Year of the Demon

conversations with her departed sensei: Glorious Victory Unsought.

Though she didn’t ordinarily believe in that sort of thing, Yamada had convinced her that Master Inazuma had folded the forces of destiny into his steel, and so Mariko’s first subject of study was her own sword. It was a subject that appeared in only one library on earth: the one in Mariko’s bedroom, piled up in haphazardly labeled boxes. No one but Yamada believed that Inazuma ever existed, and cryptohistory had no place in the history departments of modern academia. That was why all of these notebooks remained notebooks, not published works, and it was also why Mariko accepted that Kamaguchi Hanzo’s mask and her own Inazuma blade might have shared a connection that she could only describe as magical. Yamada-sensei had amassed too much evidence to dismiss the supernatural.

But though she accepted her intuition about a connection, she knew nothing about the connection itself. She had that feeling she got when she got up from whatever she was working on and went into the next room to get something she needed, only to forget what it was she was there for in the first place. Tonight was like that, but many times more frustrating, since rooting through boxes upon boxes of notes was far more difficult than remembering she’d gotten up to fetch a pen or a screwdriver or something.

By the time she finished her noodles, she still hadn’t run across whatever it was that niggled at her memory. She got to her feet, her thighs and back and shoulders protesting all the way, and traded her current notebook for two new ones. Chasing Nanami through traffic this morning had left a couple of bruises she hadn’t noticed at the time. Settling back down on the bed generated a new litany of complaints from her aching muscles. The thought of ibuprofen appealed to her, but inertia proved to be the more powerful motivator.

She flipped through a volume with notes on Okuma Tetsuro and his sons, Ichiro and Daigoro. All were ill fated, but none of them could hold her interest. They might have done so on another night, but at the moment Mariko was feeling tired and she knew she had many more pages to cover.

Two books later she found what she was looking for: a quick note in the margin, scribbled in a wispy hand. First linkage—Glor Vic to mask? On the next page, Mask postdates Glor Vic—how long? 100 years? More? A few pages later, Mask-Glor Vic affinity strongest of all. These were all marginalia, with the majority of the notes being devoted to the puzzle of how best to date Glorious Victory Unsought. He never found the answer in this notebook, but he did answer Mariko’s question, one that had been nagging at her ever since that morning, when she woke to find her sword missing. Kamaguchi’s mask and Glorious Victory Unsought were somehow connected.

She delved deeper into the notes, and the more she read, the weirder it got. Everyone associated with the mask seemed to share a sword fetish. Some were samurai, some were common criminals, but all were killers. Somehow the mask awakened a destructive hunger in whoever touched it, and the need was especially strong for Glorious Victory. Yamada even hypothesized that the mask was a sort of metal detector for Inazuma steel, coded specifically for Glorious Victory Unsought. Mariko couldn’t even imagine how that could be—you couldn’t program raw iron the way you’d program a remote control—but she had to take Yamada at his word. For one thing, he was usually right, and for another, she didn’t have anything else to go on.

At least Yamada had some evidence to work from. A few salvaged pages from a centuries-old diary suggested that the affinity between the mask and the sword was dependent on distance. On its own, the mask inspired an unnameable yearning, like a caged animal’s need to pace, always seeking an exit that wasn’t there. But when Glorious Victory was nearby, that yearning magnified into a craving as powerful sexual lust. If the mask could see the sword, it had to have it.

Whatever that means, Mariko thought. She wished the diary’s author had been a detective; similes of caged animals didn’t show up in Mariko’s case log.

Things got even more bizarre when Yamada started waxing poetical himself. On one page, she read, Wind seeks mask? Why? At the top of the next page, Wind wants Glor Vic, therefore needs mask? It made no sense. Figuratively speaking, Mariko could get her head around a winter wind seeking out the gaps in her clothing, but even at her most abstract she couldn’t see how wind could be said to want anything at all.

