Sayo does not let me die of my wounds, which I gather is a matter of some effort on her part.
She takes charge of the Cage in the space of about a hundred heartbeats.
I watch her do it from the floor, propped against a shard of the broken dais with a bearer’s cloak over my shoulders, and I cannot decide whether to be impressed or afraid.
She is sixteen years old.
Her father is lying dead six paces from her feet.
And she stands in the wreck of the greatest hall in the world, small and gray and very upright, and gives orders in a voice like a struck bell.
“You.
The lamplighter.
Take four men and carry the King to the cold room behind the east stair.
Do not let anyone see his face.
Cover it.” Toku stares at her.
“Now.”
He goes.
“You, the cook.
Get every bearer out through the ramp.
Not by the loading court.
There is a servants’ passage behind the third landing, on the left, with a door disguised as a panel.
It comes out in the laundry yard.
Take them through it and scatter them.
Tell them to go home and say nothing.” She pauses.
“Tell them the King has ascended in peace.”
“He is not—” Genta begins.
“I know what he is.” Her eyes are dry.
“But if there is a rumor that the guard is coming, and the gate is barred, and the Keepers are running through the court screaming that a demon has killed the King, then four hundred people who carried jars tonight will be dead by morning.
Do you understand?” She lifts her chin.
“Let them have a lie.
It is a small mercy.
I am told it is the only kind I have to give.”
Genta looks at her for a long moment.
Then he bows, very low, and goes.
“You,” says Sayo.
I lift my head.
She has come to stand over me.
There is blood on the hem of her pale gray robe, and a gray smudge of ash across her cheek, and her hands are folded in front of her so tightly that the knuckles have gone the color of bone.
“Can you stand?”
“Not for long.”
“Then you will have to do it for a short time.” She holds out a hand.
It is thin and cold and very steady.
“There is a place.
A pavilion, in the old Cloud Garden, at the back of the eastern court.
No one has used it in ten years.
It has a bed and a lock.
I will take you there.
Then I will go up to the hall.”
“Why?”
“Because if I do not tell them, someone else will.”
“Tell them what?”
She looks at me with those small, grave, tearless eyes.
“That my father is dead,” she says.
“And that it was not you who killed him.”
I do not remember the walk.
I remember the cloak, and the cold air, and a series of narrow twisting corridors that seemed to go on forever.
I remember Sayo’s shoulder under my arm.
I remember the sound of a hundred small bells ringing, far off, in the depths of the palace, quick and frantic, like a hive stirred with a stick.
I remember a garden, a little dark one, choked with pine and moss, and a low round building with a roof like an upturned bowl.
There is a bed.
A blanket.
A lock.
The last thing I feel is Sayo’s hands, quick and clumsy, wrapping a wet cloth around the wound in my thigh.
“My brother will not like this,” she says.
“Your brother?”
“Tadaaki.
He is the Crown Prince.
He is twenty-seven, and he has been raised since infancy to be the next vessel.” A faint bitter twist in her voice.
“Father called it the burden.
Tadaaki called it the honor.
He has waited his entire life to receive it.”
“And now there’s nothing to receive.”
“Now there is nothing.” She stands.
“He will not forgive that.
Not you.
Not me.
Not Father.
Not anyone.”
“Will he come here?”
“No,” she says.
“Not tonight.”
She goes out.
The lock clicks.
I lie there in the dark, on a stranger’s bed, with a stranger’s blanket over my legs and a hole in the floor of the world two hundred feet beneath me.
My wounds ache.
My skull throbs.
The little hard nub on my brow is hot as a coal.
Sleep, says the demon.
It is drowsy, and oddly gentle.
Just for a little.
I will keep watch.
I don’t trust it.
Nor do I.
But you are dying on your feet.
A pause.
Go on.
I will not let it in.
I close my eyes.
I do not dream so much as fall.
I fall out of the bed and out of the pavilion and out of my own skin, and for a long weightless moment I am nothing at all, a drifting scrap of awareness in the dark.
Then the dark opens, and I am somewhere else.
I am in the Throne Hall.
I know it at once, though I have never been inside.
It is the great white hall at the north end of the palace, with the huge lacquered pillars and the vaulted roof and the long empty avenue of black stone leading to the dais.
There are lamps.
There is incense.
And at the far end, on a pair of gilded chairs, sit two people who are not the King.
I do not have a body.
I am only a sort of eye, drifting through the air somewhere near the rafters, seeing what is seen.
Shigen, says the demon, very faintly, from somewhere beyond the dream.
Do not be afraid.
It is the crane.
It is sleeping, but it dreams, and the dream runs through the blood of the house.
You touched it.
You sat inside it.
