Deadly Wish: A Ninja’s Journey

by Sarah L. Thomson

  This might be the mission where I found out.

  “Kata,” Master Ishikawa said, laying an emerald delicately down on his desk and turning to me with a smile. “So pleasant to have you home again. Show me, please.” He held out a hand. I straightened up, reached into my pocket, slipped out the silk bag, and handed it to my employer. Then I waited to see if he would tell me to go.

  He did not, and I carefully kept all trace of pleasure from my face. He had no idea that the bag I’d given him did not contain all of Sakuma’s jewels. Moreover, he was going to let me see exactly what I had stolen. Not all of Master Ishikawa’s thieves got that privilege.

  I had spent two years working for Master Ishikawa, seeking him out not long after I’d first arrived in the Takedas’ city. He’d been impressed that I’d managed to locate his home, make my way inside it, and leave two of his bodyguards helpless on the ground. Instead of killing me for my presumption, he’d offered me a job.

  I’d proved valuable.

  Sometimes I knew what I was stealing or why I was sent to make my way into a samurai’s mansion or report on a courtier’s movements. Sometimes I only knew that a mysterious parcel or a bit of information was something my master needed.

  Of course, I would never pester Master Ishikawa for information that he did not offer. But it was always satisfying to know why I was doing the work I did—in this case, what that greedy fool Sakuma had that was so valuable I’d spent weeks as the maidservant Raku, scrubbing floors and vegetables and waiting for Captain Mori to arrive.

  Master Ishikawa untied the drawstrings that held the bag closed. He glanced inside and slipped out the scroll.

  Careful to keep the surprise off my face, I watched. I knew there were other things of value in that bag; why did he seem so interested in a scrap of rice paper?

  Ishikawa brushed the jewels on his desk aside as if they were nothing compared to what he now held. He smoothed the scroll flat.

  It was not a priceless piece of calligraphy or a famous painting. The surface of the paper was covered with faint, scribbly lines and tiny notations. An irregular shape, like a crescent moon scrawled with a quick and careless brush, took up most of the center. Wavelike blue lines crisscrossed the background.

  Master Ishikawa glanced up at my baffled face.

  “You’ve never seen anything like this?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. I don’t imagine you have. It’s a map, child.”

  My forehead wrinkled. A map? I knew what maps looked like. Where were the cities, the roads, the castles?

  Master Ishikawa smiled. “A map of the ocean. A map of the other lands. The territory of the Ming emperor, that’s here. Choson over here. The Ryukyu kingdom. The islands to the south where spices grow. You see?”

  I didn’t see. A map of … the ocean? He might as well have said a map of the sky. How could restless water be mapped? And why would anyone want to?

  Then I felt my eyes widen. A map of what lay across the ocean? A map of the lands over the sea?

  Since I’d arrived in this city, I’d seen ships dock, carrying goods from distant kingdoms and empires. I’d watched men in the street who spoke with strange accents and wore foreign robes. Even so, I’d vaguely imagined the places that they came from swirling like clouds on the horizon, swallowing up travelers foolhardy enough to venture far from shore.

  Now I’d stolen a map of these distant realms, as if they were no more outlandish than the domain of the warlord next door? I tried to get another glimpse, but Master Ishikawa was rolling the scroll back up, looking satisfied and, oddly, a bit regretful at the same time.

  “You can’t imagine what a ship captain will pay for a map like this. Well done, Kata. You are a valuable agent, indeed. In a way, it’s a pity that the jewels I was offered for you were even more valuable.”

  Someone dropped down from the ceiling, landed just behind me, and seized me around the throat.

  I’d allowed myself to believe that I was useful to my master, useful enough to let down my guard in his presence. I’d been weak enough to feel that, after a long mission, I’d come home.

  I’d been a fool, in short. And now a rock-hard arm was tightening around my neck. Black and purple spots were starting to blot out my vision.

