The Left-Hand Way Read online

  Their eyes and cheeks crinkled with amusement, and I saw no deception. They didn’t care. I turned to threaten Shorty to some helpful action, but he was already unconscious. Still breathing, though. That was something—they were trying to capture, not kill me.

  Then, the already speeding car accelerated. The third man brought up his gun again, and lowered his window. Behind us, a silver sports car of some British make was racing in pursuit. The third man waited, calmly assessing his shot.

  Good, they’d be distracted. The open window would let air in the front, but I suspected that wouldn’t help me enough in the back when I had to start breathing again, and that was seconds away. I thought about punching some airholes, but then another idea came to me.

  The divider glass looked thick enough to be bulletproof. But the seats—were they armored all the way through? I thought not. Leather and vinyl tended to respond better to me than glass and metal. I brought my sword back at a slight angle. In Christ’s name, I stab at thee. I jammed the blade with Spirit-aided force through the lower part of the seat. The blade sang where it touched some metal components, but went clean through, only to get stuck at the last. The limo swerved, as the driver arched his back away from the seat. Of course—the driver wore body armor, so I had pricked him, but not run him through. Good—I’d want a chat later.

  A minicar and a minitruck squealed and ran onto the shoulder. The pursuing silver car weaved through the chaos with professional style. Friend, or another foe?

  My driver had moved away from the sword point; then, focused on avoiding traffic, he relaxed his back. I shoved the blade again toward him, then twisted. Mouth gaping in pain in the rearview mirror, the driver pressed down hard on the accelerator, the motor revved up an octave, and he swerved again, running us through the guardrail and right off the road. We leapt over a ditch and through a fence. Bump after bump, each like a small crash. None of us were wearing our seat belts, and sleeping Shorty and I collided against each other and the divider glass. Then, ahead, a white form turned to face its oncoming doom, dark eyes stupidly accepting its fate.

  Baa. Bang! Sisss. The limo had finally stopped, but not before hitting a sheep. Correction: killing a sheep. Bits of bloody wool everywhere. That would look just great on my report to Attucks. I missed my father’s open mocking of these misadventures. Mutton to do about it now.

  Ouch. I thought I must have banged my head. My door was still locked. The driver was lowering the divider, probably for the benefit of the thin man and his gun. The sonics screeched again. I pulled to get my sword out of the seat, but the thin man’s gun wasn’t up, and his attention was behind me.

  I could have just punched them both, but from the thin man’s reaction, I sensed a weapon was pointed at the back of my head. I risked a glance. Behind us, the pursuer got out of the car, an Aston Martin, and shouted at us. “Police! Nobody move!” A woman. Being in England, I guessed she was of West Indian origin. She held a massive long-barreled gun out toward us in one hand, while the other was making some crafty gestures that seemed to be encouraging us to stay put. “Everybody freeze.” She wore an office suit for people too rich to actually work in offices.

  With my sword freed of the seat, I kept it low, and turned my attention again to the men in front, just as all the door locks clicked. Quicker than nature, the passenger door had been opened, and the third man was gone, nowhere to be seen. The woman was running toward us; the one combat-ready feature of her attire was her flat rubber-soled shoes. Despite his wounds, my driver already had his hands up against the roof. Shorty was snoring.

  Desperate for breath, I reached for the now unlocked back door. “Hands in the air, Major!” yelled the woman, stopping just feet away from the limo. In a lower voice, she added, “And not one bloody word from you, Endicott.”

  As if charmed by her Received Pronunciation, I took a deep inhale of the drugged air, slowly raised my empty hands, and smiled. I couldn’t fight the whole country, and at least she knew who I was. The mission had started as well as expected.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  On the other side of the world, Major Dale Morton waited for his contact in an anonymous bottle-keep club above the expat bar Geronimo’s in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. Mundane foreigners congregated in Roppongi, and magical foreigners joined them there because it wasn’t as supercharged as the rest of Japan, which was riddled with small shrines like craft fuel stations marked for convenience. All that native craft could mess up the foreign practitioner.

