Tomuchi would be furious at Saga’s betrayal but grateful for the honorable death. And afterward Saga could position the corpse into whatever state would suggest a “demon.” It wasn’t exactly what the client desired, but he would lie in his report with only the warped and chewed-over superstitious rumors to contradict him. There was nothing he could do for Kumo. And Saga the samurai would be little missed in the chaos of the mass desertion.

  All Knots satisfied. Mission accomplished.

  Marrow didn’t take the news well, did in fact shatter a sizable bamboo thicket in his fury, Saga wrenching every grain of his self-control to keep that fury in check.

  Thwarted, frustrated and sorrowful, Marrow reached his fingers for Saga with that old quiet ache, seeking comfort, and Saga, his own yearning for the moment larger than his reason, stretched out in kind. One hand passed through the other with the barest sensation, just as he knew it would, disappointment in its wake, and their threadbare bond was once again as a jaw quivering at the promise of taste and closing vacant upon its own hollow.

  Perhaps, he thought, with the Rope in conflict, it was time he tried another wound.

  Saga swallowed in a dry mouth, pressed the point of a throwing knife against the soft flesh in his throat where the thick flowing vein would give him a slow death. Careful placement, careful angle, just so....

  Live for Kagehana.

  The terror came like a tide, rising and rising and drowning his heart until its very beat was pain, until his breath came chopped and his eyes crossed over the agony in his skull. Saga’s body went numb. He dropped like a sack.

  Quickly he abandoned what he’d been musing, a bad idea forgotten, and at once the panic-tide vanished.

  “Don’t know what you expected,” he said as he righted himself. Live for Kagehana was only the Third Knot, but it was broad and strict and brooked no challenges great or small. With reverence he re-coiled the Rope.

  Marrow had watched it all, naïve, unknowing, restless.

  Saga sent him away. He sat in the brush with his eyes closed to monitor Marrow’s progress. And only when Kumo was dead and the first major obstacle passed did Saga muffle their connection and set about preparing the rest of the plan.

  He shrugged more comfortably into his cricket box and tested the mask of noise over the shuffle of his footsteps. The jostle irritated a chorus of angry chirping from the little territorial males. They didn’t like being forced together. Saga for his part offered them the only advice he knew: “Time is the mother of chance.” It was the Twelfth Knot and the favorite saying of Kagehana’s escape master. Employ enough patience and even the strongest prisons will show you a way out.

  Saga wasn’t sure he believed it. But when it came to the Knots, belief was insignificant.

  Suitably camouflaged beneath the crickets’ song, he gathered his gear and used his walking stick to pry a way among the bamboo until he found near the sandstone cliff a clearing large enough for Tomuchi’s seppuku. It was a place to appreciate the stars daubed across the sky and the rhythm of the wind. A good place to die.

  Saga brushed clean a flat-faced stone, set it to one side of the clearing, then folded a square of cloth upon it, the stone to serve as a plate, the cloth to be wrapped around the blade of Tomuchi’s knife to ensure his grip. Afterward, Saga stamped a portion of the clearing flat and arranged one of his climbing lines into a cushion for Tomuchi to kneel upon.

  He was an hour into the meticulous arrangement when a trick of the wind saved his life.

  Like the etch of time, Kagehana had trained his body to the knowledge of the rhythm of the life of the world. When all stirred and rustled and chirped as it ought, the awareness felt peaceful and right. But in that moment among the cadence of the bamboo forest the tiny creak that caught Saga was most certainly wrong—his ear knew it; his skin knew it—and before his mind had caught on he’d dropped to the earth and scrambled toward the cliff’s edge.

  The arrows came like sighs, whispers from the shadows that ended loudly in the ground he’d just abandoned.

  An ambush.

  Instantly a tug from Marrow (wants to fight alongside Brother-Anchor and kill and win and....)

  “Quiet!” Saga ordered and clamped down further on their link. He dug the fingers of one hand into a crevice in the cliff rock and swung out into space, bounced against the vertical face, jammed his free hand into another crevice, released his first grip and swung out again, losing his hat to a gust of wind and twisting his shoulder in a blaze of pain. He shoved the agony aside and this time kicked up a burst of momentum to fling himself back onto level ground, three body lengths from where he’d begun.

