Cave of the Shadow Ninja: Part II

by David Parkin

  After the outburst had echoed through the open frame of the dojo, Sato straightened and held out a hand, signaling Toji and Ozo to stop fighting. Together, the three brothers took a seat on the floor, knowing too well what came after a tantrum like that.

  “Ichi,” Sato indicated with a cool and clean voice as he straightened his robes, “I am an oath-bound samurai. I have not broken the code I live by in forty-eight years. Please, tell me how I’ve offended your honor.”

  “It’s just,” Ichi said, already knowing he’d lost the argument, “if we were given these gifts, why aren’t we allowed to use them?”

  Quietly Sato turned and gestured to three glistening bamboo swords hanging on the wall behind him. “My sons,” Sato advised, as patient as the dozing sloths of the Rainland jungles, “your gifts are like your swords, you may not use them until your fundamentals are ready to wield them.”

  Toji opened his mouth but Sato cut him off. “And you won’t be ready to use them until you stop asking. First, you learn the meaning of honor then everything else falls into place.”

  “I stopped asking,” Ozo announced, proud of himself.

  “Pride,” Sato responded, “is just as bad, son.” Akiko watched the old man turn away to hide a smile as Ozo frowned behind him.

  Sato gazed toward his beautiful sword with the red scabbard resting on a rack on the back wall of the dojo. With respect, he approached and took the scabbard in his strong hands. “The sword,” Sato continued, holding the priceless item aloft, “is the only possession of a samurai. It is his master, his servant, his prisoner, and his jailer. Your gifts must be treated the same. One day, you will be known throughout the worlds, my sons, but you must remember, without your honor your gifts and your swords will mean nothing.”

  The phrase, which Sato delivered in such a loving way, caused Akiko’s pulse to skip as if it sensed the oncoming heartbreak. At the disturbance, Ozo shifted in his seat. He looked to his brothers who returned the glance suggesting they sensed it, too. Without a word, they nodded to Ichi, prodding him to say something.

  “She’s outside again,” Ichi interrupted. Quickly, their father turned to the corner of the dojo where the rice paper had been torn away, but Akiko had already gone.

  Over the years, the young daughter of Sato had gotten to know her brothers so well, she could recognize when they were reading her. What their father didn’t know was that the boys had been practicing their skills against his wishes for some time, showing off to their peers and endlessly tormenting their sister.

  “That’s enough for today,” Akiko heard Sato say as she ran through the fur trees and jumped the koi pond toward the wooden path. Flustered, Akiko miscalculated the jump and landed with her heel in the mud. She ran up the path, dodging through the spacious gardens and slipping behind a large stone altar toward a hidden spot in the far corner of the estate.

  Flanked by a large boulder, a waterfall, and the hanging branches of a maple tree, Akiko had taken great care to find and prepare a place hidden from sight where the sounds were muffled by falling water and her footfalls were softened by the gravel beneath her feet.

  With reverence, she kneeled before a stick of maple resting on a natural shelf behind the family altar. She had spent months fashioning the branch with care to resemble the shape and design of her father’s sword. Akiko bowed in the same manner she saw her father bow to his blade countless times before. Imitating his every move, she lifted the imaginary blade from the rock, took position, and began dueling with an invisible foe.

  This spot, this hidden place, had been Akiko’s one reprieve for years from her taxing life as the youngest girl in a household of men. She had escaped to this place a thousand times. It was hers to be what she had always dreamed.

  “Your sword and your gifts,” she quoted her father, “will be known throughout the world someday, but without your honor they are nothing.” After a moment of fierce dueling, Akiko sensed something that froze her in her tracks. Terrified, she turned quickly and hid her sword behind her back as Ichi, Toji, and Ozo appeared through the bushes.

  “So this is where you’ve been hiding, you little roach,” Ichi hissed. “You were smart to find it, but you can’t hide muddy footprints.” Akiko’s little heart broke as she looked to the mud that led them there still caked on the back of her slipper. Quickly, she turned to run but Ichi caught her sleeve and pulled the wooden sword from her hand. “What do you suppose Father would say about this?” he barked.

