The Nicholas Linnear Novels (191 page)

Catching sight of the castle, still standing, looking exactly the way Akiko had described it to him, he felt a surge of faith that here was where he would be healed. He was coming closer to discovering what arcane power So-Peng’s emeralds represented. Here was where he would be restored to life;
Shiro Ninja
would be banished.

It had begun to rain. The fine needles of the alpine firs swayed in the swirling wind, and the larch leaves, showing their silver undersides, danced as if in response to a choreographer’s tutelage. The sky was oyster-white, and the air was fecund with the scent of mulch. Great drifts of blue-gray fog billowed over the sloping volcanic shoulder of Asama-yama, obscuring for minutes at a time entire sections of the valley.

Pushed by the winds through the mountains, the rain was falling in an almost horizontal plane. Nicholas hunched his shoulders, pulling up the Gore-Tex collar of his alpine parka, fastening the snaps across his throat. He was cold and wet, in need of shelter and rest.

In this atmosphere Kyoki’s castle at times appeared to wink in and out of existence, at others, to fade completely into the mist-shrouded landscape within which it was set. It had seemed close enough when Nicholas was picking his way down the rubble-strewn slope of Mt. Asama. But now in the valley itself, the perspective changed, and Nicholas could see that he had farther to go than he had at first believed.

He thought about his encounter with the ninja—the tanjian—in Dr. Hanami’s office. Tomi Yazawa had thought this had been the assassination attempt ordered by the Red Army. Nicholas did not. As Nangi had said, it was likely that there would be no assassination attempt at all, that the Red Army had no interest whatsoever in Nicholas Linnear. He could not think of a single reason why they would want him dead. Yet there was a deeper mystery to be solved: why hadn’t the tanjian killed him when he had had the chance?

If you die now, if you die too easily, you will never understand,
the tanjian had whispered in Nicholas’s ear.

Understand what?

Nicholas had no idea. He tried to put out of his mind the feeling of utter helplessness he had experienced in the tanjian’s grip. It was as if his body, ready and able to respond to the challenge, had been waiting for the proper commands from his brain. They had never come. Why?

With an effort, Nicholas pulled himself back from the abyss of despair. He found that he was panting, the breath blowing through his nostrils as if he were a frightened animal. Appalled by this lack of control, he took slow, deep breaths, trying to center himself. It was no good. Anxiety continued to swirl through his spirit as the mist advanced across the valley.

At last he came to the castle. Soon he would see Kyoki; soon
Shiro Ninja
would be just a memory, a bad dream dissipated by Kyoki’s
jaho.

The castle was nestled behind a rise strewn with mountain laurel and oak. It dominated a glen, a private sector of the alpine valley, from which it overlooked Asama-yama, as well as much of the entire Hida Range. The views from its upper-floor windows, Nicholas saw, would be spectacular.

The entire fence of vertical iron bars appeared to be something from medieval times. The high, carved wooden gate was unlocked, and Nicholas entered.

Inside the compound it was very still; the restless wind coming in off Asama-yama was nowhere in evidence.

The front door, which should have been locked, was not. Nicholas pushed it open. On the threshold of Kyoki’s domain he paused, listening to silence inside the castle. He could smell wood smoke, aromatic with balsam, undercut by the bitter scent of charcoal, residue of years of fires. As he walked in, other smells that he could not immediately identify swirled around him like the mist coming off the shoulder of Mt. Asama, like the fearful vapor through which he kept falling, falling…

At that moment he thought of Justine, and the memory was like a knife in his heart. He missed her with an intensity that he found almost insupportable. Another wave of despair washed over him with the knowledge that he would never be able to return to his old relationship with her while he was
Shiro Ninja.
The thought gave added urgency to his mission: find Kyoki, convince him to use his tanjian magic to undo what tanjian magic had created.

Although it had been utterly still in the grounds outside the castle, inside a chill wind blew through the stone corridors, the oversized chambers. Someone had been cooking recently, and the remnants of a balsam-log fire lay in the great-room hearth. Shadows lay everywhere, seeming to Nicholas like spectators at the theater, eager for the denouement. Or perhaps, he thought, it is only I who am anxious to get this over with.

