"Jinza was here back when my father was an executioner. He inst.i.tuted the policy so if he was taken hostage the prisoners couldn't escape."

The warden! Sadahiko leaned tiredly on the sasumata.

"The warden was killed in the lesser jail," Sadahiko muttered.

Minoru looked out the window and smiled, laughing a hissing laugh between his ugly teeth.

They locked the upper jailhouse behind them and followed the western wall, happening upon a discarded polearm, a tsukub that one of the doshin had dropped after impaling himself on the wall spikes trying to climb over. His body was transfixed in two places and he was bootlessly moving his limbs and moaning, trying to free himself. Whether the doshin was alive or one of the jikininki (for what else could they call them, even if they weren't exactly jikininki?) they didn't know.

Sadahiko took the T-headed tsukub and pa.s.sed it to Minoru, giving the crescent bladed sasumata to Dog and drawing his own sword. They were all armed now.

They came within sight of the western gate. It was ajar. A few of the jikininki were hunched over, wetly savaging the open trunk of a dead doshin.

They heard another musket shot from the west followed by a high pitched scream that was swiftly cut short.

"Only three," said Sadahiko, moving forward. "We can kill them easily."

Dog grabbed his sleeve. "There are too many on the other side of that gate. We should try to find another way in. We might be able to get into the lesser jail by the roof. There's a fire bell tower in the corner of the east wall."

Sadahiko shrugged him off impatiently. He wanted to kill these three jikininki. He had gone twenty nine years without killing to survive, and this night had gotten his stagnant blood going.

"How do we get over the spikes?"

"It can be done, if we don't hurry," said Dog. "We could grab a couple of the tatami from the upper prison and lay them across. I used to climb over these walls that way when I was a boy. 'Course, I was smaller then."

"Climbing like a monkey, little eta," muttered Minoru. He was smiling and leaning on his tsukub like a hermit's staff.

"We should have left him in the cell," said Dog.

"Oh but I'm useful," Minoru a.s.sured him. "I have this."

He took out his flute from where he'd tucked it in his robe.

"What'll you do with that?" Dog said warily.

"I'll play a tune to my jikininki brothers," he said.

"Like h.e.l.l you will," said Dog, shifting the blade of the sasumata in his direction.

"Where?" said Sadahiko.

Minoru pointed to the fire bell tower, a swept gabled silhouette peering over the wall where Dog had said it would be.

"That will be my stage. I'll play a tune they'll all come to hear."

"We can slip by them while they're distracted," Sadahiko said to Dog.

"If they like his music," Dog scoffed. "Personally, I'd go the other way."

"If it works, they'll swarm you. I don't know if they can climb or not," said Sadahiko.

"They won't hurt me, young master k.u.mada," Minoru grinned. "No animal attacks itself."

Sadahiko stared at the madman. He didn't know what had driven him to this state. Was it shame at his dereliction of the responsibility of oibara, or just common dementia? Was he, in his strange way, trying to make amends for his long ago disloyalty? It was an odd twist of fate that had led to their reunion.

"Alright," he said.

After retrieving a pair of the sleeping mats from the upper jail, they moved to the quiet corner of the wall nearest the bell platform. Minoru planted his tsukub b.u.t.t first in the snow. They boosted him up to the lip of the wall.

"Watch the spikes," said Dog, not knowing what else to say. He had heard of samurai self sacrifice, but he'd never seen any example of it personally. Most samurai he'd known were selfish b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Even this one, for all his good intentions, was a lowlife child killer. Yet if this worked, and he died as their decoy ... well, he couldn't say he would miss the old man. It was just gou working itself out.

Minoru was nimble as a spider. He hung by his fingers, bracing his feet against the wall, and was able with one hand to lay the sleeping mats they pa.s.sed up to him over the spikes. He straddled the wall and motioned for his tsukub. When he had it, he slipped out of sight.

Dog and Sadahiko headed back to the west gate, moving between the buildings and the wall. Rounding a corner they came face to face with one of the doshin who had led Dog to the killing grounds earlier. His eyes were white and his clothes were splashed with blood. He lunged silently at them. Dog dropped to one knee and thrust the crescent blade of the sasumata under the doshin's chin and sent his head end over end into the air. The body took a step and fell silently into the snow.

Sadahiko had been startled by the jikininki's appearance, but even more so by the swiftness of the bandit's reaction. Met with sudden danger, he had counterattacked without hesitation. He was a killer, this one, no matter what the warden had thought.

They paused at the corner and looked out at the gate. The few they had seen feeding earlier had gone, leaving an unrecognizable ma.s.s of splintered bones sucked dry of marrow and strewn with partially chewed viscera.

Keeping to the wall, they moved to stand behind the open gate and waited.

