Read Chapter 13: — MIDNIGHT TIDE

The midnight rise in the river lifted Yagyu’s deeper vessels over the shallow approach.

His plan had depended on Li Sheng clearing the patrols.

Instead he entered a prepared kill zone.

Canal boats swung from hiding places. Archers lit the night. Grappling hooks caught pirate rails.

Yagyu realised the betrayal immediately.

“Lin Zuo,” he said when he saw the officer standing at the bow of the lead boat.

They had met only briefly ten years earlier, but the scar on Yagyu’s face remembered Tang Xiao’s household more faithfully than memory did.

Lin drew the blade that had belonged to his master.

“Do you remember this?”

Yagyu smiled.

“I remember the man who carried it.”

“That is enough.”

The vessels collided.

Lin crossed onto the pirate deck.

The fight around them became noise and weather. He heard steel, screams, water, commands in Chinese and Japanese. Yet the circle between him and Yagyu seemed almost quiet.

Yagyu was older, slower, but more careful than he had been.

Lin was no longer fifteen.

For ten years he had replayed the poisoned dart, the missed chance, the horse disappearing into rain.

He had imagined revenge as a clean act.

It was not clean.

Yagyu fought with traps, hidden blades and poisoned darts. Twice Lin had to give ground rather than take the opening offered to him.

“You learned fear,” Yagyu mocked.

“I learned patience.”

Behind Yagyu, one of the pirates tried to stab Lin from the side.

A lime packet exploded in the man’s face.

Tang Zheng came over the rail.

Lin swore.

“I told you to stay on the rescue boat.”

“I was rescuing you.”

“You are doing it badly.”

They fought back to back.

For one impossible heartbeat Lin felt twenty-five again and fifteen at the same time—master and student, father and son, past and present occupying the same deck.

Yagyu saw it too.

His expression changed.

He retreated toward the stern.