Cave of the Shadow Ninja: Part IV Read online

  The rock collided with Sendai’s fingers, sounding a loud clank that echoed through the mossy room.

  “Aagrr!” Sendai called as his sword fell from his fingers.

  Ozo advanced instantly. He sent a hard jab into Sendai’s jaw, and the man spun like a top, falling to the rocks with a jingling clatter.

  Behind the swordsman Ozo stood, waiting for the man to give up, but Sendai, obviously no stranger to fortitude, stumbled back to his feet. With blood smearing his lip, Sendai threw a wild punch that Ozo could have dodged without a day’s training.

  “Each time my sword connects with an opponent,” the young samurai said, “I feel their whole body through the vibration. I can feel which muscles are strong and which are, well . . .”

  With all the grace of a three-legged dog, Sendai threw another punch. Ozo countered by snapping a foot into the Metecian’s ribs and sending a wrist into the side of his neck.

  Sendai gasped for air as he fell to the mossy broken stones. He reached for his scimitar, but Ozo kicked it from his shaking fingers, picked up his own blade, and held The Great Sendai at his mercy.

  Ozo opened his mouth, eager to gloat about how he alone had just beaten the greatest swordsman in both worlds, but his ancestors, yet again, made sure the young samurai had no time for pride.

  Down the dark corridor behind him, Ozo sensed footsteps laden in heavy scraping armor approaching. It was the Wolfen. But how? he wondered.

  “One moment,” Ozo apologized to Sendai.

  While keeping his blade trained on the great swordsman, the samurai picked up the rock with which he had just defeated the man, waited a moment, and threw it again in the opposite direction.

  The stone sailed across the room toward the edge of an archway, hurling through empty space until the exact moment Patrick’s head appeared from around the corner.

  The Wolfen didn’t even see the stone as he stepped into its path and it struck him in the temple, knocking him out cold.

  As Patrick fell with a clatter, Ozo looked to Toji standing in the upper floors, holding his head as though it pained him terribly.

  “You let the Woodlander get the better of you?” the young Samurai jibbed in a normal tone, knowing there was no need to shout with Toji listening.

  In the distance, his brother simply threw up his hands as if to say, “What can you do?”

  “Well,” Ozo said to his brother as he looked back to his defeated foe, “let’s hope Ichi fares better than you.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The rain fell cold and hard, soaking through Akiko’s robes as she knelt in her restaurant’s courtyard. Her back ached, and her muscles tightened, unaccustomed to the strain of fighting.

  Kubaba had left more than bruises across the young warrior’s frame. Akiko looked through her tears to her father’s broken scabbard, a symbol bringing with it an inevitable reunion with her brothers.

  Over the years, she had thought at length about they day they would meet again. She had planned their fight in the Forest of Arrows for a decade, yet it was only the first step in keeping the Sons of Sato blind to who she was and the extent of her skills.

  As Akiko and her angry brother’s fight moved up a split stone archway rising precariously through the center of the Shattered Fortress, her plan was finally coming to fruition.

  When facing an opponent with a disadvantage, like the slew of injuries painted across Akiko’s aching frame, the samurai code called for a stay of battle until the opponent had the chance to heal. Ichi, however, was no real samurai.

  The eldest son of Sato had always confused “honor” with “ego,” a flaw that proved advantageous for the Ninja. Ichi believed that she hadn’t taken his eyesight into account when she threw her smoke pellets, caltrops, and all the other “weak” instruments in her strap. Of course, she knew the smoke screen would bring enough callow boasting from her brother to gain the advantage she needed.

  Since the moment she, Patrick, and Sendai had entered the ancient ruins, the Ninja sensed something evil filling the shadows, the same dark magic present at the Tomb of Glass and the attacking beast in the cedar forest.

  As Akiko and Ichi moved up the slippery stone buttresses, high above the palace floor, she caught a glimpse of the rice paddies outside the northern windows, rising up the gray mountain like a giant’s staircase. With the rice plants in sight, the potent, cold sensation of that tainted smell came on stronger than ever.

