Sayo finds me standing in the crater, which is either extremely good luck or a sign that she has been running toward the explosion.
She comes through the smoking trees at a dead sprint, robe hitched to her knees, one sandal gone, with four guards pounding behind her and a woman in captain’s armor at her shoulder.
She stops at the lip of the crater.
She looks at it.
She looks at the ash where a pavilion used to be, and the smoldering black ring of what used to be a moss garden, and the tall bare figure in a stolen cloak with a sword on his back and bloody bandages on his thigh.
“That was a summerhouse,” she says.
“I know.
I’m sorry.”
“My grandmother’s summerhouse.”
“It was locked.
I couldn’t—”
“It is fine.” She presses the back of her hand to her forehead.
She is breathing hard.
“It is only that I had a whole speech planned.
I was going to be dignified.
I was going to walk through the garden and say something wise.” She lowers the hand.
“You have blown up the eastern court.”
She has a point, says the demon.
Be quiet.
I am only agreeing.
The woman in captain’s armor steps forward.
She is tall, weathered, hard-faced, with a scar through one eyebrow and the shrewd unhurried eyes of someone who has been carrying a spear since before I was born.
She looks at me for a long moment, and then at the crater, and then at Sayo.
“Highness,” she says.
“The palace guard is on its way.
Two hundred at least.
The Crown Prince has declared himself regent.”
Sayo’s face goes very still.
“He has declared what?”
“Regent.
Until the coronation.
He gave the order not an hour ago.” The captain’s jaw tightens.
“He has sealed the gates.
He has placed the Great Hall under his personal guard.
And he has said—” She hesitates.
“He has said that the King was murdered by the bell-ringer, with the connivance of the Princess Sayo.”
The silence stretches.
“Well,” says Sayo, in a small clear voice.
“That did not take long.”
Her name is Ayame.
She is the captain of the Princess’s household guard, all seven of them, and she has served the royal children since before Sayo could walk.
I gather this from the way she does not look at me, and the way she does not look at Sayo, and the way she stands between us with her hand not quite on her sword.
“There is a passage,” Sayo says.
“Behind the old kitchens.
It goes to the Ledger Hall.
I mean to take him there.”
“Highness—”
“He is wounded.
He cannot fight two hundred men.
But he can be shown.
Before it is too late.” Sayo’s eyes are very bright.
“There is a thing in that hall that Father would not let me read.
It has taken me nine years to find the key.
I want him to see it before he decides whether to kill me.”
“I have not decided that,” I say.
“Yes you have.” She almost smiles.
“You are only deciding when.”
We go by the servants’ ways.
I did not know how many of them there were.
The palace is a hive.
Behind every wall of plaster and lacquer, between every pair of pillars, inside every hollow stair, there is a second palace, narrow and dim and crooked, made for the people who are not supposed to be seen.
Passages a shoulder-width across.
Steps worn hollow by a thousand feet.
Little doors that open onto laundries and coal-rooms and the blackened backs of kitchens, where scullions in soot-gray aprons look up, and see a wounded man in a stolen cloak with a horn on his brow and a princess in gray silk, and say nothing, and look down again.
They know who you are, says the demon.
They know.
They are not afraid.
A pause.
I find that very strange.
They’ve been afraid all their lives, I say.
I think it wore out.
Ayame goes first.
Sayo walks in the middle.
I limp at the rear, and every few paces I have to stop and lean on the wall, and every time I do, the little nub on my brow pulses, hot and heavy, like a second heart.
It has grown overnight.
It is the length of my thumb now.
I keep my hand away from it.
At the end of a long, cold, damp passage, we come to a door.
It is plain.
Gray wood, unpainted.
Sayo takes a small key from her sleeve, the ninth, the one she used on the ramp, and I see, for the first time, that it is not one key but two, a long pale one and a short black one, joined at the bow like a pair of twins.
She puts the black half in the lock.
It turns with a soft, ancient click.
“My father called it the Room of Mistakes,” she says, and pushes open the door.
It is a library.
I had expected a vault.
Something dark, something cold.
But the Ledger Hall is a long, low, well-lit room, with a wooden floor polished to a glow and a great arched window at the far end letting in a thin pearl-colored light.
The walls are shelved from floor to ceiling.
