Iwa spends the last of the light building a killing ground.
I watch her do it, and I help where I can, and the whole time a small cold voice in the back of my head says this is how it will be done to you, and I have to keep pushing it aside with the count.
Four in.
Four held.
Four out.
Four held.
She works quickly, without waste.
She has clearly been imagining this night for nineteen years.
The hut sits on a shelf of stone the size of a threshing floor.
Behind it, to the north, the mountain goes straight up, a sheer black face with no handholds a sane man would trust.
On the east and west the shelf ends in a drop so long that a stone dropped from the edge takes a slow breath to land.
That leaves the south, and the south is the stairs: four hundred steps carved into the rock, climbing out of the gorge in a single narrow line, one man wide.
“They will come up them,” she says.
“The guards, at least.
The King’s men always take the direct way.
It is a habit.
It is a kind of pride.”
She has me pile stones at the head of the stair, flat gray slabs from the quarry, the same slabs I have spent forty days carrying.
I had thought she was building a wall.
I understand now that the wall was never the point.
The point was the weight.
The point was that I know exactly how much each one weighs, and exactly how far I can throw it.
She strings thin cord across the third step from the top, ankle-high, knotted through a ring of iron.
Two more strands at the tenth and the twentieth.
She tips a jar of lamp oil down the whole upper run of steps and lets it soak into the stone.
She sets a pine log the length of a man’s body on a wooden trestle at the edge, with a peg holding it, so that a single knock will send it rolling down the stairs.
“And the cliff?” I ask.
“The shinobi will not use the stairs.” She ties a last knot in a cord, and then, on the cord, tiny bronze bells.
I have not seen those before.
“They will climb the north face.
It is not possible, and they will do it anyway.
They will come over the top while we are watching the stairs.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that is what I would do.” She glances at me.
It is the closest thing to a joke she has ever made.
“I taught them, boy.
I trained the men who trained these men.
I know what they know, and I know what they will think I have forgotten.”
She strings the bells along the base of the north wall, hidden in the dead grass, hair-thin cords running to the walls of the hut.
Any weight will ring them.
Any weight at all.
“You will hold the stairs,” she says.
“I will hold the cliff.”
“There will be at least a dozen on the stairs.”
“Yes.”
“And four shinobi on the wall.”
“Yes.”
I look at her.
She is sixty years old.
She is a woman half my size, with a scar around her throat and a bow that I have seen her draw only twice.
“Iwa,” I say.
“You can’t—”
“Do not tell me what I can do.” She says it gently, for her.
“I have been waiting for this night since before you could walk.
Do you understand?
I have been waiting nineteen years for a chance to die for something.” She takes a knife from her belt and presses it into my hand, a short plain blade, well worn.
“Your father’s sword is for the stairs.
This is for the moment when the stairs are done.
Do not ask me what moment I mean.
You will know.”
I close my fingers around it.
She looks at me for a long time.
Then she nods once, sharply, and walks away toward the north wall, and I am left standing at the top of the steps with a sword, a knife, a pile of stones, and the last red edge of the sun going out behind the mountains.
We wait.
It is the worst part.
I had thought the fear would come with the fighting, and it does not.
The fear comes now, in the long stillness, and it comes in every shape.
I see the captain’s half-smile.
I see Tsugu’s head against the well.
I see the young guard’s face at the bridge, white as paper, whispering I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
I see the wound in my own side, and I feel how easily a blade goes in, and how little it matters who is holding it.
You are afraid, says the voice.
“Yes.”
That is all right.
I am not.
It is quiet, almost fond.
I have never been afraid.
I could give you that too, if you asked.
You would not feel any of this.
You would not feel anything at all.
“I know what you’d give me.”
Do you?
It waits a moment.
Your father had it.
Every night of the war, he had it.
Do you know what he said to me, at the end, when the King’s blade came through him?
He said thank you.
I close my eyes.
I breathe.
Four in.
Four held.
Four out.
Four held.
He said thank you, the voice repeats, very softly.
Because I was the only friend he had left.
I open my eyes.
The moon has come up, half full, and its light lies over the stairs like a thin coat of milk.
I hold my father’s sword low and loose, the way Daigo taught me, the way Iwa has corrected me a thousand times, and I say the names.
Hanae.
Tsugu.
The grandfather.
The horn sounds.
They come up the stairs in a column, and they carry torches.