  “Father can’t tell me how to play with a stick!” Akiko bit back as her brothers surrounded her.

  “Father told you a hundred times,” Ichi said, “’men fight, women work.’ That’s the end of it.”

  Akiko grabbed for her sword, but Ichi was too quick. He pulled the stick from her reach and tripped her into the gravel.

  Moments before, Akiko’s heart had fluttered as she watched Sato make promises to her three brothers that she had always dreamed he would someday make to her. The heartache, sadly, had become customary.

  Since she was a very young girl, Akiko had eavesdropped on countless lessons, and the one thing he taught to all of his students, especially his sons, was to focus on their weaknesses first. In Akiko’s young mind, the one obstacle standing in her way of becoming a samurai, her greatest weakness, was her womanhood.

  Every time her brothers bullied her, Akiko tried as she might to stay strong; however, as she watched Ichi set her most beloved possession against the back of the altar and kick it to splinters, Akiko’s “weakness” took over, and the young girl’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Leave the swords to the samurai,” Ichi warned as he stepped over her.

  Behind him, Akiko got to her feet in defiance. “You,” she grunted through her tears, “are no samurai.”

  “And you,” Ichi bit back, “are nothing at all.”

  Without another word, Ichi and Toji walked away.

  Akiko looked down at the pieces of her broken sword scattered across the dark gravel. Ozo bent and picked up the pieces in an attempt to fit them back together before Ichi called to him and he turned and ran, leaving his sister to her dishonorable tears.

  Later that afternoon, as the sunset cast the Sato estate in a cherry blossom glow, Akiko stood in the garden across from the dojo, watching her father practice as he did each evening. She loved to watch him. Even at his age, the samurai’s grace and poise rivaled any fighter’s, or dancer’s, for that matter, in both worlds. The way his famous sword became a part of his arm and the lines he demonstrated were a beautiful sight to behold.

  Once Sato finished his routine, he sheathed his blade, tied it to his waist, and bowed to a shrine at the opposite end of the dojo.

  “Akiko”, Sato uttered, without having to look up, “what have I said about this dojo?”

  “Ichi broke my stick,” she accused spitefully as Sato approached her.

  The old man smiled as he sat on the wooden walkway beside her. “Brothers tease sisters,” he said sympathetically. “That’s been a tradition since time began.”

  “Just because it’s a tradition doesn’t make it right,” Akiko said, ever her confident self.

  Sato put a calm and loving hand on his daughter’s shoulder and brought her in close. “One day, my sweet daughter, you’ll understand,” he offered, trying his best to speak to her pain. “Until then, please go help your mother.”

  “I’m done with my chores,” she protested. “Tradition says nothing about a daughter watching her father train, does it?”

  “Yet,” Sato replied, “it says plenty about a daughter respecting her father’s wishes.”

  Once again, Akiko attempted to stay her lips, but after what Ichi had done, she was in the mood for a fight. “I’m fed up with you and your traditions,” she complained. “You’re Bushan’s ‘Golden Dragon!’ Why can’t you start your own traditions?”

  “Akiko!” The girl shrank back as her father straightened his shoulders and stared down at her in frustration. “Your clay
is dry,” he cursed as he looked to a statue of his father across the garden. Sato stood, calming himself. “I leave in the morning,” he said. “When I return, I hope to find a little girl who knows where she belongs.”

  “Don’t worry,” Akiko answered with an ever-wounded heart, “I’ve learned all I need to know about the samurai. I won’t ask you to train me again, Father.”

  “That’s a good girl,” Sato responded, shifting his tone in an attempt to soften the blow.

  Sato turned toward her, but Akiko turned away, and her pride refused to let her look back. “Maybe this time,” she continued, “when you return, you’ll be a father who knows where his daughter belongs.”

  Without another word, Akiko walked toward her mother’s kitchen. She was done crying. In her cold eyes, she had finally accepted that this, the greatest place in Bushan to become a samurai, was last place she could ever hope to do so.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Akiko,” Ichi fumed, “by the Ancestors, how long as it been?” After watching the green-clad Ninja knock him unconscious, the samurai’s mind spun with horrible images and terrifying thoughts as if the worst nightmares of each of those who came before him ran through his consciousness at once.