And on the shelves, in row after row after row, stand black lacquered boxes.
Thousands of them.
They are all the same.
Squat, square, the size of a man’s two hands, each one sealed with a red thread and stamped on its lid with a small white crane.
There is a number on each.
A year.
A place.
I walk down the first aisle with my hand trailing along the spines, and read them as I go.
Tsukimi, 412.
Kuroda, 412.
Same.
Same.
Sarashina.
Ōmi.
Nagare.
I stop.
Nagare, says the demon.
I take it from the shelf.
It is heavy.
I break the thread, and lift the lid, and inside, on a bed of white silk, lies a single sheet of paper.
It is closely written in a neat clerk’s hand.
A list of names.
Fifty.
Sixty.
Beside each, a small note.
Old woman.
Boy, lame leg.
Grandfather, blind.
And at the bottom, a total, and a seal, and the words: Delivered in good order.
I put it back.
“They have been keeping it since the beginning,” says Sayo, quietly.
“Every tithe.
Every village.
Every name.
Six hundred years.” She has stopped at the end of the aisle, a small gray figure in the pearl light, with her hands clasped in front of her.
“I found this room when I was seven.
I thought it was a library.
I opened a box.” She looks at me.
“I have not been able to sleep properly since.”
“Why keep it?”
“Because the bargain required an accounting.” She says it very quietly.
“That is what I found, when I finally learned to read the old script.
It is all written down.
Every clause.
Every term.
My family has been paying a debt for six hundred years, and every payment is recorded, and every receipt is signed.”
She turns.
At the far end of the room, under the great arched window, there is a table.
On the table lies a book.
It is not a book.
It is a stack of thin bone tablets, each the length of a forearm, bound together at one edge with a cord of braided black hair.
The bone is yellow and dry and old beyond reckoning.
Every tablet is covered in tiny angular characters, cut into the surface with a needle.
“That,” says Sayo, “is the Bargain.”
I read it slowly.
The old script is difficult.
Sayo helps, one tablet at a time, and Ayame stands by the door with her hand on her hilt, listening to the distant sound of boots, and I lean over the table with my hands flat and follow Sayo’s slim finger across the bone.
It is the first king’s own account.
He was a warlord, in the beginning.
The strongest of a dozen rival chiefs in a country that had not yet learned to call itself a country.
A big man, hard, shrewd, capable of astonishing cruelty.
And he had a problem, which was that he was dying.
I have a canker in the lung, the tablet says.
The healers give me a year.
I have a son of six and an army of thirty thousand, and if I die, both will be eaten.
So he went into the mountains.
I sought the oldest thing in the land, the tablet says.
I sought it by the old ways, by starvation and blood and the long fast.
And on the ninth night, it answered.
I feel the demon go very still.
It came to me in a dream, the tablet goes on.
It wore a white face with two horns.
It had no name.
It said that it was the first of those who could not rest, and the greatest, and the hungriest.
It said it had been alone for ten thousand years.
And it said that it would give me my life, and the life of my son, and of his son, and of every son of my line, for as long as the line endured, in return for a single thing.
What thing?
Sayo’s finger trembles on the bone.
A body, she reads.
It wished to walk in the world.
It could not, for it had no flesh, and no flesh could bear it.
But it said that a line of blood, bred for a thousand years, strengthened by every generation, sharpened by every trial, might become a vessel strong enough to hold it.
It would take a long time, the tablet says.
I said I did not mind.
Nor did it.
I straighten.
My mouth is dry.
“The crane,” I say.
“Was never the bargain.” Sayo’s voice is very small.
“It was the leash.
It was a servant the Hollow One made for the first king, to keep the line strong.
To feed on the tithe, and to bring the strength of every dead soul to the blood of the house.
Like a farmer feeding a pig.” She swallows.
“It was never meant to be the master.
It was only meant to fatten us.”
Us, says the demon, very softly.
She says us.
“For six hundred years,” says Sayo, “the Hollow One has been waiting.
For a vessel strong enough.
For the day the line was ready.” She lifts her eyes to mine.
They are enormous, and dark, and dry.
“Father knew.
That is why he hid the mask.
He knew that Tadaaki was the strongest my family has ever produced.
He knew that if Tadaaki ever put it on, the waiting would be over.”
