The first rule of Kane-no-Tera is that I may not speak between dawn and dusk.
Tenkai tells me this on the morning after we bury Iwa, standing over my pallet with his staff and the flat, unhurried patience of a man who has said the same words two hundred and eleven times before.
He does not explain.
I ask him why, and he only taps his lips with one finger, and waits until I understand that my question was the first thing I had done wrong.
So I say nothing.
I carry water.
The spring at this temple is not at the bottom of a gorge, as Iwa’s was.
It is behind the east hall, in a stone basin fed by a thread of snowmelt, and it is only forty paces from the kitchen.
That is the cruelty of it.
The distance is nothing.
Tenkai has me fill two buckets, carry them to the kitchen, empty them into a barrel, and return.
Then he has me do it again.
He does not tell me how many times.
He does not tell me when to stop.
I understand, somewhere around the fortieth trip, that there is no number, and that stopping is the thing I am being taught not to want.
By noon my arms are shaking.
By dusk I cannot feel my hands.
At the evening bell, which does not ring, Botan taps me on the shoulder, and I am permitted to speak.
“Well?” says Tenkai, from his cushion by the fire.
“Did you find it?”
“Find what?”
“Whatever I hid in the buckets.”
I stare at him.
He is sipping tea.
Nobody else in the kitchen looks up.
“There was nothing in the buckets,” I say.
“It was only water.”
“Yes,” says Tenkai.
“And what did you think about, all day, carrying it?”
I have to think.
I do not like what I find.
“Iwa,” I say.
“The mountain.
Ryo’s tooth.
Hanae’s floor.
The captain’s face.” I swallow.
“The voice.
It talked.
I didn’t answer, because you said—but it talked the whole time.
Every step.”
“Good.” He sets down his cup.
“Then you have begun.”
I will not tell you every day of the first weeks, because they are all the same, and the sameness is the point.
I wake in the dark.
I carry water.
I split logs for the kitchen, then for the halls, then for a stack behind the north wall that Haru says is meant for the winter and Botan says is meant for no one.
I eat barley and pickled radish and, on the seventh day, a little dried fish.
I sleep on a pallet in a room the size of a coffin.
The silence rule holds.
I learn to hear things I had not noticed before.
The way the pines groan in a north wind.
The tiny rasp of a beetle in the rafters.
The steady, patient thrum of the voice in the back of my skull, which is always there, always talking, and which I had spent nineteen years mistaking for my own thoughts.
You are tired, it says, mildly, when I have hauled the ninetieth bucket.
You are hungry.
Nobody is watching.
You could stop.
I do not answer.
I count.
And a strange thing begins to happen, slowly, by degrees: the voice starts to sound less like a friend and more like weather.
A thing that happens.
A wind that blows, and blows, and does not care whether I lean into it.
The masters do not praise me.
They teach in scraps, when I least expect it.
Botan, the heavy one with the tree-root arms, catches me at the woodpile on the ninth day and throws me over his hip so hard the breath leaves my body.
I lie in the wood chips wheezing.
He looks down at me, unsmiling.
“Falling,” he says.
“First, you learn to fall.
A man who has been thrown and cannot stand is dead.
A man who has been thrown and rolls is only inconvenienced.” He offers his hand.
“Again.”
Haru, the tall one with the missing ear, takes me to the courtyard at midday and has me stand in the sun with my sword held out at arm’s length, point steady, until the tremor comes.
When it comes, she raises my elbow with two fingers and tells me to breathe.
When it comes again, she taps my knee.
She does not correct my grip.
She corrects the breath.
“A sword is a message from the lungs,” she says.
“It says only what the breath says.
If you are afraid, the blade will know.”
Sen, small as a girl and older than Iwa, shows me how to throw a knife.
I am hopeless.
She does not mind.
She throws thirty knives in a row, each one a hair’s breadth from the last, into the same knothole in the courtyard post, and then she looks at me over her shoulder with the sharp bright eyes of a sparrow.
