The Dragon King's Palace Read online

  “Oh, Reiko-san!” she exclaimed.

  Reiko slid her dagger into the scabbard strapped to her arm. She bent over the man she’d just killed and snatched his sword from its hilt.

  “Come, we must hurry,” she told Midori.

  She gripped the stolen sword as they fled up the road, past the Tokugawa banner that lay amid the carnage. But Midori’s cumbersome bulk slowed their pace. Reiko heard shouts and pounding footsteps behind them. She looked backward and saw five attackers chasing her and Midori.

  “Run faster!” she cried.

  “I can’t!” Midori gasped and wheezed. “Go without me. Save yourself.”

  Their pursuers were upon them. Reiko whirled, slashing at the men. They drew their swords. Midori moaned. Reiko called to her: “Stay behind me.”

  She lunged and sliced; the men parried. Their blades clashed against hers with resounding strikes that vibrated pain up her arms. Reiko had experienced combat before, but never against thirteen opponents at once. They surrounded her and Midori, and she pivoted, desperate to avoid capture. As Reiko fought, Midori bumped her, restricting her movements. She battered at the men, but her blows glanced off their armor.

  “Help!” Reiko shouted, hoping for aid from highway patrol troops or traveling samurai.

  Her plea rang unanswered across the vacant, misty landscape. Now two men seized Midori. “Let me go! Please don’t hurt me!” she cried.

  Desperate, Reiko fought harder. She grew dizzy from spinning, breathless and weak from exhaustion. Her muscles ached; her head echoed with metallic clangs. She heard screams in the distance and glimpsed more thugs hastening toward her around the curve in the road, bringing Keisho-in and Lady Yanagisawa. Anguish filled Reiko: Her friends hadn’t escaped.

  Suddenly, arms as hard and strong as iron encircled her waist from behind her. In a blur of black-hooded figures, clutching hands, and violent motion, somebody wrested the sword from her grasp and flung her down on the road. Men planted their heavy weight on her and immobilized her arms and legs, though she resisted with all her strength. They tore away her hidden dagger. Rough, thick cords wound and knotted her wrists together, then her ankles. Reiko saw Midori, Keisho-in, and Lady Yanagisawa lying bound and weeping near her, surrounded by the enemy. If only she’d managed to save them!

  “Who are you?” she demanded of her captors. “Why are you doing this?”

  No answer came. She’d not heard the men utter a single word. Their strange, menacing silence increased her terror. They held her head still. One crouched over her and jammed a small flask between her lips. Reiko tasted thick, bitter liquid opium. She clamped her mouth shut. As she squealed and bucked, she heard the other women retching. The men forced her jaws open and poured in the potion.

  Reiko spat and coughed, but the bitter ooze gurgled down her throat. Hands yanked a black hood over her head. Blinded, Reiko struggled in darkness for moments that seemed eternal. The sounds of the other women faded; the pain from the cords biting into her skin dulled as a smothering cloud of sleep encroached. Terror receded; unconsciousness descended. Reiko ceased struggling, felt her body lifted by unseen hands and carried briskly away. Images of Sano and Masahiro briefly illuminated the black oblivion spreading in her mind. As she yearned for her family, one last thought occurred to Reiko.

  If she lived, she would be more careful what she wished for next time.

  3

  “Excuse me, ssakan-sama, but you must get up at once.” Sano, roused from sleep by instincts ever attuned to the world around him, had opened his eyes just before he’d heard Hirata’s urgent call outside his door. His bedchamber was dark, but the corridor was lit by the lantern Hirata carried, and Sano saw his chief retainer’s shadow through the paper wall. Sano automatically reached for his wife but found emptiness beside him on the futon. Though Reiko had been gone almost five days, her absence startled him. Sano sat up under the thin sheet that covered his naked body.

  “Come in, Hirata-san,” Sano said. “What is it?”

  Entering the room, Hirata said, “A castle messenger just brought word that the shogun has summoned us to the palace.”

  “What for?” Sano said, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

  “The messenger didn’t know. But it’s an emergency.”

