It comes up out of the palace like a black sun.
I see it from the street, with the Crown Prince hanging limp across my shoulders and the noise of ten thousand bells dying around me.
First the roof of the Throne Hall splits.
Then the whole northern wall folds outward, tiles and timbers and gilded rafters cascading into the courts below.
And out of the wreckage, unfolding, dripping black fire, rises the crane.
It is not white anymore.
It is the same shape.
The same impossible neck, the same wedge of a beak the size of a house, the same great sweep of wings.
But the feathers are dark now, and each one is a hollow, a socket, a mouth open in a scream that makes no sound.
Where the eyes should be there are two red coals.
The whole vast body ripples, as if made of smoke, and behind it the sky is going the color of a bruise.
“It is wearing it,” Tadaaki croaks.
He is awake, barely, his head lolling against my neck.
“The crane.
It is wearing it, like a coat.”
“I know.”
“It will eat the city.”
“I know.”
“Not the bodies.” His fingers clutch my collar.
“The spirits.
All of them.
Every person within a mile.
It does not need flesh.
It only needs—”
The crane screams.
It is a silent scream, and it hits like a wave.
Every hair on my body stands up.
Around me, in the street, the guards and Keepers and Sweepers and priests go rigid, all at once, as though a hand had closed on the back of every neck.
I see a woman’s mouth open.
I see a pale wisp of something rise from between her lips.
“Ring!” I bellow.
“Ring the bells!
Ring them now!”
The clamor rises again, thin and ragged, ten thousand tired hands.
The wisps stop rising.
But they do not go back.
“We have to go in,” says Sayo.
She is soaked to the waist in someone’s blood and her hair is plastered to her face, but her voice is steady.
She has taken her brother’s other arm.
Between us he hangs like a rag doll.
“He can’t walk.”
“He can.” Tadaaki’s eyes flutter open.
They are gray, red-rimmed, and very clear.
“Give me a sword.”
“You are not—”
“Give me a sword, Sayo.”
A Sweeper hands him a dead guard’s blade.
He tests the weight of it, sways, and stays upright.
“The Cage,” he says.
“That is where it is drawing from.
There is a chamber under the pit, the Heart, where the first king’s bones are kept.
It is the anchor.
If we break it, the crane loses its hold.” He coughs blood into his fist.
“I know the way.
I have walked it every night since I was ten.”
I look at him.
Two days ago he broke a man’s neck with his bare hands.
Two hours ago he tried to kill me.
He is twenty-seven years old, and he looks forty, and he is standing on his own two feet.
“If you turn,” I say, “I’ll kill you.”
“I would like you to.” He almost smiles.
“That is rather the point.”
He means it, says the demon.
I know.
I like him.
You liked the Hollow One too.
For six seconds.
It was very charming.
I am over it.
I settle the bronze sword on my shoulder.
“Tsuyu!”
She is on the roof above, her cleaver dripping.
“Boy!”
“Get them out!
Every one!
The boats, the culvert, anywhere!”
“And you?”
“I’m going to make it stop.”
She looks at me for a moment.
Then she nods, once, hard, and whirls around, bellowing orders in a voice like a saw on a nail.
I run.
The bridge is the first problem.
It is the great southern one, the only way over the moat that is not burning.
Two hundred paces of stone and timber, and at the far end, the broken gates of the palace, and between them, in a solid mass, the hollowed.
They are the guards.
Or they were.
Four hundred men in white-corded armor, standing shoulder to shoulder across the span.
Their swords are drawn.
Their faces are slack.
And their eyes are red, every one, two dull glowing coals in each socket, staring at nothing.
“They are not dead,” says Tadaaki, quickly.
“The crane has them.
It is walking them like puppets.”
“Can I—”
“You can cut them.
It will not hurt them.
It hurts it.”
I glance at the demon.
It does not answer.
I feel its quiet, cold, wary readiness.
It is done with jokes.
