Seven Paths to Death

by Dorothy Hoobler

  “Even if you hadn’t seen them with your mirror ring?” Gaho pursed his lips. “Never hurts to have a little extra help. Anyway, I should have told that fat—I mean, your esteemed father—that there was no room for more players. But as I say, I thought I could reel in two big fish at the same time.”

  They heard footsteps and saw Kitsune come down from the deck. “I’m going to show you what you have to work with,” he told Seikei. He unlocked a wooden chest and brought out a framed calligraphed poem. Seikei recognized it as being from Lady Osuni’s house. It was the poem that had seemed out of place because its quality was so inferior.

  Kitsune showed what he thought of it by ripping it out of its frame and tossing it aside. Underneath the poem was a light brown piece of what looked like leather. When Seikei looked a little closer, he saw the now-familiar features of a map inscribed on it. His stomach turned over as he realized it was the tanned and preserved skin from a man’s back.

  “Boko’s map?” he asked, hating the fact that his voice shook.

  “This is Boko’s,” Kitsune confirmed. He brought out other, newer-looking pieces of leather from the chest. “Tatsuo’s, Ito’s and Korin’s,” he announced. “That makes four. You have made copies of Rofu’s and Michio’s. And the seventh . . .” He turned to look at Gaho, who seemed to be trying to sink into the floor.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Gaho with a squeak. “I never heard of any of those people.”

  “They were your friends, Gaho,” said Kitsune. “You all made an agreement with Lady Osuni.”

  Gaho hung his head. “It seemed like a good bet,” he said. “This crazy woman and her map, which she was never going to need anyway . . .”

  “She needs it now, Gaho,” said Kitsune.

  “I didn’t think you could find me,” Gaho muttered. “After I heard what happened to Boko, I changed my name. I went from place to place, using a different name each time.”

  “Every place you went, someone saw you,” said Kitsune. “You were never far from Lady Osuni’s hands.”

  Gaho slumped, looking as if he had lost his last koban.

  “Your path was the same as those your friends followed, Gaho,” said Kitsune. “It always led to death. I would have finished you off long before this, except for Lady Osuni.”

  “She has decided to be merciful to me?” A ray of hope lit up Gaho’s face. The judge had told Seikei that gamblers always think their luck will change, no matter how much they lose.

  “No,” replied Kitsune. “She wanted her son to have the honor of capturing you. If honor is the right word. So he was sent to play cards with you while I waited outside. All he had to do was get you out of there. We were going to take you to a tanner. Of course he couldn’t carry out that simple a task, and to keep you out of the judge’s hands, I had to step in and bring you here.”

  Gaho smiled weakly. “So I was lucky last night after all.”

  “Only until we reach a town with a tanner,” said Kitsune. He turned to Seikei. “In the meantime, you get started making copies of the two maps we don’t have. Figure out where they fit in with the other five.”

  “There are only four here,” Seikei pointed out.

  “Oh, yes,” Kitsune said. “I almost forgot.” Something shiny flashed in his hand and he sliced down the back of Gaho’s kimono.

  Gaho screamed, thinking that Kitsune had cut him, but then realized he wasn’t feeling any pain. The only thing that had happened was that Gaho’s kimono now hung in two pieces, and his tattoo was there for all to see.

  “Get to work,” Kitsune repeated. “And if this worthless slug gives you any trouble, let me know.” He went back on deck.

  “He didn’t need to do that,” said Gaho, picking at the torn cloth. “This is my lucky kimono.”

  “Lucky for you he missed your back,” said Seikei. He put the four maps in front of him. His stomach still turned as he looked at the three that he had first seen on living men. Poor Ito, whose only friend was a monkey. And Korin, who had let his fear take him right into Kitsune’s hands . . .

  “I can’t do this,” Seikei said.

  “What?” asked Gaho. Seikei was annoyed. He’d been talking to himself, not Gaho.

  “Help Lady Osuni overthrow the shogun,” Seikei replied.