  By then he knew the second volley had been nocked, and within an eighth-stick he was up and sprinting in a crouch-and-sway along the cliff, using the breeze-rocked stalks to his camouflage. The archers would be trained on him now, waiting for a gap in the bamboo, waiting for line of sight.... Now. Saga skidded to a halt just as more whispers sliced the air in front of him. Two, he saw as they clattered against the stone at his feet.

  And with that he shoved back into the thicket. He fought against the stubborn bamboo until he found a reedy hollow and slithered inside. He at once set about calming himself—breathing, heartbeat, the throbbing fire arcing through his shoulder. His body heat had risen significantly, the crickets at his back responding to the warmth with louder, faster songs. That wouldn’t do. He let his mouth hang open to better his hearing—his eyes, more harm than help from this vantage, he closed—and imagined himself one with the soft, cool earth, consumed in its musk, drawn down into its moist embrace (DO-ki-DO-ki-DO-ki beat his heart) down where he felt every brush of grass (DO-ki, DO-ki... DO-ki) every marching ant, every scuttling leaf as a caress on his flesh. (...DO-ki... DO-ki....)

  When he was centered, when all inside was calm, he turned his focus outward.

  There. Footsteps. Twenty paces northeast, quiet, expertly laid. Stalking him. But where was the other? And were there more than two? It was too soon for Tomuchi’s men to have noticed him missing. And with their frailty and the strange corpses in the wood, they didn’t range out this far without a reason. But this was no chance encounter. His attackers had been nearly silent in their approach. And the footfalls he tracked now were too swift for the little noise they made, too purposed for an ordinary sentry.

  Saga opened his eyes, reached back to tease the axe from his bundle.

  He opened his mind to Marrow enough to feel him cutting beneath the floorboards to Tomuchi’s quarters, then again squeezed the connection tight.

  He spread a dank layer of mud over the scrapes in his arm and reached to rip the swath of cloth from his face as a dressing for his aching hand—gashes on his palm, three fingernails torn back. He paused, decided to leave the hand. Blood could be useful.

  He considered his chisshi bombs but discounted them as too risky. Instead he grasped a throwing knife for his off hand and crept out from the hollow under the cricket’s masking song, axe at the ready. The game was simple: There were at least two men out there, but Saga could hear only one. Use what is known to reveal the unknown taught Knot Twenty-two. So he moved low, sucking in his belly to squeeze among the bamboo, angling to converge on the one man’s progress. When he found another shelter he stopped to listen, adjusted his direction, and again crept into the bamboo labyrinth, always advancing.

  This was how he first spotted his quarry, a bent shadow of a man feeling his way around the stalks with the care of a veteran—slim, agile, face and head wrapped in dark cloth, but clad in light samurai armor. A deserter, then. Or bandit.

  Of the other man—or men, he reminded himself—Saga still heard nothing. Thus the other was far more skilled than his companion. Or he hadn’t moved since the first attack.

  Saga studied his prey intently. Was this the man to give him the wound he needed? The wound he couldn’t give himself? He’d pinned that hope on others before....

  He rubbed his fingertips over the Knots in the Rope at his side. Be a sneak-thief, commanded the akunin Knots. Be bold, declared the samurai half. He compromised.

  He flexed and squeezed his injured hand, letting blood flow down the haft of his axe and off the blade. It would make his grip less sure, but he only needed one pass. He squatted low with his legs bunched under him, body tilted slightly forward, swaying with the bamboo to the rhythm of its thock-thock-thocking. When the slim outlaw stepped into a clear space, Saga shouted in a voice to make Kumo proud. “Tomuchiiii!” And like a good quarry the errant samurai startled toward the noise.

  Saga pushed off with both legs, sprang forward, flung his axe arm outward in one burst of movement. The outlaw’s eyes opened wide, the whites round and clear in the starlight, and for one continuing instant all hung on the moment—that startled gaze locked on Saga’s, the stringed droplets of blood a misty bridge between them—until the blood spattered the outlaw in the face. He flinched. And Saga, with one more lunging step, closed the distance to bury his axe in the outlaw’s throat. The impact jarred Saga to the teeth, but the sound that followed was a wail from the land of wind and ghosts—breath and blood hissing death throughout the nighttime wood.