  The Ninja sidestepped a swing form her brother and leapt from the precarious stone through a set of wooden doors at the upper-most level of the palace. Together, she and her brother entered the sizable room, fighting beneath an ornate ceiling past decaying worm-eaten furniture. Around them, tapestries depicting the end of the Great War hung from the stone walls.

  This was the very room where the two emperors had embraced fifty years ago. As she crossed the chamber with Ichi biting feverishly at her blade, Akiko wondered if it would be here that the war would start up once again.

  Ichi deflected Akiko’s advance, throwing her crashing into the frame of a large window. As the Ninja caught herself against the frame, the uppermost rice paddy came into view, reflecting the sun like a mirror. Across the tier, a trickling stream entered from the series of bamboo irrigation pipes. The water bubbled with streaks of black ink, infecting a half-circle of rice plants around it.

  The Ninja turned fast and met Ichi’s blade once again, blocking high before sending him back against the four-poster bed.

  “There,” Akiko said, signaling to the contaminated crops growing black and crooked against the reflection of the surface “the rice—” Ichi drew another attack, uninterested in words. “Listen to me!” she begged as she swatted down his advance. “There’s something out there!”

  Ichi finally stepped back but only because Toji and Ozo had appeared in the doorway of the stateroom, whole and undefeated.

  “My friends?” Akiko asked Toji and Ozo as the entered.

  “Alive,” Ozo offered to a disappointed look from Ichi.

  Of course they were alive, Akiko thought, Patrick and Sendai had faced the two sons of Sato who knew the meaning of virtue.

  With her heart breaking against the odds she now faced, Akiko turned back to Ichi and dropped her father’s sword at her feet.

  “What’s this?” Ichi demanded.

  “Something’s coming,” she whispered as a drop of blood escaped a split in her lip.

  “You’re right,” Ichi said. “Justice is coming.”

  Suddenly, something fired against Akiko’s sense of danger. She pulled a throwing knife from her belt and pitched it directly at Ichi’s face. The samurai ducked as the knife spun past his hair braid and pierced the rotten wood behind him.

  Ichi’s angry sword responded, swinging fast and hard. Akiko, still unarmed, braced for impact, but before the sharpened steel made contact with her neck, Toji’s blade deflected the strike and saved his sister’s life.

  “Why?” Ichi shouted.

  Without a word, Toji signaled to Akiko’s carefully thrown knife. Their eldest brother turned to find a strange-looking hornet struggling against the steel blade, pinned to the wood by the tip of her knife. The insect was black and gnarled with an abdomen glowing purple like a distorted firefly.

  “What is it?” Ozo asked.

  Ichi, ever the cautious one, lifted Ozo’s sword against his sister’s neck and turned with Toji to inspect the strange creature. Akiko and Ozo watched with a growing sense of peril as the wasp buzzed furiously, fighting against the steel with its legs until it finally slowed, curled, and died.

  “It’s some sort of—” Toji’s words trailed as the dead creature suddenly dissipated into a puff of black smoke and faded into the air before their eyes.

  “She saved you,” Toji said, turning to Ichi.

  “Like I said,” Akiko muttered as she struggled to keep upright, “something is coming. That’s just a hint of what we’re up against.”

  “A bug?” Ozo questioned.
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  “We?” Ichi scoffed.

  Toji opened his mouth but stopped, his eyes suddenly widening in terror as if sensing something the others could not hear. Together, Akiko and the Sons of Sato turned on their heels and stepped back as the loud hum of a swarm of insects rose like ghosts from the paddy outside.

  The rice seedpods hanging heavy off the tainted black plants shuddered and crackled as hundreds of large glowing hornets emerged, brandishing needle-sharp stingers that dripped with black manta.

  “Ozo,” Ichi whispered, turning his sword toward the window, “watch her.”

  “I can help you,” Akiko said. “Don’t cut us in half.”

  The four warriors backed into the corner of the ancient room as the large glowing swarm advanced toward them at blistering speed. The sound grew like the moan of a heavy beast until it blocked out reason like their bodies blocked out the sun.

  As the swarm closed in, Ozo struggled to keep his sword to his sister’s neck, fighting against the oath of honor binding him to Ichi’s orders. Fortunately for him, Akiko thought, I’ve made no such oath.

