Ask me, says the demon.
The King is walking toward me across the black stone with his hands open, and I have about eight seconds.
Four hundred bearers stand frozen along the rim of the pit.
Thirty Keepers are backing away with their bells raised like shields.
High above the cavern, on a gallery I had not noticed in the gloom, a ring of pale faces has appeared at a balcony rail, the royal family, come down to watch the offering, and one of them is a small gray-clad figure with a fan pressed to her mouth.
And under my feet the floor is breathing.
Ask me, the demon says again.
I have been very good.
I have not made a sound in seven days.
I have been a stone.
I would like, please, to be a great deal more than that.
I drop the empty jar.
It shatters on the black stone, and the sound goes out across the Cage like a struck gong.
“Come out,” I say.
It is not slow, this time.
On the bridge it opened like a door.
Here it goes like a dam.
The heat slams up through my spine, and I hear myself roar, a huge, cracked, ecstatic sound that shakes dust from the stalactites, and the world turns red and then clear, and I am enormous.
The horns come first, both of them, wet and hot and hard, tearing through the bandage.
The mask closes over my face like a cold hand.
My hands split their skin and lengthen.
My spine cracks and straightens.
My chest swells.
The straw tunic bursts at the seams and falls in strips, and beneath it the skin is black, and veined with red, and rippling like a river in flood.
I can feel every muscle.
I can hear every heartbeat in the cavern, four hundred of them, thirty, a hundred more from the gallery above, all of them racing.
There, says the demon, in our mouth.
Oh, there.
I had forgotten how it feels.
“Hold the reins,” I say, and my voice is a landslide.
Always, it says, delighted.
Always, always.
Only let me run.
The Keepers scream.
They are not fools.
I will give them that.
Before I have taken three steps, the whole rank of priests has closed around the pit, bells lifted, and I hear the note go out, thirty bronze voices ringing together, a great sweet dreadful chord.
It goes through my skull like a spike.
My knees buckle.
The red drains from the edges of my sight.
It is the bell of the harvest, the one that draws spirits out of the living.
And it is trying, with all its power, to draw out mine.
It hurts, says the demon, with interest.
“Yes.”
It is trying to take me.
“Yes.”
It cannot, it says, with a sudden, vast, gloating joy.
I am not in the body.
I am in you.
And you are mine.
It laughs.
I lift my head.
The bells are still ringing.
I feel them dragging at me, like a hundred small hooks in the flesh.
But I am not alone in here, and for the first time in my life the thing behind my eyes is not my enemy.
It leans into the pull, the way a wrestler leans into a shove, and the pull breaks.
I let the ring go.
It is not the ring I know.
It is the ring of the horned thing, the silence in a demon’s body, and it goes out across the cavern like a wall of black water.
The bells stop.
Every one of them.
Thirty bronze mouths, all at once, go dumb, and the Keepers stagger, clutching their ears, and the bells fall from their hands and shatter on the stone.
Silence, absolute.
Then the King says, very quietly:
“Now.”
I do not see him move.
I hear the air split.
I turn my head an inch, and something white and cold takes me across the chest and I am airborne, a body thrown like a rag, forty feet through the torchlit dark.
I hit the cavern wall.
Stone cracks.
I slide down it, and the taste of blood is very rich in my mouth, and I look up and he is standing over me.
The crane is on him.
It has come up out of the brand, out of the white lines on his skin, in the space of a single breath.
The bone plates, the folded wings, the long cruel neck.
The beak.
But it is not as it was on the bridge.
On the bridge he was holding back.
Here there is no holding.
Every plate gleams.
Every spine is razor sharp.
The gray eyes in the cracked white skull are wet and mild and infinitely sad, and the hands hold a sword.
It is a long, narrow, pale blade, like a shaft of moonlight.
It does not look like a weapon.
It looks like a thing that has always been there, waiting to be picked up.
This, the King says, in that layered voice, is the sword that killed your father.
“I know.”
I am sorry.
“You keep saying that.”
I keep meaning it.
The blade lifts.
He was my friend, you know.
Once.
In the first years.
Before it all began.
He steps in.
I roll aside.
The sword goes into the wall where my head was and sinks a foot deep into solid rock.
I come up on my knees and swing, and my clawed hand catches his ribs and the bone plates shriek, and he is thrown back three paces.
But he does not fall.
He lands lightly, pivots, and comes at me again, and I have never fought anything like it.
It is not the speed.
I am fast now, faster than I have ever been.
It is the grace.
Every move is a fold.
Every step is exactly where it must be.
He does not waste a breath.
The sword goes through my guard like a needle through cloth, and I feel a cold line open across my thigh, my shoulder, my cheek, each one light and precise and perfectly placed.