  Sano and Hirata looked toward the open window. A warm breeze wafted from the garden, where a gibbous moon floated in a black sky above pine trees and silvered the shrubs and grass. Fireflies winked; crickets sang. The dark hush of the atmosphere signified a time equidistant from midnight and dawn.

  “That His Excellency wants us at this hour means the problem must be dire indeed,” Sano said.

  As soon as he’d dressed, he and Hirata left the estate and hurried up through the winding stonewalled passages and the security checkpoints of Edo Castle to the palace. Its half-timbered structures and peaked roofs slumbered in the moonlight. Inside the formal audience chamber, Sano and Hirata found an assembly of men waiting.

  Guards stood along the walls of the long room, whose floor was divided into two levels. On the lower level knelt a samurai clad in a blue armor tunic that bore the insignia of the Tokugawa highway patrol. On the upper level, in two rows facing each other, knelt the Council of Elders—Japan’s supreme governing body, comprised of the shogun’s five elderly chief advisors. Beyond them sat Chamberlain Yanagisawa and his lover Police Commissioner Hoshina, to the right of the shogun, who occupied the dais. All wore troubled expressions; everyone silently watched Sano and Hirata approach. The tension in the room was as thick as the smoke that drifted from the metal lanterns hung from the ceiling.

  Sano and Hirata knelt on the upper level of the floor at the shogun’s left. They bowed to their lord and the assembly. “How may we be of service, Your Excellency?” Sano said.

  Incoherent sputters issued from Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. His refined face was deathly pale and his frail, slender body trembled under his white silk night robe. His usually mild eyes blazed, and Sano realized that he was furious as well as distraught.

  “You tell them, Yanagisawa-san,” he said at last.

  Chamberlain Yanagisawa nodded. In his beige summer kimono, he looked as suavely handsome as always. His enigmatic gaze encompassed Sano and Hirata. “This is Lieutenant Ibe,” he said, indicating the highway patrol guard. “He has just brought news that His Excellency’s honorable mother was abducted on the Tkaid yesterday, along with your wives and mine.”

  Shock imploded in Sano. His mind resisted believing what he’d heard. He shook his head while Hirata uttered a sound of vehement denial. But the grave faces of the assembly told them that Yanagisawa had spoken the truth.

  “How did this happen?” Sano said, fighting an onslaught of wild anxiety.

  “The procession was ambushed on a deserted stretch of road between Odawara and Hakone post stations,” Yanagisawa said.

  “Who did it?” Hirata demanded. His face was stricken with terror for Midori and his unborn child.

  “We don’t know,” Yanagisawa said. “At present we have no witnesses.”

  Sano stared in disbelief. “But there were some hundred attendants in the entourage. One of them must have seen something.”

  Police Commissioner Hoshina and the Council of Elders bowed their heads. Yanagisawa said, “The entourage was massacred during the ambush.”

  The audacity and violence of the crime struck Sano and Hirata speechless with horror. Sano regretted the deaths of his two detectives. Yanagisawa looked toward the highway patrol guard and said, “Lieutenant Ibe discovered the crime. He shall describe what he found.”

  Lieutenant Ibe was a lean, sinewy man in his twenties. His bare arms and legs and his earnest face bore streaks of grime and perspiration from what must have been a swift, grueling ride to Edo. “There were bodies strewn along the road and in the forest,” he said, his eyes haunted by memory of what he’d seen. “They’d died of sword wounds. Blood was everywhere. The baggage seemed untouched—I found cash boxes full of gold coins in the
chests. But the palanquins were empty, and the four ladies gone.”

  A dreadful thought occurred to Sano. “How can you be sure they were abducted and not—” Killed, he thought, but he couldn’t say it. Hirata emitted a low, involuntary groan.

  “We found a letter inside the Honorable Lady Keisho-in’s palanquin,” said the guard.

  Chamberlain Yanagisawa handed Sano a sheet of ordinary white paper that had been folded, crumpled, then smoothed. Dirt and blood smeared a message crudely scrawled in black ink.

  Your Excellency the Shogun,

  We have Lady Keisho-in and her three friends. Let no one pursue us, or we will kill the women. You will be told what you must do to get them back alive. Expect a letter soon.