  Saga kept his body moving, swiveling, ears strained to the forest, gaze hunting the patch from which the first volleys came. And there!, faintly over the death rattle’s fading, the creak of a distant draw, the glint of an arrowhead against a bow. Saga twisted, dodging, flung the knife with all his might at the vague shape of the second man. Found you, he thought, watching his knife sail in a perfect arc, the same moment the enemy arrow hissed from the shadows and crunched through the bones of his foot.

  The agony was an instant burn gouging streaks up his leg and Saga toppled, slammed against the press of bamboo, landed hard on his back in a splintery crash.

  A distant shriek. A mangled thud. His throw had struck home.

  * * *

  For a stick of time Saga lay still, commanding the moans back into his throat and watching, through the forest’s murmuring canopy, tattered clouds skate across a star-speckled sky. The part of his mind that belonged to Kagehana reviewed his circumstance and noted for future reference the events that led from a moment in perfect control to a moment laid flat and bleeding in a mass of escaping crickets. His tiny partners were swift to abandon the broken box, several having the bad manners to first hop across his face. Time is the mother of chance, Saga thought and wished them good fortune.

  His fingers, filled with overactive nerves, trembled as he probed the wound: foot cleft in twain to the instep, one of his toes flopping loose and gristly inside his sock. But he tasted the blood for poison and let out a shuddering breath when he found none. Not the wound he needed. Another failure.

  Eventually he managed to cut away the sock, losing his toe to the darkness of the brush. With deep breaths he steeled his nerve, reached out thinly to Marrow (climbs through a hole into a dark room) and closed their link again to the barest thread. He wadded his face cloth between his teeth. He clenched them until they creaked. He grasped the arrow in both hands, snapped the shaft in half and ripped it from his foot.

  The cloth muted his scream.

  The rest was a haze of routine: sprinkling medicine herbs and flinching from the burn, dressing the wound, cinching his foot with his belt to hold it together. He braced himself against the cage-lattice of bamboo and stood slowly on shaky legs. But he stood. And he set about investigating this bloody mess.

  The throatless man had fallen wedged among three fat stalks, axe jutting from his throat, the night making pitch of his blood and a wide wet mouth of the ragged wound. His cap was no longer in place, hair fallen loose from its knot to hang in a cascade, unusually long and sleek. With his knife unsheathed beside him and his bow trapped against his crumpled corpse, the wayward samurai resembled Izanami incarnate, ready to usher souls into the gloom. A wind stirred at the dead man’s hair, giving witchly life to the illusion. But Saga was undisturbed.

  Until he saw the face, and his skin went cold.

  With gritted teeth and the haste he could muster he hobble-hopped to a better vantage and leaned forward to see that, no, the shadows had not deceived him. Stretching from the ruin of the throat to the samurai’s waxen brow was a pulpy swath of flesh where a face should have been. Eyes, nose, lips, all vanished into a mass featureless as rice meal.

  Saga’s conditioned mind sped through the facts and left him a possibility, and a swift search of the corpse made that possibility a problem. Trapped in the body’s nerveless hand was a clay vial half filled with an evil-smelling powder, traces stilled sprinkled on the body and around. And Saga knew what this had to be: houmatsuteki na fukumen, the phantom veil.

  Akunin spies lived and died by their secrets, a fact Saga knew only too well. But unlike him, many worked in teams, and the exposure of one was a threat to all. Houmatsuteki na fukumen was a technique of the clans of the south perfected as the ultimate shroud should any one agent be cornered in the course of duty.

  Not samurai. Two akunin. Sent to stalk him. And this one... even with an axe in his throat had performed houmatsuteki na fukumen. Two strong akunin, and skilled.

  With a wet twist Saga tore his axe free then flung himself through the bamboo, head low and shoulders high, bouncing from stalk to stalk, cries and growls as his foot crashed fitfully against one hard thing and another. He heard the second man moving, then saw him, there, climbing to his feet. Saga put on a last burst and leapt upon him with a blunt strike to the back. The man cried out, fell beneath Saga’s weight, the forest leaves hissing hatred at their play. They grappled, Saga muscling to the top face-to-face with his enemy. And at once he knew his mistake.

