They dress me in the dark, with no lamp, so that nobody will remember what my face looked like.
Tsuyu ties the sash.
Genta, the cook with the scarred eyebrow, checks the fit of the straw hat and pulls it a finger lower over my eyes.
Toku the lamplighter hands me a pair of worn straw sandals and a wooden number-tag on a cord, a small flat slab with the numeral 237 burned into it, which he says belonged to a bearer who died in the spring.
Nobody has claimed it.
Nobody will.
“You walk behind me,” Toku says.
“Always.
Two paces.
You do not look up unless I do.
You do not speak.
If somebody addresses you, you drop to one knee and say yes, my lord, and let me answer.”
“And if they touch my hat?”
“They won’t.” He tries to smile.
“Nobody ever touches a bearer.
It is bad luck.”
I lift my hand to the strip of gray cloth around my forehead.
Beneath it, the little nub of bone is warm and slightly larger than it was a week ago.
I do not press it.
I have stopped pressing it.
Behind my ribs, in the room that is nearly all rubble now, something sits very still and very quiet.
I am not here, it says.
I am a stone.
I am a wall.
I am not a thing that anyone would want.
You’re doing well.
I am doing dreadfully.
I can smell them already.
A tight, brittle little laugh.
It is like being locked in a bakery with my hands tied.
Tsuyu has been watching me.
She does not say goodbye.
She only takes my wrists, one and then the other, and holds them for a moment, and lets go.
“Kazu,” she says, very low.
“I’ll look.”
“I know you will.”
Then we climb the ladder into the blue light before dawn, and I do not see her again.
The palace opens its servant’s gate at the fifth bell.
We wait in a long silent line in the lane outside, four hundred of us, hemmed in by the leaning walls of the Kawara.
Nobody talks.
The only sounds are breath and the scuff of sandals and the far-off rumble of wheels.
Men, mostly.
A few women.
Some old, some barely grown.
All wearing the same brown tunic, the same hemp sash, the same conical hat.
They stand with their heads down and their hands folded and the numbered tags on their chests, and the fog off the river lies over all of us like a wet cloth.
I count sixteen faces I recognize from Hagi’s cellar.
Genta is three places ahead.
The fish-seller is behind.
Nobody looks at anybody.
The gate is a plain low door in the palace wall, iron-studded, with a grille at eye level.
At the fifth bell it opens, and a guard in white-corded lacquer steps out with a paper list, and begins to call the numbers.
“One.
Two.
Three.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Four.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The numbers go by.
Each time a man steps forward, and the guard looks at him, and at the tag, and at the list, and nods.
He does not look at faces.
He looks at the hands.
Toku told me this.
A servant’s hands are all alike, scarred and cracked and rough as bark.
A soldier’s are not.
“Two hundred and thirty-five.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Two hundred and thirty-six.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Two hundred and thirty-seven.”
I step forward.
My mouth is dry as ash.
I do not lift my head.
I hold out my hands, palms up, the way I have been told, and I stare at the toes of the guard’s boots.
I have had eight years of Daigo’s wooden practice sword.
I have hauled water up four hundred steps in a mountain winter.
My palms, at least, are the palms of a laborer.
“Yes, my lord,” I say.
A silence.
Then the paper rustles, and the guard’s boots turn away.
“Two hundred and thirty-eight.”
I step back into line.
My knees are trembling.
I press them together, and I do not look at Toku, and I do not look at anything at all.
I had thought I understood how large the palace was.
I did not.
We go in by the north, through a back passage, along a covered walkway of cedar boards that runs the whole length of the outer wall.
And on the left side, through the slats, I see it.
Court after court after court.
Paved in white stone, raked gravel, black-pine gardens clipped into shapes like clouds.
Long low halls with curved roofs, all beams and lacquer and gold leaf.
Pools full of fat orange fish.
A pagoda with nine tiers, so tall that its top is lost in the mist.
A hundred small bridges.
A hundred small shrines.
And everywhere, hanging from every eave and rafter and railing, thousands upon thousands of paper lanterns, white ones, lit for the festival, glowing softly in the fog like a field of enormous pale flowers.