  I gripped the arm and the shoulder connected to it, dropped to one knee, and sent my attacker flying over my head, nearly into Master Ishikawa’s lap. He moved deftly aside, and she rolled and was up again only seconds after she had hit the ground. I recognized the face, teeth bared in a snarl like an angry dog’s.

  Fuku? Why had a ninja from my past dropped out of nowhere—no, out of a trapdoor I’d had no idea existed—to attack me?

  Why was for later. Escape was for now.

  But the door opened to reveal two more armed girls, and another was emerging from behind the screen in the corner, and Master Ishikawa laid a gentle and protective hand over the scroll on his desk, that mild and regretful look still on his face, as I dove to one side to avoid Fuku’s next charge. They were all on me before I could rise—a knee in my back, a hand gripping my hair, a heavy weight across my legs, a foot stamping down hard on my right wrist.

  I caught a glimpse of Jinnai’s shocked face in the doorway before Fuku’s fist, heavy with the small iron weight she had gripped in it, smashed down hard on the side of my head. The uncut jewel inside my mouth burst out and rolled across the floor as darkness fell heavily over me.

  I woke inside a cage.

  It took some time for me to realize it. At first, all I knew was that I was lying curled up on my side somewhere dark and hot. The arm that I lay on had gone numb. And I ached all over, particularly my head.

  I tried to touch the painful, throbbing lump on my temple, and that’s how I discovered my hands were bound behind me. My ankles were tied together as well, and a gag had been shoved into my mouth.

  I’d gotten out of bonds like this before. The first step was to get my hands in front of me. It would be more difficult with one arm asleep, but not impossible. I arched my shoulders and began to slide my hands down the curve of my back, but stopped at once. The cord about my wrists had also been looped around my throat. It was slack enough to give me no trouble as long as my hands stayed where they were, in the small of my back. But any struggle to get free meant I’d lose the chance to breathe.

  A ninja out of legend would have turned herself into smoke and slipped out of her bonds, leaving the knots untouched behind her. Since I was not a legend, I painfully and cautiously wriggled to my other side, to let the blood flow back into my cramped arm. Then I lay still and tried to use my eyes and ears to figure out where I was.

  The answer was: on the bottom of a bamboo cage, perhaps three feet square, covered by thick, rough cloth. Enough light filtered through the coarse weave to let me know that the sun had risen outside.

  The cage, with me in it, was moving. I was rocked and bumped and jolted, motion that, combined with the throb in my head, was making me sick to my stomach. I could hear the creak and clunk of wooden wheels and the plodding footsteps and occasional snort of oxen.

  So now I knew where I was—on a cart.

  I could guess where I was going.

  I breathed slowly and deeply through my nose, trying to stifle the urge to throw up, which would only make everything worse. Cautiously I wiggled my shoulders, flexed my ankles, tensed and relaxed the muscles of my legs and neck and back. It was all I could do to ensure that, when I reached my destination, I would be capable of movement.

  And I waited.

  After a while, the cart stopped. My cage was lifted. Swaying, I was carried for a distance and then dropped onto a packed dirt floor.

  The cover was pulled off.

  I sat up with care, blinking. I was in what looked like, and smelled like, a barn. No animals were here now, though. I recognized one of the girls who had carried me—Tomiko. The other three were strangers to me. None of the four looked my way.

  Fuku had not lowered hers
elf to the servant’s task of carrying a bamboo cage. She entered the barn now and came to crouch by the bars, peering between them to be sure her prisoner was still alive. Then she nodded and got up without a word, gesturing to the others to follow her.

  So Fuku was in charge of this mission. She must be pleased about that. Indeed, I could tell that she was; I had not grown up alongside this girl without being able to read her expression perfectly well. I’d learned to stay alert for the foot that might trip me, the handful of dirt slipped into my bowl of millet porridge, the needle tucked into her collar that might be slipped out to jab me during a sparring match.

  Now excitement was bubbling just below the surface of the face she was trying hard to keep calm and professional. Vanity had always been one of Fuku’s weaknesses. It was something to keep in mind.

  The five ninjas filed out, shutting the door behind them and leaving me alone in the almost darkness.

