by Steve Bein
They circled each other, Daigoro with a sword, his foe with no more than a steaming teapot. Somehow it was Daigoro who was too scared to speak. “No, you’re not worthy of a warrior’s death. I think I’ll resort to the weapon I originally intended to kill you with: the tea. Are you ready?”
Daigoro tightened his sweating fingers around his wakizashi. Behind the shinobi-priest, Katsushima rose silently to his feet. His face was a dripping red mask. He blinked hard, as if he was seeing stars and trying to clear them. But his blades were steady enough.
There was only one way to prevent the assassin from noticing him. It was suicidal, but Daigoro pressed the attack.
A white sleeve whipped toward his eyes. He sliced it off. His blade found cloth, not flesh. The priest-assassin stepped in. His free hand clamped down on Daigoro’s wrist. He twisted it around, driving the wakizashi toward Daigoro’s own body. Gracefully, almost lackadaisically, he poured scalding hot tea over Daigoro’s face.
It burned like dragon breath. Daigoro shut his mouth tight against it, but still he feared the poison would leak in. The more he strained to keep his face out of the downpour, the less he could concentrate on his sword. Already he felt the blade brushing the inside of his thigh. The artery there was huge. He would bleed to death in a matter of heartbeats.
Katsushima pounced. The assassin sidestepped. With a backward swipe he shattered the teapot on Katsushima’s cheek. Katsushima grunted and lashed out. He missed with his short sword, but he drove his tanto deep into the assassin’s lung.
The assassin collapsed around the blade, but instead of dying on the spot he rolled backward, somersaulting to his feet on the far end of the room. Katsushima’s knife protruded from his rib cage dripping blood. Daigoro and Katsushima stood shoulder to shoulder and advanced, swords at the ready. The assassin drew a blade of his own, a chisel-pointed tanto. Then he drove it right into the side of his neck.
Daigoro waited for the man to fall. Surely he meant to take his own life before his enemy could question him. But no. He pushed the tanto all the way through his throat. Then, with agonizing slowness, he slid Katsushima’s knife out of his chest. Impossibly, there was no blood—not from Katsushima’s knife, nor even from the dagger in his neck. If anything, the assassin seemed to have greater resolve.
Katsushima retreated a step. The sword sagged in his grip. Daigoro sympathized; what use was swordsmanship against an enemy who could not bleed? The astounded look on their faces could only bolster the assassin’s morale.
Daigoro moved away from his friend. If Katsushima could not rally and charge, at least he could stay put while Daigoro outflanked the enemy.
The shinobi-priest lunged, but not for Katsushima. With snakelike flicks of the knife, he drove Daigoro all the way to the wall. Daigoro took a cut to the wrist, another to the thigh. Then the assassin was gone, rolling across the floor. He came up in a low slash, aiming for Katsushima’s hamstring.
Instead he got a wakizashi in the arm. Katsushima cut deep but somehow the wound was bloodless. The assassin responded, raking his knife across Katsushima’s belly. Katsushima responded in kind. Both cuts were superficial. Katsushima staggered back, pressing a hand to his stomach as if to keep his guts from spilling out. Still the priest would not bleed.
Daigoro attacked but his target proved too elusive. Katsushima slashed weakly but the assassin danced away. Daigoro anticipated the dodge and rammed his wakizashi home. The sword entered the assassin’s kidney and punched out through his navel.
He should have been dead. Instead he stabbed Daigoro in the leg. Daigoro crashed to the floor.
Now Katsushima was on him. He deflected a slash to the eyes by hacking at the assassin’s knife hand. Fingers went flying. So did the knife, but the assassin snatched it right out of the air with his other hand—too late. Katsushima ran him through. His wakizashi punctured both lungs and stayed there.
Still the assassin would not fall. He would not even show pain. And now Katsushima was unarmed.
Daigoro drew his own tanto—his last weapon—and rammed it all the way through the assassin’s calf. It bought Katsushima a precious instant, just enough to dodge the savage chop meant for his throat. Still on all fours, Daigoro groped for the assassin’s foot, his pant leg, anything to keep him from advancing on Katsushima. He missed.
