Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

  A sudden splash broke her out of her reverie. Miyoko was back in the water. She swam over to Shioko and gave her a hug. Then, softly enough that their mother couldn’t hear, she said, “You have to get it, Shioko-chan. She can go deeper than either of us. We can’t let her have it.”

  “You’re a fool,” Kaida said. “Better to cut her throat than to kill her this way.”

  Genzai shot her a sharp glare; he must have thought Kaida was talking to him, and clearly he wasn’t fond of peasant girls calling him names. Cho made a face at her too; she’d heard none of her daughter’s conversation and she must have thought Kaida was talking to ghosts.

  “Cho-san,” Kaida said, “you must get your girls out of the water. Do it now, before—”

  “Enough,” Genzai said, as angry as Kaida had ever heard him. “You, girl, get back in your boat. And you, the mask stays on, you stay in the water. You will dive. Now.”

  “Shioko, you must,” Miyoko said. Then she did as she was told, returning to Sen’s rowboat.

  Shioko dived again, and again Kaida beat time with her thumb as soon as her stepsister entered the broken hull.

  She reached fifty-nine and there was still no sign of Shioko. Kaida told herself that was to be expected; she was going a little deeper this time. At seventy-nine Kaida feared the worst. At eighty-nine, everyone but Cho understood what had happened, and at a hundred there was open weeping in every boat but Genzai’s.

  Tadaaki tugged at the thick, taut tether. When it suddenly gave way, it was obvious he’d snapped the mask from Shioko’s corpse. Nothing floated to the surface.

  “You dive next,” Genzai told Kaida, before Tadaaki had even finished reeling in the mask.

  48

  “It’s her fault,” Miyoko screeched. “She was the one who told us how to dive deeper. If it weren’t for her, Shioko never would have stayed down that long.”

  Kaida didn’t bother to defend herself. The truth was plain for anyone who wanted to see it: it was Miyoko who killed her sister. In fact, it had been a joint effort, Shioko’s sheer competitiveness weighed down by Miyoko’s prodding. Kaida had seen it coming before it happened. She’d warned them all. No one listened.

  Cho sat dumbstruck in her boat, so stunned by her Shioko’s death that she couldn’t do anything but stare at the water. The tears ran down her face but she couldn’t even cry out loud. Kiyoko was at her side, hugging her close, Cho returning the embrace. But more importantly—to Kaida’s eye, at least—was that Cho made no effort to console her eldest daughter. Apart from Kaida, Cho might have been the only one who grasped the whole, horrifying truth.

  Guilt and shame tugged at Kaida like sandbags, pulling her mind into deep, cold places. She should have said something more convincing. She should have argued more forcefully with Genzai. But her better judgment said none of that would have mattered. No one would have listened. No one ever listened.

  But they were listening to Miyoko. “She killed my sister! Kaida killed my sister!” It was a litany, a mantra, maybe even a magical spell. If she said it often enough, perhaps she could beguile herself into forgetting her own part in her little sister’s suicide. A part of Kaida hoped it would actually work. Make yourself happy, Kaida thought, so long as I can get away from you first.

  She swam to Genzai’s boat and clambered in. “Someone shut that girl up,” she heard Genzai say, “or I’ll send her down to join the other one.”

  “Don’t,” Kaida said. “Her mother has lost enough.”

  Genzai snorted. “So says the one who means to abandon her own father. Since when did you start listening to conscience, Kaida-san?”

  “Shioko wasn’t the evil one. She was only trying to keep pace.”

  “And you? How evil are you?”

  Kaida didn’t know how to answer that. Not long ago she thought she wanted her stepsisters dead. Now she thought that was wrong. Not long ago she’d been certain she wanted to leave Ama-machi behind her. This morning, having seen her father take a stand for the whole village, she’d felt qualms about abandoning him. But Shioko’s death would drive Miyoko to new depths of cruelty. Leaving Ama-machi was no longer just a dream. She’d be killed if she stayed. And it would break her father’s heart if his stepdaughter murdered his only trueborn child. So Kaida’s only answer to Genzai’s question was “I’m not evil. I just do what it takes to survive until tomorrow.”

