That was the first half of the job done. His watch showed three minutes after eleven.
‘Well, God speed,’ Fandorin said quietly, taking the Herstal out of its holster.
Masa pulled a short sword out from under his belt and checked to make sure that the blade slipped easily out of the scabbard.
Erast Petrovich had estimated that the hanging island was approximately a hundred sazhens across, from the fissure to the precipice. At a stroll, that was two minutes. But they walked slowly, so that no branch would crack and the fallen pines needles wouldn’t rustle. Occasionally they froze and listened. Nothing – no voices, no knocking, only the usual sounds of a forest at night.
The house loomed up out of the darkness unexpectedly. Erast Petrovich almost blundered into the planks of the wall, which were pressed right up against two pine trees. To look at, it was an ordinary peasant hut, like many that they had seen during their journey across the plain. Wooden lattices instead of windows, a thatched straw roof, a sliding door. Only one thing was strange – the area around the hut had not been cleared, the trees ran right up to it on all sides, and their branches met above its roof.
The house was absolutely still and silent, and Fandorin signalled to his servant – let’s move on.
After about fifty paces they came across a second house, also concealed in a thicket – one of the pine trees protruded straight out of the middle of the roof; probably it was used as a column. Not a sound or a glimmer of light here either.
Bewilderment and anxiety forced the titular counsellor to be doubly cautious. Before approaching Tamba’s house – the one hovering at the edge of the precipice – he had to know for certain what he was leaving behind him. So before they reached the precipice, they turned back.
They covered the entire island in zigzags. They found another house exactly like the first two. Nothing else.
And so the entire ‘fortress’ consisted of four wooden structures, and there was no garrison to be seen at all.
What if the shinobi had left their lair and O-Yumi wasn’t here? The idea made Fandorin feel genuinely afraid for the first time.
‘Iko!’ [xvii] he said to Masa, and set off, no longer weaving about, straight towards the grey emptiness that could be seen through the pines.
The house of Tamba the Eleventh was the only one surrounded by clear grassy space on three sides. On the fourth side, as Fandorin already knew, there was a gaping precipice.
He could still hope that the inhabitants of this sinister village had gathered for a meeting at the house of their leader (Twigs had said he was called the jonin).
Pressing himself against a rough tree trunk, Erast Petrovich surveyed the building, which differed from the others only in its dimensions. There was nothing noteworthy about the residence of the leader of the Stealthy Ones. Fandorin felt something rather like disappointment. But the worst thing of all was that this house also seemed to be empty.
Had it really all been in vain?
The vice-consul darted across the open space and up the steps on to the narrow veranda that ran along the walls. Masa was right behind him every step of way.
Seeing his servant remove his footwear, Erast Petrovich followed his example – not out of Japanese politeness, but in order to make less noise.
The door was open slightly and Fandorin shone his little torch inside. He saw a long, unlit corridor covered with rice straw mats.
Masa wasted no time. He poured a few drops of oil from a little jug into the groove and the door slid back without creaking.
Yes, a corridor. Quite long. Seven sliding doors just like the first one: three on the left, three on the right and one at the end.
Removing the safety catch of his revolver, Erast Petrovich opened the first door on the right slowly and smoothly. Empty. No household items, just mats on the floor.
He opened the opposite door slightly more quickly. Again nothing. A bare room, with a transverse beam running across the far wall.
‘Damn!’ the titular counsellor muttered.
He moved on quickly, without any more precautions. He jerked open a door on the right and glanced in. A niche in the wall, some kind of scroll in it.
The second door on the left: a floor made of polished wooden boards, not covered with straw, otherwise nothing remarkable.
The third on the right: apparently a chapel for prayer – a Buddhist altar in the corner, statuettes of some kind, an unlit candle.
The third on the left: nothing, bare walls.
No one, absolutely no one! Empty space!
But someone had been here, and very recently – the smell of Japanese pipe tobacco still lingered in the air.
Masa looked round the room that had a wooden floor instead of mats. He squatted down and rubbed the smooth wood. Something caught his interest and he stepped inside.
The vice-consul was about to follow him, but just at that moment he heard a rustling from behind the seventh door, the one closing off the end of the corridor, and he started. Aha! There’s someone there!
It was a strange sound, something like sleepy breathing, the breath expelled not by a man, but a giant or some kind of huge monster, it was so powerful and deep.
Let it be a giant or a monster – it was all the same to Erast Petrovich now. Anything but emptiness, anything but deathly silence!
The titular counsellor waited for an endlessly long out-breath to come to an end, flung the door aside with a crash and dashed forward.
Fandorin only just managed to grab hold of the railings, right on the very edge of the little wooden bridge suspended above the precipice. He was surrounded on all sides by Nothing – the night, the sky, a yawning gulf.
He heard the out-breath of the invisible colossus again – it was the boundless ether sighing, stirred by a light breeze.
There was nothing but blackness below the vice-consul’s feet, stars above his head; all around him were the peaks of mountains illuminated by the moon, and in the distance, between two slopes, the lights of the distant plain.
Erast Petrovich shuddered and backed into the corridor.
He slammed the door into Nowhere and called out:
‘Masa!’
No answer.
He glanced into the room with the wooden floor. His servant was not there.
‘Masa!’ Erast Petrovich shouted irritably.
Had he gone outside? If he was in the house, he would have answered.
Yes, he had gone out. The entrance door, which the titular counsellor had left open, was now closed.
Fandorin walked up to it and tugged on the handle. The door didn’t move. What the hell?
He tugged as hard as he could – the door didn’t budge at all. Was it stuck? That was no great problem. It wasn’t hard to make a hole in a Japanese partition.
Swinging his fist back, the vice-consul punched the straw surface – and cried out in pain. It felt as if he had slammed his hand into iron.
Erast Petrovich heard a grating sound behind him. Swinging round, he saw another partition sliding out of the wall to enclose him in a cramped square between two rooms, the doors of which (as he noticed only now) were also closed.
‘A trap!’ – the realisation flashed through Fandorin’s mind.
He jerked at the door on the left, with no result, and the same with the door on the right.
They had him locked in, like an animal in a cage.
But this animal had fangs. Fandorin pulled out his seven-round Herstal and started swinging round his own axis, hoping that one of the four doors would open now and there would be an enemy behind it – in a close-fitting black costume with a mask that covered all his face, so that only the eyes could be seen.