Nathan exhaled slowly through his nose and looked out across the summit.
The Orochi Temple groaned behind him, still settling into its own ruin — a low, grinding complaint of old timber and fractured stone, a roof beam finally surrendering and dropping somewhere in the interior with a dull, echoing crash. Dust and snow rose together in pale columns against the dark sky. The ground around him was red where the great serpentine body had come apart, the snow holding the color the way snow does, vivid and unforgiving against the white.
Loud. Considerably louder than he had intended.
A quiet assassination, he had told himself on the road below. A ghost's entry, no trace, no echo. Well. The ghost had brought down half a temple and left a Daimyo scattered across a mountaintop in pieces. He surveyed the wreckage for a moment with the detached assessment of someone taking an honest inventory, then let it go. Yorimasa was dead. The outcome was the one that mattered.
