Floating City (45 page)

“My father was always expanding in Vietnam. He saw what others had not—that Southeast Asia was a shell in which pearls could be harvested at a fraction of the cost they could at home. He bought textile companies and electronics firms, fertilizer combines and interests in the old hotels of Saigon, when everyone else considered them worthless. And he bought land. This was how he came in contact with Leonforte.

“Michael Leonforte was also buying up real estate, through a dummy corporation owned by him and Rock. What it came down to was they both wanted the same plot of dirt.

“For once, my father forgot his own rules. He would not back down and neither would Leonforte. Leonforte threatened him, but my father would not be baited. Then Leonforte came after me and my father went after Leonforte. He forgot to watch his back. I saw Leonforte shoot him down like a dog in the street. What’s more, Leonforte liked it. He licked his lips and howled in glee, he did a little dance over my father’s body before dragging it into the jungle.”

Nicholas watched Tachi as the painful memories worked their way through the muscles of his face like a paroxysm. In this, at least, Seiko had not lied. Tachi was indeed obsessed with infiltrating Floating City.

Nicholas leaned over, poured Tachi a cup of tea, pushing it across the tatami, into the
oyabun’s
hands. Briefly, he touched Tachi’s fingers, which were very cold.

With the contact, Tachi’s eyes refocused on Nicholas’s face, then down at the cup of tea. He nodded in gratitude, took the cup in trembling hands, drank slowly. When he was finished, his fingers were steady again.

“Niigata hasn’t forgotten how to make tea,” he said softly, and Nicholas gave him a small smile.

“Niigata escaped from Floating City, so it’s logical to assume that he knows a way in.” Nicholas took the empty cup from Tachi. “You’ll get your chance now.”

Tachi nodded wordlessly as Niigata returned, and they began the last phase of the interview.

They left Niigata as they had found him, silhouetted in the open doorway, but to Nicholas he seemed more frail, as if the sickness were aging him at an impossibly rapid rate. He was not far wrong. Niigata estimated that he had outlived normal expectancy. “Every morning when I open my eyes,” he told them, “it is a surprise, and not always a pleasant one.” He did not have to go into the particulars of his somatic breakdown.

Outside, the cryptomeria swayed to the vagaries of the evening breeze. It had turned cold, and they hurried down the path toward the distant lights of the shrine compound, which glowed intermittently through the forest. At night, they were even more aware of the depth of the valley. The black hillsides loomed over them with a far different feeling from what they had in the benign twilight.

Perhaps it was what they had learned from Niigata that chilled them so, but both were sober and uncommunicative as they reached the small clearing beyond which was the bridge to the shrine. The shrine itself was deserted, the corners of the red-lacquered wood structures burnished with light from hanging lanterns.

Still, the moonlight was strong, and as they moved forward, it seemed to shimmer, rising up from the damp ground as if with a life of its own. It swirled in the night like mist, coalescing around a central point so that it seemed about to take on a specific shape before collapsing back on itself.

In the far distance, Nicholas heard a rhythm at once familiar and new. The heat of it fired his blood. He turned to see Tachi staring at him, and now he heard the beating at
kokoro,
the ancient magic of Tau-tau causing the transformation of thought into deed.

It was
koryoku,
the Illuminating Power, the sole path to Shuken.

“Open your mind, Nicholas,” Tachi whispered. “Here is everything you’ve wanted. Here is
koryoku.”

So close to his dream Nicholas hesitated. Could he trust Tachi this far? If he opened his mind, he would be vulnerable to a psychic attack by Tachi, who was also a
tanjian.
But if he did not take the chance, then the threat of the Kshira teaching in his mind increased exponentially. He had no choice.

He drew his essence inward toward
kokoro,
the cosmic membrane, and he began the ancient rhythms of Tau-tau. The cryptomeria forest exploded into columns of smoke, obscuring the moonlight. The world canted over on its side as the present slipped out of focus, loosed from the yoke of time. Now he dwelled in the ether of magic where horizons were unknown and arbitrary man-made laws ceased to exist. Only the cosmos swelled and breathed all around him like a gigantic engine.

