by Steve Bein
“But I saw it,” Kaida said, trying to look past him, to get just a peek at whatever his companions were taking from the rowboat.
“You see too little and assume too much.” He reached down, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and twisted her head around so she could see full well what she’d been trying to catch a glimpse of a moment before.
His companions were carrying Masa’s dead body.
Masa hung loosely, held up by his wrists and ankles, his mouth leaking salt water. His long black hair hung from his head like clumps of seaweed, dribbling shining ribbons of water. When they dumped him on the sand, he landed bonelessly, limp as a rolled-up fishnet.
“There,” Genzai said. “Have you seen enough now?”
Kaida’s eyes were locked on Masa, whose eyes stared blankly back at her from behind the demon mask—the same one his friends were finishing the night before. Thin ribbons of blood striped his face, matted his eyebrows, trickled in nigh-invisible rivulets down his cheeks. The mask had killed him. Kaida was sure of it.
It was stupid, Kaida thought, diving with a heavy iron mask on; it was as good a way as any to drown yourself. Masa would have known that. Like Kaida, he was a survivor—and unlike Kaida, he was vibrant, full of life. There was no reason for him to kill himself. So had Genzai executed his friend by drowning him? Kaida didn’t think so. Genzai was distraught. No, it was the mask that killed Masa, and Genzai knew it too, but Kaida couldn’t imagine how a mask by itself could do that to someone. It was as if wearing the mask had caused him to lose his mind.
Now that was a terrifying thought. Kaida wasn’t afraid of hungry ghosts haunting the wrecked carrack, but the mask was something she could see, something Genzai’s friends had made with their hammers and tongs. She remembered the one-eyed hunchback, the man with the wispy white beard chanting his spells, their faces sinister in the red-hot glow of the mask. What had they done? Channeled some demon into it? Was that why it was demon shaped?
It wasn’t so long ago that Kaida had looked down on her fellow villagers for fearing Genzai and Masa as evil magi. Now she found herself fearing the outlanders and their witchcraft. What else could have killed Masa? And what was in that shipwreck that was worth dying for, worth risking a friend’s life for, worth provoking the wrath of evil spirits?
“Throw it away,” Kaida whispered, only half aware that she’d spoken aloud. “That mask. Melt it down. Let the sea turn it to rust.”
“It frightens you?” Genzai said.
“Yes.” She was not ashamed to admit it.
“It should. And you are a wise child if you can see how afraid you ought to be. So do not let foolishness escape your lips. That mask is too important to be destroyed. Someone will dive with it again, and may die because of it. And since I have so few of my own men to risk, perhaps the next one to dive will be you.”
BOOK FIVE
HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22
(2010 CE)
28
Mariko ate her ramen and reflected absently on the nature of her missing finger. She was sitting on her bed, a polystyrene container of Cup Noodles in her right hand and chopsticks in her left, because her right hand couldn’t manage the chopsticks anymore. Losing her right forefinger wouldn’t have mattered so much if she weren’t living in a chopstick culture. Forks and knives worked perfectly well in a four-fingered hand.
No matter where she lived, she would have had to retrain herself to shoot left-handed—assuming she still wanted to be a cop, of course. There were plenty of professions in which a missing finger wouldn’t have caused the slightest inconvenience, but Mariko had chosen the one job in which the loss of that particular finger could actually cost her her life. Learning to shoot as a lefty hadn’t been any easier than learning to eat as a lefty. She figured she should have logged enough practice by now—a few thousand rounds on the pistol range, three meals a day for a couple of months—but her marksmanship still wasn’t where she wanted it to be, and eating still made her feel like a clumsy gaijin tourist using chopsticks for the first time.
She supposed that losing a forefinger might have been a particular hassle in the twenty-first century, but Mariko didn’t participate much in the trends that would have been a pain in the ass given the state of her hand. She’d been a ham-handed typist even before her fight with Fuchida. She had no interest in Facebook and Twitter, seeing them as two more items on a to-do list already full to bursting. She didn’t text more than once or twice a day, and then only to her sister, who was living proof that Mariko wouldn’t have needed her forefinger for that: Saori texted at lightning speed using only her thumbs. Mariko had a harder time with old technology: keys, coins, and most importantly, her sword.