“Your father,” she says, “was the worst thrower of knives I ever saw.”
It is the first time any of them has spoken of him as a person.
I nearly drop the knife.
“You knew him?”
“Everyone knew him.” She pulls a blade from the wood.
“But I am not going to talk about it.
You have work.”
Mitsu, the blind old man who sits on the steps of the west hall from dawn to dusk, has nothing to teach me but listening.
He tells me to sit beside him and be quiet, and I obey, and after an hour he says: “You are holding your breath.
Stop.” After another hour: “You are fidgeting.
Stop.” After a third: “That is better.”
I ask him what I am supposed to hear.
“Everything,” says Mitsu.
He turns his milky eyes toward the wall, toward the long dark slope beyond it.
“Including what is coming.”
They come on the eleventh night.
I am on the north wall, on watch, because Tenkai has decided that a man who cannot sleep should at least be useful.
The moon is a thin bone in the sky.
Far below, along the ring of the ridge, the torches of the King’s army burn like a necklace of small red coals.
They have been there since the day I arrived.
They do not advance.
They do not retreat.
They only wait, like a patient animal at the mouth of a den.
I hear it before I see it.
Not a sound, exactly.
A pressure.
A prickle at the back of the neck, a hush in the air, as if the night has drawn in its breath.
I look down the slope, and the pines are very still, and then something moves among them.
A shadow, then another.
Three shapes, black on black, gliding upward through the trees with the eerie smoothness of ink rising in water.
Shinobi.
“Do not draw,” says a voice beside me.
It is Haru.
I did not hear her come.
She has her arms folded and her eyes on the slope, and there is no fear in her face at all.
“They will cross the wall,” she says.
“Watch.
Do not speak.”
The three shapes reach the low stone rampart at the edge of the temple grounds. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
It is no barrier.
A child could climb it.
The first shinobi puts one hand on the top stone and vaults, light as a cat, and lands on the temple ground on the other side.
Nothing happens.
The second follows.
The third.
They crouch in the dead grass, listening, and one of them makes a small hand-signal, clear, and they begin to creep forward toward the hall.
They get six steps.
Then the first one stops.
He stands very still.
His head tilts, slowly, like a hound catching a scent.
And then he lifts both hands to his ears and screams.
It is a terrible sound.
High and thin and utterly unlike anything a man should make.
The second one has dropped to his knees.
The third is clawing at his own chest, at the neckline of his tunic, tearing it open, and by the moonlight I see a mark on his skin: a brand, pale and puckered, the shape of a crane with its wings spread wide.
“Servant-marked,” Haru says softly.
“What?”
“The King’s blood does not go into all of them.
Only the best.
The ones he trusts.” Her voice is quite flat.
“He gives each a fragment of his own spirit.
A splinter of the crane.
It makes them fast, and it makes them obedient.
Do you see the men on the ground?
Do you hear them?”
I do.
The man with the brand has stopped clawing.
He is rocking on his knees now, moaning, a low continuous sound, and his fingers have gone to his mouth, and he is chewing them.
“The ground remembers,” Haru says.
“It remembers every demon-bearer who ever held their spirit, and every one who did not.
Six hundred years.
It does not care for the King’s servants.”
“What does it do to them?”
“It rings.”
She says nothing more.
There is nothing to add.
The first shinobi has found his feet.
He staggers back toward the wall, blind, hands pressed over his ears, and blood is running between his fingers.
He reaches the rampart and throws himself over it like a man leaping into water, and I hear him crash into the pines and keep running.
The second follows, on all fours.
The third does not move at all.
He lies on his back in the grass, staring up at the sky.
His mouth is open.
A thin stream of something dark runs from his ear, and his eyes have gone milky and wide, and he is not breathing.
“Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“The bell struck a thing that could not bear to be struck.” She does not look at the body.
“Do not go to him.
Do not touch him.
Come.”
I follow her, numbly, down the steps of the wall.
