Yamada Monogatari by Richard Parks

Author:Richard Parks [Parks, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, novel
ISBN: 9781607014652
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2015-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

I’ve never had the knack of just letting go of something puzzling me. Rie knew this. So it would have been no surprise to her, had she known, that I took it upon myself to make a circuit of the nunnery walls from the outside. All I had to do was go out the main gate, walk back to the small outside gate which marked the northernmost point of Yahiko-ji, and walk the boundary, all the way to where the nunnery compound ended and the main temple compound began, just short of the ravine.

This did not teach me anything I did not already know from my examination of the inside wall, but at least I was able to eliminate the idea of a discarded scaling ladder, improbable as it was. There was no sign. No footprints, no out of place indentations in the ground along the perimeter, not even an animal trail Nothing.

The assassin did not scale the wall. The assassin did not break through the wall. If the assassin did not have a mistress on the inside, how had the breach occurred? The answer I kept coming back to, time and again, was that it was impossible. Yet it had happened, so it clearly was not impossible. Somewhere there was another possibility I had overlooked, and all I had to do now was find it. So far I had considered every possibility that made any sense whatsoever—

Perhaps it is time to consider a possibility which makes no sense at all.

Which turned out to be easier than I had believed it would be.

What if I was right about the method but wrong about the reason? Suppose one of the nuns had indeed opened the gate, not for a lover, but for the assassin, knowing all along what he was, what would happen?

The idea made me shudder, but once the possibility was considered, I realized there need be no assassin. Someone in league with the temple’s attackers would simply have opened the nunnery’s main gate to the temple compound directly and let the attackers who were already inside the walls into the nunnery itself. The small outside gate need never have been opened at all, not for a lover or anyone else. So . . . if not a lover, then why? Money? A nun grown tired of the ascetic life of contemplation in alliance with her sister nuns’ murderers for gold? As distasteful as such a possibility remained, I now had to consider it. I also considered it just as likely the corrupt nun was immediately cut down for her pains, since from the reports of both Tomoko and Rie, who had seen the attack from different positions, it was clear the attackers did not plan to leave anyone within the nunnery alive, and thus she would have become the very first victim . . .

I went back into the temple compound. My sister had gone into the village of Yahiko on an errand, but I found Tomoko. The old nun was praying and lighting incense in their temple.

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