“Stay behind me,” I tell them.
“I am a princess,” says Sayo, indignantly, and picks up a spear.
I have no time to argue.
I hit the line at a dead run.
There is no art to it.
The bronze rings, and the ring goes through them like a wave, and the red glow in the eyes of the front rank stutters and goes out.
Men fall.
They do not die.
They just drop, blinking, gasping, clutching their heads, and the men behind step over them and keep coming.
A blade takes me across the back.
I ignore it.
A spear grazes my thigh.
I roll under it, come up, and cut a man’s legs from under him with a stroke that sings a dozen clashing notes.
Behind me, I hear Tadaaki’s sword ring, ugly and desperate.
I hear Sayo scream, high and fierce, and a wet crunch that means her spear has found something.
Ten paces.
Twenty.
I let the demon in halfway.
The horns rise.
The hellfire pours up my arm, red and thick, and I sweep it in a great flat arc that erases a whole rank.
There is a horrible hush.
Then a hundred hollow men fall into the hole where their feet used to be.
Do not overreach, the demon warns.
I’m not.
You are.
A pause.
But I approve.
We cross the bridge in a running fight, three of us, breathing hard, bloody to the elbows.
At the gate, Tadaaki takes a sword in the shoulder and does not stop.
Sayo, half his size, shoves a guard off the parapet with a scream of pure fury.
And when we burst through the shattered gate into the burning Court of Rivers, I look back once and see a small pale figure leaping onto the bridge behind us.
It is Genta.
He has followed us with a dozen Sweepers, cleavers in both hands, and he plants himself at the mouth of the gate as the hollowed close in.
“GO!” he roars.
“I’ll hold them!”
“Genta—”
“GO, you great idiot!”
He does not look at me.
He is grinning, a savage, split-lipped grin, and his scarred eyebrow is raised, and the cleaver in his right hand is already swinging.
“It’s a good bridge!
I’ve always liked this bridge!
Somebody tell my wife—”
The hollowed hit him like a wave.
I do not stay to see it.
The palace is a furnace.
We run through corridors of black fire, through halls where the lacquered pillars have melted to slag, through gardens where the fish ponds boil.
The whole place is wrong.
The walls breathe.
The shadows crawl.
Twice I see a face in the smoke, a woman’s, a child’s, gaping, silent, borne along on the current of the air toward the great dark maw in the north.
The spirits.
Thousands of them.
Torn from every house in the city, streaming in through the broken roofs like moths to a flame.
It is feeding, says the demon.
Shigen, it is feeding.
I know.
Run.
Tadaaki leads.
He does not falter.
He goes through the maze of servants’ stairs and secret doors as though he had been born in it, which he was.
Twice he stops and puts his hand to a wall, and the wall slides open.
Once he kicks in a door, and a dozen hollowed guards spill out, and Sayo screams, and I cut them down.
At the top of a long dark stair, we meet the Queen.
She is standing in the middle of the corridor in her white-and-silver robe.
Her long black hair is coiled in its tower.
Her powdered face is perfectly composed.
In her right hand she holds a small bronze bell, and in her left, a thin, straight, white-handled knife.
“Mother,” says Sayo.
“Daughter.”
“Please.
Let us pass.”
“I cannot.” Queen Shizue does not move.
Her voice is quiet and cool, without a tremor.
“I have served this house for thirty years.
I have borne its children.
I have watched it die by inches.
And I will not see it end in a kitchen.”
“It is already ending, Mother!
Look around you!”
“I have looked.” Her eyes are dry.
“I am not a fool.
I know what he was, and what you are, and what that thing in the sky will do.
I know it all.” She lifts the bell.
“That is why I must stop you.”
“Why?”
“Because if you kill it, you kill the line.”
Nobody speaks.
“There is a reason,” she says, “the house has always paid the tithe.
It was not greed.
It was not fear.
It was the bargain.
The Hollow One made the line strong.
It made us last.