The assassin had four blades stuck in his body and a fifth in his hand. Katsushima would die on that dagger and Daigoro would be next. The only other weapon in the room was Glorious Victory Unsought, resting on the floor in her sheath. She was so heavy, and Daigoro was so weak, but she was his last hope.
Channeling all his desperation into his right hand, he drew the massive blade and swung it for all he was worth. In a blow worthy of his father, it sliced through the shoji wall, then through both of the assassin’s knees.
The assassin might not bleed, but neither could he stand. When he fell, the wall fell with him. The butchered shoji toppled out of its frame, crashing down on the shinobi-priest. Daigoro scrambled to him, found Streaming Dawn, and pulled it out of the assassin’s neck.
This knife could only be Streaming Dawn. Nothing else had the power to keep a man alive through all that punishment. The assassin should have been dead six times over. As soon as the Inazuma blade left his body, the blood flowed from him like a groundswell. He would be dead in moments.
But not yet. His hand punched up through the rice-paper window of the shoji. Still clutching Katsushima’s bloody tanto, he drove it into Daigoro’s back.
It was his last act, but it was enough. Daigoro fell beside him.
Daigoro saw the room go dark. Only two pinpoints of light remained, directly ahead of him. He could no longer feel his wounds. The worst was that he had no fear of dying. He had already accepted it.
Such a terrible fate, to come so far only to fail. Daigoro held Streaming Dawn in his hand. He had only to ride home. Even if he would not live long enough to kill Shichio, at least he could have delivered the blade to Lord Sora. He could have saved his family.
Streaming Dawn. In his hand. He had seen its power. The knife could save him.
He tightened his grip on its haft, turned its tip toward his body … and found he could go no further. He’d lost too much blood. The fear of death had left him, but so had his strength. Even a knife was too heavy for him now.
Such a pitiful fate. He wished he could see Katsushima, to know how badly his friend was hurt. It would have been enough to hold his hand. But now there was only darkness. “Goemon?”
“I’m here.” Daigoro could hardly hear him. Was his hearing fading like his sight, or was Katsushima that weak?
“Take … take them the …”
Those were Daigoro’s last words. Then the darkness consumed him.
BOOK SEVEN
HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22
(2010 CE)
30
Mariko hadn’t been to Machida in a long time. She’d forgotten how green it was out here. It was quiet, too. First she left the rattletrap drumming of the train behind her, then the traffic lights with their little droning melody. As she turned away from the larger streets and into the residential area, even the sounds of passing cars faded, until at last she was left with the rustle of leaves and the occasional barking dog.
Her own mind was far from quiet. Every aspect of her life had gone from bad to worse, all in one day. This morning she got suspended from her job. Then she was all but kidnapped by the Wind, who presumably let her go only because they knew they could take her again whenever they liked. Then came the blow that shook her down to the very core of her being. Joko Daishi attacked the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
In the wake of Haneda and St. Luke’s, perhaps “attack” was too hyperbolic a word to describe an impromptu press conference. No one in the press was calling it that, but of course that was the point: it was designed to look like an implosion, not an outright assault.
The terrible irony was that Kusama must have invited all the rep
orters himself, to announce a major break in the Haneda case. Joko Daishi met the first of them right at the door where Mariko went to work every day. He declared himself the prophet of the Divine Wind, and when they asked him what he was doing at police headquarters, he said, “I do here what I am called to do everywhere: to shine a light on the truth.” He told them that the police knew a great deal more about Haneda than they were willing to share, that Captain Kusama had a devotee of the Divine Wind in his office who was intimately familiar with all of the details about the attacks, and that the reporters could interview the devotee themselves if only a police officer hadn’t shot him in the head.
