The Kaisho by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online

to despise this place? Was it her refusal to learn Japanese, her eternal homesickness, or just her intolerance of the Japanese themselves? Perhaps it was a combination of all three. Other than her friendship with Nangi, she had made precious few connections in Tokyo and thus found herself isolated, enisled on an Elba of her own making. Or was it of her own making? Nicholas wondered if he was being unfair to her—or whether he was simply fed up with her complaining.
    Of course, there were pressures peculiar to their circumstance. Justine had been pregnant twice. The first time, she had given birth to a girl, who had quickly died. The second time, less than a year ago, she had miscarried in her sixth month. Now there seemed to be no solace for her agony.
    Nicholas put his head in his hands, his mind haunted still by the face of his three-week-old daughter, her blue-white face distorted by the oxygen tent. His dreams echoed with the feeble sound of her small cries like the febrile panting of a wolf snapping at his heels.
    He heard sounds from the corridors as the offices began to fill up. He had no interest in facing anyone at the moment, so he slipped out the side door to his office, took the spiral staircase down one flight to the fully equipped gymnasium. There, stripped to shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers, he spent the next three hours working first on aerobics, then abdominals, weight-circuit training, and finally, his beloved martial arts: aikido, kendo, as well as the various subdisciplines of Akshara, which were so ancient that they had no names in the Japanese language. In this manner he cleansed first his body, then his mind, and finally, his spirit of the various negative toxins that the postmodern world invariably built up.
    Nicholas was long-muscled and wide-shouldered. It was obvious that he was an athlete of some kind, but it was his presence, what the Japanese called Kara, that made him such an extraordinarily intimidating figure. He moved from the waist down, as if his feet were a part of the floor or the earth he walked upon. Seeing him for the first time, one had the distinct feeling that he could not be moved from the spot on which he stood even with extreme measures. He had the unusually upswept eyes that were a legacy of his mother, along with the angular, rugged cheeks, nose, and chin of his father. He was handsome in a charismatic rather than a poster-boy manner, with dark, curling hair flecked here and there with silver.
    He himself did not see it, but those old enough to have known Col. Denis Linnear saw the striking resemblance between father and son in the overall shape of Nicholas’s face, the line of his nose, lips, and jaw. The father, who counted among his ancestors calculating Romans and wild Celts, rather than barbarous Saxons, had had that extraordinary gift of being both warrior and statesman. It was said by those who knew them both that the son possessed the same quality.
    Nicholas’s mother, Cheong, was oriental, and it was only recently that he had been able to unravel the puzzle of her origins. She had been secretly tanjian, like Nicholas’s Chinese grandfather, So-Peng, who had adopted her. So was Nicholas.
    Trained in the arcane mysteries of Tau-tau, the tanjian, whose origins harked back to myth-shrouded ancient China, were ancient mage-warriors who wielded a knowledge so potent, so elemental, that most humans had been cut off from it for centuries.
    The basis of Tau-tau was kokoro, the heart of the cosmos. Kokoro was the membrane of life. Just as in physics the excitation of the atom caused the most extraordinary reactions of energy—light, heat, and percussion—so, too, did the excitation of the cosmic membrane manifest its own ethereal energy.
    Akshara and Kshira, the Way of Light and the Path of Darkness, were the two main branches of Tau-tau. Nicholas, who had only recently been trained in the basics of Akshara, had nevertheless some experience as well battling those versed in