It is the most beautiful place I have ever seen.
They live here, says the voice, in a dry whisper.
They eat here.
They sleep in silk.
They walk in these gardens in the evening and admire the fish.
Yes.
While the jars go by on the road.
Yes.
I would very much like, it says, with a sudden, quiet, awful sweetness, to burn it.
I do not answer.
I keep my eyes on Toku’s heels.
Not now, it adds hastily.
I am only saying.
I am being very good.
I would just like it noted.
Noted.
Thank you.
We walk on.
The wagons are already in the loading court.
It is a huge paved square at the north end of the palace, ringed by warehouses, open to the sky on the side that faces the Throne Hall.
The whole hundred are drawn up in rows, the oxen unyoked and steaming, the drivers standing at the wheels with their hands in their sleeves.
And at the tail of every wagon, on its bed of straw, the jars.
I stop breathing.
I had known it would be bad.
I had seen the convoy on the road.
But to see them here, in the flat white light, laid out in ranks and files like a field of pale mushrooms, four thousand small clay vessels each sealed with its little paper charm, is different.
It is not a thing that can be seen from the road.
It is a thing that must be walked into.
They are calling.
All of them.
I do not hear it with my ears.
It is the old pressure in the breastbone, the tug at the sleeve, but multiplied a thousandfold, a great soft ceaseless tide of pleading, so dense and vast and continuous that I stagger under it.
An old man’s bewilderment.
A child’s small crying.
A mother’s low endless murmur, calling for someone who does not answer.
It presses on the back of my eyes like a thumb.
Do not, says the voice.
It has gone very tight.
Do not listen.
If you listen, you will stop.
Keep walking.
I keep walking.
I keep my head down.
But my hands have started to shake, and I clasp them together in front of me so that nobody will see.
At the far end of the court, on a raised stone dais draped with white silk, stand the priests.
Twenty of them.
Thirty.
They are the Keepers, in their long white robes and high black caps, each with a small bronze bell on a stick, and they stand in a long rank facing the wagons with their hands folded in their sleeves.
Before them, at the center, is a man older than the rest, tall and stooped, with a hooked nose and a face like a hatchet.
He carries no bell.
He carries a long wand of black lacquer topped with a white crane, and he is watching the bearers file in with the calm, mild, dreadfully attentive eyes of a heron at the edge of a pond.
“The High Keeper,” Toku breathes, without moving his lips.
“Do not look at him.”
I look at my sandals.
They line us up in ranks of twenty.
Each bearer is assigned a wagon, and each wagon a Keeper, and each Keeper walks slowly along the rank inspecting us with a bronze bell held out at arm’s length.
It does not ring.
It only dangles, and the priest watches it, and every so often it trembles very slightly, and the priest makes a small mark on a tablet.
It is a test.
I understand that in the first heartbeat.
It is a bell tuned to the presence of a demon.
And the closer the priest comes, the more I feel the walls of the room in my chest press inward, and the more I hear the thing behind my breastbone go very, very still.
Do not, I say, without words.
I am not.
Not even a whisper.
I am dead, it says.
I am a dead thing.
I am the smallest, quietest, most stupid dead thing in the world.
The Keeper is three bearers away.
Two.
His robe rustles.
He smells of camphor and old incense.
I keep my eyes on the ground, and I count, and for the first time in weeks the count is the only thing keeping me on my feet.
Four in.
Four held.
It has cost me nothing for months, and now it costs everything.
Four out.
The bell dips.
It does not ring.
It only leans, the tiniest fraction, like a reed bending in a draft.
I see it out of the corner of my eye, hanging in the air a hand’s breadth from my sleeve, and I feel my whole body go cold.
“Hm,” says the priest.
He tilts his head.
He is a young man, thin, with a sallow face and sharp black eyes.
He looks at the bell.
He looks at me.
“What is your number?”
I drop to one knee.
My heart is going like a hammer.
“Two hundred thirty-seven, my lord.”
“Look at me.”
I lift my head.
Not far.
Just enough that the brim of the straw hat tilts back a finger’s breadth and the lantern light falls across my mouth.
His black eyes narrow.
There is a movement behind him.