He is playing, says the demon.
“No.”
He is not, it says, slowly.
You are right.
He is not.
Look.
I look.
I see his eyes.
The gray, mild eyes behind the beak.
They are streaming.
Tears run in slow lines down the bone.
He is fighting me with everything he has, and he is weeping while he does it, and every time the sword comes near my heart, I see it tremble.
He does not want to, says the demon.
It does not matter what he wants.
No, it agrees.
Only what he does.
The sword comes down.
I catch it in both hands.
It is a mistake.
I know it is a mistake.
The pale blade bites through the black skin of my palms, and I feel the edge grind against bone, and the King’s weight comes down on the hilt like a falling wall.
I go to one knee.
The stone cracks beneath me.
Above my head, the great white skull tilts, and the beak opens, and I see, deep in the throat, a faint pale glow like the light at the bottom of a well.
Now, says the King, gently.
It will be quick.
“Do it, then.”
I am sorry, Shigen.
“You keep—”
The floor explodes.
It does not crack.
It does not shake.
It erupts.
A great pillar of pale light bursts up from the center of the cavern, fifty paces off, and the stone around the pit peels back like the petals of a flower.
The Keepers go over like reeds in a gale.
The dais is flung end over end into the dark.
A hot wind screams across the Cage, smelling of blossoms and blood, and every torch in the cavern goes out at once.
In the dark, something begins to rise.
I cannot describe it.
I have tried.
I will try again, because someone must.
It is a bird.
It is a bird the size of a hill.
Its neck comes up first, a long pale column of bone and mist, a hundred feet high, glowing faintly in its own light.
Its head is a wedge of white, blind, eyeless, with a beak that could take a house in a single bite.
Its wings unfold slowly, and each feather is a face.
Ten thousand faces.
Twenty.
All of them turned toward me, their mouths open, and all of them singing, in a vast layered chorus that shakes the walls.
The crane.
It lifts itself out of the pit with a sound like a thousand doors opening, and it hangs there, over the broken floor of the Cage, and the light of it falls across the cavern in cold silver bars.
The Keepers scream and run.
The bearers are running too, clawing at the walls, at the sealed ramp, at each other.
A priest is lifted, shrieking, into the air on a thread of pale mist, and swallowed, whole, in one soft snap.
The King has let go of the sword.
He is standing very still, with his head tilted back and his mask cracked from brow to beak, looking up at the thing he has fed for thirty years.
And I see something I did not expect on his long white face.
Not fear.
Something much worse.
Recognition.
Ah, he says.
There you are.
I have been waiting.
And the crane looks down at him, with no eyes at all, and says in ten thousand voices:
You have been a good servant.
The King’s mask falls off.
It comes away in one long clean sheet, cracked, shivering, and drops to the stone.
Beneath it is his own face, gaunt and gray and gentle, and he is smiling, a strange, small, bitter, weary smile.
“You are going to eat me,” he says.
Yes.
“After all these years.”
You knew.
“I did.” He lifts his hands.
They are shaking.
“I knew, when I saw the boy come.
I knew when the jar broke and the spirit went up.
I knew it in my bones.” His eyes shift, for a moment, to me.
“It is not his fault.
Do you understand?
He only pulled the thread.
The cloth was already coming apart.”
He is the holder, the crane says, indifferent.
I will have him.
And you will be fed to him, and he to me.
It is well.
“It is not well.”
It is what was bargained.
“It was a bargain I never made.” His voice is very quiet.
“My great-grandfather made it.
And my grandfather, and my father, each one signed with his own blood, and I signed it, heaven forgive me, and I thought I could hold you.
I thought I could hold you for one more generation.
And then another.
And then another.” He laughs, softly.
“I thought I was so clever.”
You were the best of them, says the crane.
“That is what breaks my heart.”
He turns to me.
I have gotten to my feet.
I am half-crouched, black and bleeding, with my hands hanging useless at my sides, and I can feel the demon in me trembling, awed and terrified, like a child in a thunderstorm.
The King looks at me across twenty paces of shattered stone, and for the first time since the bridge, I see the man under the crane.
He is exhausted.
He is unbelievably old.
And he is, I understand, at last, quite sane.
“Shigen,” he says.
“I am going to ask you for one thing, and then I am going to do something very stupid.”
“What.”
“When I am gone, do not let it eat my daughter.”
Before I can answer, he draws a small white bell from his sleeve and throws it to me.
I catch it.
It is the twin of the Keeper’s bell, small, bronze, chill to the touch.
It rings faintly in my palm.
“That is the leash,” says the King.
“The first king made it.
