The Diamond Chariot

A DEAD TREE




Europe came to an end half an hour after they set out on their way. The spires and towers of the anglicised Bluff first gave way to the factory chimneys and cargo cranes of the river port, then to iron roofs, then to a sea of tiles, then to the thatched straw roofs of peasant huts, and after another mile or so, the buildings disappeared completely, leaving just the road stretching out between the rice fields, and bamboo groves, and the wall of low mountains that closed in the valley on both sides.

The expedition set off before dawn, in order not to attract unwanted attention. Strictly speaking, there was nothing suspicious about the caravan. It looked like a perfectly ordinary construction brigade, like the ones that built bridges and laid roads throughout the Mikado’s empire, which was striving eagerly to make the transition from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

The caravan was commanded by a sturdily built man with a coarse, wrinkled face. He stared around with the tenacious gaze of a bandit, which actually differs very little from the gaze of a construction foreman or master builder. His outfit – straw hat, black jacket, narrow trousers – was exactly the same as the workers wore, it was just that the commander rode and his thirty-two subordinates travelled on foot. Many of them were leading mules, loaded with heavy crates of equipment, by the bridle. Even the fact that the brigade was accompanied by a foreigner with his Japanese servant was unlikely to seem strange to anyone – there were many European and American engineers working on the immense building site that the Land of the Rising Sun had now become. If travellers coming the other way and peasants scrabbling in the meagre dirt watched the foreigner as he rode by, it was only because of the outlandish self-propelled kuruma on which he was riding.

Fandorin already regretted that he had not listened to the consul, who had advised him to hire a mule – the animals were slow and rather unattractive, but far more reliable than Japanese horses. However, Erast Petrovich had not wished to appear unattractive as he set out to save the woman he loved. He had taken a mule, but not to ride, only for his baggage, and had entrusted it to Masa’s care.

His servant tramped along behind him, leading the solid-hoofed creature on a rein and every now and then shouting at it: ‘Get arong’. The mule was walking along on its own in any case, but Masa had specially asked his master for the Russian words for urging on animals, in order to show off to the Black Jackets.

In everything apart from his choice of a means of transport, the titular counsellor had taken the advice of the experienced Vsevolod Vitalievich. His baggage consisted of a mosquito net (the mosquitoes in the Japanese mountains were genuine vampires); a rubber bath (skin diseases were widespread among the local inhabitants, so washing in the hotel bathrooms was a no-no); an inflatable pillow (the Japanese used wooden ones); baskets of food and lots of other essential items for a journey.

Communication with the commander of the brigade, Kamata, was established with some difficulty. He knew quite a lot of English words, but he had no concept of grammar, so without the habit of deductive reasoning, Fandorin probably would not have been able to understand him.

For instance, Kamata would say:

‘Hia furomu ibuningu tsu gou, naito hoteru supendo. Tsumorou mauntin entah.’

To start with, bearing in mind the peculiarities of the Japanese accent, Erast Petrovich restored the fragments of this gibberish to their original state. This gave him: ‘Here from evening to go, night hotel spend, tomorrow mountain enter’. After that, the meaning became clear: ‘We move on from here until the evening, spend the night in a hotel and tomorrow we enter the mountains’.

To reply he had to perform the reverse procedure: dismember the English sentence into its separate words and distort them in the Japanese style.

‘Mauntin, hau fah?’ the vice-consul asked. ‘Ninja bireju, hau fah?’

And Kamata understood perfectly. He thought for a moment and scratched his chin.

‘Smuuzu irebun ri. Mauntin faibu ri?’