Now their clouds of hot breath were a rea.s.surance. Dog had noticed that the jikininki didn't seem to breathe. Minoru had said Koda Moan was cold, too. They truly were dead. He closed his eyes, fighting down hysteria again, swallowing it in a lump and shoving it deep into the pit of his stomach.

Sadahiko almost wished the things would charge out of the gate in a mob. He remembered how he had cut the four men outside the lesser jail down with as many swings. How he looked forward to more of that sort of action!

Minoru's flute began to play, echoing hauntingly across the entire prison. Sadahiko didn't know the tune.

The music had the effect of a tidal wave. They heard the groaning begin near the bell tower, and then resound across the courtyard beyond the gate as the jikininki became aware of him.

They waited in silence, hearing the tramping of many feet pa.s.s by.

Then, directly in front of them, seven jikininki suddenly appeared, walking slowly through the snow. The two parties perceived each other at the same time, and the jikininki let out a terrible gnashing sound and doubled their speed.

Dog didn't know why they moved so slowly. Maybe their blood wasn't flowing, or the cold had some effect on them. Either way, he and Sadahiko charged at them side by side. They knew they didn't have long before Minoru was overrun or forced to retreat.

Plunging into the midst of the trudging creatures, Sadahiko struck with furious glee, chopping them down at the neck one after another like bamboo stalks, his sword whistling, cutting first air and then bone. Dog actually saw him smile. As for himself, he accounted for two, tripping them up with the b.u.t.t end of the sasumata and then slicing their heads off as they struggled to rise.

Sadahiko turned wildly, and for a second Dog lifted his sasumata defensively, thinking he would feel that sharp sword next.

"Let's go!" Sadahiko hissed.

He ran back to the west gate, and Dog struggled to keep up.

They pa.s.sed through the gate into the large western courtyard. Directly before them, the infirmary was a shambles, as was the adjoining greater jail. How many prisoners had that jail housed? Seventy? Ninety? Dog didn't like to think about it.

To their right they saw the backs of the hundred or more infected prisoners waddling toward the bell tower in the far eastern corner, behind the lesser jail (which still appeared to be locked and intact).

Dog could see the scaffold of the tower, and make out the dark iron bell on the flat platform. He supposed any one of them could have simply gone up there and rang the bell, but h.e.l.l, he wouldn't have been crazy enough to do it. Then he saw Minoru. The man was marching solemnly around the bell, the flute to his lips. As he watched, a few of the jikininki crowding the base of the tower began to tentatively scale it. They wobbled and fell back into the crowd, but always two or three rose to replace them. He wouldn't last long up there.

Then they heard a sound that made their skin rise. They had not stopped running toward the lesser jail, but they did look over their shoulders to see the source of the strange, high wail that rose above the noise of the jikininki. What they saw nearly caused them to pitch face first into the snow.

It was the women.

Last to be infected, last to leave their sequestered jailhouse nestled in the southwest corner of the prison, they were coming steadily across the snow-all of them. At least thirty, Dog thought. In their pale prison garb and with their deathly skin and chalk eyes, they melted into the winter white but for their streaming black hair and splotches of bright red blood. Truly, they were like a retinue of Yuki-onna spirits storming across the snow, ephemeral and beauteous, yet terrifying for all their anachronistically savage expressions. The queer, high-pitched sound that burst from their slender throats was mangled as it pa.s.sed through their gnashing teeth. The sight of Dog and Sadahiko enraged them, and it chilled Dog's soul.

Sadahiko felt it too, and he hissed; "Don't look at them! Run!"

They ran, but it was hard going through the snow. They reached the lesser jail door well before the women, but when Dog leaned against the bars panting, Sadahiko jerked him back. Five pairs of arms thrust through and grabbed the s.p.a.ce he had narrowly vacated.

Dog landed on his a.s.s in the wet snow and nearly lost his sasumata. He fished for it frantically. When his fingers closed around it, he was already standing.

The women were coming up on them, stumbling over each other in their haste.

Sadahiko hacked at the groping arms, lopping away hands and fingers like candle wax. The things did not recoil but prodded him with bleeding stumps protruding shorn bone.

He stood back and tore the keys from his clothing. "Hold them back!" he shouted.

Dog glanced back and saw the ones behind the door, but he was unsure if Sadahiko meant them or the approaching women. Keeping the blade of the polearm angled toward the onrushing mob, he shoved the b.u.t.t-end through the gaps in the bars hard, knocking a few of the jikininki inside flat on their backs.

It was enough. Sadahiko thrust the key into the lock and turned, then swung the door open.

He stepped across the threshold and gaped.

A dozen or more jikininki were staggering out of the dark room.

Dog looked over his shoulder and saw the trouble. They were trapped. His eyes fell ... and there, struggling to get up, face half torn away and one eye plucked out, was the warden himself.

