Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  Now that was a pleasant thought. Since Shichio was now Hashiba’s top adviser, revealing Shichio’s secrets was tantamount to treason. And since colluding with a traitor was itself a treasonous act, a rendezvous with Mio was all the pretext Shichio needed to name the Bear Cub an enemy of the state. It would be a pleasure to write the order for his execution.

  There came a series of squeaks and chirps from the nightingale floors in the hall. The bobbing foxfire glow of handheld lamps drew closer, and at long last the shoji slid aside. There was Jun, bowing so low that his forehead touched the floor. “My lord?”

  “It’s about damned time. What took you so long?”

  “A messenger came, my lord. It’s—”

  “Did I send you to dally with messengers? No.” Shichio extracted a little stack of lists from under his map and slid them along the floor toward his adjutant. “Now look at this. It says here that I’ve deployed a double garrison at some ‘green cliff,’ wherever that is, and but a single platoon at the compound of Inoue Shigekazu—at your behest. Why?”

  “Sir, the Green Cliff is the name of House Yasuda’s most fortified compound.”

  “Speak up, damn you. Explain yourself to me, not the floor.”

  Jun raised himself into a less sluglike pose. “My lord, the message, it’s quite important—”

  “I’ll be the one to tell you what’s important, Jun, and at the moment what I deem important is for you to stop your prattling. Now tell me, why should I care about these Yasudas?”

  “Lord Yasuda’s wedding gift was most generous, my lord. Nine prized horses from excellent stables.”

  “And yet he did not attend the wedding.”

  That had been one of Hashiba’s better ideas, requiring all lords to keep records of who married whom, who died when, what dowries and tokens of respect were exchanged. In truth Hashiba had stolen the idea from his predecessor, Oda Nobunaga, who saw dowries as convenient cover for his enemies to amass an army. A gift of horses might have been a pretext for building cavalry; a gift of land today could easily become rice for feeding soldiers tomorrow. To Oda’s devious mind, any gathering of the powerful represented a possible conspiracy.

  Shichio had never met the man personally, but as near as he could tell, Oda had been a brute and a bully—a samurai if ever there was one. But in this case, Shichio was glad Oda had ruled with an iron fist. It was through wedding and funerary records that Shichio could see his adjutant was even more incompetent than expected. “Read it,” he said, stabbing a finger at the stack of lists in Jun’s quivering hands. “Did the Bear Cub wed himself to the Yasudas? No. He wedded himself to the Inoues. So why are my troops stationed as if it were the other way around?”

  “House Yasuda is thought to be the closer ally.”

  “Thought to be? Come, now, Jun, you’re a bright man. You wouldn’t invite me to cut your tongue out, would you?”

  Jun swallowed. “No, my lord.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. So is this an idle guess of yours, or do you have what we might call evidence?”

  Jun shuffled through the lists, found the one he was looking for, and passed it to Shichio, all without lifting his head more than a handsbreadth from the floor. “If you’ll read here, sir, Lord Yasuda attended both the father’s and the elder brother’s funerals, and the Yasuda retainers were more numerous at both funerals than any other clan’s. It is believed that Lord Okuma—er, the Bear Cub, that is—well, that he married the Inoue girl under duress.”

  “It is believed,” Shichio said. Jun shivered, but Shichio would not be so harsh on him this time. He’d made his case. “Send a pigeon. Double the guard on House Inoue, but leave the garrison at this Green Cliff right where it is. Now, then, what other news from the north? Has there been a reply to my marriage proposals?”

  “Not yet, my lord.”

  “Why not? This messenger tonight had no word? What’s taking so long?”

  Jun shrank into himself as if hoping to become invisible. “I’m certain my lord remembers that the Lady Okuma is quite mad. Who can say what errands she’ll attend to and when?”

  “Have another proposal written up, and send it with the same pigeon. And tell the captain of the guard at the House Okuma garrison that he will return a reply from Lady Okuma or I’ll have him buried alive.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Shichio gave a satisfied sigh. “Very good, Jun. Now, what’s so important that you’d risk me cutting out your tongue?”