  That earned her an approving grunt from Tadaaki. “Spoken like a true shinobi,” he said. “You may be one of us after all.”

  Kaida felt a strange sense of satisfaction in hearing that. She didn’t know why. These men felt nothing at having just sent a young girl to her death. For Kaida to throw in with them now was almost suicidal. Of course, staying in the same village with Miyoko was suicide as well, so Kaida supposed she might just as well have the admiration of her potential killers, rather than their scorn.

  Kaida stripped off her yukata and was now naked but for the knife strapped to her left arm. Genzai narrowed his eyes at it and gave a little harrumph. Kaida took it as a sign of approval. The strangest of the outsiders, the one with the streaming white hair, stared at her, and she felt his gaze as surely as she felt the sun. He muttered guttural chants as he caressed the demonic half mask. When Tadaaki took it from him, the old man seemed reluctant to give it up. Something in the way they handled it made Kaida suddenly afraid of it. They held it as one might hold a sleeping venomous animal.

  Tadaaki leaned in toward her, and being so close, she could see into the bottom of his hollow eye socket. It was awful, all filled with scars. She supposed everyone must have looked at her stump the same way. She hated the way their eyes lingered on her scars, then darted away as if they’d never seen a thing. Now she condemned herself for doing the very same thing to Tadaaki. She looked away from his missing eye, focusing on the iron mask she’d inexplicably come to dread. Tadaaki cupped the back of her head in one hand, and with the other he pressed the demon mask to her face.

  The metal was coarse, pointy in places, and the instant it made contact with her skin she felt a strange hunger she’d never known before. Hunger wasn’t even the right word for it. Hunger could be patient. Hunger could be sated. This was like a new set of muscles under her skin, writhing with need. It made her want to move, to go and take hold of something she simply had to have, but she could not figure out what that thing was. Suddenly she understood why the wild-haired one never stopped moving his hands over the mask. The same force that moved her was moving in him.

  She felt Tadaaki’s fingers move to and fro around her head, around her mask, but paid them little attention. Even when he pulled the bonds tight, mashing the coarsest part of the mask against her forehead, she paid him no heed. Such trivial concerns were nothing in the face of this new craving.

  The strangest thought occurred to her, one that distracted her from her fear, if only for a moment: was this the way Miyoko felt? Was she driven by some deep-seated hunger? One like the mask’s, a nameless, formless, all-compelling need? Perhaps some demon possessed her, one with a face like the mask, one that spawned a visceral urge to dominate and subjugate and hurt. If so, then Kaida could understand why Miyoko took such pleasure in it: the greatest hunger promised the greatest satisfaction. She knew what she needed. She had only to dive down and get it. Without the mask, impossible. With it, inevitable, even if it killed her.

  “You know what must be done,” Genzai told her. “You understand the price of failure.”

  Kaida barely heard him. She got in the water and fixed two sandbags to her feet. Tadaaki handed her a modified kaigane, its scoop curled like a bird’s talon so Kaida could hitch it to the anchor line leading down to the wreck. Everyone else could do that with one hand while holding on to the prow with the other. Kaida could not, so as soon as she hooked the line she was already plunging toward the bottom.

  She’d never gone down this fast. Equalizing the pressure in her ears was impossible without a free hand. She felt like someone was pushing chopstick
s into her ears.

  But soon enough her toes touched down on the broken, silt-covered carrack. When she freed herself from her sandbags, one of them slipped into the hole in the hull and instantly vanished. The sight of it terrified her. In her eyes the wreck had just devoured the sandbag, and now its mouth was open and waiting for her.

  Even the mask’s strange hunger did little to quell her fear. Her throat grew tight. Her heart started pounding; she knew it would consume her body’s breath too quickly. The sheer length of the mask’s tether frightened her too. She’d only used a third of its length in getting down this far. She had a long way to go yet, and all inside the gutted wreckage.