It was eleven ri across the plain (about forty versts), and five ri through the mountains, Fandorin understood. So generally, although it wasn’t easy, they managed to make themselves understood to each other, and by midday the two of them had achieved such a close fit that they could even talk about complicated matters. For instance, about parliamentary democracy, of which Kamata was terribly fond. The empire had only just adopted a law on local government; elections for prefecture assemblies, mayors and village elders were taking place everywhere; and the Black Jackets were playing a very lively part in all this activity: they defended some candidates and also, as this advocate of parliamentarianism put it, ‘smorru furaiten’ others, that is, they frightened them a little. For Japan, all this was new, even revolutionary. And Don Tsurumaki seemed to be the first influential politician who had realised the full importance of the little provincial governments, which were regarded ironically in the capital as a useless decoration.

‘Ten eas, Tokyo nasingu,’ Kamata prophesied, swaying in the saddle. ‘Provinsu rearu pawa. Tsurumaki-dono rearu pawa. Nippon nou Tokyo, Nippon probinsu.’1 But Fandorin thought: The provinces are all very well, but by that time the Don will probably have control of the capital as well. And that will be the triumph of democracy.

The commander of the Black Jackets turned out to be quite a considerable chatterbox. As they moved along the valley, squeezed in tighter and tighter by the hills on both sides, he talked about the glorious days when he and the Don crushed the competition in the fight for lucrative contracts, and then came even jollier times – it was a period of revolt, and they fought and feasted ‘furu beri’, that is, with a full belly.

It was clear that the old bandit was in seventh heaven. Fighting was far better than working as a major-domo, he avowed. And a little later he added that it was even better than building a democratic Japan.

He really was a fine commander too. Every half-hour he rode round the caravan, checking to see whether the mules had gone lame or the baggage had come loose, joking with the fighting men, and the column immediately started moving more cheerfully and energetically.

To Fandorin’s surprise, they pressed on without a halt. He pushed his pedals economically, matching his speed to the men on foot, but after twenty versts he was starting to tire, while the Black Jackets were not showing any signs of fatigue.

Lunch lasted a quarter of an hour. Everyone, including Kamata, swallowed two rice balls, drank some water and then got back in formation. Erast Petrovich barely even had time to lay out the sandwiches prepared by the thoughtful Obayasi-san, and was obliged to chew them on the move, as he caught up with the brigade. Masa muttered as he dragged his Rosinante along behind.

Between four and five in the afternoon, having covered about thirty versts, they turned off the main road on to a narrow track. This was a completely wild area; at least, no European had ever set foot here before. Fandorin’s eye could not discern any signs of Western civilisation in the small, squalid villages. Little children and adults with their mouths hanging open stared, not only at the tricycle, but also at the round-eyed man in outlandish clothes who was riding it. And this was only a few hours’ journey away from Yokohama! Only now did the titular counsellor start to realise how thin was the lacquer of civilisation with which the rulers had hastily coated the façade of the ancient empire.

Several times they came across cows – wearing colourful aprons with pictures of dragons on them and straw shoes over their hoofs. The villagers used these imposingly attired cud-chewers as pack and draught animals. The titular counsellor asked Kamata about this, and he confirmed his suspicion that the stupid peasants did not eat meat or drink milk, because they were still completely savage here, but never mind, democracy would come to them soon.

They stopped for the night in a rather large village at the very end of the valley, just before the mountains began. The village elder accommodated the ‘construction brigade’ in the communal house – ‘workers’ in the yard, ‘masters’ and ‘engineers’ inside. A straw-mat floor, no furniture, paper walls with holes in them. So this was the ‘hoteru’ Kamatu had mentioned that morning. The only other guest was an itinerant monk with a staff and a shoulder bag for alms, but he remained apart from their group and kept turning away – he didn’t want to defile his gaze with the sight of the ‘hairy barbarian’.

Fandorin got the idea of taking a stroll round the village, but the villagers behaved no better than the bonze – the children shouted and ran away, the women squealed, the dogs barked hysterically – and so he had to go back. The embarrassed elder came, bowed many times in apology and asked the gaijin-san not to go anywhere.

‘Furu pazanto nevah see uait man,’ Kamata translated. ‘Yu sakasu manki, sinku.’

