Linnear 03 - White Ninja (80 page)

'It's perfect,' Nicholas said, stunned. 'Where did you learn this?'

'Do you know Golden Cloud?'

' "Kiyoku Utsukushiku Kanzen",' Nicholas recited. 'Yes, I know of it.' He stared at his reflection. 'You have indeed made me "Pure, Beautiful, Perfect".'

The rolling tones, like a bell around the neck of an approaching itinerant priest, were reaching a crescendo.

'He is coming,' Nicholas said. 'I must go.'

'Now you know what it is he fears,' Shisei said. But she had not yet fully betrayed him, her other half, her dark self, her love, her captor, her death, and she knew it. But if she did nothing now, she knew that her coming here was for nothing. Not for her to sit and observe. Her days and nights in her brother's hotel room had told her that.

As Nicholas turned to go, she stopped him with her mind. 'Now there is something else,' she said, one hand clasping the other. 'Something I must give you, something besides my knowledge and my skill, because now I can feel that these things alone will not stop my brother. He is already too strong.'

And she slid from her finger the emerald ring Senjin had given her on the day after he had murdered Jeiji, her lover.

'This is a tanjian emerald,' she said. 'It is the only

thing my brother ever gave me. He presented it to me on our birthday, but it was never mine. I suspected it then. I know it now,'

Nicholas took the ring with its glowing stone set in platinum and in that moment he felt what Shisei felt: the power of the Demon Woman.

Turning gracefully as a woman, as Shisei herself would,

he went out of the entranceway, up the stairs, to look

death in the face.

The energy of kokoro washed over Senjin, laving him as a mother bathes her infant. Once, he felt another presence at kokoro, the centre of things, and he reached out almost languidly, already almost a god, exerting godlike power, and the other presence disappeared.

It was Nicholas Linnear, Senjin knew, who had withdrawn when Senjin himself had reached out with the steel coils of his will to embrace kokoro. Now that he had successfully cut Nicholas off from the central energy of Tau-tau, Senjin was assured of complete victory.

Senjin sat up. The reverberations at kokoro rang in his mind, in his body, setting them vibrating. Even the tanjian elders at Zhuji cannot milk kokoro as I can, he thought. They were afraid to try, afraid that too much pressure on the membrane would cause it to rupture, causing limitless chaos to fill the world. I do not have their fears. I use kokoro as I see fit.

He reached out with his mind to enfold Shisei as he had done with kokoro, so that she could join in the exhilaration of this victory. He wanted her here, had called for her to join him because now was the time to reclaim the present he had given her: the tanjian emerald he had set into a ring for her.

Shisei had been its guardian without knowing it. When he had stolen it just before he had left the tanjian village of Zhuji, he knew that he must not keep it - at least not

initially. The tanjian elders would have used their powers to trace it had he kept it with him. Shisei had never been to Zhuji, had never learned their Tau-tau. They would not find it if she had it.

Senjin could feel her presence, but he needed to be close to her, to merge with her one last time as she gave him the tanjian emerald. Was Nicholas somehow preventing her getting to him?

He went out of the room with the trompe-l'oeil windows. His fingertips were sparking with blue flame only he could see: the power of kokoro.

Senjin paused at the top of the stairs. He heard the soft pad of feet. He extended his mind outwards, felt only a smooth featureless wall. Nicholas Linnear.

But Shisei was closer. He was smiling as he descended.

Light drifted up to him, indirect but increasing in intensity. Recalling the trick with the mirrors, Senjin prepared himself. Light was Nicholas Linnear's only ally, and Senjin was determined to strip him of it, to send him hurtling into the darkness, before he ended his life.

Light shone on -the curving staircase, bathing it as a moment before Senjin had bathed in the energy of kokoro. Into this confined field climbed the actor turned actress, the male who was female, the yang turned perfect yin: light into dark.

Senjin, at the moment of his ultimate triumph, the moment he had been anticipating, dreaming about, relishing for so many years, the moment when he would free Zhao Hsia from the infamy of defeat, when, by gathering up the stolen tanjian emeralds and murdering the treacherous So-Peng's last descendant, he would restore honour to his family line, confronted his worst nightmare.

The Demon Woman.

She rose out of the light, entangled within it, blotting it out as she approached: dark-eyed face, at once fierce and maternal, erotic and vindictive.

Haha-san's face.

Senjin screamed or shouted, he did not know which. This was no play which he was taking his intended victims to see, no play-acting upon a brilliantly-lit stage where he could observe with fear, loathing and fascination the visage of the Demon Woman, safe in the confines of the theatre, spellbound in the make-believe.

This was real. The Demon Woman, evolved from the mist of the shoreline, had at last come for him.

The shock of recognition lasted perhaps only a second. But it was enough to allow Nicholas to make the first assault, a blinding psychic attack using Akshara, the language of Eternity, taught to him by the tanjian sensei, Kansatsu.

Akshara is the centre of the universe, Kansatsu had told him. It is a silence so whole, so complete within itself that it contains the entire universe. When one expresses oneself with Akshara there is, in a real sense, no need for language. For Akshara was in existence long before there was a need for language. To employ Akshara is to be one with the universal force.

Still, though Senjin reeled backwards on the staircase, his mind ripped by the Akshara assault while he was still paralysed by the sight of the Demon Woman, he was not destroyed.

As Shisei had intimated, he was already too powerful. And Nicholas knew that he had waited too long, that he had allowed Senjin too much time to gather the forces of kokoro, that even Akshara was insufficient to stop him now.

Senjin crashed into the wall of the staircase, whirled down several steps. But now his mind had recovered from the initial shock and he extended his will like a vice, surrounding the smooth, featureless wall, exerting more and more pressure, pressing inwards, inflicting pain, until with a thunderous crash of silence, the wall collapsed.