Without it, we are only people.” A tiny, bitter smile.
“Six hundred years.
Four kings, three queens, a thousand princes.
All of them gone in a generation.”
“That is good,” says Sayo.
“Is it?” The Queen looks at her.
“You would be nothing, child.
You would be a girl in a brown tunic with a stolen spear.
I would be an old woman.
Tadaaki would be a corpse.” She turns her head.
“Is that what you want?”
Tadaaki does not answer.
“It is what I want,” says Sayo.
The Queen’s face does not change.
But something goes out of it, some final tautness in the powdered mask, and for a moment she looks very old.
“So be it,” she says softly.
She rings the bell.
I do not have time to move.
It is a small, sweet, gentle sound, and it goes through me like a hand through cloth.
I feel the room in my chest lurch.
I feel the demon cry out.
Shigen!
I’m—
She has the same bell as the Keepers!
It is drawing me!
It is—
Tadaaki hits her.
He does not use the sword.
He drops it.
He steps forward and slams the pommel of his fist into the Queen’s wrist, and the bell goes flying.
It hits the wall and bursts into a thousand pale fragments.
The sound stops.
His mother stares at him.
“You struck me,” she whispers.
“Yes,” says Tadaaki.
His voice is trembling.
“I am sorry, Mother.
I am so sorry.
But I was there.
I felt it.
I wore the mask, and I felt what it wanted, and it is not strength.
It is not anything.
It is only a hole.” He is weeping openly.
“Please.
Please.
Let us pass.”
The Queen looks at him for a long time.
Then, very slowly, she steps aside.
“Go,” she says, in a small dead voice.
“I shall wait here.”
We go.
I look back once.
She is standing in the corridor with her hands hanging empty at her sides, small and white and straight, framed in the red glow of the burning hall.
She does not weep.
She does not move.
She only stands there, like a woman waiting for a guest who will never arrive.
The Cage is gone.
I mean that quite literally.
The great cavern under the throne, the valley of black stone, the bottomless pit, the lip of pale rock: none of it is there.
In its place is a maw.
A vast, ragged, roaring hole, half a mile across, its edges melted to slag, its throat plunging straight down through the bones of the earth.
And rising out of it, coiled around the crater like a black serpent, is the crane.
I have never been so small.
It is the size of a mountain.
Its neck alone is as wide as the Throne Hall.
Its feathers ripple and writhe, each one a wailing mouth.
Its wings blot out the sky.
And from the middle of its breast, from a wound of red fire like a great open door, comes a sound I know.
A woman, singing.
Kinsie’s voice.
It is very faint.
It is very far away.
It rises and falls in that old country tune, so fragile against the roar of the storm that I can hardly hear it.
But I hear it.
And so does the demon.
Shigen, it whispers.
She is still in there.
She is holding on.
I know.
She is singing to it.
To the Hollow One.
She is trying to— Its voice cracks.
She is trying to sit with it.
I stare up at the great black head.
I stare at the beak, big as a barn door.
At the two red coals burning above it.
At the vast wound in the breast, ten paces across, ringed with fire.
I need to get in there.
It will kill you.
Probably.
It will eat you.
I know.
Shigen.
Very softly.
I would like to come.
I smile.
You’re already in.
“Stay back!” I shout to the others.
“Do not follow!
Do not—”
“You cannot do this alone!” Sayo screams.
“Shigen!
Wait!”
I do not wait.
I let it all in.
The whole thing.
Horns and mask and claws, the heat like a furnace in my chest, the black-and-red hellfire pouring up the blade.
The world goes wide and bright.
My legs bunch under me.
And I leap.
I leap the way I leapt from the tannery roof, but a hundred times higher.
Up over the lip of the crater.
Up through the drifting ash and the streaming spirits.
Up toward the black bulk of the crane, growing and growing like the face of a cliff, and the great red wound in its breast opening wide.
The beak snaps.
It misses me by a hand’s breadth.