He dangled his long arms and swayed as he hobbled round the room, laughing at the top of his voice. It took Erast Petrovich some time to understand what was wrong. It turned out that they had never seen any white people in the village before, but one of the locals had been in the city many years ago and seen an ugly trained monkey that was also dressed in a curious manner. Fandorin’s eyes were so big and blue that the ignoramuses had taken fright.

Kamata took pleasure in telling Fandorin at length what fools the peasants were. The Japanese had a saying: ‘A family never remains rich or poor for longer than three generations’, and it was true that in the city life was arranged so that in three generations rich men declined into poverty and poor men fought their way up – such was the law of God’s justice. But the boneheads living in the villages had not been able to break out of their poverty for a thousand years. When parents got decrepit and were unable to work, their own children took the old folk into the mountains and left them there to die – in order not to waste food on them. The peasants didn’t wish to learn anything new, they didn’t want to serve in the army. He couldn’t understand how it was possible to build a great Japan with this rabble, but if Tsurumaki-dono took the contract, they’d build it, they’d have to.

Eventually, weary of deciphering his companion’s chatter, the titular counsellor went off to sleep. He cleaned his teeth with ‘Brilliant’ powder and washed himself in his travelling bath, which was most convenient, except that the water smelled strongly of rubber. Meanwhile Masa set out his camp bed, hung the green net over it and inflated the pillow, working furiously with his cheeks.

‘Tomorrow,’ Fandorin said to himself and fell asleep.

The last five ri were a match for the previous day’s eleven. The road immediately started rising steeply and looping between the hills, which reached up higher and higher towards the sky. Fandorin had to dismount from his tricycle and push it by the handlebars, and the young man regretted not having left it in the village.

Well after midday Kamata pointed to a mountain with a snowy peak.

‘Oyama. Now right-right.’

Four thousand feet, thought Fandorin, throwing his head back and gauging it by eye. Not Kazbek, of course, and not Mont Blanc, but a serious elevation, no doubt about it.

The place we are going to is a little off to one side, explained the commander, who was thoughtful and taciturn today. We stretch the line out into single file and keep quiet.

They walked on for about another two hours. Before they entered a narrow but short ravine, Kamata dismounted and divided the brigade into two parts. He ordered the larger group to cover their heads with leaves and crawl through the bottleneck on their stomachs. About ten men remained behind with the pack animals and baggage.

‘Tower. Look,’ he explained curtly to Erast Petrovich, jabbing one finger upwards.

Obviously the enemy had an observation point somewhere close by.

The titular counsellor travelled the two hundred sazhens of the ravine in the same manner as the others. His outfit did not suffer at all, though: specially designed for outings in the mountains, it was equipped with magnificent knee-pads and elbow-pads of black leather. Masa panted along behind him, having refused point blank to stay behind with the mule and the tricycle.

Having passed this dangerous place they moved on, standing erect now, but sticking to the undergrowth and avoiding open areas. Kamata clearly knew the road – either he had been given precise instructions, or he had been here before.

They scrambled up the wooded slope and along a stony stream for at least an hour.

At the top the commander waved his hand and the Black Jackets slumped to the ground, worn out. Kamata gestured for Fandor in to come over to him.

The two of them moved away about a hundred paces to a naked boulder overgrown with moss, from which there was a panoramic view of the mountain peaks around them and the valley stretching out below.

‘The village of the shinobi is there,’ said Kamata, pointing to the next mountain.

It was about the same height, and also overgrown with forest, but it had one intriguing and distinctive feature. A section of the summit had split away from the massif (probably as a result of an earthquake) and twisted down, separated from the rest of the mountain by a deep crack. On the side facing them, the separated block ended in a precipice, where the slope had crumbled away, unable to retain the layer of earth on its inclined surface. It was a quite fantastic site: a crooked slice of mountain suspended over an abyss.

