Nine armies is a lot of armies.
I count them from the top of the south gate the next morning, with a rice ball in one hand and a bandage around my ribs, and the number does not get smaller.
Red on the left.
Green beside it.
Then blue, gold, purple, gray, orange, brown, and, far out on the right flank, at the edge of the morning haze, a single banner of plain black.
They stretch across the plain in ranks and columns, thirty thousand men, maybe forty.
Cavalry on the wings.
Archers in the center.
A forest of spears.
Horse-lines, supply carts, siege ladders being lashed together by sweating men.
They have not attacked.
They are only there.
“It is a very polite siege,” says Sayo.
“Is that a thing?”
“It is the only kind my cousins know.” She is sitting on the parapet with her legs dangling over a forty-foot drop, eating a rice ball of her own.
She has washed her face and found a clean tunic, and she looks about twelve.
“First they camp.
Then they send a herald.
Then they demand things.
Then they decide how much they meant it.”
“And after that?”
“After that they attack.”
Tadaaki, leaning against the wall on her other side, snorts.
He looks a little better today.
The gray has gone from his face and he can stand without help.
A bandage covers his left shoulder and another his ribs, and he wears a plain dark robe belted with rope.
He has not touched his rice ball.
He is watching the black banner on the right flank with an expression I cannot read.
“That is House Sagi,” he says.
“The ninth.”
“What about them?”
“They have not sent a herald.” His jaw tightens.
“They never do.
The other eight are only lords.
Sagi is something else.”
Before I can ask what, a horn sounds from the plain.
Long.
Flat.
Formal.
“There,” says Sayo, and licks her fingers.
“That is the herald.”
The parley is held on the south bridge, which is still black from the fire and missing half its railings.
We go out on foot.
Nine lords ride up from the plain, one for each banner, each with two attendants, and dismount at the far end of the span.
Three of us walk to meet them: Sayo in a borrowed gray robe, Tadaaki in his rope belt, and me.
Sayo has insisted I come.
Tadaaki has insisted I keep my sword sheathed.
I have compromised by keeping it on my back and my hand well away from the hilt.
You are nervous, says the demon.
No.
You are humming.
I’m not.
It is the bell-sword’s tune.
It is very catching.
A pause.
I like it.
I stop humming.
The nine lords take their places in a line across the bridge.
I look them over, one by one, the way Daigo taught me to size up a bout.
The woman in red is first.
Thirty-five or so, tall, lean, weather-browned, in scarlet lacquer over a coat of chain.
She carries a long-hafted polearm across her shoulders like a yoke.
Her hair is cropped short and her mouth curves in a lazy, dangerous smile.
Lady Akane, Sayo whispers.
Akagi.
She has never lost a battle.
The man in gray is next.
Big, bald, scarred, with a jaw like a boulder and small cold eyes.
He does not look at anyone.
Kurotani.
He commands the largest army.
Do not turn your back.
The young man in white, at the end, is smiling.
He is perhaps twenty, slim, handsome, in a robe of spotless silk.
He wears no armor.
He carries no weapon.
His hands are folded gracefully in front of him, and his smile is warm and easy and the most alarming thing on the bridge.
Shirakawa, Sayo breathes.
Cousin Hiro.
I have never known him to raise his voice.
I have never known him to be wrong.
The other six are only faces.
Men and women in armor, hard, tired, watchful.
“Cousin Tadaaki,” says Lady Akane.
Her voice is dry as a stick.
“You look terrible.”
“I have had a bad week.”
“I heard.” She tilts her head.
“I heard the King is dead.
I heard the crane is gone.
I heard a peasant boy did it all with a bell.” Her eyes slide to me.
“Is this the boy?”
“This is Shigen,” says Sayo, before Tadaaki can answer.
“He is my guest.”
“Your guest.” The corner of Akane’s mouth twitches.
“He looks like a stray dog somebody let in by mistake.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“I do not doubt it.”
Nobody laughs.
The morning wind stirs the banners.
Somewhere far behind us, in the burned city, a dog is barking.
“We have come,” says Lord Kurotani, at last, in a rumbling gravel voice, “to settle the succession.”
“There is nothing to settle,” says Tadaaki.
“The King is dead.”
“And his son is alive.”
“His son,” Kurotani says, without looking at him, “wore the Hollow One’s mask.
