They come at first light, and they come with fire.
I see it from the tannery roof.
Six columns of black-armored guards pour over the river bridges in the gray dawn, torches held high, pitch-pots swinging from poles.
Behind them the Keepers march in white rows, bells raised.
Behind the Keepers, a black palanquin borne by twelve men.
The first bridge is already burning.
Sweepers set it alight themselves, an hour ago, soaked in lamp oil.
It does not slow them.
The guards run straight through the flames and come out the other side screaming, and keep coming.
“Six hundred,” says Tsuyu, beside me.
She has a butcher’s cleaver in her fist.
“Maybe seven.”
“And us?”
“Four thousand who can hold a stick.” She spits.
“Two hundred who can hold it properly.”
Behind us, ten thousand people crouch in cellars and attics and boats on the river.
Every house has a bell hanging from its eave.
Every bell is tied to a string.
Every string runs to a child.
I settle the new sword on my shoulder.
It hums against my collarbone, low and ugly, a dozen notes at once.
The wound in your side is holding, says the demon.
Barely.
Do not do anything clever.
I’m going to do something clever.
I know.
I would just like it on record that I said so.
I take a breath.
“Ring them,” I say.
Tsuyu lifts her cleaver and brings it down on the iron rail of the roof.
Every child in the Kawara yanks a string.
The noise is a wall.
It rolls across the ward from a thousand directions, a howling, clanging, jangling cataract of cracked tin and battered bronze and goat-bells and dinner-gongs and pots beaten with spoons.
It has no rhythm.
It has no key.
It is the sound of a whole city refusing to be quiet.
The guards falter.
Only for a heartbeat.
Ordinary men, they do not feel it the way the thing in the mask will.
But they flinch, and their line goes ragged, and that is all I need.
I jump.
Forty feet.
The roof of the tannery to the cobbles of the lane.
I land in a crouch with a jolt that nearly tears my side open, and the first guard swings a spear at my head.
I do not use the demon.
Not yet.
I step inside the thrust, and the bronze blade takes the spearhead off at the collar, and rings.
It is a ghastly sound.
A dozen clashing notes, a whole tavern’s worth of noise, tearing out of the steel in a single scream.
The guard drops his spear and claps both hands to his ears.
I put my elbow into his face and take his helmet off with the next stroke.
Then they are on me.
I will not pretend it is skill.
It is footing, and rage, and a very sharp sword.
The lanes of the Kawara are six feet wide.
Three men can stand abreast, at most, and I am ten steps from the mouth of the alley, and every one of them has to come at me over a pile of his own dead.
I cut a man’s leg out from under him.
I break another’s arm on the wall.
A pitch-pot swings at my head and I duck, and it takes a guard behind me full in the face, and he goes down burning.
To my left, Kanji the smith has come out of the tannery with a sledgehammer the size of a child.
He does not fight so much as demolish.
A guard in white cord runs at him, and the hammer goes up, and comes down, and there is a very wet sound.
To my right, Genta the cook has planted himself in the mouth of a side lane with a kitchen cleaver in each hand and a look of grim delight.
Twenty Sweepers stand behind him.
They have rolled a cart across the alley.
They have piled it with barrels.
When the guards charge it, Genta kicks a barrel of lamp oil onto the cobbles and a boy of fourteen puts a torch to it.
The lane goes up like a bonfire.
“THAT’S FOR MY BROTHER!” Genta roars, into the smoke, and hurls a cleaver at something I cannot see.
Somewhere in the heat and the noise, I realize I am laughing.
Then the white bells begin.
It starts far off, at the back of the column, a single sweet clear note like a struck cup.
Then a second, exactly a third above.
Then a third, a fifth.
The Keepers have stopped marching.
They stand in ranks in the streets, thirty, forty, sixty of them, and every bell is ringing in perfect accord, a long unbroken chord of pure and shimmering gold.
The Sweepers’ noise stutters.
I feel it in my teeth.
The chord is not loud.