It has not been rung in six hundred years, because the moment it is rung, the bargain is broken and the crane is free.
But it is also the only thing that can bind it.” His face is calm.
“Ring it backward.
Hold the count.
Sit.”
“What does that mean?”
“I do not know.
Nobody has ever done it.” A faint, wry smile.
“You are the ringer.
I am only the servant.”
He turns.
The crane has been listening.
I do not know how I know.
It has no ears, no eyes, nothing that could see or hear.
But its whole vast body has gone still, and the ten thousand faces have turned, one by one, to look at the small thin man in white standing in the wreck of the floor.
You would defy me, it says.
“Yes.”
After all this time.
“After all this time.” The King reaches up and unpins the collar of his robe.
“I am the servant.
That is what I am.
Do you know what a servant can do that a master cannot?”
Tell me.
“He can refuse.”
He lifts his hands, and the crane comes out of him.
It comes all at once, not the small bone armor of the bridge, but the whole of it, the entire pale ferocious mass of the thing that has lived in his blood since the day he was born.
A great white shape tears itself loose from his chest, spreading its wings, howling with a thousand voices, and flings itself at the greater crane with a force that shakes the cavern to its roots.
They collide.
I have never seen anything like it.
Two white birds, one the size of a man and one the size of a hill, locked together in the air above the pit, beak to beak, wing to wing, in a storm of screaming light.
The little one is being torn apart.
I can see it.
Feathers fly.
Faces scream.
A great pale wing goes spinning away into the dark.
But it holds, it holds, and in the middle of it, in the eye of the storm, the King has fallen to his knees.
He is smiling.
“Now!” he shouts.
“Boy!
Now!”
I do not think.
I run.
I run across the black stone with the bell in my fist and the demon roaring in my ears, through the ruins of the dais and past the fallen Keepers and the cowering bearers, and I hear a thin high voice screaming from the gallery, a girl’s voice, Father!
Father!
But I do not look up.
I reach the lip of the pit and drop to my knees at the very edge, with the whole void yawning at my feet and a hot wind howling in my face, and I lift Tenkai’s silent bell in one hand and the King’s white one in the other.
Ring it backward, he said.
I do not know what that means.
Ask me, says the demon.
Ask you what?
What it means.
Something sharp and eager and fond.
I know.
I know because I am what it is made of.
A demon is only a spirit that will not rest.
And the bell is only a way to say: rest.
Rest?
Ring it backward, it says.
Not to call.
To send.
I understand.
I lift the white bell over the pit.
I close my eyes.
I go down.
The room is gone.
I know it at once.
There is no black water, no broken walls, no small horned figure at the shore.
There is only a great grey dark, endless, soundless, and I am standing in it, small and naked and quite alone.
It is the inside of the crane.
It is enormous.
It is a place made of voices.
They rise around me like a forest, thousands upon thousands, murmuring, weeping, singing, calling, each one a single thread in a tapestry so vast that I cannot see its edge.
They are not angry.
They are not even afraid.
They are only tired.
Tired in a way that has no bottom.
Tired in the way of a thing that has been awake for six hundred years.
Hello, I say.
Nothing answers.
I am not here to hurt you.
I am only here to sit.
I sit down.
The dark is cold.
It is not unkind.
I lay Tenkai’s bell on my knee, and the King’s on the other, and I close my hands around them both.
And I do the only thing I know how to do.
I listen.
I do not know how long it takes.
A minute.
A week.
The voices come and go around me like rain.
A man is arguing with his brother.
A child is counting.
A woman is telling a long slow story about a well.
I do not answer any of them.
I only sit, with my mouth shut and my heart open, and hear each one out, until it has nothing left to say.
And one by one, the voices begin to quiet.
It is a very small thing, at first.
A tiny lull.
A pause between one word and the next.
But it spreads, like frost across a pond, from one voice to another, and I feel the vast dark around me softening.
The tiredness lifting.
The whole enormous tapestry of grief and hunger going still, thread by thread, as though a great hand were smoothing it flat.
Yes, says a small voice, at my ear.
That is it.
That is how.
I open my eyes.
There is a shape beside me in the dark.
It is small.
It is dim.
I can hardly make it out, a woman, slight and plain, in a brown dress with flour on the hem.
She is sitting cross-legged on the floor with her hands folded in her lap.
She has a round, pleasant, ordinary face, and long dark hair coming loose from its pins, and eyes the color of river water.
She is looking at me with a very odd expression.
You are so big, she says.
I cannot speak.
You are much bigger than I thought.
She tilts her head.
Do you know, I never got to see?
They took me before you were even out of the room.
I only heard you cry.
