The white walls take two days to reach, and they do not seem to get any closer.
That is the trick of them.
I see them from the shrine at dawn, a long low line like chalk on the edge of the world, and I walk toward them all that morning, and in the afternoon they are still the same line, no thicker, no nearer.
It is only on the second day, in the flat gold light of evening, that they stop being a line and become a thing.
A wall.
A huge pale unbroken cliff of plastered stone, forty feet high, running away in both directions farther than the eye can follow, with towers at every bowshot and a black-tiled roof along the top.
I stand on a rise a mile off and I look at it for a very long time.
It is very large, says the voice.
“Yes.”
I did not know they were so large.
“Neither did I.”
Are we still going in?
I do not answer at once.
My forehead itches under the strip of cloth.
The little nub of bone beneath it has begun to ache when I am tired, a slow warm throb like a second heartbeat.
I press it with two fingers.
It settles.
“We’re still going in,” I say.
Good, it says.
And after a moment, more quietly: I only wished to be asked.
The countryside near the capital is not like the rest of the world.
I had noticed it the day before, without understanding.
Now I see it plainly.
The paddies here are laid out in perfect rectangles, as straight as a ruled page, the dikes trimmed, the water channels lined in stone.
The villages are neat, whitewashed, roofed in grey tile.
The farmers wear clean blue coats and bow when I pass.
There is not a single rag.
Not a single hungry face.
For a while I think it is a mercy.
Then I count the crane banners on the gateposts, and the guards at the crossroads, and the silence in the fields where there ought to be singing, and I understand.
These are not free people.
These are the lucky ones.
The ones the King keeps well-fed so that they can be shown to travelers.
A garden of contented cattle, planted around the slaughterhouse door.
On the third day, at a crossing of two roads, I see the convoy.
It comes in from the north along a wide paved highway, and I see it first as a dust cloud, then as a line, then as a river of carts.
Oxen.
Black-lacquered wagons with iron-bound wheels.
A hundred of them, perhaps more, in a long slow file, escorted by mounted guards at every fifth cart, and on every wagon, packed in straw, row upon row upon row, the pale clay jars.
I stand in the ditch with my straw hat over my face and I watch them go by.
It takes an hour.
I count the jars on the first cart, and there are thirty-eight, and then I stop, because I understand the sum.
Thirty-eight to a wagon.
A hundred wagons.
Four thousand souls, nodding gently on their way to the white walls in the soft evening light, their paper seals fluttering in the wind.
Shigen, says the voice.
It is very small.
There are so many.
“I know.”
They are all calling.
All of them.
It is like standing in a storm.
“I know.” My hands are shaking.
“I can’t.”
No.
“I can’t do this.
Not all of it.
Not—”
No, it says gently.
Not yet.
Watch.
Remember where they are going.
I press my fist against my mouth, and I watch until the last cart has passed.
Then I follow the dust along the highway, at a distance, into the twilight, toward the place where the wall has a mouth.
They will not let just anyone through the gate.
I see that at once.
The Great South Gate stands open at the end of a wide plaza, forty paces across, guarded by two dozen men in black lacquer.
Every traveler is stopped.
Every cart is searched.
Every man is made to remove his hat, and a guard in a white-corded helm looks at his forehead.
Looking for horns.
Looking for the nub of bone.
They know, says the voice.
“Of course they know.”
What do we do?
I turn and walk away from the gate.
I walk a mile along the wall, to the west, through a stand of willows, and find what I had half hoped to find: a ditch.
It comes out of the wall at the base of a low stone arch, a culvert, a great black drainage mouth where the city’s waste runs out into the river.
A tanner’s stink comes off it in waves, thick enough to chew.
There is an iron grate, half rusted through, and nobody guarding it, because nobody in his right mind would want to go in.
I take off my sandals and tie them around my neck.
“Ready?” I say.
No, says the voice.
But I would like to see.
I will not describe the culvert.
It is not the sort of thing that bears describing.
I go through it in the dark, wading waist-deep in a slow warm current, with my sword held over my head and my hat jammed low, for a distance I estimate at four hundred paces.
I do not gag.
I do not slip.
I only count, and when the count fails I start it again, and at the end there is a rusted ladder and a manhole cover and a slab of night sky.
I climb into the Lower Ward.
That is what they call it.
I learn the name from a drunk who is pissing against the wall, and who stares at me, an apparition dripping ordure in the dark, and says with sudden drunken gravity, “Welcome to the Kawara, brother.
It’s not much.”
It is not.
The white walls end where the river begins.
Between the two, in the crook of a wide brown bend, lies a district that the maps do not mention.
