Laura Rowland - The Incense Game

“Who is she?” one man asked. “What are you going to do with her?”

Reiko held her breath, anxious yet dreading to hear her fate.

Minister Ogyu said, “Come with me. I’ll explain.” The men’s legs moved away. “You two, stay with her.” As he left, he said, “Unwrap her, but leave her hands and feet tied.”

The two men knelt in front of Reiko. They were the guards from Kasane’s house. One drew his short sword. She gasped. He grinned. It was Jagged Teeth. He cut the ropes. The younger man, with the winsome smile and hard eyes, pulled them off Reiko. She straightened her body. Relief was immediately followed by painful spasms that shot through her stiff muscles as the blood rushed back into them. The men watched her struggle into a sitting position. Faintness and nausea washed through her; she’d been lying down for so long, and she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She looked around the room.

It was elegantly furnished with silk cushions, lacquered tables, and a mural of a river scene, but it was as cold as outdoors and, strangely, set on a wide wooden platform. A gangway extended across the space below, which was divided into compartments by a grid of wooden beams. Reiko realized that she was on stage in a theater. The compartments had once provided seating for the audience; the actors had once entered the stage via the gangway. The center of the theater was a pile of timbers and tiles open to the sky because a large section of the roof had collapsed. The light from the stage dimly illuminated railed galleries hanging off walls that leaned inward. Minister Ogyu had chosen the ruined theater as a place where he could do his evil business in complete, uninterrupted privacy.

Reiko seized her last chance to enlist allies. “If Minister Ogyu murders me, you’ll be as guilty as he,” she told the two men with her. “My husband will kill you.”

They laughed.

“If you want to live, you should stop him,” Reiko persisted even though she knew samurai didn’t defy their masters to protect strangers. “And then take me back to the castle and tell my husband that Minister Ogyu killed Kasane and kidnapped me. My husband will be grateful. You won’t be punished.”

Winsome Smile said, “You saw what we did to your guards,” and pinched her cheek so hard that her eyes watered. He was paying her back for calling his master a woman, Reiko supposed. “Keep quiet, or no more pretty little face.”

Minister Ogyu returned without his other men. His plump face was closed like a fist, as if it were gripping his emotions. His eyes wouldn’t meet Reiko’s. “Go outside and watch for anyone coming,” he told Jagged Teeth and Winsome Smile.

They left. Fear closed an icy hand around Reiko’s heart. Minister Ogyu was going to kill her; he didn’t want his men to see. All she could do was hope for a quick, painless death.

Sunset flamed briefly as Sano and his troops galloped on horseback along the highway. Night brought a darkness so pervasive that it was as if a cosmic hand had painted fields, woods, and hills black. Stars glinted like ice chips in a sky like frozen lava. The troops wore lanterns on poles attached to their backs, but hazards loomed too abruptly into the small halo of light in which Sano’s party traveled. A rider in the lead tumbled with his horse into a wide chasm. Branches on an uprooted tree knocked another man off his horse. Sano left behind troops to rescue their injured comrades. As he sped onward, his head pounded in rhythm with his horse’s hooves, but he couldn’t take more opium; he needed to stay alert. He peered into the blackness, hoping to see Reiko’s palanquin coming toward him. His vision smeared the lights from the lanterns, whose erratic motions worsened his dizziness. He could barely remain upright.

“You don’t look good,” Detective Marume, beside him, said. “We should slow down.”

“No.” Sano gripped the reins. “We have to get to Kasane and Reiko.”

Cliffs hunched like giants’ shoulders over the road. The procession came to a stop at a mountainous pile of earth, a landslide. Four men stood at its base. They called to Sano’s troops, who greeted them by name. Sano felt his spirits lift as he recognized the men. They were Reiko’s bearers. Then he saw her palanquin resting on the ground, empty.

“Where’s my wife?”

“She and her guards climbed over the landslide,” said a bearer. “She told us to wait for her.”

“When was this?” Sano asked.

“Three, four hours ago.”

Dismay stabbed Sano. “Has anyone come by?”

“Six samurai on horseback. About an hour after Lady Reiko went. Going that way.” The bearer gestured over the landslide.

“It must have been Minister Ogyu and his men.” Certain that Reiko had met them and come to harm, Sano climbed off his horse and urged it up the landslide. His men followed suit. Clinging to the reins, he let the horse drag him. The lanterns flashed on boulders, chunks of clay, and tangled tree roots. Sano stumbled; his knees struck rocks. When he reached the top, he lay there for a moment, panting, while the earth pitched under him like the deck of a ship during a storm. On the way down the other side of the landslide, he lost his grip on the reins. He rolled side over side, bumping painfully, until the ground leveled.

“Are you all right?” Marume barreled down the landslide and knelt beside him.

Wincing, Sano held his head. “Put me back on my horse.”

His men hoisted him up. As the procession galloped, he rested against his horse’s neck. Fatigued, he drifted toward sleep. Dimly aware of movement, the cold wind, and the cadence of hoofbeats, he lost track of time. A shout from Marume jolted him alert. He raised his head to see the lights in the distance. As soon as he and his men rode into Mitake, he knew something was wrong.

Villages usually shut down at sunset, but lamps burned in the windows of the thatched huts, and peasants clustered outside the bamboo fences. They gazed toward the village’s opposite end. As his procession thundered into their midst, Sano saw horror written on their faces. He urged his horse faster in the direction they’d been looking. He was first to arrive at a house with a stone wall. He jumped off his horse by the gate, which was open to reveal men loitering in a courtyard. Another man sat on an overturned bucket, his head between his knees.

Barging into the courtyard, Sano said, “What’s happened?”

The men stared in surprise, then noticed that Sano and his troops, who’d followed him, were samurai. They hastily bowed. One said, “Murder.” He gestured to the man seated on the bucket. “His aunt was killed.”

The midwife, Sano thought. He was too late. Fighting dizziness and dread, he hurried to the house. Voices and light emanated from the open door through which he staggered. “Reiko!” he shouted.

The room beyond the entryway was full of people. The raw, meaty odor of blood nauseated Sano. The scene tilted. Regaining his sense of what was up and what was down, he saw only three people standing. Eight others lay in puddles of blood that gleamed wetly red on the tatami. Blood had also splashed the walls. In the kitchen section of the room, dishes had shattered. Smeared, bloody footprints on the floor charted a vicious battle fought. All the corpses were male except one, a tiny old woman so emaciated that her body was like crooked sticks inside her robes. Papery lids drooped over her blank eyes. Her toothless mouth overflowed with blood. Her throat was cut.

Hope welled up through Sano’s horror like the sun rising on the morning after the earthquake. Reiko wasn’t among the dead. Calling her, he ran, slipping in the blood, toward a doorway that led to the house’s other rooms. One of the men stepped in front of Sano and said, “Excuse me, who are you?”