It is orderly.
It cuts through the clamor like a knife through cloth, and where it passes, the jangling dies, string by string, and the whole vast wall of sound begins to fray.
“They’re drowning us!” screams someone.
“Ring!” bellows Tsuyu, from the roof.
“Ring, you cowards, RING!”
But the children are tiring.
The strings go slack.
Here and there a bell falls silent, and another, and the guards see it, and surge forward with a roar.
Shigen, says the demon.
The chord.
It is the same pure note.
The one that calls spirits out of the dying.
If they finish it, if they make the harmony complete—
What happens?
Everyone in the ward who is standing near a dying person loses their soul.
Flatly.
All at once.
I look at the Keepers.
I look at the sword in my hand.
Ah, I think.
That.
I break cover.
There is no plan.
There is only the street, forty paces of it, and sixty white-robed priests at the end of it, and between us a hundred guards.
I do not go around them.
I let the demon in, all of it, the horns and the mask and the black claws, and the world goes red and bright and utterly clear.
Yes, says the demon, in our voice, in a hot rush.
Yes, yes, go.
I go.
I do not run.
I break the street.
I smash through the first rank like a wagon through a hedge, and a spear glances off my ribs, and I do not feel it.
A man screams.
A sword bites my thigh.
I take him by the throat and throw him into the man behind him, and the sword in my other hand is singing, a great jarring shrieking bellow of nine thousand voices all speaking at once.
The hellfire comes without my asking.
It pours up the blade in a red curtain.
I swing it low, in a flat sweeping arc, and the wave of it sweeps down the street and erases the front rank of the guards.
Not their bodies.
Their footing.
The cobbles under their feet simply cease, and they drop into the sudden pit with a chorus of shrieks.
I leap the gap.
I land in the middle of the Keepers.
They are not fighters.
They are old men and pale young priests, in long white robes, with bells in their fists.
They stare at me with their mouths open.
I see one lift his bell to strike, and I take it out of his hand with a single stroke of the bronze blade, and the dying note goes up like a gasp.
I swing.
The blade sings, once, a shattering blare that goes through the whole street like a thunderclap, and every bell in the priests’ hands cracks.
All at once.
Sixty of them.
The pure sweet chord shrieks, and warps, and snaps, and a hush drops over the fight so sudden that I can hear my own heartbeat.
Then the Sweepers’ noise comes roaring back, louder than ever.
I do not stay to enjoy it.
I hear the horn behind me, a deep flat long one, and I turn, and I see the palanquin.
It has come up to the river’s edge.
Twelve bearers in white stand in a circle around it, motionless, their faces slack, their eyes black.
The curtains are drawn back.
And in the seat, alone, upright, one hand resting on the pommel of a pale sword, sits the Crown Prince of the White Walls.
He is not wearing the mask.
I do not understand it at first.
I see his face, gaunt, gray, drawn tight over the bones, and I think: he has taken it off.
But the mask is there.
It has sunk into him.
It lies under the skin of his face like a second skull, and where his eyes should be there are two deep hollow pits, and in the pits burns a steady red glow.
“Son of Shogen,” says the Hollow One.
It does not raise its voice.
It does not need to.
The whole street goes quiet as if a hand had closed over it.
“You have made a great deal of noise.”
“I’m not finished.”
“No.” It rises from the seat, smoothly, unhurried.
“That is the difficulty, isn’t it.
You keep not being finished.”
It walks toward me.
The bearers fall away.
The guards part.
The Keepers, those who still have hands to stand, scramble back with their broken bells clutched to their chests.
I stand alone in the middle of the street with a demon in my chest and nine thousand voices in my hand, and I watch the prince come.
Careful, says the demon.
I know.
It is not afraid.
I know.
Shigen.
Very small.
It is not afraid yet.
He strikes first.
It is a long, low, lazy cut, no faster than a man walking.
The pale blade slides toward my ribs, wreathed in red, and I raise the bronze to meet it, and they touch.
