Blood Ninja (42 page)

Namae hit the ground, a question that would never be spoken dying on his lips.

“I’m sorry,” said Shusaku, his voice fading. “You deserved a better death. But I am protecting the son of my lord.”

As the sun burned him, his body began to appear out of nothingness, a shadow that grows darker as the light brightens.

Shusaku fell to his knees then, his entire body smoking. Taro ran to him, crying out a nonsense stream of “No, no, no, no …”

But though he stopped the ninja’s body from falling, he was too late to stop the life that fled from the man’s body.

Shusaku’s blind eye sockets seemed to look up and into Taro’s very mind as Taro put his hand on the slippery, bloody hilt of the sword and tried to pull it out. Even as he did it he knew it was hopeless—the sword wouldn’t kill the ninja, but the sunlight would.

“Leave it,” said the ninja. “It’s too late for me. Find Musashi, the sword saint. Tell him I sent you. He will give you the skill you need.”

He paused.
“Shogun,”
he breathed, his eyes on Taro.

And he died.

Flashes of light and darkness played on Yukiko’s vision, as if she had stared at the midday sun. Her skull was agony; her body wouldn’t work.

She saw Namae, his head cleaved nearly from his body, and she was glad.

Then she saw Shusaku. The man she had thought of as an uncle lay on the ground, eyes a mess of gore, stomach bleeding. Taro knelt beside him, his hands gripping the sword that had run him through. As Yukiko watched, Taro let go of the sword and stumbled to his feet.

Yukiko’s eyes went wide. Had Taro killed Shusaku? And if so, why?

A horrible thought crossed her mind.
He knows that his destiny is more important
. To be shogun was all that mattered to the boy. She thought of her sister. Apparently Taro had forgotten her already, just as he had forgotten his master, who even now burned on the flagstones as the sun scorched his flesh, the acrid
smell of his immolation stinging Yukiko’s nostrils.

Everywhere Taro went, he took death with him. To the abbess, to Heiko, and now to Shusaku, too. For all she knew, Hiro was also dead. Taro was like a poison on the world—like a plague, as if his very existence infected those around him with the taint of death.

And really, what had Lord Oda done? Only tried to clean this stain from the earth, remove the source of the infection. His man, Kenji Kira, had killed her foster mother and sister, it was true, but he had done it in the name of seeking Taro.

If Taro didn’t exist, then Kenji Kira would not have had to do those things, and no one would have had to die.

Yukiko watched Shusaku burn, as Taro staggered toward her, the blood of his master staining his clothes.

Yes, Taro had forgotten him, as he had forgotten Heiko. But Yukiko remembered. She remembered the way that Taro had fought Little Kawabata, the skill he had shown. He said that he had been helpless to save Heiko, that he had watched paralyzed as she’d died. But Yukiko had been drugged too, and she had not been paralyzed.

She had been unconscious.

And Taro would say anything, wouldn’t he? His ambition was limitless. There he was, the peasant son of an ama, dreaming of being shogun, leaving his friends to die.

When Yukiko looked at him, she saw not a peasant, nor a shogun, nor even a vampire.

She saw a traitor.

Taro turned in a daze and walked to the wall of the tower.

Yukiko had risen unsteadily to her feet. He put a hand under her arm and helped her toward the door. For one moment she turned a strange look on him, her eyes as hard as pebbles, then she grunted.

“You cry for him,” she said.

Taro wiped away a tear. “Yes.”

“Hmm. But Oda must die, yes? We carry on.”

“Yes,” said Taro. Yes. They would carry on.

He missed the fire in Yukiko’s eyes, the way she bit and bloodied her lip.

Taro opened the door, half-expecting samurai to spring on him. But there was no one.

Namae had not raised the alarm. Perhaps, in his arrogance, the ninja had believed that no reinforcements were necessary.

Still, Taro had enough presence of mind left to assume that guards would be posted on the stairs, protecting the room at the
top of the tower. “No,” he said to Yukiko. “We shouldn’t use the stairs. They will be defended.”

Again he pulled on his spiked gloves, and led Yukiko to the stone wall of the tower. “We climb,” he said.

They sought handholds and began.

The tower was considerably taller than the wall they had just scaled, and soon Taro’s arms were burning with the effort of pulling himself up. Twice they had to stop to rest, but Taro was conscious that—clinging onto the wall of the tower like this—they were very conspicuous. Finally he reached the uppermost window, a wide slit that gave onto a large, dark circular room. The window was big enough to fit through—this high up, who would be able to enter it?

Taro tumbled through the gap in the stone wall, headfirst. He flipped in the air, like a cat, and landed on his feet. His feet made no sound when they landed on the ground.

A moment later Yukiko landed beside him.

Taro glanced around furtively. They were standing in a luxuriously furnished bedroom that was nevertheless carpeted with a thick layer of sawdust. Taro guessed that the room must have been used for some other purpose, before Oda retreated to his tower-top aerie.

(He was right. Had he brushed the sawdust aside, he would have seen the blood that stained the stone beneath it.)

