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  LORD ODA’S REVENGE

  NICK LAKE is an editorial director at HarperCollins Children’s Books. He received his degree in English from Oxford University. Blood Ninja and Lord Oda’s Revenge were inspired by his interest in the Far East, and by the fact that he is secretly a vampire ninja himself. Nick lives with his wife in Oxfordshire, protected by booby traps, poisoned darts and a fat, lazy tom cat, but why not pay him a visit on Facebook?

  www.bloodninja.co.uk

  ALSO BY NICK LAKE

  BLOOD NINJA

  THE SECRET MINISTRY OF FROST

  LORD ODA’S

  REVENGE

  First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, 10020.

  First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Nick Lake, 2010

  The moral right of Nick Lake to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 184887 389 6

  eBook ISBN: 978 184887 391 9

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Acknowledgements

  For my mother.

  Thank you for teaching me to read.

  LORD ODA’S REVENGE

  PROLOGUE

  The Portuguese Port Town Of Nagasaki, Japan

  1566

  IT WAS NIGNT

  It always had to be night.

  The blind man traced his fingertips along the wooden wall of the warehouse, inching his way towards the door. He could smell the sea now, a sharp tang of seaweed and brine everywhere around him, as if the ocean were extending its fiefdom into the very air. It was raining heavily – the blind man could hear the drops pattering on the water, to his left.

  The warehouse was longer than he had expected. It seemed he had been walking its length all evening. But then it had to be large. This was where the nanban – the barbarians from the south – stored the goods they brought over from China in their enormous, fat-bellied ships: silk, silver, china tableware.

  And guns.

  ‘What do you see?’ he asked the boy, Jun, who was walking before him.

  ‘There is a barbarian ship at anchor. The lamp on the tallest mast is lit, but I can’t see any sailors.’

  ‘Good. And the warehouse door?’

  ‘Ahead, I think. There’s a patch of darker shadow.’

  The blind man nodded. ‘Lead me.’

  Jun took his hand – the blind man felt him shiver at the contact with the scarred, rough flesh – and the boy pulled him gently forward. They walked quietly, cloth slippers on their feet. The shadows concealed them from sight, and the pattering of the rain deadened the soft sound of their passing.

  A perfect night for their work.

  Jun stopped, and the blind man reached out in front of him, running his hands over the door, its hinges, its metal handle in the barbarian style. Then he frowned. Where the door should have met the jamb, there was a narrow space – a vertical fissure running parallel to the wall.

  The door was open.

  The blind man held his breath, while motioning for Jun to stay still. Between himself and the boy, they had set up everything – learning when the sailors would be drinking belowdecks, bribing the guard to meet them here at the side entrance to the warehouse. Then the blind man would knock him unconscious, and take the guns before they could be smuggled up-country and into the possession of one of the wrong lords.

  ‘Open the door very slowly,’ he whispered to Jun. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  There was a light creaking sound. ‘A table,’ said Jun, under his breath. ‘There’s a kind of red meat on a plate, half-eaten. And a glass of blood.’

  ‘Beef and wine,’ said the blind man. ‘Not blood.’ He knew that the barbarians ate cow, which they called waca, after the Portuguese name for that gentle animal, and that they drank a red alcohol made from grapes. He’d also heard that they drank this wine in their churches, saying that it was the blood of their god, though he was not sure whether this was only one of the more hysterical rumours about the worshippers of kirishta.

  ‘Anything else?’ he whispered.

  ‘Next to the table is a long case on the ground. It has been smashed open.’

  ‘Is there anything inside?’

  ‘No. It’s empty. And there’s—’ An intake of breath. ‘There’s something on the ground. It could be wine, or. . .’

  Blood.

  He heard Jun stoop and pick something up from the floor. Then a heavy, cold object was placed in his hands. He turned it over, seeing it with his touch. A long bar, with two prongs jutting from either side.
/>
  A cross.

  The blind man had seen these things, before his eyes were burned out. The kirishitan barbarians worshipped the symbol, saying that it was on such a cross that their god was nailed to die. The blind man thought it was strange to kneel down before the thing that killed your god – but he supposed that if you could eat the flesh of the cow, which the Buddha had declared holy, and you could drink blood in your churches, then celebrating your god’s death was nothing.

  Not that he could reproach them, of course, when it came to drinking blood.