The last thing I see, before I turn, is the crane on the man’s chest, pale against the skin.
It seems to be looking at me.
On the twentieth day, the herald comes.
He is not a shinobi.
He is a plain guard, gray-bearded, in black lacquer, riding up the last stretch of the mountain road on a tired brown horse with a white banner tied to his spear.
He stops a hundred paces from the gate and calls up, in a big flat officer’s voice, that he carries a message for the boy called Shigen, and that he is to be given an answer.
Tenkai stands on the gate platform with his staff.
He does not look at me.
I stand a pace behind him, and the six masters ring the wall, and the whole temple holds its breath.
“Speak,” Tenkai says.
“Captain Kagemasa of the Third Company sends his greetings.” The herald unrolls a strip of silk.
“He wishes it known that the King has taken an interest in the boy.
That the King has always taken an interest.
That the King would be pleased to receive him at court.”
“Court.”
“In the capital.
Alive.” A pause, while the herald’s eyes flick to me and away.
“The King is prepared to be generous.
Rice for the villages.
A pardon for the crimes of the boy’s father.
A place in the royal household.”
I feel something cold turn over in my stomach.
“He wants me alive,” I say, very softly.
“Yes,” says Tenkai.
“Why?”
“That is what we need to learn.”
He raises his voice.
“Tell the captain that the temple has heard this offer before.
From his master’s grandfather.
From his master’s grandfather’s grandfather.
It has never been accepted.”
“He anticipated that answer.” The herald’s mouth twists.
He looks tired.
He looks, I think, like a man who has been told to carry this message and does not much care for the words in it.
“The captain asks me to say that he has a second offer.”
He turns in the saddle and lifts his hand.
Down the mountain road, a wagon comes into view.
It is a low farm cart drawn by two mules.
Four guards ride beside it.
And in the back of the cart, seated on the boards with their wrists lashed to the rail, are two figures I know.
I know the first by the shape of his shoulders and the one dead eye.
I know the second by the crooked tooth.
Master Daigo.
Ryo.
I do not remember moving.
I remember the gate platform, and Botan’s hand closing on my arm like an iron band, and my own voice, cracked and ugly, calling out across the distance.
Daigo lifts his head.
He looks terrible.
His face is a mass of bruises.
His good eye is swollen half shut, and there is dried blood down the front of his robe.
But he sees me.
I know he sees me.
And his mouth, split and swollen, works around a word, and then he shouts it, in a voice I have never heard from him, a voice like tearing sailcloth.
“Do not come down!”
A guard hits him across the mouth.
He sags.
Ryo is crying, silently, with the furious dumb tears of a child who has decided not to make a sound.
The crooked tooth is gone.
Someone has knocked it out.
The herald’s voice carries clearly across the cold.
“The village of Ashigawa has been placed under the King’s protection, pending the boy’s surrender.
The captain wishes you to know that the wells are being watched.
That the granaries are sealed.” A pause.
“That in three days’ time, at dawn, one of the prisoners will be put to death.
And every dawn after that, another.”
“He is a monster,” says Haru quietly.
“He is a man who has lost half his face.” Tenkai’s voice is very even.
“That is a different thing.”
“Three days,” the herald says again.
“The captain regrets the necessity.”
The cart is drawn slowly back down the mountain, and I watch it go, and I do not look away until it has vanished into the pines.
I sit in the dark of my room for a very long time.
I do not count.
I do not breathe in fours.
I only sit, with my father’s sword across my knees and my hands hanging loose, and I listen to the voice.
It is very quiet.
I can save them, it says.
I do not answer.
I could be at the bottom of this mountain in a single breath.
I could open every throat in that cart’s escort before the first one lifted a hand.
I could carry the old man on my shoulder like a sack of rice.
And the boy.
It pauses, gentle, considerate.
You saw his tooth.
You saw what they did.
“I saw.”
It would take a few heartbeats.
You would not even have to enjoy it.
