Year of the Demon (53 page)

“Last night,” Daigoro muttered absently, working out the logistics in his head. Traveling by palanquin was cumbersome. As of last night they’d been two days on the road—less than a day’s ride on a fast horse. If the
shinobi
’s messenger could report from Kyoto in that time, then Shichio’s second message, the one confirming Daigoro’s death, could have reached him in the same time. That meant the second message was already at least a day overdue, and maybe two. “Oh, hell,” Daigoro said. “Shichio already knows his assassin failed.”

A mute nod.

“And that means more assassins are already on our heels.”

“Amateurs. The Wind would already have killed you.”

Daigoro found it hard to take comfort in that. He was a novice at this game himself. Shichio wasn’t. If he knew his newest henchmen were not up to the task, he had only to send them in greater numbers.

“We’ll have to abandon the palanquin,” Daigoro said. It was too slow, and even if it were not, Shichio’s informants might have told him of it already. Shichio was no simpleton; as soon as he learned Daigoro rode not a horse but a sedan chair, he would understand why. It wasn’t enough for Daigoro to travel disguised; he needed complete invisibility. He was a runt who walked with a distinctive limp. His
odachi
was famous, and even those who knew nothing of swords could see it was too big for him. His tack alone was enough to give him away: Daigoro could not ride without the special saddle crafted by Old Yagyu, the one that accommodated his lame, wasted leg.

The only way for Daigoro to conceal his size, his leg, his saddle, and his father’s sword was to box them up and keep them out of sight. A sedan chair was the perfect solution, and traveling under Tokugawa insignia afforded an extra degree of protection. To leave it behind was to abandon his best chance for speed and secrecy, but Daigoro could see no other choice.

“To hell with it,” he said, trying to sound confident. “It was hot enough in that palanquin to boil noodles. And my mare never cared for you anyway; she’ll be happy to have me back in the saddle.”

He beckoned the
shinobi
into his rooms and closed the
shoji
behind them. It did nothing to silence the raging storm, but at least they wouldn’t get any wetter. They sat in the center of the bedchamber, farthest from the walls, where prying ears couldn’t hear them over the weather. “I wanted us to sail from the beginning. You overruled me. Why?”

The
shinobi
said nothing; he only nodded toward the dead man lying on the floor.

“You knew Shichio had an agent in your ranks?”

“Knew it was possible. That was enough.”

Daigoro looked at the body and shuddered. He’d contracted six men to deliver him to Izu in secret. At present he only could trust two of them. One had just saved his life. The other lay staring at the ceiling, his throat ripped open, proof positive that the other four could also be Shichio’s. Daigoro’s savior had anticipated that possibility, and that was why he’d refused to sail. Maybe the palanquin allowed him to keep his charge boxed up and safe, or maybe being trapped aboard a ship would have left him fewer avenues of escape if fortune turned against him. Daigoro didn’t need to understand his reasoning. It was enough to know that his last remaining
shinobi
was trustworthy, and that Shichio’s knives might be in the very next room.

But if the other four ninja were Shichio’s men, wouldn’t they have struck by now? Daigoro almost voiced the question, but then thought better of it. He was not like Shichio. Deceit did not come naturally to him, and that left him defenseless. Better to trust no one than to risk another attack. “We must leave the rest of your clansmen behind,” he said.

“At last your mind is clear.”

Daigoro was hardly accustomed to being spoken to in this way, least of all by a hired hand, but in this case he was proud he’d finally gotten something right. “Like it or not, you’re the one man I
have
to trust. And since neither of us is a traitor, we can travel by sea again. Unless . . . no. It’s too late for that, isn’t it?”

The
shinobi
made a grunting noise that Daigoro took for assent. It made sense. Ships were faster than horses. If Shichio’s riders were already on Daigoro’s heels, then his sea captains might well have reached Izu by now. Daigoro had no doubt that Shichio would send ships. He had the might of Toyotomi Hideyoshi behind him, and a fleet to rival the Mongol hordes of old. Daigoro could not set sail until this storm blew itself out, and by then, the swiftest sloop ever put to sea would not be fast enough for him.

“But where do we go now?” he said. “If the sea and the Tokaido are barred to us, the only paths I can see are to travel overland or to sprout wings—and I’m not sure the former is any more realistic than the latter.”