  Steeling herself, she drew her little knife from its sheath on her stump, and in one deft stroke she snipped the tether linking Tadaaki to the mask. The outlanders wouldn’t be happy with her for that, but she’d planned on doing it long before it was her turn to dive. The thought of being snagged by the face while trapped in the wreck was too frightening to contemplate. Freeing herself of the tether was the only way she could make herself go in.

  She let the mask’s weight pull her inside. Its craving had a direction now. She could not yet put a name to that hunger, but its object was directly below her. And the hold was not as dark as she thought. Remembering what Genzai had taught her about imagination and fear, she let herself fall deeper.

  An open hatch lay before her. She swam through it face-first, pulled downward by the mask. The light was lower in here; what little she could see was purple, not blue, except for the yawning black mouth of another open hatch. She avoided that one. Others had gone down there. It was a dead end. But there was supposed to be a second hatch here, right next to the first. Was she in the wrong hold? Had she gotten lost already?

  She looked up to find the sun and find her bearings. Shioko looked back down at her.

  It was her stepsister’s last ambush, but it gave Kaida such a fright that she thought her heart might jump out of her chest. Shioko’s pale face almost glowed in the twilight of the wrecked ship’s bowels. Her eyes stared blankly; her mouth hung open. Her arms and legs dangled like braids of seaweed from a mooring line.

  Recoiling in horror, Kaida accidentally found the second hatch. It must have fallen shut somehow, and in the low light it was indistinguishable from the rest of the bulkhead. She’d only found it by backing into it. Now she wondered: had it fallen shut on Shioko, trapping her? Had she spent her last breaths pushing it back up? How hard she must have fought to free herself, only to see daylight just as the water filled her lungs?

  More than anything, Kaida wanted to retreat. Push off hard and kick for the surface. Get her panic under control and dive again. But she knew she could never make herself enter the ship’s corpse again. Not after seeing Shioko. Not after seeing where her own body would come to rest.

  Kaida hefted the closed hatchway and fell through it. It was the hardest, bravest, most foolhardy thing she’d ever done. Drawing her knife again, she stabbed it into the swollen wood, jamming it so that the hatch could not close. It would still be heavy, held down by all that water, but at least Kaida would be able to see its outline when she came back up. If she came back up.

  And now she had no choice but to surrender herself to the mask. She could sense the object of its desire quite clearly now. It still lay deep below her, calling to her somehow. A long, graceful curve, glowing in the darkness the way sunlight glowed through closed eyelids. It could only be a sword.

  The mask pulled her straight down. Kaida couldn’t see a thing. Something clubbed her in the shoulder. Kaida tried not to imagine what it might be. She tried to focus more on the craving of the mask than the demons conjured by her imagination. Her throat was as tight as if Miyoko were choking her.

  She fell headlong, cold water flowing over her skin, and soon collided with a wall of soft, waterlogged wood. She hit face-first; tiny pinpoints in the mask bit into her forehead. She pushed the pain out of her mind. In so doing, she became aware of her body’s other pains. Those chopsticks were back in her ears, pushed in deep by all the water overhead. Worse, her lungs burned as they’d never burned before. Now Kaida understood how Masa had died. It was the mask that killed him after all. The demonic hunger of the mask erased the pains of the body, and those pains were the only voices telling Kaida to go back up for air. The closer she got to the sword, the less she feared drowning, and that lack of fear was more dangerous than anything else in the ocean.

  Her fingers probed this way and that until she found the lip of another hatch. It wasn’t heavy like the last one. As soon as she opened it, she saw the welcome glow of purple light. Ryujin’s Claw had raked open the keel, and through those gashes she could see coral. These were the wounds that condemned the outlanders’ ship. This was the sea dragon’s deathblow.

  And trapped in a mashed, splintered corner was the sword. The mask let her see nothing else. She dived for it. It was a good way down, four or five body-lengths at least. As soon as her fingers wrapped around it, her desire for it vanished, and all of a sudden she felt the wild heaving of her diaphragm. She’d all but expended her body’s breath. And she was twice as deep as she’d ever gone before.

