Now Abbot Liu Yun finished the ritual, inking the sixth and last line on the paper. He drew a sharp breath of dismay when he saw the completed pattern, the oracle’s decision:
Hexagram number twenty-nine. K’an, the Perilous Chasm, which presaged evil for him should he pursue his current course of action.
With dread clutching his heart, Liu Yun opened the Book of Changes. The oracle spoke in oblique references and vague allusions; a hexagram must not be interpreted too literally. Each line contained shadings that might modify the decision. Liu Yun turned the pages and located the K’an hexagram.
“Danger lies ahead like an abyss filled with rushing water,” he read. “Your desired result may never come to pass.” Liu Yun’s throat constricted as he imagined two years of painstaking work culminating in his own destruction. Then he found fragments of cautious optimism inserted amid more warnings. Hope kindled.
“Progress can be made if obstacles are encountered with an attitude of sincerity and a sharp mind. Patience is essential. Eventually order will be restored.”
Abbot Liu Yun smiled as he closed the book. He was deadly sincere in his purpose. Years of scholarship, diplomatic service, and meditation had honed his mind. He’d waited this long, and could afford to bide his time. The shogun’s sōsakan would not thwart him in his drive to avenge his brother’s death, thereby restoring order to the universe and peace to his soul.
After a fruitless search for witnesses to Peony’s murder, Sano returned home at twilight, walking his horse because his sore shoulder could no longer bear the constant jolts of riding. A glowing apricot of a sun spread soft, pink radiance upon a teal blue ocean rent with waves like slits in wrinkled silk. Over the city, a long violet cloud mass advanced westward, resembling a mounted army with banners waving: the legion of night. However, Sano couldn’t afford the time to admire the beauty of this imperiled place. This was the end of the first day of the two that the Dutch captain had given him to solve Jan Spaen’s murder. He needed more medicine and a fresh bandage for his wound, a bath, and a meal before testing his theory about Deshima.
As he entered his street, he performed an automatic security check—and saw the paunchy guard strolling behind him. Uneasily he wondered whether the man had followed him all day. He must be more careful of spies tonight.
“Hirata?” Sano called down the corridor of his mansion.
Old Carp came to meet him. “Young master is out,” he said. When Sano asked where Hirata had gone and when he’d be back, Old Carp replied, “He didn’t say, sōsakan-sama.”
It was just as well, Sano decided while he ate a hasty meal, bathed, had his wound attended to, and donned clean clothes. He wanted to know whether Hirata had broken Abbot Liu Yun’s alibi for the night of Spaen’s disappearance, and to assign him the task of checking on Liu Yun’s and Urabe’s whereabouts at the time of Peony’s murder. But tonight he intended to discover the truth about the mysterious lights. He didn’t need Hirata’s interference.
As Sano started down the street toward the harbor, the skin on his back tingled. Someone was following him—someone more adept than the paunchy guard he’d easily spotted earlier. Sano returned to his mansion and found Old Carp in the kitchen. “I need your help,” Sano said.
A short while later, he watched from an upstairs window while bearers set down a palanquin outside the gate. Old Carp, wearing Sano’s cloak stamped with the Tokugawa crest, a spare set of swords, and a wide-brimmed hat that covered his face, climbed into the palanquin. The bearers carried it off toward the hills. A shadowy figure slipped out of an alley and followed. Sano smiled. He left the house and headed for the harbor.
Above the waterfront, the moon shone softly white, its edges hazy in the moist air. Lamps burned in the harbor patrol station and on a barge on the water. Nightwatchmen paced by the warehouses, their wooden clappers punctuating the ocean’s murmur with sharp clacks: All was well. Patrol officers strolled the promenade and docks. Soldiers drove oxcarts laden with cannon and ammunition for a possible battle against the Dutch ship. Sano avoided notice by staying in the shadows beneath the eaves of closed teahouses and shops as he worked his way down the promenade toward Deshima. Not knowing who might be involved in illicit activities there, he couldn’t trust anyone.
A hundred paces from the guardhouse, he sprinted across the road. He darted between two warehouses and followed a dank passage to the water’s edge, where a dock jutted into the harbor. It was the last one before Deshima, and gave an unobstructed view of the island’s water gates. Sano looked around. Seeing no one, he tiptoed to the edge of the dock.
