Blood Ninja (47 page)

Extraordinary—that the clue, the greatest clue, should come from Lord Oda’s daughter herself. Imagine if the story had never come out!

According to the guard, the tale showed that Lady Hana was a true samurai—brave, unhesitating, skilled
.

Kira disagreed. He thought it showed she was a liar
.

However, it was impossible to prove the question one way or another, since when the guards had gone to the place indicated by Lady Hana, the very next day, there had been no sign of the bodies
.

“What could it mean?” asked the guard. “What happened to them?”

Kira smiled, for he knew what it meant. Hana had met the ninja
.

The next day, the old guard—remembered by everyone as a friendly individual, garrulous when in his cups, but who wasn’t?—was found in the irrigation canal, his throat slit and his blood nourishing the village’s rice crops. Kira was already on the move. A couple of days later, he heard a strange report about a man who had confronted a rice thief—a day’s ride away, no more—and had been bitten on the neck by this same thief. The people of the villages saw the malign influences of the spirits. Again, Kira saw the ninja
.

And then had come the incident at the village of Suto. The ninja girl who had slowed them down by pretending to be Taro. It had taken place so close to where the man was bitten—only a single valley away!

But since then the trail had gone cold
.

Now, days later, Kira stretched his back as he pissed into a mountain stream. As usual, the activity was unpleasant. The Portuguese doctor sent by his merchant masters as a gift to Lord Oda had said that there were stones in Kira’s bladder, and Kira was greatly pleased by it. So long had he lived on water and the things that grew in the land, avoiding all flesh, that his very body was
becoming
stone. It was almost beautiful
.

Unfortunately, it was also very painful
.

The urine, which had always flowed easily at his command, now trickled out in excruciating drips—sometimes even containing blood. That was when he was able to make it flow out of him at all. It was ironic, since in his professional life Kira had experienced something like the opposite of this phenomenon. He had found, as he got older, as his skills of persuasion increased, that information flowed more easily
toward
him than ever
.

Sometimes it contained blood
.

Kira decided that he had probably got as much out as he ever would, and turned to go back to the men. He cursed them. They were younger than he, and more suited to roaming around on mountainsides, chasing after the
gakkyo
imaginings of some foolish peasant, who had probably only been bitten by a snake or something equally boring
.

As he turned—that was when he saw the crumpled-up piece of paper, wedged between two stones by the side of the stream. Kira stooped, picked it up, unfolded it. It began
My dear Taro.

Kira grinned, all thoughts of pain and aging suddenly gone. He turned to his men. “Turn around. We’re going to Fuji mountain. The boy’s mother is there.”

Yukiko walked through the tradesmen’s district. It was not a good place to be out at night, all alone.

And that was why she wanted to draw her assassin here. Deliberately she wore a fine silk gown,
tabi
unsuited to fighting, knuckle-dusters that looked like jewels.

She knew that Tokugawa had sent a ninja after her. She knew because Lord Oda knew, and the things Lord Oda knew were true because they were sealed in blood.

Lord Oda knew also that Kenji Kira was on his way to Fuji mountain, there to seek Taro’s mother. The fool had put this in a pigeon message to the lord, not knowing he was signing his own death warrant.

In a moment—the time it takes to ink the strokes of a name character on a piece of paper—a man’s fate can be sealed. As they had agreed, Lord Oda would give Kira to Yukiko to kill, and she would give him Taro in return.

Once this ninja was dispatched, she would mount horse with a
couple of samurai and go meet Kira there. Perhaps she would arrive before he killed Taro’s mother, and that would give her the gift of finding the Buddha ball first, and the greater gift of presenting it to Lord Oda.

Look, how I repay your trust
.

Of course, she wouldn’t
give
it to him. He was still the spider at the center of the web that had trapped the abbess and Heiko.

No, she would hold it out to him, taunt him with it, then use it to kill him. But first, she would kill Kira.

Slowly.

The ninja dropped from the roof on the left side of the street, where Yukiko had until now been listening to his progress. A moment before, he had killed a cat, thinking to preserve what he thought was the silence of his operation. Yukiko thought that was a little cruel.

The ninja crouched, absorbing the impact of the ground, and leaped straight into a kick to Yukiko’s face. She staggered back, though her apparently fearful movement disguised the way she leaned with, and diluted, the force of the kick.

The ninja reached for his short-sword, lowering his eyes for a fraction of a second.

In a moment a man’s fate can be sealed.

A moment later Yukiko looked down on the corpse of the first man she had ever killed. A single tear rolled down her cheek.

But she expected to suffer. It was in the nature of revenge.

I’d like to thank Caradoc King, Elinor Cooper, and Louise Lamont at AP Watt for their always excellent editorial feedback and encouragement—the book never would have got off the ground without them. My editor, Alexandra Cooper, also gave brilliantly insightful comments that helped to improve the story immeasurably. Krista Vossen deserves thanks too, for the startlingly awesome and deceptively simple design. In terms of influence: Anyone who has read
Shogun
by James Clavell cannot fail to see its echoes in this book. Thanks to him for sparking my interest in this subject matter in the first place.

Finally, I’d like to thank Stella Paskins, who, when I jokingly suggested a story about vampire ninjas, said, “Oh, you should write that.” This book would literally not exist without her.