It is a maze of narrow crooked lanes, hunched wooden houses leaning together over the alleys like old women gossiping, so close that a man could pass a bowl of rice from one window to the next.
There are lanterns.
There are stalls.
There are ten thousand people, more, packed into an area smaller than Ashigawa’s paddy-fields, cooking, arguing, selling, singing, spitting, dying, and every single one of them is a non-royal.
I stand in the mouth of the first alley and I stare.
I had not known there was a place like this.
I had thought, in some dim way, that the capital was the King’s, and the villages were ours, and that the two were separate.
But this is the seam.
This is the place where the seam is sewn.
These are the people who empty the King’s chamber pots, and carry his water, and sweep his floors, and burn his dead.
They live in the shadow of his wall, and they know exactly what it is.
“You,” says a voice.
It is a woman’s, low and dry and unsurprised.
It comes from a stoop across the lane, where a squat figure in a patched brown coat sits smoking a long thin pipe.
“You’ve come in by the culvert.”
I say nothing.
“It’s all right.
Half the ward does.
The guards don’t check it.
They can’t stand the smell.” She takes the pipe from her mouth.
She is about fifty, broad, sunburnt, with a face like a good loaf of bread and one gold tooth.
“You’ve got shit on your sleeve, love.
Come in and get washed.
I’ve got soup.”
I do not move.
She lets out a long gusty breath.
It is a sound of enormous patience.
“Oh, for the sake of the gods, boy.
If I’d wanted to sell you to the King I’d have done it while you were in the ditch.
Do you want soup or not?”
I look at her.
I look at the tavern behind her, a crooked little place with a lantern over the door and a sign in the shape of a wet sleeve.
I think of Hanae, stirring gruel with a stick.
Eat, I think.
“Yes,” I say.
“Please.”
Her name is Tsuyu.
She keeps the tavern, and she has kept it for thirty years, and she knows more about the King’s palace than the King.
That is what she tells me, over a bowl of thin fish soup, with the door barred and the shutters closed and a small brass lamp making a ring of light on the table.
I eat as slowly as I can, which is not slowly.
She watches me with her chin on her fist.
“You’re the bell-ringer,” she says.
“I’m nobody.”
“You’re the bell-ringer.
I’ve had six people come through that door this week with the same story.
A young man, a black sword, a bit of cloth around his head.” She taps her forehead.
“That’s the horn, isn’t it?
They said there was a horn.”
I put down my spoon.
“Don’t look like that.” She waves a hand.
“I’m not going to go looking.
I’ve seen a lot worse.
I had a customer once with a whole foot growing out of his back.
He paid on time.”
“Why are you helping me?”
“Because I want to see it burn.” She says it flatly.
“The wall.
The palace.
All of it.
I’ve lived in the King’s shadow for fifty years, and I’ve watched him take my mother, and my husband, and my brother, and my three sons.
Not in one go.
He’s clever about it.
A tithe here, a levy there.
A little at a time, so you don’t notice.” She picks up her pipe.
“I noticed.”
Her hands are steady.
Her voice is not.
“So I run a tavern.
And I listen.
And I tell people things, if they ask nicely.” A slow tilt of the head.
“What do you want to know?”
I take a breath.
“The vault,” I say.
“Under the palace.
Where they keep the jars.”
Tsuyu is silent for a long time.
“Ah,” she says at last.
“You want to see the Cage.”
“The what?”
“That’s what the servants call it.
The old ones.
The ones who’ve swept those halls for forty years.” She draws on the pipe.
It’s a room.
A very big one.
It’s under the throne hall, two hundred feet down, cut out of the rock.
They bring the jars in by a long slope, on the great wagons, and they open them one by one at the edge of a pit.”
“And the crane—”
“Is in the pit.” She says it very quietly.
“I’ve never seen it.
Nobody sees it.
But the sweepers say there’s a sound, sometimes, in the night, through the drains.
Like a great many people whispering.
And every year, at the Festival of the Tithe, when the biggest convoy comes in, the whole palace goes quiet.
The King goes down himself, with his priests.
And when he comes back up, he looks ten years older.”
“When is the festival?”
“Nine days.”
I set my hands flat on the table.
Nine days.
Four thousand jars.
A whole year’s harvest, all gathered in one place, one night, one room.
It is a chance, says the voice.
Yes.
It is also a trap.
Yes.
Both can be true.
I lift my eyes to Tsuyu.
She is watching me with her bright, hard, tired gaze, and I see, deep behind it, something that I recognize.
It is a look I have seen on the faces of the villagers at Nagare.
It is the look of a person who has waited so long for a door to open that she has forgotten she is standing at it.
