Free Cloud of Sparrows by Takashi Matsuoka Page A

confusion,” Saiki said. “Someone who you would not otherwise suspect.”
    Genji sighed. “Very well. You may look into the matter further. But please, do not intrude too much on Stark. He is our guest.”
    Saiki bowed. “Yes, lord.”
    Genji said, “Let us see how they fare.”
    On their way down the hall, Saiki thought to ask about the grocer whose building the assassin had used. “What shall we do about Fujita’s offer?”
    “Convey our thanks and say we will permit him to supply the New Year’s sake.”
    “Yes, lord,” Saiki said. That will be costly enough to relieve the grocer’s fear, but not so costly as to be destructive. A wise decision. Saiki followed his lord with ever-increasing confidence.

    The Dutch celestial telescope took Kawakami’s eye onto the rooftops above Genji’s procession. Although his angle of view prevented him from seeing that particular street, he knew where the entourage was by the behavior of people at the one intersection not obstructed by buildings. When they threw themselves to the ground, the lord was approaching. When they rose and resumed their activities, he had passed.
    Kawakami was greatly amused to see Monzaemon, the rich merchant banker, hastily stumble from his famous white horse and grovel in the dirt like any other peasant, despite his sartorial finery. Many of the Great Lords were in Monzaemon’s debt. The Shogun himself owed the insufferable little man vast sums. Yet there he was, face pressed against the ground at the passage of his betters. Money was one thing. The privilege of wearing two swords and the right to use them freely, that was quite another. No matter how much and how rapidly the world changed, Kawakami was certain of one thing. The power to buy would never match the power to kill.
    Kawakami thought he heard the sound of a single distant gunshot. As he watched through the telescope, Monzaemon jerked his head up from the ground, a look of fear on his fat peasant’s face. The white horse beside him reared in panic. Only the quick action of one of his servants prevented him from being trampled to death.
    Something had happened. He would have to wait to find out what. He stepped away from the telescope.
    “I will be in the garden cottage,” he said to his assistant, Mukai. “Do not disturb me unless the matter is urgent.”
    Kawakami went to the cottage alone. It was not much more than a simple shed in one of the smaller gardens of the vast castle. Yet it provided him with the greatest pleasure of his life.
    Solitude.
    It was a rarity in a place like Edo, filled with nearly two million people, and for a man like Kawakami, a Great Lord himself, usually surrounded by a small crowd of attendants of various ranks and kinds. Indeed, a key motivation for becoming the Shogun’s chief spy was that it gave him an excuse to be alone. Whenever he needed relief from the suffocating weight of social responsibilities, he could always invoke the need for secrecy and disappear. At first, he had done so mainly to get away from his wife and concubines and visit his various mistresses. Later, it allowed him to avoid his mistresses as well. Eventually, he warmed to the task of freely prying into private lives. Now he truly had little time for wives, concubines, mistresses, or any other of the frivolous pursuits he had once enjoyed.
    It was the waiting that was now so precious. A rare time to be alone with the small fire, the boiling water, the scent of tea, the feel of the heated cup in his hands. But today, the water had barely begun to boil when there was a familiar voice at the door.
    “Lord, it is I.”
    “Enter,” Kawakami said.
    The door slid open.

    Heiko departed from the palace immediately after Genji did. She was accompanied only by her maid, Sachiko. Great Lords could go nowhere without a troop of bodyguards. The most fearsome men in the land, they were also the most fearful. They dealt out death as freely as a happy child offered laughter. So by the