The poison takes me down through three floors of the dark.
I do not know it at the time.
I know only that I am lying somewhere cool and close, on a straw pallet, with a wet cloth on my forehead and a taste like burnt iron in my mouth, and that the world is coming and going in long slow waves.
A ceiling of black beams.
A lamp.
Tsuyu’s broad frowning face, upside down, saying something urgent to somebody out of sight.
Then nothing.
Then a hand on my jaw, forcing open my teeth, and something bitter and foul running down my throat.
Drink, says a voice.
It is not Tsuyu’s.
It is a man’s, thin and dry and cracked, with a rasp in it like a page being torn.
All of it.
Do not spit.
I did not make it for you to spit.
I drink.
The world goes black.
I do not think I am dreaming when it happens.
I think I am somewhere else.
The room is very small now.
I understand that at once.
The black water is a shallow puddle, no deeper than a bowl, lapping around my ankles.
The walls have collapsed on three sides and stand only in jagged fragments, like the ribs of a fallen ship.
The vaulted ceiling is gone.
Above me there is only a faint gray dark, and in the dark, very far away, something is dripping.
But the figure is beside me.
It is not on the far shore anymore.
It stands at my elbow, close enough to touch, and I look at it, the horned skull with the cracked brow, the tall black shape wrapped in its own dim shadow, and I find, to my surprise, that I am not afraid.
It looks very tired.
It looks like a man who has carried something heavy up a very long hill.
You are dying, it says.
I know.
I am holding it back.
But it is not enough.
A slight hesitation.
May I show you something?
What?
A memory.
It turns its head, slowly.
I have never shown one to anyone.
I did not know I could.
I look at the puddle at our feet.
Yes, I say.
The water ripples.
It goes very still.
And then, like the reflection in a pond growing clearer as the wind dies, it begins to show me a picture.
It is a tavern.
A rough, smoky, low-ceilinged place, packed with men, dim with the greasy light of tallow lamps.
The floor is sticky with spilled rice wine.
Somewhere a drunk is singing a bawdy song, badly.
And at the middle of the room, two tables are on their sides and a dozen men are fighting, a full-scale brawl, all fists and stools and broken jugs.
I am looking through someone’s eyes.
I know it at once.
It is a tall young man’s height, broad shoulders, rough hands.
He stands in the doorway with his back to the wall and his arms folded, watching the fight the way a man watches a boring play.
I feel his boredom.
I feel a familiar low hum, right at the edge of his awareness, restless and eager.
Go on, the hum says.
Go on.
Just a little.
No, thinks the young man.
He is nineteen.
He is very tired.
Not tonight.
They would deserve it.
I know.
It would be so easy—
Shut up, thinks the young man, without heat.
Just shut up for one evening.
And that is when the singing starts.
It is not loud.
It comes from the far corner of the room, from a girl I have not noticed before, small and plain, in a brown dress with flour on the hem.
She has been carrying jugs.
She has put them down.
She is standing on a bench with her hands folded in front of her, looking at nobody in particular, and she is singing a single line.
I do not know the words.
They are in that old country dialect.
But I know the tune.
The brawl stops.
It does not stop all at once.
It winds down, man by man, like a top losing its spin.
A fist hangs in the air.
A stool comes down, unused.
The drunk in the corner falls silent in the middle of a word.
In the space of a dozen breaths, every man in that room has turned to look at the small plain girl on the bench, and not one of them is moving.
She sings the line again.
Then a second.
She has a voice like water over stones.
What, says the young man, in a very small voice, is that?
The hum in the back of his head has gone quiet.
It is not gone.
It is listening.
It is listening with an intensity so total, so utterly transfixed, that I can feel it in my own chest, a great slow vast astonishment, as though something that has been shouting for nineteen years has, for the first time, been given a reason to hush.
I do not know, says the hum.
It is barely a whisper.
I do not know.
But do not let her stop.
The song ends.
The room lets out a long soft breath.
And the girl steps down off the bench, quite ordinary again, and goes back to her jugs.
The young man stands by the wall for a very long time.
Then he unfolds his arms, and crosses the room, and says the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
Excuse me, he says.
