Blood Ninja (20 page)

Almost
.

He sucked on the cool, hard pebble he had tucked into his cheek before coming here, making an effort to keep his eyes from the stuff that was now scattered on the tatami mats at their feet. Because of course it had not only been a gesture of intimidation, smashing that bowl. It had also been necessary to remove the raw fish from the table, to no longer have to look at it
.

Even now, Kira found himself glancing at the disgusting organic matter as it lay glossily on the ground. Another bowl still remained on the table, but it was empty, and although the grease of the flesh still clung to it, he could—just—bear its presence
.

“You laid out food,” he said, trying to compose himself. “Yet you
feed on blood, do you not?” He poked the empty bowl. “Who was eating with you, when we arrived?”

“I am under Lord Oda’s protection,” said the woman
.

“Not anymore,” said Kira. “You have harbored his enemies. I am authorized to deal with you as I see fit.” The woman trembled. He liked that
.

“The bowls are for the spirits,” said the woman. “I am a prophetess. I must set out food for them.”

Kira sighed. Perhaps it was true. There was no one else there, after all, and he could not believe that anyone could hide from his men in such a small house. And anyway, he needed to put the fish out of his mind. He made a hand signal to one of his samurai, and the man went to stand behind the woman, the blade of his
katana
resting against her neck. “I know about your kind,” he went on. “You can only be killed by decapitation, or a blade to the heart. Don’t think I won’t kill you if you fail to give me the information I need.”

“And what information is that?”

“I want to know where the boy went. And the ninja with him, and his fat friend.” He had a very bad feeling about that ninja, a sense that events were slipping beyond his control. He had interrogated some of the ninja who had attacked the boy in Shirahama—the circumstances of those interrogations strikingly similar to the current standoff, the same samurai’s blade against the necks of the miserable ninja who had failed Lord Oda—and they had spoken of two things that made Kira nervous
.

The boy had been turned, and the ninja who had done it had borne a sword decorated with the
mon
of Lord Tokugawa
.

“No one like that has been here,” said the woman
.

“Yes, they have. They were seen entering the door in your garden.”

“Then perhaps they broke in for supplies.”

Kira was sure, in fact, that they had received supplies, but he thought the woman had given them willingly. “What about the girls?” he asked. “We are informed that two girls live with you.”

The woman flinched, and Kira smiled inside
.

“They … are playing … in the woods,” she said
.

“Then we shall wait here for their return,” said Kira. “It will be such a pleasure to meet them.”

“No … please …”

Kira’s internal smile turned to a grin, though his face remained impassive. Good. He would break this woman quickly, when the girls came back. If only he weren’t so hungry. Blackness flickered at the corners of his vision, and he took in a deep breath, gripping the edge of the table
.

“Are you all right?” asked the woman. “You look very pale.”

Kira grimaced. He hated to show weakness in front of his men, and yet he had struggled to find vegetables in these parts, so many of the peasants’ huts and fields having been left empty by the wars that had devastated the region years before. He had taken some rice, that morning, but his strength was ebbing away. He blinked, then nodded to the man holding the sword to the woman’s neck. “Tell me where they went. Or I give him the order.”

The woman ignored him, looking at him with a solicitude that he found more insulting even than her refusal to answer his questions. “There’s more fish, if you want it,” she said. “I’m sure the spirits won’t begrudge you it.”

Kira gagged—he couldn’t help it
. She doesn’t know what she’s saying,
he thought. But maybe she did. She was a prophetess, wasn’t she?

For a moment Kira had the uncomfortable sensation that she could see into his mind, that she could see what had made him stone and metal and water instead of flesh. For that instant he was back in the battlefield after the defeat of Lord Yoshimoto, and he was again wounded in the leg, and lying covered by the bodies of the dead
.

Six days he had lain there, sucking dew from the ground, and moisture from the cold swords of the dead. He had tried to move, but his leg had been split open from hip to knee, and even if he had possessed the strength to cast aside the horse that lay over his lower half, he would not have been able to stand. So he had remained trapped there, and it was after two days that the bodies around him had started to fill with living things, and crawl with them. Rats had emerged from the stomach of the horse, chittering. Worms had crawled from men’s eyes and
nostrils, quivering in the air as if nosing the scent of death. Even frogs had made an appearance, and of course the flies, the endless flies
.

By the time he was finally rescued, Kira had known that he could no longer be the same man, that he could no longer endure the insult of the organic. The men who had pressed against him in the mud of the battlefield had been fat and bloated with the gases of decomposition, roiling with the life of the low creatures that had infested their corpses
.

That would never happen to Kira. From the day when he had been rescued, he had never again allowed flesh to pass his lips, or anything in fact but water, rice, and vegetables. He could not tolerate that the meat of another creature should be inside him, within the confines of his flesh, as those worms and flies had insinuated themselves into the dead
.

The water of the stream, the roots of the earth, the rice of the field. These were the only things he would eat, and when he died, he would be burned as the samurai tradition demanded. Yes, he would leave nothing behind but gray ashes, clean and dry, just as the swords of Yoshimoto’s men had remained unspoiled—uninvaded—in that cold mud, while the bodies of the men who had borne them rotted
.

“Kira-
san?”
asked the samurai who stood behind the old woman
.