  The blind man slipped the cross into a pocket sewed inside his kimono. There was a chain attached to the upper end of it, and he supposed that it had until recently hung around someone’s neck. The guard’s, perhaps. Something had happened here, and now the guns were almost certainly gone.

  He cursed quietly. ‘We should go,’ he whispered to Jun. Someone else had heard about the guns, it seemed. Someone had come and killed the guard, or taken him away, and then they had stolen the precious merchandise.

  He was irritated, but not surprised. As soon as he himself had heard the rumour, he had made his way south. The Portuguese had brought a new kind of gun in their latest shipment, it was said – one that used a spark created by a wheel of metal to ignite the powder, not a fuse, and could consequently be fired reliably in the rain. The blind man knew that many of the daimyos already had guns – Lord Oda was said to have constructed thousands of them on the original Portuguese model, and even trained regiments of his samurai to use them in battle. But they were long as spears, unwieldy, and made useless if the weather was wet.

  The blind man had fought battles before and was familiar with the violent simplicity of the art of war. To possess weapons that could be disabled by the weather was not a good strategy. But to be the only one with weapons unaffected by the elements? That was worth killing for.

  As he followed Jun back the way they had come, his fingertips stroking the wooden wall, he wondered who could have done it, who could have gone there before him. Oda was dead – killed in his own tower. It could have been Sumitada, perhaps, who had converted to the kirishitan religion and called himself Bartoromeo now. It was Sumitada who had given Nagasaki to the barbarians, receiving in return the first choice of silk, which had not been seen in Japan since the Chinese stopped sending it direct, protesting against the Japanese wako pirates who preyed on their ships.

  But the blind man had some experience with the missionaries who ran the Portuguese port, and he knew they were not fools. They needed Sumitada for their port, but they knew he was not important to the countrys future – he was little more than a leaf, floating on a pool, and the ripples that moved that leaf were the powerful lords like Tokugawa.

  Besides, Sumitada was a coward, not a strategist. He had become a laughing stock among the samurai for his conversion, and was hated by the peasants in his dominion. The blind man had even heard that once, Sumitada-Bartoromeo was walking in the countryside, when he came upon a shrine to a local cockerel spirit, adorned with a statue. He had smashed the statue, screaming blasphemous imprecations against the Shinto gods, talking madly of idols, and if he had been any less than a daimyo he would have been cut down where he stood for his disrespect.

  Daimyo or not, the blind man didn’t think Sumitada would make it through another year.

  There was a change in the sound of the rainfall, and the blind man realized that Jun had stopped. He heard footsteps, coming towards them from behind.

  Many footsteps, moving fast.

  ‘Who is it?’ he said, as the footsteps surrounded them.

  ‘Barbarians,’ said Jun. His voice was quavering, nervous. ‘They have tattoos on their arms, and they are carrying daggers.’

  ‘Sailors?’ the blind man asked.

  ‘I don’t know. They are tall and white and have green and blue eyes, like cats.’

  Portuguese, thought the blind man.

  The blind man heard one of the men – he was just in front, to the right – say, in heavily accented Japanese, ‘Stop, thieves.’

  The blind man held up his empty hands. ‘We have stolen nothing.’

  The man – the blind man guessed he was the leader, perhaps even the captain of the ship – took a step forward. ‘Our guard is gone. Our guns are gone. And you are here.’

  The blind man backed up against the wall. ‘We can settle this like—’

  ‘No. We settle this with your deaths.’ There was the sound of weapons being raised, and Jun screamed as the men closed in on them.

  The blind man was not yet old, and he feared death. But he was here of his own will – the boy was here because he was paid. He gripped Jun’s arms and pulled him against the wall, turning his own body to cover him. Then – and in the same heartbeat – he formed his hand into the karana mudra for expelling demons, the index and little fingers extended, which was a weapon disguised as a tool for meditation. He struck at the boy’s neck with his hardened fingers, finding the pressure point that would put him out for an incense stick, at least. The boy slumped to the ground. Good. Better that he lie there, unharmed.

  The blind man felt the souls of all the men he had killed crowding around him, as if they had returned as hungry ghosts from the realm of annoyo to weigh him down, to cling to him like pale parasites. He had lived a long time, and in the last month he had promised himself that soon he would retire from the world, enter a monastery, and kill no more men.