Could you teach me that?
The water ripples.
The picture dissolves.
I am standing in the small ruined room with my hands hanging at my sides and tears running down my face.
I do not know when they began.
That was your father, says the demon.
Yes.
And your mother.
Yes.
I did not like her, at first.
It says this with awful honesty.
I was jealous.
I had been in him for nineteen years, and I was all he had.
And then this small quiet girl walks in, and sings one line, and I am a nothing.
I was a hum in the back of his head.
A pause.
I hated her for a week.
And then?
And then she sat down across from us at dinner.
And she looked, not at him, but at me.
Right at the place where I live.
I do not know how she knew.
And she said: “You are very quiet, aren’t you?
It must be lonely in there.”
I make a small sound.
Nobody had ever said that to me, says the demon.
In all the years.
Not once.
Its voice is very soft.
After that I did not hate her.
I would have died for her.
I think I did, in a way.
The dripping in the dark has grown louder.
Why are you showing me this?
Because you are dying, it says.
And I want you to know that you were wanted.
Not only by them.
By me.
From the first night.
The night the King came, and I had to choose where to go, I chose you not because you were the nearest, but because you were the last thing she ever held.
It is crying, I think, in its own strange way.
I wanted to keep something of her.
That is all.
I only wanted to keep something.
I put my hand on its arm.
It is warm.
It is not cold at all.
Under the bone and the black shadow, it is only a very old, very frightened thing that has been alone for a very long time, and has finally found something to hold.
You did, I say.
You kept all of it.
Somewhere above us, in the gray dark, a voice begins to shout my name.
Wake up, says the demon.
Shigen.
Wake up.
The old man says it is time.
I wake with a gasp, in a cellar that stinks of vinegar and old leather.
It is a low room, brick-walled, lit by a single lamp on a shelf.
Shelves and shelves of jars and bundles of dried herbs line every wall, and the air is thick with a dozen conflicting smells: camphor, garlic, something like burnt hair.
A wooden table stands at the head of my pallet, cluttered with mortars, bowls, small knives.
And over me, with a face like a dried apple and one long yellow thumbnail hooked into my eyelid, bends the smallest, oldest, ugliest man I have ever seen.
“Ah,” he says.
“Alive.”
I try to speak.
It comes out as a croak.
“Do not.” He lets go of my eyelid.
“Do not talk.
You have an antidote in you that would kill a horse, and if you shout, you will burst something.” He straightens with a crackle of joints.
He is barely five feet tall, bald as an egg, with a nose like a fishhook and long ink-stained fingers.
“You are lucky, boy.
Very lucky.
Had it been an hour later, I would have had to take the leg.”
“Hagi,” says Tsuyu, from the shadows.
She has been sitting on a stool by the wall.
She stands, wiping her eyes.
There are deep circles under them.
It occurs to me that she has not slept.
“He’s awake,” she says.
“I can see that.”
“Will he live?”
“Everybody lives,” says the old man, with a petulant wave.
“Until they don’t.
I have done what I can.
Give him barley water.
No meat.
And no fighting, for the love of every god in the sky, for at least five days.” He glares at me.
“Do you hear?
Five days.”
“How long,” I croak, “have I been down?”
“Two days.”
I close my eyes.
Seven days, then.
Seven days until the Festival of the Tithe.
“I know that face,” Hagi says.
He has moved to the table, and is pounding something in a mortar.
“That’s the face of a man who is going to do something stupid.
I have seen it a great many times.
I made a very good living from it.”
“You made the poison,” I say.
The pestle stops.
It is a small, still moment.
Tsuyu has gone quiet.
The old man does not turn around.
“Yes,” he says.
“I did.”
“The Talons’ arrows.”
“Yes.”
“Then why—”
“Because I am an old fool.” He resumes pounding, harder than before.
“Forty years I was the King’s apothecary.
I mixed his medicines.
I mixed his poisons.
I was very proud of my poisons.
I thought, well, a man must have a craft.
I did not ask what they were for.” His voice cracks.
“Then one day a sweeper’s boy came to me, thirteen, fourteen years old, with a fever.
