Linnear 03 - White Ninja Read Free

placed it in Mariko's open mouth.
    Before he left, he washed his blades in the tiny sink, watching the blood swirling in pink abstract patterns around the stained drain.
    He cut down the length of cloth that had bound him to the standpipe. Then he went to the sooty window and, opening it, boosted himself up to its rim. In a moment, he was through.
    Senjin rode a combination of buses and subways to the centre of Tokyo. In the shadow of the Imperial Palace,
    he was swept up in the throngs of people, illuminated by a neon sky, clustered like great blossoms swaying from an unseen tree. He was as anonymous, as homogenous within society as every Japanese wishes to be.
    Senjin walked with a step dense with power yet effortless in its fluidity. He could have been a dancer, but he was not. He passed by the National Theatre in Hayabusa-cho, pausing to study posters outside to see if there was a performance that interested him. He went to the theatre as often as possible. He was fascinated by emotion, and all the ways it could be falsely induced. He could have been an actor, but he was not.
    Passing around the south-western curve of the Imperial moat, Senjin came upon the great avenue, the Uchibori-dori, at the spot which in the West would be called a square, but for which there was no corresponding word in Japanese. Past the Ministry of Transportation, Senjin went into the large building housing the Metropolitan Police Force. It was, as usual at this time of the night, very quiet.
    Ten minutes later, he was hard at work at his desk. The sign on the front of his cubicle read: captain senjin
    OMUKAE, DIVISION-COMDR, METROPOLITAN HOMICIDE.
    Under the knife, Nicholas Linnear swam in a sea of memory. The anaesthetic of the operation, in removing him from reality, destroyed the barriers of time and space so that, like a god, Nicholas was everywhere and everywhen all at the same moment.
    Memory of three years ago became a moment of today, a pearling drop of essence, distilled from the' blurred seasons passing too swiftly.
    Nicholas spreading his hands, palms up. Hook at these, Justine, and wonder what they're for besides inflicting pain and death.
    Justine slides one of her hands in his. They're also
    gentle hands, Nick. They caress me and I melt inside.
    He shakes his head. That's not enough. I can't help thinking what they've done. I don't want to kill again. Voice trembling. I don't believe that I ever could have.
    You never sought out death, Nick. You've always killed in self-defence, when your insane cousin Saigo came after us both, then when his mistress, Akiko, tried to seduce and kill you.
    Yet way before that, I sought out the training, first bujutsu, the way of the samurai warrior, then ninjutsu. Why?
    What answer do you think will satisfy you? Justine says softly.
    That's just it, Nicholas cries in anguish. don't know!< span>
    I think that's because there is no answer.
    Swimming in the heavy sea of memory, he thinks, But there must be an answer. Why did I become what I have become?
    A flash of spoken word, uttered long, long, ago: To be a true champion, Nicholas, one must explore the darkness, too. Immediately, he rejects the remembered words.
    He sees the stone basin in the shape of an old coin that lies within the grounds of his house. He recalls, in a starburst of memory, taking up the bamboo ladle in order to slake Justine's summer thirst. For a moment, the dark belly of the basin is less than full. Then he can see carved into its bottom the Japanese ideogram for michi. It symbolizes a path; also a journey.
    His journey out of childhood and into the ranks of the ninja. How rash he had been to rush into that hideous darkness. How foolhardy to put himself into such moral peril. Did he think that he could learn such black, such formidable arts without consequence? A child, unthinking, unknowing, hurls a stone into the middle of a pristine, sylvan pond. And is astounded by
    the change in the pond's appearance because of that one