I wake for the second time in Hagi’s cellar, and the first thing I hear is someone arguing about whether to kill a princess.
“She’s one of them,” says Genta.
His voice is a low, savage rumble.
“She’s his daughter.
She’s his sister.
She has his eyes.
She has his blood.
She’s been eating off silver since the day she was born, and you want to put her in a bed and feed her soup?”
“I want her alive.” That is Tsuyu, flat and tired.
“For now.”
“For now.
For what?
For what use?”
“She turned the key.
She opened the door.
If she hadn’t, four hundred of us would still be sealed in that pit.”
“She did it for him.
For the boy.
For her own reasons.”
“Then they’re good reasons, and I’ll take them.”
I lie still, with my eyes shut, and count the ceiling beams.
Nine.
There are nine beams in Hagi’s cellar.
I have counted them a dozen times.
It is the first time I have ever been glad of it, because it means I am somewhere I know, and that I am alive, and that the smell in my nose is vinegar and camphor and not the sweet dry perfume of burning lacquer.
You are awake, says the demon, very small.
Yes.
You were dreaming.
You said “no” a great many times.
Did I say anything else?
You said “sword.” Twice.
A hesitation.
I am sorry about the sword.
I open my eyes.
It is the middle of the night, or the middle of the day.
Down here I cannot tell.
A single brass lamp is burning on the table, and by its light I can see the whole crowded cellar: the shelves, the herbs, the mortars.
Hagi is hunched over a bench in the corner, grinding something with a savage rhythm, his bald head shining.
Genta stands against the far wall with his arms crossed.
Toku is sitting on the floor with his back against a barrel, staring at nothing.
A dozen other Sweepers are crammed into the shadows, silent, watchful, with the strained faces of people who have not slept in two days.
And on a stool by my pallet, wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket, sits Sayo.
She has been crying.
Her eyes are swollen.
Her hair has come down, and hangs in wet black ropes around her face, and her fine gray silk robe is ruined, torn at the shoulder, stained with river-mud and soot and, at the hem, a long dark smear of someone else’s blood.
She looks like what she is, a sixteen-year-old girl who has watched her father die and her brother go mad and her guard captain be erased by a sword.
She is holding a bowl of soup in both hands.
She has not touched it.
“You should eat,” I say.
Her head snaps up.
“You have been awake,” she says, “for an entire two seconds and you are already giving orders.”
“It’s a habit.”
“It is a bad one.” She sets the bowl down on the floor with great care.
Her hands are shaking.
“You have been asleep for a day and a half.
Hagi says you have a hole in your side that would have killed an ox.
He says you should not be alive.”
“I’ve been told.”
“He says,” she adds, in a very small voice, “that it is because of the demon.
That it has been holding you together with its own body.” She swallows.
“Is that true?”
Yes, says the demon, in my head.
And I would like to add that it is extremely tiring, and I do not expect thanks.
Thank you.
I did not say I did not want thanks.
I said I did not expect them.
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s true.”
She nods slowly.
She looks at the floor.
“I am sorry,” she says.
“About all of it.
About the palace.
About Tadaaki.
About the fact that my family—” She stops.
Her chin trembles.
“I did not know how to say it.
On the road.
In the Cage.
It seemed too small.”
“It is small.”
“Yes.”
“It’s also the only thing anyone’s said to me in three weeks that I believed.”
Her eyes fill again.
She wipes them with her sleeve, angrily, and picks up the soup, and takes a mouthful with the air of a person swallowing medicine.
Then another.
Then, quite suddenly, she is eating hungrily, in great gulps, with her head bent over the bowl, and nobody in the cellar says a word.
Tsuyu comes and stands beside her.
She is not a tall woman.
She is a broad, sunburnt, gold-toothed woman in a patched brown coat, and she looks at the princess for a long time with her hands on her hips.
Then she takes the empty bowl, and refills it from the pot, and puts it back in Sayo’s hands.
“Slowly,” she says.
“You’ll be sick.”
Sayo looks up at her.
“Why?” she says, in a whisper.
“Because you’re a child.” Tsuyu’s voice is gruff.
“And children eat.”
Hagi has been listening to all of this without looking up from his mortar.
“There is a thing,” he says, in his dry, cracked, aggrieved voice, “that you are all overlooking.”
Nobody answers.
He grinds harder.
“The Hollow One.
The mask.
The thing in the prince.
It ran from a sound.” He raps the pestle against the bowl.
“I heard it from the roof of my own cellar.
