Year of the Demon

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 naivete 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 naivete, 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 compunctions. 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.

Now that was a pleasant thought. Since Shichio was now Hashiba’s top adviser, revealing Shichio’s secrets was tantamount to treason. And since colluding with a traitor was itself a treasonous act, a rendezvous with Mio was all the pretext Shichio needed to name the Bear Cub an enemy of the state. It would be a pleasure to write the order for his execution.

There came a series of squeaks and chirps from the nightingale floors in the hall. The bobbing foxfire glow of handheld lamps drew closer, and at long last the shoji slid aside. There was Jun, bowing so low that his forehead touched the floor. “My lord?”

“It’s about damned time. What took you so long?”

“A messenger came, my lord. It’s—”

“Did I send you to dally with messengers? No.” Shichio extracted a little stack of lists from under his map and slid them along the floor toward his adjutant. “Now look at this. It says here that I’ve deployed a double garrison at some ‘green cliff,’ wherever that is, and but a single platoon at the compound of Inoue Shigekazu—at your behest. Why?”

“Sir, the Green Cliff is the name of House Yasuda’s most fortified compound.”

“Speak up, damn you. Explain yourself to me, not the floor.”

Jun raised himself into a less sluglike pose. “My lord, the message, it’s quite important—”

“I’ll be the one to tell you what’s important, Jun, and at the moment what I deem important is for you to stop your prattling. Now tell me, why should I care about these Yasudas?”

“Lord Yasuda’s wedding gift was most generous, my lord. Nine prized horses from excellent stables.”

“And yet he did not attend the wedding.”

That had been one of Hashiba’s better ideas, requiring all lords to keep records of who married whom, who died when, what dowries and tokens of respect were exchanged. In truth Hashiba had stolen the idea from his predecessor, Oda Nobunaga, who saw dowries as convenient cover for his enemies to amass an army. A gift of horses might have been a pretext for building cavalry; a gift of land today could easily become rice for feeding soldiers tomorrow. To Oda’s devious mind, any gathering of the powerful represented a possible conspiracy.

Shichio had never met the man personally, but as near as he could tell, Oda had been a brute and a bully —a samurai if ever there was one. But in this case, Shichio was glad Oda had ruled with an iron fist. It was through wedding and funerary records that Shichio could see his adjutant was even more incompetent than expected. “Read it,” he said, stabbing a finger at the stack of lists in Jun’s quivering hands. “Did the Bear Cub wed himself to the Yasudas? No. He wedded himself to the Inoues. So why are my troops stationed as if it were the other way around?”

“House Yasuda is thought to be the closer ally.”

“Thought to be? Come, now, Jun, you’re a bright man. You wouldn’t invite me to cut your tongue out, would you?”

Jun swallowed. “No, my lord.”

“No, you wouldn’t. So is this an idle guess of yours, or do you have what we might call evidence?”

Jun shuffled through the lists, found the one he was looking for, and passed it to Shichio, all without lifting his head more than a handsbreadth from the floor. “If you’ll read here, sir, Lord Yasuda attended both the father’s and the elder brother’s funerals, and the Yasuda retainers were more numerous at both funerals than any other clan’s. It is believed that Lord Okuma—er, the Bear Cub, that is—well, that he married the Inoue girl under duress.”