A flurry, a rustle of silk.
And a girl’s voice, high and clear and slightly out of breath, rings across the court:
“Keeper! Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Keeper!
Is it true that the jars are all opened tonight?
Every one?
Or only the eldest?”
The priest turns.
She is standing on the steps of the Throne Hall.
I see her past his shoulder, a slight figure at the head of the great white staircase, in a robe of pale gray silk embroidered with silver cranes.
Sixteen, perhaps.
Maybe less.
She has a small round grave face, and long black hair tied back with a white cord, and she is holding a folded fan in both hands, and her knuckles are white.
The Keeper hesitates.
It is a fraction of a heartbeat.
But it is enough.
“Your Highness,” he says, with a swift, stiff bow.
“I did not expect—”
“I asked a question.” Her voice is very level.
She does not look at me.
She does not look at any of the bearers.
She only stares at the priest, with a small, fixed, unnatural stillness, like a child holding her breath underwater.
“Every jar.
Or only the eldest.”
“Every jar, Highness.
It is tradition.”
“How many?”
“Four thousand and eleven.”
“And how long does it take?”
“The whole night.
Highness, if you would go inside, the courtyard is—”
“I would like to see the ramp.”
There is a shocked silence.
“Highness—”
“I am the King’s daughter.” A tiny, brittle tremor.
“I have never seen the ramp.
I should like to.”
The Keeper glances back at me.
The bell has gone still.
Whatever it was, the moment has passed.
He gives an irritable little shake of his tablet, and with an effort, wipes the scowl from his face and says: “As Your Highness wishes.
Two hundred and thirty-seven, move along.”
I do not move.
I have just seen her hand.
It is shaking.
The one on the fan.
And her eyes, the small dark grave eyes that have not left the priest’s face, are wet.
Brimming.
A single tear runs down her cheek and drops off her chin.
She does not wipe it.
She has been standing on those steps since before we came.
She has been watching.
Not the wagons.
Not the priests.
The bearers, the four hundred small brown figures with their heads bowed, and the jars on their shoulders.
Her whole small body is trembling with something that I recognize, because I have seen it on the faces of forty villages.
It is horror.
She is the King’s daughter, and she is horrified.
Shigen, says the voice, very softly.
That is a royal.
Yes.
You swore.
I did.
She is a child.
She is the King’s child.
I can count.
I get to my feet.
I bow my head.
I go on, into the line, and the priest turns away, and the whole way across the court I can feel a girl’s eyes on my back like two small hot coals.
The Festival begins at noon.
I do not see much of it.
A bearer’s view is a narrow one.
But I hear it, and I feel it, in the long hours we stand in ranks in the loading court, with our empty hands folded and our backs to the walls.
There is music, high thin flutes and a great slow drum.
There is chanting from the Keepers, a low endless drone in an old tongue I do not know.
And there is a moment, just past midday, when the whole palace goes silent, and I lift my eyes, against all my orders, and see the King.
He comes out onto the head of the great staircase in a robe of pure white.
He is alone.
No guards.
No attendants.
His long gentle face is calm and drawn, his hands folded at his waist.
He looks older than he did on the bridge.
There are hollows under his eyes and threads of silver in his beard that were not there ten days ago.
He stands at the top of the stairs and looks out over the court, over the four hundred bearers and the four thousand jars and the hundred wagons, and his gaze sweeps across us all like a slow lantern.
It passes over me.
It does not stop.
He does not know, says the demon, very small.
Not yet.
I do not think—
Quiet.
The King lifts one hand.
“Servants of the crown,” he says.
His voice carries without effort.
“Faithful subjects.
Tonight we make the great offering, as our forefathers made it, and their forefathers before them.
The harvest of the year is gathered.
The tithe is paid.” A pause.
“I thank you for your labor.”
Nobody moves.
“May it be remembered,” he says, “that it was done with grief.”
He lowers his hand.
The drum starts up again, a single slow beat.
And the bearers, all four hundred of us, in a single rippling motion, bow to the ground.
I bow with them.
My forehead touches the paving.
And in the moment before I straighten, I see the King’s eyes lift, for one instant, past the crowd, to the far corner of the court, to the small gray-clad figure standing at the top of the steps.
