Year of the Demon

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?”

“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