They come out of the dark like a tide of black water.
I stand alone on the burned south bridge with the bronze sword in both hands, and I watch them come.
Thirty thousand.
Maybe more.
They pour across the moonlit plain in a shrieking black flood, and where the camps of the nine houses stood an hour ago there are only fires and bodies and torn banners.
Lord Kurotani’s gray tents are already burning.
The green ones are gone.
The whole vast plain is heaving with red eyes.
Behind me, in the ruined gate, ten thousand bells begin to ring.
It is the ugliest sound in the world.
It is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.
They can hear it, says the demon.
Shigen, look.
The front rank.
I look.
The leading edge of the horde hits the noise like a wave hitting a seawall.
The marked men flinch.
Their run goes ragged.
A thousand of them stumble, clutching their ears, and the ones behind trample them, and the whole line buckles and heaves.
But it does not stop.
It slows them, says the demon.
It does not turn them.
How long?
Minutes.
I plant my feet.
“Tsuyu!” I bellow, without turning.
“Louder!”
The bells go up like a thunderclap.
The first ones reach me at a dead run.
They are not men anymore.
They are shapes in armor, hunched, drooling, with their mouths stretched open and their eyes burning like lamps.
The brands on their chests are so bright I can see them through the lacquer.
They do not use weapons.
They use hands, and teeth, and the weight of their own bodies, and the first one hits me so hard I skid across the boards.
I cut his arm off at the shoulder.
He does not scream.
He does not slow.
He lunges again, one-armed, and I take his head.
Do not kill them, says the demon.
I’m not going to stand here and be eaten.
Nor am I asking you to.
Its voice is tight.
Only remember what they are.
I know what they are.
Then remember that they know it too.
I cut through a knot of them and drive a boot into the chest of another.
The bronze sword rings.
Every stroke sets off the chorus of nine thousand voices, and every voice is a hook in the marked man’s ears.
They stagger.
They howl.
Some of them fall to their knees, clawing at their heads, and I step over them and keep fighting.
It is not enough.
For every one I drop, three more pour over the edge of the bridge.
They come from the sides, from the moat, up the burned pilings.
A hand closes on my ankle.
A man with half his face gone sinks his teeth into my forearm.
I smash his skull with the pommel and hear the bone go.
Shigen.
I’m busy.
Shigen, there are too many.
I know.
Let me help.
I do not answer.
I am past answering.
The world has gone red at the edges, and I feel the horns coming up through my skull, hot and wet, and the mask closing over my face.
The demon pours into my arms like water into a bowl.
I swing.
The hellfire goes out in a long red fan and erases a full rank.
I do not look at what it leaves.
I only keep swinging.
I do not know how long I hold the bridge.
Ten minutes.
Twenty.
Long enough that my arms go numb and the bronze blade is slick to the guard and the moat below is running red.
Long enough that I see a woman in scarlet armor go past me at a run, her polearm whirling, cutting a lane through the marked with a fury that would shame a wildfire.
“Lady Akane!” I shout.
“Boy!” She does not slow.
She sweeps a marked man off the bridge and pivots and takes another’s legs.
“You are a sight!”
“Where are your men?”
“Dead, mostly!” She laughs, wild-eyed, her cropped hair plastered to her skull.
“The ones who were marked ate the ones who were not!
It was dreadful!”
“Get behind the line!”
“I am not behind anything!” She spins the polearm over her head.
“I am going to kill so many of these poor bastards that the poets will run out of words!”
I like her, says the demon.
You like everyone.
She is very consistent.
Something huge and gray hits the bridge.
It is Lord Kurotani.
I know him by the size of him, and by the ruin of his armor.
He is not marked.
But he is swarmed.
A dozen of his own soldiers, men he commanded for twenty years, are dragging at him from every side, biting, tearing, and he is fighting them off with a broken sword and a face gone slack with horror.
“Get back!” he screams.
“Get back!
I am your lord!
I fed you!
I gave you—”
A boy of sixteen, red-eyed and drooling, sinks his teeth into Kurotani’s throat.
I move without thinking.
The bronze blade takes the boy across the back and he drops, and I catch the bald lord by the collar and haul him out of the mob.
His throat is a torn red ruin.
His eyes are wide.
He is still trying to talk.
“…I…
did not…”
“Don’t.”
“…I did not know…”
His hand closes on my wrist.
It is enormous, and cold, and shaking.
He looks up at me with those small hard eyes, and I see in them, for the first time, the man under the lord.
“Save…
them,” he whispers.
Then the light goes out.
I lay him down on the burnt boards.
I close his eyes.
I do not have time for anything else.
The horde reaches the walls.
I do not hold them.
Nobody could.
They spill across the moat in a black wave, up the pilings, through the burned gate, and into the Lower Ward.
I hear the screaming begin.