“How do I get in?” I say.
“Ah,” says Tsuyu.
“Now that’s a very good question.
And the answer, I’m afraid—”
She stops.
It is not a sound.
It is the lack of one.
The tavern has been full of small noises all evening: the wind in the shutters, the creak of the beams, the far-off murmur of the ward.
Now they all stop at once.
The lantern flame stands straight up, unmoving.
The soup in my bowl is perfectly still.
Tsuyu’s face has gone white.
“They’ve found you,” she says.
“They can’t have—”
“They have.” She is on her feet, moving fast for a woman her size, sweeping the bowls off the table.
“That’s the Talons.
I know the feel.
Every sweeper in the city knows the feel.” She yanks a floorboard up, and there is a black hole under it.
“Get down.
Go through the cellar.
It comes out in the back lane, by the well—”
The door explodes.
It does not open.
It is not kicked in.
It simply ceases to be a door.
One moment it is there, a heavy oak slab barred with iron, and the next it is a spray of splinters and a cold night wind and a very large shape stooping through the gap.
He is enormous.
Not tall, exactly.
Wide.
His shoulders scrape the doorframe on both sides.
He wears a heavy suit of white-corded lacquer that has been made to fit him, and in each hand he carries a long iron rod, thick as my wrist, ending in a heavy hooked spike.
His face is bare.
It is a young face, round and smooth, almost childlike, and it is smiling.
On his chest, through the open front of his armor, glows the brand.
It is not a splinter.
I have seen splinters.
This is a crane, the whole wingspan of it, seared in white lines from collarbone to belt, and it moves as he breathes.
“Found him,” says the big man happily.
“Found him, found him, found him.”
Behind him, in the street, two more figures are stepping out of the dark.
A woman in a feathered cloak, all white plumes, with a long curved blade in each hand.
A narrow, gaunt man in gray with a bow the height of his body and a quiver of black arrows.
“The Talons,” Tsuyu breathes.
“Oh gods.
Oh, you fool boy, they were meant to be at the palace.”
“The King’s own,” I say.
“The best he has.”
The woman in the feather cloak looks at me across the wreck of the doorway.
She has a beautiful, cold, pinched face, and her eyes are very pale.
“I am Kohane,” she says.
“That is Ibuki.
The one in the back is Yorozu, and he does not talk.
You are the boy from the bridge.”
“Yes.”
“His Majesty wishes you to know that he is sorry.”
“That’s what he said on the bridge.”
“He meant it then, too.” Her lip curls.
“He is a soft man.
It is a great failing in a king.” She lifts both blades.
“We are not.”
I feel the room in my chest lurch.
I close my eyes for exactly one breath, four counts, and I let the ring go.
It does not work.
I feel it strike them.
I feel it go out through the wrecked door like a hammer through cloth.
And I see Ibuki stagger.
The big man’s smile falters.
His shoulders hunch.
A thin line of blood runs from his nose.
But he does not fall.
“Ow,” he says, in a hurt, aggrieved little voice, like a child who has stubbed a toe.
“That hurts.”
Kohane does not even break stride.
She takes a single step forward, and the blades come up, and her pale eyes narrow.
“It is as the King said.
A splinter’s bell.
Not enough.
We have the whole feather.” She lifts her chin.
“Kill him, Ibuki.”
The big man roars.
He comes across the room in a single bound.
I go sideways, and one of the iron rods smashes through the table, and the whole thing goes to matchwood.
Tsuyu screams.
I catch her by the collar and throw her down the cellar hole and she goes with a yelp, and I roll, and come up with my father’s sword in my hand, and the second rod takes me across the ribs.
I feel something crack.
It is like being hit by a falling tree.
I go over a bench and through a wall, a thin plaster one, and land in a shower of dust in the back room.
The taste of blood fills my mouth.
My side is a bright white scream.
I try to breathe, and it comes in a shallow rasp, and I know without looking that at least two ribs are gone.
Shigen, says the voice.
I know.
They are too strong.
The ring will not hold them.
I know.
I could—
Not yet.
I roll to my knees.
The wall in front of me is a hole.
Through it, I can see the broken tavern, the lamp guttering on the floor, and the three shapes coming in: the huge one, the plumed one, the gaunt one nocking an arrow.
I see Kohane’s pale eyes.
I see Ibuki’s happy mouth.
I think of Botan.
Falling, he said.
First, you learn to fall.
I do not stand.
I push off from the floor and go forward, low, under the arc of the first rod, and drive my shoulder into Ibuki’s knee.
It is like ramming a tree.
He hardly moves.
