Lord Oda's Revenge (37 page)

He turned, so that he couldn't see her any more. His shame was a heavy enough burden – he didn't need to see it reflected in her eyes.

I'm doomed now
, he thought.
I'm lost
.

 

T
HE MAN TURNED
around, and Taro crouched behind a tree. It had been four days since he left Shirahama, or had it been three? He was finding it hard to keep track any more. He seemed to be walking so slowly, too – every footstep a painful effort. He needed blood, that was it.

Well, soon he would have it.

He slowed his breathing right down, until he could hear the
susurrus
of the wind in the trees, and the song of a faraway bird. He waited for the sound of footsteps, but none came. Eventually he eased himself onto his feet and peered round the tree. The old peasant was continuing on his way, his bony back now a fair distance down the path.

Taro cursed. Now he'd have to get close again, and he was so weak he couldn't move with his customary grace or silence. He didn't even want this old man's blood – not really.

But he did need it.

It had started with the outstretched hands, the beseeching expression. But every time he went towards his mother, she scattered on the air like a dandelion clock, and he was left embracing a column of nothingness. More and more often she had appeared to him, until she was almost a constant companion
on his journey to the ninja mountain. Always, now, she was trying to tell him something, but though her mouth opened and closed, no sound came out, her lips speaking the silent language of the dead. Perhaps he should have been returning to Mount Hiei, to see her body again before it was cremated. But he had time, he thought, before the last rites. And besides, he had been wrong to send Hiro off on his own. His friend had always been loyal. It was time to repay him in kind.

Did she understand, when he asked her what she wanted? It was impossible to tell. She only went on speaking to him in her incomprehensible, soundless speech, and sometimes shaking her head. If he tried to approach her, she turned back into air.

The day before, he'd looked down at the surface of a stream as he was crossing it, and caught sight of his face. At first he'd recoiled, thinking someone desperately ill was standing behind him. But then he'd realized that the haggard, pallid features were his own. His skin was stretched taut over his cheekbones, as if his skull had grown tired of being hidden away beneath his flesh and was pushing through to show itself to the world.

His eyes were the worst. They gazed blankly out from within sunken bruises, the eyes of a dying person. Horrified, he thought of Mokuren, and how he had grown pale and thin when his mother's ghost was visiting him – he saw Hayao, sitting in the inn, a wasted, skeletal vestige of his former self.

My mother is a
gaki, he realized. A hungry ghost.

There was a ghost killing him, and it was his own mother.

So it was that the need for blood grew stronger and stronger. He'd hunted two peasants already in this valley, and if he wasn't careful there would be men all over the woods, holding burning torches and makeshift weapons, looking for the
kyuuketsuki
. Still, it would be what he deserved, wouldn't it? He felt sick with shame
as he moved as quietly as he could between the trees, stalking the old man.

Still, it wasn't enough to stop him.

The old man paused by a tree and took some tools out of his bag. He began tapping something into the wood with a hammer.
No doubt taking the sap for glue or something
, thought Taro. Now was the time, while the man's hands were occupied. Ordinarily Taro could have chased down any man – any deer, too – and overpowered it easily.

(
Him
, he corrected himself.)

But now he was weak, and no amount of blood seemed to keep him going for long.

Stepping closer, he snapped a twig, and the man turned just as Taro reached out for his neck. Reacting instinctively, Taro lashed out with his heel, stamping on the sensitive spot between the man's ankle and the top of his foot. The man went down on one knee and Taro caught his neck, his fingers jabbing into the peasant's pressure points. The body went limp in his hands and he lowered it to the ground

(
him
)

before sinking his teeth into the neck and drinking deeply. He felt that surge of power, like a deep breath after a long dive, and then his limbs were no longer heavy wooden appurtenances, seemingly attached to him with the sole purpose of weighing him down, but light, lithe, and essential components of his being, the parts of him that touched the ground and allowed him to shape the things he could hold. He gripped the man with fingers of iron.

For a long moment he was conscious of nothing but the unbelievable sensation, warm and comforting, of satiety, but then there was a flicker of movement and he looked up to see his
mother, standing a little to the side, a shadow cutting across her body. She was looking at him with disappointment in her eyes, her mouth opening and closing uselessly as always.

He pulled away, feeling blood trickling down his chin. He looked down and saw that the man was very pale indeed, his pulse only a faint irregular vibration of the skin on his neck. Usually Taro could sense a person's heartbeat from strides away, a drumbeat that encoded their state of health, their age, their level of excitement. But this man's heart was barely beating.

You nearly killed him
, he thought – and for once, when he looked at his mother's mouth, he thought that was what she was saying too.

