Japan lay sweltering with uncertainty. Four centuries of unbridled warfare had reduced her once sturdy, centralized government to little more than a revered impotency; the country had become the property or the booty of its daimyos-those knights-errant, the pride of a nation.

It was an age of military prowess, of unlicensed chivalry, and to the victor belonged the spoils-till wrested from him, by another more powerful or less nice about the taking.

Shibata, grizzled and fair, sat upon the veranda, looking out, over the ramparts, across the moats, along the busied streets, to the mellowed hillsides beyond. It was all his: gained by life's devoted, loyal service, not to self, but to a chosen, rising superior. It had now come time for him to assert his own supremacy; the lord he served had met his doom, gone the self same way that ambition for ages had decreed-lay shrouded in state, with his good rich blood dripping cold at the dagger's point.