THE SUCCESSION OF SATSUMA IS AT STAKE
The old lord has a legitimate heir and a favorite concubine, and they do not want the same thing. Shimazu Nariakira is forty years old and still waiting to inherit. Oyura wants the domain for her own son. Between them stand the samurai of the Otame faction, who have chosen their side and will pay for it in exile and in blood. Their graves will not protect them; the lord’s anger even reaches down into the earth to exhume what is buried there.
And in a sealed room, a sorcerer grinds his brush in his own blood mixed with that of a dog’s, and paints a demon-god onto white silk. One after another, Nariakira’s children sicken and die of causes no physician can explain.
Far below the great houses, the ruin spreads outward. A sister sells herself to a man who is using her for advancement. A brother comes to Osaka to find out why. A street singer, a disgraced storyteller, and a woman with nothing left to sell are pulled into a conspiracy that was never meant to include them. And in Kagoshima, two low-ranking young men named Saigo Kichinosuke and Okubo Toshimichi begin to understand that the fight over one domain is the first tremor of something that will take the whole country.
Then smoke appears on the horizon at Shinagawa, and the Black Ships come.
THE HAUNTED FLAME is the second volume of Naoki Sanjugo’s The Chronicle of the Southern Kingdom, the 1930 novel that made its author the most popular historical novelist in Japan and gave his name to the illustrious Naoki Prize. It is a story of faction and inheritance in which the weapons are patronage, rumor, marriage, arson, and curses, and in which the men responsible for the Meiji Restoration are still young, poor, and powerless. An original English translation by Vox Day; now available on Amazon for Kindle and KU.
Excerpt
Maki Nakatarō was painting the image of a demon god.
He sat alone in a sealed room, his bloodshot eyes raw from sleeplessness, and with each stroke of the brush the figure took shape on white silk. The lines were dark in places, crimson in others. Arched brows, furious eyes, a mouth stretched wide. The rendering lacked refinement, but it carried a ghastly intensity that pressed against the viewer like a hand on the throat.
To the right of his knee sat a celadon bowl. The murky red-black liquid inside was a mixture of dog’s blood, ox blood, and blood drawn from Maki’s own arm. The brush itself had been made from the living hair of thirteen human beings blended with the fur of eight species of animal. With each stroke, Maki dipped that brush in that blood and murmured the same invocation.
“Hail, Great Wrathful King. By the law that fills heaven and shatters law, by the hundred thousand attendants, by the eighty thousand demon children, grant your protection to this rite.”
Sometimes he whispered it. Sometimes his lips moved without sound.
Now that Lord Zusho has been poisoned by the enemy faction’s treachery, there is no help for it.
The decision had already been made. Zusho had been the only man alive who understood Maki’s anguish, and the death of that one man had plunged the sorcerer into both despair and a fury that bordered on madness.
No help for it. Since it has come to this, I shall spare no one, not even my own master. The men who killed Lord Zusho cannot comprehend the true worth of a human being. Still less can they comprehend the terrible, divine power of this art.
The loss of Zusho left Maki desolate. The finance minister had been his sole believer and his sole protector, and now that protection was gone.
The small increase in stipend from Lord Narioki is nothing. I would never shorten my own life merely for that. The reason I have cursed Lord Nariakira’s children to death, the reason I have demonstrated the power of these secret arts at such cost, is threefold. First, to repay the debt of a man who understood me. Second, for the sake of the house. Third, to spread these arts throughout the realm and find their true inheritor. I practice the dark path. The dark path shortens the practitioner’s life by three years for each man killed. The righteous path preserves life, both the target’s and the practitioner’s. I know this, and I practice the dark path anyway, making enemies even of my own teachers, because I seek a successor worthy of the tradition. Lord Zusho understood all of this. He gave me his full support. And now the only man who supported me is gone.
The thought drove Maki to the edge of self-destruction.
Let it come. I will show them the full measure of this power, and then I will follow Lord Zusho into death.
Sitting on a black felt mat, he poured prayer and life force into every stroke until the small image of the Great Wrathful King was finished. He studied it for a time, then rose and carried it through the sliding door into the next room.
Four disciples sat around the altar, waiting. Maki’s face was the color of ash. He ignored their bows, reached past them to the altar, and took up the ritual sword.
The disciples sensed that today’s rite would be unlike any before. They watched with growing unease as Maki drew the blade and held it in his left hand. He thrust a stick of kindling into the guttering flame at his knees, and when it caught, he pushed the burning wood beneath the piled timber in the fire pit.
“Today I perform the rite alone,” he said quietly.
Without waiting for the disciples to rise, without looking at them, he knelt before the growing flames.
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