  Dale sat wearing one of those dreadful soldier-on-vacation outfits (a white sports coat with a loud floral shirt, completely inappropriate for Tokyo autumn) that his old buddy Chuck had favored and that Dale normally despised. But the style fit Dale’s cover, and he had to live his cover, particularly when he was also hiding his purpose from some of his own side.

  His cover was that this trip was part of some extended R&R, processed in H-ring as a well-deserved reward for last year’s country-saving exertions. Dale wasn’t much for this sort of R&R or skullduggery. He should be in uniform and in combat, where he was competent, but that was a soldier’s self-pity, so he stowed it. Better, he should be with Scherie. He missed her with a ferocity that surprised him.

  Because it would appear natural to do so, Dale checked his phone. No messages, texts, whatever. That was good. The only messages for this phone would be emergencies, and the only true emergency would be Roderick returned. In Roderick’s former life, he had cut a bloody swath across the American craft that hadn’t been equaled before or since. Dale suspected that a resurrected Roderick would be an even more powerful threat.

  For months, the House had been creaking with unease and the Left-Hand revenants had been moaning, and within that spiritual mass, Madeline’s still distinctive voice sounded shrill with anger. Hearing these omens of Roderick’s survival, Dale had delayed this mission. Then, realizing such a resurrection might make this mission vital, he rushed it forward. Perhaps he hadn’t prepared well enough.

  Autumn’s chill was in the air outside, but inside held the usual cramped excess warmth of Tokyo. Dale ordered a gin and tonic because the club’s bartenders got most everything else wrong. Intellectually, Dale knew he was drinking too much. Any good bar subconsciously charmed its patrons, and the Mortons had to be very careful of their substances at the best of times. But, like a fly trap for alcoholics, this club had some more overt craft to encourage him to drink. For him to stay too long, night after night, would be slow death. Some here were on their way to the afterlife, and some had passed over. Ghosts who resided in Japan were particularly ghoulish, with Day-Glo worms wriggling inside them, so even Dale could tell the dead from the merely dying.

  This club would soften him up quickly. Was that why Kaguya-san wanted to meet here?

  Downstairs at Geronimo’s, young Australians sang, snogged, and drank in ascending order of proficiency. Up here in the club, the older and creepier denizens of the British Commonwealth and the expat demimonde sweated overpriced booze in light-fabric suits and tried to buy class. “Class” apparently included the black velvet Olivia prints of nude or mostly nude women that hung on the walls.

  Mixed in with the usual vipers were an international assortment of craftsmen and mundane agents who came and went and passed each other cigarettes and lighters with displays of affection, covert information, or both. It was harder than usual to pick out the spies, as even the investment bankers seemed to think they were in a Bogart movie. But one of these snakes was not like the others. At the opposite end of the bar, a Chinese man wearing an incongruous yet tasteful Armani knockoff was sipping a Coke and displaying the usual situational awareness tics: taking frequent advantage of his clear view of the entire club and entrance while sitting with his back to a wall and near the only other exit. The Chinese hood’s excess situational awareness had blown his cover; his tradecraft was worse than useless.

  Up until this moment, the only noticeable absence from this gathering of mystery men
was Dale’s Japanese countercraft colleagues/competition, who mostly kept their distance from this and other Roppongi free ports. They figured that if the gaijin magi were here, they weren’t somewhere else below radar and causing serious mischief. If serious mischief occurred, well, the Japanese craft black-ops group had a well-known name, so colorful as to seldom be spoken by the wise guys. Most Japanese secrets and conspiracies were like that—hidden defiantly in plain sight.

  Dale looked up from his empty glass and glanced toward the entrance, and there was his contact, Kaguya-san. Years before, Dale had staged from Yokosuka in support of a Japanese op in North Korea, where Kim Jong-il’s craftsmen had been trying some desperate magics, and Kaguya-san had gone in with him. Afterward, Dale and she had broken (shattered, really) certain craft fraternization regulations, and he hadn’t regretted it for a second. In Japan, the issue of craft contact felt different, and Dale assumed he wasn’t alone.

