by Al Ewing
This is what it was to see Nanashi No running across the plain.
At first glance, he might seem a paragon of humanity, but even a brief glimpse would confer a sense of dismay upon the observer, a sickly feeling creeping down the spine and into the belly, a terrible understanding that something was unaccountably, irredeemably wrong. Nanashi No felt no pain and did not tire. He was the strongest and the fastest man from ocean to ocean. To watch such a man sprint, covering miles by sun and moon, never slowing, never stopping... to watch such a feat might impress at first, until you notice the sickly, clammy pallor of the flesh, the fixed intensity of the eyes, the bare feet never stumbling or tripping even on sharp stones or deep snow. Admiration was often the first emotion when faced with the Cold Ronin - an admiration that quickly curdled to unease and then to horror. For a man who never sleeps, never tires, never stops is not truly a man, particularly when there is still a dark stain tracing from the corner of his lips, from a grotesque appetite fulfilled.
In such a manner, Nanashi No crossed the gap between Oda Nobunaga's territory in the Omi Province and Uesugi Kenshin's camp in the Kaga Province in a matter of days, stopping only to evade confrontation with military forces. When he stopped running, there was no catching of breath, no panting - he simply became as still and silent as the corpse he appeared to be. It was in this state of stillness and silence that he approached the boundary of Uesugi Kenshin's camp.
The Cold Ronin stood on the thin branch of a tree, perfectly balanced and unseen, hidden from sight by a curtain of fragrant blossom, and simply watched. He watched the patterns of the guards - as they walked and waited and crisscrossed one another, when they came on and off their duties, where their gazes fell - for a full day and a full night. Then he left his perch to move and walk through them as though they did not exist, without sound or trace of his passing - his sharp mind and sharper wits allowing him to snake between the watchful gazes of thirty men charged to guard their camp on pain of shame and suicide as though he had no more substance than a ghost.
Once inside the camp, he moved from shadow to shadow, never in the light for more than an instant. He went unnoticed and unremarked upon, although he was a legend throughout the provinces - even those who caught him directly within their field of vision could not afterwards be sure they had seen anything at all, so swift was his passing. Was it a cat streaking across the ground, or a falling blossom wafted by the wind? Surely it was not the Cold Ronin.
And thus, in the fullness of time, through patience and an unquestionable skill in the ancient art of the ninja, the science of walking undetected and unguessed, Nanashi No found himself laying like a wolf upon the roof of a small wooden hut built to serve as an outhouse for the officer class, sprawled in such a fashion as to be quite invisible to all passers. In this manner he passed a day, a night, a day, a night and the best part of another day, until the sun was low and angry red on the horizon. During this time, he neither moved nor breathed - for in addition to his other skills and talents, the Cold Ronin possessed the ability to still his heart and his breath and in this state to simply allow time to pass, cool and inert, like a pretty-patterned snake coiled upon a stone in the noonday heat.
At the end of his long vigil, he heard a voice - clearly aged, racked with coughs and spasms, shaken, but with a ragged air of absolute authority and cold command, giving orders to a much younger, stronger, but less sure-sounding voice.
This, then, was Uesugi Kenshin. Nanashi No noted with a certain grim satisfaction that he had been correct - the old man perhaps had six months left in him, if that. But for those six months he would be a formidable force and one best not underestimated. Perhaps Oda Nobunaga had been right to hire his services.
Nanashi No waited, without moving even the muscle of his heart, without taking a single breath, as the old voice finished its business with the younger voice, and strong footsteps marched into the distance. The door to the hut opened slowly, creaking and groaning on its hinges as though pushed by an aged, withered claw. There was the sound of sandals shuffling on wooden slats, another racking cough that shook the roof of the hut on which the Cold Ronin lay, and then the unmistakable sound of urine falling through a hole in the floor into a pit that had been dug previously.