Erast Petrovich pressed his binoculars to his eyes. He could not make out any signs of human habitation at first, only the pine trees crowding close together and flocks of birds flying in zigzags. The only structure was clinging to the very edge of the precipice. Adjusting the focus with the little wheel, Fandorin saw a wooden house that was certainly of considerable size. It had something like a little bridge or jetty protruding from the wall that ran down into nowhere. But who could moor at that berth, at a height of two hundred sazhens?

‘Momochi Tamba,’ said Kamata in his distinctive English. ‘His house. The other houses can’t be seen from below.’

The titular counsellor felt his heart leap. O-Yumi was near! But how could he reach her?

He ran the binoculars over the entire mountain again, slowly.

‘I don’t understand how they g-get up there …’

‘That’s the wrong question,’ said the commander of the Black Jackets, looking at Erast Petrovich, not the mountain. His gaze was at once searching and mistrustful. ‘The right question is how do we get up there? I don’t know. Tsurumaki-dono said the gaijin will think of something. Think. I’ll wait.’

‘We have to move closer,’ said Fandorin.

They moved closer. To do that they had to climb to the peak of the split mountain – and then the separated block was very close. They didn’t walk, but crawled to the fissure that separated it off, trying not to show themselves above the grass, although on that side they couldn’t see a living soul.

The titular counsellor estimated the size of the crack. Deep, with a sheer verticalwall – impossible to scramble up. But not very wide. At the narrowest spot, where a dead, charred tree stuck up on the other side, it was hardly more than ten sazhens. The shinobi probably used a flying bridge or something of the sort to get across.

‘Well then?’ Kamata asked impatiently. ‘Can we get across there?’

‘No.’

The commander swore in a Japanese whisper, but the sense of his exclamation was clear enough: I knew a damned gaijin wouldn’t be any use to us.

‘We can’t get across there,’ Fandorin repeated, crawling away from the cliff edge. ‘But we can do something to make them come out.’

‘What?’

The vice-consul expounded his plan on the way back.

‘Secretly position men on the mountain, beside the crack. Wait for the wind to blow in that direction. We need a strong wind. But that’s not unusual in the mountains. Set fire to the forest. When the shinobi see that the flames could spread to their island, they’ll throw a bridge across and come to this side to put them out. First we’ll kill the ones who come running to put out the fire, then we’ll make our way into their village across their bridge.’

With numerous repetitions, checks and gesticulations, the explanation of the plan occupied the entire journey back to the camp.

It was already dark and the paths could not be seen, but Kamata walked confidently and didn’t go astray once.

When he had finally clarified the essential points of the proposed action, he pondered them for a long time.

He said:

‘A good plan. But not for shinobi. Shinobi are cunning. If the forest simply catches fire all of a sudden, they’ll suspect that something’s not right.’

‘Why just all of a sudden?’ asked Fandorin, pointing up at the sky, completely covered with black clouds. ‘The season of the plum rain. There are frequent thunderstorms. A lightning strike – a tree catches fire, the wind spreads the flames. Very simple.’

‘There will be a storm,’ the commander agreed. ‘But who knows when? How long will we wait? One day, two, a week?’

‘One day, two, a week,’ the titular counsellor said, and shrugged, thinking: And the longer the better. You and I, my friend, have different interests. I want to save O-Yumi, you want to kill the Stealthy Ones, and if she dies together with them, there’s no sorrow in that for you. I need time to prepare.

‘A good plan,’ Kamata repeated. ‘But no good for me. I won’t wait a week. I won’t even wait two days. I also have a plan. Better than the gaijin’s.’

‘I wonder what it is.’ The titular counsellor chuckled, certain that the old war-dog was bragging.

They heard muffled braying and the jingling of harness. It was the caravan moving up, after passing through the ravine under cover of darkness.

The Black Jackets quickly unloaded the bundles and crates off the mules. Wooden boards cracked and the barrels of Winchester rifles, still glossy with the factory grease, glinted in the light of dark lanterns.

