The cries of the merchants filled the smothering dark. The lamentations were close by, but in the pitch black, Haru could not see the merchants. They were as invisible to him as he was to them. For a few moments, he could wrap himself in oblivion and not confront the cost and the scale of his failure. For a few moments, though it shamed him to admit this to himself, he could rest in the illusion of irresponsibility. In this void, there was nothing he had to do any longer.
“I am here, Lieutenant Haru,” said Ishiko.
He had been named. The illusion was over. He was summoned to resume his duties.
“I am here,” said Hino. “I have Ekei with me.”
Silence from Fujiki.
“Give us some light,” Haru commanded.
After much fumbling, Chen managed to get a lantern lit. From its glow, others spread as the surviving merchants found their lanterns, and the surroundings came into view.
The caravan was inside a deep cave. The entrance, blocked by the avalanche, was about fifteen feet wide and high. Past the entrance, the ceiling went higher as the cave bored into the mountainside, until the cavern became a high split in the rock, as if struck by a monstrous ax. After the first fifty feet, the cave narrowed until it was a fissure no more than five feet wide that vanished into the heart of the mountain.
Haru took a breath and with his bushi began to take stock and to count the cost.
“A bit more than half the caravan remains,” Ishiko summarized when they were done.
He nodded. The rest of the merchants were gone. So was Fujiki. No one said they were fortunate that the losses were not worse. The shame of what had been lost was too great.
Haru picked up a lantern and strode through the merchants to the entrance. He looked up at a solid wall of snow.
“We will not be leaving again in a hurry,” said Ishiko.
“There is no need to,” Haru answered. “We are safe from the storm here. We have food enough, and we can make all the water we need.” They could survive in this cave almost indefinitely. “We will dig our way out, however long it takes. If the storm is done, we move on. If it is not, we wait it out. Divide these laborers into digging teams. One hour each. That will give them something to focus on.” He turned and looked at the merchants. “We are safe,” he said again, more loudly. “The danger is past. We will prepare a way out for when it is time for us to resume our journey.” He chose his words carefully, making the snow seem like a useful tool instead of an impenetrable wall trapping them inside.
Haru and his bushi led the digging shifts. He wanted to set the example of industry, of the calm determination that would re-emphasize the lesson that there was nothing to fear.
This was what he told himself.
And it worked. It was the right decision. Haru took the first shift, using one of the spades in the caravan’s supplies. He scarred the snow with the first cuts himself. The unblemished whiteness was an ominous sight. It was too final. He dug into the wall, and turned it back into mere snow. What lay ahead was a long, arduous task, not an impossibility. The merchants on his shift attacked the barrier with a will.
The wails that had come with the darkness ceased entirely. The merchants no longer mourned the lost. They were grateful to be among the survivors. And they were grateful also to their savior.
“Lieutenant Haru,” said Chen as he dug into the snow and added to the pile behind him, “we are in your debt forever. Your foresight has preserved us.”
Haru grunted. He kept working. He clenched his jaw shut to keep himself from lashing out at the merchant’s sycophancy. I do not deserve your thanks.
“Lieutenant Haru…” Chen began again.
Be silent! “Save your breath for work,” Haru said, coldly, but keeping his temper.
Chen’s thanks grated. They shattered the wall of mindlessness that Haru sought to create through heavy labor.
Foresight. What a bitter joke that was. If Chen were not such a spineless creature, Haru would have suspected him of satire. It would be a pleasant thing, a joyous thing, to say that he had known the cave would be here, that this had been his goal all along. Instead, he had only luck or fate to thank. Both shamed him. He wasn’t sure which made him more uneasy.
Chen kept quiet now, but it was too late. Haru attacked the snow as if it were his guilt given form. He sweated with effort. His muscles began to ache as he punished himself with the heaviest load he could take with each spadeful. Nothing he did let his mind rest.
He kept seeing Barako’s face. She did not look on him, as he so often wished she would, with tenderness. She looked at him instead with judgment in her eyes. In reality though, he had never seen her do that, either. There had never been anything other than a respectful neutrality in her gaze.
Haru had no illusions about himself and Barako. He would, in due course, be wed to the woman of his mother’s choosing, selected for political advantage and the extension of the lineage. Barako was a warrior, not a courtier. She served under Ochiba, the captain of Striking Dawn’s guard.
Her political unsuitability was only one obstacle, though. There was also Haru’s incompetence. He had yet to perform on the battlefield in a way that would measure up to Barako. He had never done anything that would earn her respect, let alone her admiration. That neutral, disinterested gaze hurt. He would move mountains to see some other emotion directed his way.
I’ve done that now, haven’t I? I’ve brought one down on us.