But his weight is on the wrong foot, and I catch his ankle in both hands, and I roll, the way Botan taught me, and the whole vast bulk of him goes over my shoulder and through the doorway and into the street.
He lands with a crash that shakes the lane.
“Oh,” he says, sitting up.
He seems astonished.
“Oh, that’s good.”
An arrow takes me in the thigh.
I do not see it coming.
I hear it: a thin flat thup, like a wet finger snapped against a drumskin.
Then the pain, hot and sudden, high on the outside of my left leg.
I look down.
There is a black-fletched shaft standing out of the muscle, and around the wound the skin is already turning dark.
Poison.
I break the shaft.
I do not think.
I break it at the skin and I throw myself out through the doorway into the lane, because inside I am a target, and the arrows are coming faster now, one after another, each with the same flat thup, and I hear them punching through the plaster where I was.
The lane is narrow.
Ten feet across.
On either side the leaning houses rise three stories, wooden and shuttered, hung with washing lines and lanterns.
I run along it, dragging my leg, and the arrows follow me.
One skims my ear.
One takes a lantern and it explodes in a spray of burning oil.
Shigen.
I know.
The leg.
It is going numb.
I know.
Shigen, please.
“Not yet,” I say aloud.
Then when?
I do not have an answer.
I only have the lane, and the poison creeping up my thigh, and the three shapes coming after me with their patient horrible cheerfulness.
Kohane is somewhere on the rooftops, I can hear her feet.
Ibuki is thundering behind me with a rod in each hand.
The archer is a silent shadow, always at the edge of sight.
I duck into a side alley.
Then another.
The ward is a warren, and I know nothing of it, but I run.
At the end of the third alley, the lane simply stops.
It is a dead end.
A blank wall, twelve feet high, glistening with damp, and a heap of rubbish at its foot.
There is no door.
There is no window.
There is only a dripping drainpipe and the night sky, and behind me, at the mouth of the alley, the steady approach of three sets of feet.
I turn around.
They are standing at the end of the lane in a row.
Ibuki in the middle, rods dangling. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Kohane at his left, blades crossed.
Yorozu, a little apart, with his arrow drawn and pointed, unwavering, at my heart.
“That is enough,” says Kohane.
“Kneel.”
“No.”
“His Majesty asked for you alive.” She tilts her head.
“He did not say in what state.”
“Kneel,” says Ibuki, brightly.
“It’ll be all right.
It’ll be all right, it’s only going to hurt a bit.”
I straighten.
My leg is dead from the hip down.
My ribs grind.
I hold my father’s sword low in both hands, and I feel the blade thrum, faintly, against my palms.
Now?
says the voice.
Now.
I do not do it the way I did on the bridge.
I do not let it flood.
I do not let the horns come, and the mask, and the great dark rush.
There is no room for that in a ten-foot alley.
Instead I do something I have never tried.
I close my eyes, and I go down into the room, and I find the demon standing at the edge of the black water with its hands cupped.
One hand, I say.
One?
Just the right.
Just this.
A pause.
Then, slowly, it smiles.
Yes, it says.
I can do that.
The heat comes into my right arm.
It is very precise.
It begins at the shoulder and runs down like a spill of hot ink, lengthening the bones, hardening the skin.
The fingers stretch.
The nails curve.
I feel the muscles knit and thicken and bunch, and the black veins rise along the forearm in a fine lattice, and the whole limb swells to half again its size.
My right hand, when I open my eyes and look at it, is a long black claw, and it grips my father’s sword like iron tongs.
The rest of me is still my own.
I turn my head and look at the three of them.
“Oh,” says Ibuki softly.
“Oh, that’s new.”
“Careful,” says Kohane.
I step forward.
I am not fast.
Not the way I was on the bridge.
My left leg is dragging and my ribs are broken.
But my right arm moves with a speed that seems to come from somewhere else, and my father’s sword moves with it, and when Ibuki swings the first rod at my head, I catch it.
I catch it in the black claw.
I feel the impact go up my arm and out through my shoulder, enough to break a normal man’s bones, and it does nothing.
The iron bends in my fingers like hot wax.
I twist.
The rod comes out of his hand.
Ibuki stares at it.
He stares at me.
His round face, for the first time, is truly frightened.
“That’s mine,” he says.
I put my father’s sword through his belly.
It goes in to the hilt.
There is a wet thick sound.
The great brand on his chest flares white, and he screams, high and thin and utterly childish, and he grabs my arm with both hands and holds on.
He is still smiling.
It is the worst thing I have ever seen.
“It hurts,” he says.
“It hurts, it hurts, it—”
I pull the sword out.