  Jun looked up from his brush and paper, his eyes wide with fear. “My lord?”

  “The messenger, you dolt. The one whose ramblings sent you running here all in a lather.”

  “Ah.” Jun swallowed and cleared his throat. “My lord, the Bear Cub is dead.”

  “What?” Shichio rose to his feet so fast he knocked the table over. “Where? How?”

  Jun produced a small slip of paper from the pocket of his sleeve, pressed it on the floor with both hands, and slid it forward. Shichio snatched it up. In a tight, neat hand it read BEAR STRIPPED OF PELT TONIGHT. THERE IS NO MAN THE WIND CANNOT REACH.

  Shichio gave a triumphant cry, crushing the note in his fist. Images flashed in his mind: the whelp’s throat cut open; the whelp disemboweled; the whelp dead with an arrow in his eye. He couldn’t decide which method he liked best. It hardly mattered. He’d receive another note from the assassin soon enough, chronicling the details. In the meantime, though, he’d relish the moment.

  Before he knew it, the mask was in his hands. He couldn’t say how it got there. “Be gone,” he said to Jun. Even the most incompetent aide had his uses. It would be a shame to kill him for no better reason than to celebrate the Bear Cub’s demise.

  52

  Lightning struck like Raijin’s own fist, so close that the thunderclap shuddered every timber of the inn. The bolt threw a rhombus of white light through the open shoji, causing Daigoro’s bloody form to glow like a foxfire where it lay on the floor.

  In the next instant all was black, darker than it should have been even for an inn nestled deep in the pines in the dead of night. That instant of brightness made the ensuing darkness impenetrable.

  A lone figure stepped over the prostrated body. It opened Daigoro’s unresponsive mouth and forced a vile, poisonous liquid down his throat. Then, with fingertips striking as hard as hammers, it drove penetrating blows into vital nerve centers and pressure points. Each strike landed expertly, in precisely the right sequence, to ensure that the task was finished.

  It was the last blow that forced Daigoro to vomit. His body twitched and heaved, splattering the rain-slicked floorboards with poison and blood and counterpoison. Pain bent him into a fetal position. With one arm he clutched his aching belly, and with the other hand he pressed down on the seeping wound in his neck.

  Lightning flashed again, illuminating the little glass bottle that the figure astride him had emptied into his gullet. “What was that?” Daigoro groaned, his reeling eyes trying to focus on the bottle.

  “Antivenom,” said the shinobi crouching above him. “An old formula. We carry it often. Too easy to be cut on one’s own blade.”

  “No. I mean, what—what poisoned me?”

  His shinobi did not deign to answer, leaving Daigoro to piece things together himself. He recalled collapsing to the floor. That explained his throbbing forehead, but not the sharp pain in his throat bones. Something hard and thin had struck him there.

  A knife-hand strike. He remembered now. It was meant to crush his windpipe, to keep him from vomiting. And there was the vile taste a moment before, burning his tongue like fire. He’d been asleep, and he’d opened his eyes to see a shadow-clad figure above him.

  They’d struggled. Daigoro could still feel it: the panic of being entangled in his bedclothes. Pain rupturing through his right hand as he landed a punch. Poison raging through his guts like wildfire. He remembered the world slowing to a crawl. His senses took on the preternatural clarity of the dying. A hissing noise like an arrow in fli
ght, audible even over the wind and the rain. A glimmer of steel flashing past his face. A tiny thunk when it caught his assailant behind the ear.

  The shuriken wasn’t fatal. It had only driven the assassin back. Daigoro had finished the rest, grabbing the shuriken with his good hand and ripping it across his assailant’s throat. The wounds went numb where he’d cut his fingers on the shuriken. Venom. He remembered stumbling toward his cabin door, delirious. Then nothing.

  “You,” Daigoro said, his throat still burning with bile, “you saved my life.”

  “Yes,” said the shinobi. “Most uncautious. Should learn not to sleep so soundly.”

  Daigoro looked at the dead man sprawled at the foot of his bed. He recognized his face: another ninja, one of six he’d hired from the Wind. This one had been masquerading as Daigoro’s palanquin bearer. For three days Daigoro had traveled with him, even shared meals with him, and tonight he’d killed him.