The sound is indescribable.
It is not a clash.
It is a scream.
A hundred bells, a thousand, all shrieking at once, a great raw torrent of cracked and jangling noise pouring out of the meeting of the blades like water from a burst dam.
It rips across the street.
Windows shatter.
Roof-tiles lift.
And the thing in the prince’s face flinches.
Its whole body jerks, and the red glow in its eyes gutters, and it takes a single stumbling step back.
There!
the demon cries.
There!
It hates it!
Again!
I lunge.
The bronze sings.
The pale sword rings.
We go at it up the length of the lane, cut and parry, cut and parry, and every stroke sets off the chorus of nine thousand voices, and every note of that noise is a hook in the Hollow One’s skin.
It snarls.
It spits red.
Where my blade lands, the pale armor cracks, and black fluid seeps out like tar.
But it does not stop.
It fights without breathing, without fatigue, without pain.
A cut opens my forearm to the bone.
A thrust catches me under the collarbone.
The hellfire bursts out of the pale sword in a solid wall, and I take it on the flat of the bronze and feel the steel hum against it, bell against void, a clash of two things that cannot both exist.
The blade holds.
For now.
“It is very loud,” says the Hollow One, conversationally, through the sound of the fight.
“I will grant it that.
I have not heard anything so dreadful since the first age of the world.”
“Then get out.”
“I cannot.” It swings.
I block.
“But I can end you, and then it will be quiet.”
The hellfire comes.
It is not red.
It is black.
I do not see how it hits me.
It is not a flame.
It is an absence.
A great black hole in the air, spreading outward from the pale blade in an expanding ring, and everything it touches simply stops.
The cobbles under my feet.
The air in my lungs.
The song in my sword.
The song.
The bronze goes silent.
It is the worst thing I have ever felt.
The sword is still in my hand, still warm, still heavy.
But the voices are gone.
The clash and the clamor and the wild raucous joy of it, gone, like a candle snuffed.
I stand in the black ring with a dead blade in my hand, and the red glow in the Hollow One’s eyes flares with a vast, soft, hungry joy.
“There,” it says.
“Much better.”
The blade comes up.
I cannot move.
Shigen!
says the demon.
Shigen, the ring!
You must ring it, you must—
I can’t—
You can.
It is only a room.
It is only a wall.
You have done this.
Reach!
I reach.
It is not in my chest, this time.
It is in the sword.
It is in the nine thousand tiny dents along the blade, each one a small dead bell, each one a small quiet farewell.
I close my hand around the hilt, and I ask.
Please, I say. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
I know it’s dark.
I know it’s cold.
But you are not alone in it.
There are nine thousand of you.
Ring.
Nothing.
The pale sword falls.
And from the roof of the tannery, in a clear, cracked, furious, unforgettable voice, Tsuyu screams: “RING YOU BASTARDS!
RING FOR THE BOY!”
Ten thousand bells go off at once.
It is not a sound.
It is a storm.
Every bell in the Kawara, every cracked tin cup and dented pot and rusted cowbell, every child-yanked string, every hand-rung gong.
It comes howling across the rooftops in a single vast shock, and it hits the sword in my hand like a hammer on an anvil.
The bronze screams.
It is a thousand-throated shriek, a great chaotic shattering explosion of noise, and the black ring around me cracks like a frozen pond.
I feel the sword come alive in my fist.
I feel every voice in it wake, all nine thousand, roaring, laughing, shouting, singing, weeping, and I feel the Hollow One’s blade slide down my edge and skid.
I step forward.
I do not use skill.
I use the noise.
I put the whole raging, ringing weight of the blade behind a single blow and drive it up through the pale sword’s guard and into the face of the horned skull beneath the prince’s skin.
The mask cracks.
It is not a hairline.
It is a great jagged rent, from brow to jaw, and red light pours out of it in a geyser.
The Hollow One shrieks, a sound like a hundred crows, and staggers back with both hands over its face, and the pale sword drops from its fingers and rings on the cobbles like a struck bell.
