by Nick Lake
Yes – there. Inside the man’s heart he felt the same flicker – not all around the body, for Shusaku did not drain to kill, he attempted to feed without murder. But there were ghosts in the ninja’s heart, yes. Taro reached out to them and shivered, as he understood something. They were not ghosts, not in a certain sense, anyway.
Shusaku kept them there, Taro realized. He thought the ninja had held the men he’d killed tight to him, drawn them into him, making his heart a tomb for his ghosts, feeding his own guilt.
All evil done clings to the body, Taro thought. It was something Shusaku had told him. But now it seemed to Taro that it was Shusaku who was clinging onto his evil, or what he thought was his evil – that Shusaku was inviting the dead to share his body, was killing himself with shame and guilt, wadding it into his heart as powder is wadded into a gun, with consequences that would be just as lethal, if slower. They were not haunting him. He was keeping them in him.
Taro reflected that if he survived this, he would need to tell Shusaku. To encourage him to let go of what he had done, and to set himself and his ghosts free.
Then he allowed himself to rise again, and he gazed down once more at the field of blood and at Lord Oda, a small figure now in the centre of it, frozen in an attitude of anger. He knew what to do now. He couldn’t use the ball to command another’s body, but he could move his own body, that was something even a child could do; and he didn’t need the ball to see ghosts, that was an ability that he had possessed all along.
I never needed the ball to defeat him, he thought with wonder. He could have killed Lord Oda from the other side of the battlefield, if only he’d been able to see how simple it was.
He prepared to re-enter his body, not wanting to because of the pain, but knowing that he would eventually have to, or be lost to the rain and the sea and the drifting clouds.
Before he did so, though, he let something click in his head and took control of his blood that was circulating in Lord Oda’s body – it was his, and so it was in his power to command. Momentarily he wondered whether Shusaku knew he had this power over him, over Taro – whether Shusaku had ever sensed his own life force in Taro and known it would still obey him. He wondered if any of the vampires knew. The consequences, the ramifications, were terrifying. . . He could tell Little Kawabata to jump off a cliff, because he had turned him, and his blood beat in the other boy’s heart.
Later he would ask Shusaku, and find out if he knew. If he did, then Taro was grateful – grateful that the older ninja had never used this ability to control him, even when he was behaving hotheadedly and stupidly.
Calmly he asked the flickering spirits within Lord Oda a question, and they answered him silently. He wondered why they had never rebelled before now, but he thought maybe Lord Oda’s spirit was too strong, was subduing them in there, and it took the spirit of the boy who had made their jailer a vampire to help them overcome their bounds.
He slid back into his body.
And then he asked his blood, and the blood of Lord Oda’s victims, to leave Lord Oda.
There was a moment of tense compression, a hollow moment, as when the diaphragm has expanded and air is just about to fill the lungs – then blood sprang from Lord Oda’s eyes and his ears and his mouth, and then a heartbeat later he exploded; blood was flung into the air with the force of a fountain, and it was pattering down, soft percussion on the ground and a gentle hiss on armour and blade, and it was one with the rain that Taro had called down with the ball, clear water and red blood mingling in the air, running together in the soft mud and coursing away in twisting rivulets, snakes of liquid that carried Lord Oda’s life away in all directions, in tiny particles, to end one day in the sea.
Lord Oda’s sword fell, and it would have struck Taro’s neck, only somehow Hiro had pulled away from the men holding him and he caught it, by the blade, the cutting edge sinking into his flesh, so that some of his blood joined Taro’s, and Lord Oda’s, and that of the men whom Lord Oda had killed.
For just a moment, Taro thought he heard voices, only they weren’t voices, they were people speaking somehow in his mind, only they weren’t speaking, they were simply conveying something of their essence as they left this plane of existence. He was aware, somehow, that one of the men who had helped him kill Lord Oda had been a peasant and a bandit, and that Lord Oda had torn out his windpipe with his teeth, in a wooden building in a forest – and that was just one of the stories he knew.
Holding tight to the ball, he closed his eyes. He heard Hiro shouting to the Ikko-ikki, telling them to help lift him, and he heard the clang and scrape of fighting, too – presumably the monks dispatching the last of the samurai.
Well, let them. Right now he just needed to sleep, and mend. There’d be plenty of time for looking at things later, and moving, and doing all the things that people do.
He’d hug Hiro. He’d go to Shusaku and tell him what he’d seen, tell Shusaku to forgive himself. He’d kiss Hana.
But all that would come later.
Later.
CHAPTER 74
KENJI KIRA COULD not believe his luck when he saw the girl run past him, through the trees. She hadn’t even seen him – she’d been so busy crying, which he thought was pathetic. She wasn’t armed either, and a small part of him regretted that he would have to do it like this. He would have liked some resistance.
Of course, she didn’t fail to see him just because she was crying. She wouldn’t expect to see him, would she? He was dead, after all. She’d killed him herself.
No. He would be the last person she would expect to see.