  Daigoro struggled to his feet. The wind knocked him over twice before he managed it, and when he stiff-armed the doorjamb to steady himself, his right hand recoiled in pain. His fingers were broken again, the same ones Sora Samanosuke had broken in their duel. Hot lines of pain burned in his left hand too, across the palm and the pads of the fingers, everywhere the shuriken had left its mark.

  “What’s the time?” he said.

  “Time to flee,” said the shinobi. “This inn, no longer safe.”

  “No,” Daigoro said, frustrated with his inability to communicate. The attack, the poison, the shinobi’s violent curative, they’d conspired to beat his brain into something approaching drunkenness. “What I mean to say is, why were you in my rooms at this hour? How did you know to look for an assassin?”

  The shinobi grunted. “Sent message to Shichio. Confirmed assassination of Bear Cub. He responded with pleasure, not confusion. Only one explanation.”

  Daigoro stepped out on the veranda, hoping the cold rain whipping his face might also whip the fogginess from his mind. “How did you know?”

  “Didn’t. Shichio’s reaction proved it. From there, only a matter of waiting.”

  Daigoro tried to make out the shinobi’s face, but it was too dark. He was certain this was the shinobi he’d first spoken to—that lupine voice was unmistakable—but somehow he’d still never gotten a clear look at the man’s features. They’d traveled together for three days and three nights, but this one had always ridden ahead as a scout until sundown, and from sunrise onward Daigoro had always been confined to his palanquin. The Wind had chosen to disguise him as a junior emissary of Tokugawa Ieyasu, on the assumption that no one would molest even the lowliest lickspittle of such a powerful lord. Daigoro could not begin to guess how they’d stolen a palanquin bearing the triple hollyhock leaves of the Tokugawa, with uniforms and weapons to match. It was enough that the emblems were authentic, and that the six ninja in his employ were utterly fearless, even of the most powerful warlords in the empire.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Stupid question.”

  “I just wanted to thank you.”

  “The Wind is without name. I am of the Wind.”

  “Well, thank you anyway,” Daigoro said, choosing not to add, you stubborn son of a bitch. “For saving my life.”

  “Too early to be thankful. Now matters are worse.”

  “Why?”

  The shinobi looked at him as if Daigoro were holding his sword backward. “Well?” Daigoro said. “Am I wrong to think I’m better off now that my assassin is dead? Does that make me an idiot?”

  “We do not know how many Shichio has in our company. We do not know whether this one prearranged a second message to Shichio. We know nothing.”

  “Second message?”

  Even over the storm, Daigoro heard the ninja grumble. “No fool, your assassin. Must have anticipated a false report to Shichio. True confirmation of your death would be followed by a second message, verifying the authenticity of the first. A code phrase, something no one else could guess. I could have extracted it from him. You killed him too soon.”

  Daigoro didn’t like the way he said extracted. He didn’t like being blamed for defending himself either. What was he supposed to do, lie back and let his assassin go about his business?

  Even as these irritations crossed his mind, he also felt ashamed. Not only had he killed their only source of intelligence on the enemy, but he’d even managed to poison himself while doing it. He squeezed his left hand into a fist, mashing the open cuts in his palm. Let this be a reminder, he thought. You’re alone now. Self-pity and impetuous action are luxuries you can no longer afford.

  In his mind he could hear the same warning, the same lesson, summed up in a single word: patience. He missed Katsushima more than ever.

  “So what now?” he said.

  “You already know.”

  There was that look again, as if Daigoro were a wayward schoolboy. “All right,” Daigoro said, “I’ll work that one out for myself. You said Shichio was happy to hear I’m dead. That means the one you sent to confirm my death must have reported back to you already. When?”

  “Last night.”

  A rush of righteous anger hit Daigoro like a slap. This man—his hireling, bought and paid for—had let an entire day slip by with no mention of the threat on his master’s life. No samurai should brook such an offense; Daigoro had the right to behead a servant just for spilling his tea.