A thousand bells, cracked and cheap and ringing out of tune.
And the palace went silent.
Did none of you notice?
The proclamation stopped.
The fire stopped.
For the length of four breaths there was no sound from the White City at all.”
“It was afraid,” says Sayo, slowly.
“It was hurt.” Hagi turns on his stool.
His bright black eyes glitter.
“I have been a physician for sixty years.
I know the look of a wound.
And I say that thing has a weakness, and the weakness is noise.”
“The bells of the Keepers are noise,” Genta says.
“The bells of the Keepers are music.” Hagi almost spits the word.
“Pure, sweet, perfectly tuned.
A single true note.
That is what a bell is for.
It rings a clear tone, and the tone calls to something.
It draws.
It summons.” He waves a long ink-stained hand.
“The Keepers have been using those bells for six hundred years to call the spirits out of the dying.
And what did the Hollow One do, when it came to the Cage?
It did not shudder.
It did not falter.
It liked it.”
“So what did it flinch at?”
“The Sweepers’ bells are junk,” says Hagi, with relish.
“Cracked and dented and flat.
Goat-bells.
Tavern bells.
Bells off children’s toys.
They don’t ring a note.
They ring a racket.
A thousand of them, all at once, all out of tune, clashing and scraping and banging against each other like pots in a bad kitchen.” He grins, showing three yellow teeth.
“And it hated it.”
He is right, says the demon, quietly.
You said that already.
I said the thing flinched.
I did not know why.
It sounds thoughtful.
But I think I do now.
The Hollow One is a thing of perfect emptiness.
It is the first of the unquiet dead.
It has been alone for ten thousand years.
And the one thing it cannot bear is—
Company.
Yes.
Its voice is very soft.
Noise.
Mess.
The chaos of a great many small lives, all rubbing up against one another, all a little out of tune.
It is the sound of everything it has lost.
I sit up slowly.
“It hates the sound of the living,” I say.
Nobody speaks.
The lamp flame flickers.
“That’s what a market sounds like,” says Toku, from the floor.
His voice is hoarse.
“A festival.
A wedding.
A funeral.
It’s what the Kawara sounds like on a market morning.
It’s noise.”
“It’s us,” says Tsuyu.
They come at dawn on the second day.
We are still arguing over what to do with the knowledge when the first of the runners comes skidding down the ladder, a barefoot girl of about twelve, gasping, with a smear of soot across her nose.
She is one of Tsuyu’s serving girls.
Her name is Mio.
She falls on her knees on the cellar floor.
“They’re coming,” she says.
“Guards.
Hundreds.
They’ve closed all the bridges.
They’ve got torches and pitch and, and the Keepers, with the white bells—”
“How many?” Tsuyu says.
“I don’t know!
A lot!
They’ve got lists!” She catches her breath.
“And a man on a black horse.
He’s wearing a mask.”
Everyone goes still.
“Not the prince,” says Mio, quickly.
“Not the horned one.
A plain one.
White.
A captain, I think.
He’s reading out a proclamation.” She squeezes her hands together.
“He says that on the third day from now, at dawn, the Lower Ward will be purged.
That every house will be burned.
That every person who has sheltered the bell-ringer will be given to the crane.” Her voice cracks.
“And that anyone who gives him up will be pardoned.”
“How long have we?” Sayo says.
“Two days,” says Tsuyu, flatly.
“They gave us two days.”
“To do what?” Genta demands.
“To run?
To hide?
Where?
The whole ward is a pit.
There’s one road out and it’s held by the King’s guards.”
“Then we don’t run.”
It is a new voice.
Deep, gravelly, tired.
An old man has come down the ladder behind the girl.
I have never seen him before.
He is huge, bald, bearded, with a leather apron scorched black across the chest and forearms like two knotted hawsers.
His hands are thick and scarred and crusted with ash.
He carries a bundle wrapped in a piece of sailcloth, and he sets it down on the floor in front of me with a heavy clang.
“Kanji,” says Hagi, sourly.
“The smith.
He makes knives and pots for half the ward.
He is a fool and a drunkard and he has never once paid me for a poultice.”
“I paid you in nails,” says the smith.
“Nails are not money.”
“They are in the eye of the beholder.” He kneels.
His knees crack like kindling.
“Boy.
This is yours.”
He unwraps the cloth.
I know what it is before he lifts the last fold.
It is my father’s sword.
Or it was.
What lies on the sailcloth is a long, dark, twisted thing, black as burnt wood, with a lattice of fine cracks running the length of it.
The blade has warped.