She’d skipped her kenjutsu class tonight. It was hard enough to come home and see the empty sword rack where Glorious Victory should have been; its absence would loom all the larger in the dojo, proving more and more distracting with each new drill. And her new sensei, a wizened war veteran named Hosokawa, did not admit distraction in his dojo, least of all from his sole female student. He was of the old guard, the generation that thought it unbecoming to teach swordsmanship to women. His view was hardly unique; for hundreds of years, everyone thought that way. But Hosokawa-sensei had earned his belt ranks under Yamada, and as Mariko had the honor of being Yamada’s last student, Hosokawa had accepted her as a matter of fealty to his late sword master.
But it didn’t follow that he had to be patient with her.
Following along with others wasn’t Mariko’s forte, and taking a formal class didn’t suit her nearly as well as the private lessons she’d started with, alone with Yamada-sensei in his backyard. As that was no longer an option, Mariko trained under Hosokawa for four nights a week, and four nights a week Hosokawa-sensei berated her for her sloppy technique, her wavering focus, and above all for her improper grip.
The right forefinger was of utmost importance in swordsmanship. Highest on the hilt, it was the strongest source of control. Closest to the tsuba, it provided the first point of contact, facilitating a fast and fluid draw. Mariko was handicapped on both counts. Of course it was impossible to know whether Hosokawa-sensei was really so obsessed with form or whether he was merely using it as a convenient ruse to mask his overt sexism. Either way, Mariko felt the same kind of pressure at kenjutsu that she felt on the firing range, an incessant drive to outperform her male counterparts just to be recognized for having done anything right at all.
So, sitting on her bed and eating her ramen, Mariko concluded that of all the people who could ever have lost their right forefinger, the one with the most to lose was a Japanese swordswoman in the TMPD.
Because her left hand was clumsy, she spattered tiny flecks of chicken broth on the notebook she was skimming. It was Yamada’s, one of the hundreds she kept in her stacked columns of banker’s boxes. If there was a system there, Mariko didn’t understand it yet. Some boxes were labeled, others not. Sometimes a box would contain exhaustive notes on a single subject, sometimes a chaotic cornucopia with no unifying theme. It had taken her weeks of filtering to set aside all the books that had details on the obvious starting point for her nightly conversations with her departed sensei: Glorious Victory Unsought.
Though she didn’t ordinarily believe in that sort of thing, Yamada had convinced her that Master Inazuma had folded the forces of destiny into his steel, and so Mariko’s first subject of study was her own sword. It was a subject that appeared in only one library on earth: the one in Mariko’s bedroom, piled up in haphazardly labeled boxes. No one but Yamada believed that Inazuma ever existed, and cryptohistory had no place in the history departments of modern academia. That was why all of these notebooks remained notebooks, not published works, and it was also why Mariko accepted that Kamaguchi Hanzo’s mask and her own Inazuma blade might have shared a connection that she could only describe as magical. Yamada-sensei had amassed too much evidence to dismiss the supernatural.
But though she accepted her intuition about a connectio
n, she knew nothing about the connection itself. She had that feeling she got when she got up from whatever she was working on and went into the next room to get something she needed, only to forget what it was she was there for in the first place. Tonight was like that, but many times more frustrating, since rooting through boxes upon boxes of notes was far more difficult than remembering she’d gotten up to fetch a pen or a screwdriver or something.
By the time she finished her noodles, she still hadn’t run across whatever it was that niggled at her memory. She got to her feet, her thighs and back and shoulders protesting all the way, and traded her current notebook for two new ones. Chasing Nanami through traffic this morning had left a couple of bruises she hadn’t noticed at the time. Settling back down on the bed generated a new litany of complaints from her aching muscles. The thought of ibuprofen appealed to her, but inertia proved to be the more powerful motivator.