No, he had no illusions about Barako. But he had his dreams. He had been thinking of those dreams when he had pushed the caravan onto the ridge and away from certain shelter. He imagined how she would look him when he finally did reach Striking Dawn, with half a caravan or less. The condemnation he pictured was another dream. It was a nightmare. It was no more real than the tenderness he was used to conjuring for himself. Barako was the model of honor. She would no more show her disappointment in him than she would a forbidden love.
That means nothing. She would not show what she does not feel.
He dug even harder at the snow. Be silent, he shouted silently, at himself now instead of Chen. Put this aside. It doesn’t matter. It will never matter. Those dreams were foolish. Now they’re dust. Get back with what you can. That’s all that’s left.
Haru threw himself into the work. He would have been grateful for total exhaustion. The more Barako and thoughts of shame haunted him, the more ferociously he worked to put them aside. The dig turned into a backbreaking rhythm. He worked until the cavern felt like a furnace. The cold of winter was far from him. He only felt it now and then on the back of his neck, a single point of cold. It scratched at his mind. The chill cut through the sweat to make his skin prickle.
Just before his first shift ended, when despite all his efforts, Barako and who she was loomed in his mind’s eye, he heard the whisper. Close and far, a breath in his ear and an echo lost in the stars. When he stopped moving, the whisper was gone.
That was her voice.
No, it wasn’t. You didn’t hear it properly. You didn’t even hear what it said. You must have misheard.
When his shift was over, Haru moved back in the cavern, away from the merchants and the other bushi, putting some distance between himself and the din of the work. Taking up his watch duty, he listened for the whisper.
He did not hear it again. He did discover why he had felt cold on his neck. A draft blew in from the depths of the cave. It was sporadic, and so gentle it would have been unnoticeable except that it was so cold. It came after long intervals, a slow sigh of the mountain.
Haru looked into the darkness of the narrowing cave. He wondered how far the fissure went.
Ishiko was leading this shift of excavators. Haru watched her as he waited for the next touch of the cold, and still listened for the whisper. He began to lose track of time. Ishiko jerked at one point and looked around, startled, then resumed her digging.
Haru had heard nothing. He looked at the other bushi. Ekei was unconscious, and too badly injured to be of use. Hino was asleep, resting before her turn digging and keeping watch. Haru waited until the hourglass he had taken from a wagon marked the end of the shift. It was, as near as he could guess, the hour of the ox.
Ishiko woke Hino and then came to Haru to relieve his watch and let him rest.
“What did you hear?” Haru asked.
Ishiko hesitated. But he had not given her the option to say she had heard nothing. “A whisper, I thought,” she said.
“What did it say?”
“I don’t know. I must have been mistaken.”
“I don’t think you were,” Haru said.
She nodded in understanding of his implication.
He felt the exhalation of the mountain against the back of his neck again. “What do you make of that draft?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. It might come from another entrance.”
“That is my thought as well.” He wanted to keep the whisper separate in his mind from the draft. There were other possibilities. Neither Haru nor Ishiko wanted to articulate them just yet. “We need to see how far this cave goes,” Haru said. “And where it goes.”
Ishiko nodded.
They spoke briefly to Hino. Then Ishiko took one of the lanterns and they started deeper into the gloom. As the cave narrowed, it became a tunnel. The ceiling was invisible. Ishiko held up the lantern. The fissure above them never closed. The crack seemed to run all the way to the peak of the mountain.
Soon the passage was no more than five feet wide. It turned sharply, but always straightened, going ever further into the mountainside. It kept heading west. The sounds of the digging became muffled very quickly. Soon they were inaudible. Haru and Ishiko were alone, two ants tunneling through a hairline crack in stone.
The cold draft came at sporadic intervals.
“Is it stronger now?” Haru asked.
“I think it is,” said Ishiko.
Haru kept listening for the whisper. He wanted to hear it again, to learn what it was. He hoped he would not hear it, so he could dismiss it as an illusion that he and Ishiko had somehow shared at different moments.
The air in the deep mountain was still. It was oppressive. It was heavy with waiting.
After half an hour, the relentless westward direction of the passage began to worry Haru. It was also sloping downward. It had been almost since Haru and Ishiko had left the caravan, and the descent had been much steeper in the last while.
Ishiko must have had the same thought. “If we keep going this way…” she began.
“I know.” They were deep now into the last of the mountain chain before the Kaiu Kabe, the Carpenter Wall against the Shadowlands, the region of darkness where all that was evil dwelled, all the hungry dead and the demonic oni that fell under the dominion of the fallen kami Fu Leng. “We still have a long way to go,” Haru said.
He tried to picture the caravan’s precise position. Striking Dawn was south of the Castle of the Forgotten, midway between it and Hida Castle. With most of a day’s march still ahead of the caravan, Haru knew that, relative to the Wall, the caravan was at a considerable distance to the north and south from one of the twelve Kaiu Towers. They were parallel with one of the sections of curtain wall. It was impossible to patrol every part of that huge length at all times. These were the regions of the Kaiu Kabe most vulnerable to attacks from the monsters from the Shadowlands.