  Kaguya-san’s appearance reminded him of all the reasons for his misbehavior. Her red dress was in the snug-fitting style they called bodycon, short for body conscious. The style went with the place, so it was good cover in that sense, but not in any other. The few Western women in the club gave her the once-over, trying to assess if she was one of the giggling, mouth-covering office ladies whom they vociferously resented beyond what feminism called for. The Western men’s admiration was checked only by their prior exposure: they had seen such before. As for Dale, he loved his wife, but he wasn’t dead and dispelled. Kaguya-san was as stunning as ever, with everything from eye to calf still better than nature could have rightfully intended.

  Dale stood and motioned toward the neighboring seat that he had kept empty with great effort, and Kaguya-san greeted him. “Morton-san. Konbanwa. So good to see you again, eh.” She didn’t need the panglossic language craft for him to understand; she spoke a form-perfect English that still had something Japanese about it, and which sometimes fell into Canadian vowels. “Eh” and “ne” might end alternate sentences.

  “Kaguya-san. It’s been too long. You are well?”

  “Yes, thank you. And you have married, ne? Omedeto gozaimasu.”

  “Thank you,” said Dale. She wasn’t putting him off sexually; rather, she was letting him know as a favor that her superiors were aware of Scherie.

  “It is very nice that you asked to see me,” said Kaguya-san.

  “You were kind to agree,” he replied. She waited, silent, looking at him expectantly. Right to business then, which was unlike her. Had Japanese farsight guessed why he was here?

  “I’m here about my father,” he continued. “Before his breakdown, he came here, to Tokyo.” Perhaps to this very club.

  “Very strange, Morton-san.” But no surprise showed in her eyes. “You never mentioned this before.”

  “I didn’t discover it until recently. I want to know what he was doing here. Did he ask your agency any questions? Did he meet with any other practitioners here?”

  She sucked the air through her teeth, and he knew what was coming. “Further queries would be … difficult, ne?”

  She was playing this more Japanese than necessary. “Kaguya-san…”

  She dropped the formalities. “I’m very sorry, Dale, but I can’t tell you anything.”

  “Miki, why can’t you speak?” She remained silent. He had been in conversations like this with her before. She wanted to tell him something, but had been ordered not to discuss certain things directly. “Perhaps we could talk about something else. What’s been on your mind?”

  A barely perceptible nod. “I’ve been thinking about craft morality and culture.”

  “That’s very interesting,” he said, encouraging. “I’ve often wondered if craft morality differs among nations.”

  “Yes. In particular, it seems that your American craft distinctions don’t suit us anymore.”

  A chill went down his spine. “Evil is evil, everywhere.”

  “What is evil about wanting to prolong life?” she asked, a Socratic irony in her tone. “We’ve had centuries in the East where life extension was thought to be the right of a powerful man.” That was a more Chinese perspective, but he took her point, and maybe China was her point. Unlike everyone else in the club, the Chinese man at the end of the bar was very deliberately not looking at Kaguya-san.

  Dale tried another gambit. “My Family had a great interest in the Taoist alchemies.”

  “Then you’ve had useful experience.” Lips parted, she showed a hint of small teeth as with her fingernail she drew a lazy circle on the bar top. She implied many things: that he had turned Left Hand, that he knew their secrets, or that he knew how to fight them.

  In Japan, honest feeling was often the best reply, and his feelings about the Left Hand were clear. “Theoretically, life extension is harmless, but practically, well, it’s always different than that. When my Family sought immortality, it involved psychic vampirism, possession, and killing lots of people. And it never stops at just life extension. The goals become grander, and the killing goes on and on.” Or in Roderick’s case, the killing seemed to become the main point.

  Kaguya-san nodded once with emphasis. “I’ve told my friends that you would not be interested in helping anyone pursue this.”

