The short hairs began to prickle at the back of Ryan’s neck, and his hand fell to the butt of his automatic. There was something wrong.
“Stay here and get hold of your blaster,” he whispered. “Try and warn the others.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t know. Just a bad feeling. Wait here.”
He didn’t stop to hear any argument. He slid the panel behind him, though it wouldn’t protect Krysty from an attack by an enraged mouse.
It was quiet.
Too quiet.
The SIG-Sauer was in his hand, probing at the air in front of him like the tongue of a viper.
He sniffed at the air, his forehead wrinkling as he tried to separate the alien mix of smells the bitter, acrid flavor of the industrial pollution, the scent of flowers and the musk of the oils in the hot bath.
And something else.
It was a smell that few of the soft and effete people who lived in predark days would have recognized fresh-spilled human blood.
Ryan considered going back for J.B., Jak and the others, but he was there, outside the rooms, on his own.
The taste of blood, hot and salty on his tongue, grew stronger as he moved a few steps toward the main part of the house.
He paused at the corner and squinted around it, every nerve combat ready, every fighting reflex on the hollow-ground razor’s edge.
Two corpses lay sprawled in the casual untidiness that screamed death, the stillness that was like no other stillness in the world. Both of them were women, lying huddled together, both on their backs, the cotton shifts ridden up over their knees, showing the neat little clogs on their feet.
Both had their throats slit from ear to ear, savage cuts that had almost decapitated the servants, exposing the whiteness of splintered spinal bone. The blood was still oozing, not yet congealing, the surest sign that the murders had taken place within the past two or three minutes.
Meaning that the butcher was close by.
Ryan stepped around the corpses, careful to avoid the spreading lake of crimson, pausing to look and listen. It was almost certain that there were outside killers in the fortress.
A dead manservant lay half in a doorway a little farther around the next section of the passage, his fists clenched as though the moment of death had caught him in helpless anger.
His red-and-white cotton uniform was so sodden with blood that Ryan couldn’t see at first how the man had died. Then he saw that the material was torn across the chest. The one-eyed man stooped and rolled him over, seeing a similar cut below the left shoulder blade, slightly wider. It was the entrance wound of a long, edged weapon.
Like a samurai sword.
The man’s narrow eyes were open wide, as though his passing had been a matter of considerable surprise to him. Whoever was doing the chilling was good at his tradeor “their” trade, if there was more than one of them.
Somehow Ryan had the feel of a lone assassin, a single, solitary figure creeping about in the dark recesses of the fortress, perhaps wearing samurai armor, so that anyone hapless enough to meet him would take him for those vital, fatal secondsfor a member of Mashashige’s retinue.
The fourth body was a child, no more than eight years old, his little body thrown into a corner, also run clean through with a sword.
Blood still flowed, and Ryan knew that he was closing with the killer.
The walls on either side of him were oiled, silken paper, hung on bamboo slats.
The sword cut through the wall from Ryan’s right and knocked the blaster from his hand in a fearsome, jarring blow.
Chapter Eleven
The attack wasn’t unexpected, but it was so swift and violent that for several racing heartbeats, Ryan wasn’t certain precisely what had happened. For a split second he even thought that the hacking sword had actually cut through his arm, somewhere above the wrist, and that his hand lay on the floor, still gripping the butt of the fallen SIG-Sauer.
There had been a sharp, jarring blow, the pain running to his shoulder. It had been hard enough to knock him off-balance, sending him staggering to his left, away from the plunging, whirling attack.