Blood Ninja (11 page)

The problem was, so was the current shogun.

Ever since the previous shogun had died, his young son had been protected by six lords, the daimyos, each of them charged with keeping the boy shogun safe. The dying shogun had reasoned that each would prevent the others from rising up against his son—that their rivalry would result in a fragile balance. So far, he had been proven right, thanks to a lasting alliance between Lord Oda Nobunaga, daimyo of Taro’s province, and Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu, the cunning and equally powerful daimyo of the Northern Territories. Since Oda’s victory at Okehazama, he and Tokugawa had merged their armies to protect their neighboring territories from smaller lords, and to enforce the shogun’s rule.

Shusaku cuffed Taro around the ear. “Drink. Now.”

Taro wavered. In his mind his mother’s expression echoed—the one she had used when he was learning to swim, and swallowed salt water; the one she had used when he lay in the healer’s shack, his shoulder bleeding black and sluggish blood from the wound where the shark had bit him.

Ame futte ji katamuru
.

Land that is rained on will harden.

Like a charm, the words lifted the darkness that had settled
on Taro’s spirit, the tremble that had set into his legs. He looked down at the man.
I will be rained on
, he thought.
It is in the nature of revenge to suffer. But I will grow strong, and I will use my strength to find my mother and avenge my father
. Filial piety was the perfection of Bushido ethics, and the greatest gift a son could give his father was revenge on those who had wronged him. Just as the great hero Yomato Takeru had slaughtered his father’s enemies in numbers like locusts, so Taro would lay low the men who had killed his.

Taro bent down and lifted the surprisingly light wrist.
The man must have the bones of a bird
, he thought. The wrist was narrow, and the bones and muscles impossibly small and delicate beneath the wrinkled, loose skin. Taro felt a comforting hand on his shoulder. Shusaku.

Suppressing the urge to gag, Taro raised the arm to his lips. He felt a strange movement in his mouth—
my teeth lengthening?
—and then bit. Then there was only the urge to bite, the biting, the sinking of teeth into flesh, and the hot burst of blood in his mouth—and Taro was surprised to find that it tasted good. More than that, it
felt
good, the same way that water feels good when you’re hot and thirsty and your tongue is a squat toad in your mouth—and then he was aware of nothing more than sucking down that hot, vital life force and wanting it to go on forever, and he could feel his own blood rising to meet it, beating more forcefully than he had ever known it, and—

Rough hands pulled him up, wresting his mouth from the man’s wrist with a popping sound.

“Enough,” said Shusaku. “You will kill him.”

Taro looked down at the man. His skin looked a little blanched, as if the color had been drained from it. Taro felt sick, but also alive and quick. Smooth power flooded the much-abused machinery of his strength, loosening his every joint.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.” He ignored Hiro, who was looking at him with something approaching horror. He had never felt such energy, such focus.

Shusaku nodded. “You will ride in the palanquin. Hiro and I will carry it. You had better take the letter.” He handed Taro the scroll, on which was a wax seal bearing the petals-within-petals
mon
of Lord Oda, and the crossed-sword
mon
of the shogun.

“You will also wear his clothes,” continued Shusaku. “The ambassador’s, that is. We will hope that, in this age of boy emperors and boy shoguns, a boy ambassador will raise no suspicion. Strip him, please.” As he said this, he was stripping the simple clothes from the smaller of the two servants. He took off his own black ninja’s clothes—for a second he disappeared from sight—and then began to pull on the simpler garments. “Only ninjas wear black,” he added.

“What about your tattoos?” asked Hiro, as Taro took off the rich man’s clothes and began to substitute them for his own.

Shusaku had uncovered his face, and for Taro, the man’s eyes were floating again in thin air.

“No human will question them. They will think I was once a criminal, a member of the thieves’ fraternity. If we encounter a vampire … that would be more awkward. They may not know what it means, but they would see, as Taro sees, a pair of eyes bobbing about unsupported. That would be enough to make anyone suspicious, and ninjas are suspicious folk by temperament.”

Shusaku looked at Taro, who was bedecked now in the opulent clothes, and whose feet had disappeared entirely beneath a flowing pool of silk on the ground, his hands concealed by great wide sleeves.

The ambassador was a lot bigger than him.

Shusaku adjusted one of the sleeves. “Hmm. Well, it might do, if you’re sitting down.”

He beckoned Hiro forward. “Bend your neck,” he said, then began to wrap his scarf around Hiro’s face, leaving only the boy’s eyes uncovered.

“What are you doing?” asked Hiro.

“We may not need it,” said Shusaku. “If they believe that Taro is who he is supposed to be. But if you hear me say the word ‘balance,’
straightaway you yelp as if in pain and drop the palanquin. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but—”

“Good.”

Shusaku bent down to the larger of the prone servants. He flourished a knife that seemed to have been conjured from nowhere. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, then cut off the man’s left little finger. The prostrate man did not stir, still sleeping soundly from the drug in the dart.

Taro could hardly believe what he had just seen. “Hey!” he said. “What are you doing?”

Shusaku weighed the finger in his hand. “It is not much to him, the smallest finger of his left hand. Its loss will not prevent him from wielding a sword, or a pen.” He reached inside his kimono and removed a gold coin. Once again Taro wondered how the ninja was able to secret such things about his person, as if his clothes, whether borrowed or not, were capable of producing on demand the items of his requirement. Taro had seen Shusaku replace his clothes after swimming to the small boat the previous night—and had seen no evidence of the swords, blowpipes, coins, and gods-knew-what-else that the man apparently carried.

Shusaku tore a length from his cast-aside ninja’s scarf, bandaged the servant’s stump with it, then curled the man’s fingers over, like a small octopus closing over its prey, and slipped the coin into the grip so created. “A small compensation for your loss,” he murmured to the unconscious man. “You see, to us your littlest finger is much indeed, if it keeps us safe tonight.”