  Slowly, as the sound and sight of the green bamboo forest appeared like pinholes through his torment, Ichi’s brain began piecing together the events that had just transpired. Toji and Ozo on their backs, his father’s sword, the spinning lights, and the revelation of who it was he was hunting, too terrible to be true.

  Dishonor, Ichi thought as the stomach-churning memory of the thrown fistful of earth came back to him. To his dismay, Ichi had finally arrived back into consciousness.

  “Ichi!” Toji called from his knees as the oldest brother opened his eyes.

  The three of them were bound and tied in a row on the forest floor. The wind chimes were silent, the mirrors were gone, and the skulls in the trees were empty.

  “Are you okay?” Ichi begged his brothers as he opened his eyes and strived to lift his head.

  “All but my pride,” Toji returned, struggling against his ties. Ichi looked up to find their three swords planted in the ground ahead of them like gravestones.

  “Why were we spared?” Ozo questioned, “I don’t understand this.”

  “Perhaps we can ask the Ninja,” Toji suggested. “She’s just over there.

  “She?” Ozo asked, confused. “What’s happening?” When Toji saw the look of horror on Ozo’s face, he knew his little brother’s question was answered.

  After a deep breath, Ichi looked up to see a face he and his brothers had not seen since they were children. Akiko had shed her green camouflage in exchange for the traditional black pajama of the Ninja, gripping the hood and shozoko in her hand.

  “Is that . . .” Ozo squinted against the light of the setting sun, “sister?”

  “Don’t say that word like you know me, Samurai,” Akiko cut back. “You have no ‘sister.’” The three brothers shuddered against the woman’s tone.

  “What have you done?” Toji begged, his throat sounding as dry as each of their hearts.

  “Sato’s child!” Ichi cried out as spittle ran down his chin. “A Ninja, a thief, a liar, a murderer!”

  “Oni,” Akiko stated coldly. “He kidnapped Sato and charged me to trade the worms for his life. I had no choice. I’m here to save our father.”

  “By killing innocent men?” Toji demanded.

  “I’ve killed no one,” Akiko answered, keeping an even tone. “At least not of late.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Ozo’s voice quivered as he rocked against his ties. “I think I’m gonna retch.”

  “If you’re telling the truth,” Ichi said, coughing the blood from his throat, “you might as well give up now. When father learns of the disgrace you’ve become, he’ll die of shame. We’ll never stop hunting you.”

  “I’m not asking you to stop,” the Ninja said, as cold and serious as frostbite. “This is my quest and I am asking you to join me.”

  In the moments since his own sister had defeated him, Ichi tried to prepare himself for whatever she might say, but this was too much. His laughter quickly turned back to coughing.

  “Has your honor blinded you that much?” Akiko demanded. “Our father is in the hands of an evil man. That’s more important than affiliations!”

  “Father’s in trouble because you dishonored him,” Ichi uttered. Akiko’s color shifted slightly, a reaction only Ichi could see. The shift in her heart rate suggested she was struggling to keep her rage in check.

  “A samurai speaks of honor till his death,” she continued. “Yet when he’s scared, there’s no such thing.” Slowly Akiko lifted an accusing finger to her eyes, reminding Ichi of the dirt he had thrown in her face.

  “You blinded me,” Ichi said. “I blinded you.”

  “Yet you could still see,” Akiko answered.

  Ichi’s heart sank as Toji and Ozo looked at him, appalled.

  “Tell me,” Akiko asked, “why is it that it’s impossible for a daughter to bring honor to her home no matter what she does, but she can bring dishonor simply by running away?”

  Ichi scoffed. The question wasn’t worthy of an answer. By now, his clay pot had been reduced to ash amid the fire. There was no saving his chi now. This girl, in one instant, took that sacred bond from them all.

  “Then what I suspected is true,” Akiko answered her question for him. “After all this time, you three have yet to grow up.”