He sits down in the alley.
He puts both hands over the hole, looking puzzled.
And then his eyes go blank and he falls sideways, and the white brand goes dark.
Behind, says the voice, quick and calm.
I drop.
Kohane’s blade takes a lock of my hair off the back of my head.
She has come down from the rooftop in one fluid leap, feather cloak spread like wings, and both her swords are already moving.
I get my own up in time to catch one.
The other comes in under my guard and opens my left shoulder from collarbone to bicep.
I do not feel it.
The poison has taken that arm as well.
“You are very good,” she says, above the ring of steel.
“I confess I did not expect it.
The King said you were a boy.”
“I am.”
“Then he is a fool.”
She is fast.
Faster than Kagemasa.
Faster than any human being should be, with a flowing dancer’s grace that reminds me horribly of the King.
Every stroke of hers is a bird’s dive, and I cannot follow it.
I block, and block, and block, and each block costs me a little more, and I feel the right arm burning as the demon’s strength drains out of it into the parry.
She is too quick, says the voice.
I know.
I cannot hold the arm much longer.
I know.
Shigen, the archer.
I see it in the corner of my eye.
A tall gray shape against the mouth of the alley, the bow drawn back to the ear, the tip of the arrow steady as a star, aimed at the exact center of my back.
I have one chance.
I do it the way Iwa taught me.
I do not think.
I step into Kohane’s stroke, into the sweep of the left blade, and I take it on my dead shoulder, and I feel it bite to the bone.
She gasps.
She is not used to being met.
She hesitates for the barest half-heartbeat, and in that half-heartbeat I seize her by the throat with my clawed hand and swing her around.
The arrow hits her in the back.
It is a beautiful shot.
It goes through the feather cloak and the white lacquer and out through the front of her chest, and she stares down at the black tip, poking through her ribs, with an expression of pure astonishment.
“Yorozu,” she says.
The gaunt man’s face does not change.
He is already reaching for another arrow.
I let go of her.
She drops.
And I throw, with my whole right arm, the only weapon I have, my father’s sword, spinning end over end down the length of the alley.
It takes Yorozu through the throat.
He looks at it.
He does not speak.
He never did.
He sits down slowly against the wall, with the black-fletched arrow still nocked, and the sword standing out of his neck like a flag, and I watch the white brand on his chest dim and go out.
Kohane is on her knees.
She is not dead.
Not quite.
She kneels in the filth of the alley with the arrow sticking out of her, one hand pressed to the wound, and looks up at me with her pale dazed eyes.
“He was right,” she says.
“The King.
He said you would be a problem.”
“Where is the vault?”
“You will not reach it.” She almost laughs.
“You cannot.
He has already prepared.
The festival, the priests, the great wards, the whole hall.
Nine days, and he has had nineteen years.”
“Where is the vault?”
“Under the throne.” Blood is trickling from the corner of her mouth.
“Two hundred feet.
Behind the door of the nine white keys.
There is a chamber.
He goes down every year.
He takes a lamp.
He sits.” She smiles at me, dreamily.
“He weeps.
Did you know that?
Every year.
The whole night.
We hear him through the floor.”
I stare at her.
“He is a soft man,” she whispers.
“A king should not be soft.”
She topples forward, and does not move again.
I stand in the alley for a very long time.
The demon has let go of my arm.
It lies at my side, pale and shaking, the veins slowly fading into the skin.
The poison is a slow black tide climbing my leg, and my shoulder is a crimson ruin, and I am aware, distantly, of the sound of a woman calling my name from behind the wall.
Shigen, says the voice.
Shigen, you are dying.
“I know.”
Not from the wounds.
From the poison.
I can slow it, but not for long.
“How long?”
An hour.
A pause.
Perhaps two.
I laugh.
It is a thin, cracked thing.
“I’ve had worse.”
I do not think you have.
“No,” I admit.
I lean against the wall.
The alley swims.
Somewhere above me, at the top of the wall, a rope comes down, and a ladder, and a broad brown face peers over the parapet with a gold tooth flashing in the lantern light.
“Oh, you idiot,” says Tsuyu.
“Oh, you stupid, stubborn, magnificent boy.
Hold on.
Hold on!
I’ve got a friend who knows about poisons.”
I close my eyes.
I let go.
The last thing I feel, as the darkness closes over me, is a small warm presence in the back of my skull, curling around the edge of the room, holding the last of the light against the dark.
I will sit with you, it says.
All the way through.
And from somewhere very far away, on the other side of the white walls, faint and sweet and impossible to mistake, a woman begins to sing.
End of Chapter Eleven