I go after it.
Behind the crack, I see a man’s mouth.
A man’s chin.
A young man’s stubbled jaw, gray with exhaustion, and one wild human eye rolling white in a socket of black.
He is choking.
He is clawing at his face.
And from the ruin of his mouth, in the prince’s voice, in the prince’s own frightened, hoarse, desperate whisper:
“Sayo…”
“No!” shrieks the Hollow One.
I raise the sword.
“Shigen!”
She has come out of nowhere.
Sayo is running.
Small, gray, wild-haired, shoeless, tearing up the middle of the lane in a brown tunic three sizes too big.
She is holding something up in both hands.
A tiny bell.
A silver one, no bigger than a plum, with a chipped lip.
She does not look at me.
She does not look at the guards.
She runs straight through the ring of fire and the ring of dark and the ring of bell-song, and she throws her arms around her brother’s waist.
She rings it.
Right in his ear.
The world goes white.
I do not see what happens.
I only know that the sound is enormous.
It is not the roar of the ward.
It is one small, cracked, ordinary silver bell, jangling right against the side of a man’s head, and it is the loudest thing I have ever heard.
The mask screams.
It screams with a voice that has no bottom.
And then, with a crack like a frozen lake giving way, the whole thing breaks.
The pale bone shatters.
It flies apart in a thousand fragments, tinkling on the cobbles like broken teeth.
And out of the wreck of the prince’s face, in a great black surging cloud, pours the Hollow One.
It is not a shape.
It is a smear.
A boiling, howling, hungry stain on the air, ten feet across, twenty, fifty, and in the middle of it two burning red coals of eyes, wild with fury.
You, it says.
It is not a voice anymore.
It is the sound of a hundred thousand throats, all of them screaming.
You have taken it.
You have taken my body.
You have taken six hundred years.
Sayo falls.
She does not let go.
She holds on to her brother, who has crumpled against her, limp as a doll, gray and gasping and utterly, blessedly, alive.
His face is bare.
His eyes are closed.
There is a long red mark across the bridge of his nose where the mask sat, and he is breathing.
“Tadaaki,” Sayo sobs.
“Tadaaki, Tadaaki, Tadaaki—”
The black cloud lunges.
I move between them.
I do not know how.
I only know that the bronze is up, and singing, and that I have thrown myself in front of a boy I swore to kill, and that the Hollow One’s howling rage is a hand’s breadth from my face.
It hovers there.
It writhes.
It stares at me with two burning eyes, and I stare back.
“Get out of my city,” I say.
It laughs.
It is a terrible sound.
A cascade of ten thousand small dry sobs, like the death rattle of a whole dying world.
Your city, it says.
Your city.
Ah, child.
You have such a small idea of what a city is.
It swirls.
For a moment it hangs above us like a thunderhead, vast and black and hideous, its shadow sweeping the street.
The guards have thrown down their weapons.
The Keepers are on their knees.
Somewhere, far above, a bird cries out.
Then it drops.
Not on us.
Not on the ward.
It streaks north, a comet of black fire, a single long shrieking arc across the dawn, over the river and the moat and the burning white walls.
I watch it go.
I watch it spiral down toward the palace, toward the eastern hall, toward the great black hole under the throne.
Toward the Cage.
Oh no, says the demon, softly.
What?
It cannot have a body.
Its voice is hushed.
So it has gone to find one.
I feel it, then.
Through the ground.
Through my soles.
A vast, deep, tremendous shiver, as of a great beast waking in a cave.
The cobbles quiver.
The river ripples.
Across the whole city, one by one, every bell falls silent.
And from the north, from the ruin of the White Palace, from the floor of a cavern two hundred feet down, there comes a sound that I have heard once before, in the hour of the Festival.
It is the sound of a very large wing unfolding.
But this time, when it screams, it does not sing.