The media had a field day with it. Only the stragglers thought to press Joko Daishi for answers about Haneda; all the go-getters had rushed inside, slavering to be the first to publish photos of the dead body leaking brain matter onto a decorated police captain’s carpeting. Joko Daishi just disappeared in the shuffle, leaving a few cryptic quotations behind. Somewhere along the line, some conspiracy theorist leaped to the conclusion that it was Hamaya, not Joko Daishi, who was the lead suspect on Haneda and St. Luke’s, and that his capture was to be Captain Kusama’s big announcement. Those with more journalistic integrity took the trouble to look up who Hamaya was, who his clients were, and what he’d been up to recently. That led to a screen shot from some Correctional Bureau computer—maybe hacked, maybe leaked—that quickly became the most viewed image in the country: Koji Makoto’s release forms, complete with date, time, and mug shot.
The headline of the Daily Yomiuri’s morning edition—TMPD INSIDER: JEMAAH ISLAMIYAH CONNECTION “TOTALLY BASELESS”—had been enough to get Mariko suspended. The evening edition’s headline was enough to make her sick: TOKYO’S FINEST COVER-UP: POLICE RELEASED TOP HANEDA SUSPECT HOURS BEFORE BOMBING. Mariko had advised against letting him go, then advised against withholding his name—not just advised but pleaded, forcefully enough that it cost her her rank. Now everything had gone just as Mariko said it would. Joko Daishi got exactly what he wanted: Tokyo’s top law enforcement agency was now one of the bad guys.
Mariko wished she could take comfort in having been right all along, or at least some smug satisfaction in watching Kusama get his ass kicked in front of the microphones. But when the shit hit the fan, it didn’t just splatter back on him; it smeared the whole department. She’d worked her whole career to make it into Tokyo’s most elite police unit, and now that unit was being dragged through the sewer.
It would have been healthier not to ground so much of her self-esteem in her career. She knew that. When work went to shit, so did everything else in her head. Usually kenjutsu cleared her mind. Not tonight. Before she’d taken up the sword, forty or fifty kilometers on her bike would have done the trick. Not tonight. So she’d come here, to the only place that might make her feel at ease.
Yamada-sensei’s house was just as she remembered it. A high slat fence the color of milk tea surrounded the backyard. A wooden lattice arched behind it, densely embroidered with wisteria vines. The blossoms were gone, and with them their creamy scent, but the chrysanthemums in the front yard were in full bloom. The heavy door resonated deeply when she knocked on it. It was a relic of an earlier time, solid oak, not composite with a wood veneer.
She thought of the whole house as an island in time. There was no cable modem, no Wi-Fi connection. Yamada never even owned a microwave. He used to boil water for tea the old-fashioned way: in an iron tetsubin teapot heated on a gas range.
The door creaked open to reveal an old woman wearing big black Coco Chanel sunglasses. She wore a black Chanel jacket with fat white buttons, black Chanel slacks, and a white Chanel blouse. Her outfit cost more than Mariko’s dress uniform, which was by far the most expensive outfit Mariko had ever owned. Shoji Hayano had always enjoyed looking good.
“Mariko-chan!” Shoji said. “Come in, dear. Oh, how good it is to see a friendly face.”
It was a figure of speech; Shoji didn’t see her at all. She’d lost her sight during the war, when she was still a little girl. It was around that time that she’d first met Yamada-sensei, before his name was even Yamada. She had always called him Keiji-san, his given name before he was dishonorably discharged from Army Intelligence. He’d been forced to abandon the name Kiyama Keiji in order to escape his war record, adopting the alias Yamada Yasuo in graduate school and founding a storied career on it: a doctorate in medieval history, a professorship at Todai, thirty degrees of black belt spread across five or six different sword arts, and enough published books to bow the shelves in Shoji-san’s sitting room. The finishing touch was a star of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum, bestowed posthumously by the Emperor himself—who, apart from Shoji and the Empress, was the only other person to refer to Yamada-sensei as Kiyama Keiji.
Yet Mariko was supposed to believe this man—her hero—was a criminal.
That was what that sun-blotched bastard Furukawa Ujio would have her believe. If Yamada was the Wind’s archivist, as Furukawa claimed, then her beloved sensei had been a member of a criminal organization. Mariko didn’t buy it for a second. Nevertheless, she couldn’t get Furukawa out of her head. She had a keen sense for when people were lying, one she’d first developed as the sister of a meth addict, then sharpened as a beat cop and honed to a razor edge as a detective and a narc. That sense had saved her ass many times over, and she’d learned to trust it without question—until today. Today it insisted that Furukawa was telling the truth.
