Year of the Demon (49 page)

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 chopsticks 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

T
he 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.

Kaida watched the light play on them as they came up. They were the strangest school of fish she’d ever seen.

Genzai rumbled like distant thunder, and his anger seemed to lessen somewhat. His breath was less audible, at any rate, and his shoulders and jaws relaxed. Perhaps it was relief at seeing the sword, and no abatement in his anger at all. Kaida wondered if he still meant to kill her.

At length, begrudgingly, he said, “I suppose you’ll be wanting me to make good on my word.”

“And then some,” Kaida said.

He grunted again. “You press your luck too far, little girl.”

“You said whoever got the sword could name her reward.
And
you promised to take me with you if I told you how we could dive better. So I did. I told you to tether the mask, not our ankles.”

“What of it?”

The strange fish were almost to the surface now, close enough that she could make out the fangs and horns of the mask. “So you were sworn to take me with you even if the sword remained at the bottom until the ocean dries up. Now you owe me my reward as well.”

He grunted again, almost growling. She didn’t look up, but she could hear him scratching behind his beard. “This one’s too clever by half,” Tadaaki said.

“She is. And damn it all, I’m a man of my word. Name your price, Kaida-san.”

“Not here,” she whispered. “There are too many people listening.”

She wasn’t wrong. Every last villager fixated on her, agape, stunned into silence. Not only had Kaida spared the village from Genzai’s wrath, but she’d also pulled off the impossible, diving deeper and longer than the best
ama
in the village. She did not meet their stares, and did not speak again until all the other boats had turned in to shore. She waited until the wild-haired grandfather had his iron mask back in hand and Tadaaki had bound the Inazuma blade to his own body, so that even if he were killed it would not sink out of reach again. All the while Genzai scowled at her wordlessly.

At last she asked him, “You’re
shinobi
,
neh
? Men of magic?”

“There are no magic men. The only place you’ll find
shinobi
is in fairy tales.”

“Fairy tales and in this boat. You said it earlier. ‘Spoken like a true
shinobi
.’ That’s what you said.”

“Too clever by half,” he muttered, frowning at her. “If I were any other man, I’d drown you here and now.”

“But you’re not. You’re a man of your word.”

His grimace became a squint-eyed scowl. “Name your price, then.”

“I want to be one of you. A
shinobi
. I want you to train me.”

He scratched behind his beard. “You do not know what you ask.”

“What need is there to know? I know I cannot stay here. I know my father would do better to see me go than to see me killed by his own stepdaughter’s hand. And I know if I go with you, you’ll sell me off as a whore at your first opportunity.
Neh
?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Then I need you to make me one of your own. I cannot dive and fish for the rest of my life. Now I see how much more is possible. I don’t want to be pushed around ever again. Nobody pushes you around. You overpowered my whole village with six men. I want to learn how to do that.”

Genzai scowled. A guttural growl rumbled out of him.

The wild-haired one finally broke the silence. “She has her uses,” he said, caressing the mask in his hands. “She has proven her fortitude. And cripples pose no threat. We can put her close to targets we could not otherwise approach.”