I feel the wind of it, cold as a grave.
I twist in the air.
I drive the bronze into the base of the neck with all my strength, and it screams, nine thousand voices at once, a shattering noise that shakes the whole sky, and the crane shudders and rears back, and black fire spews out of every feather.
I hang there.
For one long breath, I am dangling from the neck of a creature the size of a mountain, with a sword in its throat and a demon in my chest.
Then I let go, and drop, and plunge headfirst through the wound in its breast into the dark.
It is silent.
That is the first thing.
After the roar and the flame and the wailing chaos of the palace, the inside of the crane is as quiet as a held breath.
I fall through it for a long time, through a great black hollow, with no walls and no floor.
Then I hit something soft, and roll, and lie still.
I get up.
I am standing in a room.
It is very large.
It is completely empty.
The floor is black stone, polished to a mirror.
The walls are black stone.
The ceiling is a vault so high I cannot see it.
And in the middle of the room, facing me, twenty paces away, stands a figure in a long white robe.
It is a man.
Or the shape of one.
Tall, thin, pale, with long black hair and a face like a beautiful mask, perfectly smooth, perfectly blank.
It has no eyes.
Where they should be, there are two smooth hollows, and the hollows are dark.
Welcome, says the Hollow One.
Its voice is soft.
It is not the vast hundred-throated roar I heard in the street.
It is a single voice, low and level, courteous and infinitely tired.
I had hoped you would come.
I lift the bronze sword.
Put it down, it says.
Please.
I have no wish to fight.
“You tried to kill me an hour ago.”
Yes.
It tilts its head.
I did.
I was afraid.
And when I am afraid, I do things I regret.
A small sad smile.
I have been afraid for ten thousand years.
“I don’t care.”
No.
You wouldn’t.
It sighs.
I only ask that you hear me, once.
That is all.
One hearing, and then you may do as you wish.
Do not, says the demon.
I know.
It is lying.
No.
I look at the pale, patient, hollow-eyed face.
It isn’t.
I lower the sword.
It tells me everything.
It does not do it with words.
It does it the way Hisui did, by showing.
The floor ripples, and the black stone becomes a window, and I look down through it into a memory older than history.
A dark world.
A cold one.
A plain of gray ash under a starless sky.
And in the middle of it, alone, sitting on a boulder, a small pale figure with its knees drawn up to its chest.
I was the first, says the Hollow One.
The very first to die and not go.
There was nothing in the world then.
No people.
No cities.
Only animals, and grass, and the wind.
And I was a woman.
Or a man.
It was so long ago I do not remember.
I was hungry.
I was cold.
And I was so very, very lonely.
The figure in the ash lifts its head.
I sat there for a thousand years.
Then ten thousand.
Nobody came.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody listened.
And slowly, slowly, I forgot how to be anything but empty.
The picture shifts.
A warlord in a cave, dying of a lung-sickness, whispering in the dark.
He was the first person who ever answered me.
Do you understand?
The very first.
In all those ages.
He was afraid, and greedy, and cruel, and he answered.
Its voice breaks.
And I loved him for it.
I loved him so much.
I would have given him anything.
Then why the tithe?
I did not ask for it.
The hollow face turns to me.
That was the crane.
The crane was my servant.
I made it, out of my own hunger, to keep the line strong.
I did not know it would grow.
I did not know it would eat.
I only wanted them to live.
I only wanted them to be there when I came.
So I would not be alone.
The picture fades.
The floor is black again.
I stand very still.
Six hundred years, says the Hollow One.
They have been dying for me.
Every one.
And I did not know how to stop it.
I did not know how to make it end.
I only knew that if I let go, if I stopped, then I would be left in the ash again.
So you took Tadaaki.
He asked.
Very quietly.
He was so lonely.
He was exactly like me.
I could not help it.
And now?
Now I am here.
The smooth face lifts.
With you.
In the last room.
And I am afraid.