“And now he has.”
“Now he has.”
The door bangs open.
It is not Ayame’s guards.
It is a Keeper.
A young one, thin, sallow, with a bell in one hand, and he stands in the doorway with his mouth open and his black eyes wide, staring at us.
I recognize him.
It is the priest who tested me in the loading court, the one whose bell leaned, the one Sayo distracted.
“Highness,” he says, in a cracked whisper.
“Highness.
You must not stay.
He is coming.”
“The regent.
The prince.
He has—” His voice fails.
He swallows.
“He is not himself.”
Behind him, in the corridor, the light has changed.
It is a dim, dull red, like the glow of dying coals.
It pulses.
It flows in through the open door and across the polished floor in a slow creeping tide, and the temperature of the room drops ten degrees in the space of a breath.
The lacquered boxes on the nearest shelf begin to hum.
I feel it in my teeth.
Hellfire, says the demon.
Shigen.
It is his.
It is real.
The Keeper turns his head.
He looks back down the corridor, and his face changes, slowly, to a look I have seen on the faces of men in the last moment before they die.
“Oh,” he says.
“Oh, no.”
He does not finish.
Something long and pale comes through the doorway, edge first, and takes him under the ribs.
It goes in and out so fast that I see only the pale flash of the blade.
The young priest looks down at himself.
He drops his bell.
It rings, once, on the polished wood.
Then he falls, and behind him, framed in the red-lit doorway, stands the Crown Prince of the White Walls.
He is not what I saw in the dream.
In the dream he was a shadow.
A silhouette with horns.
Here, in the thin gray light of the Ledger Hall, he is a man, tall, lean, dressed in black, with the pale sword in his right hand.
His hair is bound in its high knot.
His shoulders are square.
His posture is elegant, unhurried, almost lazy.
But his face is not his face.
The mask sits over it like a second skull.
It is small and white and cracked with age, the color of old teeth, with hollow eyes and a long narrow patient jaw.
Two horns curve up and back from the brow, thin as knife-blades, and where they meet the bone there are hairline cracks running through the ivory like frost.
Behind the eyeholes, something glows.
A dull, low, smoldering red.
It is looking at me.
Shigen, says the demon.
Its voice is stripped of every trace of irony.
It is thin, and cold, and small.
That is not a man.
“No,” I say aloud.
“Ah,” says the thing in the mask.
It is not the prince’s voice.
It is under his voice.
It is a deep, slow, resonant thing, like a great bell heard from inside a well, and it comes out of the narrow jaw of the mask in a sort of dull echoing hum that makes the floorboards shiver.
And beneath it, faint, like a face seen through water, I hear the prince’s own voice, quick and clipped and desperately, hopelessly afraid.
…Sayo…
Sayo, run…
“The son of Shogen,” says the Hollow One.
It does not sound surprised.
It sounds, if anything, mildly pleased.
“How very interesting.
I had wondered if you would come.”
“Get out of him.”
“I cannot.
I am afraid we are rather attached.” The horned head tilts.
“He asked me, you know.
He begged.
I would not have taken him otherwise.
That is the whole point of a bargain.
I have never once taken anything that was not freely given.”
“You don’t get to say that.”
“I say it because it is true.” The red glow behind the eyes flickers.
“Your father’s demon was a scrap.
A fragment.
A child of mine, lost in the world, that wandered until it found a house.
But you—” The voice softens.
“You have made it whole.
You have taught it to sit.
To listen.
To ask.” The mask turns, very slightly, toward the dark corner behind my ribs.
“I have not seen that in six hundred years.
It is very moving.
I am proud of it.”
Do not, says the demon, in a whisper.
Do not listen to it.
It is not—it is not a father.
It is only hungry.
“Little one,” says the Hollow One, softly.
I am not your little one.
“No,” it agrees.
“You are the boy’s.”
The sword comes up.
I do not have time to draw mine.
The prince does not run.
He does not lunge.
He simply is somewhere else, and then the pale blade is a hand’s breadth from my chest, wreathed in that thick sullen red, and I throw myself backward with a shout and feel the fire pass across my face like a breath from a furnace.
It does not burn.
It erases.
A strip of the cloak on my shoulder simply ceases to exist.
The stone of the floor where I was standing is smooth and black and slightly warm.