  The look of heartbreak in the Ninja’s eyes was, perhaps, her greatest insult. “How did she have the gall to be offended?” Ichi wanted to scream, to thrash, to tell the disgrace standing before him that her feelings were no different than a murderer’s demanding an apology for bloodying the knife he stuck in his victim’s back. He wanted to say that but he didn’t. Silence, he thought, at the request for resolution, was the biggest insult of all.

  Akiko looked them over a moment longer before she pulled the mask back over her head. “You keep hunting me all you want,” she said through a quivering voice. “But the only way to stop me is to kill your only sister.”

  “You said it yourself,” Ichi said. “We have no sister.”

  Ichi spotted the red pulse below her eyes, indicating the imminent arrival of tears before she leaped into the trees and disappeared without another word.

  “Come back, Ninja!” Ichi called, still straining against his ties. “Let’s see how well you fight without your cowardly toys!” Ichi growled as he pulled against the cords at his wrists until they snapped.

  Stammered by defeat, the samurai stood, pulled his sword from the ground, and ran after Akiko into the woods.

  “She’s gone!” Ozo called, slowing Ichi in his tracks.

  As the blue sky began to gray through the dense green trees, Ichi fell to his knees, letting the moist evening air settle over his wounds. “She’s gone,” Ozo repeated.

  “Not for long,” Ichi said.

  “He’s right,” Ozo realized as his eyes darted back and forth, sensing Akiko’s movements. “She’s injured. I can feel it in her step.”

  “Did you strike her?” Toji asked Ozo.

  “No,” Ozo responded, looking almost relieved to say it.

  “Ichi?” Toji turned to his brother.

  Traditionally, an injured foe was good news. It meant a slower mark and a stiffened opponent; however, if the injury was caused by dishonorable means, the code of the samurai stated that a hunter should call off his pursuit until his prey had sufficient time to heal. It was the only way to regain his honor.

  Ichi thought of his father. Why, he asked himself, why would he abandon them for her? How would he feel when he finds out what she has become? Ichi’s hate rose from the pit of his stomach.

  With the fire that engulfed his clay pot now dictating his every move, Ichi answered his brother. “No,” he whispered, keeping his eyes to the ground, “it wasn’t me.”

  “At least we have that,” Ozo off
ered with relief.

  “If you didn’t hurt her after you threw that . . .” Toji avoided the rest of the sentence, “it must have happened on the rim of the Glass Tomb. We’re within our honor to continue our pursuit.”

  Ichi stayed quiet as a tear fell from his cheek and landed on the edge of his sword, washing away a perfect circle from the smear of his sister’s blood across the steel.

  To be continued…

  PART III PREVIEW

  Patrick looked to Sendai before he stood and moved toward the outcropping. As they approached, a mass of freshly killed soldiers slowly came into view. Patrick stopped. His blood ran cold as he gazed upon the dozens of guardsmen lying motionless in the sun.

  “This is recent,” Sendai observed, staying close behind his friend. “Since this morning at most.”

  As Patrick looked over the dead, he noticed that each of their throats had been cut, many with their swords still in their belts. Sadly, the Wolfen was no stranger to sights like this, but something about it brought a sense of hollow terror into his gut.

  Patrick had seen these faces in the nightmares caused by the dark water. He had watched each of them die through the eyes of their killer. But how? Why? Then suddenly, he knew . . “You’re right,” Patrick said softly and coldly, “we need to go after the Ninja.”

  “Something on your mind?” Sendai asked delicately.

  “Have you ever met a witch?” Patrick asked.

  “No, Have you?” Sendai responded, his tone swelling with concern.

  “I . . .” Slowly, the Wolfen turned toward the black lake as the memory of a thousand horrors raced through his mind, “I think I just did.”

  Part III out on March 10th!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Parkin has been a writer and screenwriter for ten years. His graphic novel, The Devil is Due in Dreary was named by Crave Online as one of the top twenty comic books of the year in 2015 and is currently in development as a major motion picture. He has film and TV projects in various stages of development for many Hollywood production companies including Fox Television and Disney. He is also a writer and co-host for the fiction and audio drama podcast, The Junto Presents, available on iTunes and Stitcher.