A rowboat was moored to a piling. It appeared empty, except for what looked to be an old blanket spread on the bottom. Sano lowered himself into the boat. His feet had just touched the blanket, when suddenly it shifted under him. He bit back a cry of surprise and shot backward onto the dock. Sword drawn, he leapt to his feet. In the boat, a human figure sat up and threw off the blanket. The moonlight caught the man’s face. Sano’s relief turned to anger.
“Hirata, what are you doing here?” he demanded in a loud, furious whisper.
The young retainer bowed, clutching a jitte in one hand. “Gomen nasai—forgive me for startling you,” he whispered back. “I’m waiting to catch the mysterious lights.”
“I told you to stay away from Deshima.” Sano jammed his sword back into its sheath. “Now get out of that boat and go home.”
“But sōsakan-sama—”
A sharp clacking silenced his protest. Sano turned and saw a light between the warehouses. Instantly he was off the dock and in the boat with Hirata, who threw the blanket over them. They lay tense in suffocating darkness while the dock creaked under the watchman’s footsteps. Sano inhaled the blanket’s musty odor and hoped the watchman wouldn’t inspect the boat. He didn’t want a scene that might chase away the mysterious lights and suspend the events they signaled, or his actions reported to the authorities.
The watchman’s footsteps retreated. Sano sighed in relief, then emerged with Hirata from beneath the blanket.
“I’m not leaving you,” Hirata whispered. “I found witnesses who saw Abbot Liu Yun near the harbor the night Director Spaen disappeared. The townspeople say he’s a powerful sorcerer who performs magic in the marketplace during festivals. He could be the one who makes the lights. If he’s the killer, you mustn’t face him alone.”
Sano felt a spring of gladness at having new evidence against Liu Yun, who might also have murdered Peony and left the fake suicide note. Yet he couldn’t allow Hirata’s continued presence in Nagasaki, especially if his own suspicions about the lights proved true. “No arguments, Hirata-san,” he said. “You leave for Edo tomor …”
His voice trailed off as, across the water, lights blinked purple, white, green.
“Get out of here, Hirata!” Sano rasped.
“No!”
The lights drifted toward Deshima, growing larger and brighter. Sano resigned himself to Hirata’s company. To send him away now might attract the notice of the culprits—or provoke an attack by the archer who’d wounded Sano last night. The lights drew nearer to shore, smoke wafting from them. A breeze carried a harsh, burnt odor toward Sano. Now he saw a dark shape beneath the lights, and behind it, a wake that gleamed in the moonlight.
“A boat?” whispered Hirata.
They watched the lights draw up to the Deshima water gates. In the colored flashes, they saw the gates open and dark figures descend the steps to the water.
“The Dutch?” Hirata guessed.
“Or the guards.” Sano noticed that the barge he’d seen earlier had vanished.
Then the lights went out. Darkness enfolded the island. Sano cursed. “Let’s get over there.”
He cut the boat’s mooring lines. Hirata stood in the stern, lifted the oar, and began to row. The boat sped across the moon-dappled black water. The wind blew chill and moist, but anticipation warmed Sano. He knew with certainty that he was on the path to Jan Spaen’s killer. Th
en the lights reappeared, flashing upon the water south of the island, moving out toward the harbor channel. Hirata matched their speed to the lights’ rapid pace. The tall, black forms of anchored ships rose around them, decks unmanned while the foreign crews slept—or hid from the ghosts.
“Take us closer,” Sano told Hirata, softly so his voice wouldn’t carry across the water.
Panting, Hirata labored to reduce the distance between their boat and the lights. Sano peered ahead. Did he see a boat under the lights, with an oarsman in the stern and a passenger in the bow? Were they human? Sano shivered involuntarily as his disbelief in ghosts wavered and his faith in his theory weakened.
“Maybe it’s Urabe,” he whispered, telling Hirata about his interviews with the merchant and Kiyoshi, and his ideas about Peony’s murder.
The harbor channel narrowed. They headed seaward between wooded bluffs that sloped up to terraced fields. The lights angled right.
“They’re going ashore.” Sano’s excitement grew. “Speed up, we’ll catch them there.”