  “Is that what she’s trying to do?” said Gaho. “That explains everything. And it’s all the more reason why you should help her.”

  “No,” said Seikei. “She’s evil.”

  “She won’t hesitate to kill you if you don’t help her,” said Gaho. “The best you could hope for is that she does it as painlessly as possible. And she isn’t that sort of person.”

  “I am a samurai,” said Seikei.

  “So was Ieyasu,” Gaho replied.

  Seikei was puzzled. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Well, he was the first of the Tokugawa shoguns, as you know. Today there are temples and memorial stones all over Japan in his honor. It’s almost like he was a kami.”

  “He was a great man.”

  “Certainly. Everyone knows that. And do you know how many people he killed?”

  Seikei hesitated.

  “Of course you don’t,” said Gaho. “Nobody does. You couldn’t count them all. You see, my young friend, people like you and me are like leaves floating on a river. No matter how many of us there are, it’s the river that takes us where it wants to go. The river is people like Ieyasu and Lady Osuni. If she succeeds in overthrowing the shogun, then people will build temples to her.”

  “No,” Seikei said. “She won’t succeed.”

  “She might. You and I have nothing to say about it.”

  “You’re wrong. She wants me to make copies of the two maps she doesn’t have. You say I’m only a leaf, but I don’t have to do that.”

  “That’s right. You can go up on deck and throw yourself over the side of the ship. I’ll go with you. With luck, we’ll swim to shore. Can you swim? I can’t.”

  Seikei was angry, but he didn’t know if he was angry at Gaho or himself.

  “Anyway, if you don’t make the maps,” Gaho went on, “Kitsune will just go back, kill your father and take the original maps. So you’ll die needlessly.”

  “But with honor,” Seikei said. Still, he wondered if what Gaho was saying was true.

  “If you stay alive, on the other hand, who knows what will happen?” said Gaho. “I’ve learned you can’t win unless you stay in the game.”

  “Why are you interested in keeping me alive?” asked Seikei.

  “Nobody else on this boat is likely to help me, are they?”

  20

  THE LAST LINK

  Yours is the final map,” Seikei told Gaho. The ship had been traveling down the coast for two days and nights. While the others slept, Seikei and Gaho were chained so they couldn’t escape. Not that there was any place to escape to. Even though Seikei could swim a little, the ship stayed far enough from the shore so that he could never have reached it.

  Lady Osuni was impatient for him to complete the work. She seemed to think that threatening to kill Seikei would make him work faster. Actually, it only made him think harder about refusing to do this at all.

  Assembling the maps was like doing a puzzle. After Seikei figured out where the two missing maps belonged in the chain, making new copies of them became an easier task. He was pretty sure he’d gotten them right.

  Even so, there was no way to be certain. He still didn’t understand why there were so many marks alongside the paths. Soldiers, Rofu had said they were. But no soldiers would still be standing in the same places ten years later.

  Discovering that the map on Gaho’s back was the last one only raised another puzzle. The path stopped at a place where there was another strange mark: a series of wavy lines. What could that be?

  “You know,” Gaho said, “now that you mention it, I think the tattooist—what was his name?”

  “Tengen,” Seikei recalled.


  “Yes, that was it. A strange old fellow—all he cared about was tattooing. Well, he said I was the final link in his masterpiece.”

  “Did he say what the wavy lines meant? Or exactly where this was supposed to be?”

  “Not that I recall. We were in Yamaguchi, the castle town of the Osunis. But old Tengen had a paper map he was working from. It could have shown any place in Japan.”

  “What happened to the paper map?”

  Gaho smiled. “That would clear up a lot of things, eh? And if Lady Osuni had it, she wouldn’t need you or me. We’d have been fish food long ago.”

  “My father was told it had to be destroyed so the shogun’s officials wouldn’t discover it.”

  “That would make sense. You know, now something else is coming back to me. When Tengen was doing my back, he talked about wanting to see the cave.”

  “The cave? Is that what the map leads to?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “Do you know what happened to Tengen?”

  “Never saw him again, but I guess—” Gaho stopped.

