Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  “I heard something similar.” Daigoro forced a smile, but his mind recalled images of Mio’s terrible, gaping wounds.

  “Can you imagine the mess, Daigoro-sama? A big, disgusting man like that. Not like you, my lord.”

  So it’s back to bantering, Daigoro thought. He said just enough to keep the conversation going. His mind was elsewhere, trying to get the measure of Shichio. The man was as comfortable with deceit as Daigoro was with breathing. He used his lies as deftly as a sword, cutting down his enemies while defending himself. Katsushima’s suggestion of resorting to shinobi no longer seemed desperate at all. Shichio was a foe unlike any Daigoro had ever faced. Squaring off against an enemy with a sword was simple—terrifying, yes, but simple. But Shichio didn’t square off with his enemies; he maneuvered and manipulated, always from the shadows, and if a steadfast retainer was sometimes killed in the process, so be it.

  Daigoro didn’t know how to fight an enemy who wouldn’t come out of the shadows. The only recourse he could see was to hire shadow warriors to fight in his stead. It shamed him even to think of it—his father would never have allowed someone else to do his fighting for him—but Daigoro didn’t see what else he could do.

  “Tell me, Hanako, have you ever heard of the Wind?”

  She giggled. “Have I ever heard the wind? Silly man. What kind of question is that?”

  “Magic men. Shinobi. You’ve heard of them?”

  More giggling. “Of course. And tengu and kappa and snow-women too. What do bedtime stories have to do with hearing the wind?”

  “Shinobi are more than bedtime stories. Many daimyo hire them, especially in the Kansai.”

  Now Hanako laughed out loud. “Ah! And now I understand. You aren’t from around here, are you? I knew it! It’s your accent.”

  “Be serious.”

  “How can I, with you toying with me like this?” She giggled, or at least pretended to in order to take the focus away from Daigoro’s hinterland gullibility. “You’ve heard about our local legends and you’re trying to scare me. The wind! Honestly, Daigoro-sama, you’re too much.”

  Daigoro swallowed his frustration along with the last of the sake. Pointless, he thought; it’s all pointless. Maybe back in Izu he might have known which ears he ought to whisper to if he wanted to hire shinobi, but finding them here was like finding a snowflake in a waterfall.

  He dismissed Hanako and doused the lantern. As tired as he was, he found he couldn’t sleep, which only added to his frustration. It was shameful enough that he’d resorted to hiring someone else to fight his battles for him. Simply attempting it already betrayed his father’s principles. Worse still was the fact that he’d betrayed his principles and hadn’t accomplished anything by it. He’d compromised his conscience, and his reward was exactly what his father would have said it would be: nothing. Nothing but guilt and disappointment.

  He lay in bed for an eternity before the weight of his shame lifted enough that he could sleep.

  • • •

  When he woke he saw a man sitting at the foot of his bed.

  Daigoro recoiled, his heart a ball of ice. The man did not react. He was barely visible, a presence felt as much as seen, for although the moon was three-quarters full, she shed little light through the room’s only window. The door had not opened. Daigoro was certain of that. And the window was nothing more than a long, narrow transom running along the top of the back wall; nothing bigger than a finch could get through it. Yet there the man sat, cross-legged, looking at him.

  Daigoro reached for Glorious Victory and could not find her. His wakizashi was missing as well. He carried no knife and his armor was bundled in the corner. He was naked, defenseless, and alone.

  “You seek the Wind,” the man said.

  His voice was low and gravelly, the voice a boulder might have. Daigoro found it eerie that even when he spoke his body did not move at all. Daigoro could not even see him breathing.

  “I do,” Daigoro said, and the pleading tone in his voice shamed him.

  “For what purpose?”

  “I have an enemy. I want him dead.”

  “Then kill him.”

  Daigoro swallowed. “He is beyond my reach.”

  “Name him.”

  “Shichio.”

  Daigoro’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness. He could just make out the whites of his visitor’s eyes, though he could discern no other features. The man did not blink. Ever.

