by Steve Bein
PRAISE FOR
DAUGHTER OF THE SWORD
“A noir modern Tokyo overwhelmed by the shadows of Japanese history . . . a compelling multifaceted vision of a remarkable culture, and a great page-turner.”
—Stephen Baxter, author of Bronze Summer
“Daughter of the Sword really captured my imagination. The interweaving of historical Japanese adventure and modern police procedural, Tokyo-style, caught me from two unexpected directions.”
—Jay Lake, author of Endurance
“Effortlessly combines history and legend with a modern procedural . . . will have you staying up late to finish it.”
—Diana Rowland, author of Touch of the Demon
“An authentic and riveting thrill ride through both ancient and modern Japan. Definitely a winner.”
—Kylie Chan, author of Hell to Heaven
“Bein’s gripping debut is a meticulously researched, highly detailed blend of urban and historical fantasy set in modern Tokyo. . . . Bein’s scrupulous attention to verisimilitude helps bring all the settings to life, respectfully showcasing Japan’s distinctive cultures and attitudes.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“One of the best debuts I have ever read . . . an epic tale that heralds the emergence of a major talent.”
—Fantasy Book Critic
“A great police procedural urban fantasy that deftly rotates between Mariko in present-day Japan and other warriors in past eras.”
—Genre Go Round Reviews
“Daughter of the Sword reads like James Clavell’s Shogun would have if it had been crossed with high fantasy by way of a police procedural.”
—Otherwhere Gazette
“Magic swords and samurai set alongside drugs and modern Tokyo and all blending in together to produce an engrossing and original story.”
—Under the Covers
“I loved the plot of this book. . . . I would recommend it to those who like fantasy and those who take an interest in Japanese culture.”
—Book Chick City
“Daughter of the Sword is a gritty and compelling police procedural . . . written in beautiful and exotic detail.”
—All Things Urban Fantasy
“If you love reading about faraway places, historical fiction, and fantasy, this book should definitely be on your list.”
—Literal Addiction
ALSO BY STEVE BEIN
THE FATED BLADES SERIES
Daughter of the Sword
Year of the Demon
PENGUIN SPECIALS
Only a Shadow
YEAR
OF THE
DEMON
A NOVEL OF THE FATED BLADES
STEVE BEIN
A ROC BOOK
ROC
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014
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A Penguin Random House Company
First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,
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Copyright © Steve Bein, 2013
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Bein, Steve.
Year of the demon: a novel of the fated blades/Steve Bein.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-62645-0
1. Women detectives—Japan—Tokyo—Fiction. 2. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title.
PS3602.E385Y43 2013
813'.6—dc23 2013018673
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental..
Contents
PRAISE FORDAUGHTER OF THE SWORD
ALSO BY STEVE BEIN
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
JAPANESE PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
BOOK ONE
1
2
3
4
BOOK TWO
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
BOOK THREE
16
17
18
19
BOOK FOUR
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
BOOK FIVE
28
29
30
31
BOOK SIX
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
BOOK SEVEN
41
42
43
BOOK EIGHT
44
45
46
47
48
49
BOOK NINE
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
BOOK TEN
59
60
61
62
63
GLOSSARY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAPANESE PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
Readers have been telling me they’d like a little guidance how to pronounce all the Japanese names they find in my work. Ask, dear reader, and ye shall receive. Three general rules tell you most of what you need to know:
1. The first syllable usually gets the emphasis (so it’s MA-ri-ko, not Ma-RI-ko).
2. Consonants are almost always pronounced just like English consonants.
3. Vowels are almost always pronounced just like Hawaiian vowels.
Yes, I know, you probably know about as much Hawaiian as you do Japanese, but the words you do know cover most of the bases: if you can pronounce aloha, hula, Waikiki, and King Kamehameha, you’ve got your vowels. Barring that, if you took a Romance language in high school, you’re good to go. Or, if you prefer lists and tables:
a as in father
ae as in taekwondo
ai as in aisle
ao as in cacao
e as in ballet
ei as in neighbor
i as in machine
o as in open
u as in super
There are two vowel sounds we don’t have in English: ō and ū. Just ignore them. My Japanese teachers would slap me on the wrist for saying that, but unless you’re studying Japanese yourself, the difference between the short vowels (o and u) and the long vowels (ō and ū) is so subtle that you might not even hear it (and if you can’t see a difference between them, it’s probably because the e-reader you’re using doesn’t support the long vowel characters). The reason I include the long vowels in my
books is that spelling errors make me squirm. What can I say? I’ve spent my entire adult life in higher education.