And Senjin was inside Nicholas's last line of defence, in Nicholas's mind, the energy of kokoro manifesting itself by tearing Nicholas's psyche apart.

The end was approaching, more rapidly than Nicholas could have imagined. He fell to his knees. His costume ripped, the elaborate wig fell off his head.

He could not breathe, could not move. Thinking was all but obviated by the pressure Senjin was bringing to bear on him. Darkness was descending.

But there was a central core of light that burned in the darkness: a crystal lantern, the essence that Shisei had given him...

Now, come to me, my sister, my twin, my love, thought Senjin. Now is when I need you. The dark, sinuous coils of his will expanded outwards, touching the smooth wall of Nicholas's psyche.

But the wall was no longer featureless. Its vast curving surface was aglitter with the essence of his twin sister. Shisei rose to meet him, and as Senjin reached out, he was met with a swirl of mist and vengeance.

Shisei! Senjin's mind cried...

Nicholas's fingers felt as if they were encased in lead as he fumbled in his pocket. Pain gripped him; he felt his heart thudding heavily in his chest as if at any moment it might burst.

Then the tanjian emerald Shisei had given him was in his palm, on the tips of his fingers. He exerted the last piece of his will.

And now he felt a power outside himself drawing him and it towards Senjin, faster and faster, as if two unimaginably powerful magnets were about to come together.

They touched...

Within the firelight dancing in Senjin's mind was a hollowness. He saw her as if from afar, and he knew with a despair that shrivelled his spirit that he had been

abandoned, betrayed by the creature he had created. His

only love. His ultimate nightmare.

The Demon Woman: Shisei...

It was as if the faceted emerald had become a blade, for as it came into contact with Senjin's chest, it cut through skin, muscle, viscera and bone.

Blood exploded outwards, showering Nicholas, the staircase, the walls. Senjin's body arched like a bow. His eyes bulged out, his mouth opened soundlessly. Then all light and life went out of him, just as if some divine hand had extinguished the spark.

Shisei screamed, spun around. She held on to Conny

Tanaka's broad shoulders so that she would not collapse.

She felt the death of her twin as the earth feels its sun in

eclipse.

She gasped once, sharply. She felt ripped asunder, as if she had been eviscerated, a surgeon's cruel scalpel excising in an instant what had been part of her since birth.

Darkness, the utter chill of an endless night. And then, as miraculous as the emergence through winter's frozen soil of the first tender shoot, light and warmth returning.

One heart beating, thum-thum, thum-thum, instead of two. Silence where there had been shadowy intimations, calm instead of echoes feverishly ringing. Shisei breathed. At last, she was released from the dark, metallic coils of Senjin's will.

'Are you all right?' Conny asked.

'Yes,' Shisei managed to get out. 'Now.'

Immediately Nicholas felt the pain inside him lift. The husk of Senjin Omukae, the dorokusai, lay sprawled across the stairs, as inconsequential as ash. The dark reverberations ceased.

Echoes, then silence. ~

Kokoro was at rest.

SUMMER-AUTUMN, PRESENT

Marco Island/Tokyo/Washington

The sun was shining in south-west Florida when Nicholas and Justine drove their convertible rental car across the San Marco Drive causeway on to Marco Island.

Lew Croaker and Alix would have met them at the Fort Myers airport, but they were out on their boat, chartered for the morning.

Nicholas turned on to Collier Boulevard, heading for the dock where Lew's boat was berthed. They went past lavish private homes, surrounded by lush tropical foliage, many with their own boat slips, then condominium developments that fronted the beach against which lapped the warm, gentle waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

Nicholas pulled into a parking space, turned off the engine. For a time, neither of them moved. They listened to the wind in the palms, the crying of the gulls, watched the serpentine sweep of the pelicans as they skimmed the diamond-lighted waves, searching for food.

'Justine,' Nicholas said. 'I'm sorry. At the beginning of all this, I closed you out. I thought I was doing the noble thing, that I could protect you from what was happening to me.' He took her hand. 'But the truth is that I shut you out long before that. I was so happy to be back in Japan that it simply never occurred to me that you could feel differently - that you must feel differently. You didn't know the language, the customs were strange, there were few friends of your sex and age to be made and, most of all, you must have missed home.'

'Nick-'

'No, let me finish.' He watched the salt breeze take her hair, whip it about her face. 'Ironically, it was through Senjin that I found you again, that I came to understand the core of our estrangement. But then I betrayed you again. I used you to trap Senjin, to blunt his power which was growing each hour. I put you in danger. It was a calculated risk, I admit, because I put you centre stage in a theatre of my own making. But - '

Justine's hand on his mouth stopped him. The sun was shining in her eyes, turning them a vivid green. The red motes swam in her left eye like points of fire. 'Nick, you must know how deeply I love you. Words mean nothing. But you can look inside my mind -I know that now after the events of the last few days. You can feel what I feel about you.'

She brought his hand up to her mouth, kissed his palm. 'I thank God that you've told me what happened, and that it wasn't what I feared. Nick, for a long time I thought you hated me because you blamed me for our daughter's death.'

'Justine, how could you - ?'

'Hush, now. Let me have my say. I was afraid of that because of my own guilt. I projected it on to you and, as we drifted further and further apart, the idea got set in my mind. You never knew, because I couldn't admit it to myself, that I was terrified of having a child. And then when our daughter died, it occurred to me that my fright had somehow killed her.'

She drew a lock of hair off her forehead. 'And as for Senjin, you did what you had to do. You didn't involve me - Senjin did. You just reacted in the only way you could. No one else could have stopped him, I'm certain of that.'

She kissed him hard on the lips. 'Now it's over. There's a new life inside me. Our child, Nick. And I'm not afraid any more. I want it as much as I want you. And very soon,