The Gate of Sorrows (74 page)

U-ri let go of his hand. Shigenori raised and dropped his arms as though he were doing calisthenics. He heard Aizawa laughing.

“Mistress Galla will defeat the Sentinel,” U-ri said. “It’s a rule of the Nameless Land. No one who gets as far as the Gate of Sorrows is ever defeated. That means …” She bit her lip. “It means Kotaro will never return.”

Shigenori froze, hands in the air, and stared at her. Shigeru was laughing and telling him he could stop already.

“So pray for him. That’s the only thing we can do for him now.”

It was Shigenori’s turn to grab for her hand, but his fingers closed on air. The wolf was gone.

He shivered with foreboding and fished his phone out of his back pocket.
Kotaro Mishima
 … Flustered, he hit the call button. He got a ring signal. It rang three times before the synthetic voice of the message center came back.

On the last day of Kotaro’s summer vacation, in a corner of West Shinjuku, Shigenori Tsuzuki stood rooted to the spot.

Mishima …

He had a vision of that face. A single-minded, cheeky punk who didn’t listen to his elders.

What’ve you gotten yourself into?

Mana opened her eyes. Something was calling her.

A little shaded lamp cast a soft glow in a corner of the room. Her friends—a colorful gathering of stuffed animals—surrounded her down pillow. She turned her head on the pillow and put a shoulder outside the light summer comforter to gaze at them, but she didn’t think one of them had woken her up.

They’re all go to sleep.

Aunt Hatsuko always put them to bed with Mana. She would address them in order.
Good night, Pepe-chan. Good night, Kuu-chan. Good night, Panda-chan.

Before, whenever Mana had woken in the middle of the night, she’d begun to cry. Aunt Hatsuko would come and comfort her, but sometimes she’d be so sleepy, or cold, or worn out, that Mana learned to turn her face into the pillow and cry without making noise, because when she saw Aunt Hatsuko looking worn out and sleepy, she remembered how her mother had looked worn out and sleepy too, until one rainy night she went to bed and never woke up again. What would Mana do if Aunt Hatsuko didn’t wake up?

But Mana didn’t cry in the night anymore. Once she fell asleep, she slept soundly until morning, because she knew from Uncle Kotaro that Mama was always with her and would always be beside her.

What woke me up?

She sat up. The little light on the air conditioner glowed blue. Aunt Hatsuko had told her the air conditioner was always watching her with its little blue eye to make sure she didn’t get too hot, but Mana knew it was just a light. Ms. Sato told her all about it.
That’s just electricity.

As the room came into focus, she started feeling thirsty. She put her arms around her knees and took a deep breath, and she knew.

The bodies and minds of very young children are connected by a direct circuit, one that parts naturally as they grow older. But Mana still had it, and it told her what she needed to know.

It’s Uncle.

What’s happen to him?

She felt like she did on the night her mother went to sleep forever. Something bad was happening.

Monster.

She threw off the comforter, knelt on the bed and gathered her friends —Pepe-chan and Kuu-chan and Panda-chan, with their soft round faces and gentle eyes—into her arms. She shared her nameless dread with them, and they comforted each other.

The summer sun would rise early. She would not sleep before it did.

Two titanic bodies met head-on in battle.

Kotaro felt the staggering energy unleashed as they fought. This was not a clash of fang and claw. It was a hurricane. A tsunami. An eruption. A phenomenon of nature, something people can only watch with astonishment, waiting until it subsides.

Ancient people laid the blame for nature’s ferocity at the feet of angry gods. Gods with ultimate destructive power were imagined as terrifying forms, giving rise in turn to purely malevolent deities that in turn spawned tales of numberless monsters.

All monsters are descendants of fallen gods. Now two of those descendants fought before Kotaro’s awestruck sight. He was one of them, a beast with hooked talons and a terrible stench; he too was a walker in darkness, but he could not keep his footing in the presence of that terrible howling and the whirlwind and the quaking of the earth. It was hard to even keep his eyes open.

This was Galla’s true form, the Guardian of the Third Pillar of the Tower of Inception. She had no need for puny blades. Her scythes were never really weapons. They were keys.

Fists like small mountains howled as they cut the air. The dragon’s spine was a row of blades. It moved sinuously, taking her blows and hurling them back. Its long tail hammered the ground, raising clouds of dust and rending the earth.

But the gate beyond did not waver. The world it enclosed was quiet and serene. The distant lights in the Hall of All Books shone faint and clear, like stars in a galaxy beyond the Milky Way.

Galla’s skin was obsidian. Her fangs and claws shone like drawn swords. Her whiplike tail was silhouetted against the sky as it lashed out and wrapped around the dragon’s neck. Kotaro watched, transfixed, as she pressed the attack.

At first the duelists were evenly matched, but the balance was upended when Galla shattered her opponent’s horn. The dragon had fought with spirit and power, using its torso as an undulating battering ram, but now it began to succumb to gravity. Its massive tail beat the ground erratically. Its jaws snapped, but the fangs closed on air. Galla seized her opening and tore off the dragon’s other horn. Some of its hide came away, sending a spray of bright blood into the air. The dragon’s howls turned to shrieks.

She seized her opponent by the nape of the neck. Her teeth gleamed in the darkness of the Nameless Land.

The memory was present again, as real as if Kotaro had been in that room watching, a scene he could not have witnessed in this way because he was part of it. He both saw and felt himself grasp Glitter Kitty in his claws, pull her close, and bite off her head.