  The message bore no signature. Stunned by fresh shock, Sano passed the letter to Hirata, who read it and gaped in astonishment. Lieutenant Ibe continued, “I fetched officials from Odawara, the last checkpoint that the procession passed. They matched the bodies to the names in the records.”

  Checkpoint officials inspected the persons of everyone who passed through their stations, looking for hidden weapons or other contraband. Female inspectors were employed to search the women. Because the Tokugawa restricted the movements of women to prevent samurai clans from sending their families to the countryside in preparation for revolt, the law required female travelers to have travel passes. The officials copied the information on each pass, which listed the social position, physical appearance, and identifying birthmarks or scars of its owner.

  “The female inspectors remembered the four ladies well,” said Lieutenant Ibe. “Everyone else was accounted for. The ladies were definitely not among the dead.”

  This was inadequate comfort to Sano and Hirata, when their wives’ fate was unknown. They exchanged apprehensive glances.

  “One survivor was found,” Police Commissioner Hoshina said. He was broad-shouldered and muscular, with an angular, handsome face. Ambitious to rise in the bakufu—the military government that ruled Japan—he took every opportunity to draw his superiors’ attention to himself. Now he conveyed facts he’d apparently learned from the highway patrol guard before Sano and Hirata arrived: “The officials identified the survivor as Lady Keisho-in’s personal maid, a woman named Suiren. She was badly wounded, and unconscious. Troops are bringing her to Edo. With luck, she’ll be here tomorrow.”

  Perhaps she would identify the attackers, but what might happen to Reiko, Midori, Keisho-in, and Lady Yanagisawa in the meantime? Sano stifled his emotions and willed the detective in him to analyze the situation.

  “Has the area around the ambush site been investigated for clues to where the kidnappers took the women?” he asked.

  “The local police were on their way to the scene when I left,” said Lieutenant Ibe. “They may have found something by now.”

  “The women’s guards, and the two detectives we sent, would have fought whoever ambushed the procession,” Hirata said, jittering with his effort to control his distress. “Some of the attackers must have been killed. Were their bodies found and identified?”

  “There were signs of a battle, but we found no bodies except those of the ladies’ entourage,” Lieutenant Ibe said regretfully. “If any of the kidnappers died, their comrades removed them from the scene.”

  “They massacred the attendants and defeated a squadron of Tokugawa troops. They removed their dead and carried away the four women. And no one saw that?” Incredulity lifted Sano’s voice. “At this time of year, the highway is usually crowded with peasants going to market and tourists bound for the hot springs. Where was everybody when the procession was attacked?”

  “That stretch of the Tkaid runs through mountainous terrain,” Hoshina said. “There are places where the road is bordered by a high cliff on one side and a steep drop on the other. Someone put up roadblocks made of heavy logs at two of these places. The procession was ambushed between them.”

  Personally unaffected by the crime, Hoshina seemed to relish it, and Sano disliked him even more than their history of bad blood merited. They’d first clashed during a murder case in Miyako. Ever since the chamberlain had appointed him police commissioner, Hoshina had considered Sano a rival, sought to prove himself the superior detective, and constantly undermined Sano. Of course Hoshina would welcome Sano’s misfortune.

  “No one passed during the attack because traffic was backed up at the roadblocks until the highway was cleared,” Hoshina finished.

  Someone had employed many men and gone to great lengths to engineer the ambush, Sano observed.

  “You’re dismissed,” Chamberlain Yanagisawa told Lieutenant Ibe. “You’ll stay in the castle barracks in case you’re needed for further questioning.”

  No sooner had a guard ushered Ibe from the room than the shogun burst out, “I don’t understand how you can all, ahh, sit and chat while my mother is, ahh, at the mercy of such cruel villains! Are you so heartless?”

  “We must all keep calm so we can absorb the facts and decide what to do,” Chamberlain Yanagisawa said.

  Tokugawa Tsunayoshi glared at him. “It’s easy for you to be calm. We all know you’re a cold, selfish brute who wouldn’t care if your wife, ahh, dropped off the face of the earth.”

  The shogun doted on Yanagisawa, almost never criticized him, and usually seemed oblivious to his faults, but anxiety had sharpened the shogun’s wits and tongue. The elders winced at the personal insult, but Yanagisawa appeared unruffled. “I am very concerned about my wife’s safety,” he said.