  She was bloody and smelled of leather and oil instead of perfume; her hair was hidden beneath a cap and she wore a bruise at her temple from Marrow’s jab. She was a stranger in most respects: nose gone crooked, lips thinner, wrinkles at the eyes, skin uneven and blemished. But that mocking smile, grim though it was, was unmistakably Amé’s.

  The rules and the stratagems and the lessons of nerve and sinew all collided in the fore of Saga’s brain to produce the single most worthless reaction possible. His skin went cold. “What?” spoke his lips.

  He had time only to register the shift in her smile—even in that ridiculously stretched moment their roles ever the same—before her hand shot down and cruelly vised his testicles. His body heaved of its own accord and Amé twisted free like fish from a child’s hand. She spun. His jaw rattled. And all at once he was prone once more, listening to the liquid rush of her flight through the brush.

  Saga scrambled to his knees blinking the haze from his eyes. He froze.

  His thinking, despite anguish in his foot and groin and skull, had recovered to clarity. So he promptly abandoned any idea of pursuit when he spied what Amé had used to strike his jaw. Lying there beside him, heavy and glinting dully, was a small wire box filled with a waxy mass. A red glow sparked inside.

  Bomb, Saga thought at once, and in a painful seize of muscle he dove from the thing with all his power. But before he could duck his head or cover his ears, a tremendous flash of white light burst soundlessly from the box, destroying the night and sending Saga reeling. All color fled; the forest became of a graveyard of bone and shadow, as if the sun throne itself had descended in all its shattering glory—and then in an instant, as mutedly as it had come, the light was gone.

  Saga’s vision was bleached and dizziness plagued him, but he in his panic noticed neither. Amé was akunin. And this weapon, a flare as if stolen from the sun.... There was only one reason for akunin in this place on this night disguised as samurai to have such a device at hand. Saga fought pain and the fog of blood-loss to fling his soul outward, heedless of the mission, heedless of safety and caution. He poured himself in a bolt toward Marrow, shivering with the gravest, loudest, fiercest warning he knew. Beware! BEWARE! BEWARE!

  But Saga’s great effort had failed.

  For it was then that Marrow, his ghost, the secret and deadly Ink of Kagehana, began to scream.

  * * *

  Over-I

  Trapped! Hate! Help! Grief and sorrow forever and stifling fear from the god-rope and rage, all of the rage, a sky of rage, rage-rip and burn-gut the filthy slow meat traitor trappers, please kill, please come, please help, please, please... please....

  * * *

  He was small inside the trap, stripped away and missing most of him. But outside was a death of light. And though dooms and insanities of fury tempested him full to swelling, he dared not break free.

  He could see nothing but smelled much, and heard, and felt. It was plain that Tomuchi sat nearby in the stifling heat of his brazier. He spoke to a personal guard of eight samurai. The samurai listened. They asked tentative questions. A conflagration of chemicals fouled the air around them. Tea was waiting nearby.

  Other samurai patrolled or lounged in rooms above and adjacent, uneasiness in the way they shifted, in the questions they muttered. All were marked for vengeance as Tomuchi had been marked, over and over again, time churning in a constant now filled with primal schemes and the agony of captivity.

  “Do not assume,” Tomuchi was insisting. “His alibis mean nothing. Yes, he was asleep at times in the barracks or patrolling in groups when the sabotage was at play. But trust that he is the traitor. There can be no excess of care with this man.”

  “But... Saga?” the stunned soldier asked again. He and the others muttered to each other in disbelief.

  Tomuchi gave them a moment to air their astonishment before he brought the discussion back in hand. “Despite your feelings, he will require a horse. Beyond that, twelve more mounts should suffice: one for each of you and three in reserve; the strongbox will ride with me.”

  At this mention every face turned toward the prison, and several men shuddered as though an echo of the hatred roiling inside touched their necks.

  “You’re to travel with us, lord?” asked a soldier. “NikyM is several days distant, even over good terrain. We ought not—”