End of Chapter Eighteen
ASHOGEN THE HOLLOW CROWN ARC Chapter Eighteen: Dawn of the Purge
They come at first light, and they come with fire.
I see it from the tannery roof.
Six columns of black-armored guards pour over the river bridges in the gray dawn, torches held high, pitch-pots swinging from poles.
Behind them the Keepers march in white rows, bells raised.
Behind the Keepers, a black palanquin borne by twelve men.
The first bridge is already burning.
Sweepers set it alight themselves, an hour ago, soaked in lamp oil.
It does not slow them.
The guards run straight through the flames and come out the other side screaming, and keep coming.
“Six hundred,” says Tsuyu, beside me.
She has a butcher’s cleaver in her fist.
“Maybe seven.”
“And us?”
“Four thousand who can hold a stick.” She spits.
“Two hundred who can hold it properly.”
Behind us, ten thousand people crouch in cellars and attics and boats on the river.
Every house has a bell hanging from its eave.
Every bell is tied to a string.
Every string runs to a child.
I settle the new sword on my shoulder.
It hums against my collarbone, low and ugly, a dozen notes at once.
The wound in your side is holding, says the demon.
Barely.
Do not do anything clever.
I’m going to do something clever.
I know.
I would just like it on record that I said so.
I take a breath.
“Ring them,” I say.
Tsuyu lifts her cleaver and brings it down on the iron rail of the roof.
Every child in the Kawara yanks a string.
The noise is a wall.
It rolls across the ward from a thousand directions, a howling, clanging, jangling cataract of cracked tin and battered bronze and goat-bells and dinner-gongs and pots beaten with spoons.
It has no rhythm.
It has no key.
It is the sound of a whole city refusing to be quiet.
The guards falter.
Only for a heartbeat.
Ordinary men, they do not feel it the way the thing in the mask will.
But they flinch, and their line goes ragged, and that is all I need.
I jump.
Forty feet.
The roof of the tannery to the cobbles of the lane.
I land in a crouch with a jolt that nearly tears my side open, and the first guard swings a spear at my head.
I do not use the demon.
Not yet.
I step inside the thrust, and the bronze blade takes the spearhead off at the collar, and rings.
It is a ghastly sound.
A dozen clashing notes, a whole tavern’s worth of noise, tearing out of the steel in a single scream.
The guard drops his spear and claps both hands to his ears.
I put my elbow into his face and take his helmet off with the next stroke.
Then they are on me.
I will not pretend it is skill.
It is footing, and rage, and a very sharp sword.
The lanes of the Kawara are six feet wide.
Three men can stand abreast, at most, and I am ten steps from the mouth of the alley, and every one of them has to come at me over a pile of his own dead.
I cut a man’s leg out from under him.
I break another’s arm on the wall.
A pitch-pot swings at my head and I duck, and it takes a guard behind me full in the face, and he goes down burning.
To my left, Kanji the smith has come out of the tannery with a sledgehammer the size of a child.
He does not fight so much as demolish.
A guard in white cord runs at him, and the hammer goes up, and comes down, and there is a very wet sound.
To my right, Genta the cook has planted himself in the mouth of a side lane with a kitchen cleaver in each hand and a look of grim delight.
Twenty Sweepers stand behind him.
They have rolled a cart across the alley.
They have piled it with barrels.
When the guards charge it, Genta kicks a barrel of lamp oil onto the cobbles and a boy of fourteen puts a torch to it.
The lane goes up like a bonfire.
“THAT’S FOR MY BROTHER!” Genta roars, into the smoke, and hurls a cleaver at something I cannot see.
Somewhere in the heat and the noise, I realize I am laughing.
Then the white bells begin.
It starts far off, at the back of the column, a single sweet clear note like a struck cup.
Then a second, exactly a third above.
Then a third, a fifth.
The Keepers have stopped marching.
They stand in ranks in the streets, thirty, forty, sixty of them, and every bell is ringing in perfect accord, a long unbroken chord of pure and shimmering gold.
The Sweepers’ noise stutters.