He killed a High Keeper with his bare hands.
He burned the eastern court.
He set a black crane loose on the city.” His small eyes finally lift.
“It is a curious record for a king.”
“It was not me.”
“Nobody thinks it was you, cousin.
That is precisely the difficulty.” He spreads his thick hands.
“A house that can be so easily overrun by a demon is a house that cannot rule.
We are not blaming you.
We are only observing.”
“You want the throne.”
“We want order.”
“Order,” Sayo says, and her voice cracks like a whip, “is what you call it when somebody else’s people are afraid.”
Kurotani looks at her for the first time.
She is sixteen.
She is small and gray and standing very straight, with her hands clenched in the folds of a borrowed robe.
He looks at her for a long moment, in the manner of a man considering a mildly interesting insect.
“Little cousin,” he says.
“You have grown.”
“I am the only person here who has been in that pit.”
“So I have heard.”
“Then you know what it was.”
“I know what it did.” Kurotani’s rough voice softens, almost kindly.
“It kept us strong.
It kept the country whole.
It fed the houses, and the houses fed the realm, and for six hundred years no one starved and no one rebelled.” He shrugs.
“Perhaps it was cruel.
It was still effective.”
“It was not effective,” I say.
Every head turns.
I have not meant to speak.
But it is out before I can stop it, and the nine lords are looking at me with the flat surprised attention of a row of hawks.
“It was murder,” I say.
“Forty-one people at Kuwabara.
Thirty at Nagare.
Eleven thousand in nineteen years, on one man’s ledger.
I don’t know what you call that in your houses, but where I come from, it has a shorter name.”
“The peasant speaks,” says Lady Akane, mildly.
“He speaks the truth,” says Shirakawa.
It is the first thing he has said.
His voice is soft, pleasant, musical.
He steps forward, smiling, hands still folded, and stops a few paces from me.
“Please forgive my cousins,” he says.
“They have a bad habit of forgetting that nine of us came here today for nine different reasons.”
“And yours?”
“Mine is very simple.” His smile widens.
“I would like to see what happens next.”
It happens sooner than he expects.
I hear it first as a gasp, from the crowd of attendants behind Lord Kurotani.
Then a scuffle.
Then a strangled, wet, choking cry, and a man’s voice raised in sudden screaming.
“My lord!
My lord, he is—”
One of the gray banner’s own soldiers has fallen out of the ranks.
He is a big man, heavily armored, and he is on his knees on the blackened boards with both hands clawed at his chest.
The lacquer breastplate has split.
Beneath it, through the torn cloth, I see the brand.
It is glowing.
It is not the dull white it was on the shinobi at the temple wall.
It is red.
A hot, angry, throbbing red, spreading outward from the crane’s outline in long veins across his skin.
His eyes have gone the same color.
His mouth is open.
He is screaming, a long high raw sound, and the veins are running up his neck, into his jaw, into his temples.
“Somebody hold him!” roars Kurotani.
Nobody does.
The soldier arches.
His back cracks like a bow.
He lifts his face to the sky, and I hear something inside him tear.
Blood pours from his eyes and ears and mouth.
He throws out his arms like a scarecrow, and the brand on his chest bursts into flame, and he falls forward and does not move again.
The smell of burning flesh drifts across the bridge.
Nobody speaks.
Then Lord Kurotani lifts his head.
His small cold eyes are bright with something that might be fear, or fury, or the raw beginnings of despair.
“That,” he says, “is why we have come.”
He tells it flat, without decoration.
It began the night the crane fell.
Every marked man in every army, the brands on their chests, the splinters of the great hunger sown into their blood, began to fail.
Slowly at first.
A headache.
A fever.
A shaking in the hands.
“Four thousand,” says Lady Akane.
“In my army alone.
The best I have.
The ones who can fight like five.” She does not smile now.
“They are dying, cousin.
One after another.
Since the pit closed.”
“They were fed,” says Kurotani heavily.
“Every month.
Every year.
A little spirit from the tithe, a little of the crane’s blood, poured into the brands to keep them strong.
Without it, they starve.” His broken voice drops.
“And when a marked man starves, he goes mad.
And when he goes mad, he does not die quietly.
He takes things.
Life.
Breath.
Whatever is near.”