The girl.
The princess.
She has not bowed.
She stands very straight, with her fan clutched to her chest.
The King looks at her.
Something crosses his face, quick as a bird’s shadow.
It is not anger.
It is a terrible, tender, hopeless sorrow.
He turns away first.
They load us at dusk.
It is done by numbers.
Each bearer steps to a wagon, and a guard hands down a jar, and the bearer lifts it onto his right shoulder and holds it with both hands.
It is heavier than it looks.
Not from its weight, which is little more than a full water jug’s.
From what is inside.
I take mine.
It is cool.
It is smooth.
It hums against my collarbone like a bee trapped in a cup.
I feel it, the small hot frightened flutter, not a thing I hear but a thing I am, and my whole shoulder goes numb.
Do not open it, says the voice.
I wasn’t going to.
Your hand is on the paper.
I look down.
It is.
My thumb is under the edge of the charm.
I take it away.
She is very afraid, says the demon.
This one.
I can feel her.
She is only a young woman, from a fishing village.
She does not understand.
She thinks she is dreaming.
Stop.
I am only telling you.
Stop telling me.
You should know.
All of them.
You should know exactly what you are carrying.
My jaw is clenched so tight it aches.
I know what I’m carrying.
Every one.
Good, it says.
And, with a flicker of something dark and sharp and almost approving: Then when the time comes, you will not hesitate.
I do not answer.
It is the first time in weeks that the voice has sounded like itself, the old voice, the one that said let me and the strength of fifty men.
It is not cruel.
But it is not soft, either.
It is the demon at its most honest.
And I find, to my surprise, that I am glad of it.
The drum beats.
The line begins to move.
The ramp is a mouth.
I have been told, and I have pictured it, and it is still worse than I imagined.
It opens in the eastern wall of the loading court, a sixty-foot arch of black stone carved with cranes, wings spread, beaks open, row on row on row, climbing up the sides of the arch until they vanish in the shadow at its crown.
Beyond the arch is a slope.
A great smooth spiraling ramp, wide enough for ten men abreast, cut down into the living rock, dropping away into a darkness so thick it seems to swallow the torchlight.
And from that darkness, rising on a cold breath, comes the sound.
It is not a voice.
It is not a thousand voices.
It is the thing beneath voices, a vast slow whispering murmur, like a crowd heard through a wall, or the sea heard from the inside of a shell.
It rises and falls.
It has the rhythm of breathing.
I feel the hair stand up along my arms.
The line begins to descend.
We go down in silence.
Four hundred bearers, four abreast, each with a jar on his shoulder, each with his eyes on the heels of the man in front.
The torches burn in iron brackets along the wall, one every thirty paces, and their light is small and red and hardly enough to see by.
I count steps.
I lose count.
The ramp winds down and down, in long slow coils, and the air grows steadily colder, and the murmur grows steadily louder, until it is not a sound at all but a pressure, a weight, a hand laid flat against my face.
Somewhere around the fortieth turn, a bearer falls.
I do not see it happen.
I hear it.
A soft clay crash, and a stifled gasp, and the echo of a single sandal skidding on stone.
I look up, against every rule, and I see him, three ranks ahead, a young man on his hands and knees on the slope.
His jar has slipped from his shoulder.
It has struck the ramp and broken.
A pale curl of shards lies scattered around him, and above the shards, rising very slowly out of the wreckage, something small and faint and luminous is unfolding.
It is a spirit.
A girl’s.
A child’s.
It hangs in the torchlit air like a scrap of mist, and I feel it, I feel it look around, bewildered, and I feel it see the ramp, the cranes, the four hundred faceless figures.
And then, very clearly, it begins to cry.
“No,” whispers someone, behind me.
“Hush,” says the guard.
He has come out of nowhere.
A tall man in white-corded lacquer, striding down the ramp with a Keeper at his heels.
It rings, once, a single sweet clear note, and the little spirit shrieks, and its faint form is pulled, twisting and wailing, toward the bronze lip, and vanishes.
The Keeper lowers the bell.
He nods.