“How would it keep us safe?” asked Taro. He was, despite himself, impressed by the ninja’s generosity, even if he
had
just maimed a man for no clear reason. A gold coin of that size could buy a small holding of several square
ri
.

Shusaku ignored him, handing the finger to Hiro. “When you drop the palanquin, you also drop this, all right? And you look at it, so as to make sure that others notice it too.”

Hiro took the finger with a disgusted expression and tucked it
into a pocket in his robe. “If you’ll just tell me why I must carry this finger and cover my face, then—”

Shusaku put a finger to his lips. “An old man must have his secrets,” he said.

Shusaku moved toward the palanquin, stretching the muscles of his arms and shoulders. Taro climbed inside the little carriage, and felt it rise into the air. He sat back. He was proud of Hiro’s strength, and grateful for it. If Hiro had not been as large as he was, Taro didn’t know how they would have disguised themselves to get into the town.

Two slits had been cut into the front of the palanquin so that the person inside could see out, without anyone being able to easily see in. Taro looked through these eyeholes as the palanquin turned around, and he saw the bodies of the men Shusaku had knocked out.

“Wait,” said Shusaku. “Put the palanquin down.”

Taro leaned out of the door. “What is it?”

Shusaku had lifted up one of the bodies by the armpits. “Help me hide these in the undergrowth,” he said to Hiro. “They won’t stir for many incense sticks, but we don’t want anyone seeing them. With any luck, they’ll realize what happened and get safely away before Oda finds them, and punishes them for letting us overpower them.”

Taro rolled his eyeballs. “Lord Oda is merciful,” he said. “They’re just servants. They can’t be expected to defend themselves against a trained ninja. A person cannot be killed simply for failing in the face of impossible odds.”

Shusaku came back for the third man, the ambassador himself. “Usually,” he said softly, “that is
just
what gets people killed.”

Ito Kazei walked down the long corridor, the echoes of his
tabi
on the stone floor seeming to measure out the remainder of his life. He would have liked dearly to dawdle, but when Lord Oda Nobunaga requested one’s presence at one’s soonest convenience, it was a request in name only, and was rarely convenient. It was said that when a distant family member had been too slow to offer his condolences at the funeral of Oda Masahine, Nobunaga’s father, Nobunaga had forced the miscreant to commit seppuku right there, disemboweling himself with his own ceremonial sword
.

Ordinarily, a samurai committing this most sacred of ritual acts was accorded the courtesy of a second—another samurai who would stand behind and decapitate him as his blade cut through his guts, allowing him to escape much of the terrible pain
.

Nobunaga always refused
.

Many had wailed for Nobunaga’s father that day. But their sobs had been drowned out by the cries of the dying man, who’d knelt by the pyre with his guts at his feet for hours before death had come for him, too
.

Ito was carrying the sword as he walked—not sheathed, as that would be an unforgivable presumption, but wrapped in oiled cloths and cradled in his arms. He increased his pace, careful not to drop the precious package. This sword had cost him several months of work, with him beating and re-beating the three steel bars that made up the blade, hammering and cooling them with great precision in order to achieve a
shinogi
line that undulated along the dull edge of the blade, a pale blue wave against the gleaming silver
.

It was the finest blade Ito had ever made. And he had instructed his artisans to create the finest
tsuka
hilt and the most beautifully decorated
tsuba
hand guard ever produced, to complement the sharp metal and create a weapon of the most extraordinary beauty. An excellent nobleman’s sword might take several days to make. Lord Oda’s had been three months in the workshop
.

When one of Lord Oda’s retainers had presented himself to Ito and asked that he make a sword for the daimyo, Ito had been proud of the skill that he had spent so many years honing, perfecting it as the blade is perfected by the hammer and the forge. For his reputation to have reached the ears of the lord was praise indeed
.

But he had also been terrified. Oda was known to have acquired the title of sword saint, or
kensei .
Various sword masters from the length and breadth of the country could attest to his skill—if they still lived. But everyone who had ever dueled with Oda was dead, and they had been many too
.

A door opened ahead of Ito, and a girl’s face of astonishing beauty looked out. Ito almost gasped out loud. He had heard of the legendary looks of Hana, Lord Oda’s only daughter. But he had assumed them to be exaggerations—obsequious flattery disguised as gossip, in order to keep the lord happy. Ito stopped, without even being aware of it. He stared at the girl. She truly was exquisite: her dark, limpid eyes were as midnight pools, and her long eyelashes strands of weeping willow. Her skin was white with blushes of pink, like the blossom that was her namesake. There was a nervousness about her, a restless kind of grace, but this only made her more attractive. Ito had heard that Lord Oda feared for her safety. He wondered what could possibly threaten this beautiful
girl, what kind of man—or demon—could possibly want to hurt her
.

He was not aware that he was staring at her. She cast her eyes down, her cheeks flushing, and retired into the room. The door shut behind her. Ito, who had not even been aware he was holding his breath, let it out. He continued on his way
.

The end of the corridor arrived too soon, and Ito could no longer delay. He stood in front of the heavy wooden door. Voices came from the other side. “Where is the boy?” Ito heard Oda say, in his unmistakable gruff voice. Ito had seen the lord only when he and his retainers had ridden past the workshop on one or other of their hunting expeditions, but he had learned quickly to distinguish the man’s authoritative tone and deep timbre
.

There was an indistinguishable mumble from someone else, then a clattering sound of metal on stone. “I sent you for the boy,” shouted Oda. “And you return with nothing but excuses. He’s nothing but a child! Children are easy to kill. It is one of their advantages.”