Daughter of the Sword by Steve Bein

children away in the night? It is an Inazuma blade! A sword without equal! Of course there will be legends attached to it.”
    “Not legends like these,” said Nakadai.
    “Get a hold of yourself! Legends were spoken of the lord himself. Do you truly believe he killed a hundred men at Kamakura? Neither do I, but that is what the villagers say of him. Choose, my friend, whether you are peasant or samurai. Do you honestly believe spirits can control swords?”
    Nakadai’s head dropped for a moment. When it rose again, his fat cheeks were split in a smile. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. Our lord’s death must be distracting me.” He shook his head as if to throw off the last traces of a bad dream. “I’m sorry. Now, shall we fetch our retainers and return to Lord Ashikaga?”
    Saito’s eyes fell to the body once more. “You go ahead. Someone has to prepare the head and compose his death poem.”
    Nakadai nodded and Saito watched him amble up the hillside, on his way to find the dozen bushi who had accompanied them on the chase. Saito and Nakadai were the best horsemen among the group and had been able to navigate their mounts deeper through the forest than any of the others. Eventually the trees had become so dense that they too were forced to dismount. The pursuit continued on foot, while the horses stayed obediently where they were left. Saito assumed that wherever Nakadai found their horses, he would also find their retainers.
    That didn’t leave much time. As soon as Nakadai’s round figure plodded out of sight, Saito’s gaze fell back on the body of his fallen master. It lay there, legs crossed over each other, the torso twisted in an impossible pose as the spine and rib cage no longer held it to a normal human shape. Kanayama’s right hand still gripped the handle of his tachi , which was so sharp that it sank half its length into the ground when its wielder fell.
    Saito prayed it had not struck a rock when it dropped. He drew the Inazuma blade out of the earth, sighing when he saw that no stone had ground away the perfection of its edge. Inazuma, the weapon’s creator, was a sword smith the world would not see the likes of again for generations. Of course he had taken apprentices, but none of them had been able to replicate the genius of the master himself, and after his death the Inazuma school dropped out of existence. That was two hundred years ago, and his legacy only remained in blades such as this, a treasure Saito never believed he would have the honor to wield in his lifetime.
    Saito was quite a swordsman himself, even among samurai. Nothing along the lines of Lord Kanayama, but still, he was more skilled than most. In addition to the fencing practice that all samurai made their purpose in life, Saito was also a longtime student of iaidō , the art of drawing the sword. He prided himself on the speed of his draw, onhow fluidly it flowed into cuts and parries and counterstrikes. A master of iaidō could draw, cut, and resheathe his blade before his enemy’s corpse hit the ground. Saito was not there yet, but he was trying.
    As it happened, this particular blade was forged by the master Inazuma especially for iaidō . It was named Beautiful Singer for the whistle of the tachi ’s edge as it flashed out of its scabbard. An iaidō sword had to be lighter than most tachi for better speed on the draw; this one felt as if its mass was suspended by muscles of its own, an extension of Saito’s arm, weightless.
    It was truly a masterpiece. To send it to the afterlife with Lord Kanayama would have been criminal. It was no dishonor to take the sword. No dishonor at all. If the only way to rescue a masterpiece was to steal it from a dead man, he told himself, then stealing was neither craven nor shameful.
    And the rumors surrounding the blade couldn’t possibly be true. Saito laughed at the thought as he examined the blade in a beam of sunlight. He wiped its gleaming surface clean, admired the