The Diamond Chariot (80 page)

Bewilderment and anxiety forced the titular counsellor to be doubly cautious. Before approaching Tamba’s house – the one hovering at the edge of the precipice – he had to know for certain what he was leaving behind him. So before they reached the precipice, they turned back.

They covered the entire island in zigzags. They found another house exactly like the first two. Nothing else.

And so the entire ‘fortress’ consisted of four wooden structures, and there was no garrison to be seen at all.

What if the
shinobi
had left their lair and O-Yumi wasn’t here? The idea made Fandorin feel genuinely afraid for the first time.

‘
Iko!
’
²
he said to Masa, and set off, no longer weaving about, straight towards the grey emptiness that could be seen through the pines.

The house of Tamba the Eleventh was the only one surrounded by clear grassy space on three sides. On the fourth side, as Fandorin already knew, there was a gaping precipice.

He could still hope that the inhabitants of this sinister village had gathered for a meeting at the house of their leader (Twigs had said he was called the
jonin
).

Pressing himself against a rough tree trunk, Erast Petrovich surveyed the building, which differed from the others only in its dimensions. There was nothing noteworthy about the residence of the leader of the Stealthy Ones. Fandorin felt something rather like disappointment. But the worst thing of all was that this house also seemed to be empty.

Had it really all been in vain?

The vice-consul darted across the open space and up the steps on to the narrow veranda that ran along the walls. Masa was right behind him every step of way.

Seeing his servant remove his footwear, Erast Petrovich followed his example – not out of Japanese politeness, but in order to make less noise.

The door was open slightly and Fandorin shone his little torch inside. He saw a long, unlit corridor covered with rice straw mats.

Masa wasted no time. He poured a few drops of oil from a little jug into the groove and the door slid back without creaking.

Yes, a corridor. Quite long. Seven sliding doors just like the first one: three on the left, three on the right and one at the end.

Removing the safety catch of his revolver, Erast Petrovich opened the first door on the right slowly and smoothly. Empty. No household items, just mats on the floor.

He opened the opposite door slightly more quickly. Again nothing. A bare room, with a transverse beam running across the far wall.

‘Damn!’ the titular counsellor muttered.

He moved on quickly, without any more precautions. He jerked open a door on the right and glanced in. A niche in the wall, some kind of scroll in it.

The second door on the left: a floor made of polished wooden boards, not covered with straw, otherwise nothing remarkable.

The third on the right: apparently a chapel for prayer – a Buddhist altar in the corner, statuettes of some kind, an unlit candle.

The third on the left: nothing, bare walls.

No one, absolutely no one! Empty space!

But someone had been here, and very recently – the smell of Japanese pipe tobacco still lingered in the air.

Masa looked round the room that had a wooden floor instead of mats. He squatted down and rubbed the smooth wood. Something caught his interest and he stepped inside.

The vice-consul was about to follow him, but just at that moment he heard a rustling from behind the seventh door, the one closing off the end of the corridor, and he started. Aha! There’s someone there!

It was a strange sound, something like sleepy breathing, the breath expelled not by a man, but a giant or some kind of huge monster, it was so powerful and deep.

Let it be a giant or a monster – it was all the same to Erast Petrovich now. Anything but emptiness, anything but deathly silence!

The titular counsellor waited for an endlessly long out-breath to come to an end, flung the door aside with a crash and dashed forward.

Fandorin only just managed to grab hold of the railings, right on the very edge of the little wooden bridge suspended above the precipice. He was surrounded on all sides by Nothing – the night, the sky, a yawning gulf.

He heard the out-breath of the invisible colossus again – it was the boundless ether sighing, stirred by a light breeze.

There was nothing but blackness below the vice-consul’s feet, stars above his head; all around him were the peaks of mountains illuminated by the moon, and in the distance, between two slopes, the lights of the distant plain.

Erast Petrovich shuddered and backed into the corridor.

He slammed the door into Nowhere and called out:

‘Masa!’

No answer.

He glanced into the room with the wooden floor. His servant was not there.

‘Masa!’ Erast Petrovich shouted irritably.