I hit the table.
The bone tablets go flying.
I roll over them, come up in a crouch, and my father’s blade is in my hand, though I do not remember drawing it.
I meet the second stroke with the flat, and it is like catching a falling star.
The whole length of the steel screams.
My arms go numb to the shoulder.
“Sayo!” I shout.
“Get out!”
“I am not—”
“Highness!” Ayame has her by the collar, hauling her toward the door.
“Now!
We cannot help him, we can only—”
The prince turns his head.
It is a small motion.
A slight tilt.
But Ayame stops as though she has run into a wall.
The red glow behind the mask flares, and a long red thread of fire lashes out from the pale sword and takes the captain across the chest.
She does not scream.
I do not think she has time to.
One moment she is a tall woman in scarred armor with her hand on the Princess’s collar.
The next there is a wide, smooth, black hollow where her chest used to be, and she is falling, and her eyes are already empty.
She hits the floor without a sound.
“Ayame!” screams Sayo.
“She was loyal,” says the Hollow One.
It sounds faintly regretful.
“It is always the loyal ones.”
Shigen, says the demon.
Shigen, now.
Please.
Now.
I let it in.
I have never done this in a room so small.
The horns come up through my skull in a wet, tearing rush.
The mask closes over my face.
The heat runs through me like a river bursting its banks.
But this time the demon does not stop at the surface, does not merely wear my body like a coat.
It goes deeper, into the fires under my ribs, into the place where hellfire lives, and I feel it wake.
It is not like the summerhouse.
In the summerhouse I copied a shape.
Here I become one.
The sword in my hand turns red.
It does not simply glow.
It drinks.
The fire pours up out of the blade in a spreading curtain, sullen and thick and deep, and where it touches the polished floor the wood goes dark.
I lift the sword, and the whole Ledger Hall lights up, a red hellish glare that throws my shadow ten feet high across the ceiling.
I see the prince’s masked face turn toward me.
I see it tilt.
“There you are,” says the Hollow One, and it sounds almost tender.
We meet in the middle of the floor.
I will not pretend I can describe it.
It is not a fight in any way I have known.
It is a collision of two furnaces.
Every stroke throws sparks the size of hands.
Every clash shakes the shelves, and the black lacquered boxes rattle in their rows, and here and there one falls and bursts open, and pale slips of paper go whirling through the air like moths.
I cut.
He parries.
He cuts.
I parry.
The pale sword is faster than I am.
The red fire is thicker.
But I am angry, and there is a great cold delight in my chest, and the demon is singing in the back of my mind like a thing gone mad with joy.
Yes, it cries.
Yes!
Again!
Higher!
Yes!
I take him across the shoulder.
The pale armor rings.
He staggers, and for an instant I see, through the hollow eye of the mask, a flicker of real human fear.
…stop…
please stop…
it is going to kill us all…
The voice is his.
The prince’s.
It is a dim, hoarse, terrified thing, drowned in the roar of the fire, and it goes through me like a nail.
He is still in there, I say.
Yes, says the demon.
He is.
Barely.
Can I—
No.
Sharply.
Do not.
It is trying to make you.
That is what it does.
It wants you to spare him, so that it can strike you while you hesitate.
It is the oldest trick of all.
But—
Shigen.
Very quiet.
He is already dead.
He died when he put it on.
All that is left is the shape.
Do you understand?
You cannot save him.
You can only stop it.
I hesitate.
It is a very short hesitation.
A single heartbeat.
The pale sword goes through my left side.
It does not hurt at first.
That is the terrible thing.
It goes in with a small cold shock, like a plunge into snow, and I look down and see the blade standing out of my ribs, wreathed in red, and I feel nothing at all.
Then the fire reaches the wound.
And it erases it, a bright white agony, as the flesh around the steel simply stops being there.
I scream.
I hear the demon scream with me.
It is a dreadful sound, two voices in one throat, and it tears at the cracked walls of the Ledger Hall.
I fall to my knees.
The sword slides out with a wet, hollow sound, and behind it the horned mask leans in, and I see, deep in the hollow eyes, a great slow ancient patience.
“It is over now.
You have done very well.”
The blade rises.
It stops.
It stops because, at the far end of the Hall, in the great arched window, the light has changed.