  He stared at Daigoro, silent for so long that Daigoro wondered whether he’d actually managed to say Shichio’s name, or whether he’d heard himself in his mind but hadn’t mustered enough self-control to voice it aloud. “General Shichio,” he said. “He is Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s man.”

  “He is known to us.”

  “Us?”

  Those eyes shifted to a point beyond Daigoro’s right shoulder. Daigoro twisted where he sat, straining in the dark to see what his visitor might have been looking at.

  More eyes stared back at him.

  Daigoro all but leaped out of his skin. Three more figures sat behind him, silent as statues. He could only make out their eyes. A chill washed over him, goose bumps too, despite the heat of the night. He scrambled away from his futon, crab-walking until his shoulder blades struck a wall panel. Not one of the four figures moved. Only their eyes followed him.

  “Expensive,” said the only one who had spoken.

  “But you can do it?”

  “There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”

  Daigoro’s eyes strained against the dark, trying to make out something, anything, of his interlocutor’s face. It was not lost on him that there were four shinobi, and that four was the number of death. It was a symbol; these men had brought death to Daigoro’s bedchamber.

  “Name your price,” said Daigoro.

  “Too high,” said the boulder-voiced man.

  “My family can pay. I guarantee it.”

  “You are without family.”

  It was a statement of fact, not a guess. Daigoro could tell by his tone. “You don’t even know who I am,” he said.

  “Daigoro. Once Okuma Daigoro of Izu.”

  “How do you—?”

  “There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”

  Daigoro swallowed. The noise seemed terribly loud to him in the dark.

  “Then you know my reputation,” said Daigoro. “The clans of Izu will stake me. Name your price and you shall have it.”

  “Gold is one thing. Blood is another. We will not spill our own in killing this man.”

  Daigoro braced himself against the wall. “Then why have you come? To kill me?”

  “Our designs are our own. But we will help you if you wish.”

  “I want him dead. You already said you will not do it.”

  “Kill, no. Help, yes. Meditate again on what you need.”

  Daigoro’s mother leaped to his mind. Katsushima’s suggestion to kill her leaped to mind next. “Has my man Katsushima spoken to you?”

  “He is known to us.”

  “I will not have her come to harm. Do you understand me? My mother is not to be touched.”

  The boulder-voice snorted. “Limited thinking. Limited vision. You know not what you need.”

  “I know perfectly well what I need.”

  Daigoro realized he’d spoken too loudly—to say nothing of too harshly, given the fact that he was unarmed with four shinobi in his rooms. “I know what I need,” he said again, quiet and calm this time. “My mother cannot marry that madman. I need to stop their wedding.”

  “Still you see as if from the bottom of a well.”

  “How else am I supposed to see things?” It was an effort for Daigoro to keep his voice down. After a long day of frustrations, he had no patience for word games.

  “Two are to marry. You will not kill her. We will not kill him. Broaden your vision.”

  “Explain yourself, damn you. Why did you even come to me if you only plan to speak in riddles?”
<
br />   “We are of the Wind. Our designs are our own.”

  Daigoro’s breath came loud and angry through his nose. Some strange metamorphosis had transformed his fear into exasperation. Neither emotion was worthy of his birthright. In his mind his father’s voice chided him: the samurai makes every decision in the space of seven breaths—and not angry breaths, either.

  He tried to calm himself. He had a wedding to stop, and he could touch neither the bride nor the groom. His thoughts ran to his own forced marriage. Akiko had many sisters; could he somehow force Shichio to marry one of them? House Inoue was of samurai lineage; that would satisfy that preening peacock’s need to pretend at nobility. But no. Even if he could persuade his father-in-law to marry off another one of his daughters, nothing would prevent Shichio from taking Daigoro’s mother as a concubine.

  But the reverse wasn’t true, was it? If his mother was married, she would be out of Shichio’s reach.

