Lord Niu sped after him. Only a slight limp betrayed his handicap as he jumped over bodies. His features had gone taut with determination; he flourished his sword with incredible power.
Too late Sano saw the doshin’s body sprawled in his path. His foot struck it. He fell, landing hard on top of the dead man. His hands scrambled in a futile effort to right himself and to grab the sword that lay just beyond his reach.
Lord Niu stood over him. “You’re a formidable nuisance, Sano-san,” he said between rapid breaths, “but one that I need worry about no longer. Farewell, my enemy.” Slowly and deliberately, he raised his sword high.
Sano saw his death in Lord Niu’s glowing eyes, in the shiny steel blade. Then, as he prepared to meet it with a samurai’s stoic courage, his right hand grasped a hard metal wand. Two prongs protruded above its hilt. Not his sword, but a jitte, the parrying weapon of the police.
As soon as he recognized it, something happened inside him. Fear vanished; all distractions faded to insignificance. The jitte: symbol of law and order against anarchy and chaos; right against wrong; truth against deception; the good in him versus the evil in Lord Niu. These thoughts flicked through his mind with lightning speed. A sunburst of wordless comprehension lit him. Power rushed from the weapon and into his body. In aligning himself with all that was moral and righteous, he found strength and courage. His fragmented center coalesced and began to radiate energy. Now, in the space of an instant, he faced his destiny.
With an ear-splitting shriek, Lord Niu brought his sword slashing down in a diagonal arc. At the same moment, Sano swung the jitte across his body. It met Lord Niu’s blow in a clash that sent pain shooting up his arm. The hook caught the blade just short of his throat. Sano thrust sideways, using Lord Niu’s surprise and momentum to throw his opponent off balance. Lord Niu stumbled. Before he could recover and free his sword, Sano jerked the jitte away and brought it around full circle to crack against the side of Lord Niu’s face. Lord Niu went down hard. Sano could tell that this great swordsman had no training in jittejutsu. His confidence soared as he realized that his own limited experience gave him a small advantage. This expertise, combined with his newfound power, could win him this battle. He leaped to his feet.
Then he saw he’d misjudged the angle of the blow, the force required to kill, or his opponent’s determination. Lord Niu righted himself with great agility. His broken jaw distorting his face into a ferocious, lopsided leer, he glared at Sano with undiminished fury. He lunged, his flashing blade whitening the air.
Sano’s left arm was virtually useless, and his right began to tire under the force of the repeated blows. Lord Niu gave him no time to recover his own sword. But his perception sharpened until he reached a state of extraordinary mental clarity that he’d never before attained.
He acted without conscious thought, anticipating and countering Lord Niu’s moves with his own. Although he kept his attention riveted on his opponent, he was simultaneously aware of everything in and around him. The battles still raged. He saw-without watching-a guard slice the throats of two men in rapid succession. Pain existed; he couldn’t forget O-hisa, Raiden, Tsunehiko, Wisteria, his father, or his loathing for this man who had driven his mother to murder and suicide. But memory, emotion, and physical sensation simply merged with the oneness of his inner self. They fed his strength, inspired his judgment.
Moving with increasing aggressiveness, he used the other edge he had over Lord Niu-mobility. First swooping near and then bounding away, he forced Lord Niu to follow him. He jabbed Lord Niu’s torso again and again with the point of the jitte. He paid for his extra risks when Lord Niu’s blade sliced his forearms and cheek, but the added pain became another source of power and knowledge. Suddenly he grasped the central truth about his opponent: Lord Niu wanted to kill, but he also wanted to die. The two desires balanced each other. That was the real reason why he wanted to assassinate the shogun, and the reason he’d chosen to attack in a place from which there was little chance for escape.
Backhanding a blow to his opponent’s good leg, Sano knocked Lord Niu to his knees. He felt the balance between the young man’s kill-wish and death-wish shift for an instant. His twisted face contorted further in agony, Lord Niu paused before rising-just long enough for Sano to shift the jitte to his left hand, crouch, and rise again with his long sword in his right. A heady surge of elation erupted inside him. He tasted victory.
Lord Niu swung again. Sano parried with the jitte and caught the blade. He gave the jitte a sharp wrench. Lord Niu’s sword snapped at the hilt. The long blade whirled away. Lord Niu froze. He looked first at his broken sword, then at Sano. Their eyes met for a moment that lasted an eternity. Sano saw hatred, anger, and fear in Lord Niu’s. Then resignation.
Flinging away the jitte, Sano gripped his sword in both hands. He swung it around and upward. Pain screamed in his left shoulder. He screamed, too, in triumph. With all his strength, he sliced downward at Lord Niu’s head. Steel met flesh and bone as his blade cleaved Lord Niu’s skull from crown to brow.
Sano stood motionless for a moment, his hands still locked around the hilt of his sword. His energy abruptly ceased to flow. Like a banked fire, it flickered in the depths of his center, then died. The heightened clarity of perception left him. His surroundings lost color and life. Only a moment after leaving his exalted spiritual state, he could hardly remember what it had felt like. He was empty, numb.
Then the world and its cares came rushing back to fill the void.
He stared at his fallen enemy. Lord Niu lay on his back, legs bent, still clutching his sword. Blood and gore oozed around the blade embedded in his skull and pooled under his head. Death had extinguished the evil light in his eyes. His face looked strangely innocent and peaceful in its final repose.
Sano released the sword. He stumbled backward. Fully conscious now of the throbbing pain in his shoulder and a debilitating weakness in the rest of his body, he sank to his knees. He forced his eyes away from Lord Niu and looked around.
Corpses lay strewn over the blood-spattered ground. All of the Twenty-One, it appeared, and all of the police. A surprising number of other samurai who’d joined the battle, including the armored guards from the gate. Revelers trampled during the stampede. His horse, and another belonging to one of the Tokugawa men. But the shogun and two surviving bodyguards stood a short distance away, watching him. Except for the excited murmurs of spectators who watched from the windows, the street was silent.
Sano closed his eyes against the carnage. It’s over, he thought as a weary sense of completion spread through his mind like a soporific drug. He collapsed to the ground. Through a thickening cloud of pain and dizziness, he was dimly aware of the shogun’s men loading him onto a litter, covering him with a blanket; of the tramp of their feet as they conveyed him out of Yoshiwara and down a dark road; of the immense star-flecked sky above him. He fought to stay alert so that he could explain to the shogun all that had led up to the assassination attempt, and the reason for his own presence. But waves of blackness lapped at his mind. Half-conscious, he dreamed.
He was dead. Pallbearers were carrying his body to a blazing funeral pyre.
“Please,” he whispered. He couldn’t die without telling his story and finally having someone believe him.
“Rest now, talk later,” a gruff voice ordered.
Jolted out of his nightmare, Sano looked down the steep road at what he’d mistaken for a funeral pyre. It was a boat, bobbing on the black river beside the Yoshiwara dock, its cabin decked with glowing lanterns and its masts flying a banner emblazoned with the Tokugawa crest. The litter tipped beneath Sano as the men carried him aboard. He groaned when they slid him onto soft cushions in a small, bright compartment. He saw Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s anxious face hovering over him, heard a voice ordering the boatmen to cast off. Someone cut away his garments and dabbed his wounds with something that burned and stung. He closed his eyes again.