"Sensei, there are people in the little cabin there!"
Akechi-sensei, a faintly limned shadow in the starlight, nodded. "All the better. Proceed."
"But what if they interfere?"
"They will not." He pointed back toward the woods. "Go. Hurry."
Shiro obeyed, returning to where Tadasu waited with the shoten. The chosen site lay half a mile north of a golf course and barely more than half a mile from any dwelling, yet here among the silent trees, civilization could have been a thousand miles away.
That changed as he neared the rotting cabin in a tiny forgotten clearing.
Not completely forgotten, obviously. Four teenagers—two couples—had driven a battered Jeep to the cabin and begun an impromptu party. They had beer and were playing loud music.
He found Tadasu about fifty yards from the cabin. The shoten lay bound and gagged on the ground before him.
"Sensei says to proceed," he said when he arrived.
Tadasu nodded, then knelt next to the shoten. He pulled a blue vial from his pocket.
"Hold his head and remove the gag," he said.
Shiro did as he was told and the shoten began cursing.
"What the fuck you sonabitches—"
"Drink this," Tadasu said, forcing the mouth of the vial between his lips.
The old drunk apparently never refused anything to drink because he swallowed it in one gulp. Then he made a face.
"Shit! What is that shit?"
Shiro reapplied the gag, then stepped away. Tadasu remained kneeling.
"Now we wait."
The shoten's muffled protests and struggles against his bonds slowed, then ceased. When he lay quiet, Tadasu removed the gag and then produced a red-striped wooden sliver.
"A doku-ippen?" Shiro said.
"Akechi-sensei's idea. Just to be safe." He pricked the shoten's neck with it, then rose and stepped over him. "Back to sensei. Quickly. We don't know how soon it takes effect."
Shiro led the way, and soon the three of them were standing together next to their car on an empty side road, staring in the general direction of the shoten.
Suspense gripped Shiro like a vise. His breath felt trapped in his chest.
"What will happen, sensei?"
"Something wonderful, Shiro. No one alive has seen a Kuroikaze. We shall be the first in a generation."
"Why did we use a doku-ippen?"
"The ekisu causes the one who drinks it to become a focus for the Kuroikaze. The Black Wind will last as long as the shoten survives. Because this is an experiment to test the ekisu, I do not want large-scale death. We will save that for later. I had you choose a sickly shoten because, while the Kuroikaze is sapping the life from all it touches, it is also diminishing the life of the shoten. The longer the shoten survives, the more fierce the wind, the greater the radius of death. The particular doku-ippen used will bring death shortly after it is introduced into the body. So even if this wasted shoten taps into some hidden reserves of strength, he won't survive long enough to raise a full-fledged Kuroikaze."
"There!" Tadasu cried, pointing. "Something is happening!"
Shiro strained to see, but the starlight was dim, and the trees dark.
And then he saw it—a layer of blackness overspreading an area of trees… a cloud, blacker than Shiro had ever seen… so black it didn't reflect the meager starlight, but rather seemed to absorb it… devour it.
The way it oozed across the treetops made Shiro's gut crawl. This was evil, and he didn't like to think of the Order to which he had devoted his life as dealing with evil. But then, this was certainly no more evil than the atomic bombs that killed so many in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yes, if he thought of it that way, he could accept.
He watched and waited, expecting to see the inexorable flow of the blackness slow and then begin to ebb. But it continued to expand, coming their way.
"Sensei? Shouldn't it be stopping now?"
Akechi-sensei turned to Tadasu. "You are sure the point pierced his skin?"
"I saw blood, sensei."
"Then he should die any minute."
But the blackness showed no sign of slowing, let alone retreating.
"Perhaps we had better move farther way," Tadasu said.
"No," said their teacher. "If you did your duty, we have nothing to fear."
Shiro felt he had a lot to fear. That blackness… it made him want to run, and hide, find his mother and cower behind her.
Abruptly the blackness changed. Instead of spreading toward them, it began expanding upward, shooting a towering ebony column into the sky, reaching toward the stars.
And then it was gone, and the blackness over the trees evaporated like smoke in a gale.
"Quickly," Akechi-sensei said. "Into the woods. We must see what it has done."
Shiro led the way, directing his flashlight beam ahead of him. He moved cautiously at first because he didn't know what to expect. But then, seeing no trace of the blackness, he picked up speed…
Until he came upon the dead vegetation—like crossing a line of death where everything on one side thrived and everything on the other was dead. Every leaf on every tree and bush was wilted and brown, every needle on every pine was brown, even the weeds were dead. Nothing moved. No owls hooted, no crickets chirped, no mosquitoes bit.
All this death… from the Kuroikaze?
He came upon the shoten. The flashlight beam revealed a shrunken cadaver that looked as if it had been dead for weeks.
Shiro backed away, then approached the shack. Entering, he found the structure intact but its inhabitants… he had to look away.
He had only glimpsed them before the Kuroikaze, so he didn't know how they had changed. They looked shrunken, though not so much as the shoten. But what Shiro found most disturbing was their expressions. Each open-eyed, openmouthed face carried the same look: a great sadness, an unfathomable hopelessness.
"And this is how it will be."
Shiro started and turned at the sound of his sensei's voice. He found him gesturing to the corpses and to the shack around them.
"They firebombed Tokyo, atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but worst of all, they humiliated the Son of Heaven, made Him bow to them, made Him surrender. Now it is their turn. We will set up strong, vital shotens around the city. We will feed them the ekisu and we will not pierce them with a doku-ippen. Then the clouds will rise and merge, creating such a Kuroikaze as has never been seen. It will leave the entire city like this. Millions dead, yet the buildings untouched. Imagine, the entire city silent, unmoving. All the structures intact, unmarred, just as they had been before the Kuroikaze, but filled with the dead, millions and millions of dead."
O'Day… the man's name was Thomas O'Day.
It had taken Hideo a while to find him in the police database. Due to the poor light in the captured still, the face recognition program had been unable to create a sufficiently specific map to pin down the man he sought. The result was dozens of hits, followed by the wearisome task of tracing the current whereabouts of each one of them. Some were dead, some were still incarcerated, and some were free and gainfully employed.