‘About the forest fire – that’s good, that’s right,’ Kamata said in a satisfied voice as he watched four large crates being unloaded.

Their contents proved to be a Krupps mountain gun, two-and-a-half-inch calibre, the latest model – Erast Petrovich had seen guns like that among the trophies seized by the Turks during the recent war.

‘Shoot from the cannon. The pines will catch fire. The shinobi will run. Where to? I’ll put marksmen on the bottom of the crack. On the other side, where the precipice is, too. Let them climb down on ropes – we’ll shoot all of them.’

Kamata lovingly stroked the barrel of the gun.

Fandorin felt a chilly tremor run down his spine. Exactly what he was afraid of! It wouldn’t be a carefully planned operation to rescue a prisoner, but a bloodbath, in which there would be no survivors.

It was pointless trying to argue with the old bandit – he wouldn’t listen.

‘Perhaps your plan really is simpler,’ said the vice-consul, pretending to stifle a yawn. ‘When do we begin?’

‘An hour after dawn.’

‘Then we need to get a good night’s sleep. My servant and I will bed down by the stream. It’s a bit cooler there.’

Kamata mumbled something without turning round. He seemed to have lost all interest in the gaijin.

‘The dead tree, the dead tree’ – the words hammered away inside the titular counsellor’s head.

To be beautiful

After death is a great skill

That only trees have

1 ‘In ten years, Tokyo is nothing. Real power is the provinces. Real power is Mr Tsurumaki. Japan is not Tokyo. Japan is the provinces’ (distorted English)





THE GLOWING COALS




It was not difficult to get to the next mountain in the dark – Fandorin had memorised the way.

They clambered up to the top by guesswork – just keep going up and when there’s nowhere higher left to go, that’s the summit.

But determining the direction in which the split-away section of the mountain lay proved to be quite difficult.

Erast Petrovich and his servant tried going right and left, and once they almost fell over the edge of a cliff, and the cliff turned out not to be the one they needed – there was a river murmuring down at its bottom, but there was no river at the bottom of the crack.

Who can tell how much more time they would have wasted on the search, but fortunately the sky was gradually growing lighter: the dark clouds crept away to the east, the stars shone ever more brightly, and soon the moon came out. After the pitch darkness, it was as if a thousand-candle chandelier had lit up above the world – you could have read a book.

Kamata would have had to wait a long time for a thunderstorm, Erast Petrovich thought as he led Masa towards the fissure. Somewhere not far away an eagle owl hooted: not ‘wuhu, wuhu’ as in Russia, but ‘wufu, wufu’. That is its native accent, because there is no syllable ‘hu’ in the Japanese alphabet, thought Erast Petrovich.

There it was, the same place, with the charred pine on the far side, the one that the titular counsellor had noticed earlier. The dead tree was his only hope now.

‘Nawa,’1 the vice-consul whispered to his servant.

Masa unwound the long rope from his waist and handed it to him.

The art of lasso-throwing, a souvenir of his time in Turkish captivity, would come in handy yet again. Fandorin tied a wide noose and weighted it with a travelling kettle of stainless steel. He stood at the edge of the black abyss and started swinging the noose in wide, whistling circles above his head. The kettle struck the tree with a mournful clang and clattered across the stones. Missed!

He had to pull back the lasso, coil it up and throw again.

The loop caught on the trunk only at the fourth attempt.

The vice-consul wound the other end of the rope round a tree stump and checked to make sure it held. He set off towards the fissure, but Masa decisively shoved his master aside and went first.

He lay on his back, wrapped his short legs round the rope and set off, placing one hand in front of the other and crawling very quickly. The lasso swayed, the stump creaked, but the fearless Japanese didn’t stop for an instant. In five minutes he was already on the other side. He grabbed hold of the rope and pulled on it – so that Erast Petrovich would not sway as much. So the titular counsellor completed his journey through the blackness with every possible comfort, except that he skinned one hand slightly.