I see them first as a line of orange sparks far below in the gorge, climbing slowly, single file.
I count them.
Ten, eleven, twelve.
Fourteen.
Some carry spears.
The rest have swords, and they move with the loose, easy rhythm of men who do not expect to be hurt.
At the front, where the stair narrows and steepens, is a tall figure whose armor catches the moonlight in a way the others’ does not.
It has a long, curving sword.
I cannot see his face from this distance.
I do not need to.
Even from four hundred steps, I recognize the way he holds his head.
Kill him, the voice whispers, so softly it is almost a sigh.
I will help you kill him.
I do not answer.
I count.
I wait.
The lead guards reach the two-hundredth step.
Then the three-hundredth.
I can hear their boots now, ringing on the stone, and the creak of lacquered plates, and somebody’s low, bored laugh.
At the three-hundred-and-eightieth step, the first man trips the cord.
It is the ring of iron that gives it away.
A soft chink, barely louder than a coin dropped on a floor.
But the whole column stops, and in the silence I hear a man say, with a note of real surprise: “Hey—”
I kick the peg.
The log goes over the edge with a groan of wood and starts down the stairs, slowly at first, then faster, then with a tearing roar.
It hits the first guard at the height of the knee.
It takes him off his feet, and the man behind him, and the man behind him.
It goes on rolling, bouncing, smashing the steps to powder.
The screams start high and stop short.
I have already lit the oil.
It is one spark from a flint, one drop of flame, and it runs down the upper stairs like a living thing, orange and bright, and the smell of scorched pine fills the air.
Two men trapped on the burning steps are shrieking now, batting at their legs.
One of them stumbles.
He falls sideways off the edge of the stair, and I watch him fall a long, long way.
I do not feel joy.
I feel something dull and sour, like a stone in my stomach.
Then the rest are coming up.
Nine of them.
Then eight, when I get the first one with a thrown slab, a heavy one, that takes him full in the face and leaves it something that is no longer a face.
Then seven, six, as I hurl the stones down the stair and hear them crack against armor and bone.
But the stones run out.
They always do.
The first man reaches the top step, and I meet him with the sword.
I have not lied to you, and I will not begin now.
I am not good.
I have forty days of training and nineteen years of losing, and the men who come up those stairs have killed more people than I have met.
They are fast, and they are skilled, and for the first several exchanges I do nothing but stay alive.
What I have, though, is the stairs.
I had not understood, until now, why Iwa made me climb them.
Why four hundred steps a day, why buckets, why stone.
It is not strength.
It is footing.
It is knowing, without looking, where the next step is, and the one after it, and where the balance point lies when a man is above you and a man is below.
I fight from the top of a staircase the way a fish swims in water.
The guards do not.
The first one lunges.
I step back, half a pace, and his blade goes past my chest, and he overbalances on the lip of the step.
I do not cut at him.
I only kick, hard, low, into the hinge of his knee, and I feel it give.
He goes down the stairs backwards.
He takes another man with him.
The second one is quicker.
He catches my shoulder with the tip of a spear, a hot bright line of pain, and I turn with it, and I bring the sword up and across, and there is a soft resistance and then none.
He looks down at himself.
He says something I do not catch.
Then he sits, slowly, on the top step, and holds his belly in with both hands.
I have killed a man.
I do not have time to feel it.
I lose count of how many I kill.
I will not pretend I do not remember them, because I do, each face, each sound.
But the number, no.
The number is lost somewhere in the smoke and the noise and the endless, ringing red.
What I remember is the captain.
He does not climb with the others.
He stays behind, on the seventieth step or so, watching, his sword resting against his shoulder and his half-smile visible even from here.
He watches his men die.
He watches without expression.
And when the last of them is dead, when I stand at the top of the burning stair with blood to my elbows and my breath tearing in my chest, he begins to climb.
He takes his time.
He steps over the bodies as though they were driftwood.
“There you are,” Kagemasa says.
It is the first time I have heard his name.
He says it himself, as though it means something.
“You look different.” He glances up at me, at the blood, at the sword.
His scarred lip lifts.
“The whole valley said you were nothing.
I quite agreed.
But here you are, all the same.
It seems I owe you an apology.”
“You killed her.”
“I killed a lot of people that day.
You’ll have to be more specific.”
I go down two steps.
“You’ll want to think about that,” he says, mildly.
“I am not the fool on the bridge.