I look at it.
I look at the tall thin silent figure in the white robe.
At the two dark hollows where its eyes should be.
At the faint pale glimmer at the corner of one, like the track of a tear.
Shigen, whispers the demon.
Do you see?
It is only a wound.
Only a very old, very large one.
I see.
Hisui said it.
Sit with it.
Every time.
I know.
It will not be easy.
No, I say.
It won’t.
I set the bronze sword on the black floor.
I sit down.
The Hollow One stares at me.
What are you doing?
“Sitting.”
Why?
“Because you asked to be heard.” I fold my legs.
“So I’m listening.”
The silence stretches.
Somewhere, very far away, I can hear the muffled roar of the storm outside.
But in here, in this vast black room, there is only the two of us, and the slow deep sound of my own breath.
The Hollow One does not move.
Then, slowly, awkwardly, like a very old child, it lowers itself to the floor across from me and folds its long white legs beneath it.
I do not know how to do this, it says.
“Neither do I.”
What do I say?
“Whatever you want.”
It is quiet for a long time.
Then it begins to talk.
It tells me about the ash.
About the boulder.
About the sound of the wind, and the color of the sky, and the first time it saw a living thing, a small gray lizard, sunning itself on a rock.
It tells me about the warlord’s face.
His crooked teeth.
His terrible laugh.
It tells me about a hundred generations of kings, each one different, each one dear, each one gone.
It tells me about a girl in a fishing village, the first bearer, who looked at it across a room of black water and said: you are very quiet, aren’t you?
And I sit, and I listen, and I do not say anything at all.
I do not know how long it takes.
Hours.
Years.
The black walls around us seem to soften.
The vault above us grows a little less dark.
Once, twice, I feel a small warm hand touch my shoulder, and I look up, and there is a woman in a brown dress with flour on the hem, sitting cross-legged beside me on the floor, smiling.
Hello, Shigen, says my mother.
“Hello.”
You are doing very well.
“I’m not doing anything.”
That is the hardest part.
She reaches out and takes the Hollow One’s hand in her own.
It does not resist.
Hello, old friend, she says, gently.
Do you remember me?
Yes, says the Hollow One.
You sang.
I did.
You have been singing for a very long time.
Nineteen years, says Kinsie.
It is not so long.
And she begins to hum.
It is the lullaby.
The old tune, rising and falling like water over stones.
And around her, one by one, out of the dark, other voices begin to join.
A man.
A child.
A crowd.
Ten thousand souls, sitting down in a ring around the Hollow One, on a floor of black stone, in a room at the center of the world.
They do not speak.
They do not weep.
They only sing.
And the Hollow One puts its face in its hands.
It does not end with a bang.
I have thought about that a great deal, since.
I had imagined a battle.
A final blow.
A cry of triumph, or defeat.
Instead, it is only a long slow softening, like the coming of dawn.
The black walls go gray.
The vault fills with a pale, thin, tender light.
The figure in the white robe grows fainter, and fainter, and its smooth pale face seems, for a moment, to open, to fill with something like wonder.
Oh, it says.
I see.
“What?”
It was so quiet, says the Hollow One.
I did not know it could be like this.
Its voice is very small.
I did not know it could be quiet and not be alone.
“Yes.”
Thank you.
It lifts its head.
For the first time, I see its eyes.
They are not hollow.
They are gray, and mild, and wet, and they look a great deal like the eyes of a tired old king on a bridge at dusk.
Will you tell the boy, it says, that I am sorry?
“Tadaaki?”
All of them.
Its hand tightens on my mother’s.
I am sorry.
I am so sorry.
I will not do it again.
It smiles.
And then, very gently, like a candle at the end of a long night, it goes out.
The room is empty.
There is only a pale gold light, and a woman’s small warm hand in mine, and, all around us, one by one, like stars coming out, the shapes of ten thousand people rising slowly toward a distant skylight and disappearing into the dawn.