It is not the dull pearl of dawn.
It is bright.
It is gold.
It is a hard, clean, blinding gold that comes through the tall window in a single shaft and falls across the floor like a bar of fire.
And in the middle of the shaft, small and gray and trembling with the effort of not falling over, stands Sayo.
She is holding the twin key.
She is holding it high over her head, the pale half and the black, joined at the bow, and it is blazing.
It burns with a cold white radiance, so bright that I have to shut my eyes, and the whole Ledger Hall rings with a sound like a struck bell, low and sweet and immensely old.
“Tadaaki!” she cries.
Her voice cracks.
“Tadaaki, look at me!”
The masked head turns.
“You are my brother,” says Sayo.
“You are my brother.
You taught me to swim in the pond behind the east hall.
You gave me your fan when mine broke.
You cried when Mother sold my dog.” She is weeping, openly, uncontrollably, tears streaming down her small grave face.
“It is not too late.
Put it down.
Please.
Please.
Put it down.”
The red glow behind the eyes flickers.
For one bright instant, I think it will work.
Then the Hollow One laughs.
It is a soft, low, sorrowful sound.
Not cruel.
Almost kind.
“Little Sayo,” it says, in the prince’s voice, in its own voice, in both.
“He cannot hear you.
He cannot hear anything.
He is very tired.”
It lifts the sword.
Shigen!
says the demon.
I move.
I do not think.
I hit the prince from the side, the whole of my weight behind my shoulder, and the two of us go through the great arched window in a shower of glass and lead.
Not glass.
Paper, thin panes of oiled paper stretched over a cedar lattice, and it shreds like a torn cloth.
We fall.
We fall for a long time.
Then we hit a tiled roof twenty feet below, and roll, and slide, and go over the edge, and hit a lower one.
I lose the sword.
I do not see where it goes.
I see only the sky, and the gold light, and a long white horned skull above me, and a hand closing around my throat.
The pale blade is somewhere behind us.
The mask has slipped.
Not off.
Just slightly aside, so that one hollow eye is turned toward the sun, and through the gap, for a single instant, I see a human face.
It is gaunt.
It is gray.
It is the face of a young man who has not slept in a week.
His eyes are wet and wild and utterly, terribly lucid.
“Kill me,” says Tadaaki.
His voice is a whisper.
It is his own.
“Kill me.
Please.
I cannot stop it.
It has my hands.
It has my mouth.
I can only—” A hoarse, sobbing breath.
“I asked for this.
I begged for it.
Heaven help me, I thought I was worthy.
Do it before it takes the rest.”
The mask slides back.
I see the red glow flare behind the eye, and hear the Hollow One’s voice, very close, very calm: “He is delirious.
Pay him no mind.”
I do not answer.
I have nothing left to answer with.
My side is a bonfire.
My strength is a thread.
The great hand around my throat is tightening, slowly, patiently, and the world is going dark at the edges.
Shigen, says the demon.
It is weeping.
I am so sorry.
I cannot hold it.
I am not strong enough.
I am only a child of it.
I am only a scrap.
It’s all right, I say.
It is not.
No, I admit.
But you did well.
The hand tightens.
And then, from somewhere very far off, from the direction of the Kawara, from the crooked lanes and the leaning houses and the tannery-stinking river, there comes a sound I do not expect.
A bell.
It is a small one.
Thin, cracked, out of tune.
It is the kind of bell that hangs over the door of a tavern, or on the neck of a goat.
It rings once.
Then another.
Then a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, a great ragged clamor rising from every corner of the ward, bells of clay and bells of tin and bells of old iron, all ringing at once.
The Sweepers.
They are ringing every bell in the Lower Ward.
Not the King’s bells.
Not the priests’.
Their own.
And in the middle of that clamor, faint and high and impossible to mistake, I hear a woman’s voice, fierce and cracked and brave, shouting across the rooftops:
“Ring, you bastards!
RING!”
The Hollow One stiffens.
I feel it.
I feel the great hand slacken on my throat, a fraction, as if something has pricked it.
The horned head turns, slowly, toward the sound.
And in the hollow eyes, for the first time, I see doubt.
“What,” it says, “is that?”
“That,” I croak, “is noise.”
I hit it in the face.