"Look there! On the floor!" he shouted, and turned back to the women just as the first of them charged him with open arms and mouth roaring.

Dog shoved the crescent blade into her open mouth and with the help of her own momentum, sheared off the upper half of her face, sidestepping the flailing, spurting body in time to meet two others whom he battered down with the haft.

Sadahiko saw. He jumped into the room and swung down at the disfigured warden as he sat up. Tasogare parted the warden's head and wedged halfway down his chest in his breastbone. It was the most magnificent cut he'd ever made.

As the body sank back, the upper head and neck peeling into two bleeding halves, one whole the other a nightmare of exposed tissue and bone, he pulled the sword free and chopped the jikininki on his left down at the knees. He pushed the other back with his foot and thrust his hand frantically into the warden's robes as the dozen advancing on him howled and stretched their arms towards him.

Dog swept the sasumata back and forth. He had fought off a gang once the very same way with a whip-like bamboo fishing pole, but in that instance, fear of pain had driven the superior number back. These women stepped heedlessly into his arc and fell, some only to rise once more, not even stunned by the force of his blows or the horror of their wounds. He whimpered. This was h.e.l.lish work, cutting into a crowd of women.

He was nearly overcome when he recognized one of the women as Oyuki, the old white haired crone who had worked as the prison asaji, attending to the female prisoners and washing the heads of the executed. Auntie Oyuki, he had always called her. She had washed his feet with cool water from the courtyard well on hot, dusty days. He split the side of her old head open above the ear and sent her down hard. Doing it nearly made him vomit.

But it wasn't Old Oyuki and they weren't women, he told himself. Not anymore.

Then he thought, what if his father still worked here at the prison? He had no idea if he was even alive. But no, the eta corpse handlers had gone home, hadn't they? Yes, otherwise Koda Moan's body wouldn't have stayed in the lesser jail overnight.

If his father still lived, he was sleeping down by the river in the eta village in the old hut. And his mother? His sister? If he lived through this nightmare ... no.

He wouldn't think about that.

Sadahiko ducked out, curling fingers tearing his sleeves. He slammed the cell shut and broke off the key, then turned in time to cut a woman from her shoulder to her armpit.

"I've got them!" Sadahiko shouted, feeling the cold iron ring against his belly.

Dog shoved two of the women back. He couldn't cut them anymore. Though they were swiftly trapping them in a semicircle in front of the lesser jail, he just couldn't.

"The flute!" Sadahiko exclaimed.

What flute? Dog thought, and then realized what he was getting at.

The absence of it was deafening.

Then they heard a roaring noise from behind the lesser jail. They both knew what it meant. Minoru was dead. The ma.s.s of jikininki would return, attracted by the sounds of the women.

Sadahiko lashed out, cutting the women to pieces like dolls. Delicate, porcelain heads spun through the air, long black hair whipping about.

Dog was using the back end of his sasumata, shoving them away like unruly livestock.

"What are you doing?" Sadahiko screamed. "Cut them down!"

Dog shook his head, tears in his eyes. It was too horrible. They were so beautiful, even in this horrendous state. He had no right.

Then the crowd of jikininki came surging around the corners of the jailhouse, relentless, infinite. They pressed through the trilling women, b.l.o.o.d.y and terrible. Dog turned his blade on them, unable to discern anymore. He and Sadahiko were two threshers in a field, two trees groaning before a broken levee.

Then, from the sky, a T-shaped tsukub descended between them.

Sadahiko glanced up.

Minoru was braced on the lip of the jailhouse roof, holding the tsukub down to them by the b.u.t.t.

"Grab on, young master!" he called.

While not bladed, the 'T' on the tsukub was studded with small barbs up to about a shaku down the length of the haft, so that a criminal couldn't grab it and force it away without tearing up his hands. Minoru had wrapped the T end in cloth torn from the hem of his prison robe.

Sadahiko whipped the blood off his sword and took the blade in his teeth. He grabbed the tsukub with both hands, leaping up as Minoru swung. He left the ground and reached out, hands clamping on the edge of the roof. He drew his feet up.

Minoru swung the tsukub back down to Dog.

Dog thrust his own weapon lengthwise at the front row of the jikininki, forcing them back, then turned and grabbed the proffered lifeline. He fumbled, almost fell, but Sadahiko, who had pulled himself up in the interim, grabbed his arm and held him.

One of the things reached up and hugged his ankle, teeth seeking his flesh.

He screamed and kicked out, pulping its nose, but it would not let go.

Sadahiko lay on his belly on the roof and pushed the point of his sword into its eye. When the blade finally broke through the back of its skull, it released Dog and dropped into the crowd below.

Sadahiko pushed Jinza's keys into Minoru's hands. "Lock them in! We'll head for the main gate."

Minoru nodded and smiled in his way, clutching the key ring like a treasure.