Mother.
It is the first time I have ever said it.
It comes out as a croak, a cracked and childish thing, and I feel my face crumple.
She reaches out, very slowly, and touches my cheek.
Her hand is not solid.
It is a warmth, a lightness, the memory of a hand.
But it is there.
It is there, and it rests on my face, and all the walls in me that I have built over nineteen years, all the counting, all the names, all the small fierce careful defenses, simply give way.
Oh, you are crying, says my mother.
Don’t.
It is all right.
I have been trying to find you.
I know.
She smiles.
It is a small, shy, very tired smile.
I have been listening.
I heard you on the bridge.
I heard you at the temple.
I heard you, every time you sat down with a jar.
She strokes my cheek with a thumb that is not there.
You are so like your father.
He never stopped either.
I can get you out.
No, she says gently.
I can.
I have the bell.
It is not that.
She shakes her head.
I am not held, Shigen.
Not the way you think.
I could have left, a long time ago.
A dozen times.
The crane cannot keep a spirit that does not wish to stay.
She looks around at the vast grey dark.
But I would have had to leave the others.
I stare at her.
I sing to them, she says.
That is all.
It is a small thing.
But they are so frightened.
They come in, all at once, in the middle of the worst moment of their lives, and they do not understand.
And someone has to tell them it is all right.
Her eyes are very bright.
So I sing.
And they listen.
And a few at a time, they stop being afraid.
How long?
Nineteen years, says my mother.
It is not so long.
Come with me.
I will, she says.
When it is empty.
I open my mouth.
But not tonight, she says.
Not while there are so many.
I will come when I am the last.
She kisses me, very lightly, on the forehead, exactly where the little hard horn is growing.
And you will not have to look for me.
I will find you.
I always did.
Mother—
Now, she says, go.
There is something in the way of the music.
And she smiles, a small sweet ordinary human smile, and lifts her chin and begins, softly, to sing. Find the original chapter at g.com.
I open my eyes.
I am kneeling at the edge of the pit with a bell in each hand, and the world is roaring.
The two cranes are still locked in the air over the void.
The little one is nearly gone, a shredded scrap of pale wing and one white eye, held together only by will.
Beneath it, the King lies on his back on the shattered floor, arms outstretched, blood pooling around his head.
His mouth is moving.
He is trying to speak.
I lift the white bell.
Ring it backward, says the demon.
Its voice is very quiet.
Now.
I ring it.
It is a strange, small sound.
Not sweet.
Not high.
A dull, low, mournful thing, like the tolling of a bell heard across water from a long way off.
And it does not call.
It sends.
It goes out from my hand in a great slow ripple, out over the pit and into the crane, and into every face on every feather, and every voice in every throat.
Rest, it says.
The crane screams.
It is a scream of rage, of terror, of a hunger so old and so vast that it shakes the mountain.
The huge white head whips around.
The ten thousand faces turn toward me, and the beak opens, wide enough to swallow a house, and comes down at me with a speed I cannot follow.
I do not move.
I hold the bell.
I hold the count.
I hold the small warm hand of a woman I have known for exactly one moment, and I say, in the great deep voice of the two of us together:
“Rest.”
The beak stops.
It stops an arm’s length from my face.
I feel the cold breath of it on my skin.
I see, in the pale hollow where an eye should be, a thousand small faces looking out at me, wide-eyed, wondering, and among them, briefly, one plain and ordinary and smiling.
Then the crane comes apart.
It does not explode.
It does not burn.
It unfolds, the way a flower closes at dusk, a great slow settling, the wings drawing in, the neck sinking, the faces one by one going quiet and dim.
It sinks back into the pit like a tide going out, and the light goes with it, and the roar of its passing fades to a whisper, and a sigh, and at last to nothing at all.
The floor of the Cage is silent.
I sit at the edge of the pit with my hands hanging.
Beside me, the demon is weeping quietly.
I can feel it.
Not with grief.
With awe.
It is asleep, it says.
It is only asleep.
It is not gone.
But it is asleep, and it will sleep for a long time.
A small shaky laugh.
You did it.
You actually did it.
Nobody has ever done it.
Hisui did.
Hisui held it.
You sent it.
It is quite different.
And I helped a little.
You helped a lot.
I did, it says, with dignity.
I would like it noted.
I would laugh.
I do not have the strength.
The King is still alive.
I find him a long way from the pit, on his back on the shattered stone, with his white robe soaked through and one arm lying at a wrong angle.
The little crane is gone.
There is only a man, thin and gray and quite ordinary, with a great red wound in his side and blood running out of the corner of his mouth.
I kneel beside him.