  “What?”

  “Well, Lady Osuni wouldn’t want loose ends, would she? If she were going to destroy the map, she wasn’t going to leave anyone around who’d seen the full map.”

  “You mean she killed him.”

  “The sort of thing she’d do, don’t you think?”

  Gaho was right, Seikei agreed. And now, as he assembled the parts of the map in the proper order, he realized that he would have the full map.

  What would Lady Osuni think about that?

  He decided to take a little longer before announcing that the task was finished. He needed time—time to enable the judge to find him.

  There were a few small portholes in the cabin. Though he couldn’t have squeezed through them, Seikei was able to catch a glimpse of the shore from time to time. He wondered if the judge had any idea where Seikei was. By now he must have learned that Lady Osuni had left her mansion and fled the city. That in itself was a crime, but of course the judge knew she had far worse deeds planned.

  If the ship was headed for Yamaguchi, where the Osuni castle was, the judge would follow. Seikei was sure of it. But no other ships appeared as the days went by. Most Japanese vessels traveled the Inland Sea, but Lady Osuni’s crew followed the outer coast, ordinarily a lonely place. Fishermen didn’t like to venture far out to sea, because of the danger of storms. And if Seikei’s rescuers were traveling on horseback, the journey by land would take much longer than the sea route.

  Seikei looked at the map he had decided must be first in the series. It was from Korin’s back. There was nothing on it that resembled a castle. A large section of the map consisted entirely of wavy lines—and then Seikei remembered that on Korin’s actual tattoo, that area was blue. It must be the sea.

  If so, then two massive soldiers apparently stood on the very edge of the coast. Between them began the path, marked by the pointing arrows that Seikei had learned looked like a musket.

  He had been concentrating so much on the map that he hadn’t noticed someone come up behind him. Seikei jumped when he saw a shadow move across the page.

  He turned to face Kitsune. The man’s unnerving yellow eyes bored into Seikei, who felt they could pierce through any secret.

  Kitsune put his finger on the map, between the two soldiers. “Is that where the search begins?” he asked.

  “Yes, if there are two soldiers at the right place,” said Seikei.

  “Lady Osuni assures me they will be there,” replied Kitsune. “Have you finished all the maps?”

  “Not . . . not completely,” said Seikei.

  “Lady Osuni is impatient.”

  “One of the maps was on the back of a firefighter,” Seikei explained. “He had burns that made copying the map difficult.”

  “And him?” Kitsune gestured toward Gaho, who was in a corner trying to make himself invisible. “Are you finished with him?”

  “He’s actually . . . ah . . . helping me to figure out what the maps looked like originally,” said Seikei.

  Kitsune gave Seikei a skeptical look, but said only, “We should arrive at our destination by tomorrow. Be ready.” He headed back on deck.

  “Thank you,” said Gaho, in a small voice after the ninja had left.

  “It would be lonely if you weren’t here,” said Seikei. “You really have finished, haven’t you? I saw you place all the maps together.”

  Seikei shrugged. “I can’t be positive I’m right. I won’t know until we get there what some of these marks mean.”

  “Look at it this way,” said Gaho. “If you’ve copied the maps badly, Lady Osuni will have you killed. But if you’ve done your job right, then you’ll no longer be useful and she’ll kill you anyway.”

  “No,” said Seikei. “You’ve forgotten that my father has her son. She won’t kill me as long as she wants to get him back.”

  “The flat-nosed one at the card game?” Gaho recalled. “Was that him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lady Osuni is going to make him the ruler of Japan? Playing cards with him was like toying with a child.”

  “He didn’t seem very bright,” Seikei admitted.

  “You know what you should do? Convince Lady Osuni that you’re her true son, the one who will make her proud and fulfill her ambitions. Let her adopt you, and she can stop worrying about the other one.”

  “I wouldn’t want her to be my mother,” Seikei said firmly.

  “You shouldn’t be so picky,” responded Gaho. “She could—”

  He was interrupted by Kitsune, who reappeared at the entranceway. “Put the maps away,” he told Seikei. “Put them in the waterproof chest. A storm is coming.”