It is not a good blow.
It is a desperate, sloppy, half-conscious thing.
But it lands on the edge of the mask, on the crack that runs from brow to jaw, and I feel the ivory give.
A single hairline fracture spreads, wide as a finger, and a gout of red light shoots out of it like steam from a kettle.
The Hollow One screams.
It is not the sound I expected.
It is not rage.
It is pain, naked and enormous, a wail so vast and so old that every tile on the roof cracks beneath us.
The hand lets go of my throat.
The prince’s body staggers back, clawing at the mask, and I roll away across the slates and get my knees under me and see, dimly, that the gold light in the window has grown brighter, and that Sayo is standing in the shattered frame, with the key held out in front of her like a lantern.
“Now!” she screams.
“Shigen!
Now, while it is bleeding—”
I cannot.
I have no sword.
I have no strength.
I have a hole in my side and a demon curled up whimpering behind my ribs and a thousand tiny bells ringing in the distance like a flock of startled sparrows.
I stagger to my feet.
I take one step.
The prince straightens.
He is still standing.
The mask is cracked from brow to jaw, and red light streams from the wound, and beneath it, through the fracture, I can see his mouth, drawn back over his teeth in a snarl of anguish and fury.
His shoulders shake.
“Enough,” says the Hollow One.
It is not loud.
It is not even angry.
It is very quiet, and very cold, and something in it makes every hair on my body stand up.
“I have waited six hundred years,” it says.
“I can wait a little longer.”
It raises its hand.
The fire that pours from the pale sword is not red anymore.
It is black.
A deep, absolute black, darker than any night, and it spreads across the roof in a widening ring, and where it touches, the tiles turn to dust.
“Run,” it says.
“Run, little ones.
I will find you.”
The ring of black fire expands.
I do not stop to think.
I grab the nearest thing, Sayo, small and gray and struggling, and I haul her out of the window frame, and I jump.
We land in the river.
It is not a graceful landing.
It is a fall of forty feet, from the roof of the eastern hall to the black slow water of the palace moat.
The cold hits me like a fist.
The world goes silent, and dark, and green.
I hold on to Sayo’s arm.
I do not let go.
I kick, blindly, upward, toward a smear of gray light, and break the surface with a gasp.
The sky is on fire.
I do not mean that as a figure of speech.
The whole eastern court is ablaze with a slow black flame, a spreading, silent, hungry stain that eats through roof-tiles and pillars and lacquered beams.
The gilt is going.
The paper lanterns are curling.
And in the middle of it, tall and thin and black against the burning white, stands the horned figure of the Crown Prince, with the pale sword in his hand and a crack in his face.
He is looking down at us.
He does not follow.
He does not need to.
He only lifts one arm, slowly, and points.
And from every tower in the White City, all at once, the palace bells begin to ring.
They ring the great slow tolling of a royal proclamation, the sound I heard at Ashigawa on the ridge road, the sound that means the King has spoken.
And on the wind, over the roar of the fire and the clamor of the Sweepers’ bells, in a voice that is not a man’s, that is a thousand men’s, that is the sound of an old hunger finally given a mouth, I hear it:
By order of the King and the blood of the royal house.
The tithe shall be doubled.
The bell-ringer is proclaimed an enemy of all living things.
And the throne is no longer empty.
I turn my face into the cold black water and, for a moment, I do not want to come up.
Shigen, says the demon, very faintly.
I’m here.
I am so sorry.
Don’t.
It is only— A small, shaken breath.
It was afraid of the bells.
I lift my head.
What?
The bells, says the demon.
The little ones.
The ones the Sweepers rang.
It flinched.
It did not flinch at the fire.
It did not flinch at the key.
A pause.
It flinched at the noise.
I look at the burning palace.
I look at the tiny, cracked, discordant clamor rising from the Lower Ward, ten thousand ordinary bells, ringing, ringing, ringing, in the smoke.
Yes, I say slowly.
I think it did.
Beside me, in the black water, Sayo has begun to cough and weep at once.
I put my arm around her small shoulders.
I hold her up.
We drift, together, along the moat toward a low stone arch and a rusted grate and a stink of tannery and old smoke, and behind us the White City burns.
I think, I say, we’ve just been given a weapon.
End of Chapter Sixteen