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prickly warrior!”
    “Enough!” Ken’ishi stepped toward him.
    “Are you worthy to serve, samurai? Or will your suffering be your undoing?”
    “What? You speak nonsense!”
    The man laughed. “And now anger claims your composure. You are too easy to manipulate. Bah! Very well, here are my terms.”
    Ken’ishi stood now just out of reach of the man’s greatsword. He could not deny that the man’s strange manner and words had unsettled him, pricked at things deep within that he could not name. He reached for the emptiness again and squeezed Silver Crane’s hilt with his right hand. The sword remained silent in his grip, quiescent, but attentive and sharp as a razor. Perhaps it was hungry for this man’s blood.
    The man said, “I shall give you one free cut. In the future, at a time of my choosing, I will come to you and demand a return stroke, whereupon I will cut with all my might. A river of your blood will stain my blade.”
    Ken’ishi considered this.
    “Do you accept my terms?” the man said.
    Ken’ishi drew his blade. “I do.”
    “Then know that after your stroke, you are bound by honor to offer me a return stroke on the day of my choosing.” The man slid the massive great sword, with its blade as long as Ken’ishi was tall and as wide as his palm, into the long scabbard across his back. “You may have your stroke, samurai.”
    Ken’ishi settled into the emptiness between moments, wariness tickling him, expectation of some trick tingling with unease up and down his back. He listened for warnings from the kami , but the spirits of the wood and air and earth hung silent as well as if in rapt fascination or utter disregard of the outcome.
    “What you waiting for, warrior?” the man said, his voice devoid of fear. “Take your stroke, or else I shall kill you on this road here and now.”
    Ken’ishi raised Silver Crane’s curved, polished sheen high.
    The man did not flinch.
    Ken’ishi leaped forward, slashing. The man’s neck and spine offered hardly any resistance. Ken’ishi passed behind the man and stopped, recognizing the perfection of his cut.
    He heard the man’s feet stumble. Something landed in the dirt and bobbled wetly.
    He expected the sound of a body toppling like a felled tree, but it did not come. He spun just in time for a shock such as he had not experienced in more than three years. He saw the big man’s body still standing, saw the man’s severed head lying in the dirt, looking up at him dispassionately from a grotesque angle, saw the huge meaty hand reach down and pick up the head by the hair. The body turned to face Ken’ishi, and the hand raised the head to regard him.
    “Well struck, samurai,” said the head. “I will return at a time of my choosing and claim my stroke. Until then, fare well, and guard your virtue.”
    Ken’ishi tried to speak, but no words would come. A chill shot through him.
    The towering headless shoulders turned away from him and strode away down the road, swinging the head lackadaisically, like a child with a bucket.
    The man disappeared around the next bend in the road before Ken’ishi’s body reclaimed the will to move. He looked down at the blood on this blade, on the road, the dripping trail that followed the man’s path.
    It had been real.
    And the last time he had seen a headless body maintain its life had been during the horrific battle with the demon bandit Hakamadare, a battle that had only ended with the complete dismemberment of the demon’s body and the roasting of the head until it was nothing but a blackened skull.
    This man did not seem to be an oni.
    But what was he?
    * * *
    Ken’ishi’s wariness remained at high tension as he made his way down into the mountain valley. The silver-frothed river gushed and burbled down the rocky bed in the folds between mountains. Towering walls of pine trees loomed over him, shrouding their under-parts in cool shadow. The road followed the river but could hardly be called a road, little