“You mean he eats people,” I say.
“I mean,” says Kurotani, “that if I do not feed my army, I will have twelve thousand demons in my camp by morning, and they will not be picky.”
The bridge is very quiet.
“So you want the tithe back,” says Sayo, very softly.
“We want a bridge.” Kurotani’s jaw works.
“A single season.
One harvest.
A hundred villages, chosen carefully.
It would keep the brands alive long enough to find another way.” He looks at her.
“I do not like it either, girl.
I am not a monster.
But I have thirty thousand men who did not choose what was done to them.
Who were taken as boys, and marked, and made into weapons.
Would you have them die?
All of them?
Screaming?”
Nobody answers.
I am looking at the dead soldier on the boards.
I am looking at his hands.
They are scarred, callused, work-worn.
Farmer’s hands.
A boy’s hands, aged thirty years too fast, curled into fists.
Shigen, says the demon, softly.
Yes.
He was not much older than you.
I know.
I think we should try something.
What?
The thing we did at Nagare.
Its voice is very quiet.
The brands are only splinters.
Only small pieces of the crane.
They are the same as the jars.
They can be sat with.
I close my eyes.
It might kill them.
It might not.
It might kill us.
Yes, says the demon.
It might do that also.
I open my eyes.
“Where are the rest?” I say.
Kurotani frowns.
“What?”
“The marked.
The ones who are failing.
Where are they?”
“In the camp.
We keep them in the rear, in pens, under guard.” He hesitates.
“They are not safe to be near.”
“Show me.”
“That is—”
“Show me.
Now.”
Something in my voice makes him blink.
Beside me, Tadaaki has taken a very slow, careful step to the side, and Sayo has put her hand on my sleeve.
I ignore them both.
“If I’m wrong,” I say, “I die.
If I’m right, you don’t have to feed anybody.” I look at Kurotani.
“Tell me that’s not worth a walk.”
The bald lord stares at me.
Then, unexpectedly, Lady Akane laughs.
“Oh, I like him,” she says.
“Cousin, I do like him.
Let the boy walk.”
They are penned in a hollow between two hills.
I smell it long before I see it.
The stink of sweat and old blood and burnt flesh, thick as porridge.
Then the sound: a low, unceasing, rasping moan, like the sea in a cave.
Then, over the crest of the rise, the pens themselves.
They are just fenced fields.
Rough palisades of sharpened stakes, twenty feet high, with archers on scaffolds.
Inside, packed shoulder to shoulder, standing and sitting and lying in the mud, are the marked.
Four thousand of them.
I have never seen so many broken men in one place.
They are all ages.
Boys of fifteen.
Graybeards of fifty.
They wear the black and white of the King’s guard, or the colors of the nine houses, and every one of them has the brand on his chest, and every brand is glowing.
A slow, sullen, throbbing red, like coals in ash.
They rock.
They shiver.
They clutch their heads, or their chests, or their throats.
Some are quiet.
Some are screaming.
A few are dead, sprawled where they fell, and nobody has moved them.
The guards on the scaffolds do not look at us.
They look at the pen.
“Open the gate,” I say.
“Boy—”
“Open it.”
The gate swings wide.
I walk in.
It is the worst thing I have done.
I do not mean the most dangerous.
I mean the hardest.
The moment the gate closes behind me, the whole pen turns.
Four thousand heads, all at once, four thousand pairs of glowing eyes, and a sound goes up like a great slow breath.
Food, says a voice.
It is not one voice.
It is a hundred, a thousand.
It comes out of the mouths of the marked men, in a dry hiss, in a whisper that is also a roar.
Food.
Food.
Food.
I stop.
They are moving toward me.
Not fast.
Not yet.
A slow, shambling, hungry tide, hands outstretched, mouths open, feet dragging in the mud.
The nearest is a boy of fifteen.
His eyes are pure red.
His lips are cracked.
He looks at me the way a starving dog looks at a bone.
Now, says the demon.
Sit.
I sit down in the mud.
What are you doing?
screams Sayo’s voice, from very far away, from the fence, from the rest of the world.
I do not answer.
I lay the bronze sword across my knees, and I take Tenkai’s silent bell from around my neck, and I put my hands around it, and I close my eyes.
I go down.
The room is very small.