Nanashi No moved quickly, rolling silently across the roof, catching its edge with the palms of his hands and swinging down into the hut. Uesugi Kenshin had time to turn his head before the Cold Ronin reached out his hands to clasp the throat, tightly but firmly, blocking the blood flow to the brain and compressing the windpipe enough not to allow Uesugi Kenshin a chance to scream. The touch was delicate - no bruises would be left behind - and yet, the grip was unbreakable. Uesugi Kenshin's withered fingers scrabbled at Nanashi No's hand, but the old man could not even tear the Cold Ronin's skin with his jagged nails, and within seconds his struggles ceased as the life left him, his brain deprived of the blood it needed to survive. Nanashi No let go and danced backwards, swinging himself up to his place on top of the outhouse, and was back in position before the body even hit the ground.
The Cold Ronin waited, inhaling the scent of ordure and micturation that was the natural accompaniment of death, as the bowels loosened and disgorged their unclean secrets - but then, it was an outhouse, and there was little notable difference overall. He waited as the sun continued to sink, wondering if his moment for escape would come before the old man was discovered. Then he heard the return of the young man's footsteps, walking at first, then running, as he shouted the name of his commander. He listened to the sounds of grief, the thunder of similar footsteps as other lieutenants and familiars came to gaze on their dead lord, and especially to the pronouncements that Uesugi Kenshin's heart had simply given out, that there were no signs of violence, that he had simply died of old age there in the outhouse.
Nanashi No resisted the urge to sigh. As though one as strong as Uesugi Kenshin would submit so readily to the bony finger of death without completing the task he had set himself! It was clear that Uesugi Kenshin's plans for conquest lay as dead as he, that his heirs and second-in-commands would be unable to perform the duties set them if they so easily clung to comforting fables instead of looking at the truth directly in front of their eyes. Oda Nobunaga had been correct. He would become the supreme power within Japan.
The Cold Ronin waited as the hours passed, until the hour of midnight. Uesugi Kenshin lay in state in one of the nearby tents, and the heart had vanished from the camp. Where Nanashi No had needed to watch the patterns of the guards for a day and a night to gain entrance to the camp, he barely had to muster the smallest effort to escape unnoticed, and was soon in the trees beyond the camp's furthest edge with none the wiser.
But Nanashi No knew, and the knowledge was bitter as poison to him. He had cravenly murdered a strong man in order to help a weaker one rise to power. He had slaughtered a man in the most ignoble circumstances possible. Moreover, he knew that the story would spread - if not from the lips of Uesugi Kenshin's forces, then from his opponent, Oda Nobunaga, who would allow the legend of the Cold Ronin to bolster his own.
Almost unconsciously, Nanashi No set off to the east.
Better for the Cold Ronin to remain a legend, rather than for more power-hungry men to break the blissful solitude of Nanashi No. And better that Nanashi No should himself disappear - board a boat and cast himself into the arms of the wide Pacific, with only his sword as a reminder of what he had once been. The Japan he knew was ending, and Nanashi No would end with it. When his storm-tossed boat finally reached whatever land lay on the other side of the great ocean, another man would disembark, more suited to the new world he found himself in, armed with a sharp sword from a far-off land to keep his blessed solitude.
Nanashi No, who would soon be no one at all, smiled a peaceful smile as he watched the blossom float from the trees. And then he walked towards the sea, O Best Beloved, and out of all stories forever.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Killing Man
...but that was long ago, and far away.
The man with the broken nose was named Albert Gregory Morse, and he was indeed a boxer - he'd been a boxer since he was nine, after a childhood spent scrapping in the streets and generally getting in the kind of trouble that would slowly wend its way down to the prison gates as the years went by. He was a social worker's poster-boy, grown up in a house with an alcoholic father and a sickly, underweight mother, and three other kids younger than him who needed feeding and clothing. But he never saw a social worker, of course - in those days slipping through the cracks was even easier than it is now, and besides, he didn't need some fey twat from the council to set him right. Albert Morse had the gym, the circle of tough men who lived by coded violence, who would ritually try to kill each other through the morning and then go to the pub on the corner for lunch and stand each other pints, all malice forgotten, who would let him watch the fights and punch at the heavy bag and keep the place clean for cash-in-hand. Who provided the path to his salvation. Who allowed Albert Gregory Morse into the Ring.