Hirata turned their boat, but the lights suddenly disappeared, as if extinguished by the night that lay heavily upon the landscape. Only the faint smell of smoke remained.
“Row along the coast,” Sano ordered.
The coastline was irregular, convoluted. Sano and Hirata navigated around partially submerged rock formations and jutting spits of land. Above them, the woods loomed like a windswept, rustling black wall. Waves lapped the shore. Ears alert for any guiding sound, Sano strained his eyes against the darkness.
Nothing.
Then, reaching the point where they’d seen the lights vanish, they came upon a narrow cut in the coastline.
“The lights must have gone in there.” Hirata propelled the boat into the channel. There the darkness was almost complete, with only the faintest moonlight penetrating the overhanging foliage. The boat scraped against the sheer rock walls that lined the channel. The splash of the oars echoed. Not knowing what to expect, Sano gripped his sword, preparing for a clash with ghosts or men, while his heart drummed a quickening rhythm of anticipation.
Now the channel curved sharply left and opened into a circular cove. Moonlight illuminated a steep, rock-strewn shore with woods above and the mouth of a cave in the center. From within the cave’s recesses, a purple light shone.
Hirata guided the boat to the right of the cave. Sano stepped out and helped his retainer lift the vessel ashore. With Hirata close behind, he tiptoed to the cave’s opening, sword drawn, and peered inside.
Stone walls and an arched ceiling, purple in the light’s eerie, smoky glow, enclosed a short passage. The sea filled its bottom; narrow ledges ran just above the waterline. At the rear of the passage, the floor slanted upward to form a landing. There sat a boat; the light shone from some sort of fixture on a pole in its bow. Otherwise the cave was empty. The boatman had vanished.
They cautiously sheathed their swords. Motioning Hirata to follow, Sano entered the cave. He crept sideways along the ledge, clinging to the rough surface of the wall. They stepped onto the landing and over to the boat.
The vessel, perhaps fifteen paces long, was heaped with wooden crates. Sano examined the light fixture, a pyramidal metal lantern of strange design, with a door on each face. One door stood open; inside, a metal cup attached to the support pole held a substance that burned a brilliant, blinding purple and emitted black smoke. Sano turned a crank on the side of the lantern and, by a clever system of gears, belts, and levers, the other doors opened and closed in sequence. Through them he saw two more metal cups, which held residues of what he surmised had once burned green and white.
“The mysterious lights,” he said, his voice echoing in the cave. A man-made device—fashioned by Abbot Liu Yun, or by the Dutch?
Hirata pried the lid off a crate inside the boat. “Look at this!”
Nestled in layers of cotton batting were ten mechanical clocks like the one in Governor Nagai’s office. Sano and Hirata opened the other crates. These held muskets and pistols; ammunition; Chinese porcelainware; Persian silks; Christian crosses and rosaries; bundled spices that filled the cave with the sweet odors of cinnamon and nutmeg.
“Smugglers’ loot,” Sano said grimly. Just as he’d expected. Jan Spaen had plied his illicit trade in Japan as well as in the Spice Islands, and it had survived his death. “The lights kept everyone away from Deshima while the smugglers moved the goods out of the warehouse and over here.” Dismay seeped like cold water into his heart. “For an operation of this magnitude to succeed, a lot of people must be involved—the barbarians to supply the loot and the Deshima staff to transfer it; a merchant like Urabe to sell it; the harbor patrol, police force, and Governor Nagai to look the other way. One of the smugglers must have shot me last night, to keep me from catching them.”
Sano knew he must expose and disband the smuggling ring, among whom he suspected he would find Spaen’s killer. But could he stay alive long enough to do it? Such powerful adversaries wouldn’t hesitate to destroy even the shogun’s emissary to protect themselves and their operation, which must earn them huge, untaxed profits.
“Where did the boatman go?” Hirata said. “If he came out of the cave and went up the beach to the woods, we would have seen or heard him—we weren’t that far behind.”
In a niche in the cave wall stood an oil lamp. Sano lit it from the lantern’s purple light and walked toward the back of the cave. He halted abruptly, looking down. A dark substance stained the cave’s floor. Sano knelt and saw streaks, as if someone had tried to scrub the floor clean, but the rock had absorbed the color. He sniffed the substance and detected a faint, metallic sourness.