Go on, says Kinsie, smiling, to the last of them.
It is all right.
The last of them goes.
She turns to me.
And now, she says, it is empty.
I look at her.
I look at the flour on her hem.
The gentle crooked smile.
The round, plain, kind face I have known for exactly two moments in my whole life.
Mother, I say.
Come here, says my mother, and opens her arms.
When I open my eyes, the sky is blue.
I am lying on my back on the melted stone edge of a crater, in the ruins of the palace of the King of the White Walls.
There is ash in my hair.
There is blood on my hands.
The great pit beside me is empty.
It has no bottom, and it has no crane, and it has no voice.
A thin breeze is blowing across it, and it smells of morning, and rain, and wet stone.
My mother is not here.
I know that before I look.
I remember her arms around me, and the smell of flour, and her voice at my ear saying, Now it is empty.
Now I can go.
I remember her kissing my forehead, exactly where the horn was.
Then she was light, and the light went up.
Somebody is holding my hand.
It is Sayo.
She is kneeling beside me, gray-faced, red-eyed, filthy, with her brother’s arm around her shoulders.
Tadaaki is sitting on the ground next to her, breathing hard, one hand pressed to his bleeding side.
He looks at me.
He does not say anything.
I sit up.
“Is it—”
“Yes,” says Sayo.
“Did it—”
“Yes.” She is crying.
She is laughing.
She does not seem to know which.
“It is gone.
It is all gone.
Every bit of it.
All the spirits rose up out of the crater in a great white flood, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, and went up into the sky, and I thought—I thought you were—”
“I’m not.”
“I can see that.”
I look at my hands.
The horn is gone.
I feel for it, on my brow, where the little hard nub has been these last weeks, hot and aching and heavy.
My fingers find only smooth skin.
There is no bone, no ridge, no mark.
Only a faint pale scar, like a healed cut.
Shigen, says a very small voice in the back of my mind.
I’m here.
I am here also.
A shaky breath.
I was afraid I would not be.
I was afraid, when it went out, that I would go with it.
But I did not.
I am still here.
A pause.
Only it is very quiet.
Is that bad?
No, says the demon, wonderingly.
It is only strange.
There is nothing left to be afraid of.
I laugh.
It hurts.
It hurts a great deal.
But I laugh anyway, lying on my back in the ashes of the White City with the sun coming up over the eastern hills, and after a moment Sayo begins to laugh too, and then Tadaaki, a cracked, unfamiliar, astonished sound, like a man rediscovering a lost language.
We are still laughing when the horns begin.
They are not the horns of the King’s army.
They come from the east, deep and clear and sweet, rolling across the hills like a slow tide.
Nine notes, one after another, each higher than the last.
I lift my head.
Sayo has gone very still.
Tadaaki’s laughter dies.
On the eastern ridge, in the first gold light of the morning, a line of banners is rising.
They are not black and white.
They are red, and green, and blue, and gold, and purple, and gray.
Nine of them.
Nine great silk standards, each with a different crest, each carried by a horseman in full armor, and behind each horseman, spread out across the hills in a vast bright glittering tide, an army.
“No,” says Tadaaki, in a whisper.
“Who are they?”
“The Nine Houses.” His face has gone white.
“The great lords of the provinces.
The cousins.
The ones who hold the nine keys.” His hand clenches on Sayo’s shoulder.
“Father sent word to them.
Before the Festival.
He told them, if he did not return—”
“What?”
“That the throne was to be theirs.”
Sayo stares at him.
“They have come,” he says, “to take the crown.”
Far away, faint and sweet, the horns sound again.
Nine notes.
Nine houses.
Nine armies, drawing slowly closer across a country that has just lost its king and its demon in a single night, and I sit in the ruin of the greatest city in the world with a scar on my forehead and a hollow where my rage used to be, and I think:
Well.
Yes, says the demon, quietly.
It does appear to be starting again.
End of Chapter Nineteen