She flipped through a volume with notes on Okuma Tetsuro and his sons, Ichiro and Daigoro. All were ill fated, but none of them could hold her interest. They might have done so on another night, but at the moment Mariko was feeling tired and she knew she had many more pages to cover.
Two books later she found what she was looking for: a quick note in the margin, scribbled in a wispy hand. First linkage—Glor Vic to mask? On the next page, Mask postdates Glor Vic—how long? 100 years? More? A few pages later, Mask-Glor Vic affinity strongest of all. These were all marginalia, with the majority of the notes being devoted to the puzzle of how best to date Glorious Victory Unsought. He never found the answer in this notebook, but he did answer Mariko’s question, one that had been nagging at her ever since that morning, when she woke to find her sword missing. Kamaguchi’s mask and Glorious Victory Unsought were somehow connected.
She delved deeper into the notes, and the more she read, the weirder it got. Everyone associated with the mask seemed to share a sword fetish. Some were samurai, some were common criminals, but all were killers. Somehow the mask awakened a destructive hunger in whoever touched it, and the need was especially strong for Glorious Victory. Yamada even hypothesized that the mask was a sort of metal detector for Inazuma steel, coded specifically for Glorious Victory Unsought. Mariko couldn’t even imagine how that could be—you couldn’t program raw iron the way you’d program a remote control—but she had to take Yamada at his word. For one thing, he was usually right, and for another, she didn’t have anything else to go on.
At least Yamada had some evidence to work from. A few salvaged pages from a centuries-old diary suggested that the affinity between the mask and the sword was dependent on distance. On its own, the mask inspired an unnameable yearning, like a caged animal’s need to pace, always seeking an exit that wasn’t there. But when Glorious Victory was nearby, that yearning magnified into a craving as powerful sexual lust. If the mask could see the sword, it had to have it.
Whatever that means, Mariko thought. She wished the diary’s author had been a detective; similes of caged animals didn’t show up in Mariko’s case log.
Things got even more bizarre when Yamada started waxing poetical himself. On one page, she read, Wind seeks mask? Why? At the top of the next page, Wind wants Glor Vic, therefore needs mask? It made no sense. Figuratively speaking, Mariko could get her head around a winter wind seeking out the gaps in her clothing, but even at her most abstract she couldn’t see how wind could be said to want anything at all.
His marginal notes developed into paragraphs in the following pages, but the more he developed his thoughts, the more cryptic they became. He developed a bizarre metaphor, likening wind to a shinobi, a ninja. No riddles there—wind was invisible—but then his invisible air currents took on human desires. As if wanting and seeking weren’t bad enough, the wind started planning, designing, orchestrating. Weather just didn’t do that.
The only deduction she could draw for certain was that Yamada-sensei knew a lot more about the mask than he bothered to write down. Most of his notes read like someone else’s grocery shopping list. Items like “lotion” or “food for Buster” might be on the list, but what kind of lotion? Sunblock? Moisturizer? A medicinal cream? And what was Buster? He could be a dog or a parakeet. There was no way to tell. Mariko could read between the lines all she liked and she’d never figure out everything her sensei knew about the mask.
A couple of notebooks and a couple of hours later, she hadn’t clarified much about the mask or the wind, but what little she’d managed to gather had seriously creeped her out. Somewhere along the line, the mask was damaged. Someone had scarred it, and somehow that deformed its enchantment too. Its affinity—or curse, or fetish, or whatever you called it—expanded from swords to all weapons. Yamada even hypothesized about how it might mutate over time, creating a lust for muskets and matchlocks as those came of age, and later semiautomatic pistols, maybe even machine guns. In a modern theater of war, it might have been IEDs. The mask did not discriminate.
Mariko had encountered an artifact like this before: Beautiful Singer, lightest and fastest of all the Inazuma blades. It too infected the wielder’s mind, and Mariko knew all too well how deadly that obsession could be. She’d flatlined on Beautiful Singer’s edge, the very last in a series of bloody murders stretching back almost a thousand years. Unlike a sword, a mask was benign, but perhaps that was what made it so dangerous: it seemed harmless.
