ran like hell. Mariko tried to get up and pursue, but made it only as far as her knees. Dizziness and nausea sat her right back down. Her vision was full of glowing squiggles. When she pressed her palms to her eyes to clear them, her right hand came away bloody. She probed her fingertips through her short, choppy hair and found a wide gash in her scalp.
Still nauseous, she crawled to the wall and pushed herself up to a seated position. Giving up wasn’t her forte, but she was too dizzy to stand and she had no way to call for backup. She had to count herself lucky that her assailant had fled instead of fighting for the bag—or worse, for the pistol at Mariko’s hip. Mariko was lucky to be alive.
Once she caught her breath, the squiggles started to subside. She found herself looking at the shoulder bag in her lap. One corner was stained with blood—Mariko’s—with something pointy poking up from within the fabric. Mariko opened the bag to see what it was.
A familiar mask looked up at her. It had stubby horns and sharp teeth, and someone had sliced the tip off of one of the fangs. Its iron skin was pitted with rust and age. Whoever first crafted it had a gift, for it was astonishingly expressive, its scowl as livid as any human’s.
Mariko had seen this mask before, most recently on the face of Joko Daishi. The only difference was that it now had a ragged, gleaming, rust-free dent in its forehead, almost as if someone had ricocheted a bullet off the mask.
It was impossible—or if not impossible, then downright creepy at the very least. Not twenty-four hours ago, Mariko had asked Captain Kusama to seize the mask as evidence, to keep it out of Joko Daishi’s hands. Mariko had no doubt that Joko Daishi had taken his inspiration from it in bombing the airport. And no sooner had it fallen into Joko Daishi’s possession than he lost it again. It could have gone to anyone, yet somehow it found its way to Mariko.
In her gut Mariko didn’t believe in destiny, but intellectually, she had to acknowledge that this was more than coincidence. She didn’t have a name for the forces that could have put the mask in her hands. She was certain the woman she’d taken it from hadn’t intended for Mariko to steal it. Mariko had a grade two concussion to prove it. But she was equally certain that she couldn’t have crossed paths with the woman by accident. There were thirty-five million people in greater Tokyo, and thirty-five-million-to-one odds against this woman losing the mask only to Mariko.
No, this was no coincidence. Someone had orchestrated their encounter. The only question was who, and why.
BOOK TWO
AZUCHI-MOMOYAMA PERIOD, THE YEAR 21
(1588 CE)
7
Shichio sat in the shade of the sedan chair, stroking his iron mask as if it were a cat.
Sedan chairs were supposed to be cool. That was why the upper classes hired them: to sit at ease, out of the sun. Or out of the rain, if the fickle dragon-god Kura-okami would visit a little rain on this forsaken land. Even a few clouds would be an improvement. Let them be as miserly as an old crone’s teats; at least they would bring some shade.
But no. This was Izu, and that meant hot and miserable.
As if it were not bad enough to listen to his bearers’ grunting, he could also smell them. Their sweat mingled with the dust of the road—and there was no shortage of dust, that was sure. Not a month past, a typhoon had lashed the entire eastern coast, from the Kansai all the way up to Totomi and Suruga, but it had stopped just shy of Izu. It was as if the clouds themselves had the good sense to avoid this place. The only water was the ocean, whose relentless droning filled Shichio’s nose with a salty tang—which, sadly, did little to mitigate the stink of the bearers.
The mask’s call distracted him from all of that. Though he would have thought any distraction would be welcome, in truth the mask frightened him. Its iron brow would never sweat, though hundreds of tiny pits suggested that salt and water had been at work over the years. Its features were so lifelike that sometimes Shichio thought it might well close its eyes to sleep. How many times had he wished it would? A little respite from the mask, just one