The Ring was a way to keep his family going, and to have a little pride as well. He was a practical lad, and sweeping up was as good a way of making money as any, but with a dustpan in his hand he was nobody. On Saturday night, slamming his gloved fist into the face of some local tough who thought he was tough enough, breaking his nose and his jaw and sending him crashing down to the mat like a fallen tree, the numbers echoing like prayers in a cathedral as the crowd cheered for Albert Morse, he was somebody. He had a name. And even when it was his turn to tumble down, struggle to rise and finally collapse through pain and exhaustion and the ringing of his head as the number ten sounded around the hall - well, he'd given a good fight. The crowd knew he was a tough man to beat, and there was another fight in a couple of nights. Albert Morse felt no shame at being beaten in the Ring.
Albert Morse was often beaten. He was a good fighter, unskilled but with a rough, merciless enthusiasm for despatching weaker opponents, but a stronger fighter who could stand his sledgehammer right long enough would see the obvious holes in his defence and soon Albert would be eating the mat again. Albert accepted this. Every fight won was another purse, another week of meat, school, new shoes, kitchen appliances and a little whisky to keep the old man quiet, but even losing a fight brought money in. Being knocked half to death in the Ring was a lot better than working in a factory, he figured, and he could still sweep up in the gym for extra money during the week when he wasn't training, and with six mouths to keep fed and clothed, that was a mercy.
Like all teenagers, he was untouchable, unstoppable, unbeatable - but even at an amateur level, boxing is all about being touched, stopped and beaten. When he was not quite twenty-two, a doctor told him that if he took another six months of punches to the head, he'd be a vegetable for the rest of his life. Doctor Sengupta was not a man known for his tact, so when he took Albert's dreams away from him with a brutal frankness usually only encountered in hanging judges, it's perhaps not surprising that Albert reacted with his fists. Doctor Sengupta's nose and jaw were broken, along with two of Albert's knuckles, and when the bandages came off he was no longer welcome at the gym.
He made the local papers - the front page, this time, not the sport - with an editorial tying the incident into supposedly spiralling waves of Mod versus Rocker violence, a personal grievance of the editors that was already six or seven years out of date. The race angle was mercifully unexplored, although in Albert's neighbourhood that might well have won him as many friends as enemies.
So Albert Morse was rewritten as a tearaway, a hoodlum, a violent young offender, and in this capacity he was splashed all over the local press. He was vicious, and violent, and he did solve his problems by inflicting pain, all this is true - but he was bound by the Ring, by rituals and codes, his violence channelled for so long into a structure that, if not quite moral, at least followed recognisable rules of engagement. Of course, left alone, it was only a matter of time before this ingrained code degraded and his brutal personality led him into the path of an old lady out too late at night with too much money, to the courts, and to Wormwood Scrubs, in that order.
But he was not left alone.
His violence, his code, his need for money and most of all his need to appear a hero, if only to himself - all of these drew the attentions of the organisation known as Military Intelligence 23.
The first time the grey-suited man arrived at the Morse household, Albert assumed he was another reporter and told him to piss off. The grey-suited man was an ex-drill-sergeant promoted to MI-23 recruiter named Selwyn Hughes, and he knew how to deal with the likes of Albert Morse. Without blinking, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a short iron truncheon, and swiftly broke two of Albert's ribs, before kicking the lad in the teeth hard enough to knock out a molar and telling him to shut his horrible trap and listen. After that, Albert thought he must be a copper, but he did listen, and what he heard interested him enough that when he came out of the hospital he made his way to the Tower with the other tourists and asked the old lady selling the souvenirs if she'd seen his Uncle Dee nosing about. This was a contact protocol that new recruits were encouraged to follow.
It will surprise nobody to learn that 'Uncle Dee' was a reference to Dr John Dee, who had first attempted to study 'the dead who walk' in the reign of Queen Bess, although it was not until late in the reign of King James that the organisation that would become MI-23 was set into motion. Albert Morse knew none of this, and made little attempt to learn in later life; what interested him was the job as it stood in 1973, a means of getting his fists dirty for Queen and Country against things that go bump in the night, a career straight out of a Hammer horror flick, and one that'd pay enough to keep his whole family fed, clothed and schooled. It sounded too good to be true, and to begin with there was no indication that it wasn't. Who believed in monsters in this day and age, after all?
