Disciple of the Wind - Steve Bein Page 0,77

the dog spirit in him too, and more than anything he wanted to indulge it. Spending his days in peace, protecting his home only when he had to, that was the life Daigoro wanted.

Was that cowardice? He opened his mouth to ask Katsushima’s opinion, but then he thought better of it. For one thing, Katsushima had deliberately turned his back on domestic life. For another, he’d spoken the truth: his opinion was irrelevant. This was Daigoro’s doubt. He alone could face it.

He crouched to pick up a stone when suddenly his knee buckled. Just like my hopes, he thought. At the last instant he stretched out his arm, avoiding an embarrassing face-first tumble into the surf.

“Daigoro, pick yourself up and tell me what you mean to do.”

He did as he was told. “Look at me, Katsushima. I still haven’t gotten used to the weight of this armor. Maybe I’m only cut out for the life of your friendly watchdog.”

“Self-pity does not become you.”

“All right.” Daigoro threw his stone, but it sank immediately. Another ill omen. “What do I mean to do? A good start would be to turn myself invisible. That way I could sneak into Shichio’s home and kill him in his sleep. After that, I’d like to make gold coins appear out of thin air. Let them appear directly over Kenbei’s head. With luck they’d bludgeon him to death.”

“More self-pity. Go cry to your wife; I have no ear for it.”

“Goemon, I cannot walk the path before me. Even the first step is hopeless. I must find Streaming Dawn, though no one knows where it is. Then I have to give it to Lord Sora, to keep him from backing Kenbei. At the same time I have to give it to Lady Nene, or else break my word and lose my bid for Shichio’s neck. Since I cannot give it to two people at once, I may as well give it to three people at once. If I give it to Lord Yasuda too, maybe its power will be enough to wake him, and then he can slap some sense into that greedy, shortsighted son of his.”

“At last you’re making sense. You said Sora claims to have seen this knife, neh?”

“Yes.”

“And your father saw it too?”

“Yes.”

“Then at least we know it exists. Finding it can’t be harder than turning invisible, neh? It’s surely easier than transmuting air into gold.”

“I suppose so.” One kind of impossible wasn’t any harder than another kind of impossible, Daigoro thought. And Katsushima had it right—or his squirrel had, anyway: the only way to do the impossible was first to believe he could do it. He would probably fail, but if he believed that from the outset, he would fail before he even began.

And there was one more factor to consider: Bushido asked the impossible of him every day. The way of the samurai was the way of honor, and if there was one thing Daigoro was sure of, it was that mortal men were not honorable creatures. By nature they were selfish, fearful, and petty, all of the vices bushido stood against. If Daigoro could overcome his own human nature in living the warrior’s code, then perhaps doing the impossible was within his grasp after all.

“All right, it’s settled. We go to find Streaming Dawn.”

The real trouble was figuring out where to begin.

BOOK FIVE

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010 CE)

21

Mariko envisioned Captain Kusama standing in front of her. Then she brought Glorious Victory Unsought crashing down on his head, chopping him in half.

It was the sixtieth time she’d done this. Her forearms and shoulders burned, but she had forty more to go.

This was her second kenjutsu drill of the morning. For the first hundred strikes, she’d imagined Joko Daishi instead, leering at her from behind his demon mask. Those had been kesagiri strikes, slashing him open from his left shoulder to his right hip. Just like the shomenuchi she was using to bisect Kusama, the hardest part was stopping the enormous blade before it chopped the hardwood floor to bits.

She practiced on the top floor of her mother’s apartment building, in a large studio with wheeled, folding Ping-Pong tables arrayed against one wall. On weekday afternoons, Mariko’s mother came up here to beat the pants off of anyone who dared to face her in table tennis. Other residents used this space for morning tai chi classes and other group activities. A few days ago Mariko had invited herself over, in part because it was

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