It is bent in two places, and along the spine there is a long ragged split, like a seam in a rotten plank.
The hilt is scorched.
The black cord has burned away.
The eye-mark on the pommel is nearly worn smooth.
I do not touch it.
“A boy brought it to me,” Kanji says.
“Three streets over.
A laundry boy, ten years old.
He found it in the rubble of the eastern court while the guards were busy with the fire.
Carried it out under his shirt.
Ran the whole way to the ward.” He runs a callused thumb along the split.
“I asked him what he wanted for it.
He said nothing.
He said he’d seen the man who owned it fight, from the roof of the laundry, and he wanted to see it fixed.”
“It can’t be fixed,” I say.
“No,” the smith agrees.
“It’s dead.”
“Aye.” He lifts the blade.
It crumbles slightly under his thumb, and a puff of black dust rises from the crack.
“It held a demon too long.
It held your father’s, and yours, and it took the hellfire on the roof, and that was the last straw.
It’s done what it was made to do.
There’s nothing left in it but the shape.”
I am so sorry, the demon says, in a whisper.
I burned it.
I did not mean to.
You didn’t burn it.
It lasted longer than it had any right to.
It was his.
It was the only thing of his that you had.
No, I say.
I have you.
There is a very long silence in the back of my skull.
That, the demon says at last, in a strangled voice, is the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.
I would like it noted.
I am going to be quiet for a while.
Kanji is watching my face.
“I can’t mend it,” he says.
“But I can make something new out of it.
If you’ll let me.
It’s good steel.
Old steel.
You don’t find it anymore.
A man could fold it into a new blade, and it would still be his father’s, in a way.” He lays the cracked sword down.
“But it would need something else.
Something to carry the weight.”
“Like what?”
“Bronze,” says Kanji.
He looks at Hagi, and Hagi looks at him, and I see something pass between the two old men, a small dry gleam of understanding.
“Bell-bronze.
It’s the best there is for a thing that has to sing.”
“You want to melt a bell,” says Sayo.
“A great many bells,” says the smith.
I do not know whose idea it is.
I think it is nobody’s.
I think it simply rises out of the cellar like the smell of bread, out of the little quiet pause after Kanji speaks, when a dozen exhausted people look at one another and, one by one, begin to understand.
They do not vote.
There is no speech.
Tsuyu is the first to move.
She takes the tin bell from over her tavern door, the little rusty one shaped like a wet sleeve, and lays it on the table beside the ruined sword.
Genta comes next, with a cowbell he has been using as a doorstop.
Toku has a small brass thing from a child’s rattle.
The fish-seller has one from a hen-coop.
Mio, the serving girl, has a tiny silver bell tied to her wrist with a bit of string, and she looks at it for a long moment, and then unties it, and puts it down.
Nobody says what it is for.
By the time the gray light of the second morning is leaking through the cellar shutters, the table is covered.
Tin bells and iron bells and clay bells.
Bells from oxen and goats and toys and doors.
Bells cracked, bells rusted, bells bent.
There is a small pile.
Then a larger one.
Then, as runners go from house to house through the crooked lanes of the ward and word spreads in a low urgent whisper, a mountain, and then a wagonload, and then an entire cart hauled down to the smithy by six men with their sleeves rolled up.
Ten thousand people live in the Kawara.
I think, by the end of that day, every single one of them has given something.
The forge is in the tannery.
It is the only building in the ward big enough, and the only one whose stink will keep the King’s men out.
It stands on the riverbank, a long black barn with a slate roof and a chimney like a fat gray finger.
Inside, Kanji has built a fire.
It is a great red roaring pit of a fire, banked with charcoal and stoked with bellows worked by four men at a time, and the heat in the barn is like a physical blow.
The walls run with sweat.
The rafters glow.
I sit on a barrel by the door with my side bandaged and my back against a post, because Hagi will not let me do anything else.
I watch them work.
It is the strangest thing I have ever seen.
They bring the bells in by the basketful and tip them, one by one, into a great iron crucible hanging over the fire.
But before each one goes in, the person who has brought it lifts it, and rings it.
Once.
A single clear crack of sound, a little dull clank, a thin tinny chime.
They ring it, and they listen, and then they let it go.
I do not understand at first.
It is a farewell, says the demon.
What?
It is the last time it will be a bell.
It sounds fascinated.
They are saying goodbye.
Each one.
To the sound.
I watch a woman in a laundress’s apron ring a small iron cowbell, and hold it against her cheek for a moment, and drop it in.
