Shichio’s body like a nest of snakes. He’d never felt its need so acutely before, but—no. He had. Once. At the Okuma compound.
Only Inazuma steel could arouse the mask this way. Glorious Victory Unsought was nearby. That meant the whelp was too. But where?
The mask made him acutely aware of Nezumi’s swords, and Oda’s, and his own. Even the samurai in the teahouse seemed to resonate to him, like a bell’s lingering tone long after it was struck. But there was Inazuma steel too. Where? He scanned the pool, the rocks, the bamboo clinging to the valley walls. There was no sign.
Where was the Bear Cub? And what was that hanging in the air? It looked like smoke, a faint blue ribbon of it, rising up from the ledge where his archers lay in ambush. No—not rising up from, but falling down to. Now there came another, fluttering down from the very crest of the cliff. Shichio could just make out the little iron ball sputtering flame.
45
When people told the story of Prince Yamato, they never mentioned what a difficult time the prince must have had moving around in women’s clothing.
Daigoro found the lilac kimono terribly confining, not because it was too small for him but because a courtly woman wore her garments so tight that she could hardly breathe. Daigoro didn’t suffer that particular problem—his Sora breastplate gave him adequate breathing room—but the silken kimono still made it hard to move. As difficult as it had been getting up into the saddle, somehow he’d given no thought to what would happen when he tried to get back down.
The moment he fell off the horse, he was certain the ruse would fall apart. Shichio looked him right in the eye. But with the makeup, and with his hair down, and with the veil and head ornaments and everything else, Daigoro supposed Shichio must have seen only what he expected to see. And if there was one benefit to wearing such tightly constricting clothes, it was that they made his limp invisible. Since he was confined to small, shuffling steps, it was as if he limped from both legs.
He’d hoped to walk right up to Shichio before the first explosion. Now he could only hope Katsushima would understand what it meant for him to fall from the saddle. They had prearranged the signal yesterday afternoon: when Daigoro dismounted, light the first grenade. That was the last time they’d spoken. Katsushima had spent the whole night hiking up the neighboring dell. Some time early this morning, he would have looped back down to reach the cliff top overlooking Obyo Falls. Daigoro had allowed him plenty of time, because they had no way to communicate—nor any way to discuss whether tumbling out of the saddle counted as dismounting.
Looking up, he saw Katsushima had arrived at the top of the cliff after all. Right on cue, he’d lit the first grenade. Even now, Daigoro saw the second one fall, trailing a string of blue smoke behind it. It was clear from his bewildered look that Shichio saw it too.
Daigoro jerked his tanto from a sheath inside his obi and cut away the lilac kimono. As he reached for the fallen parasol, a thunderclap punched him in the ear. It was the loudest noise he’d ever heard in his life.
* * *
Smoke consumed the ledge where Shichio’s archers were hiding. In the same instant, a shuddering bang almost knocked Shichio flat. A lightning bolt could not have been louder. Then came a second bang, and this one did knock him down. Behind him, a horse screamed and reared. He turned, hoping to see the horse running away instead of trampling toward him. Instead he saw the Bear Cub.
The whelp had cut himself free of that ludicrous lilac kimono, and now he was scrambling for the parasol. No, not a parasol. Glorious Victory Unsought, in the thinnest disguise imaginable. Shichio could not believe he’d fallen for the ruse. “Loose, damn you, loose!” he shouted. “Kill them! Kill them all!”
* * *
The world fell into chaos. The peacock shrieked like a frightened maid, shouting at his hidden archers. Nene’s horse nearly stove Daigoro’s skull in. It bucked and jumped, spinning with a dexterity Daigoro wouldn’t have believed possible. Then it fled for its life.
A third Mongol grenade exploded, filling the valley with thunder. Still Shichio screamed for his archers, not realizing in his panic that all of them were dead. Tatters of the damned kimono still clung