  But Daigoro had given up his station. His highborn instincts would not serve him anymore, and in any case, this shinobi had taken heroic efforts to keep Daigoro alive. Had the man slept last night, or had he kept a vigil just like tonight, waiting for the assassin to strike? Daigoro assumed the latter—and if he was right, then this hireling of his was forged out of pure steel. As the company’s outrider he would have covered twice the distance of the palanquin bearers he scouted for. He’d been riding hard for three days in a row, he hadn’t slept in two nights, and not only did he show no sign of tiring, but he was the one saving Daigoro’s life, not the other way around.

  “Last night,” Daigoro muttered absently, working out the logistics in his head. Traveling by palanquin was cumbersome. As of last night they’d been two days on the road—less than a day’s ride on a fast horse. If the shinobi’s messenger could report from Kyoto in that time, then Shichio’s second message, the one confirming Daigoro’s death, could have reached him in the same time. That meant the second message was already at least a day overdue, and maybe two. “Oh, hell,” Daigoro said. “Shichio already knows his assassin failed.”

  A mute nod.

  “And that means more assassins are already on our heels.”

  “Amateurs. The Wind would already have killed you.”

  Daigoro found it hard to take comfort in that. He was a novice at this game himself. Shichio wasn’t. If he knew his newest henchmen were not up to the task, he had only to send them in greater numbers.

  “We’ll have to abandon the palanquin,” Daigoro said. It was too slow, and even if it were not, Shichio’s informants might have told him of it already. Shichio was no simpleton; as soon as he learned Daigoro rode not a horse but a sedan chair, he would understand why. It wasn’t enough for Daigoro to travel disguised; he needed complete invisibility. He was a runt who walked with a distinctive limp. His odachi was famous, and even those who knew nothing of swords could see it was too big for him. His tack alone was enough to give him away: Daigoro could not ride without the special saddle crafted by Old Yagyu, the one that accommodated his lame, wasted leg.

  The only way for Daigoro to conceal his size, his leg, his saddle, and his father’s sword was to box them up and keep them out of sight. A sedan chair was the perfect solution, and traveling under Tokugawa insignia afforded an extra degree of protection. To leave it behind was to abandon his best chance for speed and secrecy, but Daigoro could see no other choice.

  “To hell with it,” he said, trying to sound confident. “It was hot enough in that palanquin to boil
noodles. And my mare never cared for you anyway; she’ll be happy to have me back in the saddle.”

  He beckoned the shinobi into his rooms and closed the shoji behind them. It did nothing to silence the raging storm, but at least they wouldn’t get any wetter. They sat in the center of the bedchamber, farthest from the walls, where prying ears couldn’t hear them over the weather. “I wanted us to sail from the beginning. You overruled me. Why?”

  The shinobi said nothing; he only nodded toward the dead man lying on the floor.

  “You knew Shichio had an agent in your ranks?”

  “Knew it was possible. That was enough.”

  Daigoro looked at the body and shuddered. He’d contracted six men to deliver him to Izu in secret. At present he only could trust two of them. One had just saved his life. The other lay staring at the ceiling, his throat ripped open, proof positive that the other four could also be Shichio’s. Daigoro’s savior had anticipated that possibility, and that was why he’d refused to sail. Maybe the palanquin allowed him to keep his charge boxed up and safe, or maybe being trapped aboard a ship would have left him fewer avenues of escape if fortune turned against him. Daigoro didn’t need to understand his reasoning. It was enough to know that his last remaining shinobi was trustworthy, and that Shichio’s knives might be in the very next room.

  But if the other four ninja were Shichio’s men, wouldn’t they have struck by now? Daigoro almost voiced the question, but then thought better of it. He was not like Shichio. Deceit did not come naturally to him, and that left him defenseless. Better to trust no one than to risk another attack. “We must leave the rest of your clansmen behind,” he said.

  “At last your mind is clear.”

  Daigoro was hardly accustomed to being spoken to in this way, least of all by a hired hand, but in this case he was proud he’d finally gotten something right. “Like it or not, you’re the one man I have to trust. And since neither of us is a traitor, we can travel by sea again. Unless . . . no. It’s too late for that, isn’t it?”