He became aware of another psychic presence on the opposite side of the glittering column of light. Tachi.

Koryoku
stood between them like a charismatic lodestone toward which they both moved. The danger increased as both men approached the central column of light. Nicholas’s mind was open wide. He could feel Tachi’s essence and get a sense of its texture but not its substance. If Tachi was his secret enemy, this would be a perfect place for him to ambush Nicholas, now when he was engrossed in
koryoku,
dazzled by it, when his psychic defenses were folded away to allow the lesson of the Illuminating Power to flow through him.

He felt a ripple outside time, like a loop completing itself, and he once more experienced
shicho,
that peculiar and remarkable current of thought emanating from Tachi.

Now both men were so close to the coruscating column of light that Nicholas could see Tachi’s face through it, illuminated by it, transfigured by it. He felt the other man’s urging, and he reached out with his mind. Closer and closer he came to the glittering, mysterious column until he could sense the surge of ionized particles, feel the prickling sensation of their excitation on the surface of his mind.

Then something curious happened.

Nicholas heard Tachi in his mind.

I can’t,
Tachi said.

Can’t what?

For an instant, the image of Tachi behind the column of light winked out and Nicholas sensed he was alone in Tau-tau. Then Tachi reemerged into the light thrown off by
koryoku.

Tachi, what is it?

Something
...
I don’t know...
There was an odd look on his face.
The Kshira is so strong...

My Kshira?
Nicholas thought.
Is my Kshira so strong it won’t allow me to reach
koryoku? What else could Tachi mean?

Then Tachi’s presence winked out again and Nicholas knew he was not coming back. He took one last lingering look at the column of light. Without Tachi’s presence it was already beginning to break up, swirling ever more slowly like an engine without an energy source, and Nicholas pulled himself out of Tau-tau.

He found himself back near the shrine. He looked around.

Tachi was crossing over the bridge to the shrine, but he was not headed for the steep stairs that would take him back to the village. Nicholas was crossing the bridge after him when he heard a sharp sound coming from the nearest of the shrine buildings to their right.

He paused, peering into the lantern-lit gloom, but could see nothing.

Tachi had already entered the shrine.

“Tachi!”

“There’s someone here.” Tachi’s voice was breathless.

“It’s just a priest or the caretaker.”

But Tachi shook his head. “It’s someone who does not belong here.”

He disappeared around a corner and Nicholas went over the bridge after him. The interior of the shrine was open, as was the custom. There were small covered areas, and a sacred fountain in the shape of the coiled serpent Noten O-kami. A small bamboo ladle lay along the stone basin, and it was this simple symbol of purity that Nicholas would remember long after that night was over.

“Tachi,” Nicholas said again. He caught sight of the
oyabun
in an open field facing the last building in which stood a series of stone statues of the venerable priests who founded this shrine centuries ago. They were set into the steep forested hillside into which the stone steps had been laboriously cut.

“Here!” Tachi said, pointing to a gap between two of the statues. He took a step up the slope, then abruptly spun around. What at first appeared to be a black rope arced out from him, his arms were flung wide, and he hit the ground.

Nicholas was already more than halfway to him. He saw, as he approached, the fletched end of the steel bolt that had pierced Tachi’s heart. And along the sward, the black rope draped, a long, thick line of Tachi’s blood.

“Tachi!”

He knelt beside the
oyabun,
put his hand to the side of his head. Tachi’s eyes were open, an expression in them somewhere between surprise and outrage.

“What did you see?” Nicholas whispered, but Tachi was past hearing anything.
Shicho,
the current of thought that had run between them, had been severed, and he felt its absence like the loss of a hand.

Nicholas rose, leaping over the dead
oyabun,
and, grasping the rough, lichen-studded surface of one of the statues, leaped upward into the first line of trees. He raced silently through the thickets of the forest, listening to the immediate environment as he went. A full moon rode in a sky rid at last of the mist of the day, and its light cast everything in an eerie chiaroscuro.

