They didn’t notice her straight away, but when they spotted the figure in the black, close-fitting ninja costume, they were startled.
Midori-san raised her empty hands and shouted.
‘Mr Tsurumaki knows me! I am Tamba’s daughter! I will show you his secret hiding place!’
The Black Jackets swarmed round her and started searching her. Then the entire crowd moved towards the porch and went into the house. Not a single soul was left outside.
The distance was only about thirty paces, Masa suddenly realised. If there was an explosion, wreckage would come showering down. He had to drag the master farther away.
He put his arms round the motionless body and dragged it across the ground.
But he hadn’t carried him very far, only a few steps, when the earth shook and his ears were deafened.
Masa turned round.
Momochi Tamba’s house collapsed neatly, as if it had gone down on its knees. First the walls caved in, then the roof swayed and came crashing down and broke in half, sending dust flying in all directions. It was suddenly completely light all around and a blast of hot air hit him in the face.
The servant leaned over to protect the body of his master and saw tears flowing out of the wide-open eyes.
The woman had deceived him. The master did not come round in an hour, or even in two.
Masa went to look at the heap of rubble several times. He dug up an arm in a black sleeve, a leg in a black trouser leg, and also a close-cropped head without a lower jaw. He didn’t find a single person alive.
He came back several times and shook the master to make him wake up. The master wasn’t actually unconscious, but he just lay there without moving, looking at the sky. At first the tears kept running down his face, then they stopped.
And not long before dawn Tamba appeared – he simply came through the forest from the direction of the crevice, as if everything was perfectly normal.
He said he had been on the other side and killed the sentries. There were only six of them.
‘But why didn’t you fly here through the sky, sensei?’ Masa asked.
‘I’m not a bird, to go flying through the sky. I flew down off the cliff on wings made of cloth, a man can learn to do that,’ the cunning old man explained, but, of course, Masa didn’t believe him.
‘What happened here?’ asked the sensei, looking at the master lying on the ground and the ruins of the house. ‘Where’s my daughter?’
Masa told him what had happened and where his daughter was.
The jonin knitted his grey eyebrows together but, of course, he didn’t cry – he was a ninja.
He said nothing for a long time, then he said:
‘I’ll get her out myself.’
Masa also said nothing for a while – for as long as was required by consideration for a father’s feelings – and then he expressed concern about his master’s strange condition. He enquired cautiously whether Midori-san could possibly have tried too hard and whether the master would now be paralysed for ever.
‘He can move,’ Tamba replied after taking another look at the man on the ground. ‘He just doesn’t want to. Let him stay like that for a while. Don’t touch him. I’ll go and rake through the rubble. And you cut some firewood and build a funeral pyre. A big one.’
I could sit watching,
Watch it till the break of dawn -
HE DIDN’T ANSWER
Fandorin lay on the ground and looked at the sky. At first it was almost black, lit up by the moon. Then the highlighting disappeared and the sky turned completely black, but seemingly not for long. Its colour kept changing: it became greyish, acquired a reddish glaze and started turning blue.
While Midori’s final words were still ringing in his ears (‘Farewell, my love. Remember me without sadness’) – and that echo lingered for a long, long time – tears flowed unceasingly from benumbed Erast Petrovich’s eyes. Gradually, however, the echo faded away and the tears dried up. The titular counsellor simply lay on his back, not thinking about anything, observing the behaviour of the sky.
When grey clouds crept across it, crowding out the blue, Tamba’s face leaned down over the man on the ground. Perhaps the old joninhad appeared earlier, Fandorin wasn’t entirely sure about that. But in any case, until this moment Tamba had not attempted to shut out the sky.
‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘Now get up.’
Erast Petrovich got up. Why not?
‘Let’s go.’
He went.
He didn’t ask the old man any questions – he couldn’t care less about anything. But Tamba starting talking anyway. He said he had sent Masa to Tokyo. Masa had been very reluctant to leave his master, but it was necessary to summon Tamba’s nephew, a student in the faculty of medicine. Dan was the only one left, if you didn’t count the two who were studying abroad. They would come too, although not soon, of course. The Momochi clan had suffered grievous losses, it would have to be restored. And before that Tamba had to settle accounts with Don Tsurumaki.
The titular counsellor listened indifferently. None of this interested him.
In the clearing beside the ruined house a huge stack of firewood had been piled up, with another, smaller stack beside it. On the first stack there were bodies wrapped in black rags packed close together in three rows. Something white and narrow was lying on the second one.
Fandorin didn’t really look very closely. When you’re standing up it’s awkward to tilt your head back to look at the sky, so now he was mostly just examining the grass at his feet.
‘Your servant spent several hours chopping and stacking the wood,’ said Tamba. ‘And we carried the dead together. They are all here. Most of them have no heads, but that is not important.’
He walked up to the first stack of wood, bent over in a low bow and did not straighten up for a long, long time. Then he lit a torch and touched it to the wood, which flared up immediately – it must have been sprayed with some kind of combustible liquid.
Watching the fire was better than watching the grass. It kept changing its colour all the time, like the sky, and it moved, but still stayed in the same place. Fandorin looked at the flames until the bodies started moving. One dead man squirmed as if he had decided to try sitting up. That was unpleasant. And there was a smell of scorched flesh.
The titular counsellor first turned away, then walked off to the side.
The fire hissed and crackled. But Erast Petrovich stood with his back to it and didn’t turn round.
After some time Tamba came over to him.
‘Don’t keep silent,’ he said. ‘Say something. Otherwise the ki will find no exit and a lump will form in your heart. You could die like that.’
Fandorin didn’t know what ki was and he wasn’t afraid of dying, but he did as the old man asked – why not? He said:
‘It’s hot. When the wind blows this way, it’s hot.’
The jonin nodded approvingly.
‘Good. Now your heart won’t burst. But it is encrusted with ice, and that is also dangerous. I know a very good way to melt ice that shackles the heart. It is vengeance. You and I have the same enemy. You know who.’
Don Tsurumaki, the titular counsellor said in his head, and listened to his own voice – nothing inside him stirred.
‘That won’t change anything,’ he said out loud.
Tamba nodded again.
Neither of them spoke for a while.
‘You know, I found her,’ the old man said quietly a minute later, or perhaps it was an hour. ‘I had to rake through the beams and the planks, but I found her. She’s there, look.’
And he pointed to the second pyre.
That was when Erast Petrovich realised what it was lying there, covered with white material. He started shaking. It was impossible to stop the shuddering, it got stronger and stronger with every second.