I feel it in my teeth.
The chord is not loud.
It is orderly.
It cuts through the clamor like a knife through cloth, and where it passes, the jangling dies, string by string, and the whole vast wall of sound begins to fray.
“They’re drowning us!” screams someone.
“Ring!” bellows Tsuyu, from the roof.
“Ring, you cowards, RING!”
But the children are tiring.
The strings go slack.
Here and there a bell falls silent, and another, and the guards see it, and surge forward with a roar.
Shigen, says the demon.
The chord.
It is the same pure note.
The one that calls spirits out of the dying.
If they finish it, if they make the harmony complete—
What happens?
Everyone in the ward who is standing near a dying person loses their soul.
Flatly.
All at once.
I look at the Keepers.
I look at the sword in my hand.
Ah, I think.
That.
I break cover.
There is no plan.
There is only the street, forty paces of it, and sixty white-robed priests at the end of it, and between us a hundred guards.
I do not go around them.
I let the demon in, all of it, the horns and the mask and the black claws, and the world goes red and bright and utterly clear.
Yes, says the demon, in our voice, in a hot rush.
Yes, yes, go.
I go.
I do not run.
I break the street.
I smash through the first rank like a wagon through a hedge, and a spear glances off my ribs, and I do not feel it.
A man screams.
A sword bites my thigh.
I take him by the throat and throw him into the man behind him, and the sword in my other hand is singing, a great jarring shrieking bellow of nine thousand voices all speaking at once.
The hellfire comes without my asking.
It pours up the blade in a red curtain.
I swing it low, in a flat sweeping arc, and the wave of it sweeps down the street and erases the front rank of the guards.
Not their bodies.
Their footing. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
The cobbles under their feet simply cease, and they drop into the sudden pit with a chorus of shrieks.
I leap the gap.
I land in the middle of the Keepers.
They are not fighters.
They are old men and pale young priests, in long white robes, with bells in their fists.
They stare at me with their mouths open.
I see one lift his bell to strike, and I take it out of his hand with a single stroke of the bronze blade, and the dying note goes up like a gasp.
I swing.
The blade sings, once, a shattering blare that goes through the whole street like a thunderclap, and every bell in the priests’ hands cracks.
All at once.
Sixty of them.
The pure sweet chord shrieks, and warps, and snaps, and a hush drops over the fight so sudden that I can hear my own heartbeat.
Then the Sweepers’ noise comes roaring back, louder than ever.
I do not stay to enjoy it.
I hear the horn behind me, a deep flat long one, and I turn, and I see the palanquin.
It has come up to the river’s edge.
Twelve bearers in white stand in a circle around it, motionless, their faces slack, their eyes black.
The curtains are drawn back.
And in the seat, alone, upright, one hand resting on the pommel of a pale sword, sits the Crown Prince of the White Walls.
He is not wearing the mask.
I do not understand it at first.
I see his face, gaunt, gray, drawn tight over the bones, and I think: he has taken it off.
But the mask is there.
It has sunk into him.
It lies under the skin of his face like a second skull, and where his eyes should be there are two deep hollow pits, and in the pits burns a steady red glow.
“Son of Shogen,” says the Hollow One.
It does not raise its voice.
It does not need to.
The whole street goes quiet as if a hand had closed over it.
“You have made a great deal of noise.”
“I’m not finished.”
“No.” It rises from the seat, smoothly, unhurried.
“That is the difficulty, isn’t it.
You keep not being finished.”
It walks toward me.
The bearers fall away.
The guards part.
The Keepers, those who still have hands to stand, scramble back with their broken bells clutched to their chests.
I stand alone in the middle of the street with a demon in my chest and nine thousand voices in my hand, and I watch the prince come.
Careful, says the demon.
I know.
It is not afraid.
I know.
Shigen.
Very small.
It is not afraid yet.
He strikes first.
It is a long, low, lazy cut, no faster than a man walking.