  She looked down at the coral and up at the hatch she’d come through. The shortest route to the surface went straight up through the wreck. But there was no straight line there, only a dark and circuitous path. The clearest route lay outside in the open water, but she had to swim farther down to get free of the carrack. She was already far too deep. And the sword was as heavy as an anchor.

  It was never the easy choice, swimming down instead of up. But obviously Shioko had tried swimming upward. Kaida was the stronger swimmer, up or down, but Shioko hadn’t shared Kaida’s fear of being trapped in the wreck. And Kaida had already spent too much time choosing. Black spots formed drifting schools in her vision.

  Up, down, both options were probably fatal. There was no doubting it. Kaida gave herself over to the mask and the sword. They pulled her downward, out of the wreckage.

  Escaping its innards was such a relief that it gave her newfound hope. She even had a flash of insight: she knew she lacked the strength to drag her two anchors all the way to the surface, but perhaps she could use the hull as a sort of ladder, launching herself one push at a time, just like kicking off the sea floor. Suddenly the broken carrack became the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  Then she looked up. As soon as she realized just how deep she was, she knew she’d never make it.

  49

  The black spots in her vision pressed in, multiplied, reeled drunkenly. She saw more darkness than light. Being the strongest diver of her generation meant less than the fact that, unburdened, her body would float to the surface even if she were dead. At least her father would have the chance to give her a proper funeral. Shioko’s mother could not say the same.

  Kaida’s lungs had long since stopped hurting. Even her diaphragm had given up its death throes. Kaida pushed off the wreckage one last time, then let her body’s buoyancy do what it could for her. She didn’t think it would count for much.

  She blacked out entirely. She could no longer sense the water moving around her, and because of that she was no longer sure she was even floating upward. She vomited into her mouth. Pushing the filth out let seawater in. Kaida knew it was the first taste of drowning.

  And then she broke the surface. Her gasps of breath didn’t even sound human. Still seeing black, she nearly slipped below the surface again, but sheer animal instinct forced her legs to kick.

  Soon enough daylight pressed its way into her vision. Genzai’s boat was not far away. It bobbed crazily on the waves—or was it Kaida’s mind lurching, throwing everything off-kilter? He was saying something, but she had to get her breath under control before she could hear him.

  “Where is the mask?” he bellowed. It was the first time she’d ever heard him raise his voice.

  “Down,” she said, gasping, paddling toward his boat like a wounded animal. �
�Down there.”

  “The tether is broken,” he said. She saw Tadaaki beside him, holding the dripping, limp end of it. “And broken cleanly. You cut it?”

  “Had to.” Kaida’s breath still came raggedly. “Can’t—can’t dive with it.”

  “You cut the cord to the mask,” said Genzai. He’d regained control of his temper. “If you’ve lost it for us, I will kill you. You know this.”

  “Anchor line,” Kaida said. At last she reached Genzai’s rowboat. She didn’t want to swim to him, but his was the closest boat, and her body swam to it instinctually, without her willing it.

  “Make sense, girl.”

  “Anchor line,” she said, hooking the gunwale in her feeble grip. “Haul it in.”

  “I felt it the moment you cut it,” said Genzai, his fury so hot she thought she could see it rising from him like the sun shimmering on sand. But that too might have been a trick of her staggering air-starved mind. “I can only assume you cut the anchor line for spite. That will not be the offense I kill you for. Tadaaki, pull in that line. And you, girl, tell me about my sword and mask.”

  At first Kaida could not answer. Her relief at having something sturdy to hold, some reason to think she might escape drowning, left her incapable of anything other than a weak, exhausted smile.

  “Well? Speak! I will have you tell me where you left the mask before I send your body back down to join it.”

  “It was too heavy,” Kaida said. “The sword too. I couldn’t swim back up with them. So I tied them to the anchor line.”

  Even as she said it, the demon mask rose toward the surface. Trailing it was a broken wooden spar, the anchor point that had connected Genzai’s little boat to the wreck until Kaida kicked it loose, her last conscious act before ascending to the surface. Trailing the spar and the mask was the sword known as Glorious Victory Unsought.