“Well,” Reiko said, "it’s a good thing you came home, because there have been some urgent messages for you. Lord Matsudaira has sent his envoys here three times this morning. He wants to see you, and he’s getting impatient.”
Sano’s spirits plummeted lower. He could just imagine how Lord Matsudaira would react when he heard about last night’s episode. “Anything else?”
“One of your detectives came by, Hirata-san,” said Reiko. “He’s found that priest you were looking for.”
Sano was so tired that he had to think for a moment before he remembered what priest. “Ozuno,” he said. “The wandering holy man who might know the secret martial art of dim-mak.”
“Where is he?” Hirata asked Reiko.
“At Chion Temple in Inaricho district.”
Two days ago, when Sano had first heard of the priest, Ozuno had seemed crucial to the investigation, but he’d lost importance. “Now that we know who the Ghost is, we don’t need Ozuno to tell us.”
“He might still be useful,” Hirata said. “Two martial artists who share the secret of dim-mak, both in Edo, must know each other. Maybe the priest can help us find the Ghost.”
“You’re right. Go to Chion Temple and talk to Ozuno. I’ll expand the search for Yugao and Kobori, then deal with Lord Matsudaira.” Sano braced himself for an explosion. Maybe he would drop dead before Lord Matsudaira could punish him.
“I still think Yugao’s friend Tama knows more than she told me yesterday,” Reiko said. “I’ll pay her another visit.”
The sector known as Inaricho bordered on the edge of the Asakusa Temple district. Hirata and his detectives rode through streets crowded with religious pilgrims. Shops displayed Buddhist altars, rosaries, candleholders, statues, vases of gilt metal lotus flowers, and name tablets for funerals. Gongs rang in the small, modest temples that had proliferated in Inaricho. The rustic speech of pilgrims, the cries of roving peddlers, and smoke from crematoriums flavored the bright afternoon.
“Chion Temple is somewhere around here,” Hirata said.
They were passing one of the district’s many cemeteries when an unusual sight caught Hirata’s eye. Toward him along the road walked an old man, limping on a lame right leg, leaning on a wooden staff. He had long, unkempt gray hair and a stern face deeply lined and suntanned. He wore a round black skullcap, a short, tattered kimono, loose breeches printed with arcane symbols, and cloth leggings. A short sword dangled at his waist. Frayed straw sandals shod his bare feet. On his back he carried a wooden chest hung from a shoulder harness decorated with orange bobbles.
“It’s a yamabushi,” Hirata said, recognizing the old man as a priest of the small, exclusive Shugendo sect that practiced an arcane blend of Buddhist and Shinto religion laced with Chinese sorcery. He and the detectives paused to watch the priest.
“Doesn’t his sect have temples in the Yoshino Mountains? I wonder what he’s doing so far from there,” said Detective Arai.
“He must be on a pilgrimage,” Detective Inoue said. The yamabushi were known for making long, arduous trips to ancient holy sites, where they performed strange rituals that involved sitting under ice-cold waterfalls in an attempt to achieve divine enlightenment. Rumors said that they were spies for secret anti-Tokugawa conspirators, or goblins in human disguise.
“Is it true that yamabushi have mystical powers?” Arai said as the priest limped nearer. “Can they really cast out demons, talk with animals, and put out fires by sheer mental concentration?”
Hirata laughed. “That’s probably just an old legend.” The yamabushi was a just a cripple like himself, he thought glumly.
Five samurai ambled out from a teahouse opposite the cemetery. They wore the crests of different daimyo clans, and Hirata recognized them as the kind of young, dissolute men who sneaked away from their duties to rove in gangs about town and look for trouble. He’d arrested many such as them for brawling in the streets during his days as a police officer. Now the gang spied the yamabushi. They wove through the passing crowds and eddied around him.
“Hey, old man,” said one of the samurai.
Another blocked the priest’s path. “Where do you think you’re going?”
The yamabushi stopped, his expression unperturbed. “Let me pass,” he said in a gruff, strangely resonant voice.
“Don’t you tell us what to do,” the first samurai said.
He and his gang began shoving and mocking the priest. They yanked off his shoulder harness. His wooden chest fell on the ground. The samurai picked it up and heaved it into the cemetery. The yamabushi stood passive, leaning on his staff.
“Go away,” he said calmly. “Leave me alone.”
His apparent lack of fear enraged the gang. They brandished their swords. Hirata decided that their fun had gone far enough. Once he would have rescued the priest and sent the hoodlums on their way himself, but now he said to the detectives, “Break it up.”
Arai and Inoue jumped off their horses, but before they reached the gang, a hoodlum swung his sword at the priest. Hirata winced, anticipating the sound of steel cutting flesh and bone, the gush of blood. But the hoodlum’s sword hit the wooden staff, which the priest raised in such a swift motion that Hirata didn’t even see it. The hoodlum yelped in surprise. The blow to his sword knocked him reeling backward. He fell, obstructing the way of Detectives Inoue and Arai, who were rushing to the priest’s aid. Hirata gaped.
“Kill him!” the other hoodlums shouted.
Furious, they assaulted the yamabushi with their swords. His staff parried their every strike with a precision that Hirata had seldom seen even among the best samurai fighters. A typhoon of flailing bodies and lashing weapons surrounded the priest as the hoodlums tried to fell him. He revolved in the middle, his arm and staff a blur of motion, his stern features alert yet placid. His opponents seemed to fling themselves against his staff. One dropped unconscious from a blow to the head. Another hurtled into the cemetery, where he crashed against a gravestone and lay moaning. The three others decided that they’d taken on more than they could handle. They ran off in terror, bruised and bloody.
Hirata, Inoue, and Arai stared in astonishment. Murmurs of awe sounded from spectators who’d gathered to watch the fight. The yamabushi hobbled into the cemetery to retrieve his belongings. Hirata clambered off his mount.
“Take those injured samurai to the nearest neighborhood gate. Order the sentry to call the police and have them arrested,” he told his detectives. Then he hurried up to the priest. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?” the priest said as he donned the harness and hoisted the chest onto his back. He wasn’t even winded from the fight. He seemed more annoyed by Hirata’s intrusion than by the attack on him.
“How did you manage to defeat five able-bodied samurai?” Hirata said.
“I didn’t defeat them.” The priest flashed Hirata a glance that appeared to take his measure, commit him to memory, then dismiss him. “They defeated themselves.”
Hirata didn’t understand this cryptic answer, but he realized he’d just witnessed proof that this yamabushi did have the mystical powers that he’d laughed off only moments ago. He also realized with a start that the priest must be the man he’d come to see. “Are you Ozuno?”
The priest barely nodded. “And you are?”
“I’m the shogun’s sōsakan-sama,” Hirata said, and gave his name. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Ozuno didn’t look surprised, or interested. He appeared to be like others of his kind-solitary and standoffish. “If you’re just going to hang about and gape at me, I’ll be on my way.”