As that thought struck him, he asked, “What do you know of Streaming Dawn?”
“The knife?” Jinichi’s lips pursed and his eyes widened. “Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long while.”
“Did you ever talk to my father about it?”
“How could I not? That was quite a story.”
“Would you tell me what you remember?”
“Of course, of course. Come, let’s have some tea.”
They had more than tea. Jinichi called servants to prepare a formal dinner, then sent a messenger into the foothills to fetch Katsushima. Daigoro had left his traveling companion with the horses in an abandoned logging camp. On the back roads they could ride together, but never in the public eye; Shichio’s mercenaries knew to look for a traveling pair, a crippled boy and his ronin companion. Daigoro’s mount was a giveaway too. With one leg heavier than the other, staying in an ordinary saddle was a constant struggle, so Daigoro rode with the special saddle Old Yagyu had constructed for him. It was one of a kind, all too easy to spot.
When Katsushima reached Fuji-no-tenka after dark, he came with what looked like a packhorse in tow. From a distance, Daigoro didn’t recognize his own mount; Jinichi’s messenger had brought a pack harness with him, and crammed Daigoro’s unique saddle into one of the panniers. For that Daigoro was supremely grateful; it was a clever ruse, and it had allowed Katsushima and their horses to reach Fuji-no-tenka unseen.
Jinichi and Daigoro talked over dinner while Katsushima remained characteristically quiet. Afterward, Daigoro had expected Katsushima to go out and find himself a sporting woman, but evidently his friend had taken an interest in the dinner conversation. “Forgive me,” he said as a maidservant poured sake, “but I’ve not heard the entire story; I’ve only heard the two of you comparing memories. Let me be sure I understand: do you honestly believe Okuma Tetsuro fought a demon?”
“I do,” said Jinichi. And I can turn into a bear, thought Daigoro.
“You don’t mean this poetically? You mean an actual creature from hell?”
Jinichi nodded. “A horned fiend with skin like polished steel. They say it could travel in human form, in the guise of an old crone. Lord Okuma told me its barest touch could kill the body while trapping the living mind inside. In those days people called it the demon assassin.”
“‘Those days’ weren’t so long ago,” Daigoro said. “I think I was nine or ten when my father came home to tell us about it.”
“You’re missing the point, my boy. This creature was hundreds of years old. The first time it visited Izu, I wasn’t even your age. Scared me half to death, it did. They say shinobi spellcraft summoned the creature. No one knows what dark bargain its masters struck with it, but somehow they commanded it to serve them. For hundreds of years it reigned as the deadliest killer in the realm.”
Daigoro held his tongue and drank his sake. The version Okuma Tetsuro told his sons was quite different. The demon was a disguise, not a creature. The wearer was indeed an assassin, and while it was true that some said the assassin was immortal, Daigoro’s father put the point rather differently: so long as the assassin goes masked, who can say whether it’s the same man? If ten men wore it over the span of a hundred years, did that make the assassin a hundred years old?
Of all his stories, this was the one Daigoro never asked him to repeat. It was the only one in which his father lost a fight. “But for an assassin’s mercy, I would be dead,” he’d said. Daigoro remembered little more than that; at the age of ten he had no interest in hearing about his valiant father’s vulnerability.
“So Lord Okuma fought this . . . demon,” Katsushima said. “Where?”
“In the shadow of Kiyosu Castle,” Jinichi said.
“And that’s how he got Streaming Dawn?”
“In a manner of speaking. He never kept it.”
Daigoro leaned forward, all ears now. “Did he tell you what he did with it?”
“He did what any wise man would do: he went straight to the nearest shrine that could wash its evil from him.”
Katsushima could not have said that sentence with a straight face. Yasuda Jinichi was gravely earnest. “I tell you, that blade was forged in the fires of hell,” Jinichi said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if every demon carries one. It may well be the key to their immortality.”