One corner of the round room was divided off by paper screens decorated with cranes and flowers. Taro could just see that behind it was a bed, covered with silk sheets that pooled expensively on the floor at its foot, soft and as white as the foam on the waves of the Kanto.

Taro padded around the circle of the wall, examining the rest of the room. Yukiko followed, her hand on the hilt of her short-sword. There was a desk, on which sat pieces of cream paper and an ink quill. There was also a chest, carved with monstrous reliefs—dragons, demons, devils. And there was a slender stand on which perched a magnificent chicken hawk, its head hooded.
As Taro and Yukiko crept about the room, the hawk turned its head to follow their near-silent tread.

A noise from the bed startled him, and Taro whirled around to see a torch flare into life on the wall behind the bed, projecting the clearly defined silhouette of a standing figure onto the paper screen.

Then the figure stepped out from behind the screen.

Golden light from the torch filled the room. Taro moved forward. He drifted in a dazzle of sawdust, the motes spangling the air around him as if he walked through diamonds.

Through that constellation of air, he saw his victim’s face.

It was not Lord Oda.

It was a girl.

The same girl they had rescued in the woods, from the
ronin
.

Hana got out of bed. She had heard a noise in the room, and had risen to investigate. It did not occur to her for a moment that there might be intruders, interlopers in her bedroom. That ninja, Namae, was outside, after all. The one she’d overheard with her father. She wasn’t supposed to know that he was there. She wasn’t really supposed to know that she was in any danger, in fact—and the truth was that while she knew it, she didn’t really understand it. Moving to the tower felt like an imprisonment, not a necessary precaution for her safety. For days she had banged on the door, trying to rouse a response from the guard outside, trying to get an answer from her father. But all that came was her twice-daily meal, pushed under the door
.

She was furious
.

She wanted too an explanation of what had happened to the Tokugawa boy and his mother. She had watched them being dragged to the tower, and suspected that they had been sequestered in the room below this one. But while she had heard dim cries at first, on her arrival here—had caught the odd plaintive echo through the stone—she lived now in a solitary silence unpenetrated by human voice or form
.

Until she stepped around the paper screen and saw, on the other side of her room, two ninja. One of them was holding a short-sword
already. The other held a surprisingly small and delicate hand to the pommel of his
.

Hana opened her mouth to scream. But with a speed that seemed impossible, the larger ninja had dropped the sword and was upon her, holding his hand over her mouth
.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered urgently
.

Surprised, she tried to answer, but all that came out was a grunt. His fingers crushed her lips, while his thumb pressed against the bottom of her jaw, holding her mouth closed to stop her biting. The ninja leaned in close, and she was struck to see that his eyes were clear, kind, and, most of all—young. She felt she recognized them from somewhere
.

He mimed a question
. If I move my hand, will you scream?

Hana found herself more curious than afraid. She shook her head. Rousing the guards would be pointless, anyway—from the speed with which the ninja had leaped across the room, she guessed he could gut her before the scream had fully exited her lips
.

The ninja considered for a moment, then withdrew his hand
.

“I should ask you, what are you doing here?” whispered Hana. “This is my bedroom.”

“No …,” said the ninja, apparently in some shock. “You should be Oda.”

“Yes,” said the smaller ninja, stepping forward, and Hana was startled to realize that it was a girl. “You should be Oda, and you should die.”

“I am Oda. My name is Lady Oda no Hana. I am Lord Oda Nobunaga’s only daughter.”

The boy ninja gasped. “But Shusaku said …,” he whispered, seemingly to himself. An expression of confusion, then anger, flitted across his face
.

He fell back, confusion written in his movements, as the lines of a calligraphy character can betray the turmoil of its author
.

Hana felt suddenly sorry for this clear-eyed ninja. He did not appear very threatening. She put a hand on his arm. “Tell me,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

Taro looked into the girl’s sea-gray eyes. She was asking him what he was doing there, but he found it hard to concentrate on anything other than the cool roundness of those irises, the graceful splay of those long dark lashes. The pain of losing Shusaku was still there, but as he looked at the girl before him, the pain seemed to fade, to melt into the background, like words written in ink that has dried in the sun.

“I won’t kill you, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “I’m supposed to, I think … but I won’t do it.”

“You … expected my father?” asked the girl.

“Yes. And I didn’t expect
you
.”

“What do you mean?”

Taro took his mask off, and Hana gasped. “You! From the woods!”

Taro held out his hand, showing her the ring he still wore on his little finger, the one she had given him after they’d saved her. It seemed right that they should meet again like this, as if fate, once more, were at work. He remembered that she had been reluctant to tell them who she was, that she had spoken of rewards but had said that she couldn’t tell her father she was out alone.

No wonder, if she was Lord Oda’s daughter.

Taro’s head spun. They had been so close to Oda, all those weeks ago, when they had killed those
ronin
in the woods! They had saved his own daughter! He felt as though he were taking part in a vast and complicated play, in which nothing was mere coincidence. For a brief instant he entertained the shameful notion that if they had known who the girl was, that night in the woods, they could have taken her hostage.

But no. He would not become like Lord Oda in the service of killing the man. He would not view people as mere playing pieces, helpful to the execution of his aims.