  The Ninja acted quickly, swinging a wrist guard against Ozo’s blade and springing into the air. Akiko strained against her stiffened joints as she swept Ozo’s feet from beneath him, picked up her sword, and sliced an attacking hornet in two. Ozo landed along side the pieces of insect as Akiko turned toward the rest of the menacing swarm.

  Ichi had no time to protest before the glowing wasps vomited through window. Each of the four warrior’s blades responded, sending pieces of cursed insects in all directions.

  Like a gust of wind, the bulk of the swarm blew past them through a large opening in the ceiling above. “This was you!” Ichi accused his sister as the insects arched back toward them for a second assault. “Now it’s killed us all!”

  As thousands of angry wings and stingers screamed toward their prey, Akiko threw three more smoke pellets, igniting a familiar white screen that swallowed the four warriors. The swarm entered the smoke, but they struggled to find their victims through the haze. Moments later, the deep guttural buzz faded inside the room, and the creatures began drifting in lazy circles before falling across the ground like a glowing hailstorm.

  Quietly, Akiko and her brothers emerged from beneath the old bed and cut the few remaining pacified hornets from the fog.

  “You see, brothers?” he sneered as the last insect dissipated into black smoke. “When you take up swords with a Ninja, you’re forced to use their cowardly ways to survive.”

  Akiko winced from the smell of the black manta streaking Ichi’s sword as he pressed it into her neck. “Ichi,” she said, carefully, “the manta on your sword. If it enters my bloodstream, I’ll be turned to the shadow curse as well.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Ichi sneered stiffening his arm against her flesh.

  “For one who can see the moons around the planets,” Akiko said, calmly, “you can be so blind, brother.” Slowly Akiko sheathed their father’s sword, knelt before her brothers, and presented it in her open palms. “Please,” she begged once more, “We can stop this if you’ll just listen.”

  Ichi’s keen eyes examined her, watching for the lie-indicating changes in her complexion, but she knew he would not find them. There was no dishonesty in the fact that Akiko needed her brothers if she ever hoped to succeed, and she was running out of time.

  “How did you know the wasps were coming?” Ichi asked.

  “I smelled the manta on the wind,” Akiko admitted.

  Ichi, Toji, and Ozo lifted their noses slightly, searching for the scent in the air.

  “It has no smell,” Ichi answered, confused.

  It took only a moment for Toji, the pragmatic thinker to understand Akiko’s admission. “You have a gift, too,” he said, speaking the Ninja’s final secret aloud.

  “Of course!” Ozo said, “That explains so much!

  “What harm is it to just listen?” Toji asked his eldest brother.

  “Toji,” Ichi ordered, keeping his stone-cold eyes on his sister. . . “bind her hands.”

  Toji smiled with relief as he turned to pull the rope from the decaying tapestries on the wall.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Okay, Patrick thought to himself, I boxed the Samurai’s ears, ran toward Sendai, then, darkness. The Wolfen pulled against the ties around his hands and feet, striving to remember how he had once again found himself in a dark place, unable to move. At least I’m not buried alive, he thought, shifting his body against the stone floor.

  “You made the same mistake I did,” Sendai’s familiar voice called through the darkness. “You picked a fight with the Sons of Sato.”

  Blinding light flooded in all around him as Sendai leaned in and pulled the hood from Patrick’s head with his teeth.

  The defeated men lay hogtied in an alcove off the great hall in the Shattered Palace. The expansive room opened around them returning each sound they made like a choir of mimicking ghosts.

  “Wait!” Patrick said, suddenly putting the situation together. “You. . . lost?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Sendai balked.

  Whatever the story was, Patrick wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it, either. “Akiko,” he remembered.

  Sendai nodded toward a high room in the ruins above them. Inside, the lonely Ninja knelt, silhouetted against the light of the setting sun, speaking as her three brothers stood over her.

  Slowly Akiko lowered her head as Ichi turned and walked away, followed by Toji and Ozo. The youngest brother made it only a few steps before turning back and embracing his sister. She melted into his arms as if it was the first time she’d known affection in a lifetime.