  Time passed.

  When the door slid open again, it was Tomiko who entered, with another girl I did not know at her side. She carried a bowl of rice with vegetables and another of water, which she set beside the cage as she knelt to my level.

  “Kata? If you don’t try to kill me, I’ll untie your hands so you can eat.”

  I hesitated, and then twisted cautiously around so that my bound hands were near the bars. Tomiko reached in and hastily slashed the cords that bound me, pulling back quickly enough that, slow and stiff as I was, I had no chance to seize her hand or her knife.

  Clumsily I worked the cords off my wrists and from around my neck, pulled the gag out of my mouth, and reached through the bars for the water. I sipped it carefully. Coolness slid down my throat and the remaining nausea eased out of my stomach. New strength flowed through my veins. Tomiko and her companion had left by the time the bowl was empty.

  I freed my feet and got hold of the bowl of food, cold but welcome. I shoveled the meal down greedily and then patted the pockets of my jacket to see what had been left to me. No weapons, of course. Ninjas trained as my captors had been would not have missed anything I might have used to defend myself.

  But my hands and feet were still deadly enough, if I could get them ready for use. I began to work in earnest on loosening my cramped shoulders and rigid back.

  Before I had made much progress, the door to the barn slid open again. A small upright figure stood outlined against the light.

  The one I had been expecting.

  Madame Chiyome.

  FIVE

  Nothing about her had changed in the two years since I had left her school. She still held herself perfectly straight, yet not at all stiff. Her hair, white and gray, was gathered loosely at the back of her neck. Her kimono was gray, too, sober in design, rich in material. The heavy silk flowed like water about her, beginning to move a moment after she took her first step, continuing to swirl a moment after she came to a stop by my cage. Her eyes were alert and pitiless as she studied me, crouched behind bars.

  In the past two years, I’d thought, more than once, that Master Ishikawa had taken me on because he could see that I was not afraid of him. Perhaps that had intrigued and impressed him. Very few people could meet the most notorious thief in all the coastal provinces without quailing.

  Master Ishikawa did not know that I’d spent twelve years of my life in a school run by a mistress who made him look like a kindly grandfather. Who could fear the worm once she’d faced the dragon?

  Fuku had followed Madame into the barn. Madame gave me another careful, narrow-eyed look, as if I were a horse she was thinking of buying, and she had no intention of being cheated. Then she nodded once to Fuku, who bowed and departed.

  That girl had improved in self-discipline since I’d left Madame’s school. Something else to keep in mind.

  “You have a decision to make,” Madame Chiyome said.

  I did? I was a prisoner in a cage. Prisoners did not usually get to make decisions.

  “My client will be here to speak with you soon,” Madame went on. In the warm, stuffy dark of the barn, her voice had an odd quality, so clear and calm I felt as if I should be able to see by it, as if she’d lit a paper lantern with her words.

  I’d known that Madame would not be taking me back to the school where I had grown up under her sharp eye. I had no place there anymore. Was she going to return me to the man she’d sold me to? I’d escaped from his castle and his service the very night she’d taken his string of gold coins into her hands.

  “You have something in your possession that belongs to her,” Madame went on.

  Madame’s client was not the warlord I’d briefly belonged to, then. I felt coldness gather at the base of my throat and around my heart.

  “You can return her possession freely, or you will be killed. That is your choice to make.”

  It wasn’t much of a choice.

  “It’s Saiko,” I said, my voice a husky rasp, my mouth still sore from the gag. “Saiko is your client.”

  I didn’t need to make it into a question. Madame didn’t treat it as such. From her face, you would not know that I’d spoken.

  “I am telling you this now so that you can think over what you will do,” she continued. “And I will add one more thing for you to keep in mind. This is simply a mission for me. For my client it is more than that. She is not one to accept being robbed of what she feels should be hers. If you choose death, it will not come quickly.”

  She turned, her kimono swirling like a whirlpool. Fuku was there to slide the barn door open and to close it after her.