So you can see what it sees.
I can see them.
Yes.
A pause.
It is showing you on purpose.
Why?
I do not know.
Another pause.
I do not like it.
I look down.
The woman in the left-hand chair is very beautiful and utterly still.
She wears a robe of white and silver, layered in a dozen thin silk sheets, and her long black hair is coiled in a tower on her head, pinned with combs of pale jade.
Her face is a mask of powder.
It does not move.
It has not moved, I suspect, in thirty years.
This is the Queen.
Her name, I gather, is Shizue.
The man beside her is standing.
He is tall.
Taller than his father was, and broader, with a soldier’s shoulders and a dancer’s spine.
He is dressed in black, not the white of the court, a plain close-fitting robe of black silk trimmed with silver thread.
His hair is bound in a high knot.
His face is long and fine and severe, a younger, harder cast of his father’s, with the same gray eyes, but none of the mildness.
Tadaaki.
He is looking down the length of the hall at the doors, which have just been flung open.
A man stumbles through.
He is an old man in white robes, torn and bloodstained, with a hooked nose and a face like a hatchet.
One of his arms hangs at his side, broken.
His high black cap is gone.
His lacquered wand, the one topped with a white crane, has snapped in two, and he clutches the pieces to his chest like a child with a broken toy.
The High Keeper.
He falls to his knees in the middle of the hall.
It is a long way to the dais, and he does not seem to be able to lift his head.
His voice, when it comes, is a thin cracked whisper, and yet in the great silence it carries like a bell.
“Your Highness,” he says.
“Your Majesty.
I have—I have terrible news.”
“Speak,” says Tadaaki.
“The offering.
It was—there was an intruder.
A bearer, in disguise.
He had—” A shuddering breath.
“He had the horns.
He had the mask.
He broke the rite.
The crane was awakened, and it rose, and—”
“And?”
“His Majesty is dead.”
Nobody moves.
The old man raises his face at last.
It is streaked with tears and blood.
“His Majesty is dead,” he says again.
“He stood before the crane and refused it. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
He gave himself to hold it.
And the boy, the bell-ringer, the son of Shogen, took a white bell from the King’s hand and rang it backward.” His voice cracks.
“It sleeps.
The crane sleeps.
It has gone into the pit and it is silent.
The bargain is broken.
It is over.
It is over, Highness, it is all—”
He does not finish.
Nothing happens for a long time.
I watch it from the rafters, and it is the strangest silence I have ever known.
The Queen has not moved.
The courtiers lining the hall stand as though carved.
Somewhere, very far off, a bird is singing in the garden.
Then Tadaaki begins to walk.
He comes down the steps of the dais, slowly, one at a time.
His robe whispers on the stone.
He crosses the black floor with an easy unhurried stride and stops in front of the kneeling old man, and looks down at him.
“The crane sleeps,” he says.
“Yes, Highness.”
“And my father is dead.”
“Yes.”
“And a peasant boy did this.
In our own hall.
On the night of the offering, with four hundred Keepers and a thousand guards.” His voice is perfectly level.
There is not a flicker in it.
“How many of them are still alive?”
“Highness?”
“The guards.
The Keepers.
The bearers.
How many are dead?”
The High Keeper hesitates.
“I—I do not know.
Some.
The priests fled.
The servants scattered—”
“So no one stopped him.”
“Highness, the crane—”
“No one stopped him.”
The old man flinches.
“We could not.
He was—”
Tadaaki takes hold of his head, one hand on each side, the way a man takes a jar from a shelf.
He does it almost gently.
There is no rage in his face at all.
He twists.
The sound is very small.
A dry snap, like a dead branch under a boot.
The High Keeper’s body drops onto the black stone in a heap, and lies there, and the lacquered wand slips from his fingers and rolls away, and comes to rest against the base of a pillar.
A courtier makes a noise.
It is cut short.
Tadaaki wipes his hands on a square of white silk he takes from his sleeve.
He folds it.
He tucks it away.
Then he lifts his eyes and looks up, and up, and up, directly at the rafters, at the place where I am not.
He smiles.
Shigen, says the demon, sharply.
Shigen, he can feel you.
I know.
Get out.
Get out now—
“There you are,” says the Crown Prince, very softly, to the empty air.
The dream breaks.
It does not shatter, exactly.
It slides, like a painting knocked from a wall, and the hall goes spinning away into the dark, and I am falling again.
I catch a glimpse of the Queen, still motionless in her chair.
I catch a glimpse of Sayo, coming through the great doors at a run, her gray robe streaming, her mouth open in a cry I cannot hear.
Then the dark closes over me.
And then, the dark opens again.
It is a corridor.
