herself it might not do too much harm, the lie she had told.
But she knew it would. It had to. It was for the purpose of doing harm that Lord Tokugawa, who had once been a young samurai – who had once loved her, she was sure of it, as she loved him – had asked her to do it. And she owed him, didn’t she? He had saved her, again and again.
From death. From her parents. From prostitution.
She owed him everything, including her life. Lying to the boy was nothing, spinning him that ridiculous tale about having a destiny, that preposterous prophecy.
And yet, why did it lodge in her mind, sharp and shining? Why did she feel she had helped to put into motion something ve
ry bad indeed, something that would cause nearly as much damage in the world as the stupid honour of the samurai, rippling out from this moment like water from a stone?
Perhaps, though, just perhaps, she could atone a little for what she had done to that poor boy Taro. By dying at Kenji Kira’s hand, and giving him more time to escape. Of course, he might escape from Lord Oda, but he would never escape from his own father, who had planned his life from the very beginning.
This – the way that Lord Tokugawa had planned everything from the very beginning – was the secret the prophetess knew, and Shusaku and Taro didn’t. It was a secret she intended to take to the grave.
‘You laid out food,’ Kenji Kira said. ‘Yet you feed on blood, do you not?’ He poked the empty bowl. ‘Who was eating with you, when we arrived?’
‘The bowls are for the spirits,’ she said. ‘I am a prophetess. I must set out food for them.’
Kira sighed. He made a hand signal to one of his samurai, and the man went to stand behind her, the blade of his katana resting cold and sharp against her neck. ‘I know about your kind,’ he went on. ‘You can only be killed by decapitation, or a blade to the heart. Don’t think I won’t kill you if you fail to give me the information I need.’
‘And what information is that?’
‘I want to know where the boy went. And the ninja with him, and his fat friend.’
‘No one like that has been here,’ she said, lying. It was something she knew how to do.
‘Yes, they have. They were seen entering the door in your garden.’
‘Then perhaps they broke in for supplies.’
‘What about the girls?’ he asked. ‘We are informed that two girls live with you.’
Despite herself, she felt her chest constrict, and she was sure he noticed it. Heiko and Yukiko. She loved them, she was surprised to realize. At first she had taken them in because Shusaku asked it, and Shusaku was an old favourite of Lord Tokugawa’s. A friend of hers, too. But she had grown fond of them over the years. Even Yukiko, who had a cold heart under that pretty exterior of hers. Cold as the snow she was named for. She was concerned about what Yukiko might become, saw violence in those shiny eyes of hers – and it didn’t diminish her love for the girl by a single particle.