Year of the Demon

“It is believed,” Shichio said. Jun shivered, but Shichio would not be so harsh on him this time. He’d made his case. “Send a pigeon. Double the guard on House Inoue, but leave the garrison at this Green Cliff right where it is. Now, then, what other news from the north? Has there been a reply to my marriage proposals?”

“Not yet, my lord.”

“Why not? This messenger tonight had no word? What’s taking so long?”

Jun shrank into himself as if hoping to become invisible. “I’m certain my lord remembers that the Lady Okuma is quite mad. Who can say what errands she’ll attend to and when?”

“Have another proposal written up, and send it with the same pigeon. And tell the captain of the guard at the House Okuma garrison that he will return a reply from Lady Okuma or I’ll have him buried alive.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Shichio gave a satisfied sigh. “Very good, Jun. Now, what’s so important that you’d risk me cutting out your tongue?”

Jun looked up from his brush and paper, his eyes wide with fear. “My lord?”

“The messenger, you dolt. The one whose ramblings sent you running here all in a lather.”

“Ah.” Jun swallowed and cleared his throat. “My lord, the Bear Cub is dead.”

“What?” Shichio rose to his feet so fast he knocked the table over. “Where? How?”

Jun produced a small slip of paper from the pocket of his sleeve, pressed it on the floor with both hands, and slid it forward. Shichio snatched it up. In a tight, neat hand it read BEAR STRIPPED OF PELT TONIGHT. THERE IS NO MAN THE WIND CANNOT REACH.

Shichio gave a triumphant cry, crushing the note in his fist. Images flashed in his mind: the whelp’s throat cut open; the whelp disemboweled; the whelp dead with an arrow in his eye. He couldn’t decide which method he liked best. It hardly mattered. He’d receive another note from the assassin soon enough, chronicling the details. In the meantime, though, he’d relish the moment.

Before he knew it, the mask was in his hands. He couldn’t say how it got there. “Be gone,” he said to Jun. Even the most incompetent aide had his uses. It would be a shame to kill him for no better reason than to celebrate the Bear Cub’s demise.

52

Lightning struck like Raijin’s own fist, so close that the thunderclap shuddered every timber of the inn. The bolt threw a rhombus of white light through the open shoji, causing Daigoro’s bloody form to glow like a foxfire where it lay on the floor.

In the next instant all was black, darker than it should have been even for an inn nestled deep in the pines in the dead of night. That instant of brightness made the ensuing darkness impenetrable.

A lone figure stepped over the prostrated body. It opened Daigoro’s unresponsive mouth and forced a vile, poisonous liquid down his throat. Then, with fingertips striking as hard as hammers, it drove penetrating blows into vital nerve centers and pressure points. Each strike landed expertly, in precisely the right sequence, to ensure that the task was finished.

It was the last blow that forced Daigoro to vomit. His body twitched and heaved, splattering the rain-slicked floorboards with poison and blood and counterpoison. Pain bent him into a fetal position. With one arm he clutched his aching belly, and with the other hand he pressed down on the seeping wound in his neck.

Lightning flashed again, illuminating the little glass bottle that the figure astride him had emptied into his gullet. “What was that?” Daigoro groaned, his reeling eyes trying to focus on the bottle.

“Antivenom,” said the shinobi crouching above him. “An old formula. We carry it often. Too easy to be cut on one’s own blade.”

“No. I mean, what—what poisoned me?”

His shinobi did not deign to answer, leaving Daigoro to piece things together himself. He recalled collapsing to the floor. That explained his throbbing forehead, but not the sharp pain in his throat bones. Something hard and thin had struck him there.

A knife-hand strike. He remembered now. It was meant to crush his windpipe, to keep him from vomiting. And there was the vile taste a moment before, burning his tongue like fire. He’d been asleep, and he’d opened his eyes to see a shadow-clad figure above him.

They’d struggled. Daigoro could still feel it: the panic of being entangled in his bedclothes. Pain rupturing through his right hand as he landed a punch. Poison raging through his guts like wildfire. He remembered the world slowing to a crawl. His senses took on the preternatural clarity of the dying. A hissing noise like an arrow in flight, audible even over the wind and the rain. A glimmer of steel flashing past his face. A tiny thunk when it caught his assailant behind the ear.

The shuriken wasn’t fatal. It had only driven the assassin back. Daigoro had finished the rest, grabbing the shuriken with his good hand and ripping it across his assailant’s throat. The wounds went numb where he’d cut his fingers on the shuriken. Venom. He remembered stumbling toward his cabin door, delirious. Then nothing.

“You,” Daigoro said, his throat still burning with bile, “you saved my life.”

“Yes,” said the shinobi. “Most uncautious. Should learn not to sleep so soundly.”

Daigoro looked at the dead man sprawled at the foot of his bed. He recognized his face: another ninja, one of six he’d hired from the Wind. This one had been masquerading as Daigoro’s palanquin bearer. For three days Daigoro had traveled with him, even shared meals with him, and tonight he’d killed him.

Daigoro struggled to his feet. The wind knocked him over twice before he managed it, and when he stiff- armed the doorjamb to steady himself, his right hand recoiled in pain. His fingers were broken again, the same ones Sora Samanosuke had broken in their duel. Hot lines of pain burned in his left hand too, across the palm and the pads of the fingers, everywhere the shuriken had left its mark.

“What’s the time?” he said.

“Time to flee,” said the shinobi. “This inn, no longer safe.”

“No,” Daigoro said, frustrated with his inability to communicate. The attack, the poison, the shinobi’s violent curative, they’d conspired to beat his brain into something approaching drunkenness. “What I mean to say is, why were you in my rooms at this hour? How did you know to look for an assassin?”

The shinobi grunted. “Sent message to Shichio. Confirmed assassination of Bear Cub. He responded with pleasure, not confusion. Only one explanation.”

Daigoro stepped out on the veranda, hoping the cold rain whipping his face might also whip the fogginess from his mind. “How did you know?”

“Didn’t. Shichio’s reaction proved it. From there, only a matter of waiting.”

Daigoro tried to make out the shinobi’s face, but it was too dark. He was certain this was the shinobi he’d first spoken to—that lupine voice was unmistakable—but somehow he’d still never gotten a clear look at the man’s features. They’d traveled together for three days and three nights, but this one had always ridden ahead as a scout until sundown, and from sunrise onward Daigoro had always been confined to his palanquin. The Wind had chosen to disguise him as a junior emissary of Tokugawa Ieyasu, on the assumption that no one would molest even the lowliest lickspittle of such a powerful lord. Daigoro could not begin to guess how they’d stolen a palanquin bearing the triple hollyhock leaves of the Tokugawa, with uniforms and weapons to match. It was enough that the emblems were authentic, and that the six ninja in his employ were utterly fearless, even of the most powerful warlords in the empire.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Stupid question.”

“I just wanted to thank you.”

“The Wind is without name. I am of the Wind.”