Long, narrow, dim, lit by a single smoking torch.
I am not a bodiless eye anymore.
I am behind someone, following close, so close I can see the small hairs on the back of his neck.
He is tall.
He is dressed in black.
He is walking very fast, and his footsteps do not make a sound.
It is him, says the demon.
Its voice is thin, tight, wary.
It is the prince.
It is showing you where he goes.
He passes through a door.
Another.
A third.
The corridors grow narrower, and older, and colder, and the lamps grow fewer, and I understand, distantly, that we are descending into a part of the palace no one visits.
The walls are bare stone.
The air smells of dust and iron and something faintly sweet.
He stops at a door.
It is plain.
Black wood, iron-banded, with a single lock in the shape of a crane.
He lays his palm against it.
Something in the lock shifts, softly, and the door swings inward without a sound.
Beyond it is a room.
I cannot see it properly.
The dream is trembling now, the edges fraying, the light going strange.
But I see enough.
A long low chamber, walled with black stone, lined with racks.
Racks of swords.
Racks of helms.
Racks of armor, all white, all bone-pale, all of it made in the shape of feathers.
And at the far end, on a pedestal of black marble, under a single beam of cold gray light, a thing I cannot look at directly.
It is small.
It is white.
It is the size of a man’s face.
It has horns.
He turns.
I have not been seen.
I am sure of that.
He has not looked at me.
He has not spoken.
But he has stopped, in the doorway of that terrible room, and slowly, with great deliberation, he has turned his head.
And his shadow has horns.
I see it on the wall, thrown by the smoking torch, tall and black and wavering.
It is his shadow.
It is the shape of his body, the line of his shoulders.
But where his head should be there is a shape that does not belong to any man, a long narrow skull with two curving horns sweeping up and back, and beneath the skull, in the shadow of a jaw, a dim red gleam.
No, says the demon, in a very small voice.
The shadow lifts its hand.
Fire runs up the wall.
It is not orange.
It is not yellow.
It is a deep, thick, sullen red, the color of embers in a dead hearth, and it does not flicker.
It pours.
It rolls up out of the floor in a slow terrible wave, and it does not burn the stone, or the wood, or the air.
It burns only the space.
Everything it touches goes dark, and hollow, and wrong.
Hellfire, whispers the demon.
What?
It is called hellfire.
It is the oldest thing in the world.
It is what a demon does when it has stopped being afraid of what it costs.
Its voice shakes.
I have never used it.
I did not know how.
But I know the shape of it.
It is in the bones of every one of us.
A gasp.
He is showing you how.
Why?
I do not know.
Shigen.
Shigen, wake up.
The shadow raises a sword.
It is a long, pale, narrow blade, like a shaft of moonlight.
I have seen it before.
I have held its edge in my palms.
It is the sword that killed my father.
And the shadow lifts it high over its horned skull, and the red fire runs up the length of the steel, and lights it from within, and the whole dark room goes bright as a furnace.
The shadow brings it down.
Wake, says the demon.
Wake up.
Wake up—
I wake with a scream.
I am sitting bolt upright in a strange bed, in a strange dark room, with sweat pouring down my face and my heart going like a drum.
The pavilion is quiet.
The lamp has gone out.
Through the paper screens I can see the gray light of a very early dawn.
I am here, says the demon.
It is shaking.
I am here.
It was only a dream.
It wasn’t.
No.
A pause.
It was not.
My hand has closed around the hilt of my father’s sword.
I do not know how it got there.
Someone, Sayo, or one of the Sweepers, must have carried it from the Cage and left it by the bed.
I stare at it, at my own knuckles gone white on the black cord.
The blade is half out of the scabbard.
And, faintly, at the very edge of my hearing, it is humming.
Do it, says the demon.
What?
The fire.
You know the shape of it.
You saw it.
It is quick, urgent, breathless.
I do not know why, but I think you will need it.
Very soon.
Please.
While it is still fresh.
I look at the sword.
I think of the Crown Prince, smiling up at the rafters.
I think of the horned shadow on the wall.
I stand up.
I am naked.
I am bandaged.
I am a wreck.
But my legs hold, somehow, and I draw the blade in the dim gray light, and it comes out with a whisper, cold and dark and plain.
I hold it in both hands, the way Daigo taught me.
I breathe.
I let the demon in.
Not all of it.
A sliver, a spark, a single hot coal in the center of my chest.
It rises through my arms and into my hands, and along the length of the steel, and the blade goes warm.
Then hot.
Then red.
A deep, thick, sullen red, the color of dying embers, that pours from the edge in a slow spilling wave and hangs in the air around the sword like a curtain.
Hellfire.
It is beautiful.