  Again, a great deal of ambiguity—helping whom do what?—but it was clear she was looking out for him with her people. “Thank you.”

  She closed her eyes, as if seeking calm amidst discomfort. “Others are going to want to discuss this with you.”

  This was very bad news, and raised a swarm of new questions, but one seemed particularly urgent. “Why now?”

  “You’ve never told me, Dale, whether eternal silence is one of your family gifts.”

  She was asking if Dale could kill himself with craft rather than break under interrogation. The answer was no, not readily enough, but he carried a mundane means: a saxitoxin-impregnated needle. “I have a remedy,” he said. Then he repeated: “Why now?”

  She gave him a closed-lip smile. “You should ask at home. In person. And soon.”

  With unaccustomed abruptness, she stood up and walked for the door. She must have hit her information limit, perhaps passed it. He half thought of following her. Yes, she’d told him to scram back to the States, but she couldn’t mean this minute, and now that their business was done, they could get a few drinks, rent a karaoke box, sing badly together. Maybe she would let something else slip. All very innocent.

  “I had a friend like that.” In a snap, his father was sitting where Kaguya-san had been, cooling the air and making the I’m watching you gesture at Dale. “So don’t try to pull one over on me.” Despite Scherie’s dispelling power, the Family ghosts loved her and were perhaps overly protective. Infidelity in the craft was perilous to all concerned—contact had consequences. Though mundane generals seemed to regard mistresses as a privilege of rank, Dale wouldn’t dare translate fornication into adultery—at least, not now that he was thinking more clearly.

  “Hi, Dad. You’re a long way from House.” Ghosts often found overseas travel difficult.

  “It’s easy for me to be here. I’ve been here before. But you already knew that.” He was dressed civilian, like he had been when he had gone East on some never disclosed quest that had driven him insane, leaving an alienated Grandpa and young son Dale behind. “You’re tracing my last known whereabouts before I went nuts. How did you find my trail?”

  “Your expenses. Abram and Madeline had purged your official accounts, but you went off H-ring and used a Morton offshore account and credit.”

  “Followed the money? Well, that should do it then. You won’t get farther than this.”

  Great, so he wasn’t going to make this any easier. “Let’s take a walk.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I’m going to look like I’m talking to myself, I want to do it out of doors.”

  They stepped out onto the packed sidewalk at Roppongi Crossing. Fog and mist blurred any view much beyond the brightly
lit intersection. It would be a long walk back to the Hotel Okura, but this might be a long conversation. Dale put on his Bluetooth earpiece so he could speak to his father aloud and have it look natural, and they headed toward a less crowded back way to the hotel. Dale still kept his voice down in case more discerning listeners were nearby.

  “Where’s Grandpa?”

  “Home. He doesn’t know what you’re doing here. Don’t make me tell him.” A problem of the reconciliation between his dad and grandfather—the old ghosts could and did gang up on him.

  “What were you up to here, Dad?” This topic was going to be risky. It had made his father nervous before, and when a question agitated a ghost, he tended to dissipate before he could answer.

  “They took my statements in the rest house.”

  “The place they kept me in after that Persian magus cursed me?” His father nodded. “All the statements you gave there were cut out from the record—sometimes literally with a razor blade.” That was what had started Dale on this quest. The mole triumvirate of Madeline, Abram, and Roderick had left a wide trail of unreasonably suppressed information. Their response to his father’s last mission had been particularly thorough, meaning that mission may have contained a possible threat to their plans, perhaps a threat to the Left Hand generally. It was good tradecraft to follow up on such suppressions, and Dale finally had a long enough leash to investigate on the spot. His mission only felt personal; this was spy business of the best sort.

  “What were you looking for?” Dale asked.

  “I can’t remember what I found. It blew out most of my mind, then the treatments took out the rest.” A ghost had a distant way of speaking of life’s tragedies. “I do know that it was a mistake.”

  “Dad, please. That wasn’t what I asked. What were you looking for? I think you remember that much.”