  “Ozo!” Ichi’s echoing voice fell down over Patrick and Sendai, signaling the young samurai to jump and run like a trained dog.

  “Well,” Patrick said, hopeful, “they didn’t kill us. Maybe they’ve decided to help?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Sand!” the Wolfen griped as Akiko followed him across an endless desert. The wind whipped the stinging grit from the dunes against her skin, grating it like a carpenter’s file. “This is why I didn’t take the southern road in the first place,” Patrick continued.

  Ahead, Ichi and his two brothers lead the trudging party through the shifting dunes. Akiko, Patrick, and Sendai followed close behind, each bound in chains at the wrist.

  Since Akiko had surrendered, Ichi had listened carefully to her pleading before taking her prisoner along with Patrick and Sendai.

  The three warriors had been led through the Broken Mountain to the Backbone’s southern road, heading toward Paoyang and certain death at the hands of the emperor.

  “Patrick, I understand your complaints,” Akiko said. “But thanks to my brothers, everyone opposing Oni and the shadow curse will be dead soon, so I wish you’d hold your tongue.”

  “My swollen tongue,” Patrick corrected.

  “I thought you picked the northern route through the Backbone as a strategy,” Sendai asked.

  “Nope,” Patrick coughed, “it was the sand. We just got lucky. And if I’d known you couldn’t even throw a punch, I wouldn’t have come at all!”

  “Me, neither,” Sendai agreed, taking the jibe in stride as usual.

  “I was just as surprised,” Ozo agreed from ahead. “But at the same time, you’d think an outlaw knight from Wolfwater would know how to swing a sword.”

  “He’s got a point,” Toji agreed.

  “Is that a fact?” Patrick said bluntly. “How are those blessed ears of yours, Samurai?”

  “Quiet, all of you!” Ichi ordered from the head of the party.

  “Excuse me,” Patrick continued, “but the day I take orders from a man who wants to see his only sister killed is the day I eat my own sword.”

  “That can be arranged,” Ichi threatened. “This isn’t our fault, remember that. None of us would be here if it wasn’t for her.”

  “But it did happen,” Ozo countered, “and now we
’re walking away from Father.”

  “Respect, Ozo!” Ichi barked.

  Ozo stopped, forcing the others to halt along with him. “Tell me,” he asked, “does honor not become a weakness if it forces one to turn his back on family?”

  “Or when it becomes something to hide behind when one is too scared to make his own decisions?” Akiko added.

  “We’re not turning our back on anyone,” Ichi maintained as he pushed up the dune in the desert heat. “We’ll go after Father once she’s in the hands of the Royal Guard.”

  “You’re both so stubborn,” Toji complained, standing his ground next to Ozo. “I just wish one of you would apologize and we’d be past this!”

  “What exactly do you want me to apologize for?” Akiko asked, offended. “For getting in the way of your fists all those years?”

  “No,” Toji relented, “I want you to apologize for breaking Mother’s and Father’s hearts.”

  “How could that be true?” the Ninja asked, raising her rattling chains toward the cloudless sky. “I was nothing but a burden from the day I was born!”

  “We looked for you!” Toji said, “for years. Ichi will never admit it but he looked the hardest. You weren’t the only victim of your disappearance. Are you too selfish to see that?”

  Akiko looked away, unsure how to react.

  “Or you, brother,” Toji turned to Ichi, “Ping will kill her, you know it.”

  “Sometimes honor makes decisions hard,” Ichi said. “But it doesn’t make them wrong. The path of a Ninja only leads in one direction.”

  “Of the two of us,” Akiko contended, as tears filled her eyes, “I’m the only one who has kept her honor in a fight. And you have no hope against Oni without me.”

  Ichi snorted a laugh, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “She’s probably right,” Toji said. “With a honed sense of taste and smell, not only could she detect an enemy approaching, but she’d know the precise moment of attack from the scent of their perspiration. On a good day, I bet her range is almost limitless. In fact,” Toji continued, turning to Akiko, “I bet you can detect poisons and predict the weather, too.”