It is horrible.
It does not burn me.
It only hollows, a soft, slow, awful erasing, and I feel it eating at the edge of the world.
Now, says the demon.
Cut it.
Cut the fire?
Yes.
Cut it.
It wants to be cut.
It is only waiting for the blade.
I do not understand.
But I have learned to trust it.
I lift the sword over my head, the red flame pouring down it like blood, and I bring it down with everything I have, a single vertical stroke through the heart of my own fire.
The world explodes.
I will not dwell on it.
I remember a light like the sun.
I remember a roar that turned my bones to water.
I remember the roof of the pavilion lifting off, all at once, like the lid of a pot, and the walls blowing outward in a ring of white splinters, and the little moss garden turning to ash around me in a great spreading circle.
I remember flying.
I land on my back in the smoking ruins of what used to be a summerhouse.
For a long time I do not move.
My ears are ringing.
My eyes are full of dust.
I lie there, staring up at a sky the color of pearl, while the last fragments of the roof come drifting down around me like burning snow, and I think, quite calmly:
Well.
That will have been noticed.
Yes, says the demon.
It sounds appalled.
And, underneath, very faintly, thrilled.
That will definitely have been noticed.
Far off, across the palace, I hear a hundred bells begin to ring.
I sit up.
The ground around me is a crater, twenty paces across, black and smoking, the earth fused to black slag at the edges.
The pines are gone.
The moss is gone.
The only thing left standing is the frame of the door, absurdly upright, with a few tatters of paper hanging from it, and my father’s sword lying at its foot, unharmed, cold and dark as ever.
I stagger to my feet.
I retrieve it.
I put it on my back, and I take the bearer’s cloak off the wreckage, and wrap it around me, and I look toward the palace.
It is waking.
I can see lanterns coming on in the windows of the great halls.
I can see the tiny black figures of guards running along the galleries.
I can hear shouting.
Somewhere close, a horn is sounding, long and flat and urgent.
And through it all, beneath the noise and the smoke and the pale rising light, I feel something else.
It is very faint.
It is a tug, a thread, a cold fine wire drawn taut between my chest and a place a long way off, deep in the heart of the palace.
It is the same thread I felt in the dream.
It is him.
Shigen, says the demon.
Its voice is hollow.
Shigen.
I can see him.
Where?
Not with my eyes.
With the other thing.
The thing that is left of the crane.
A shuddering breath.
He is in the armory.
He is standing before a pedestal.
He has the sword.
Which sword?
Your father’s killer.
It is whispering now.
The pale one.
It was in the wall of the Cage.
Someone carried it up.
Someone gave it to him.
A pause.
It is in his hand.
He is holding it.
He is looking at the thing on the pedestal.
What thing?
A mask.
I go very still.
It is very old, says the demon.
It is made of bone.
It is the shape of a skull.
It has two horns.
It is the first king’s mask.
The one that made the bargain.
Its voice is faint, and very far away.
It is not a crane’s.
It was never a crane’s.
It is the face of the thing that bargained with him.
It is the face of the first demon.
Shigen.
What is he doing?
There is a long, terrible silence.
He is lifting it.
I do not see it.
I am not meant to.
But the demon tells me, in a small, flat, appalled voice, and I stand in the ashes of the Cloud Garden with the dawn coming up behind me and feel it happening as though it were my own hands.
The Crown Prince Tadaaki stands in the black stone armory with the sword that killed my father in his right hand.
He does not look at it.
He looks at the pedestal.
At the small white shape lying on its bed of black silk, with its two curved horns and its hollow eyes and its long, narrow, patient, smiling jaw.
He sets down the sword.
He lifts the mask in both hands.
It is cold.
It hums, the demon says, very faintly, like a struck bell.
He is not afraid, says the demon.
Shigen.
He is not afraid at all.
He raises it to his face.
Do not, I say, out loud, to nothing.
Do not.
It settles over his brow like water closing over a stone.
There is a small dry sound, like the crack of a bone.
A whisper of movement in the dark.
And in the black stone armory, in the last of the smoking torchlight, the Crown Prince of the White Walls lifts his head, and the two horns of the mask gleam, and behind the empty eyes something wakes and begins, very slowly, to smile.
The sword rises from the floor.
I do not see who lifted it.
Shigen, says the demon, and its voice is nothing at all now, a thread, a breath, a dying spark in the dark.
Shigen, that is not the crane.
Then what is it?
I do not know.
It is very quiet.
But I think we have just met the thing that made the bargain.
Behind me, across the smoking garden, the bells of the palace ring on and on and on, and in the deep heart of the White City something far older than the crane draws its first breath in six hundred years.
End of Chapter Fifteen