Had he gone outside? If he was in the house, he would have answered.

Yes, he had gone out. The entrance door, which the titular counsellor had left open, was now closed.

Fandorin walked up to it and tugged on the handle. The door didn’t move. What the hell?

He tugged as hard as he could – the door didn’t budge at all. Was it stuck? That was no great problem. It wasn’t hard to make a hole in a Japanese partition.

Swinging his fist back, the vice-consul punched the straw surface – and cried out in pain. It felt as if he had slammed his hand into iron.

Erast Petrovich heard a grating sound behind him. Swinging round, he saw another partition sliding out of the wall to enclose him in a cramped square between two rooms, the doors of which (as he noticed only now) were also closed.

‘A trap!’ – the realisation flashed through Fandorin’s mind.

He jerked at the door on the left, with no result, and the same with the door on the right.

They had him locked in, like an animal in a cage.

But this animal had fangs. Fandorin pulled out his seven-round Herstal and started swinging round his own axis, hoping that one of the four doors would open now and there would be an enemy behind it – in a close-fitting black costume with a mask that covered all his face, so that only the eyes could be seen.

And in fact he did see a black man without a face, but not where he was expecting to see him. As he gazed round on all sides, the titular counsellor raised his head – and froze. Directly above Fandorin, there was a ninja lying (yes, yes,
lying
, in defiance of all the laws of nature!) on the ceiling, spreadeagled against it like a spider. The two glinting eyes in the slit between the headscarf and the mask were staring straight at the vice-consul.

Erast Petrovich threw up the hand with the revolver, but the bullet hit the boards of the ceiling – the
shinobi
grabbed the barrel of the diplomat’s gun with an incredibly fast movement and turned it away. The spider-man had a grip of iron.

Suddenly the floor under Fandorin’s feet caved in and the titular counsellor went hurtling downwards with his eyes closed. Meanwhile the Herstal remained in the ninja’s hand.

Erast Petrovich landed softly, on what felt like cushions. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in darkness, but there was a lamp burning in the basement.

The stunned Fandorin was facing a lean little old man sitting with his legs crossed and smoking a pipe with a tiny bowl at the end of a long stem.

He blew out a cloud of bluish smoke and spoke in English:

‘I wait and you come.’

The narrowed eyes opened wider and glinted with a fierce flame, like two glowing coals.

The wood and the fire,
The coal, the time, the diamond
And the chariot

1
‘Rope’ (Japanese)

2
‘Let’s go!’ (Japanese)

THE DEATH OF AN ENEMY

Unlike the rooms that Fandorin had seen upstairs, the basement looked lived in and even cosy after a fashion. There really were cushions scattered across the floor, a cup of tea was steaming on a lacquered table, and behind the frightening old man there was a picture hanging on the wall – a portrait of a warrior in a horned helmet, with a bow in his hands, an arrow in his teeth and his glittering eyes glaring menacingly up at the sky.

Erast Petrovich recalled the legend of how the great Momochi Tamba shot the false moon, but the titular counsellor was in no mood for ancient fables just at the moment.

It was pointless to throw himself at his enemy – Fandorin remembered his two previous skirmishes with the
jonin
only too well, and the humiliating way in which they had ended. When an opponent is a hundred times stronger, an individual of dignity has only one weapon – his presence of mind.

‘Why did you abduct O-Yumi?’ Erast Petrovich asked, trying with all his might to impart a dispassionate expression to his face (after the shock he had just suffered this was difficult). He sat down clumsily on the floor and rubbed his bruised fist. The hatch through which Fandorin had tumbled had already slammed shut – now there was a ceiling of yellow planks above his head.

‘I did not abduct her,’ the old man replied calmly in his broken but perfectly understandable English.

‘You lie!’

Tamba did not take offence or grow angry – he half-closed his eyelids sleepily.

‘Lies are my trade, but now I am telling the truth.’

Erast Petrovich was unable to maintain his dispassionate expression: driven by a sudden paroxysm of fury, he lunged forward, grabbed the little old man by the neck and shook him, forgetting that the
jonin
could paralyse him with a single touch of his finger.