The pale blade slides toward my ribs, wreathed in red, and I raise the bronze to meet it, and they touch.
The sound is indescribable.
It is not a clash.
It is a scream.
A hundred bells, a thousand, all shrieking at once, a great raw torrent of cracked and jangling noise pouring out of the meeting of the blades like water from a burst dam.
It rips across the street.
Windows shatter.
Roof-tiles lift.
And the thing in the prince’s face flinches.
Its whole body jerks, and the red glow in its eyes gutters, and it takes a single stumbling step back.
There!
the demon cries.
There!
It hates it!
Again!
I lunge.
The bronze sings.
The pale sword rings.
We go at it up the length of the lane, cut and parry, cut and parry, and every stroke sets off the chorus of nine thousand voices, and every note of that noise is a hook in the Hollow One’s skin.
It snarls.
It spits red.
Where my blade lands, the pale armor cracks, and black fluid seeps out like tar.
But it does not stop.
It fights without breathing, without fatigue, without pain.
A cut opens my forearm to the bone.
A thrust catches me under the collarbone.
The hellfire bursts out of the pale sword in a solid wall, and I take it on the flat of the bronze and feel the steel hum against it, bell against void, a clash of two things that cannot both exist.
The blade holds.
For now.
“It is very loud,” says the Hollow One, conversationally, through the sound of the fight.
“I will grant it that.
I have not heard anything so dreadful since the first age of the world.”
“Then get out.”
“I cannot.” It swings.
I block.
“But I can end you, and then it will be quiet.”
The hellfire comes.
It is not red.
It is black.
I do not see how it hits me.
It is not a flame.
It is an absence.
A great black hole in the air, spreading outward from the pale blade in an expanding ring, and everything it touches simply stops.
The cobbles under my feet.
The air in my lungs.
The song in my sword.
The song.
The bronze goes silent.
It is the worst thing I have ever felt.
The sword is still in my hand, still warm, still heavy.
But the voices are gone.
The clash and the clamor and the wild raucous joy of it, gone, like a candle snuffed.
I stand in the black ring with a dead blade in my hand, and the red glow in the Hollow One’s eyes flares with a vast, soft, hungry joy.
“There,” it says.
“Much better.”
The blade comes up.
I cannot move.
Shigen!
says the demon.
Shigen, the ring!
You must ring it, you must—
I can’t—
You can.
It is only a room.
It is only a wall.
You have done this.
Reach!
I reach.
It is not in my chest, this time.
It is in the sword.
It is in the nine thousand tiny dents along the blade, each one a small dead bell, each one a small quiet farewell.
I close my hand around the hilt, and I ask.
Please, I say.
I know it’s dark.
I know it’s cold.
But you are not alone in it.
There are nine thousand of you.
Ring.
Nothing.
The pale sword falls.
And from the roof of the tannery, in a clear, cracked, furious, unforgettable voice, Tsuyu screams: “RING YOU BASTARDS!
RING FOR THE BOY!”
Ten thousand bells go off at once.
It is not a sound.
It is a storm.
Every bell in the Kawara, every cracked tin cup and dented pot and rusted cowbell, every child-yanked string, every hand-rung gong.
It comes howling across the rooftops in a single vast shock, and it hits the sword in my hand like a hammer on an anvil.
The bronze screams.
It is a thousand-throated shriek, a great chaotic shattering explosion of noise, and the black ring around me cracks like a frozen pond.
I feel the sword come alive in my fist.
I feel every voice in it wake, all nine thousand, roaring, laughing, shouting, singing, weeping, and I feel the Hollow One’s blade slide down my edge and skid.
I step forward.
I do not use skill.
I use the noise.
I put the whole raging, ringing weight of the blade behind a single blow and drive it up through the pale sword’s guard and into the face of the horned skull beneath the prince’s skin.
The mask cracks.
It is not a hairline.
It is a great jagged rent, from brow to jaw, and red light pours out of it in a geyser.