He went through chamber after chamber, found them empty though not unused. In the Room of All Shadows, where once Akiko had knelt to meditate on her
jaho
lessons, the flickering flames of slender white tapers cast shadows as sharp as knife blades into every corner of the chamber.

Upstairs Nicholas entered a singular chamber whose ceiling was arched. Tatami mats covered the floor. It was divided by a traditional Chinese moon gate, and Nicholas nodded in recognition. Tanjian was, after all, originally a Chinese discipline.

The room had about it the air of great antiquity, as if it had existed long before the rest of the castle, as if by his magic Kyoki had transported it here from another place, another time. Of course, nothing of the sort was possible, Nicholas told himself. There must be a limit even to Tau-tau.

The scent of lit joss sticks was so thick it was cloying, clinging to the back of his throat, choking him. Coils of the aromatic smoke lay on the air like sleeping serpents. Nicholas went across the chamber. The stone walls were unadorned, and there were few pieces of furniture. A dark wood
tansu
chest stood against one wall, stark and majestic, surrounded by space.

Just beneath the moon gate was the demarkation between two tatami, and Nicholas, about to go through the gate, paused. Still in the first half of the chamber, he knelt down, stared at the black borders of the two straw nuts. Unlike the usual close abutment, he saw a space of perhaps a sixteenth of an inch between the mats beneath the moon gate. Immediately he looked up, located the hairline slit in the underside of the gate.

He looked around the part of the room he was in, took up a floor pillow, braced himself, thrust it through the moon gate.

With a faint hiss a blade blurred down, bisecting the pillow. As the blade whirred back into its hidden niche, Nicholas somersaulted though the opening.

He was about to make a quick circuit of the chamber, but instead stood as still as a statue. In a moment tiny, violent quiverings broke out just beneath his skin. He felt sick to his stomach.

He had found Kyoki, the tanjian.

Kyoki lay spread-eagled in a far corner of the chamber. There was so much blood that for a moment Nicholas could not understand how he had failed to smell the stench. Then he remembered the lit joss sticks.

Slowly, as if in a dream, he approached the corpse. He stared in horrified fascination. Kyoki’s skin had been detached in precise strips, every inch of his body laid open. The skin, like ruddy streamers, lay in a pinwheel pattern, radiating out from the central core of the corpse.

The tanjian’s face was unmarred. Nicholas had no trouble identifying Kyoki from Akiko’s description—it was as if he had not aged at all from the time he had trained her.

This close, the stench of death was apparent. Nevertheless, Nicholas squatted by the corpse’s side. A despair he had never known before overwhelmed him. Kyoki had been his only hope, and now that hope had been denied him. What was he to do now? Was it his karma to remain
Shiro Ninja
until his unknown adversary came to kill him?

No, no. It could not be. His hands at his sides curled into fists. He fought against the hopelessness of his situation. But then a new dread wormed its way into his psyche. Kyoki had been tanjian, a master of Tau-tau. And yet he had been skinned alive. By whom? Who could have such power?

We have no power if we cannot use our imagination,
Kansatsu-san, Nicholas’s first ninja
sensei
had told him.
Just as we know that the mind-body continuum maintains a balance inside the human shell, so we have learned that power and imagination provide the Way inside the human mind.
Kansatsu-san, small and intense, tranquil as a stone amid a leaf storm. Black eyes shining in Nicholas’s mind, his words playing the chords of memory.
Others teach that being excessive is the same as being inadequate. These
sensei
do not possess imagination, which is synonymous with excess. Yes, it is true that in the mind-body continuum excess is to be avoided. But the power-imagination continuum is different; it presents us not with a whole new set of laws—which would be impossible to absorb, since we obey the Way—but with no laws at all.

Now we can understand the origin of chaos, because in the power-imagination continuum chaos can reign. This is the side of unbridled power. But imagination keeps chaos in check, knowing that power with too little imagination is disastrous not only for the perpetrator, but for those around him as well.

Never forget, Nicholas, that
ninjutsu
is in the realm of the power-imagination continuum. Those who abuse its teachings are
dorokusai,
warped beyond redemption, and must be destroyed.