“You overlook the obvious.”

“Do I?” Daigoro scrunched his eyebrows and thought about it. The back roads were laid not by the great houses but by farmers. They connected villages, not cities or ports. Some ran nowhere at all; they tapered out halfway up a mountain, for reasons only the local grandfathers could remember. Few were charted, all were winding, and none were well maintained. A night like tonight would wash many of them out of existence.

“I give up,” he said. “What is so ‘obvious’ here? Where the Tokaido has bridges, the lesser roads have fords. If this storm topples trees, they’ll be cleared from the Tokaido. Not so for the other roads. Shichio will hasten his wedding plans the moment he learns I am still alive. So tell me, how am I to outrace him by clambering over every obstacle between here and Izu? I don’t even know where
here
is.”

“Childish. You have a mind like thin ice. No flexibility.”

“And afraid it might crack? Is that what you think? That I’m afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Then teach me to think like water, damn you. Show me what leeway I have to adapt. My enemy commands the oceans, riding the back roads will take weeks I do not have, and the Tokaido is watched.”

“Not the Tokaido. You.”

Daigoro’s shoulders slumped and his head sagged. “What difference could that possibly make?”

“Obvious. Send me in your stead.”

“That’s no solution. What I’m going to ask for is too outrageous for anyone but me to ask it.”

“New disguises, then. Your limp, easy to hide. Your weapon, impossible. Do what must be done.”

“Oh, no. If it weren’t for this sword, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. I’m not getting rid of her now.”

The
shinobi
snorted. “Then your mind is not clear after all. You are a child. As well ask for a square egg as to ask me to deliver you to your family’s home. You wish to be there without going there. You refuse straight paths and then complain of curves and corners. You would go without being seen, without surrendering that which makes you seen. Pah!”

Daigoro made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Pain and weariness and despair bore down on him, so heavy that he wasn’t sure he could stand. He was desperate, he’d run out of options, and now he’d managed to aggravate even his unflappable companion. He’d never seen
anyone
display as much anger as this nameless man now captured in a single scowl. And this was his last friend in the world.

He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep. Even an hour would be enough. He was so tired he could hardly think. But Shichio’s riders could arrive at any moment. For the hunted man, rest was an enemy, not an ally.

He forced himself to his feet. “You’re right,” he said, marshaling what little energy he had left. “I ask the impossible. But we have three advantages in our favor.”

“Optimistic. Stupid.”

Daigoro would not be deterred. “First, any good knife can make a round egg square. Second, my family’s compound is not our destination.”

“I am to deliver you to Izu. To prevent your enemy from wedding your mother.”

“Yes, but doing that from my mother’s house is impossible. The answer to that riddle lies in the house of Yasuda.”

The furrows between the
shinobi
’s eyebrows grew deeper and darker. “This clan is unknown to me.”

“To Shichio too. They’re just up the road from my family’s compound. Trust me; Shichio may have men on the road, but he won’t be watching House Yasuda itself.”

“You are certain?”

“Of course. Why waste the manpower? The Yasudas are no threat to him.”

The
shinobi
breathed loudly through his nostrils. “You said three advantages. You named only two.”

“Ah, yes,” Daigoro said with a smile. “The third is that I have you with me. And there’s no place the Wind cannot reach.”

53

D
aigoro stood proudly at the wheel, his ketch in plain view of the fleet blockading the Izu Peninsula. His starched
haori
snapped in the crosswind, whose gusts were so powerful that Daigoro had to brace his feet against them. Sometimes he had to clutch the spokes or else be lifted bodily overboard. The storm he’d weathered had finally broken, but by no means had it blown itself out. There were still clouds all the way to the horizon, and all of them were in a foul, blustering mood.

Another squall raked the ship, forcing him to hold tight to the wheel. His hands burned like hellfire. Fortunately his
shinobi
knew techniques for binding broken bones—techniques quite similar to Tomo’s, in fact—and like Tomo he’d bound Daigoro’s two broken fingers to a little curved splint. It allowed Daigoro to hold things like sword grips and the spokes of a ship’s wheel, but Daigoro feared the bones would mend in a curve, so that he’d never be able to fully straighten his right hand again.

