Page 80 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Thaniel lost four games of Go, slept unexpectedly well on a mattress on the floor, thanked the monk again and set out at half-past six in the morning. The monk made him take a lightbulb and wouldn’t let him pay for it. When Thaniel put it in his coat pocket, it stayed lit even with the insulation of the fabric. It looked like he’d picked up a star.

The mist was dense, and the great pines were close-set, so the glow of the lightbulb didn’t reach far. Sometimes it was stronger and sometimes weaker, and then, suddenly, it went off altogether. The difference was amazing. The air felt light and clear. The pain in the roots of his teeth vanished. He could smell the pines, that lovely, resin freshness, and the soft saltiness of wet stone from the path. He sat down in the roots of a tree to enjoy it, and to get his breath back. The horrible foreboding feeling went away.

When the electricity came back, it was sharp, a nasty twang that made every cell in him squeeze. He took another morphine tab.

Something cold traced a soft, barely perceptible arc across the top of his spine. When he looked back, it was someone’s toenail.

He almost dropped the lightbulb as he spun away from the tree. The body was hanging from one of the lower branches. There were others too, perhaps two dozen, all a good way apart from each other. Some were clear and some were only shadows. It took him a minute or so, standing and waiting for his ribs to unlock, to see that they were all shapes in the mist. None of them was solid. When he moved the light towards them, they had no colour. The mist had only furled into the imprints of people, like plaster into fossils. The nearest one swayed, but the rope made no sound. Very slowly, he touched its ankle. His hand passed straight through. There was only the dampness of the mist – just enough resistance to suggest some unusual quality of the air, just enough for him to have felt it when it brushed him.

He stood for a long time watching the ghosts, but none of them did anything sudden. A long way off, crows hooted – they didn’t caw here – but that was all. His breath helixed away from him. He didn’t want to carry on. But going back would mean going past the hanging ghosts. He felt tight and anxious again, in a way he hadn’t since having nightmares as a small child. Maybe it was the altitude – altitude made you panicky, Mori said – but Thaniel didn’t think so.

Eventually, he started along the path again. Once he was on the upper track, the lightbulb shone brighter. Steadily, over perhaps seven or eight hundred yards, the glow strengthened, and so did the sharpness of the ghosts. They weren’t all hanging. He saw a man in the mist spooling out a long string between the trees. One end of it was still tied around a tree beside the path, though the length of it had fallen and rotted away a long time ago in the damp.

A flash of blue light flickered right across the sky. Thaniel was still wondering what it was when he felt something hot in his pocket. By the time he remembered his watch, it was burning. He pulled it out by its chain, his sleeve over his hand. It was too hot to hold. He put it down on the ground and knelt still. Where the chain sat over the damp moss, it steamed.

It would have been sensible to leave it behind. But the watch was a little cache of old happiness, and while he should have let it go, even without any electricity, he couldn’t.

Carefully, he tucked the watch into his wallet and waited to see if he could smell anything burning, but it seemed all right. It was hot, but only like a hot-water bottle. He slid it into his breast pocket to have the warmth over his lungs. Ashamedly, he decided he would rather burn than leave it.

THIRTY-ONE

Abashiri, Hokkaido, 19th January 1889

Horikawa the gatekeeper was taking pot-shots out of the gatehouse window with an ancient rifle, aiming at the forest. Takiko arrived just in time to see an Ainu man jerk behind a tree.

‘Bloody savages,’ Horikawa said. ‘Bloody bear ceremony. What did the bear ever do to them?’

She pushed the gate open with her shoulder and decided life would be much pleasanter if she just pretended he didn’t exist from now on.

The owls were still on the roof of the Oracle tower. She stood and looked at them for a while. Yesterday she had walked all around the tower, but there were no doors. There must have been a cell up there, but whichever way they had taken Mori up, she couldn’t find it. She had a heavy feeling that they’d walled him in. Today, she was here half an hour early to see if she could find a way in from the inside of the warden’s office.

Just to make sure Mori was all right. If he was, he was staying put.

There was no one at the desk in the guards’ office. Tanizaki had died in the night. A seizure. She heard it from the prisoners. They were chanting it on the fourth wing.

‘Well?’ Oemoto snapped. He was the tall man who Tanizaki had been teasing, and now he was prickly with anxiety. There were so many prisoners to so few guards now; he looked hunted. ‘Are you going to do the tea or was that only so you could make eyes at Tanizaki?’

‘I do it at ten o’clock,’ she said. ‘Keep yourself busy another couple of hours.’

‘Damn it, you’ll do it now! Do as you’re told!’

‘Ten o’clock,’ she said, and looked at the whip in his hand when he twitched it.

She turned away from him, knowing he was going to hit her. When he did, it hurt incredibly. It felt like a hard smack over the back of the head. She didn’t feel the slashing sting of it until a moment later. She pushed her hand up through her hair. Her fingertips came away sticky. She looked back slowly. Oemoto’s expression was caught exactly halfway between shocked and brash.

‘No more of that,’ she said quietly. She had to concentrate hard to keep calm. She had known it was coming, but she hadn’t realised how furious she would be, or how powerful the urge to punch him in the face. She had to summon up everything Ayame had hammered into her for the stage. He had once screamed into her face to make sure she could stay as calm as a princess should. Even knowing it was pretend, it had been difficult at the time not to nut him. You had to put yourself behind a glass pane. ‘You can make your own tea.’

The back of her skull still howling, she carried the bucket and cleaning things up to the warden’s office. She had a sharp sense of being a small person in among a lot of big, frayed, angry ones on short fuses. Of course, it didn’t change anything. What she had to do was the same. Find whatever it was Mori needed, decide whether or not she should help, find a ship, and bugger off home. It was simple. But it seemed further away than before.

The key to the office was stiff. She expected the room to be empty, and she gasped, surprised, when she saw a man at Nakamura’s desk, typing. He lifted his hand and ducked his head, and then went back to the photographs and the numbers.

‘I’m just going to clean out the grate,’ she said.

The man touched his own ear and made a slicing motion with one hand. Deaf. She pointed to the grate and mimed scrubbing. He nodded.

Her knees cracked when she knelt down and pulled out the grate to look up into the chimney shaft, hoping for steps up. Nothing. It was far too narrow to fit a person.

But, she could just make out another grate, well above this one.