I hear Tadaaki’s voice, hoarse and ragged, shouting orders.
I hear the bells, ten thousand of them, and they are not enough.
Shigen, says the demon.
We are losing.
I know.
We cannot fight them all.
I know.
We cannot sit with them.
There are too many.
There is no time.
A pause.
We need something else.
I am standing in the middle of the gate with the bronze sword raining blood and my chest heaving like a bellows.
Around me, the marked are piling up.
Not dead.
Only stunned, and stumbling, and rising again.
Beyond them, in the streets of the Kawara, the fires are spreading.
I think of the pen.
Of four thousand men sitting in the mud, weeping.
Of the little splinter in the boy’s chest that said: I want to go home.
I think of a tavern, nineteen years ago, and a small plain girl on a bench.
Shigen, says the demon slowly.
Do you remember the song?
I go very still.
The one she sang.
The one she stopped the fight with.
Its voice is trembling.
I have it.
I have kept it all these years.
I could not remember the words.
But I have the tune.
Hum it.
Now?
Now.
The demon hums.
It is not loud.
That is what I remember most.
The whole gate is a roar of bells and screams and clashing steel, and in the middle of it, very quietly, in the back of my skull, a thin low wavering line of sound begins to rise and fall like water over stones.
I take it up.
I do not sing.
I do not know the words.
I only hum, with my mouth closed, in a rough cracked voice, badly, with half the notes flat.
It comes out of my chest like breath.
It goes out across the gate.
The nearest marked man stops.
He is a big one, a soldier with a beard braided in three ropes, and he has both hands on the shoulder of a Sweeper girl.
His mouth is open.
His teeth are bared.
But he has stopped, and his head is tilted, slowly, like a dog hearing its name.
I hum.
Louder, says the demon.
I hum louder.
The bearded man’s hands loosen.
The Sweeper girl drops out of his grip and scrambles away.
He does not follow.
He stands there, swaying, his red eyes wide and puzzled, and something in his slack face begins to work.
“Ma,” he says.
It is a tiny, cracked, astonished word.
“Ma?”
I keep humming.
The marked man beside him stops.
Then another.
Then a dozen, all along the gate, in a slow rippling wave, as though somebody had laid a hand across the top of a boiling pot.
They stand in the smoke and the noise, and I see them lift their heads, one by one, and listen.
It is working, says the demon, in a whisper.
It is actually working.
It’s not enough.
No.
A pause.
We need more voices.
Tsuyu is the first to take it up.
I hear her before I see her, a rough, cracked, unlovely alto, coming from the roof of the tannery.
She does not know the tune.
She is only following mine, a beat behind, a little off-key, and she is singing words I do not recognize, made-up ones, bits of a lullaby her own mother must have sung her in some forgotten dialect.
But the shape of it is the same.
Then Toku, from a window.
Then Kanji, in a great rumbling bass, humming from deep in his barrel chest.
Then Hagi, cracked and reedy.
Then Sayo, high and clear, from the top of the wall.
Then Tadaaki, low and unsteady, his voice breaking on the first note.
And then, all at once, like a dam bursting, they all begin.
I cannot describe it.
I will try.
It is not a choir.
It is not a song.
It is ten thousand people humming a tune they half-know, in ten thousand different keys, at ten thousand different speeds, some of them weeping, some of them laughing, some of them only breathing in time.
It goes out from the Lower Ward in a great soft rising tide, and it rolls across the plain like the sound of the sea.
The marked stop.
All of them.
Not only at the gate.
Not only in the streets.
Out on the plain, in the ruins of the burning camps, ten thousand, twenty, thirty thousand red-eyed shapes stand suddenly still in the smoke and the moonlight.
They lift their heads.
They stare at the city.
They listen.
Now, says the demon.
Shigen.
Now.
I close my eyes.
I go down.
The room is no longer a room.
It is a field.
A wide dark plain under a sky of soft gray, dotted with small dim shapes as far as the eye can see.
Each one is a marked man’s splinter.
Each one is a tiny frightened spirit, huddled in the mud, shivering, listening.
I stand in the middle of them.
It is all right, I say.
It is all right.
The song is everywhere.
It hangs in the air like mist.
It runs through the ground, through the sky, through my own hollow ribs.
And in its warmth, the small dim shapes begin to stir.
They lift their heads.
They look around.
They see me, and each other, and the vast gray plain.
Hello, says one, timidly.
Hello.
Are you the one who sits?
Yes.
Will you sit with me?
Yes.
I sit.
And another comes, and sits beside me.
And another.
And another.
They gather around me in the gray light like children around a fire, one, ten, a hundred, ten thousand, and the song goes on, soft and endless, and I do not say a word.
I only listen.
I listen as they tell me their names.
Their rivers.
Their mothers.