As for consonants, g is always a hard g (like gum, not gym) and almost everything else is just like you’d hear it in English. There’s one well-known exception: Japanese people learning English often have a hard time distinguishing L’s from R’s. The reason for this is that there is neither an L sound nor an R sound in Japanese. The ri of Mariko is somewhere between ree, lee, and dee. The choice to Romanize with an r was more or less arbitrary, and it actually had more to do with Portuguese than with English. (Fun fact: if linguistic history had gone just a little further in that direction, this could have been a book about Marico Oxiro, not Mariko Oshiro.)
Finally, for those who want to know not just how to pronounce the Japanese words but also what they mean, you’ll find a glossary at the end of this book.
BOOK ONE
HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22
(2010 CE)
1
Detective Sergeant Oshiro Mariko adjusted the straps on her vest, twisting her body side to side to snug the fit tighter. The thing was uncomfortable, and not just physically. Mariko hadn’t had to wear a bulletproof vest since academy. Even then it had been for training purposes only; she’d never strapped one on in anticipation of being shot at.
“Boys and girls, listen up,” Lieutenant Sakakibara said, his voice deep and sharp. He was a good twenty centimeters taller than Mariko, with a high forehead and a Sonny Chiba haircut that sat on his head like a helmet. He looked perfectly at ease in his body armor, and despite the heavy SWAT team presence, there was no doubt that the staging area was his to command. “Our stash house belongs to the Kamaguchi-gumi, and that means armed and dangerous. Our CI confirms at least two automatic weapons on-site.”
That sent a wave of murmurs through the sea of cops surrounding him. CIs were renowned for their lousy intelligence. Narcs with holstered pistols, SWAT guys with their M4 rifles pointed casually at the ground, all of them were shaking their heads. They all spoke fluent covert-informantese, and in that surreal language “at least two” meant “somewhere between zero and ten.”
Mariko was the shortest one in the crowd, and if she looked a little taller with her helmet on, everyone else looked taller still. Police work attracted the cowboys, and the boys really got their six-guns on when they got to armor up and kick down doors. Being the only woman on the team was alienating at the best of times, and now, surrounded by unruly giants, Mariko felt like a teenager again, awkward, soft-spoken, trapped in the midst of raucous, rowdy adults and just old enough to understand how out of place she was.
It was no good dwelling on how she felt like a gaijin, so she returned her attention to Lieutenant Sakakibara. “There’s going to be a lot of strange equipment in there,” he said, though he hardly needed to. SWAT had downloaded images of all the machines they were likely to encounter. The target was a packing and shipping company, an excellent front for running dope, guns—damn near anything, really—and the machinery they’d have on-site would offer cover and concealment galore. Everyone knew that, but Sakakibara was good police: he looked out for his team. “Weird shadows,” he said, “lots of little nooks and crannies, lots of corners to clear. You make sure you clear every last one of them. Execute the fundamentals, people.”
Again, everyone knew it, and again, everyone needed the reminder. Mariko marveled at how some of the most specialized training in the world boiled down to just getting the basics right. In that respect SWAT operations were no different than basketball or playing piano.
“B-team, D-team,” Sakakibara said, “you need to hit the ground running. I want to own the whole damn structure in the first five seconds. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” said twelve cops in unison.
“C-team, same goes for you, but don’t you forget”—Sakakibara pointed straight at Mariko as he spoke—“Detective Sergeant New Guy is a part of your element. The Kamaguchi-gumi has put out a contract on her. I won’t have her getting shot on my watch, got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Mariko said with the rest of C-team.
The first of the vans started up with a roar, and the sound made Mariko’s heart jump. She chided herself; she was thinking too much about those automatic weapons, and now even the rumble of a diesel engine sounded like machine gun fire. She reached down for the SIG Sauer P230 at her hip, taking yet another look down the pipe of the pistol she already knew she’d charged.
“The seven-oh-three gets here in”—Sakakibara checked his huge black diver’s watch—“six minutes. That gives you five and a half to get where you need to be. Now mount up.”
“Yes, sir,” the whole team said, and Mariko started jogging toward the B and C van. The rest of her element fell in behind her.