The guard looks down at the young man kneeling in the shards.
“Get up,” he says.
The bearer gets up.
He is trembling so hard his hat falls off.
He is not much more than a boy, with a thin pale face and a downy lip.
“I’m sorry, my lord,” he whispers.
“I’m so sorry.
The step was wet, and I—”
“It is a great sin to spill the King’s tithe.”
“Yes, my lord.
I know.
I—”
The guard draws his sword and puts it through the boy’s throat.
It is very quick.
There is a small wet sound, like a wet cloth torn in half, and then the boy is falling, his hands scrabbling at nothing, and the guard kicks him off the blade and he rolls, in slow silent tumbles, over the edge of the ramp and out of sight.
I do not move.
I do not breathe.
I stand on the slope with a jar humming against my shoulder and a red haze creeping in at the edges of my sight, and I feel the room in my chest buck, like a horse at a snake.
Shigen, says the demon, very quietly.
Not gently.
It is a sound I have not heard from it since the mountain, low and flat and hungry.
That is a man who has just killed a child.
In front of you.
And you are going to let him walk away.
Yes.
Say the word.
No.
Just one word.
He is ten paces away.
I could have his head off before he blinks.
And then?
And then we die, says the demon, calmly.
But the boy would be avenged.
I close my eyes.
I do not count.
I do not think of Hisui.
I think only of a small clay jar, and a straw hat rolling in the dark, and a name I will never learn.
Not tonight, I say.
You are a coward.
Yes.
You are a very good one, it says, after a moment, with a strange grudging respect.
Very well.
But I will remember his face.
So will I.
The guard sheathes his sword.
The line closes up, and shuffles forward, over the wet place where the boy fell.
Nobody looks down.
I step over the spot.
Something under my sandal is sticky.
We go on.
The ramp ends without warning.
One moment there is a wall on the left, and a black drop on the right, and the next the wall simply stops.
I look up.
The torches are gone.
The air has changed.
It is colder here, and wider, and it smells of stone and salt and something ancient and sweet, like old blossoms.
We are standing on a wide flat shelf of dark rock, in an enormous dark space, and somewhere in front of me, very far off, a great many people are whispering.
A voice speaks, thin and high.
“Halt.”
The line stops.
We stand there, four hundred strong, in the dark.
Then, one by one, torches begin to flare.
They are set in a great ring around the walls, fifty, a hundred, each in an iron bracket the size of a man.
They catch in sequence, each lit by the last, so that a ripple of yellow fire runs slowly around the circumference of the space.
And as the light grows, I begin to see it.
The Cage.
It is a cavern.
It is a cavern the size of a valley.
The ceiling is lost in the dark, two hundred feet above, hung with pale stalactites like a thousand dripping teeth.
The walls curve away into shadow.
The floor is a great smooth bowl of black stone, sloping gently inward, and at the center of the bowl, five hundred paces from where I stand, there is a hole.
It is not large.
Not by the measure of the cavern.
Perhaps fifty paces across.
But it is absolute.
It does not have a bottom.
It has a lip, a smooth curved edge of pale stone, and beyond the lip there is nothing at all, no light, no shadow, no floor.
It is like looking at the place where the world has been cut out.
And from the hole rises the whisper.
I understand, now, what it is.
It is the sound of a great many people, all speaking at once, in low soft voices, very far away.
Ten thousand voices.
Twenty.
They are murmuring, weeping, pleading, singing, praying, all at the same time.
It is the most terrible sound I have ever heard, and beneath it, faint but perfectly clear, threaded through the rest like a bright wire through wool, I hear a single high sweet line.
A woman is singing.
I do not move.
I do not look at the pit.
I look at the floor, at the toes of my sandals, and I hold on to the jar with both hands, and I say a single word inside my head, over and over and over.
Mother.
Shigen, says the demon.
Its voice is very small.
I can hear her too.
But you must keep your head down.
They are watching.
I can feel it.
I lower my hat another finger.
Around me, in the gloom, the line of bearers has begun to spread out along the rim of the pit, jar after jar after jar, four hundred small brown figures in a ring.
Between them, on the pale lip of stone, the Keepers have taken their places, bells held out over the void.