It was while his fingers were being bound that he got his first close look at the
shinobi
. The man’s hair was shorter than a grain of rice, and he wore a thick beard of the same length. Judging by his pug nose and flat face, he’d never walked away from a fistfight in his life. His forearms were covered in coarse black hair, more than Daigoro had ever seen on a human being. There were even traces of it on the digits of his fingers and the tops of his toes. Daigoro had never heard of a man having hair on his chest, but he’d seen tufts of it peeking out from the
shinobi’
s jacket. Between the hair and that growling voice, Daigoro found himself thinking of his companion as more animal than man.

Daigoro had become something of an animal himself, sleeping under brambles and evading the eyes of men. He and his
shinobi
had used the storm’s fury to mask their escape. It broke Daigoro’s heart to abandon his favorite mare in the innkeeper’s stable, and with her his saddle, the only one of its kind. Both deserved a better fate than to be forgotten in the hands of a stranger, to be sold off at a whim, but his emotional attachment was exactly why he needed to leave his horse and tack behind. Anyone pursuing him would think not that he’d ridden off in the night but that he’d simply vanished. They would try to figure out where his body was buried before they ever thought to track a highborn princeling through the muck.

By morning the storm had not slackened in the least. There was no sun, only a gradual lightening from black to gray. Rain became hail, pinging off Daigoro’s breastplate. At last he could go no farther, and he and his
shinobi
found a stand of wind-battered pines that would ward off the hailstones, if not the wet and the cold. The princeling would have been miserable beyond description, but Daigoro the outlaw just looked for a rock flat enough to serve as a pillow.

Sora armor made a poor futon. He hadn’t managed even an hour of sleep, and awoke with his hips and back feeling just like his broken fingers. He cursed sleep for a beguiling temptress, and cursed the gods of wind and thunder for their spite of mortal man. There was no telling when the rain would change to hail, driving every sane person into shelter while Daigoro and his
shinobi
soldiered on.

But no sooner did that thought strike him than he understood: the storm was the greatest gift the gods could bestow. Horses would not abide the hail. Daigoro’s mare was lucky to be left behind in her stall. So long as the gods remained fickle—so long as their rain could turn to hail on a whim—Shichio’s hired swords could never coax their mounts into the storm.

Daigoro’s thinking had been wrong from the start. He’d confused his allies for enemies and his enemies for allies. Twice now, in the inn and under the pines, he’d wanted to sleep. The next time he would not forget: for the hunted man, sleep was a foe, not a friend. Even the hailstones, the worst of his tormentors, did him more good than harm. The real threat was a clear sky.

That was the realization that unlocked the Toyotomi blockade: the most dangerous enemy was the innocuous one, the one that seemed like a friend. As soon as that dawned on him, he’d arrived at a decision: it was high time he came to learn the arts of naval warfare. He decided he would become a pirate.

He and his
shinobi
had pressed on through a miserable day and a cold and miserable night. By the hour of the dog they’d put the worst of the storm behind them, and by midnight they’d reached their goal: a wharf, and in it a junk-rigged Toyotomi ketch rocking sleepily beside her quay. Dispatching the night watch had posed little difficulty; the
shinobi
was as silent as his own shadow, and Glorious Victory’s long reach was more than a match for any seaman’s dirk. Most of the crew were ashore, probably bedding whores and feeling thankful that they weren’t the ones stationed out in the rain. Together Daigoro and his
shinobi
made short work of the watchmen left aboard. They slipped the little ship’s hawsers unnoticed, and with a skeleton crew of two they rode the tide out to sea.

Daigoro was no great sailor, but he’d lived his entire life on the coast, with his family’s harbor for a playground. He knew his way around a junk rig, and his
shinobi
was evidently an expert seaman. In fact, the man seemed to do everything with an expert hand. The Wind must have trained him since boyhood. He and Daigoro had that much in common: neither of them had ever been children. Daigoro spent his childhood learning swordsmanship, horsemanship, archery, calligraphy, poetry; the
shinobi
must have been raised on brewing poisons, moving silently, killing men with his bare hands. Daigoro wondered at what rigors the Wind must have put him through, and how many of its disciples survived the training.