  Although he didn’t love his wife, she was a Tokugawa relative and therefore a valuable possession that comprised his family link to the regime, Sano knew. And woe betide anyone who stole anything that belonged to Yanagisawa.

  The shogun rose awkwardly to his feet. Puffed up with rage, he declared, “I shall send out the army to rescue my mother!”

  Sano and Hirata beheld him with consternation. Chamberlain Yanagisawa frowned, while Hoshina watched everyone with the air of a theatergoer enjoying a good play. Murmurs arose from the Council of Elders.

  “With all due respect, Your Excellency, I must advise against sending the army after the kidnappers,” said Senior Elder Makino, a crony of Chamberlain Yanagisawa and persistent detractor of Sano. He had an emaciated body and ugly skull-like face. “The letter expressly instructs you not to pursue them.”

  “Those villains do not command the supreme dictator of Japan!” roared the shogun.

  “They might make good on their threat to kill the women,” Makino said.

  “They wouldn’t dare!”

  “They’ve already dared to kidnap your mother and murder her entourage,” Chamberlain Yanagisawa pointed out.

  “Even if we knew where the kidnappers went, we can’t mount an assault without endangering the women’s lives,” Sano said, and Hirata nodded.

  “Ahh, yes. You are right.” Unhappy comprehension deflated the shogun. He wailed, “But we must do something!”

  “May I propose an alternative to the army?” Chamberlain Yanagisawa said deferentially. “Police Commissioner Hoshina and I have formed an elite squad of troops who are trained to handle dangerous, sensitive missions. We can employ them to find and rescue the women.”

  The very idea repelled Sano. He knew those troops were assassins whom Yanagisawa employed primarily to keep himself in power. Though Sano respected their skill, he didn’t trust them.

  “I’ll lead the squad,” Hoshina said, his face alight with eagerness. “The kidnappers won’t even see us coming. Just leave everything to us, and the Honorable Lady Keisho-in will be back in Edo in no time.”

  Nor did Sano want Yanagisawa and Hoshina to take charge of the situation. Their sole concern was rescuing Keisho-in, and perhaps Lady Yanagisawa. They wouldn’t care if the other women got killed in the process. Sano burned with hatred toward Hoshina. The police commissioner saw the kidnapping as his big chance. He would climb to power over the corpses of Reiko and Midori!

  The shogun brigh
tened, ready as usual to believe someone could solve his problems for him. Before he could speak, Sano turned his rage on Chamberlain Yanagisawa. “I won’t let you shut me out of this,” he said.

  “I’ll do what’s best,” Yanagisawa said with equal ire. “And you’re forbidden to object.”

  Bushido—the Way of the Warrior—demanded a samurai’s un-swerving obedience to his master and superiors. Yet in this situation, Sano must defy the code by which he lived. “Hirata-san and I aren’t leaving our wives’ fate in your hands,” Sano declared.

  “I suppose you’d rather entrust the rescue to those hundred reckless amateurs that you call your detective corps?” Police Commissioner Hoshina sneered. “You might as well condemn the women to death right now.”

  The elders conferred among themselves. The shogun’s gaze moved from one man to another as he tried to follow the argument.

  “We shall compromise,” he said, waving his hands to silence the assembly. “I’ll send out the army.” He thumped his chest. “You lead your, ahh, elite squad, and you take along your detectives,” he said, pointing at Hoshina, then Sano. “Together we’ll hunt down the kidnappers and rescue my mother.”

  The shogun swelled with authoritative pride. But Sano saw his dismay mirrored on the faces of his companions as they all imagined the chaos that would result from their lord’s plan.

  “That’s a brilliant idea, Your Excellency,” Chamberlain Yanagisawa said in the warm, admiring tone he used when he disagreed with the shogun and meant to have his own way.

  “But . . .” Police Commissioner Hoshina began cautiously. Sano had no patience for the process of manipulating the shogun. He said, “Pardon me, Your Excellency, but we don’t know who the kidnappers are or where they are, or anything else about them except that they’ve already murdered a hundred people. To launch any attack is too big a risk to our women.”