  But not just yet.

  Yes, the blind man feared death. He had made so much of it, sent so many men to Amida Buddha, that if he was lucky he would be reincarnated on four legs, and if he was not, he would spend his next lifetime being boiled in a pot, the souls of his victims feeding insatiably on his being, for the dead are always hungry.

  And now he would be forced to make more.

  As if he were holding a magnifying glass to a scroll, he brought the world into focus, centring his qi. He could hear every raindrop, and he knew where they hit the ground, and where they were prevented from doing so by the bodies of men. Then there was the smell of them. A blend of sweat, sea salt, and rum – and underneath all that, the iron scent of blood. The blind man had heard that when Lord Oda lost the use of his right arm, he learned to wield his sword in his left, compensating for his loss. Something similar had happened to the blind man, his sense of smell becoming so acute that he could almost see these barbarian sailors, glowing in the dark around him like skeletal assemblages of red tubing, pulsing, pulsing with fresh blood.

  He felt the first man move towards him, swinging something in his hand – he could hear the whum, whum, whum it made as it rotated. It could have been a sword, or it could have been a rope.

  It didn’t matter.

  He heard the man sidestep to hit him with the thing that sang in the air, and he felt pity. These men were corpses, and they didn’t even know it. The blind man ducked, turned, struck out with his heel. The barbarian dropped to one knee – it made a crack sound against the stone – and cried out, but the sound was cut off as the blind man drew his concealed blade and let it leap for the man’s throat.

  Another one approached him from behind, the rain pattering on his head as loud as temple bells, and the blind man threw his left hand back while his sword impaled another man before him. The fingers of his rear hand struck the same spot he had aimed for on the boy, though this time he did it harder. The man behind fell, as the one in front screamed, trying to pull himself off the blind man’s sword. With a twitch of his wrist, the blind man withdrew the blade, thrusting it up and to the side in the same movement, cutting another’s throat.

  The other men had a better idea of what they were dealing with now, and two of them came at him from either side, throwing out their arms to try to contain him. But they would sooner catch one of the raindrops that gave them away; they would more easily spear the very wind. He moved back, so quickly it made the attackers’ movements seem exaggerated, as if they were moving through a different medium – they w
ere creatures of liquid, and he was a creature of the air.

  They were still bringing their arms together, still believing he was there, when he gutted them. Now three men attacked him at once, and he was forced to adapt his tactics. He brought his foot up, hard, between the first man’s legs, while striking behind him with his sword, and simultaneously driving his left palm up to smash the middle sailor’s nose. Fighting fair might be the best way to accumulate good karma, but as far as this realm of samsara went, it was also the best way to get yourself killed. Without pausing, he followed his punch with a dose of steel to the gut, then stepped forward. The man he had kicked in the groin was still doubled over, and it was the work of a child to behead him.

  The blind man heard curses, presumably Portuguese. He was no longer thinking now, but was lost in a type of Zen meditation, where the question of what belonged to his body and what was outside of it became meaningless. He was the rain, and the wind, and the stone below his feet.

  A very faint voice at the back of his mind told him this fight was unfair, but he knew that there was no fairness in fighting – only the dead, and the living.

  He was living. Everyone else was dead.

  He avoided a blow from an irrelevant weapon, dimly hearing the whap as it sliced the air where he had been standing a moment before, and then he brought his sword up to eviscerate the barbarian. The man screamed, shocked, as if this were not to be expected. The blind man sighed inwardly. As soon as these men had stepped onto the quay, they had been dead. Better that they accept it – otherwise they would not believe they were in annoyo, and their reincarnation would be hard on them.

  Amida Buddha, he called out silently, as he leaped towards the last of them. I call on you and on all good karma to assist these souls in their journey. With hands of iron, he snapped the man’s wrist, hearing his dagger clang on the stone. Then he gripped the man’s head and angled his mouth to bite his neck, feeling the blood flow into him, making him stronger.

  He drank deep.

  Breathing hard, letting the body of the barbarian fall to the ground, the blind man slowly sheathed his sword – it slid into a scabbard that lay snug against his side, under his robe. He was turning to the boy when there came a metallic scraping sound from towards the sea. He froze. From the other side, by the warehouse wall, came another. Then another, from the left. And the right.