He would be the last person she would see.
Kenji Kira moved quietly through the trees. He had no sense of smell, now he was dead, and so he did not know if his clothes were giving off a foul odour. He thought they probably were. He had rotted, after all. His body had lain on the mountaintop for a month, he supposed – he’d seen the smoke from the biers the day after he escaped, and bodies were usually burned one month after death, on the first auspicious date.
One month of rot. His flesh when he’d returned to his body was loose, bruised-looking. After he’d travelled far enough from the monastery – leaving a monk dead on the ground behind him – he had stopped to examine himself. He had pressed his fingers into his left arm, and he had been surprised and horrified when the nails broke through the skin, and pushed through to the bone beneath – the consistency of his body was that of boiled rice.
At first he’d screamed. A deer had gone leaping off into the woods before him, and he had sunk to his knees. He’d escaped the battlefield in hell, he’d followed Taro out of death. But he had not escaped the corruption. Something inside his arm burrowed away from his probing fingers, something white and squirming, and he screamed and screamed and screamed.
He’d wanted to be stone, he’d wanted to last forever. He’d always feared this stinking mess that was death.
But then, as he kneeled on the forest floor, a thought had come to him.
He’d pressed his fingers into his flesh – right into his flesh – and it hadn’t hurt. Surely it should have hurt? But then, he was a living thing in a dead body. He wasn’t sure if any of the usual rules applied.
Experimentally he pushed his fingers in farther, seized a handful of muscle and fat and skin.
And he pulled.
There was no pain.
Now he stalked through the woods in his funeral clothing, but only the white garments covered his bone. He had flayed himself – had torn the stinking soft stuff from his skeleton, leaving the hard smoothness beneath. He’d started with a leg, pulling all the wet and soft stuff from it, to leave only bone. He’d wanted to see if it would still move, with no muscle to animate it. And, to his surprise, it had. It had moved just fine. Concentrating, he had applied himself to the rest of his body. It had taken a long time.
The organs, in particular, were tricky.
He’d kept the clothes – had put them on in case anyone saw him. A
t a glance, from a distance, he would appear an eccentric in white, flowing robes. Only closer up would the observer see that he had no skin on his face, that he was nothing but a skeleton walking. He hadn’t finished the job yet, of course. He’d torn off what he could, scraped with stones and sticks found in the woods. But to clean himself properly of his body he would have to rub himself with sand, bathe in the salt water of the sea.
That was all right. He had all the time in the world.
He saw a flash of Yukiko’s clothes ahead – she was moving quickly, but she was no match for him. That had been another surprise. He’d only meant to strangle that monk, back on the mountain, and he’d near taken the man’s head off with his bare hands. Being in hell had made him strong.
He pressed the pace, flashed through the trees, a nightmare in white clothing. Idly he wondered why Yukiko was alone, where she had left her sword. He didn’t really care, though. She’d killed him, and now she was going to pay. He may have got what he’d always wanted, but revenge had to come first. He saw Yukiko stumble; recognized the moment at last.
I am stone, he thought. I am bone and I am incorruptible. I have sloughed off my covering of vile flesh. I am reborn, and I am beyond the betrayal of living things, the weakness of the flesh, the depredations of low creatures. Nothing will ever feed on me.
He lunged forward and caught Yukiko’s ankle in his hard fingers. She went sprawling. To her credit, there was still some of the fighter in her – she sprang up, and though she didn’t have a sword, a branch seemed to appear in her hand, so quickly did she pick it up.
She stared at him, and then she screamed.
‘What – what – what –?’ she stammered.
‘Don’t you recognize me?’ he said. ‘This is how I always looked. . . underneath.’
She was backing away. It wouldn’t do her any good. ‘Ken. . . ji. . . Kira?’ she said.
He bowed. ‘At your service. You know, when you put that sword through my heart, it hurt. It hurt a lot.’
He was looking into her eyes, and so he saw the exact moment her mind snapped – it was like the darkness in her pupils suddenly became not just a darkness but an emptiness. He recognized that emptiness. It was the true face of hell, under the illusions it conjured to torture you.
She knows she’s dead, he thought.
He leaped forward and caught her, and his bony fingers closed on her throat. He wished he could smell, because he was sure he would smell pure fear, in this instant. He pressed hard, and as when he had squeezed his arm, his fingers broke through the skin, scraping on tendon, brushing against her spine with a noise like heaven as he shook her, shook her, shook her.
Her eyelids fluttered. Her legs kicked – he was holding her right off the ground, and he wasn’t even aware of the weight. Then, the strangest thing. He could swear that, just before she died, she smiled.
He saw her lips move, though no sound came out – he had crushed her voice box and her airway, had felt them break brittle beneath his fingers, as if they were the bones of a small, delicate creature, a rabbit perhaps.
‘Heiko,’ she seemed to say. He remembered that was the name of her sister, whom he had killed.