  It was a dark thought. Daigoro did not care to think of his mother as a playing piece. Neither did he care to speculate what the lords protector of Izu would think of him for marrying off his own mother as a political ploy. But he didn’t see that he had a choice. Outside of Izu, he didn’t have a single ally—apart from Katsushima, anyway, but Daigoro had no better hope of reaching him than of reaching the rabbit in the moon. In any case, this was a better prospect than Katsushima’s plan of matricide.

  “I know how to stop the wedding without bloodshed,” Daigoro said. “I have no need for your assassins. I only need you to deliver a package.”

  “This package, it will prevent this wedding?”

  “If it reaches its destination in time, yes.”

  The silhouette gave the smallest of nods. “Where?”

  “Izu.”

  “Expensive,” said the silhouette, in that voice one might expect an earthquake to have. “Far from here. Many eyes to avoid.”

  “You said there was nowhere the Wind cannot reach. Do you stand by that or not?”

  The silhouette looked at him, and though Daigoro could make out none of its facial features, somehow he was sure it was frowning. “There is no place the Wind cannot reach,” it said.

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  “Difficult now. Many troops in Izu. Many shinobi here in the Kansai.”

  It took Daigoro a moment to grasp his meaning. “You mean Shichio, neh? He’s hired ninja to kill me?”

  “Stupid question. Obvious.”

  His tone was even more ominous, if that was possible. Daigoro tightened his grip on his wakizashi. “Did he hire you to kill me?”

  “Our designs are our own.”

  It was hardly an encouraging answer. For all Daigoro knew, their designs included extinguishing House Okuma. Or perhaps Daigoro was being deployed as a weapon against Shichio. He imagined himself as an arrow, and thought of how little the archer would care if the arrow splintered after felling the target.

  He supposed he’d never learn the truth. Not from inscrutable replies like these, anyway. But he also decided the answers didn’t matter. Shichio was his target. The Wind was the bow that could launch him there. What did the arrow care why the bowstring was drawn? It cared only about the target.

  “This package you would have us deliver,” the boulder-voice asked him, “is it large or small?”

  Daigoro smirked. “That depends on what you mean by small.”

  The shinobi looked at him sternly—a notable accomplishment for one with no discernible face.

  “It’s me,” said Daigoro. “The package is me.”

  51

  Shichio had birds of prey on his mind.

  His mask glared down at him from the shelf where he’d sequestered it. He could feel its empty eyes following him as if it were a hawk perched on a high branch, patient and deadly. He was spending another late night in his study, and the oil lamps cast fluttering shadows behind the mask that made it appear to have wings.

  At the same time he imagined himself as an eagle. A map of Izu lay splayed across his writing table, and Shichio imagined himself circling over the peninsula, searching the landscape for his prey. Somewhere down there, a lone bear cub was crawling home. Shichio wanted to find it and kill it before it burrowed into some den he could not see.

  The image of the eagle was fitting: a hunter, a carrion feeder, a creature that could not live except on death. Shichio had come to think of the mask in the same way. He wanted nothing more than to touch it, yet the thought of its touch repulsed him. It was making him more and more like itself. Before, it inspired a lust for swords in him. After the Bear Cub scarred the mask, that lust had become hunger, and one who could hunger could also starve. The mask’s need had become deadly.

  And bloody. He’d purchased thirty swords, some of them massive odachi like the Bear Cub’s, and had sword racks installed in his bedchamber, his study, even his bathhouse, so that no matter where he went, he would be surrounded by blades. His people had scoured the Kansai in search of an Inazuma blade for him to buy. There were none, and even if there had been, Shichio knew it would not help him. There was a time when Inazuma steel would have satisfied the mask, but now it hungered for blood.

  He’d hoped Mio’s death would sate it, but he wasn’t so lucky. If anything, it made matters worse. So long as he wore the mask, its hunger drowned out his moral sensibilities, but as soon as he took it off—to bathe, to sleep, or simply because the mask had come to frighten him—the memories came flooding back. Wearing the mask, he imagined tying the Bear Cub to his table; taking it off, he shuddered at the same vision.