When she reached the dark back corner of the van her heart was racing, and she knew it wasn’t because of a ten-meter jog. Her hand drifted to the holster on her hip, satisfying an irrational need to confirm that her SIG was even there. Running her left thumb over the ridges of her pistol’s hammer, she absently wondered why the movement should still feel strange to her. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t logged the hours retraining herself to shoot as a lefty; at last count she’d expended about two thousand rounds on the pistol range. She hadn’t yet hit the same scores she’d been shooting right-handed, and that idea weighed on her, heavier than the ceramic plating of the body armor that now made her shoulders ache. Despite all the training, somehow her brain couldn’t even get used to the fact that when she held something in her right hand, she held it with four fingers, not five.
Thinking about her missing finger made her think about the last time she had to point a pistol at a human being. Fuchida Shuzo had cost her more than her trigger finger. She’d actually flatlined after he rammed his katana through her gut, and she had matching scars on her belly and back to prove it. But more than this, he’d scarred her self-confidence. Everyone on the force knew they could die in this line of work, but Mariko had died, if only for a few minutes, and ever since then she wondered how things might have gone if she’d pulled that trigger even a tenth of a second earlier—if she’d put a nine-millimeter hole right in his breastbone, if she’d spared herself the weeks of rehab, if she’d earned herself a bit of detached soul-searching about the ethics of killing in the line of duty rather than ruminations on everything she’d done wrong to let things get that far.
Those ruminations plagued her day and night, and images of Fuchida and his sword flashed in her mind every time she visited the pistol range. Sometimes it got so bad that she couldn’t even pull the trigger. The more she needed to hit the target dead center, the more she got mired in the fear of failure, and once she fell that deep into her own head, she couldn’t even put the next shot on the paper.
Her former sensei, Yamada Yasuo, had a term for that: paralysis through analysis. Swordsmanship and marksmanship were exactly the same: the more you thought about what you were doing, the less likely you were to do it right. So long as Mariko trapped herself in doubting her marksmanship, she was a danger to herself and others.
Now, listening to her pulse hammer against her eardrums, she worried she might freeze up when those van doors opened and her team had to move. Two thousand rounds she’d slung downrange, trying to train her left hand to do its job, and two thousand times she’d failed. Now other cops were counting on her, and if she failed tonight the way she did with Fuchida, it might be one of their lives on the line. She drew back the slide on her again, knowing it wasn’t necessary, needing to do it anyway.
She felt a tap on her shoulder pad and looked up. “Hey,” Han said, “you think you checked that weapon enough yet?”
It was a little embarrassing being caught in the act, but the fact that he’d noticed was reassuring. Han and Mariko were partners now, and his attention to detail might save her ass someday. She’d already made a habit of noting the details about him. He always put his helmet on at the last minute. He tended to bounce a little o
n the balls of his feet when he was nervous. He had an app on his phone that gave him inning-by-inning updates on his Yomiuri Giants. The TMPD patch Velcroed to the front of his bulletproof vest was old, curling at the corners. Hers was curling a bit too—the vests usually sat in storage, sometimes for years, and who would ever bother to peel the patches off?—but Han’s patch had a weaker hold on his chest, probably because he caught the curled-up corner of it with his thumb every time he reached up to brush his floppy hair away from his ear. He wore his hair longer than regulations allowed, and his sideburns—longer and bushier than Mariko had ever seen on a Japanese man—were against regs too. But violating the personal grooming protocol was one of the perks when you worked undercover, and Han made the most of it. He’d have worn a beard and mustache too, if only he could grow them, but his boyish face didn’t allow him that luxury.
“I’m pretty sure that chambered round hasn’t gone anywhere,” he said. “Then again, I haven’t checked it myself. You mind checking it for me?”
“Smart-ass.”
Han grinned. “Guilty as charged.”
She noticed he was bouncing a little on the balls of his feet, and since he didn’t make any noise Mariko knew he’d strapped everything down tight. The SWAT guys that filled the rest of the van were equally silent—no mean feat given the close quarters and the sheer numbers of magazines, flash-bangs, gas masks, and radios they’d affixed to their armor.
The floor rumbled, someone pulled the door shut, and they were off. The lone red lightbulb cast weird shadows. There was an electric tension in the air, a palpable enthusiasm silenced of necessity but champing at the bit. “Han,” Mariko whispered, “you ever had to wear a vest before?”