If so, then the Bulldog showed remarkable foresight in separating himself from it. That, or else he shared the sixth sense of the alpha male for any threats to his dominance. Kamaguchi was violent, but only on his terms. If simply holding the mask was enough to awaken a deep-seated need for destruction, then Kamaguchi was right to keep it far away, on a high shelf where no one else would ever have reason to touch it. He didn’t even have to know why he did it; alpha male instinct would be enough.
Mariko found the mere thought of it chilling. She wanted to think that the whole story was mere superstition, that while medieval people might have believed in such things, in her world inanimate objects didn’t have such power. Yet as soon as the thought struck her, she knew she was wrong. What, other than “obsessive-compulsive,” was the right term to describe the average schoolboy’s relationship to his video games? Mariko thought of her sister Saori and the four or five thousand texts she sent every month. She thought of her own habits too: feigning kenjutsu strikes while waiting in elevators, oiling her bicycle chain before a ride though she knew full well she’d tuned up the whole bike the day before. How many times had she practiced drawing, aiming, and firing with her left hand? And she’d done the same with her right for years, long before Fuchida had maimed her finger. Was her obsession with marksmanship any less morbid than the hunger to destroy lurking within Yamada’s mask?
It was different. It had to be, or else Yamada would never have made a note of it. He knew obsession all too well. A man did not collect thirty degrees of black belt without admitting obsession into his life. No, this mask was something unusual, something dangerous, and knowing that made Mariko wish she had something more to go on, some way to track the thing down, some means of predicting the bearer’s intentions. But none of the notebooks provided clues.
She looked at the clock. Twelve-oh-eight. She had to work in the morning.
And yet there were two faces she couldn’t get out of her head. One was the Bulldog’s demon mask, stolen so brazenly from the middle of an active crime scene. The other belonged to that lunatic Akahata, his eyes blazing like twin suns in his bruised and battered face, his broken lips incessantly chanting their mantra. Akahata wasn’t the mask thief. He’d been in critical care at the time of the robbery. Mariko remembered the image of the thief, dressed head to toe in SWAT armor, the better to walk through a swarm of cops unnoticed. The feed from the security camera was fairly low fidelity, but now, seeing Yamada-sensei’s notes on the mask, Mariko remembered the thief as clearly as if she’d been standing in the room with him.
“Just one more book,” she said aloud, to Yamada-sense
i as much as to herself. Mariko had never been much of a scholar, and so reading a historian’s notes was usually the sort of thing that would put her to sleep, not keep her up. In college she’d majored in journalism, which she defended to this day as the only writing-intensive major that actually left a graduate with legitimate job prospects in her field. She’d always thought of all that “love of learning for its own sake” crap as the lullaby that literature and philosophy majors used to sing themselves to sleep after a tough day of waiting tables. But now she was beginning to understand why Yamada had done what he’d done with his life, pursuing a master’s degree, then a PhD, then tenure, then one book project after another until he could hardly see the pen in his hand. Some of this stuff was honestly interesting in its own right—maybe not worth a college degree, but well worth the lost sleep she was inviting by telling herself “just one more.”
In fact it was three notebooks later that she struck gold. Yamada had ventured to guess that wind and divine wind might be the same thing. Her first thought was that obviously this couldn’t be a reference to the Divine Wind she was investigating, the cult of Akahata and Joko Daishi. Yamada was a historian: in his context, kamikaze—“divine wind”—was either the suicide pilots of World War Two or their namesake, the great typhoons that swamped the fleets of Kublai Khan, drowned his armies, and saved Japan from being just another province of the Mongol Empire. And since he’d already associated the mask with wind, the two typhoons were a sure bet.
But then came the mother lode. It was a tangential comment about the wind creating the mask, and it sent Mariko shuffling through all the notebooks that now lay scattered like playing cards on her bed. She rubbed her eyes, cursed the clock, and at last she found the book with the weird references to wind. If she reread them to say not “wind” but “the Wind,” the most bewildering passages suddenly became clear. The Wind wanted the mask. The Wind sought it out. It all made sense.