That was the first half of the job done. His watch showed three minutes after eleven.

‘Well, God speed,’ Fandorin said quietly, taking the Herstal out of its holster.

Masa pulled a short sword out from under his belt and checked to make sure that the blade slipped easily out of the scabbard.

Erast Petrovich had estimated that the hanging island was approximately a hundred sazhens across, from the fissure to the precipice. At a stroll, that was two minutes. But they walked slowly, so that no branch would crack and the fallen pines needles wouldn’t rustle. Occasionally they froze and listened. Nothing – no voices, no knocking, only the usual sounds of a forest at night.

The house loomed up out of the darkness unexpectedly. Erast Petrovich almost blundered into the planks of the wall, which were pressed right up against two pine trees. To look at, it was an ordinary peasant hut, like many that they had seen during their journey across the plain. Wooden lattices instead of windows, a thatched straw roof, a sliding door. Only one thing was strange – the area around the hut had not been cleared, the trees ran right up to it on all sides, and their branches met above its roof.

The house was absolutely still and silent, and Fandorin signalled to his servant – let’s move on.

After about fifty paces they came across a second house, also concealed in a thicket – one of the pine trees protruded straight out of the middle of the roof; probably it was used as a column. Not a sound or a glimmer of light here either.

Bewilderment and anxiety forced the titular counsellor to be doubly cautious. Before approaching Tamba’s house – the one hovering at the edge of the precipice – he had to know for certain what he was leaving behind him. So before they reached the precipice, they turned back.

They covered the entire island in zigzags. They found another house exactly like the first two. Nothing else.

And so the entire ‘fortress’ consisted of four wooden structures, and there was no garrison to be seen at all.

What if the shinobi had left their lair and O-Yumi wasn’t here? The idea made Fandorin feel genuinely afraid for the first time.

‘Iko!’2 he said to Masa, and set off, no longer weaving about, straight towards the grey emptiness that could be seen through the pines.

The house of Tamba the Eleventh was the only one surrounded by clear grassy space on three sides. On the fourth side, as Fandorin already knew, there was a gaping precipice.

He could still hope that the inhabitants of this sinister village had gathered for a meeting at the house of their leader (Twigs had said he was called the jonin).

Pressing himself against a rough tree trunk, Erast Petrovich surveyed the building, which differed from the others only in its dimensions. There was nothing noteworthy about the residence of the leader of the Stealthy Ones. Fandorin felt something rather like disappointment. But the worst thing of all was that this house also seemed to be empty.

Had it really all been in vain?

The vice-consul darted across the open space and up the steps on to the narrow veranda that ran along the walls. Masa was right behind him every step of way.

Seeing his servant remove his footwear, Erast Petrovich followed his example – not out of Japanese politeness, but in order to make less noise.

The door was open slightly and Fandorin shone his little torch inside. He saw a long, unlit corridor covered with rice straw mats.

Masa wasted no time. He poured a few drops of oil from a little jug into the groove and the door slid back without creaking.

Yes, a corridor. Quite long. Seven sliding doors just like the first one: three on the left, three on the right and one at the end.

Removing the safety catch of his revolver, Erast Petrovich opened the first door on the right slowly and smoothly. Empty. No household items, just mats on the floor.

He opened the opposite door slightly more quickly. Again nothing. A bare room, with a transverse beam running across the far wall.

‘Damn!’ the titular counsellor muttered.

He moved on quickly, without any more precautions. He jerked open a door on the right and glanced in. A niche in the wall, some kind of scroll in it.

The second door on the left: a floor made of polished wooden boards, not covered with straw, otherwise nothing remarkable.

The third on the right: apparently a chapel for prayer – a Buddhist altar in the corner, statuettes of some kind, an unlit candle.

The third on the left: nothing, bare walls.

No one, absolutely no one! Empty space!

But someone had been here, and very recently – the smell of Japanese pipe tobacco still lingered in the air.

