"Yvonne Navarro - Elektra" - читать интересную книгу автора (Navarro Yvonne)

life, it seems, is much more like the ancient Japanese game of Go, where even the best of players can
sometimes find themselves seriously trapped and unable to break free, even beyond the death of a
playing piece. Go, unlike life, assumes two sides with equally matched opponents. Some might say it’s
good against evil, but it’s never truly that simple. Life is that game of Go, always going on around us,
everywhere we turn or think to turn, in every choice we make, every step we take.

The ancients whisper to one another that secret portions of the game are real, that somewhere there are
actual competitors, and that everything in the lives of the players in this mystical game continues from a
challenge match of Go started five hundred years ago in Japan. They talk in hushed tones about how it
began in a medieval Japanese village where the clan wars had finally ended and an entire generation of
samurai suddenly found themselves with little or no livelihood, no way to feed and support families and
wives, no means to provide dowries for daughters waiting to be wed. Life for them became an existence
of anger and boredom.

As is often the case—or again, so they say—idle hands are the playground of the devil, and so they
turned to the villagers for entertainment and sustenance. The languishingronin robbed and pillaged and
committed other acts considered unspeakable, and soon the powerless villagers searched for other
methods with which to defend themselves. They turned to stealth and secrecy, and ultimately found their
salvation in mastery of the mystical arts. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that long before the last of the masterless
samurai were defeated.

Knowledge, however, had taken a firm hold, and over the years these humble villagers grew into a large
and powerful organization. What had started out of necessity as a militia to protect the people turned into
a dark and criminal enterprise, ayakuza powered by forces the average man would never understand.
They called itthe Hand. Its practitioners hid their faces behind the black costumes of ninjas, and the rare
witness to a Hand member’s death whispered of the acrid green smoke that wafted from the body when
its spirit went on to its reward…or punishment.

The Hand grew strong,too strong. Ruthless, cruel,barbaric —they evolved into exactly what they had
been created to defeat. Their darkness blossomed like kudzu and took over large parts of the
underworld until even the hushed mention of their name brought shudders of dread.

But things have a way of balancing out.

For every black deed, there is a white one, for every evil created, something good is also born. Some of
theninjutsu students of the Hand and the shadow arts split away from their increasingly corrupt and
power-hungry masters. They called themselves the Chaste, and vowed they would not be defiled by the
ways of darkness, nor would they be tempted by the worldly treasures that had so driven their former
brothers to greed and rapacity. Hidden in secret mountain retreats, they trained in the same mystical
shadow arts and mastered the same deadly skills, but their goals were to balance out the dark influence
of the Hand. And while it was never intended to be so—such things seldom are—a war began between
the two factions.

Or maybe…

It was a game.

And so it raged. Through decade after decade, century after century, times of political riots,
assassinations both successful and unsuccessful, and public violence. Unlike their dark-side counterparts,
the Chaste couldn’t offer wealth and power as rewards, so as they fought with the Hand, they began an