I could have cured him.
I had the medicine on the shelf.
And the captain of the guard said: The King needs the medicine.
The boy is nothing.
And I gave it to the captain.”
He stops.
“He died that night,” he says.
“The boy.
I sat with him.”
Nobody speaks.
“I left the palace the next morning.
I have lived in the Kawara for fourteen years.
I make medicine for whoever asks.” He turns, at last.
His bright black eyes are wet.
“It is not enough.
I know it is not enough.
But when Tsuyu came down the ladder last night with a half-dead boy and a black-fletched arrow, and I saw my own handiwork sticking out of a man’s leg—” A short bitter laugh.
“I thought, well, Hagi.
Here is a chance to unmake one thing.”
I look at him.
I look at the ink-stained fingers, the cracked yellow nails, the fishhook nose.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Do not thank me.
Eat something.”
I do not fight for five days.
I want to.
I lie on my pallet in Hagi’s cellar and stare at the beams, and I feel every hour of it going by, each one a small cold coin dropped into a well.
But the old man is right.
My leg is a mass of livid scar.
My left shoulder is stitched and strapped.
Two ribs have knitted badly, and every breath is a small stabbing lesson.
I am not fit to lift a bucket, let alone a sword.
So I lie there, and I listen, and I learn.
They come to see me.
That surprises me most.
On the second evening, Tsuyu brings the first, and on the third, three more, and by the fifth night there is a slow steady trickle of visitors down the cellar ladder, one or two at a time, in the small hours after the ward has gone to sleep.
They are all ordinary.
That is what I keep noticing.
A cook with burnt forearms.
A lamplighter with a crooked back.
A night-soil carrier, a laundress, a stable boy, a woman who sells fish.
A dozen.
Twenty.
They sit in a ring on the floor around my pallet, with their hands folded and their faces closed, and they look at me the way you might look at a bridge you are not sure will hold.
“They call themselves the Sweepers,” Tsuyu says, on the fourth night.
“It is a joke.
Half of them have never lifted a broom.
But it is the palace servants who started it, forty years ago, after the last great cull.
They are the only ones who see inside.
They carry the water, and the laundry, and the slops.
They notice things.”
“What do they want?”
“The same thing you do.” She shrugs.
“To stop it.”
“They could have run.”
“To where?” It is the cook who says it, a heavy-shouldered man named Genta with a scar across one eyebrow.
“There is nowhere.
The King’s roads go everywhere.
If you leave the ward you are a stray, and if you stay you are a hostage.” He shakes his head.
“We have tried the other way.
Petitions.
Bribes.
Prayer.
Nothing works.” He looks at me.
“But then, we never had a bell-ringer.”
I do not know what to say to that.
So I say nothing.
I only listen, to the long slow murmur of their voices in the dim cellar, and I begin to piece together a map.
The palace is a city inside a city.
That is the first thing I learn.
It is not a building.
It is a walled compound the size of ten Ashigawas, laid out on a strict grid of courts and halls and covered walkways, all of it white plaster and black tile and gilt-tipped rafters, arranged in ranks along a great central avenue that runs north to south.
At the southern end is the Great Gate, where I first saw the guards.
At the northern end is the Throne Hall.
“It is where the King sits,” says the lamplighter, a wispy man named Toku.
He draws it for me in charcoal on the cellar floor.
“Not for show.
It is where the work is done.
The hall stands on a stone platform, forty feet high.
Beneath the platform there are storerooms, and cisterns, and the old wine cellars.
And beneath those—”
“The Cage.”
“We do not know how deep it goes.
Nobody has ever come back to say.” He taps the chalk.
“But we know how it is reached.
There is a ramp, here, on the eastern side, from the loading court.
Sixty feet wide, cut into the rock.
It runs down in a long spiral.
That is how the jars go in.”
“On wagons.”
“On the backs of people.”
I look up.
“The wagons stop at the top of the ramp,” Toku says.
“They cannot go down.
The slope is too steep.
So the jars are unloaded, one by one, and carried down by hand.
By us.
The sweepers.