I watch a boy of six ring a bell shaped like a fish, and grin, and be lifted onto his father’s shoulder.
I watch an old man ring a huge bronze one that has hung in the shrine at the corner of his street for sixty years, cracked right down the middle, and I watch him touch his forehead to it before he lets it go.
The crucible fills.
The sound in the tannery grows.
It is not music.
It is the opposite of music.
It is a chaos of cracked and clashing notes, ten thousand of them, dull and bright and flat and shrill, overlapping and colliding and tearing at each other, until the whole long barn hums with it like a hive.
It is the ugliest noise I have ever heard.
It is, I realize, quite beautiful.
Shigen, says the demon.
Yes.
I can feel it in the metal.
Its voice is hushed.
I do not know how.
But it is in there.
All of it.
Every wedding.
Every funeral.
Every little nameless Tuesday.
It is soaking into the steel like water into a sponge.
Can it hold?
I do not know.
A pause.
But I would very much like to find out.
They pour it at midnight.
I have never seen anything like it.
Kanji stands at the lip of the crucible in his blackened apron with a long iron rod in his fist, and his huge scarred face is bathed in orange light, and he looks like a figure out of an ancient painting, a god of some old country, presiding over the making of the world.
Behind him stand a dozen men with their hands on the chains.
The whole tannery has fallen silent.
Even Hagi has stopped fussing.
The sword lies in a long stone mold on the floor, cracked and black.
“Say something,” Kanji says.
I look at him.
“When it goes in.
Somebody should say something.
It’s a custom.” He grins, showing a broken tooth.
I’m a smith.
I talk to iron.”
I look at the crucible.
At the mountain of molten bronze, red and gold and shimmering, bubbling like a stew.
At the faces gathered around it in the firelight: Tsuyu, Genta, Toku.
The princess, small and gray and wide-eyed.
Old Hagi, clutching his shawl.
A hundred others whose names I do not know.
They have all come.
They stand shoulder to shoulder in the dark, without a sound, waiting.
I try to think what Iwa would say.
Or Botan.
Or Hanae.
“Thank you,” I say.
My voice is hoarse.
It echoes strangely in the long barn.
“I don’t know how to say the rest.
I’ve never been good at it.
But—” I swallow.
“I’ve spent my whole life believing I was nothing.
A joke.
A leftover.
And I came here to kill a man, and I found out he was a man, and I couldn’t.
And you took me in.
All of you.
You fed me and healed me and hid me, and you asked for nothing.” I look at the fire.
“You’ve given me the only weapon I’ll ever need.
I’ll try to deserve it.”
Nobody speaks.
Then, from somewhere at the back of the barn, a dry cracked old voice says, “Get on with it, boy.
I’m not getting any younger.”
A ripple of laughter runs through the crowd.
It is small, and nervous, and it dies at once.
But I feel something loosen in my chest, a knot I did not know was there.
“Pour,” says Kanji.
I will not describe the next hours.
I do not think I could.
The men tipped the crucible.
The molten bronze ran down into the mold in a roaring river of light, and where it touched the ruined steel it hissed and steamed and bit, and for a long moment I could see nothing but a blinding gold glare and hear nothing but a vast hollow roar, like the sea in a cave.
Kanji shouted.
The men shouted back.
Somebody dropped a chain and swore.
Then a great silence, and a long time, and the slow red fading of the glow.
I fell asleep against the post.
I did not mean to.
When I woke, the tannery was almost dark.
The fire was low.
The men were gone.
Only Kanji remained, on a stool by the mold, holding something in both hands and turning it slowly in the light of the coals.
“Aye,” he said.
“That’ll do.”
He held it out.
It is a sword.
It is not my father’s.
It is not a bell.
It is neither, and both.
The blade is long and straight, a little longer than the old one, and it is the color of dark honey, a deep warm bronze-gold veined with threads of black where the old steel has run through it like ink through water.
The edge is bright.
The spine is thick.
Along the flat, incised by Kanji’s own hammer while it cooled, runs a single line of small, uneven marks.
I bend close.
They are not characters.
They are dents.
Hundreds of tiny dents, each one different, some deep, some shallow, some round, some square.
They run down the blade in a wandering, crooked, intricate row, and when I run my thumb along them I feel every one.
“Those are the bells,” says Kanji, quietly.
“Every one.
I couldn’t help it.
When the bronze cooled, the shapes came up in the metal, all of them, like fossils in a stone.
There’s over nine thousand.” He shrugs.
“It’s the only sword in the world with nine thousand voices in it.”
