Ice Blue - Anne Stuart [65]
She was sitting in the living room, her back to him. Why the hell didn’t she run? He’d made up his mind that if she did, he’d let her go. He’d be taking a risk; if the Shirosama caught her before he knew the urn was gone she would be in for a very bad time. But if Taka kept her with him, then sooner or later he’d have to do what he’d been ordered to do. And he was still fighting it. As long as the Shirosama couldn’t get his hands on the urn it didn’t matter where the shrine was located. There was nothing Shiro Hayashi, the man who called himself the Shirosama, could do about his planned Armageddon as long as Taka held the urn, and he wasn’t going to let go.
“Tell me again what Hana-san has to do with all this?” Summer’s voice was quiet, contemplative.
He grimaced. “Your so-called nanny came from one of the oldest, most powerful families in Japan, dating back to feudal times. In the chaos following World War II she was sent to relatives in California in the hope that she would blend in with the people returning from the detention camps, and eventually she would be brought home again when things had settled down. But most of her family was killed, and she was stranded here, safeguarding her secret.”
“What secret?”
He hesitated. “You want the long version or the short version?” he asked. “In the early seventeenth century a monk and visionary was born in the mountains of Japan. He was an albino, and he took the name Shiro-sama, or White Lord, and he created his own religion, one that combined Buddhism, Shinto and the worship of Kali the Destroyer. He believed Japan must be destroyed to attain its full power in some kind of post-apocalyptic existence, and he had thousands of followers in a time where very few people questioned the way things were.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“I wouldn’t expect you had. What do you know of Japanese history?”
“I read Shogun,” she said, with light sarcasm. “Not to mention I have a doctorate in Asian art.”
He ignored that. “The original Shiro-sama failed, of course, and was ordered by the emperor to commit ritual suicide in his temple in the mountains. He did, and his followers cremated his body and put his bones in a sacred urn to be guarded until the time he was reborn.”
“And that’s the Hayashi Urn?” she said. “A funeral jar? And I kept my cookies in it?”
“The bones are presumably in the possession of the current Shirosama. I don’t think your cookies were contaminated.”
She still didn’t look too happy about it. “Why did Hana have it? And why does the Shirosama want it?”
“Hana was a descendant of one of the most powerful followers of the original Shiro-sama, and the original temple was on lands once belonging to her family. No one knows for sure where the ruins are—only she kept the secret—but the True Realization Fellowship have every intention of retrieving the urn and returning it to where it belongs.”
“What’s wrong with that? You yourself said it was a Japanese treasure that belongs in Japan.”
“It belongs to the people of Japan, and a government that can watch over it. Not a group of fanatics who are far more dangerous than anyone realizes.”
“What harm can an ancient piece of ceramic do?”
He leaned against the wall. “Don’t be naive. The urn is nothing more than a catalyst, a symbol. The current Shirosama and his followers plan to take it back to Japan, find the ruins of the temple and the remains of the original Shiro-sama and reunite the bones and the urn.”
“So?”
“And then, according to legend, the new Shirosama will ascend in full power to the universe, Armageddon will follow, and the world will be