Every year, on the night of the Festival, four hundred of us shoulder a jar and walk down into the dark.” He says it with no expression at all.
“It is the one thing the King cannot do without.
He has tried machines.
They break.
He has tried guards.
They will not go down.
Only the servants, who have been carrying his burdens for six hundred years.”
The cellar is silent.
The lamp flame wavers.
“You could be one of us,” says Tsuyu.
I turn.
“Just for a night.” She leans forward.
Her one gold tooth catches the light.
“A jar-bearer.
A tunic, a sash, a straw hat.
No one looks at a servant’s face.
Four hundred of us, all alike, walking in a line.
You would have a jar on your shoulder and a hood over your head.
And you would walk straight down into the pit.”
“The wards.”
“What wards?”
“The King’s men check foreheads at the gate.” I touch the strip of cloth.
“And in the hall, there will be more.
Paper charms.
Priests.
The crane will feel me the moment I cross the threshold.”
“It felt you at the tavern,” Hagi says, without turning from his mortar.
“That is how the Talons found you.”
I go still.
“I have been thinking about it,” he says.
“It was not a leak.
Tsuyu’s people are as tight as a drum.
It was not a spy.
It was you.”
“Me?”
“You use the ring, boy.
Every time.
And every time, you crack a little more of the wall.” The old man gestures, vaguely, at my chest.
“It leaves a mark.
A scent.
Like a wound in the world.
Any demon in a mile can smell it.
The crane most of all.”
He is right, says the voice, very quietly.
I do not move.
I did not want to tell you, it says.
I have felt it since the bridge.
The room is cracked, and the crane can see the crack.
It is a door.
I am— It hesitates.
I am the beacon.
When I come out, it is like lighting a lamp.
Why didn’t you say?
Because you would have asked me to stay quiet.
A tiny broken sound.
And I could not bear it.
Oh, I think.
You fool.
Yes, it says.
I know.
They leave me alone for an hour after that.
I sit on the pallet with my back against the wall and my knees drawn up.
I do not cry.
I have done enough of that.
I only sit, and breathe, and hold Tenkai’s silent bell in my fist, and listen to the quiet thing in the corner of my skull that is trying very hard to make itself small.
I am sorry, it says again.
“Stop that.”
I did not mean—
“I know.” I let out a long breath.
“I know you didn’t.
You were lonely.
It was the first time in your life somebody asked you to come out.”
Yes.
“And you liked it.”
Yes.
A pause.
Very much.
I open my eyes.
“Then you’ll have to like it a lot less for a few days,” I say.
“Can you do that?”
I can try.
It sounds very young.
What will you do?
“Go in without you.”
Without the ring?
“Without the ring, without the horns, without anything.” I look at my hands.
They are pale and steady.
“Just a servant with a jar on his back.
If I do it right, the crane never feels a thing.
I walk down into the pit, I find her, I do what I came to do.
And then I let you out.”
And if you cannot?
“Then I die,” I say.
“Quietly.”
The silence stretches.
I do not want you to die, it says.
“I know.”
I would rather be the beacon than lose you.
I laugh, a short, dry, startled sound.
“That’s the first thing you’ve said in a week that made me want to hit you.”
I am sorry.
“Don’t be.” I shake my head.
“It’s the truth.
But it isn’t a choice.
It’s just the way it is.
You can’t help being what you are.
Neither can I.” I lean my head back against the brick.
“We’ll do it my way.
Nine days is a long time for a lamp to stay dark.”
Seven.
“Seven.”
I will hold as still as I can, says the demon.
I will not so much as breathe.
“Good.”
And Shigen.
“Yes?”
If there is a moment.
At the very end.
When I can help.
When it is the only way—
“Then you’ll ask,” I say.
“And I’ll say yes.
That’s the arrangement.”
That is the arrangement, it agrees.
And, very softly, in the back of my mind, it begins once more to hum.
On the sixth night, Tsuyu brings me a bundle.
It is a plain brown tunic, patched at the elbows, and a wide sash of undyed hemp, and a conical hat of woven straw.
I hold them up to the lamp.
They smell of woodsmoke and old sweat and the particular sourness of a man who has worked too long and eaten too little.
