s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

"Get him out of sight. Tell Grant to stay in the ready room."
In a very aggrieved voice, Bry asked, "How do you expect me to do that? Since
when has he ever listened to me?"
Wearily Kane said, "I don't know. Tell him we're planning a birthday party and
if he comes out he'll spoil the surprise."
' 'Is it his birthday?'' asked Bry.
"Hell, I don't know. Just tell him anything so he'll stay put. For the moment,
I need to control the information he gets."
"What information is that?" Bry's tone sounded decidedly confused.
"Bry, goddammit "
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"All right, all right. Will do." Bry paused and
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added, in a tone that sounded a bit trepredatious, "Just so you'll
know...Shizuka is with him."
At the mention of the name, all the anger returned to Domi's eyes and
comportment. In a soft, disgusted voice she said, "Shit."
Chapter 5
Grant and Shizuka were waiting for Kane in the ready room, their stances
telegraphing impatience and suspicion. To Kane's considerable surprise and
amusement, Grant was attired in the formal samurai dress known as the
kamishimo, which consisted of wide-legged trousers and a red-and-blue jacket
called a ka-taginu.
The flaring, stiffened shoulder epaulets only accentuated the massive breadth
of the man's shoulders and chest.
Even in the flat-soled sandals, he stood four inches over six feet tall. Gray
threaded his short, curly black hair. A gunfighter's mustache swept fiercely
around his lips and curved halfway down to his prominent chin, showing
jet-black against his coffee-brown complexion. Smiles didn't come easily to
him, and as usual his mouth was drawn in a frown, just as his heavy brows were
knitted together at the bridge of his nose, casting his dark eyes into deep
shadow.
His blunt fingers tapped a nervous ditty on the hilt of the short wakizashi
sword thrust through a silk sash knotted around his waist.
Before Kane said anything, he cast his gaze around surreptitiously for a
glimpse of Sindri. Fortunately, the little man was nowhere in sight. "Well,"
Kane began, letting a grin spread across his face, "it didn't
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take you long to go native. Or is it laundry day on NewEdo?"
Grant didn't laugh, but Shizuka did, a lovely musical fluting. A slender
Japanese woman a couple of inches over five feet in height, Shizuka wore an
ankle-length surcoat of blue silk accented by white-and-red embroidery.
Beneath it was a pale green billowy kam-ishimo, the uniform of the daimyo's
retainer. She carried a dai-sho pair of swords in her sash, a long curved
katana and a tanto.
Her tumbles of glossy black hair framed a smoothly sculpted face of
extraordinary beauty. Her complexion was a very pale gold with pink roses and
ivory for an accent. Beneath a snub nose, her petaled lips were full.
Shizuka's dark brown, almond-shaped eyes held the fierce, proud gleam of a
young eagle. Her hair was gathered in a tortoiseshell barrette at her nape,
one stray wisp dangling across her cheek.
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She started to speak, but Grant growled "No" in his lionlike rumble of a
voice. ' 'It was a day like any other one that began with me waking up and
wondering if this would be the day you'd come up with a thin pretext to drag
my ass back here."
Kane's grin faltered at the edge of genuine hostility and accusation in
Grant's deep voice. Kane didn't blame him for resenting being yanked
unceremoniously from his new life on New Edo, since that life really hadn't
had much time to get started. However, he felt the slow flush of anger rising
on his neck at the implication he had contrived an emergency in or-
86 JAMES AXLER
der to summon his friend back to deal with the responsibilities of his old
life.
"I don't have a pretext," he stated flatly. "I have a damn good reason.
Probably the best damn reason since we left Cobaltville."
Grant seemed unmoved. Crossing his big arms over bis chest, he rumbled, "What
old sparring partner has come looking for a rematch now?"
Kane understood the reference he made to the circumstances of the last time
they embarked on an op, when Grigori Zakat apparently returned from the dead,
seeking revenge for a past defeat. That incident was only two weeks in the
past, but Grant had brought the situation to Kane's attention, not the other
way around. For the sake of diplomacy, Kane decided not to point that out.
"It's not so much an old enemy who has come back," Kane told him, "but one
that's been under our noses for quite some time without us knowing it."
Shizuka's delicate eyebrows arched. "What do you mean, Kane-sarc?"
Grant nodded to the Sin Eater strapped to Kane's forearm. "Is that why you're
walking around heeled?"
Before Kane could even partially frame a response, Sindri chose that moment to
saunter into the anteroom from the operations center. Both Grant and Shizuka
stared at him in dumbfounded silence for a long tick of time. Then Grant
bellowed, "What the hell !"
He made a clumsy, fumbling motion to unsheathe his wakizashi sword. His motor
functions were still
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impaired due to the residue of the terrible shock that had temporarily
paralyzed him less than four weeks before.
Shizuka's sword slid from its lacquered wooden scabbard with lightning speed,
the naked steel glittering brightly in the overhead light. The tip touched
Sindri's neck and she muttered in low, grim tone, "Zurui chibi.
I wondered if we would ever meet again."
Kane knew she had said "Sneaky dwarf," and judging by the red spots of anger
appearing on Sindri's cheeks, he knew it, too. His face remained impassive
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even as the razored edge of the sword forced him to tilt his head back. The
blades of the Tigers of Heaven were almost supernaturally sharp, able to
cleave smoothly even through polycarbonate. Shizuka had once attributed the
cutting quality to an old technique of laser-sharpening the edges to only a
few molecules of thickness.
"What the fuck is he doing here?" Grant snarled, jamming his sword back into
its scabbard. He seemed slightly embarrassed that he had been able to withdraw
only a quarter of its length in the time Shizuka had completely unsheathed her
own weapon.
"I'd like to know that myself," Shizuka said in a silky soft tone, although
her eyes were cold. "I haven't forgotten how this koitsu imprisoned me in the
Chronos installation, used me as a tool against you. I
owe him a bloodletting."
Kane had picked up enough Japanese since meeting the New Edoans to know koitsu
meant "little rat."
He also knew Shizuka referred to the incident some
88 JAMES AXLER
months ago when she and a contingent of samurai arrived on Thunder Isle
searching for him, Grant and
Brigid. She hadn't found the three friends she sought, but Sindri, who had
commandeered the facility, found her.
When the outlanders returned to Thunder Isle a couple of weeks later, Sindri [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]