  21

  AN ALLIANCE

  This time Gaho wasn’t the only one who thought he was going to die. Seikei had seen storms on the Inland Sea when he lived in Osaka. But the terrible wind and rain that blew from the Outer Sea was far worse.

  Lady Osuni came below too, her face as dark as the sky. She felt personally offended that Susanoo, the kami of storms, had chosen to interfere with her plans. Shouting and shaking her fist, she roamed the cabin, demanding that the storm cease at once.

  Gaho had become ill again, and this time of course couldn’t use Lady Osuni’s fish bucket. So he had tried to go up on deck, and the boat lurched just as he reached the top of the steps. He fell backward, giving his head a nasty crack. Lady Osuni, not surprisingly, was unsympathetic, giving him a sharp kick and a tongue-lashing.

  Now Gaho sat in a corner, clutching a bucket of sand that was intended for fighting fires. Gaho was using it for a different purpose, half-burying his face in it whenever he got sick.

  The storm had been raging for hours, but showed no sign of letting up. In Seikei’s opinion the crew should have tried to take the boat ashore before the wind reached dangerous levels. Lady Osuni apparently felt they were safer from pursuers if they stayed on the sea. Now, however, it looked as if they would soon be under the sea.

  It was frustrating for Seikei to know that his death would have nothing to do with honor or bravery. Susanoo would claim all—the cowardly and the courageous, the good and the evil alike.

  The wind howled as if laughing at them, and Lady Osuni screamed back, seeming to think she could out-shout it.

  “Stop it!” Seikei yelled at her.

  It worked—on Lady Osuni, not the wind. She was so surprised that she shut her mouth, but only for an instant.

  Then: “How dare you!” she cried. “I’ll have you thrown overboard.” Over her shoulder, Seikei could see Gaho silently mouthing pleas for him to stop.

  “All your hired men are on deck,” said Seikei, “trying to keep the ship afloat. And here you are, shouting at the storm. Who’s going to throw me overboard?”

  Lady Osuni looked around the room. Perhaps she was trying to find something to kill Seikei with. He didn’t care.

  He took a step toward her. “All this for your in
sane quest to overthrow the shogun?”

  She looked at him, suddenly wary. “Who told you that?”

  The judge did, thought Seikei. Or at least he had figured it out. Maybe he wouldn’t want Lady Osuni to learn that he knew it.

  Seikei must have glanced at Gaho, because Lady Osuni whirled to look at him. Gaho squeaked and pushed his head deeper into the sand bucket.

  She turned back to Seikei. “He doesn’t know. None of them knew. You’re guessing.”

  Seikei realized she must think he had learned of her plans from one of the tattooed men. He decided to be mysterious. “I know everything,” he told her. He recalled the judge telling him that if a suspect thinks you know what he has done, he will gladly discuss it with you. “You can learn many things that way,”the judge had said.

  “You do?” said Lady Osuni, but not in a fearful way. She was far more cunning than her son. “What do you know?”

  Seikei decided to mention the most important thing that he did know. He was taking a chance, but he was desperate. “I know about the muskets,” he said.

  He saw that Lady Osuni was impressed. Her nostrils widened and her eyes blazed. She raised clenched fists as if she would like to beat him.

  But she thought better of it. “Shosho,” she said. “He must have told you. None of them knew that,” she said, gesturing at Gaho.

  Seikei had no idea who Shosho was, but tried to look as if he did. “I know everything Shosho does—and more,” he said.

  “Really?” She didn’t believe him. “Only I know more than Shosho,” she said.

  “Have you fired a musket?” Seikei asked.

  “Don’t tell me you have,” she said. Despite her skepticism, he could see she wanted to believe him. Her eyes glittered.

  “I’ve seen it done at the shogun’s castle,” he told her.

  She nodded eagerly, ready to share her story. “You have? Truly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you must know how powerful they are. My husband said that with a hundred of them, he could make himself shogun.”