And at the head of the pit, on a low black dais that rises from the floor like a tongue, in a white robe, with his hands folded and his face turned to the dark, stands the King.
He is alone.
He has been standing there, I think, for a very long time.
The High Keeper lifts his lacquered wand.
“Begin,” he says.
It goes on for hours.
I will not tell it all.
I do not think I could.
It is a great slow shuffling ritual, a hundred small gestures, the rank of bearers stepping up to the lip one after another, tilting their jars, and pouring.
Not water.
Light.
A faint pale stream of luminous mist, pouring from each open mouth and drifting down into the dark like smoke into a well.
The Keepers ring their bells.
The priests chant.
And each time a jar is emptied, the whisper in the pit swells, a little louder, a little hungrier, like a beast lapping at a bowl.
I keep my eyes down.
I keep my jar sealed.
I am number two hundred thirty-seven, and my turn is very near the end, and I count the men in front of me as they go, and I try not to think about the thing behind my ribs.
It is not still anymore.
I feel it, restless and sick, like a dog that has been kept too long in a hot room.
It says nothing.
But it moves.
It paces.
It hangs on the very edge of the silence, and every moment I stand at the rim of that pit, I feel it reaching for the black, the way a man dying of thirst reaches for water.
I could take her, it says, at last.
Your mother.
She is right there.
It would take one breath.
No.
You are so close.
No.
I am only saying—
I said no.
Yes, says the demon.
A long pause.
You did.
At last, I am the next in line.
I step up to the lip.
The pit yawns at my feet, black and bottomless, and a cold wind blows up out of it, smelling of blossoms and rot.
Beside me a Keeper lifts his bell.
On the dais, twenty paces away, the King stands with his back to me and his gaze on the dark.
I reach up to the paper charm.
Now, says the voice.
I could not say which of us said it.
I peel back the paper.
The jar breathes.
A thin pale curl of mist rises out of the mouth, and I tilt it, slowly, over the void, the way I have seen the others do, and a small, frightened, fluttering thing slips out and hangs in the air before me.
It looks at me.
I do not let it fall.
I close my hand over it.
It is not a solid thing.
It is warm, like a candle flame, and it trembles against my palm like a captive bird.
And I whisper, so softly that only the two of us can hear:
“Not down.
Up.”
It goes.
It shoots out of my hand like an arrow, up through the dark, past the stalactites, past the ring of torches, and out through some crack in the ceiling I cannot see.
A single bright spark, streaking heavenward.
The Keeper beside me makes a small choking noise.
The bell drops from his hand.
And every other head on the rim of the pit turns, in a slow horrified ripple, to look at the man in the straw hat with the empty jar in his hands.
I lift my chin.
The hat falls off.
The bandage slips down over one eye.
In the light of a hundred torches, above a face that is not a servant’s face at all, a small, smooth, warm nub of bone shows plain against the pale skin of my brow.
Nobody moves.
On the dais, slowly, the King turns around.
He is not surprised.
I see that at once.
He looks at me, at the hat lying on the stones, at the empty jar in my hands, and something in his long gentle face gives way, like a dam after a very long time.
It is not fury.
It is not even sorrow.
It is relief.
“There you are,” says the King.
His voice carries across the whole cavern, and every Keeper on the rim of the pit goes rigid.
“I hoped it would be you who came.” He steps down from the dais.
“I have kept the doors open all night.”
Behind me, with a sound like a great stone falling, the ramp closes.
I do not turn to look.
I do not need to.
I feel it, in the floor, in the walls, in the very air.
The whole cavern has shifted.
A hundred torches gutter and flare blue-white.
The murmur in the pit has stopped, all at once, and in the silence that follows, I hear something far below the bottom of the world begin, slowly and with enormous patience, to breathe in.
Shigen, says the demon, and there is no shyness left in it, no softness, nothing but a cold clear sharp-edged joy.
It is awake.
I know.
Ask me.
The King is walking toward me across the black stone, unhurried, with his hands open at his sides.
And beneath his feet, out of the bottomless dark, comes a sound like the unfolding of a very large wing.
End of Chapter Thirteen