Well, perhaps they were together now. It seemed unlikely – he was fairly sure Yukiko was going to hell. But if it had helped her in her final moment, then so be it. He had no power to enter her mind and remove any comfort she might find there, as he had scooped out his own innards.
More was the pity.
He had heard people say that they felt empty after taking revenge, but that wasn’t the case for him. He looked down at her dead body in his hands, and he laughed and laughed, and then he dropped her like a child’s doll to the ground and he capered around her, dancing in his glee.
He didn’t smell her blood, exactly – but he was aware of it; keenly aware of it, as he imagined a wolf must be, when it came to the spoor of prey. He hadn’t known until now what was required of him, what was needed to maintain his hardness of stone, his beauteous absence of useless flesh.
But it seemed right, all the same, and he made no conscious decision, he just crouched by her side. He tore open her ribs, reached inside, and ripped out her heart. All his life he had been afraid of things feeding on him when he was dead. Then he had died and things had eaten him in hell, and he had followed Taro back to the living world.
Now he was dead but alive, and it seemed that to stay that way, he had to eat the living; he had to become the thing he most feared, to become a maggot or a rat or a crow. He appreciated the irony – he appreciated it almost as much as the joy of Yukiko’s death.
He raised her heart to his lipless mouth and squeezed it, and blood ran down his throat and through it and soaked into his bone, and he laughed as he fed.
CHAPTER 75
LORD TOKUGAWA WAS enjoying a cup of steaming sencha tea when a messenger appeared in the doorway of his private teahouse, a charmingly rustic structure on the beautifully tended grounds of his castle, its shadowy interior a cool and calm retreat from the phenomenal world, with its rivalries and battles and deaths.
He raised his head and sighed. ‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘Two pigeons for you, sire,’ said the messenger. He approached, bowed deeply, then kneeled, the two rolled-up pieces of paper on his hand, his head held low so as not to meet Lord Tokugawa’s eyes.
Lord Tokugawa lowered his cup and took the messages. ‘Go,’ he said.
When the irritant footsteps had retreated, he finished the cup of tea. It was, like everything else, an exercise in patience and control. Drink the tea, and then read what the messages had to say. It was thanks to these moments, these constant challenges to his own self, that he had been able to secure the position in which he found himself. Slip up for just one moment, allow emotions to cloud his actions, and he could be destroyed.
He could end up like that fool Oda, who by now – Lord Tokugawa hoped – was dead. He anticipated that one of these messages would bring him news of that death, but he was in no hurry. He wanted to savour the moment.
Finally he set the teacup – a gorgeous and ancient Chinese object, chased with golden dragons, which had been presented to him by the Portuguese merchants – aside. He slowly unrolled the first message.
The boy has the ball, it said, and it was signed by the abbot of the Tendai monastery on Mount Hiei.
Lord Tokugawa smiled. Everything was going according to plan.
Then he unrolled the second message, and smiled even wider. It was from Jun, and it said that Oda had attacked the Hongan-ji, as Lord Tokugawa had known he would. The monks had slaughtered the samurai with their swords, and Lord Oda himself had died in some fantastical manner – Jun reported that some witnesses claimed to have seen him burst into pieces in front of their eyes, spraying blood everywhere.
The ball, no doubt.
He made a mental note to send a reply to Jun, to thank him for the news, and to ask him to stay with Shusaku and his son, to await further instructions. He was pleased with the boy’s performance. Ever since he had contrived to have Shusaku take him on, Jun had kept him faithfully informed. He would reward him one day, when this was all over.
He called out for someone – it didn’t matter who, there would always be someone, waiting just outside, impassively, for the time when they would be called to do their duty – that was one of the advantages of being a daimyo.
When a head appeared at the door, he said, ‘Bring me the generals.’ The head nodded, bowed, then disappeared.
He leaned back on the cushion, granting his spine an unaccustomed break from erect rigidity, and allowed himself to feel one moment of pure peace and happiness.
Everything had fallen into place, and the prophecy was unfurling as he wished it to do, like a bolt of silk rolled across a smooth wooden floor.
He allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation. He had read the signs and researched the legends, and gone to Shirahama one day in search of the woman who would give him this son, this shin
ing vampire son – and now it was all coming together as he had hoped.
The boy, Taro, had the ball.
Lord Oda was dead.
The end had begun.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THANKS, AS ALWAYS, to the fabulous team at A.P. Watt literary agency – Caradoc, Elinor, and Louise. Thanks are also due to Alex Cooper at Simon & Schuster and Sarah Norman at Atlantic for their brilliant and insightful comments on the earlier drafts of this book. It would be a far, far poorer novel without them. Finally, thanks to Valerie Shea for doing such an extraordinary job of checking through the manuscript, picking up on all the things I had written that flatly contradicted my statements in Blood Ninja, and pointing out the many errors and inconsistencies. By the time the book arrives in your hands, dear reader, it is (one hopes) relatively free of mistakes and satisfying in its structure – so you will have to take my word for it as to what a sterling job these editors do. I’m extraordinarily grateful.