I listen to a thousand small forgotten stories, told in a thousand small cracked voices, and I do not hurry them.
One by one, they stop being afraid.
One by one, they rise.
I wake to dawn.
It is a thin pale gray, the color of ash, streaked with pink at the eastern rim.
I am lying on my back on the burnt boards of the south bridge, and there are people all around me.
I hear their voices, low and muffled.
I hear somebody sobbing.
I hear a horse whicker.
I do not hear any screaming.
I sit up.
The plain is silent.
It is covered with people.
Thousands upon thousands of them, sitting or kneeling or lying in the trampled grass, spread out in a vast dark carpet from the moat to the horizon.
They are not moving.
They are not fighting.
They are weeping, or staring at their hands, or clutching one another, or simply looking up at the sky with dazed, empty, astonished faces.
Their eyes are all brown, or gray, or blue.
Shigen, says the demon, very softly.
It is finished.
How many?
All of them.
A long shaky breath.
Every marked man in the nine armies.
Twenty-six thousand.
A pause.
And the city is still standing.
I look down at my hands.
They are pale.
They are shaking.
There is no red in my vision, and no horn, and no mask.
There is only a great deep exhaustion, and behind it, a strange bright stillness, like the quiet after a very long storm.
Somebody is standing over me.
It is Sayo.
She is filthy and smoke-blackened and bleeding from a cut on her forehead, and she has been crying, and she is grinning like a lunatic.
“You hummed,” she says.
“I know.”
“You hummed a lullaby at thirty thousand berserk demons.”
“It was the demon’s idea.”
It was a very good idea, says the demon.
I would like it noted.
Sayo is laughing.
She is laughing so hard she is crying, and I laugh too, and it hurts my ribs, and neither of us can stop.
Behind her, Tadaaki has sunk to the ground with his back against a broken pillar, and he is laughing also, in a cracked, hoarse, astonished way, with his head thrown back and his eyes shut.
It is the happiest I have ever seen any of us.
Then a shadow falls across the bridge.
There is a woman standing at the end of the span.
She has come out of the dawn without a sound.
She is tall and slight, dressed in plain black from head to foot, with a hood drawn low over her face and a long straight sword sheathed at her hip.
Behind her, spread out across the bridge and the plain in perfect ranks, stand a thousand people in identical black robes.
They wear white masks.
They carry no banners.
They do not speak.
I know at once who they are.
I have seen the black banner on the right flank.
I have seen it stand motionless all through the night, while the other eight armies burned and tore themselves apart.
It never moved.
It did not fight.
It only waited.
“House Sagi,” says Tadaaki, hoarsely.
The woman lowers her hood.
She is about fifty.
Her hair is iron gray and cropped close, and her face is long and pale and lined, with the calm, serious, unhurried look of a woman who has spent her life at deathbeds.
She does not smile.
She looks at the plain, at the thousands of freed men, and she looks at me.
“That,” she says, “was extraordinary.”
I get to my feet.
It takes two tries.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Sagi Tomoe.
I am the head of the ninth house.” She bows, a slow deep formal bow, and I see that her hands are gloved in black.
“My family has kept the graves of the royal line for six hundred years.
We bury the dead.
It is a dull trade.”
“You didn’t fight.”
“No.”
“You let them tear each other apart.”
“Yes.” She meets my eyes.
“I had to see what you would do.”
The bridge is very quiet.
“I have been watching,” Lady Sagi says, “since the night you entered the Cage.
I sent no herald.
I made no demands.
I only observed.” She glances at the plain.
“I confess I did not expect a lullaby.
I have been putting the marked to rest for three hundred years.
I have never once thought to sing.”
“You’ve been killing them.”
“I have been releasing them.” Her voice is quiet, level, unashamed.
“A marked man who cannot be fed is a demon in waiting.
When they burned out, when the houses discarded them, when the tithe was cut, they came to us.
We gave them a quiet death.
It was the only mercy we had.”
I look at her masked army.
At the thousand pale blank faces.
She is telling the truth, says the demon.
I know.
It is horrible.
I know that too.
“You didn’t have to,” I say.
“No.” She tilts her head.
“I know that now.”
She steps forward.
She takes off her right glove, slowly, one finger at a time, and holds out a bare hand.
“I would like to speak with you, Shigen,” she says.
“Privately.
There is a thing you should know before the other lords return.
It concerns the Hollow One.
And the crane.
And why there were nine houses in the first place.”
I stare at her hand.
“Why?”
She looks at me for a very long moment.
“Because,” says Lady Sagi, “the crane was not the only servant it made.”
The wind stirs the ashes on the bridge.
Behind her, a thousand white masks do not move.
“There were nine,” she says softly.
“Nine servants.
Nine houses.
Nine keys.” She lowers her hand.
“The Cage was only the ninth.”
End of Chapter Twenty-One