It may have been a day after that, or it may have been a week, when he came finally to the little hut at the top of the meadow. It was near dusk, or near dawn, Taro wasn't entirely sure. Small flowers dotted the high grass, nature bombarded his senses with the rich smell of its healthiness, its vigour, the vivid colours of the new life. He couldn't wait to get inside and see Hiro again. Hiro would know what to do.

No, Hiro probably wouldn't know what to do. But he would help, that much was certain.

Taro dragged himself up the slope. Then he saw that something was wrong.

The door to the hut was open.

Taro stared. The door was
never
open. Nobody knew that the ninjas used this summit's crater as their base, and the ninjas had every intention of keeping it that way. Then he saw something even worse.

The trapdoor inside was open too.

 

H
IS HAND ON
his sword's grip, Taro stepped slowly into the main hall. Reddish light flooded in, making a bright shaft in the middle of the cave, something that seemed to Taro as though, were he to step into it, he might dissolve into light himself. His eyes went up, and he saw the great tear in the canvas that had once held the night sky, and its charred edges.

They burned the sky
, he thought.

He took a step forward, then stopped. He stood very still, looking around him. Piles of clothes lay on the ground, evocative of splayed and agonized bodies, though there were no bodies to fill them.

Only ash.

He fought back a wave of nausea.
They're all dead
, he thought.
All the vampires. . .

At first he wanted to turn on his heel and leave. Then he remembered Hiro. His friend was not a vampire – that meant his body would be here, if he'd died too. Something had already torn in Taro's mind, that night on the top of Mount Hiei, when he lost everything – so he assumed that there was no more of him left to break.

He was wrong.

Taro got down on his knees, began to crawl around the floor of the great hall, checking the clothes, turning over pieces of black and grey fabric, but he found only bones and dust. Tears stinging his eyes, he began to crawl faster, stirring up the burnt remains, mingling the dead with one another in his haste to find his friend. A distant part of his mind remembered the Tendai monks in the ruins of the Hokke-do, prizing up the pieces of their fellow monk with chopsticks, putting them so carefully into the urn, in order from toe to top. Familiar shame rose hotly in him, as he thought of these dead ninjas waking up in whatever new plane they found themselves in, their reborn bodies a jumble of different parts, as if Enma had assigned them new heads and feet and hands as a final, humiliating prank.

Ignoring these thoughts that raced around his mind like rats, he moved quicker and quicker still, wasting the energy from the old man. There was a larger pile than the rest, but it turned out to be a girl, one who had been at the wrong end of a sword. Taro thought he recognized her. She was the daughter of one of the older ninjas – she'd have been made a vampire soon, if she'd lived.

There was a scraping sound behind him, and he was turning on his knees before he even registered alarm, his sword jumping up from his side as if suddenly animate, and he was moving up onto the balls of his feet, snarling.

Just before his sword bit into the body before him, he stopped it, gasping with the effort.

‘
Taro?
' said Hiro.

 

H
IRO STEPPED ASIDE
and Little Kawabata appeared beside him, both of them seeming to emerge from the rock itself.

The hidden passage
, thought Taro. He'd had so many occasions to curse it, when Kawabata Senior would suddenly appear to put him off his concentration while sparring. But now he blessed it with all his heart.

Hiro threw his arms around Taro and hugged him tight, cutting off Taro's breathing, but that was all right.

‘What happened?' Taro asked, when Hiro finally released him. ‘Did you see?'

Hiro nodded. ‘The sky started to burn first. Nearly everyone was here, for a ceremony. One of the boys was going to be turned.'

‘It was as if they knew,' said Little Kawabata.

‘The light came bursting through,' said Hiro. ‘Arrows, too. People were screaming. . . running around. . . Then they were falling. I was just. . .' He turned his head from side to side, as if to mime his incomprehension, his inability to
do
anything.

‘I was the only one who could bear the sunlight,' said Kawabata. ‘I grabbed Hiro and pulled him in here. After that we only heard.'

‘The screaming,' said Hiro, ‘went on for a long time.'

‘Who did it?' said Taro. But a horrible suspicion was forming in his mind.

‘Yukiko,' said Little Kawabata. ‘We heard her. . .' Now it was his turn to raise his hands, in silent mime of his inability to describe what he had witnessed.

‘We heard her kill Little Kawabata's father,' said Hiro.

‘Gods,' said Taro. ‘I'm sorry. I mean, I know your father tried to kill me. But he was still your father.'

Little Kawabata bowed. ‘But that's not the worst thing.'

‘What?'

‘Yukiko said Lord Oda was still alive.'

Taro swayed on his feet. ‘Kenji Kira said that too. How is it possible?'