“You’d enjoy it.”
Yes.
There is no shame in the word.
I would.
But is that so terrible?
Is it worse than what happens if you do not?
I close my eyes.
It is the trap.
I know it is the trap.
I have known the shape of it since the mountain: the good reason, the reasonable request, the small step that becomes a stair.
My father took that stair a hundred times.
Each time it was for someone.
A village, a child, a friend.
Each time it was the right thing to do.
But Daigo is alive.
Daigo, who never once drew his sword in front of Hanae’s killers, who told me I am not proud of it, but it is the truth.
Daigo, who is shouting at me across a mountain not to come.
And Ryo.
Ryo, who is thirteen years old.
Who beat me eleven times out of eleven and never once made me feel small.
“Shigen.”
I open my eyes.
Tenkai is standing in the doorway.
He has not knocked.
He never does.
“Do not ask me to let you go down,” he says.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were.” He does not say it unkindly.
“Do not lie to me.
Not tonight.”
I lower my head.
“Yes,” I say.
“I was.”
He comes in.
He sits down on the floor across from me, and he is quiet for so long that I begin to think he has gone to sleep.
When he speaks, his voice is heavy.
“If you go down the mountain tonight, you will die.
You know that.
You may take some of them with you, if you let the beast out, but you will not save the old man and the boy.
The captain will see to that.
He has planned for it.” A pause.
“That is what a hostage is for.
It is not meant to be paid.
It is meant to be an argument you cannot win.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“I do not know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I have taught this art for sixty years,” Tenkai says, “and in that time I have found exactly one true thing.
It is that there is a moment, in every hard road, when the wise man looks at the choice he has been given and asks: who made it?”
I stare at him.
“The captain has offered you two roads,” he says.
“Surrender, or slaughter.
Both suit him.
Neither suits you.
Somewhere between, there is a third road that he has not thought to guard.” He rises, slowly, with a small crack of old joints.
“It will not be an easy one.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“No.
But I know who does.”
“Who?”
He looks at me for a long moment, and in the lamplight his honey eyes are strange, sad, and very old.
“The ground,” he says.
“Come.
It is time you were shown what lies beneath the north hall.”
He leads me across the courtyard in the dark.
The wind has died.
The bells hang over the gate, silent as ever, and the six masters are waiting at the door of the north hall in a row, wrapped in their gray robes, as motionless as stones.
Nobody speaks.
Haru opens the door.
I have been past this hall a hundred times.
I have swept its steps, split its kindling, hauled its water.
I have never been inside.
It is a low, windowless building of black timber, older than the rest, and as we step into the dark, I feel the hair rise along my arms.
There is a smell.
Old stone, cold earth.
Beneath it, something else, faint and sweet, like a rotting flower.
Tenkai lights a single lamp.
The light travels slowly across a bare floor, and I see that it is not a floor at all.
It is a great slab of dark stone, sunk into the earth, and in the center of it, cut deep into the rock, there is a hole.
A stair.
A narrow spiral of steps, going down.
“Six centuries,” Tenkai says quietly, “we have kept this.
It is why the temple was built.
It is why the King’s blood cannot cross our wall, and why the crane hates us.” He lifts the lamp.
“Every student who fails is buried in the grove.
But there was one who did not fail, and did not succeed, and could not be buried.”
“What do you mean?”
“The first of us.” He starts down.
“The first who ever held a demon, and lived.
She is still down there.”
I stand at the top of the stair.
Below me, faint and far, from somewhere in the earth, there comes a sound.
It is not a voice.
It is not a bell.
It is the memory of both, a low soft chime like a single struck note dying away in a very deep well.
Behind my eyes, in the dark, the voice goes suddenly and utterly still.
Do not, it says.
It sounds, for the first time in my life, afraid.
Shigen.
Do not go down there.
Please.
I look at Tenkai’s back, at the slow small circle of lamplight, at the steps going down into the dark.
Then I follow him.
End of Chapter Six