I am not the boy who ran you through.”
“I know.”
“Then why come down?”
“Because,” I say, “you’re the one who laughed.”
He tilts his head, as if he has not considered this before.
Then the half-smile widens, and he draws.
I have no words for how fast he is.
The first cut is a flicker.
I feel the wind of it against my cheek before I understand it has been thrown.
The second takes the sword out of my line and opens my forearm to the bone.
The third I block only by dropping to one knee, and the blow drives me back a full step, and I feel my father’s sword sing along the length of the blade as it takes the strain.
He is toying with me.
I know it.
He knows I know it.
Let me, the voice says.
“No.”
He is better than you.
You will die.
“Then I’ll die.”
Kagemasa laughs.
He steps in, and I go back.
He cuts, and I duck.
And somewhere in the dance of it, in the flow of the steps, I begin to feel something I had not expected: a rhythm.
The sway of the stairs under my feet.
The weight of the sword.
The steady, patient count of the breath.
It is not skill.
It is only forty days of water buckets, finally coming home.
He steps up onto the next stair, and it is the wrong one.
It is the third from the top.
It is the step with the cord.
The ring of iron chinks under his boot, and something drops on him from the eaves of the hut: a heavy rope net, weighted with stones, that Iwa has been saving for a quieter moment.
It catches him across the shoulders and drags him down onto one knee.
His sword arm is tangled.
His half-smile has vanished.
I do not stop to think.
I bring my father’s sword down across his face.
It is a clumsy stroke, and it does not kill him.
It opens him from the corner of the mouth to the ear, laying the scarred lip wide, and he howls.
It is not a sound I ever expected to hear from that mouth.
He tears at the net with his free hand, rolling, kicking, and I go after him with the sword raised, and I know I have him, I know—
Shigen!
It is Iwa’s voice.
It comes from behind the hut, sharp and hoarse and terrible.
I turn.
The shinobi have come over the wall.
Four of them, black-clothed, faces smudged with soot.
They are not in the dark now.
They are standing in the light of the burning stair, and one of them is already dead, an arrow through the throat, hanging from a rope at the top of the cliff.
A second is on his back in the dead grass, kicking, with Iwa’s knife in his eye.
But the third and fourth have her cornered against the wall of the hut, and one of them is holding a short, curved, ugly blade, and the blade is already in her side.
She does not scream.
She looks at me across the clearing, and her pale eyes are wide and very calm.
Now, she mouths.
The moment I meant.
I do not think.
I do not count.
Something inside me lets go.
I will try to tell it as I remember it.
It is not much.
I remember the heat first.
It floods up from somewhere below the stomach, through the ribs, through the throat, and it is a heat like nothing I have ever felt, pure and clean and immense.
It is not pain.
It is the exact opposite of pain.
It is what pain would feel like if it were turned inside out, and the whole world becomes a bright, singing, uncomplicated place.
I remember my hands.
They are long.
The nails have gone black and hard, and they curve like knives.
I remember something growing out of my forehead.
Two things.
Hot and heavy and right, pushing through the skin above my brows, and I feel the bone parting for them the way soil parts for a shoot.
There is a sound like wet wood snapping.
Then a smooth, cool weight settles against my face, and the moonlight goes red, and I understand, with a distant, delighted clarity, that I am wearing the skull.
There, says the voice.
It is not in my head.
It is my voice.
It is in my mouth.
There.
Was that so hard?
I cross the clearing in a single stride.
The first shinobi has time to turn.
That is all.
I take him by the head, one hand, and I lift, and something in his neck makes a noise like a green branch breaking.
I throw him against the wall of the hut.
He hits the stone and does not fall.
He slides, leaving a long dark smear.
The second one goes for my eyes.
I catch his wrist.
I turn it, without effort, as though it were a wet cloth.
There is a scream.
I pull, and I feel the arm come away from the shoulder, and I hold it up in the light like a trophy and I laugh.
I laugh.
It is the most terrible sound I have ever heard, and it is coming from me.
Yes, the voice croons.
Yes, yes.
Look at them.
Look at how small they are.
The shinobi is sobbing, curled around the stump.
I put my foot on his chest.
I look down at him through the eyes of the skull, and everything is red, and everything is beautiful, and I think, nothing has ever felt this good.
I raise my hand.
“Shigen.”
A whisper.
So faint I almost do not hear it.
“Shigen.
Count.”