“They’re mine,” she says.
“My youngest boy’s.
He carried a jar, three years ago.” She stops.
“You are much the same size.”
I do not ask what happened to him.
“The hat comes down over the eyes,” she says briskly.
“You keep your head lowered.
You do not look at anyone.
You do not speak unless spoken to.
If someone shouts, you say yes, my lord, and you go on walking.” She hands me a strip of gray cloth.
“That is for the forehead.”
“I have one.”
“That is a rag.
This is a bandage.
There is a difference.” She wraps it around my head with the swift rough tenderness of a woman who has bandaged a great many heads.
“Half the jar-bearers have them.
It is the ramp.
The floor is uneven, and the ceiling is low.
They are always bumping themselves.”
“Thank you.”
“Do not thank me.
Just do it.” She sits back on her heels.
In the lamplight she looks older than I have seen her, her face softened and hollowed with exhaustion.
“I have a request.”
“Anything.”
“When you are down there.” She swallows.
“If you find him.
My youngest.
Kazu.
If there is a jar, and a name, and a small piece of paper with an eleven on it—” She stops.
“Do not tell me.
Just let him out.
That is all I ask.”
I take her hand.
It is broad and hard and callused.
It trembles slightly.
“I will look,” I say.
“I promise.
I will look at every single one.”
She nods.
She does not say anything else.
She only squeezes my fingers, once, very tightly, and then lets go and stands and goes up the cellar ladder without looking back.
The seventh night is the last before the Festival.
I do not sleep.
I lie on my pallet in the dark and listen to the sounds of the ward, the far-off shouts, the creak of the boards, the distant bark of a dog.
It is a quiet, cold, starry night, and beyond the shuttered window, over the roofs of the Kawara, I can hear a low deep sound, growing, like the roar of a great river far away.
It is the sound of the convoy.
The biggest one yet.
A thousand wheels on a paved road, all rolling toward the same white wall.
Hagi has come down with a lamp.
He sits on a stool at the foot of my bed, wrapped in a moth-eaten shawl, and looks at me for a long time.
“You will die,” he says.
“Probably.”
“I have been trying to think of something to say.” He fiddles with the fringe of the shawl.
“I am not good at it.
I used to say things to the King.
Wise things.
He rarely listened.”
“Say it anyway.”
“Well.” His bright black eyes are very old.
“I have known a great many brave people.
Most of them were fools.
The rest were liars.
But now and then you meet one who is neither, who is simply so tired of watching the world go wrong that he is prepared to spend himself to put one small piece of it right.” He stops.
“That is the rarest sort.
I have only met two.”
“Who was the other?”
“A boy,” says Hagi.
“With a fever.”
I do not know what to say.
I put out my hand, and the old man takes it in both of his, dry and warm and shaking.
“Go and do your stupid thing,” he says gruffly.
“And if you happen to live, come back and tell me how it went.
I would like to know.”
“I will.”
“Good.” He gets up.
He shuffles to the ladder, and pauses with one foot on the bottom rung.
“Oh.
And boy.”
“Yes?”
“The poison.
I did not tell you everything.” His face is unreadable in the dim light.
“It is out of your blood.
All of it.
But it left a mark.
A small one.” He taps his own forehead.
“In about three days you will start to feel a certain warmth.
Do not be alarmed.
It is only your horn.
It is growing.”
I stare at him.
“Growing?”
“Slowly.
A finger’s breadth by midsummer.
It is the demon’s way of settling in.” He shrugs.
“I thought you should hear it from someone who does not like you.”
He climbs the ladder.
The trapdoor thuds shut.
I lie in the dark.
Growing, says the voice, in a small horrified whisper.
I did not know.
I promise I did not know.
“I believe you.”
I will try to make it stop.
“You can’t.”
No, it says.
But I can try.
I close my eyes.
Somewhere over the wall, over the roofs of the King’s city, through the silence of the winter night, I hear the low hum of a hundred wagons drawing near.
And under it, faint, sweet, endlessly patient, a single woman’s voice, singing a lullaby for a child who has finally come home.
End of Chapter Twelve