Year of the Demon

exert power over their betters.

Shichio slammed the sliding door aside and looked down upon the messenger kneeling in the weeds. “What do you think you’re doing, stopping your lord on the way to his wedding?”

The man bowed deeper. “General, your orders were to deliver any news of the Bear Cub, day or night.”

The Bear Cub? How could any word of him have reached Izu already? Shichio’s fleet had been the first to set sail after that storm, and it should have swept up all other ships in its net. No horseman could have outrun them.

He looked down at the mute messenger. “Well? Spit it out, boy.”

“My lord, the Bear Cub stormed the Yasuda compound last night. We lost fifty men.”

“Fifty?”

“He was said to have a rider with him. A ronin of some years.”

“No,” said Shichio. His spies on the Tokaido had reported that Daigoro and his haggard bodyguard had split ways at least a week past. His agent within the Wind said the boy had been alone when he hired his retinue to spirit him to Izu.

But this was not the first fantastic tale to have reached Shichio’s ears. Just this very morning a skiff had come alongside Hashiba’s flagship, delivering word that the Bear Cub had stolen a frigate after slaughtering the entire crew. It was preposterous, of course. Yes, the Okumas were a coastal power, but the boy was a cripple, not a seaman, and each of Shichio’s vessels was teeming with armed men. The whelp would need an army of pirates at his command. The tale was so ludicrous that Shichio had ordered a broadside into the skiff that delivered the message. He would have sunk the bastards for their cheek had Hashiba not heard the sudden cannonade and ordered a cease-fire.

Out of sheer magnanimity Shichio chose not to kill this messenger either. “The Yasuda garrison is playing tricks on you,” he told the kneeling man. “They take advantage of your gullibility.”

“My lord, they were most explicit: a young boy with an odachi and a lame leg —”

“Quit while you still have a tongue in your mouth.” Shichio had a sudden vision of blood oozing from the messenger’s mouth, and he realized his fingers had worked their way under the folds of Chinese silk. He was touching the mask.

He withdrew his hand as if the mask had bitten it. Hashiba frowned at him but said nothing. Shichio banged on the roof and the stinking, sweating bearers resumed their march.

When he reached the gate, Shichio was pleased by what he saw. House Okuma commanded a grand vista. Katto-ji, home to the abbot he was soon to kill, peered out from the pines on the next summit to the north. Below, on the saddle between the peaks, a double garrison was camped along the road flying Toyotomi colors. That road and the jetty were the only ways to reach the Okuma compound. Rumors be damned, Shichio thought. He would believe his eyes before he believed tales of captured frigates and samurai heroics, and his eyes saw no corpses lining the road, nor any pirate vessels anchored in the bay.

Just inside the gates, Okuma warriors formed columns of red and brown, their bear paw crests fluttering overhead on their banners. Opposite them stood a wall of soldiers in mossy green, with a fat white centipede winding its way up the length of each green banner. He remembered that crest from his intelligence reports: House Yasuda. He wondered how low a clan had to sink before it took a wriggling insect as its sigil.

In the center stood his bride, the Lady Yumiko, cradling an infant. Shichio remembered hearing the Bear Cub’s wife was with child. That wedding must have been rushed along by spearheads if the cub’s child was already born. Again exercising his generosity, Shichio decided he would let his new bride coddle her grandson for a few minutes before ordering the wedding to commence. He was happy to see the woman sober enough to stand. If even half of the rumors that reached him were true, she spent her days either sedated by poppy’s tears or wailing and running about like a hungry ghost.

The primary reason Shichio had cajoled Hashiba into coming with him was not to have his friend, lord, and lover by his side on his wedding day, but to guarantee that the wedding would take place. The matron of House Okuma had yet to respond to a single one of Shichio’s marriage proposals, and he needed a contingency plan if she chose to remain mute when her would-be husband arrived. That was where Hashiba came in: he could simply order her to marry Shichio. But seeing Lady Yumiko in her bridal dress, with her attendants and even the attendants of neighboring houses arrayed to honor the occasion, Shichio could see her will had finally caved.

“My lord regent,” he heard a familiar voice say, “and General Shichio too, what a pleasant surprise! You honor House Okuma with your attendance.”

Shichio stepped out of the palanquin and looked over the top of it. There stood the Bear Cub’s tall, lean bodyguard, the one with the bushy sideburns and tousled paintbrush of a topknot—Katsuhara, Shichio thought his name was, or Katsushira, something like that. He stood just inside the Okuma gate, looking tired and gray and not at all like a proper attendee at a wedding. Shichio expected no more of the man; he’d always struck Shichio as common.

“Why, we’re just as surprised to see you, aren’t we?” Shichio said. He set the mask in the palanquin; shabby though he was, the ronin was dangerous, and Shichio needed to keep his wits. “Word reached me that you abandoned your little cub in his hour of need—and now here you are at his homestead. Fickle, aren’t you? One who lacked manners might ask whether you had impure designs on the boy’s mother.”

“His designs on my mother are pure enough,” said the voice Shichio hated most in the world.

The Bear Cub stepped out from the midst of the Okuma column, pallid as a corpse but somehow still standing. It was impossible. Every path to the compound was under watch. But there he was, with that long and lovely sword slung across his back. Its tsuba and pommel glittered in the morning sun.

The boy bowed deeply, and Shichio responded with the slightest dip of his chin. “I bow to your superior,” the Bear Cub said, and Shichio turned back around to see Hashiba had hopped out of the palanquin.

“Ah!” said Hashiba, marching around so that he could see the gathering; he was too short to see over the palanquin. “An honor guard after all! I was beginning to think you’d lost your manners, Daigoro-san.”

“The honor guard is my mother’s,” said that odious voice, “and she and I beg your pardon alike. We did not know you were coming, my lord regent.”

“Forget it,” Hashiba said, waving his hand as if shooing off a butterfly. He inhaled deeply, flaring the nostrils in his too-flat nose, and clapped his hands against his breastplate with a grandiose and flippant air. “Smell that breeze from the sea! So different from Kyoto.”

Daigoro stepped forward to usher Hashiba inside the compound. Shichio noticed the boy’s limp was much more pronounced than he’d seen before. “Why, young Daigoro,” he said. “You seem to be limping more than usual, my lad. Is your infirmity growing worse?”

“I took a wound to the leg last night.”

“Ah, yes. Getting out of bed, was it? What a trial it must be, being unable to do all the things the rest of us take for granted.”

“It was a sword wound,” said the whelp, grinding his teeth.

“Was it indeed? Can the rumors of your assault on the Yasuda compound be true? Do tell me who cut you; I shall have to decide whether to promote him or to chastise him for not cutting deeper.”

“You needn’t burden yourself with such difficult decisions. He’s dead now.”

“Is he?” Shichio found himself unable to keep the glee from his voice. It caused the boy such obvious pain simply to be standing on his own two feet. He so plainly wanted to rest that Shichio resolved to keep him standing and talking for as long as possible. Taunting him was just a garnish on a plate that was already beautifully overfull. “I shall add his murder to the list of charges against you.”

“Why stop with one murder?” said the whelp. “Make it fifty.”

“Fifty? That’s the second time I’ve heard that number, neh? Yes, it is. You’ve become quite the little brigand, haven’t you? Perhaps the lord regent and I should have you crucified now, and get to the wedding later.”

Shichio saw Hashiba’s eyes light up at the mention of crucifixion, but on the face of that despicable boy he saw an insufferable little smile—a tiny thing, so small it was barely there, yet it seemed to hold back a torrent of