It is a single bare chamber now, smooth and gray, with a low ceiling and no water.
There is no crack in the wall.
The demon sits against the far side, cross-legged, quiet, its horned skull turned toward me.
Ready?
it says.
No.
Nor am I.
I reach out.
I have never done it to so many at once.
At Nagare, at Ōkuma, I did it a jar at a time, slowly, carefully.
Here there is no time.
The four thousand are pressing in on me from every side, and I feel their splinters as a single vast howling wound, a chorus of tiny hungry voices, each one a scrap of the crane, each one starving.
It is all right, I say, to all of them.
It is all right.
I am not going to hurt you.
FOOD.
I know.
I know you are hungry.
I know you have been hungry for a very long time.
I breathe.
I am going to sit here.
That is all.
I am going to sit, and listen.
FOOD.
FOOD.
FOOD—
Tell me, I say.
Silence.
Then, very slowly, one thin voice among the thousand hesitates.
…Tell you?
Whatever you want.
It is a small voice.
Frightened.
Scratchy, like a child’s.
It belongs to the splinter in the chest of the boy of fifteen, who is standing an arm’s length from me with his hands raised and his teeth bared.
I want to go home, it says.
I stay very still.
Where is home?
I do not know.
A tiny, bewildered pause.
It was a long time ago.
There was a river.
There was a woman who sang.
It hiccups.
I have forgotten her name.
What did she sing? This story is hosted at g.com.
I do not know.
I only remember that it was warm.
I put out my hand.
Come here, I say.
The brand on the boy’s chest flares.
Once.
A soft gold light, not red, spilling out through the torn cloth, and a thin pale wisp rises from between his ribs.
It is the smallest spirit I have ever seen.
It hangs in front of me for a moment, trembling, turning, taking in the mud and the sky and the ring of red-eyed men.
Go on, I tell it.
It’s all right.
It goes.
The boy collapses.
I do not see what happens next.
I only hear it.
A sound like a great stone rolling away from the mouth of a cave.
A long, low, shuddering sigh, rising from four thousand throats.
And then, one by one, all around me, the glow goes out.
It is not sudden.
It goes like candles in a windy room, one after another after another, each brand flickering, dimming, dying to a dull gray scar.
The red fades from the eyes.
The moans stop.
Around me in the mud, men are sinking to their knees, to their hands, to their faces.
They are weeping.
They are laughing.
They are saying names.
Mother.
Anna.
Taro.
Where is the river?
I have my hands around Tenkai’s bell, and the world has gone very white, and I am aware, faintly, that I am bleeding from my nose and both ears.
Shigen, says the demon.
Shigen.
That is enough.
You can stop.
How many?
All of them.
Its voice is shaking.
All four thousand.
Every one.
It is finished.
I open my eyes.
The sky is a very bright blue.
The mud is warm under my palms.
And in front of me, on his knees, is the boy of fifteen.
His brand is a small pale scar.
His eyes are brown.
They are wide, and wet, and completely ordinary.
“Who are you?” he whispers.
“Nobody,” I say.
He begins to cry.
I lie back in the mud and look at the sky, and I do not move for a long time.
When I come to, there are people standing over me.
I see Sayo first, white-faced, kneeling with her hand pressed to my chest.
Then Tadaaki, tall and gray against the sun.
Then Lady Akane, hands on her hips, with an expression of wary astonishment.
And behind them, drifting back through the open gate in a slow ragged tide, four thousand men in torn armor, blinking, dazed, weeping, as if they had been asleep for years and had just been told what day it was.
“He’s alive,” says Sayo.
Her voice is thick.
“He’s alive.
He did it.
He did it.”
“He did,” says Akane.
She squints down at me.
“I confess I did not think he would.
What in the name of every hell was that?”
“Sitting,” I croak.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s a technique.”
She stares at me.
Then her mouth twitches, and she throws back her head and lets out a great bark of laughter, so loud that the nearest of the freed marked flinch.
“Sitting,” she says.
“Oh, I do like him.”
“Cousin,” says a low voice, and the laughter dies.
Lord Kurotani has come up behind her.
He does not look at me.
He looks at the pen, at the four thousand men who were, an hour ago, his army’s sharpest edge, and who are now sitting in the mud with their heads in their hands, crying like children.
His face is a stone mask.