The Hollow One shrieks, a sound like a hundred crows, and staggers back with both hands over its face, and the pale sword drops from its fingers and rings on the cobbles like a struck bell.
I go after it.
Behind the crack, I see a man’s mouth.
A man’s chin.
A young man’s stubbled jaw, gray with exhaustion, and one wild human eye rolling white in a socket of black.
He is choking.
He is clawing at his face.
And from the ruin of his mouth, in the prince’s voice, in the prince’s own frightened, hoarse, desperate whisper:
“Sayo…”
“No!” shrieks the Hollow One.
I raise the sword.
“Shigen!”
She has come out of nowhere.
Sayo is running.
Small, gray, wild-haired, shoeless, tearing up the middle of the lane in a brown tunic three sizes too big.
She is holding something up in both hands.
A tiny bell.
A silver one, no bigger than a plum, with a chipped lip.
She does not look at me.
She does not look at the guards.
She runs straight through the ring of fire and the ring of dark and the ring of bell-song, and she throws her arms around her brother’s waist.
She rings it.
Right in his ear.
The world goes white.
I do not see what happens.
I only know that the sound is enormous.
It is not the roar of the ward.
It is one small, cracked, ordinary silver bell, jangling right against the side of a man’s head, and it is the loudest thing I have ever heard.
The mask screams.
It screams with a voice that has no bottom.
And then, with a crack like a frozen lake giving way, the whole thing breaks.
The pale bone shatters.
It flies apart in a thousand fragments, tinkling on the cobbles like broken teeth.
And out of the wreck of the prince’s face, in a great black surging cloud, pours the Hollow One.
It is not a shape.
It is a smear.
A boiling, howling, hungry stain on the air, ten feet across, twenty, fifty, and in the middle of it two burning red coals of eyes, wild with fury.
You, it says.
It is not a voice anymore.
It is the sound of a hundred thousand throats, all of them screaming.
You have taken it.
You have taken my body.
You have taken six hundred years.
Sayo falls.
She does not let go.
She holds on to her brother, who has crumpled against her, limp as a doll, gray and gasping and utterly, blessedly, alive.
His face is bare.
His eyes are closed.
There is a long red mark across the bridge of his nose where the mask sat, and he is breathing.
“Tadaaki,” Sayo sobs.
“Tadaaki, Tadaaki, Tadaaki—”
The black cloud lunges.
I move between them.
I do not know how.
I only know that the bronze is up, and singing, and that I have thrown myself in front of a boy I swore to kill, and that the Hollow One’s howling rage is a hand’s breadth from my face.
It hovers there.
It writhes.
It stares at me with two burning eyes, and I stare back.
“Get out of my city,” I say.
It laughs.
It is a terrible sound.
A cascade of ten thousand small dry sobs, like the death rattle of a whole dying world.
Your city, it says.
Your city.
Ah, child.
You have such a small idea of what a city is.
It swirls.
For a moment it hangs above us like a thunderhead, vast and black and hideous, its shadow sweeping the street.
The guards have thrown down their weapons.
The Keepers are on their knees.
Somewhere, far above, a bird cries out.
Then it drops.
Not on us.
Not on the ward.
It streaks north, a comet of black fire, a single long shrieking arc across the dawn, over the river and the moat and the burning white walls.
I watch it go.
I watch it spiral down toward the palace, toward the eastern hall, toward the great black hole under the throne.
Toward the Cage.
Oh no, says the demon, softly.
What?
It cannot have a body.
Its voice is hushed.
So it has gone to find one.
I feel it, then.
Through the ground.
Through my soles.
A vast, deep, tremendous shiver, as of a great beast waking in a cave.
The cobbles quiver.
The river ripples.
Across the whole city, one by one, every bell falls silent.
And from the north, from the ruin of the White Palace, from the floor of a cavern two hundred feet down, there comes a sound that I have heard once before, in the hour of the Festival.
It is the sound of a very large wing unfolding.
But this time, when it screams, it does not sing.
End of Chapter Eighteen