I am my own shape again, pale, shaking, wearing nothing but torn straw and blood.
“You did it,” says the King.
“So did you.”
“I did nothing.
I only bought you a minute.” His eyes are very clear.
“It hurts a great deal.
Is that not strange?
I have felt nothing for thirty years.
Now I feel everything.”
“Don’t talk.”
“I will talk if I wish.
I am the King.” He tries to smile.
It does not quite work.
“Is it asleep?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nor do I.” He closes his eyes.
“It does not matter.
I have seen it.
That is enough.
A king should see his kingdom once, before he dies.”
He is quiet for a long time.
The silence stretches.
Somewhere behind us, I hear a small sound, a gasp, a scuffle of feet on stone.
I do not turn.
“My daughter,” he says.
“She’s here.”
“Is she?” A flicker of the old tenderness.
“I thought she might be.
She is a good girl.
Better than I deserved.
Her name is Sayo.” His fingers close, weakly, on my wrist.
“You swore.
On the road.
I know you did.
To kill every one of us.”
“Yes.”
“Will you keep it?”
I look down at him.
At the long gentle face, the tired eyes, the blood on his beard.
I think of my father, sitting on the edge of a bed, saying I am sorry.
I think of Iwa.
The dead are owed nothing.
I think of a jar dropped on a black ramp, and a boy’s straw hat rolling in the dark.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Good.” He smiles, faintly.
“That is the right answer.”
His hand loosens.
“Shigen,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Your mother.” The words are very quiet.
“She sang to you.
In the room.
Before I—” He stops.
“I have never forgotten it.
It was the most beautiful thing I ever heard.”
I bend my head.
“I know,” I say.
“She told me.”
The King of the White Walls does not answer.
He does not say anything at all.
I stay there for a long time.
I do not know how long.
Around me, the Cage slowly comes back to itself.
The bearers are creeping out of the corners where they hid, singly and in pairs, staring.
The surviving Keepers have fled.
A hundred torches lie in ruins.
A single lantern still burns, swinging on a broken chain, and the light of it moves across the cavern like the ghost of a wave.
Toku is at my elbow.
He is white and shaking, his hat gone, a cut across his forehead.
Genta is behind him, and the fish-seller, and a dozen others.
They do not speak.
They are only looking at me, at the dead man beside me, at the great dark hole in the floor.
And then, behind them, there is a sound.
It is the ramp.
I turn my head.
It is a long way off, and dim, but I see it.
The great stone door at the mouth of the cavern, sealed since the hour of the offering, is grinding slowly open.
A crack of gray light shines through.
Someone is standing in the gap, small and slight, in a robe of pale gray silk.
She has one hand pressed to the wall.
In the other she holds something that glints.
A key.
She stands there for a long moment, looking down the length of the cavern, at the ruin, at the bearers, at the body of her father on the floor.
Then she lifts her chin, and begins to walk.
She comes slowly.
Her sandals scuff on the stone.
She does not run.
She does not weep.
She comes across the whole length of the Cage with her back straight and her face blank and her knuckles white on the key, and she stops, six paces from me, and looks down at her father’s face.
“He is dead,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No.”
“Did it?”
“No.” I meet her eyes.
“He did it himself.
For all of us.”
She nods.
She does not say anything for a moment.
She only stands there, small and gray and very upright, with the lantern light swaying on her face.
“Then it is over,” she says.
“No.”
“No,” she agrees, quietly.
“It is only beginning.” She lifts her chin.
“I opened the door.
I turned the ninth key.
I was not supposed to have it.
My father gave it to me, last night, and told me to keep it, and I did not understand why.” Her voice does not shake.
“I understand now.”
I stand up.
I am naked, bleeding, sixteen paces from a hole in the world, and the last heir of the house I swore to destroy is standing in front of me with tears on her face.
I think of a vow made on a dirt road, in the cold, with the smell of a burned village in my nose.
I think of a promise to a man who has not yet cooled.
I do not have a sword.
It is somewhere in the wreck of the floor.
Sayo looks at me for a long, level moment.
And then she does a thing I do not expect.
She kneels.
She kneels in the wet dark at my feet, and lays the key on the stone, and bows her head.
“You swore to kill every one of us,” she says.
“I have heard.
Everyone has.
It is the first thing they told me about you.” She does not look up.
“I would ask that you not do it tonight.
I would ask that you wait until I have shown you what is in the rest of the palace.” A pause.
“And then, if you still wish it, you may start with me.”
The lantern swings.
The bearers hold their breath.
And behind my ribs, in the little room that is nearly all rubble now, a quiet, dry, delighted voice says:
Oh, this is going to be interesting.
End of Chapter Fourteen