With a shiver of precognition, Nicholas knew that it was such a one—a
dorokusai
—he had encountered in Dr. Hanami’s office. If that was the case, even with So-Peng’s emeralds, without
Getsumei no michi
Nicholas knew that he had no chance to survive.

Douglas Howe, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stood on crowded Wisconsin Avenue, in Chevy Chase, just outside the Washington, D.C., city limits. As he glanced around the posh neighborhood, his car, a sleek, dark blue Lincoln Continental, slid to a stop in front of him and he climbed in. The Lincoln took off.

Howe slipped the gift-wrapped package onto the backseat, said one word, “Nora’s,” to Michael, his chauffeur/bodyguard. As the big car slipped through the late-morning Washington traffic, Howe settled back in the leather bench seat. A letter faxed from his office was waiting for him, and he pulled it out of the portable machine’s slot.

He turned on a light, slipped on a pair of half-lens glasses and began to read. The words meant nothing to him. His mind was still on the size-four Louis Feraud suit—mid-tone speckled gray wool with a fox-trimmed peplum, harbinger of the new fall collection—that he had just picked up. He had picked it out last week, and in his absence, it had been put on the seamstress’s torso he had had Saks Jandel make for him in lieu of tedious fittings. He had heard that Jack Kennedy had had one made to fit Marilyn Monroe’s figure, using it to buy her occasional presents of a jacket, a dress, or a suit.

With an effort, he concentrated on the memo. It concerned the number of new Navy transport carriers to be allotted in next year’s military budget. Howe scribbled his comment in the margin, initialed it, sent it back by fax to his office, put the glasses away.

Truth to tell, it was not precisely the Louis Feraud suit that was on Howe’s mind, but rather, what the suit represented: not so much a present, but a bonus for a hazardous job well done. Not that he knew for certain yet what the final outcome would be, but it was good to be prepared.

The Lincoln Continental pulled into the curb on R Street. Douglas Howe fleetingly felt as he opened the door that in leaving the Louis Feraud suit on the seat, he was leaving a part of himself behind. Immediately he overcame this weakness and emerged into the glorious Washington sunlight.

It was exceptionally hot and humid, nothing new for summer in the city on the Potomac. But Howe was, as usual, crisply, sharply dressed in a single-vent charcoal pinstripe suit of a superb tropical-weight worsted, brilliant white shirt hand-loomed for him from Egyptian cotton, and a dark tie of rich silk in a thoroughly subdued pattern, so as not to take anything away from the exemplary cut of the suit.

Howe was a slight man with fine sandy hair above the high, domed forehead of the deep thinker. His face was odd, compelling, with its pointed chin, sunken cheeks, and round blue eyes that burned with a luminous intensity. He was not a handsome man, yet he was so totally at ease with people that no one had yet commented on how much his face resembled that of a weasel.

Howe was greeted by Nora’s smiling maître d’, shown to his usual table in the far corner, where he commanded a full view of the room.

Within moments a Bloody Mary made to his specifications appeared. Howe took a long swallow, allowed himself the luxury of one long circuit looking around the restaurant. He nodded to several people he knew or who fancied they knew him. The room was already three-quarters full. Within ten minutes, he knew, there would not be a seat free.

He glanced at his Polo watch. Twelve twenty-eight. Brisling had precisely two minutes to walk through Nora’s door and sit down at his table. Two minutes and counting.

Actually, Howe couldn’t care less about Brisling or the news that he would bring. Brisling would no doubt be so anxious to relate it that he would not even wait a civilized amount of time until a drink was brought and consumed in quiet reflection.

All things considered, David Brisling was the perfect assistant. He was smart enough to accomplish most assignments on his own, but stupid enough for Howe to control him utterly. He was, Howe thought, like an idiot manqué something Howe might have concocted in his laboratory had he been a genetic engineer in the twenty-first century.

Thirty seconds to go, and there was David Brisling, hurrying by the maître d’. In another life, Howe thought as Brisling was shown to his table, his assistant might have been a CIA agent. He was thoroughly nondescript, a man of middle America, made of solid stock. Salt of the earth.

David Brisling sat and, without a greeting, said a bit breathlessly, “I think I’ve got the answer.”