“You have ruined me,” he says, in a very quiet voice.
“I have saved your men.”
“You have unmade them.” His hands are shaking.
“Do you understand?
They were the reason I could hold a border with ten thousand.
The reason no lord dared cross me.
The reason my house mattered.” His small eyes are wet and wild.
“Without them, I am nothing.”
“You’re a man with four thousand living soldiers.”
“Living farmers,” he snarls.
“Boys who cannot fight!
Who cannot even stand!”
“Then teach them,” I say.
“Feed them.
Send them home.”
He stares at me.
“You are a fool,” he says.
“You have no idea what you have done.”
He turns on his heel and strides back toward the Gray banners, and the nine lords’ attendants scatter out of his way.
Sayo lets out a small breath.
“That,” she says, “did not go well.”
“No,” says Lady Akane, cheerfully.
“That is the sound of a man deciding to start a war.”
It is midnight when the howling begins.
We have made a camp in the ruins of the south gate, Sayo and Tadaaki and Tsuyu and I, with a small fire and a pot of soup and a great many blankets.
The freed marked are quartered in the Lower Ward, four thousand strangers being fed and washed and bandaged by the ten thousand people who, a day ago, were their enemies.
It is a curiously peaceful scene.
I sit with my back against a broken wall, half asleep, with the bronze sword across my knees and a bowl of barley in my hands, and I think, for the first time in a very long time, that things might be all right.
Then I hear it.
It comes from the plain.
From the camps of the nine houses.
A single voice at first, long and thin and inhuman, rising into the cold night like the cry of a wolf.
Then another.
Then a dozen.
Then a hundred.
Tsuyu lifts her head.
“That’s not soldiers.”
“No,” says Tadaaki.
He is on his feet.
His face has gone white in the firelight.
“That is the rest of the marked.”
“The rest?”
“There are more than four thousand.
There are thirty thousand.
Every house has them.
We only saw the sick ones.
The ones in the pens.” He drags a hand across his mouth.
“The others were still holding.
Barely.
Waiting for the tithe.”
“And now?”
“Now they know it is not coming.”
The howling swells.
It is not one sound anymore.
It is a roar, a vast raw ocean of noise, rolling across the plain from nine directions at once.
Ten thousand voices.
Twenty.
All of them shrieking together, in a single, primal, agonized chorus, and over it I hear something else.
A sound like a dam giving way.
Like the first crack of ice on a great frozen lake.
The camps are breaking.
I see it from the top of the wall, with the others crowded at my side.
The firelit tents on the plain are boiling like anthills.
Lines of torches scatter and vanish.
Men are running, screaming, and among them, tall and red-eyed and terrible, dark shapes are moving through the crowd with dreadful speed.
They are not attacking the city.
They are attacking each other.
Shigen, says the demon, very quietly.
They are feeding on their own.
I stand there with the wind in my face and the roar of the dying camps in my ears, and I look out at the plain, and I understand.
We didn’t free them, I say.
We only freed the ones we could reach.
Yes.
The rest—
The rest are going mad.
Its voice is small and hollow.
All of them.
At once.
Thirty thousand.
And there is nothing between them and the city but a broken wall and a bridge that has been burned twice.
Behind me, Tsuyu swears.
Sayo is very pale.
Tadaaki has drawn his sword.
I look down at the bronze blade in my hands.
At the little wandering line of dents along the flat.
At nine thousand tiny farewells.
“How long until they reach us?” I ask.
“An hour,” says Tadaaki.
“Perhaps two.”
“And the other eight houses?”
“Running.” A bleak, twisted smile.
“The ones who can.”
I nod slowly.
“Then we have an hour,” I say.
“Tsuyu.
Get the bells.”
She stares at me.
“All of them,” I say.
“Every bell in the Kawara.
Every child, every string.
Ring them until your arms fall off.” I tighten my grip on the sword.
“Sayo, find the Keepers.
The ones who are left.
Tell them if they ever want to be forgiven, they can start by ringing something that isn’t gold.”
“And you?” says Sayo.
I look out at the plain.
Somewhere out there, in the dark, thirty thousand starving demons are coming.
And far behind them, on the right flank, a single black banner has stopped moving, and stands motionless in the moonlight, waiting.
“I’m going to go and meet them,” I say.
End of Chapter Twenty