Despite his scepticism, Albert Morse settled in quickly, spending most of his time performing small tasks such as breaking the legs of journalists who'd got a little too close to something they shouldn't have, or putting the frighteners on old ladies who were talking too loudly about things they should've kept to themselves. It was nasty work, but Albert Morse found himself surprisingly untroubled by conscience. He didn't enjoy it - not exactly - but it was work that had to be done for the sake of the Crown, and Morse was a practical man. He knew that he had to get his hands dirty one way or another. He was out of the Ring, banished from its clear structure, its rituals, its codes of honour and law, and now he had to use his fists where he could. MI-23 was not the Ring. But it would have to do.
By his twenty-fifth birthday, Albert Morse had become very practical, and very tough. He was almost happy - as happy as he could be out of the Ring - and secure in his routine, in his duties, in what was expected of him.
He did not believe in anything that he had not seen with his own two eyes.
On his twenty-fifth birthday, Albert Morse had his clearance level upgraded from code green to code yellow, and he was taken down to the dungeons underneath the Tower Of London, in the lower levels.
It was there that he saw his first werewolf.
Ten feet of muscle, growling in a cage, sniffing the air. Albert Morse moved his hand through the bars, laid it on fur that was rough and soft, the beast standing, growling, acknowledging one of its masters. Albert could have run then - run, screaming, bolting through the doors as others had done, desperately running and hiding in some dingy rented room, curling up in the corner and sobbing, retching up their guts until the men in the grey suits padded silently up their stairs with their silenced guns at the ready, silence their code and the punishment for those whose nerve broke. Kneel and face the window. I'm sorry it had to come to this - no, don't look, don't look. It'll all be over in a minute, son. You just close your eyes.
Albert could have run. But he didn't run.
Albert did not see a thing to fear, there in the cage.
&nb
sp; He saw a wonder.
The werewolf looked at him, eyes burning, glowing a brilliant blue, cocking its head. Under the coarse fur, muscles shifted. This was what Albert Morse had been chasing his whole life, without knowing it. This was power - vicious, violent, trammelled and restrained in flesh and muscle, coiled and waiting in the service of men. He took a deep breath, inhaling wolf, inhaling strength and fury.
The wolf growled, a long, rumbling bass note, and Albert felt it pass through the pit of his belly.
Behind him, Selwyn Hughes, code orange, smiled paternally. Albert turned, looked at him, eyes shining. He was breathless.
"What does it eat?" He swallowed, shaking his head. "What does it hunt, Mister Hughes?"
Mister Hughes told him, and after that there were no more thoughts of the Ring and the happy days of rules and boundaried violence. If the werewolf was everything Morse had always wanted to see in the world, then the zombies were everything Morse wanted to take out of it. Cold, dead men, dead physically, dead emotionally, hollow men walking amidst those who had life in them... and with their secret. The terrible secret of what animated them, what set them walking the world like clockwork toys, integrating with society, killing and feeding, the secret, forgotten program that instructed the dead-who-walk in their every action and reaction. The secret, sinister clockwork of the dead.
The clockwork that would end the world, if it was allowed to.
These secrets and others Albert Morse learned, his savage boxer's brain turned to something greater, his ugly talents shaped and honed. Selwyn Hughes had seen something special in the boy that day he'd smashed his face in and sent him away in an ambulance. Something in those hollow eyes that said - I can replace you. Let me.
Hughes was old, past his prime - he'd had one heart attack already, and his world was not a restful place. He knew that Morse had what it took to be code orange, the one man at the centre of the web of strangeness and charm that held civilisation back from an unimaginable abyss, so it might have the liberty of choking to death on poison or going to war for fresh water or any one of a million vastly preferable ends. He knew that Morse could stand where he stood, at the gates that separated humanity from the final end that passeth beyond all understanding, of which the legions of the dead-who-walk were only the part visible to us.