‘What have you done with Yumi? Where is she?’

Tamba offered no resistance, and his head bobbed about on his skinny shoulders.

‘Here. She is here,’ Fandorin heard, and jerked his hands away.

‘Where is “here”?’

‘At home. Midori is expecting you.’

‘Who the hell is Midori?’ the titular counsellor asked, wrinkling up his forehead. ‘Where’s my Yumi?’

Behaving as if everything was perfectly normal, the old man glanced into his pipe, saw that the tobacco had been shaken out and packed in a new pinch. He kindled the flame first, puffing out his cheeks, and then spoke.

‘Her real name is Midori. She is my daughter. And I did not abduct her. I’d like to see anyone abduct a girl like her …’

‘Eh?’ was all that the astounded Fandorin could find to say.

‘She makes her own mind up about everything. She has a terribly bad character. And I’m a soft father, she does as she likes with me. The real Tamba would have killed a daughter like that.’

‘What do you mean, “the real Tamba”?’ the vice-consul asked, desperately rubbing his forehead as he tried to gather his thoughts. ‘Then who are you?’

‘I am his successor in the eleventh generation,’ said the
jonin
, pointing with his pipe at the portrait of the warrior in the horned helmet. ‘I am an ordinary, weak man, not like my great predecessor.’

‘D-damn the genealogy!’ Erast Petrovich exclaimed. ‘Where’s my Yumi?’

‘Midori,’ the eleventh Tamba corrected him again. ‘She was right in what she said about you. You are half-sighted, short-winged, half-blind. Your sight is keen, but it does not penetrate far. Your flight is impetuous, but not always precise. Your mind is sharp, but not deep. However, I see you have a
kagebikaru
shadow under your left cheekbone, which tells me that you are still at the very beginning of your Path and can change for the better.’

‘Where is she?’ Fandorin cried, jumping to his feet: he did not wish to listen to this nonsense. And when he jumped up, he banged his head against wood – the ceiling was too low for his height.

Bells started chiming in the crown of the vice-consul’s head and circles started spinning in front of his eyes, but the old man who called himself O-Yumi’s father did not stop talking for a moment.

‘If I had noticed the
inuoka
bumps at the sides of your forehead in time, I would not have set the adder on you. Dogs do not bite people like you, snakes leave you alone, wasps do not sting you. Things and animals love you. You are a man of a very rare breed. That is why I assigned my daughter to you.’

Erast Petrovich did not interrupt him any more. O-Yumi had mentioned that her father was an unsurpassed master of
ninso
! Could what he was saying really be true?

‘Midori took a look at you and said yes, you were special. It would be a shame to kill someone like that. Properly employed, you could be very helpful.’

‘Where is she?’ Fandorin asked in a dejected voice. ‘I must see her …’

At that Tamba reached out one hand to the wall, pressed something, and the wall slid sideways.

O-Yumi was sitting in the next room, wearing a white and red kimono, with her hair in a tall style. Completely motionless, her face absolutely still, she looked like a beautiful doll. Erast Petrovich was no more than five steps away from her.

He shot forward towards her, but O-Yumi didn’t stir and he didn’t dare to embrace her.

‘She’s drugged!’ – the thought flashed through his mind; but her gaze was perfectly clear and calm. This was a strange, incomprehensible O-Yumi sitting in front of him, close enough for him to reach out and touch her, but that distance seemed quite insurmountable. It was not this woman he loved, but another, who, as it turned out, had never existed …

‘What? Why? What for?’ poor Fandorin babbled incoherently. ‘Are you a ninja?’

‘The very best in the Momochi clan,’ Tamba declared proudly. ‘She can do almost everything that I can do. But in addition, she has mastered arts that are inaccessible to me.’

‘I know,’ the titular counsellor said with a bitter laugh. ‘For instance,
jojutsu
. You sent her to a brothel to study that wisdom.’

‘Yes. I sent her to Yokohama to study. Here in the mountains no one would have taught her to be a woman. And Midori had to study the foreign barbarians, because Japan needs them.’

‘Did he order you to study me too?’ Erast Petrovich asked the woman of stone.