The hilt is plain, wrapped in a strip of gray cloth.
Sayo’s, I realize.
She must have torn it from her own robe.
I take it.
It is warm.
It is alive.
It hums against my palm with a low, dull, discordant note, a dozen tones at once, clashing and scraping and harmonizing in ways I have no name for.
It is not a pure sound.
It is not a clean one.
It is the sound of a whole street waking up on a market morning.
It is the loudest, ugliest, most human noise I have ever heard, and it goes through me like a river.
Oh, says the demon.
It is a very small, very awed sound.
Oh, Shigen.
It is singing.
I know.
It is all of them.
It is every single—
It stops.
I feel it trembling.
I feel it, in the little rubble-strewn room behind my ribs, reaching out toward the blade like a child toward a fire, and I feel the metal answer, warm and welcoming and glad.
May I?
it whispers.
It’s yours too.
The blade rings.
It is not a strike.
I have not touched it to anything.
It is a spontaneous, glorious, cacophonous shout, a chord of a thousand mismatched voices, ringing out through the silent tannery in a great tumbling cascade of sound, and every window on the riverbank rattles in its frame.
Far away, in the huddled dark of the Kawara, I hear a dog begin to bark.
Then another.
Then a baby, crying.
Then, faintly, ragged and cracked and quavering, somebody laughing.
Kanji lifts his head.
“Ah,” he says, with deep satisfaction.
“There she goes.”
I do not sleep that night.
I sit on the barrel by the door with the new sword across my knees, and I watch the river go by, black and slow under a smear of stars.
The tannery is empty.
The forge is dying.
Across the water, the White City is a dark cliff against the northern sky, and above it, where the palace should be, there is a dull red smear, a sullen glow like a wound that will not close.
Sayo comes and sits beside me.
She does not say anything at first.
She only draws her knees up under her chin and looks at the river.
She has washed her face.
She has found a plain brown tunic somewhere, too big, with the sleeves rolled to her elbows.
She looks very young.
“They said I could stay,” she says.
“Who?”
“Tsuyu.
And the others.
They said I could sleep in the cellar, and I did not have to be locked in.” A faint, wondering note.
“I told them I would understand if they did not want me.”
“What did they say?”
“They said,” says Sayo carefully, “that I was a child, and children sleep.”
I almost laugh.
“You are very quiet,” she says.
“I’m thinking.”
“About the sword?”
“About the bells.” I turn the blade in my hand, and it hums, softly, like a great sleeping beast.
“The Hollow One flinched at a thousand noisy little tavern bells.
And now I have nine thousand of them in a single piece of metal.
It won’t be a weapon so much as—”
“A wound,” says Sayo.
“You are carrying a wound in your hand.”
“Yes.”
“For a thing that cannot bear to be wounded.”
“Yes.”
She is silent for a long time.
“Tadaaki was always afraid of noise,” she says at last.
I look at her.
“When we were children.
He hated it.
Loud rooms.
Crowds.
He would go pale and shaky, and put his hands over his ears, and run and hide in the garden.” She stares out at the river.
“Father said it was a weakness.
That a prince should never flinch at anything.
He sent him to the drum-school for a year to cure it.” Her voice catches.
“It did not work.
He never stopped hearing it.
He only stopped letting anyone see.”
“Do you think—”
“I think the thing in the mask found him because of that.” Her hands are clenched around her knees.
“I think it looked for the loneliest of us.
The one who could not bear the sound of other people.
And it said: come with me.
It is quiet here.”
The river goes by.
Above us, in the dark, the stars are very cold and very clear.
“Then he’s still in there,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Somewhere.”
“Yes.” She turns her small pale face toward me.
“That is what I am afraid of.
Because if there is any of him left, if there is even one single thread, then when you kill it, you will kill him too.”
I do not answer.
I look at the new sword.
At the little wandering line of dents along its blade.
At the threads of black running through the bronze like veins.
At nine thousand tiny farewells, made visible.
“Maybe not,” I say slowly.
“Maybe there’s a way to make it ring.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know yet.” I lift the blade, and the ugly, glorious music of it rises and falls in the dark like the sound of a great city breathing.
“But I think I’m going to find out.”
Across the river, very faintly, from a high window in the burning palace, I hear a sound that is not a bell.
It is a thin, tired, unmistakable cry, a young man’s voice, hoarse and cracked and shaking with something that might be fury, or grief, or the first wild flicker of hope.
It says a single word.
Sayo.
End of Chapter Seventeen