  Rubbing my fingers together to warm and loosen them, I slipped a hand inside my jacket to untie the cords that held a pocket shut. Inside the pocket was the object Saiko believed I had stolen from her.

  Carefully, I drew it out and held it cradled in my hands.

  A pearl encircled by a band of gold the width of a thin willow twig, it nearly glowed in the dimness, even pulsing a little as if with its own eerie heartbeat. Whoever had searched me while I’d been unconscious had not taken this. They’d only been looking for weapons; perhaps they had missed it. Or, more likely, Saiko had given orders that anything valuable in my possession should not be touched. As far as she was concerned, the fewer people who knew the pearl existed, the better.

  The little white orb looked simple enough, valuable perhaps, but nowhere near worth the heap of jewels I’d glimpsed on Master Ishikawa’s table. Nowhere near worth the trouble of kidnapping me and dumping me at Saiko’s feet.

  But of course the pearl wasn’t what Saiko wanted, not really.

  What she wanted was the demon’s soul inside it.

  I rolled the jewel lightly between my fingertips, feeling the cool smoothness of the pearl, the slick softness of the gold. Did I imagine a faint, deep chuckle, like stone grinding on stone, almost too distant to hear?

  Hurriedly, I stowed the pearl away in my pocket once more, tying the cords tight.

  I’d been the guardian of the pearl for two years now, ever since Saiko’s little brother had thrust it into my hand, the silk-white surface of the jewel warm with his own blood. In that time, I’d made four wishes, calling on the power of the demon trapped inside.

  Each wish had brought that demon a step closer to freedom.

  Since I’d escaped from the warlord who had owned me—who happened to be Saiko’s uncle—I’d never made a wish. I’d kept the pearl safe, and slowly its tendency to call forth ghosts and demons wherever I went had died down. Oh, now and then something was stirred to wakefulness and hunger by the presence of the demon in my pocket—a kappa lurking in the shallow water beneath a bridge, a ghost moaning from a well, the neko-mata last night. But those stirrings were rare, and becoming rarer. I’d thought I had the demon in check.

  There were two wishes left, or perhaps one. And once they were gone, the demon would have its freedom.

  It would also have the soul of the last person to make a wish.

  I’d heard the demon in my mind. I’d seen the forms that i
t could take. And I had no wish at all to set it loose upon the world or to hand it over to Kashihara Saiko.

  For a time we’d been … certainly not friends. Allies, perhaps. At least twice she’d saved my life. I’d come fairly close to trusting her.

  That had been a mistake. But not as serious a mistake as underestimating her.

  Saiko had depths to her that made Madame look shallow. Whatever happened, I could not risk letting her get her hands on this pearl.

  I could spend a fifth wish. I could free myself from this cage. But if I did that, there was a good possibility I would free myself from my soul as well.

  So I made no wish. I had another ploy to try first. It had already been set in motion—at least I hoped so. To see if it would work, all I had to do was wait.

  I spent the next day in the cage and was fed twice more. Another night fell, and Saiko did not arrive. Apparently I was being given time to make my choice.

  Before the cracks in the barn walls began to brighten with daylight for a second time, someone pushed the door open again, just enough for a slim body to slip through. Footsteps, very nearly silent, padded toward my cage. Something was set down on the ground. The footsteps retreated and the door closed once more.

  I put a hand through the bars and groped about for the object that had been placed there. My fingers touched a soft, quilted bag with something slender and hard inside.

  Lockpicks.

  It is quite awkward to kneel inside a cage and open a lock on the outside. Total darkness does not make it any easier. I was glad I’d had a very good teacher.

  Once I’d gotten the lock undone, I crawled out of the cage, stood, and stretched. Oh, the relief of a straight spine! Then I made my way to the barn door. It had been left open a crack. I put my ear to it and listened.

  I heard a thump, like a stiffened hand meeting a solid mass of flesh and bone. Then a heavier thump, like a body falling to the ground. A voice from the other side of the door spoke my name, so quietly that even a termite dozing in its hole would not have stirred. “Kata?”