Kira looked up. “Ah … yes. I was thinking, that’s all.” He leaned back from the table. “Now, old woman. You had better tell us where the boy has gone.”

“I’ve seen the future,” said the woman. “If you know anything about me, you know that I can do that. I’ve seen the future, and that means I know that I will never answer your questions, no matter what you do to me.”

“Perhaps not. But you’ll have to endure the pain of the questioning, nevertheless.”

The woman smiled. “Questioning is always painful. That’s what people don’t understand about fortune-telling. But, as much agony as I feel, I will tell you nothing.” She paused. “No. Wait. I will tell you two things that you don’t know.”

“Go on,” said Kira, his voice neutral
.

“The boy is going to get the Buddha ball, and he’s going to use it to kill Lord Oda.”

Kira sneered. “The Buddha ball is a silly story.”

“You may think what you like. But Oda believes in it. Why do you think he wants the boy so badly?”

Kira’s head was reeling, and again he wished that he had been able to find more to eat. Could it be true? But no, Lord Oda would have told him, wouldn’t he? This was his mission.… He had been … entrusted
.

He caught the table edge just before he fell. He blinked. When he got back to Nagoya, he was going to have to ask Lord Oda some pointed questions. But then, what if he didn’t go back to Nagoya? What if he found the ball for himself? He still only half-entertained the notion that it might be real, but … if it was! The possibilities. With that thing in his hand, he could rule the world. They said it was the very world model that the Compassionate One had held in his hands when he still lived in this realm of samsara, allowing him to see into and direct the hearts of every living thing, and the weather and the land and sea, too. It had been taken from the roots of the Bodhi tree in India, and after that had been lost
.

Could it be here, in Japan? Could the boy be the key to finding it?

A rush of joyful, swooning anticipation went through him, and he almost fell again. With the ball he could tell his body never to rot, could command the worms of the earth and the flies of the air to leave it alone, to never take up habitation inside it
.

“I really think you should take some fish,” said the woman. “You do look very weak.”

“I don’t eat fish!” he screamed
.

“No, of course,” she murmured, and in that instant Kira was sure she could look into him, that she had been taunting him deliberately, and he was filled with a consuming fury. She was making it up, about the Buddha ball. She had seen into his being, and knew his fear of the low creatures that could invade his body—his fear of flesh and decay
.

Yes, she had lured him with the ball. She knew his covetousness would make him take his attention from what was important—from
the way that she was mocking him. The ball wasn’t real. Only her cruelty and mockery were real
.

If she imagined that he would not kill a woman, then she was sorely mistaken. He had killed women before—had, even, killed a ninja woman before. That whore of a girl who had claimed to be Lord Tokugawa’s serving maid, but had in truth been sent to protect him by the ninja in Tokugawa’s employ. When word had come from a traitor in the ninja ranks—Kawabata, his name had been—Lord Oda had sent Kira to eliminate the girl. It wouldn’t do for Lord Tokugawa to benefit always from such protection
.

It had been tricky, of course. The woman was a vampire, making her hard to kill, and not only that but she had fallen in love with Lord Endo, one of Lord Tokugawa’s greatest samurai. Some even said she had made him a vampire too, biting him when he was on the verge of dying from a spear wound
.

All of these things—the proximity to Lord Tokugawa, the protection of vampire strength, the alliance with the great swordsman Lord Endo—should have made the girl impossible to kill, even for a man who could stomach the murder of a beautiful young woman. But Kira had managed it nonetheless. It had been a simple matter, really. To anyone uninformed, the girl was just a servant, and so it had not been difficult for Kira to get close to her, as the men had been distracted by planning the next assault on the shogun’s enemies
.

He had taken her head off with a single sword blow
.

The fortune-teller was staring at him with fear in her eyes, and then the fear left her and she smiled
.

“What? Something amuses you?”

“I said I would tell you two things.”

Kira thought for a moment. “You did. You said the boy would get the Buddha ball, and that he would kill Lord Oda.”

“That’s one thing. I will tell you another, if you wish to hear it.”

Kira nodded. “Very well.”

“It is this,” she said. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “When you die, your body will languish for many moons, consumed slowly by the creatures of the night. Worms will eat your eyes. The eggs of flies will
hatch among your sinews.” She paused, her smile growing wider. “You cannot escape it.”

Kira’s vision was awash with redness, like a sun was setting behind his eyelids, and he could feel his blood hammering in his forehead. He had never felt fury like this, not even when he had believed that his companions were never going to rescue him from that hell realm of liquefying corpses
.

He looked at the white-haired prophetess through a film of red. “You can see the future, yes?”

She nodded
.

“Then you must have seen what I am about to do.” He looked at the samurai behind her and made a cutting gesture with his fingers. The man swung back his sword
.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have.”

Shusaku led the way through ever steeper land, as they rose from the foothills into the mountains. Taro held his bow in his hand, the new string so taut it almost hummed as the air ran over it, as much an instrument as a weapon. It was good to feel its power once again. He was surprised to realize how much he had missed it, when the string had been softened and weakened by the sea. Yes, it had helped them when the ninja had attacked their palanquin, but it had been reduced to the status of a short-range weapon, like a sword.