“Kill him!” the other hoodlums shouted.
Furious, they assaulted the yamabushi with their swords. His staff parried their every strike with a precision that Hirata had seldom seen even among the best samurai fighters. A typhoon of flailing bodies and lashing weapons surrounded the priest as the hoodlums tried to fell him. He revolved in the middle, his arm and staff a blur of motion, his stern features alert yet placid. His opponents seemed to fling themselves against his staff. One dropped unconscious from a blow to the head. Another hurtled into the cemetery, where he crashed against a gravestone and lay moaning. The three others decided that they’d taken on more than they could handle. They ran off in terror, bruised and bloody.
Hirata, Inoue, and Arai stared in astonishment. Murmurs of awe sounded from spectators who’d gathered to watch the fight. The yamabushi hobbled into the cemetery to retrieve his belongings. Hirata clambered off his mount.
“Take those injured samurai to the nearest neighborhood gate. Order the sentry to call the police and have them arrested,” he told his detectives. Then he hurried up to the priest. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?” the priest said as he donned the harness and hoisted the chest onto his back. He wasn’t even winded from the fight. He seemed more annoyed by Hirata’s intrusion than by the attack on him.
“How did you manage to defeat five able-bodied samurai?” Hirata said.
“I didn’t defeat them.” The priest flashed Hirata a glance that appeared to take his measure, commit him to memory, then dismiss him. “They defeated themselves.”
Hirata didn’t understand this cryptic answer, but he realized he’d just witnessed proof that this yamabushi did have the mystical powers that he’d laughed off only moments ago. He also realized with a start that the priest must be the man he’d come to see. “Are you Ozuno?”
The priest barely nodded. “And you are?”
“I’m the shogun’s sōsakan-sama,” Hirata said, and gave his name. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Ozuno didn’t look surprised, or interested. He appeared to be like others of his kind-solitary and standoffish. “If you’re just going to hang about and gape at me, I’ll be on my way.”
“I’m investigating a crime,” Hirata said. “Your name came up as someone who might be able to help. Do you know Kobori Banzan?”
Emotion stirred behind Ozuno’s steady gaze. “Not anymore.”
“But you once did?”
“He was my pupil,” Ozuno said.
“You trained him in the art of dim-mak?”
Ozuno sneered in disdain. “I taught him sword-fighting. Dim-mak is just a myth.”
“That’s what I once believed. But five men were recently murdered by the touch of death.” Six, if Sano was the next victim, Hirata thought. “I’ve seen proof. Your secret is out.”
The disdain melted from the priest’s face, which took on the expression of a samurai wounded in battle and keeping a calm manner by act of sheer will. “You think Kobori is the killer?”
“I know he is.”
Ozuno sank to his knees beside a gravestone. For the first time he appeared as frail as most old men. Yet although clearly shaken, he seemed unsurprised, as if a prediction had come true.
“I have to catch Kobori,” Hirata said. “Do you know where he is?”
“I haven’t seen him in eleven years.”
“You’ve had no contact at all since then?” Hirata was disappointed, but he thought that finding Ozuno was a lucky break, even if not for the murder investigation.
“None,” Ozuno said. “I disowned Kobori.”
The bond between teacher and pupil was almost sacred, and Hirata knew that disownment was an extreme act of censure by the teacher and a terrible disgrace to the pupil. “Why?”
Ozuno rose and gazed into the distance. “There are many misconceptions about dim-mak. One is that it’s a single technique. But it belongs to a wide spectrum of mystic martial arts that include fighting with weapons and casting spells.” His shock at the news that his former pupil was a wanted criminal had broken his reticence. Hirata understood that Ozuno was telling him things that few mortals ever heard. “Another misconception is that dim-mak is an evil magic, invented for use by assassins. But that was not the intention of the ancients who developed it. They meant for the touch of death to be used honorably, in self-defense and in battle.”
“They must have known it could be used to kill for dishonorable purposes,” Hirata said.
“Indeed. That’s why their heirs have guarded the knowledge so closely. We comprise a secret society whose aim is to preserve it and pass it on to the next generation. We take a vow of silence that forbids us to use it except in cases of extreme emergency or reveal it to anyone except our carefully chosen disciples.”
“How do you choose them?” Hirata said, intrigued.
“We scout the young samurai among the Tokugawa vassals, the daimyos’ retinues, and the rōnin. They must have sound characters as well as natural fighting ability.”
“But sometimes mistakes are made?” Hirata deduced.
Ozuno nodded regretfully. “I found Kobori in a martial arts school in Mino Province. He was the son of a respectable but impoverished clan. He had superior skill in the martial arts, and a determination that is rare. Our training is extremely rigorous, but Kobori took to it as though he’d been reincarnated from an ancient master.”
“What went wrong?”
“I wasn’t the only person who noticed his fighting skills. They came to the attention of Chamberlain Yanagisawa, who also scouted the samurai class for good warriors. While Kobori was training under me, he was offered a post in Yanagisawa’s squadron of elite troops. Soon afterward came the incident that led to the break between us.”
Painful remembrance crossed Ozuno’s features. “It’s well known that those elite troops were assassins who kept Yanagisawa in power. You have heard of his rivals who were conveniently attacked and killed by highway bandits?”
“That was always the official story,” Hirata said, “but everyone knows those deaths were murders ordered by Yanagisawa. His elite troops were too clever to be caught and never left any evidence that would incriminate them, or him.”
“Kobori was clever, too, and expert at the art of stealth. One day I heard that an enemy of Yanagisawa’s had dropped dead, for no apparent reason. He was presumed to have died from a sudden fit. But I had other suspicions.
“I asked Kobori if he’d given the man the touch of death. He didn’t deny that he’d used our secret art to commit cold-blooded murder. In fact, he was proud of it.” Ozuno’s expression darkened with disapproval. “He said he’d put his knowledge to good, practical use. I told him that his duty was to learn the techniques and someday teach them to a disciple. But he said that was pointless. The truth was, he’d been seduced by the excitement of killing and the prestige that working for Yanagisawa brought him. I told him that he couldn’t go on studying with me and serve Yanagisawa at the same time.”
“And he chose Yanagisawa?”
Ozuno nodded. “He said he had no more use for our society, or for me. That day I disowned him and cast him out of our society.”
“And that’s the last you saw of him?” Hirata asked.
“No. I saw him one more time,” Ozuno said. “Our society has a procedure for handling rogues. In order to prevent one from misusing our secret knowledge, or giving it away, we eliminate him.”