Daughter of the Sword (50 page)

It clattered across the floor as he rounded on her. She retreated around the boxed linoleum tiles, her only cover. Now his face was fully lit and terrifying. His lips were dark, as were the rims of his wild eyes. His flesh was a quilt of tattoos, rippling as he raised Beautiful Singer overhead. In the center of his chest a buddha wreathed in flame slashed with a sword of its own.

Mariko’s hand dove for the Sig. She drew it, found her two-handed grip, put her front sight on the fiery buddha.

The sword flashed down.

The gun didn’t fire.

All at once the blood in Mariko’s arm turned to gasoline. Even with her eyes locked on his red-splashed sword, her mind found time to note the burning pain. He’d rushed her too hard and now he stumbled past her. She tried to shoot him again, and again pain flooded her arm.

Fuchida had chopped off her trigger finger.

The sight of her maimed hand terrified her. Even in a rage, he struck deftly enough to take her finger and only her finger. Yamada had been right from the beginning: Fuchida was a master.

Fuchida turned on her and Mariko retreated. Something hit her in the butt: the stack of tiles. Mariko groped blindly for a sword, found one with her left hand, and tried to circle around the stack. Fuchida was faster, circling with her.

Only blind luck allowed Mariko to duck Fuchida’s next attack. She instinctively raised her arms to fend off the third, and again blind luck saw her parry his blade with her Sig Sauer. The clash knocked her
pistol across the room. She would have been dead a second later if only Fuchida had been in position to strike. But his slashes were wild, overpowered. He lost his footing, giving Mariko time enough to draw her sword.

She nearly dropped it, blood-slick as it was. Only when her left hand found the hilt did she establish a firm grip. Fuchida was on her again, and this time Yamada’s training paid off. She sidestepped and counterstruck.

But Fuchida was the better swordsman. He shrank back a hand’s breadth out of reach, then squared off against her.

Her attack should have cut him. But, then, her sword should have weighed double what it did. Mariko looked down to see the Tiger on the Mountain in her hands.

She was lost. She’d never trained with a sword this size. It was light, tiny, fast as hell, but everything she’d learned about staying at range was useless now. Glorious Victory’s greater reach had been her sole advantage. The Tiger seemed even shorter than Beautiful Singer, and certainly Mariko’s arms were shorter than Fuchida’s. He was the stronger fighter too, and the more experienced, and she was already bleeding and scared.

Fuchida inched closer. Mariko stepped back. He lashed out with a stab to the throat. Mariko batted down at his hands. She missed, but she made him miss too.

“Yamada wasn’t idle in his last days, was he?” Fuchida sneered at her. “You fancy yourself a swordswoman?”

Mariko didn’t fancy herself anything. The only part of herself she could think of was her butchered hand. Her heart beat against her ribs the way a boxer beat a punching bag. “Just take your sword and go,” she said.

“You’re a meek little thing, aren’t you? You talked tough on the phone. And I’ll give you this: it took balls to come in here on your own. But now we get to see the real you. When the cards are down, you’re just a whimpering little schoolgirl.”

He feinted a stab at her. She tried to parry it and missed. He stabbed for real, capitalizing on her overreaction, and this time her blade was just able to knock his aside. His mouth curled into a snarl. He was angry now. Was it just that she’d stood too long against him? Did he want the quick kill, and had she—miraculously—denied it?

Still snarling, he pounced at her, his sword flashing. She sidestepped. Fuchida tripped over her foot. It was the same sweep Yamada had done to her, she realized. Fuchida hit the floor in a heap, and too late Mariko saw she could have closed and finished him. By the time she’d noticed, Fuchida was up into a crouch, sword in hand.

Mariko glanced at Glorious Victory Unsought. It was right next to him, resting in its scabbard atop the stack of boxes. “Take the sword and go,” she repeated, trying this time to keep the desperation out of her voice.

“Oh, I’ll take it,” Fuchida said. He rose to his feet, switched Beautiful Singer to his left hand, and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around Glorious Victory’s long grip. “I’ll kill you with it. Then I’ll kill your sister with it.”

Lines of ink rippled across the muscles of his arms. Then, suddenly, he lunged at her, chopping with Beautiful Singer. His swing was well short of her, and for half a second Mariko thought he was feinting, setting up a second attack. Then she realized the truth: it wasn’t Fuchida who attacked her.

It was Beautiful Singer.

