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TENGU: The Mountain Goblin
The long awaited third installment of
the Burke/Yamashita series has been
scheduled for release in Fall 2008 by
YMAA Publications.
Thanks to all the readers who have
kept the faith, reading and re-reading
Sensei and Deshi and continually
letting me know that the audience for
fiction that takes the martial arts
seriously is still alive and well.
I hope you'll enjoy Tengu.
Keep your eyes open for details
about subsequent novels in the
series as well--Kage (book #4) is well
under way.
JD
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Prologue: Demons
A famous physicist once said that it’s
impossible to examine the world
objectively: the very act of looking disturbs
the gossamer filaments that bind the
universe together and, as a result, they
vibrate with unanticipated harmonics. Our
mere existence changes everything.
We move through life thinking that the
distinction between ourselves and others,
between ourselves and the world, is
absolute. The Zen masters know better. We
are linked in ways that are both intimate
and fearsome.
I have come to believe that this is so. I don’t
think I could ever have anticipated the
events that would have brought me
somewhere far from my home, preparing to
kill the one person I most admired in the
world. Looking back, it is as if we were
drawn to that place by a chain that, for all its
invisibility, was stronger than the steel of
the sword that my master taught me to
wield.
Our progress through this world sets the
sea of molecules in motion. Like tide or
wind, our very passage through the world
creates unseen patterns in the fabric of life.
They churn and swirl. Some fade away into
quiet; others spawn into things of a size
and monstrous intensity we could never
imagine.
These, ultimately are the demons that haunt
us. They are not some force from out
there—they are creatures of our own
making. They grow, sometimes without our
awareness, spinning off into the darkness,
until the day their orbit brings us once more
into collision.
The old teachers were men alive to the
currents that swirled around them. Human
storm cells themselves, they churned
through life with an intensity that de-
stabilized the system. And they knew this.
So they searched the darkness, aching to
divine the pattern of the cyclones that
moved, just beyond the limen of
consciousness. The power they sensed
was something to harness, something to
defend against. Something to fear. And the
melancholy dignity they have passed on to
those who follow in their footsteps is this: if
you train hard enough, you can face the
looming force in the darkness and not flinch.
The sensei, students of both motion and
stillness, know that the quest for mastery
and control creates new currents, new
powers, and new challenges.
These challenges become tests that some
survive. But all too often, only the
bystanders remain to tell the story.
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