A gang of nuns broke through the defense and stormed the palanquin, their faces contorted in maniacal fury. Shrieking, they beat clubs against the vehicle. Some grabbed the poles and rocked the palanquin, throwing Reiko and Haru from side to side. Others thrust spears through the window. Haru screamed. Reiko drew the dagger strapped to her arm and struck at the blades. Soldiers closed in, slashing at the nuns. Reiko saw women release their spears as their eyes went blank and they fell away from the window. But one nun lunged through the window, snarling and clawing.

Reiko struck out with her dagger and gashed the nun’s throat. Warm, thick blood spurted on Reiko. She cried out as the dead nun collapsed across her legs. Then she heard the palanquin’s door open. Turning, she saw Haru scramble out.

“Haru!” Reiko called in alarm.

She grabbed for the girl, but missed. Thoughts raced through her mind: If Haru got away, Sano would never forgive Reiko. In a flash, she was out of the palanquin.

35

Reiko cast a frantic glance around the precinct and saw Haru scurrying through the battle. Small and unobtrusive, the girl dodged fighters who took no notice of her. Reiko sped off in pursuit, shouting, “Stop, Haru!”

Haru kept going. A screaming nun charged at Reiko, swinging a club. Reiko lashed out with her dagger and cut the nun across the abdomen. More nuns chased Reiko. She saw Sano, astride his horse, battling four priests.

“Haru has escaped,” Reiko called to him. “I’m going after her.”

But Sano didn’t even look toward Reiko: He couldn’t hear her over the noise. The deranged nuns chased her away from him. A mob of priests and mounted troops blocked her path, and by the time she’d detoured around them, she’d shaken off the nuns, but lost Haru. Then she spotted the girl running into a thicket of trees at the north side of the temple. Reiko hurried toward her.

This area was deserted. The dense foliage screened out the battle noises and the light from the buildings. Reiko saw her quarry’s shadowy figure race down a gravel path and disappear beneath an arbor. She followed through the leafy tunnel and emerged into open space. Before her loomed the abbot’s two-story residence. Reiko halted, gasping in exertion and anxiety. Haru was nowhere in sight, but the door to the residence stood ajar.

Reiko raced up the steps. She hesitated at the door, fearing that there were Black Lotus members inside. Emboldened by her determination to catch Haru, she slipped through the door. Beyond the entryway, a corridor encircled the building’s interior, which was dark except for a dim glow visible through openings in the partitions that divided the rooms. Listening, she perceived wheezes coming from the direction of the light: Haru was there. Reiko groped her way through the chambers.

The light was a lamp that shone through a paper wall. The wheezes were louder now, accompanied by the scrape of something heavy against the floor. Then came scuffling noises, and creaks. Reiko looked into a room that was empty except for a cabinet, a lacquer chest, and a table upon which the oil lamp burned, and quiet except for a hollow, rhythmic clattering noise.

“Haru?” Reiko said, puzzled because the girl had mysteriously vanished.

Then she noticed that the chest stood at an odd angle across the floor, and the shadow beside it wasn’t really a shadow, but a hole from which the clattering emanated. Dismaying realization struck her. Haru had moved the chest and gone through a secret entrance to the temple’s underground realm.

Moving to the edge of the hole, Reiko spied a ladder leading down to a dimly lit cavern. She considered and rejected the idea of fetching Sano. If the tunnels extended beyond the temple district as Pious Truth claimed, Haru could be far away before Reiko returned with help. Besides, it was Reiko’s fault that Haru had gotten away, and Reiko’s responsibility to get her back. Donning courage like an armor tunic over her fear, Reiko slipped her dagger into the scabbard strapped to her arm and descended.

She had an unsettling sense of the earth swallowing her. Her heart hammered, and a chill draft shivered her skin. The underground seemed alive, breathing pure malevolence. Reiko alighted in a junction of three tunnels. Drawing her dagger, she looked around, expecting to see a horde of armed nuns and priests, but no one appeared. The clattering pulsation accompanied rushes of air that wavered the flames in oil lamps on the walls. Haru’s wheezes and footsteps echoed from one branch of the tunnel.

In the temple precinct, Sano lashed his sword at the priests clamoring around him and his horse. “Get away!” he shouted, trying to clear a path to Reiko’s palanquin.

White-robed figures poured out the open gate, chased by soldiers. Wounded sect members gulped the contents of vials that hung on strings around their necks and expired in violent convulsions, having poisoned themselves to avoid capture. Though the grounds were covered with fallen priests and nuns, the temple yielded up a seemingly endless supply of new attackers. The fires caused by the torches had lit the shrubbery. Anraku’s conflagration had begun. Sano feared that his army wouldn’t be able to contain the violence, and he would fail in his duty to prevent the destruction of Edo.

As he fought his way closer to Reiko’s palanquin, an object the size of a teapot soared through the air ahead of him, trailing a short tail with a burning end. It thudded to the ground amid a nearby group of combatants and exploded with a tremendous boom and blinding flash of light.

Sano exclaimed in shock. His horse reared. A huge smoke cloud burgeoned at the site of the explosion. Out of this flew bodies hurled by the blast. Agonized screams arose. The Black Lotus had begun deploying gunpowder bombs intended for the destruction of Japan. All around the temple, priests ignited fuses and flung more bombs. More explosions produced more screams and maimed corpses. Injured survivors moaned. Then Sano saw a bomb land on the roof of the palanquin.

“Reiko!” he yelled, horrified. “Get out! Run!”

He vaulted from his saddle, over the priests around him, and landed hard in a crouch. The impact rolled him heels over head, across rough grass, until he halted some ten paces from the palanquin. Still gripping his sword, he leapt to his feet, just as the palanquin exploded.

The blast threw him backward. He felt intense heat. Broken boards showered down upon him. Gunpowder fumes seared his lungs. Then he was crawling through the smoke, frantically pawing the wreckage of the palanquin.

“Reiko!” His ears were ringing from the explosion; he could barely hear himself. A dark afterimage of the flash obscured his vision. “Where are you? Answer me!”

Heedless of the flames that licked his hands, he flung aside splintered panels. A motionless, bloody form appeared.

“No!” The violent denial erupted from Sano.

Then he noticed the corpse’s shaved head: It was a nun. Yet Reiko must be here somewhere. Willing her to be alive, Sano worked furiously until he’d cleared all the debris off the palanquin’s shattered base. But he found no trace of Reiko, nor Haru. Sano’s relief was transient, obliterated by fresh horror. He looked up and saw Hirata running toward him.

“They’re gone,” he shouted over the noise of more explosions.

“What?” Hirata, grimy and sporting cuts in his armor, halted and looked at Sano in confusion. “Who?”

“Reiko and Haru.”

“Where?”