Mariko hoped Shoji-san might help her solve the paradox. If anyone could do it, it was the blind woman who knew it was Mariko on her porch even before she opened the door.
Mariko took the old woman’s hand and placed a little box of cookies in it. “Bisuko,” she said, “your favorites.”
“You remembered,” said Shoji. “Aren’t you a dear?”
Something was wrong. Shoji’s voice was thick, as if she’d been crying. On a second look, Mariko noticed she had been crying; her nostrils were rimmed in red and her cheeks were flushed. “Shoji-san, are you all right?”
Shoji sniffled. She tried to force a smile, but it just made her seem sadder. “It’s this awful business about the … the airport, the hospital … just all of it. It’s all so horrible.”
Mariko took her by the arms and gave her an awkward hug. She wasn’t any good at this kind of thing. She’d never known Shoji to be the type to take such events so personally, either. Growing up with earthquakes, typhoons, and tsunamis, Japanese people tended to be fairly stoic about national calamities. But in the very moment she had the thought, Mariko realized that she herself was unwilling to include terrorism in the same category as all the natural disasters. This was different. There was someone to blame.
Including you, Mariko told herself. Furukawa’s math was perfectly clear: one living cult leader equals dozens of dead civilians. Mariko was no assassin, but she had to accept the consequences that came with that decision.
“Come on, let’s go inside,” she said. “Let me fix you some tea.”
Once they were in the house, Shoji’s domestic instincts kicked back in. Under her roof, she would be the one to make the tea. She was most insistent, so Mariko wandered into the sitting room.
She loved this room. This was where she’d had her most important conversations with Yamada-sensei. It was where he became a grandfather to her. It even still smelled like him—or rather, it was redolent of old books, a smell she would forever associate with him. Bookshelves lined the walls, and technically every last volume belonged to Mariko. Yamada-sensei had left everything to Shoji in his will, but since none of the books were in Braille, she’d given them all to her old friend’s protégé. Shoji insisted on keeping them here since she knew Mariko’s apartment was far too small to house them all. “I’ll be your library,” she’d said at the time. “That way you’ll be sure to come visit.”
Mariko didn’t visit as often as she’d like. Shoji-san had been a friend to Mariko when no one else was there. They’d met soo
n after Yamada-sensei’s murder, right in the morgue. She had invited Mariko to tea and Mariko said yes. That had evolved into an invitation to come home with her and catch a nap and a shower. Again Mariko had agreed. It ran totally against Mariko’s nature to leave herself vulnerable in a strange place, but she’d done it anyway. Somehow it felt as if she and Shoji had known each other for decades.
In fact, there was a sense in which they had—a very weird sense, but then everything was weird when it came to Shoji’s senses. She was a goze, a seer, possibly the only one alive. There was a time when Mariko put as much stock in goze as she had in space aliens, but as a detective, she had to accept whatever the evidence told her. If little green men beamed down and bowed to her, Mariko would have bowed back, and if a little blind lady foretold her future, then Mariko would listen.
“Shoji-san,” Mariko said, drifting toward the kitchen, “does the name Furukawa Ujio mean anything to you?”
“Hm. That’s not a name I expected to hear from you.”
“So you know him?”
“I used to. He was … well, you could say he was my son’s doctor.”
Mariko’s brain did a stutter step. “I didn’t know you had a son.”
“No? I guess not. We don’t talk much about family, do we, dear?”
“No …” Mariko trailed off; most of her attention was dedicated to catching up with her own thoughts. Shoji knew Furukawa. Furukawa was—how did she put it? Her son’s doctor. Not our family doctor, which would have suggested a general practitioner. A specialist, then. Was he a pediatrician? Or did her son have special medical needs? How rude was it to ask? More to the point, Mariko asked herself, how rude am I willing to be?