His ears detected a small sound, then a series, like leather struck against stone, and he changed directions, sprinting in an oblique direction to his left, toward the stone steps. His stride lengthened and his blood pumped. It felt good to rise to motion after the long hours inside Niigata’s stupefying catafalque.

He could see the line of stone steps now, gleaming as whitely as bones—Niigata’s scantly covered bones—in the milky werelight.

Someone was on them, running upward, and he changed direction again, paralleling them, keeping to the shadows of the cryptomeria. It was difficult going; much of the hillside was scree, friable rock thickly carpeted with gnarled roots, lichen, and moss, treacherous underfoot.

Where the stairs turned forty-five degrees and the massive bronze image of Yoshitsune’s sword rose from its stone bed, he broke cover, coming obliquely toward the running figure. He could see that the lightweight titanium-and-boron hunting crossbow was loaded with another steel bolt. It was leveled at him, but as he approached, the figure dropped the weapon to its side. The next moment, it moved again, this time into a patch of moonlight, and Nicholas saw the face.

He almost stumbled as he came up short on the steep, rocky slope of the hillside.

Seiko!

“Christ, what have you done?”

“He was poison,” she managed between teeth clenched in rage. Her eyes were darting this way and that. “He would have destroyed everything.”

“You’re wrong, he—”

“He would have taken you away!” she shouted, and lifted the crossbow.

Nicholas whirled and, with his muscles popping, wrenched the bronze sword from its stone. The sharp edges of the carved flames shone weirdly in the moonlight, making it seem as if they were real, flickering over the blade.

Seiko screamed and let fly the bolt.

Nicholas leapt, but she was not aiming at him. The bolt smashed into the thin layer of rock on which he was standing, and with the weight of the gigantic sword, he came down awkwardly on a mixture of stone shards and upturned earth that was already sliding down the steep slope.

He tried to grab on to a tree or an outcropping, but there was no immediate handhold, and he felt himself sliding down into the blackness of the valley as she, still striped in moonlight, dashed upward through the forest and away.

He kicked out, felt a gnarled root slam into his ankle, and immediately he bent his leg. The root held and he hung upside down, dizzy from momentum for a moment, before he plunged the tip of the sword into the side of the steep hill. He carefully unhooked his ankle. The sword held his weight. He swung up on it, reaching with his right foot for a sharp outcropping of rock. He gained purchase, balanced his weight, and let go of the sword.

Then he was scrambling back up the hill, scuttling on all fours to increase his speed and to keep himself in the shadows. He could feel her, knew the moment she paused, turning to look back down into the darkness of the forested valley, thinking of him.

That was enough for him to overtake her. He meant nothing more than to pin her to the ground, to question her, but he came out of the darkness with such appalling speed that she gasped. The crossbow came up, its metal bolt gleaming dully in the moonlight. “Go ahead. Shoot me like you shot Tachi.”

She bit her lip, shook her head violently. “You don’t understand.”

“Why did you kill him?”

“He would have killed you,” she said softly.

“So you said, but I don’t believe you. You were jealous of him because of the link he and I established. It left you out.”

“What does it matter what I say? You don’t even have to open your mouth; I can feel how your heart has turned to stone.”

What could he say when she knew the truth? Lying to her would be infinitely more cruel than his silence.

“Now I know I was fooling myself. Whatever we had came from me; whatever we had was an illusion.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I k
now!”
A tear leaked from her eye, then gaining control of herself, she wiped it away.

“What do you care, anyway? You’re not interested in me.” She shook her head. “That damn psychic link made you vulnerable. I could see you were suspicious, but then that link drew you to him.”

“You’re wrong about Tachi. He was a friend—”

“Is that what you think?” She gave him a lopsided smile, “I didn’t send for Tachi, he came to me. He was sent by someone who wanted you dead.” She saw his expression. “Don’t believe me? Tachi was ambitious, but he was in a vulnerable position. He was appointed head of the Yamauchi clan as a kind of compromise. Because Tomoo Kozo had been a member of the Kaisho’s inner council, the two remaining council
oyabun,
Akira Chosa and Tetsuo Akinaga, had to approve the third member. Tachi was the only one both would vote for.