It was drawing him away from the other weapon. But even in his demented state, Fuchida had incredible strength of will. With stomping steps he returned to Glorious Victory Unsought, and in one smooth motion he drew the massive blade.

It took impossible strength to wield Glorious Victory in one hand, but Fuchida was impossibly strong. His eyes were wide, crazed, his head shifting side to side as if looking for the best angle of attack. At last he came at her, both blades whirling, a manic scream bursting
from his spit-flecked mouth. Mariko threw herself sideways, lashing out with the Tiger on the Mountain.

Glorious Victory clattered to the floor, half an arm still attached to it.

Fuchida didn’t even register the blow. He whirled on her, and before Mariko could regain her footing, she felt Beautiful Singer plunge through her belly. Fuchida drove the sword all the way to the hilt. The pain made the whole world disappear.

No. Not the whole world. She still had a sword and a target. With her last breath Mariko ran the Tiger on the Mountain sidelong into Fuchida’s rib cage. She caught him through both lungs, her bloody blade lancing out from the opposite side of his body.

They fell together. Mariko did not register her head hitting the concrete floor. Her shrewd detective’s mind did not notice when she puked, nor when she pissed herself, nor when her body entered a violent fit of agonal spasms. She couldn’t even feel the pain from the stump of her severed finger anymore. The world disappeared into a haze of white, and the only thing left to her was Saori.

Saori screamed and cried and begged Mariko not to die. But Mariko died anyway.

76

Two bolts of lightning hit her in the chest.

Smells came to her: blood, ozone, urine, vomit, dust, sweat. Sounds came next. Saori was still crying. Someone said, “We’ve got her back. Keep pressure on that.” A wet gurgling sound came now and again, weak underneath all the other noises but close enough that Mariko could make it out. It took several repetitions before she recognized it as her own breathing.

Mercifully, her tactile sense was dead to her, muted by hypovolemic shock. Nor was there much for her to see; just vague shapes drifting in the white haze. She could taste blood and vomit. Gusts forced cold air down her throat at regular intervals, each breath tasting like the inside of a plastic water bottle.

She had no sense of time, no sense of continuity. Saori would be wailing, and then all consciousness would lapse, and when it returned none of the old background noises were there anymore. There was a beeping, and the ingress and egress of air pushed mechanically through some narrow hose nearby. Then those things would vanish and she would regain consciousness drowning in a sea of pain. Then haziness and light. Then nothing at all.

And then, after a thousand such episodes—or was it only a dozen?—Mariko opened her eyes. Blurs of various shades resolved themselves into ceiling tiles, a sliding aluminum rail for a curtain, the
top edge of a wooden door. “She’s awake,” Mariko heard Saori say, and then a new set of blurs resolved themselves into the crying, smiling faces of her sister and mother.

“I thought I’d lost you,” Saori said, at the same instant their mother said, “I knew you’d make it.” But Saori went on, the words tumbling from her mouth like snowflakes in a blizzard. “I was stuck there. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t move. All I could do was watch you die. I’m so, so sorry, Miko-chan.”

Mariko tried to speak but found something had been taped into her mouth. She could not move her jaw, and even if she could, there was the thing in her mouth to gag her. She grunted, and then Saori and Mom disappeared for a while, pushed out by a sudden influx of nurses.

It was another twenty-odd hours before Mariko could keep a hold on consciousness for more than a few seconds, and in those hours each waking moment seemed to blend into the next. One moment she would be talking to her sister; then she would blink, and opening her eyes she’d find it was her doctor she was talking to, and it was not sunlight but streetlights streaming through the window.

“I’m so, so sorry,” her sister said.

Her doctor said, “You’re a very lucky woman, Oshiro.”

“Not your fault you got kidnapped,” Mariko told Saori.

“We couldn’t save your finger,” said her doctor. “By the time we had you stabilized, it had been on ice too long. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” said Saori.

“What happened to the emperor’s sword?” asked Mariko.

“In the ER,” the doctor said. Mariko couldn’t sort out which question he was answering.

“I’ll never do it again,” Saori said, and hugged her tight.

Mariko fell asleep in her arms, and when she woke, she was lucid.

77

It was light in the room, probably early morning, and someone was standing at the foot of Mariko’s bed. “Hi,” Mariko said.

Her doctor, who wore glasses and a Moe Howard haircut, looked up at her over the top of the manila folder whose contents he’d been reading. “Oh!” he said, smiling. “You’re awake. And looking much better than yesterday, I must say.”