Even so, if the tunnel ran all the way through the mountain, which Haru still wanted to believe was unlikely, then they would still emerge with the Wall before them. He was facing enough current disasters without imagining new ones.
The descent worried him, though. He could not stop himself from picturing this crack going down and down and down, below the roots of the mountains, and passing underneath the Wall.
Is it possible? It isn’t likely. But it isn’t impossible.
What if it’s true? To find such a break in the defenses would be extraordinary.
It would be a way back from the disgrace of failure. It would mark a return in triumph. A return, also, to the respect and reputation he deserved. He would have found something critical to the survival of the Kakeguchi, and perhaps of the Wall itself.
Too much imagining. Set this aside. Concentrate.
That was enough fantasizing. Indulging in fantastic hopes was not the least of his flaws. He lived too much for what he hoped. That had been his downfall on the battlefield more than once. Disaster for the Kakeguchi family had been averted by Ochiba and Barako. And by his father. It was his hopes of restoring himself in the eyes of his mother, and most of all Barako, that had made him lose half the caravan. What was he hoping for now? Something terrible and vast? Anything he found that was as important as he wanted would also be something that two samurai could not possibly defeat.
Not two samurai led by me, at any rate. So stay focused. Think about real consequences.
Consequences. If this passage somehow led all the way to the Shadowlands, then the cavern was not a refuge for the caravan at all. But he did not know this. It was still entirely possible that he and Ishiko would simply find another crack in the mountainside, perhaps one they could use, perhaps not, and nothing more extraordinary than that.
The breeze blew again. It was stronger. Haru was certain. There was more than a frozen touch on his cheek. The breeze pushed against him. As it did, he heard the whisper.
Haru jerked to a halt, hand on the hilt of his katana. “Did you hear it?” he asked Ishiko. “The whisper?”
“No. Could you make it out?”
Haru shook his head. That was almost a lie. Though the breeze made no sound, the syllables of the whisper hid beneath it, wrapped in its cold, their presence discernible but not their shape. Yet there had been two syllables.
A sigh like hunger. Aaaaaaaaaaa.
A cunning moan. Oooooooooo.
That was not my name. I did not hear my name. I’m just looking for a pattern.
Aaaaaaaaa… ooooooooo…
Not my name. Not my name.
No point in saying anything to Ishiko until he was sure. Better that she listened unbiased.
It was a little while before the breeze came again. When it did, it was stronger than ever. Colder. And it lasted longer.
Ishiko gasped.
Haru paused and turned to her. “You did not hear your name,” he said.
Ishiko stared back at him. “How did you…”
“Because earlier, it was not my name that I heard.”
She nodded slowly.
“This is the first time you’ve heard the whisper since we left the caravan?” Haru asked.
“It is. You heard nothing just now?”
He shook his head.
“Perhaps it is not our names,” Ishiko said, expressing less a concession than a hope.
“But it is real,” Haru admitted.
“You think we should go on, Lieutenant Haru?”
“I think we need to know the nature of the threat. If there is one. We are presuming the worst. We might be wrong to do so.”
“You believe, then, that it would be a greater risk to the caravan not to go forward?”
“I do.” I am aware of my responsibilities. I am thinking of the consequences. This felt like the right decision.
They moved on, still heading west, still descending. The breeze soon became a wind. It blew with increasing frequency, until it became a continuous blast. The breaths Haru had felt before now revealed themselves to have been the gusts, so powerful that not all the twists and turns of the passage could block them completely.
“We must be nearing a way out,” said Haru. He had to raise his voice. The wind keened in shrill pain.
Snow began to appear. The wind hurled flakes with stinging force down the tunnel. There were no more whispers. The howl of the wind sometimes sounded like voices.
The further Haru and Ishiko went, the fiercer the wind became. Haru had to lean into it. The wind strained against him, a physical barrier that sought to halt his advance. The cold pulled his lips back in a frozen grimace. It bit into his nose and cheeks, its teeth sharp and painful. Then it gnawed until he was numb.
The tunnel narrowed again. There was barely enough room for Haru to pass. His shoulders brushed against the frost-covered walls. The wind screamed. His breath hissed with the effort to move forward.
Haru followed the bend as the tunnel curved to the left, and suddenly the exit was before him. The wind screamed at him once more, the snow blinding him. He could just make out that he was not coming to a cliff, that there was stone stretching out in front of him. He took another few steps forward, and then he was outside.
No longer funneled into the passageway, the wind lost its strength. It fell back, defeated.
Haru wiped the snow from his eyes.
Ishiko stopped beside him. “What…” she began, staring at what lay before them.
“I don’t know,” Haru whispered. His throat had gone dry, and the words came out in a croak.