Now Galla was about to dispatch the Sentinel the same way. She sank her fangs into its neck, grasped the neck with her claws and strained to tear the head from its body.

A ball rolls quickly along the grass in a park under a blue sky. It strikes a bump in the ground and vaults lightly into the air, just like Kitty’s head. How small and light it was! How high it flew! One moment it was part of her body, and an instant later just a plaything soaring through the air.

Galla tore the dragon’s head off and raised it high with a mighty cry of triumph. The decapitated corpse toppled slowly over onto its side with a shuddering crash. Galla bellowed as the crash reverberated. She was calling out, but Kotaro couldn’t understand the words. Maybe they weren’t words at all. Then he saw her howl with the Eye.

Hall of All Books, I have vanquished the Sentinel!

The lights seemed to quaver at the sound of her voice.

I am Galla, Guardian of the Third Pillar of the Tower of Inception, Mother of Auzo the Warrior. The Sentinel is fallen. Open the gate!

The Sentinel—its headless body and its head, still held high by Galla—returned to stone. The hide turned a cold ash gray as the head and body started to crumble. Thousands of years of weathering unfolded in seconds as the dragon collapsed into a pile of rubble.

Galla began to transform. As he watched, Kotaro noticed out of a corner of his eye that the shadow of her legs was shrinking. She became the Galla he knew best: long black hair, white face, inky wings, a strange and beautiful woman who was not quite human.

The lights in the fortress quavered in unison.

A stiff wind, cold and fresh as spring water, lifted Galla’s hair and swirled around Kotaro as though purifying them both. He held up his hand. It was a human hand. He had human legs. A human body.

He felt his face. It was the face he’d lived with for nineteen years. His fangs were gone. The stench of blood had vanished. He was wearing the same T-shirt and jeans he’d had on when he raced to the park to look for Mika.

“Stay where you are.” Galla spoke over her shoulder as she stood vigilant, eyes fixed on the Hall of All Books. “They will come quickly.”

Kotaro’s knees were like water. He had difficulty standing. He kept trying to get to his feet and falling over onto his hands and knees.
I have to get up. Galla brought me with her. I’m a guest in the Nameless Land. I’ve got to pull myself together.

He managed somehow to crawl alongside her and come to a kneeling position. He looked toward the fortress and saw the same sight he’d witnessed when he arrived. One by one, lights separated from the Hall of All Books, gradually multiplying and forming a moving line. It was coming toward them.

“Are those guys nameless devouts too?”

Galla’s eyes narrowed. “Only the devout live and move in this land. There are no others, human or animal,” she explained. “The nameless devout are empty. There are tens of thousands, but only one. There is only one, but there are tens of thousands. That is what they say, but it is a figure of speech, and it is meaningless. Emptiness cannot be counted.”

Kotaro finally struggled to his feet. He smoothed out the wrinkles in his T-shirt and brushed off his knees. The lights were getting closer.

There was a faint sound of squeaking metal. The ground vibrated faintly, then the rumbling grew louder.

A barrier of pikes linked by shields. With a rumble deep enough to shake the soul, the gate opened inward.

There was nothing between them and the nameless devout.

The lights of the snaking procession were torches held high by figures in simple black robes, with shaven heads and pallid faces. Their bare feet beat down the dried grass. They said nothing, and they made no noise as they walked. They almost seemed unreal.

The black wave lapped toward them. When the figures were close enough to tell apart, Kotaro gasped with surprise.

They had the same face, a face that was vaguely familiar, with symmetrical placement of nose and eyes. Kitty’s cheeks. Makoto’s eyebrows. Kazumi’s mouth. U-ri’s eyes. They looked like everyone and no one, approaching in three columns like a solemn funeral procession. The wings of the gate picked up the light from their torches, casting long, barred shadows.

Galla stood motionless, waiting. Kotaro followed her lead.

The marchers stopped. He wondered how so many people could walk in perfect formation. No matter how many there were, there was only one.

Three devout faced them, one at the head of each column. The one in the center came forward and bowed slowly.

“Mistress Galla, Guardian of the Third Pillar of the Tower of Inception.” A young man’s voice. Kotaro looked up at Galla. Her pupils flickered almost imperceptibly.

“The Gate of Sorrows is open,” the youth intoned. “Why have you come to the Hall of All Books in the Nameless Land? What is your purpose here?”

She took a long step forward. “I want my son.”

“What is his name?”

“Auzo the Warrior. My only child.”

“What was his sin?”

“He violated our Precept.”

“And what would that be?”

“To be darkness.” Her voice cracked like a whip. “Auzo wanted to flee our region in search of light. He betrayed our mission as guardians of the Tower.”

Kotaro thought back to what he’d seen along that great gallery. The vastness beyond the pillars had been like the floor of an ocean, yet compared to the pure emptiness of the world of the Tower, how full of life and sound—how human, even—Galla’s region had been.

What Kotaro sensed had been real. Something human did reside in that darkness, and precisely because it was human, it could tire of darkness and long for light. Auzo had sought only to spread his wings and seek other regions.

Is that a sin?

To search for other worlds? To rebel against confinement in darkness, against being forced to
be
darkness?

“We are darkness,” Galla said. “We preserve the purity of the Tower where the souls of words are born. To accept darkness is our calling. To cast that calling aside is an unforgiveable sin. Auzo committed the great sin of exchanging his life for an obsession.”