I turn my head.
Iwa is sitting against the wall of the hut, one hand pressed to her side, and the blood is coming through her fingers in slow, dark pulses.
She is looking at me.
Not at the horns.
Not at the black claws or the mask.
At me, at whatever is left of me behind the bone, and her face is not afraid.
“Count,” she says again.
“Your father wept.
Remember.”
I stand very still.
The clearing is silent.
The stair is still burning.
Somewhere behind me, faint and far away, a man is groaning into the snow.
And in my head, in that huge red noise, there is a small, thin, insistent thread of something else, a woman’s voice, a dry, patient, terrible voice, saying: four in.
Four held.
Four out.
Four held.
I bite down.
The skull has no tongue to bite.
It has teeth, though, and they are mine.
I drive them into the inside of my cheek, and taste blood, real blood, hot and human.
And then, with an effort I have never made in my life, I begin to breathe.
No, says the voice.
No, no, not now, you fool, you—
Four in.
Do not do this.
You will die.
All of them will die.
Four held.
I am the only thing that ever loved you.
Four out.
The heat goes out of me like a tide.
The horns retreat.
I feel them shrinking, drawing back into the bone with a soft, sick, wet sound, and the mask peels away from my face in a slow, cool sheet, and the red drains from the world, and I am on my hands and knees on the stone of the shelf, retching, and every muscle in my body is screaming.
The shinobi is dead.
I do not remember killing him.
I stay there for a long time, shaking.
Kagemasa is gone.
When I finally raise my head I see the tangle of rope by the top of the stair, and the blood on the third step, and a long red smear where a man has dragged himself away.
The captain has cut himself out of the net and gone down the mountain in the dark.
Half his face is laid open.
He will not smile again the way he did.
I could follow.
I know that, distantly.
I could track him down the stair by the blood and finish it.
But Iwa is bleeding into the dirt, and I do not have the strength to stand.
I crawl to her.
She is still conscious, breathing shallow and quick.
Her side is a red ruin, and I press both my hands to it and feel the heat bubbling up between my fingers, and I say, stupidly, “You said you’d die for something.”
“I did.” Her lip twitches.
“I am not dead yet.”
“You—”
“The blade was poisoned.
I know the smell.
It is slow.” She closes her eyes.
“I have perhaps a month.
Maybe a little more, if I am careful.”
“There has to be—”
“There is not.
Do not insult me.” Her hand comes up, slowly, and closes over my wrist.
Her fingers are cold.
“I saw what you did tonight.
I saw you let go, and I saw you take it back.
Do you know how rare that is?
Your father never did it once.
Not in all his years.”
“I nearly killed you.”
“You nearly killed yourself.
It is not the same.” Her eyes open.
They are pale and clear and almost young.
“You held it, boy.
Just for a breath.
But you held it.
That is the whole of the art.”
I do not say anything.
I cannot.
She looks past me, at the fire on the stairs, at the bodies, at the wide black sky, and something in her face softens.
“You cannot stay here,” she says.
“The captain will come back with more.
You must go north, to the temple called Kane-no-Tera, the Temple of Broken Bells.
There are six of us left who hold the old art.
I have not seen them in nineteen years.
Tell them the rock has fallen.” Her fingers tighten.
“They will teach you the rest.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“You will.” The word is very quiet.
“You will, and you will do it now, because in three days I will not be able to walk.
I will not die on a mountain of my own making, waiting for the King’s men to finish what they started.” She almost smiles.
“You will carry me, if you like.
As far as the road.
It is a long way.”
I look at her.
I look at the hut, black against the stars.
At the stairs, still burning.
At the dead, and the blood, and my own two hands, which are pale and shaking and entirely ordinary.
“How far?” I say.
“Twelve days.” She pauses.
“Perhaps thirteen, at my pace.”
I get one arm under her shoulders, and the other under her knees, and I lift her.
She weighs almost nothing.
She is as light as Hanae was.
The thought comes, unbidden, and I put it away.
At the top of the stairs I stop and look down, once, at the long black gorge, and the road beyond it, and the faint gray edge of dawn beginning to show in the east.
I am not angry, the voice says.
It is very quiet, and very close.
I only want you to remember.
You let go.
You liked it.
Nothing you say to yourself will ever change that.
I know.
I know it, and it is the worst thing I have ever known.
I turn away from the edge, and I begin to walk.
End of Chapter Three