“Blood,” he said. “Director Spaen was shot and stabbed here. That’s why there was no evidence of his murder on Deshima, and why the divers couldn’t find the weapons.”
Now the barbarians rejoined the array of suspects. If Spaen had come here, so might have Assistant Director deGraeff or Dr. Huygens. The smugglers’ cache proved that they did, after all, have access to guns. Sano’s spirit quailed as he saw the investigation circle right back to where he’d started. He would have to reinterrogate the Dutch later. When he rose to continue his examination of the cave, he saw that Hirata had vanished.
“Here, sōsakan-sama,” Hirata called, emerging from a crevice hidden behind a protruding rock formation.
Sano held the lamp to the crevice and saw an ascending passageway. The lamp’s flame wavered in a cool draft. “A tunnel. The smugglers must use it to carry the loot away. They have a head start on us, but maybe we can still catch them.”
But before he and Hirata could enter the tunnel, they heard sounds outside the mouth of the cave: the rustle and snap of tree branches, then footsteps clattering over the rocky shore.
Sano put down the lamp and crept along the ledge to the cave’s mouth, Hirata behind him. The footsteps outside drew closer. Now Sano could hear the intruder’s harsh, rapid breaths. A hand groped at the wall of the cave; a sandaled toe probed for the ledge. When the intruder’s leg came into view, Sano grabbed it and yanked hard.
With a startled cry, the intruder thudded to the ground outside the cave. Sano lunged out and threw himself on the intruder, who shrieked and flailed. In a tangle of thrashing limbs, they rolled over the rocks. Sano banged his head and caught a blow to his jaw. His opponent struck his wounded shoulder, and he gasped. But the man was smaller and lighter than he. Sano grabbed the man’s right wrist before he could draw his sword and quickly pinned him to the ground, faceup in the moonlight. Surprise shot through Sano as he saw handsome, youthful features, distorted with terror.
“Kiyoshi?” he said. Was Chief Ohira’s son a smuggler—or Jan Spaen’s killer?
In the woods above them, branches crackled; voices rumbled. “More smugglers,” Hirata said. “I’ll catch them.” He scaled the rocks and disappeared into the dark forest.
Kiyoshi struggled. Sano kept a knee planted on his stomach and his hands immobilized. “
Who sent you? Who are you working for? What do you know about the smuggling?”
The boy’s chest heaved with panicky breaths. “Please, let me go,” he begged. “I have to stop—I have to warn—I mean, I don’t know anything.”
Sano thrust his weight against Kiyoshi. “Who killed Jan Spaen? Was it you?”
“No, no!”
Bright light swept over them, and the sound of running footsteps echoed in the night. Sano tensed; Kiyoshi moaned.
“There they are!” male voices shouted.
Down a path from the forest tramped a band of samurai. The four leaders held flaming torches; their helmets bore the Nagasaki harbor patrol insignia. Then came two doshin armed with jitte, accompanied by assistants who carried clubs, spears, and ropes. Last strode Yoriki Ota. Quickly they surrounded Sano and Kiyoshi.
“So. Kiyoshi. And Sōsakan Sano.” Ota glared down at them, his face ruddy in the torchlight. To his men, he said, “Arrest them.”
Dazed, Sano released Kiyoshi and stood, raising an arm to shield himself from the torches and weapons pointed at him. Kiyoshi curled up, hands over his face, weeping. “What’s the meaning of this?” Sano demanded, pulling away from the doshin who grabbed him. “Why are you arresting me? What are the charges?”
“Smuggling foreign goods,” Ota said. “Take their weapons and tie their hands,” he told the doshin, then turned to the harbor patrol officers. “Search the cave.”
Sano struggled against the doshin and assistants, but they overpowered him, stripping off his swords and binding his hands behind his back. “I’m not a smuggler,” he protested in vehement outrage. “I followed the lights here from Deshima, and found the cave. I caught Kiyoshi outside. I’ve done nothing illegal!”
The other police had seized Kiyoshi, who offered no resistance. He sagged between two captors, head bent. The sound of his sobs filled the cove.
“The real smugglers must have run away when they heard me coming,” Sano said. “If we hurry, perhaps we can catch them. Now let me go!”
The Way of the Traitor Page 18