Masa looked round the room that had a wooden floor instead of mats. He squatted down and rubbed the smooth wood. Something caught his interest and he stepped inside.

The vice-consul was about to follow him, but just at that moment he heard a rustling from behind the seventh door, the one closing off the end of the corridor, and he started. Aha! There’s someone there!

It was a strange sound, something like sleepy breathing, the breath expelled not by a man, but a giant or some kind of huge monster, it was so powerful and deep.

Let it be a giant or a monster – it was all the same to Erast Petrovich now. Anything but emptiness, anything but deathly silence!

The titular counsellor waited for an endlessly long out-breath to come to an end, flung the door aside with a crash and dashed forward.

Fandorin only just managed to grab hold of the railings, right on the very edge of the little wooden bridge suspended above the precipice. He was surrounded on all sides by Nothing – the night, the sky, a yawning gulf.

He heard the out-breath of the invisible colossus again – it was the boundless ether sighing, stirred by a light breeze.

There was nothing but blackness below the vice-consul’s feet, stars above his head; all around him were the peaks of mountains illuminated by the moon, and in the distance, between two slopes, the lights of the distant plain.

Erast Petrovich shuddered and backed into the corridor.

He slammed the door into Nowhere and called out:

‘Masa!’

No answer.

He glanced into the room with the wooden floor. His servant was not there.

‘Masa!’ Erast Petrovich shouted irritably.

Had he gone outside? If he was in the house, he would have answered.

Yes, he had gone out. The entrance door, which the titular counsellor had left open, was now closed.

Fandorin walked up to it and tugged on the handle. The door didn’t move. What the hell?

He tugged as hard as he could – the door didn’t budge at all. Was it stuck? That was no great problem. It wasn’t hard to make a hole in a Japanese partition.

Swinging his fist back, the vice-consul punched the straw surface – and cried out in pain. It felt as if he had slammed his hand into iron.

Erast Petrovich heard a grating sound behind him. Swinging round, he saw another partition sliding out of the wall to enclose him in a cramped square between two rooms, the doors of which (as he noticed only now) were also closed.

‘A trap!’ – the realisation flashed through Fandorin’s mind.

He jerked at the door on the left, with no result, and the same with the door on the right.

They had him locked in, like an animal in a cage.

But this animal had fangs. Fandorin pulled out his seven-round Herstal and started swinging round his own axis, hoping that one of the four doors would open now and there would be an enemy behind it – in a close-fitting black costume with a mask that covered all his face, so that only the eyes could be seen.

And in fact he did see a black man without a face, but not where he was expecting to see him. As he gazed round on all sides, the titular counsellor raised his head – and froze. Directly above Fandorin, there was a ninja lying (yes, yes, lying, in defiance of all the laws of nature!) on the ceiling, spreadeagled against it like a spider. The two glinting eyes in the slit between the headscarf and the mask were staring straight at the vice-consul.

Erast Petrovich threw up the hand with the revolver, but the bullet hit the boards of the ceiling – the shinobi grabbed the barrel of the diplomat’s gun with an incredibly fast movement and turned it away. The spider-man had a grip of iron.

Suddenly the floor under Fandorin’s feet caved in and the titular counsellor went hurtling downwards with his eyes closed. Meanwhile the Herstal remained in the ninja’s hand.

Erast Petrovich landed softly, on what felt like cushions. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in darkness, but there was a lamp burning in the basement.

The stunned Fandorin was facing a lean little old man sitting with his legs crossed and smoking a pipe with a tiny bowl at the end of a long stem.

He blew out a cloud of bluish smoke and spoke in English:

‘I wait and you come.’

The narrowed eyes opened wider and glinted with a fierce flame, like two glowing coals.

The wood and the fire,

The coal, the time, the diamond

And the chariot

1 ‘Rope’ (Japanese)

2 ‘Let’s go!’ (Japanese)