He was thirtyish, cultivating the beginnings of a potbelly, and because she was lying down Mariko had a hard time guessing how tall he was. “What happened to the emperor’s sword?” she asked.

“Do you mean the one you had sticking out of you when you came into the ER? They’re still talking about you down there, you know.”

“No,” Mariko said.

“Oh, yes they are. You made quite an impression, Oshiro. You’re a very lucky woman. First, whoever stuck that sword in you didn’t pull it back out. Second, when you fell, you landed on your side, not on the sword. Third, your friend called backup for you just in the nick of time.”

“Friend?”

“Yes, the blind woman. Just in the nick of time. Did you know you arrived at the hospital DOA? That was another piece of luck for you: you got your fatal stabbing right across the street from a hospital. You were dead for almost four minutes. Uncanny, that luck of yours. By all rights you shouldn’t be here.”

“The sword, the emperor’s sword,” Mariko said, horrified by the memory that’s she’d bled all over it. “And the other one. Where are they?”

“I don’t know if it’s the emperor’s or not,” the doctor said with a laugh, “but your coworkers claimed the sword you had in your small intestine as evidence.”

“Not that one. There were two others. Where are they?”

Mariko attempted to sit up, but spikes of pain stabbed her in the gut and the back. Teeth clenched, she slumped back into her pillows.

“Easy, now,” the doctor said. “Don’t go ripping out your stitches. There was another sword the police claimed from the ER. It used to be stuck in the fellow they brought in with you. Not so lucky, that one. He probably would have bled out from what was left of his arm, but the sword that stuck him went through both lungs and nicked his descending aorta. Never had a chance.”

“Is Shoji-san here? The blind woman? I need to talk to her.”

“Easy, Oshiro. You need to stay calm.”

“Sorry.” Mariko took a deep breath. “Doctor…sorry, I don’t really remember your name.”

“Anesthesia will do that to you. My name’s Hayakawa.”

“Dr. Hayakawa, there was a sword—”

“Don’t worry about that,” said a familiar voice, and Mariko saw Shoji standing in the doorway and flanked by Saori and Mariko’s mother. The two of them rushed to Mariko’s side, abandoning Shoji and all but shoving Dr. Hayakawa out of the way.

“You’re awake!” Saori said.

“Hi,” Mariko said. She could muster little else, crushed as she was under her family’s embrace. Those spikes stabbed her in the gut again when she tried to hug them back.

“I guess I’ll be moving along,” Hayakawa said, and after a few moments Shoji-san took his place in Mariko’s field of vision.

“Don’t worry about the Tiger,” she said. “I’ve seen it safely home for you.”

Mariko couldn’t bring herself to ask whether the emperor would forgive her for bloodying his family’s heirloom. That would have to wait.

Her mother, looking as weary as if she’d just delivered a child, sat in one of the room’s padded chairs. Saori released her hug only to clasp Mariko’s hand in both of hers. It was a sensation Mariko had never felt before, and after a moment she realized why: she had no index finger on that hand, and so she felt Saori holding a stump as well as the three remaining fingers. Some instinct bade Mariko to feel embarrassed by her deformity, but Mariko had no inclination to oblige it. She was happy to be alive, nine fingers or ten, and the idea of shame seemed, for the first time in her life, a trivial concern.

Saori’s wrists were bound in broad bandages the color of white people’s skin. The bandages were puffy, and through the haze of delirium-addled memory Mariko recalled that similar bandages circled Saori’s ankles. In straining at her bonds, Saori had pulled
hard
.

“I’m so, so sorry, Miko.” Saori was on the edge of crying.

“Don’t be,” Mariko said. “You didn’t do anything wrong to get kidnapped. That’s all on Fuchida, not on you.”

“Not that,” said Saori. “I was an idiot. I talked myself into thinking I didn’t have a drug problem. But I do, and you knew it, and I didn’t listen. I’m so sorry.”

Mariko opened her mouth to speak, but Saori shushed her. “Don’t say it’s okay. It’s not. But I couldn’t see that. I thought it was
my
problem. I didn’t know what it was like for you, or for Mom, watching me kill myself and knowing there wasn’t anything you could do to stop me. But then, when I was strapped to that chair, when I saw him kill you and there was nothing I could do…I’m sorry, Miko. I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t know.”