  One way or the other, he would see the Bear Cub dead. That much had nothing to do with the mask—a fact the boy should have known by now, if he had any sense. But if he’d had any sense, the boy would have recognized Shichio as a threat from the moment he learned who the abbot was and why Shichio wanted his head. Shichio’s grudge against the abbot was probably older than the Bear Cub himself. The whelp should have seen it from the outset: to make an enemy of Shichio was to make an enemy for life.

  But foresight wasn’t a virtue of the warrior. No, the Bear Cub venerated that savage naïveté known as bushido. All samurai were alike: they believed savagery could be bound by rules, and that their enemies would handicap themselves with the same set of rules. Their honor code would only be—could only ever have been—their undoing.

  That was why Shichio would always have the advantage over them, and it was why the Bear Cub was doomed to fail. From the moment the boy left the Jurakudai, he had but two tactics available to him: he could face Shichio head-to-head, or he could admit he was outnumbered and outclassed. The boy was smart enough to choose the latter, and perhaps he was even desperate enough to overcome his pretended nobility. Falling in with the ninja clans was the only intelligent choice left to him. But Shichio had foreseen the shinobi threat years ago, and he’d established informants within all the major houses save one. The Wind would not sell him their own secrets, not for any price. Shichio didn’t care for such peevishness from his underlings, but when he’d attempted to infiltrate their ranks with a shinobi of his own, he’d woken one morning to find his agent in his antechamber, waiting with the patience of the dead. They had flayed all the skin from his face. The message was crystal clear: there is no mask we cannot see through, and no place the Wind cannot reach.

  The sight was so horrifying that Shichio never tried to make contact with the Wind again—until now. As soon as the Bear Cub left the Jurakudai, Shichio had reached out to them with a new contract: not for an informant within their halls indefinitely, but rather for a contingency plan to inform him if the Bear Cub should ever come calling. It came at enormous expense, but the gamble was worth it: he’d received a message before the week was out, confirming that the Bear Cub had made contact.

  And, since he did not subscribe to the samurai’s savage naïveté, he immediately made the next move. Bushido forbade the Bear Cub from paying another man to do his fighting for him, but Shichio had no such compu
nctions. He did not even balk at the price—which, in this case, was extortionate. Shichio suspected they doubled their fee just for him, for no other reason than that they knew he was desperate enough to pay anything they asked. They weren’t wrong; he would empty Hashiba’s treasury if that was the price to put an end to the Bear Cub.

  In fact, he’d already gone to enormous expense. Even before he’d made contact with the Wind, Shichio had foreseen the possibility that the Bear Cub would slink back home. He’d deployed ships, riders, carrier pigeons, everything he had at his disposal. He had even bullied two Portuguese sea captains into devoting their galleons to the cause. That was likely to cost Hashiba in the future—those southern barbarians were touchy, especially when it came to their ships—but Shichio could see no faster way to deploy troops to Izu in sufficient numbers. Patrols on every road, guards at every crossroads, crews in every port and harbor; nothing less would suffice. Every friend and ally to the Okumas had to be under watch. Hashiba would never have approved the expense, but as the regent’s chief logistics officer, Shichio was the only one who could give himself away.

  No. There was one other, but he did not have the backbone to speak for himself.

  “Jun!” Shichio cocked his head, listening for movement from the corridor, but heard nothing. “Where is that confounded man?”

  He dismissed one of his door guards to hunt him down, then returned his attention to the map. It was a seafaring chart, not detailed enough for him to judge the distances between House Okuma and its neighbors by horseback. They were all insignificant houses—Shichio had heard of none of them at court—but even ignoble allies were allies. Any one of them might offer a burrow where the Bear Cub could go to ground.

  None of them were likely. If Shichio’s informant in the Wind was correct, the whelp was heading straight for home. It seemed he had a mind to forestall his mother’s marriage—and if that were true, then Shichio had underestimated Mio Yasumasa. What a staggering feat of endurance that must have been, to track down the Bear Cub even after Shichio had lavished such attention on him. Those wounds should have killed an elephant, but somehow Mio must have survived long enough to reveal Shichio’s wedding plans to the boy.