His marginal notes developed into paragraphs in the following pages, but the more he developed his thoughts, the more cryptic they became. He developed a bizarre metaphor, likening wind to a shinobi, a ninja. No riddles there—wind was invisible—but then his invisible air currents took on human desires. As if wanting and seeking weren’t bad enough, the wind started planning, designing, orchestrating. Weather just didn’t do that.

The only deduction she could draw for certain was that Yamada-sensei knew a lot more about the mask than he bothered to write down. Most of his notes read like someone else’s grocery shopping list. Items like “lotion” or “food for Buster” might be on the list, but what kind of lotion? Sunblock? Moisturizer? A medicinal cream? And what was Buster? He could be a dog or a parakeet. There was no way to tell. Mariko could read between the lines all she liked and she’d never figure out everything her sensei knew about the mask.

A couple of notebooks and a couple of hours later, she hadn’t clarified much about the mask or the wind, but what little she’d managed to gather had seriously creeped her out. Somewhere along the line, the mask was damaged. Someone had scarred it, and somehow that deformed its enchantment too. Its affinity—or curse, or fetish, or whatever you called it—expanded from swords to all weapons. Yamada even hypothesized about how it might mutate over time, creating a lust for muskets and matchlocks as those came of age, and later semiautomatic pistols, maybe even machine guns. In a modern theater of war, it might have been IEDs. The mask did not discriminate.

Mariko had encountered an artifact like this before: Beautiful Singer, lightest and fastest of all the Inazuma blades. It too infected the wielder’s mind, and Mariko knew all too well how deadly that obsession could be. She’d flatlined on Beautiful Singer’s edge, the very last in a series of bloody murders stretching back almost a thousand years. Unlike a sword, a mask was benign, but perhaps that was what made it so dangerous: it seemed harmless.

If so, then the Bulldog showed remarkable foresight in separating himself from it. That, or else he shared the sixth sense of the alpha male for any threats to his dominance. Kamaguchi was violent, but only on his terms. If simply holding the mask was enough to awaken a deep-seated need for destruction, then Kamaguchi was right to keep it far away, on a high shelf where no one else would ever have reason to touch it. He didn’t even have to know why he did it; alpha male instinct would be enough.

Mariko found the mere thought of it chilling. She wanted to think that the whole story was mere superstition, that while medieval people might have believed in such things, in her world inanimate objects didn’t have such power. Yet as soon as the thought struck her, she knew she was wrong. What, other than “obsessive- compulsive,” was the right term to describe the average schoolboy’s relationship to his video games? Mariko thought of her sister Saori and the four or five thousand texts she sent every month. She thought of her own habits too: feigning kenjutsu strikes while waiting in elevators, oiling her bicycle chain before a ride though she knew full well she’d tuned up the whole bike the day before. How many times had she practiced drawing, aiming, and firing with her left hand? And she’d done the same with her right for years, long before Fuchida had maimed her finger. Was her obsession with marksmanship any less morbid than the hunger to destroy lurking within Yamada’s mask?

It was different. It had to be, or else Yamada would never have made a note of it. He knew obsession all too well. A man did not collect thirty degrees of black belt without admitting obsession into his life. No, this mask was something unusual, something dangerous, and knowing that made Mariko wish she had something more to go on, some way to track the thing down, some means of predicting the bearer’s intentions. But none of the notebooks provided clues.

She looked at the clock. Twelve-oh-eight. She had to work in the morning.

And yet there were two faces she couldn’t get out of her head. One was the Bulldog’s demon mask, stolen so brazenly from the middle of an active crime scene. The other belonged to that lunatic Akahata, his eyes blazing like twin suns in his bruised and battered face, his broken lips incessantly chanting their mantra. Akahata wasn’t the mask thief. He’d been in critical care at the time of the robbery. Mariko remembered the image of the thief, dressed head to toe in SWAT armor, the better to walk through a swarm of cops unnoticed. The feed from the security camera was fairly low fidelity, but now, seeing Yamada-sensei’s notes on the mask, Mariko remembered the thief as clearly as if she’d been standing in the room with him.

“Just one more book,” she said aloud, to Yamada-sensei as much as to herself. Mariko had never been