The Gate of Sorrows

  “People in Hokkaido and Shizuoka and Kanagawa?”

  “They’re all in Japan. Okay, Tomakomai is a bit far away, but the problem isn’t real distance. It’s perceived distance. Net friends can get very close. One person could’ve killed them all.”

  Shigenori looked at him in disgust. “If the killer and his victims were communicating by Internet or smartphone, there’d be a trail.”

  “Trails can be erased. With the right skills and software, the killer could even do it remotely.”

  Shigenori was about to answer, but stopped. He held up a hand for silence. He looked up at the hatch in the ceiling. Kotaro did the same. “What is it?” he whispered.

  “I heard movement. Something’s up there. It passed overhead.”

  Kotaro held his breath for a moment, then grabbed the ladder and hoisted himself to his feet. “I’ll take a look.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “You can’t move as fast as I can.” Kotaro picked up the crowbar and put his foot on the first rung.

  “Leave that here,” Shigenori said.

  “Just in case.”

  Kotaro climbed up and raised the hatch cautiously to look out. The sky was still black, with the faintest premonition of morning. It was just past five.

  The roof was deserted. There was nothing but the fragments of the original statue. The wind was blowing hard now.

  Kotaro tipped the hatch back and climbed halfway, then all the way out. He stood next to the hatch, tense with anticipation, and peered all around. There was nothing to see. The north wind was keening. The colors of the neon signs were starting to fade as the darkness showed the first signs of retreating.

  Shigenori put his head out of the hatch and looked up at Kotaro. “Come on, get back in here.”

  “It’s all right. There’s no one here.”

  “But—” Shigenori’s voice caught in his throat. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. He stared at Kotaro. His face was pale with shock.

  No, he wasn’t staring at Kotaro. He was looking into the sky behind him.

  Very slowly—slowly enough to hear the bones in his neck creaking—Kotaro turned his head and looked over his shoulder.

  The Circle and the Warrior

  1

  It was Mana’s monster. It was not a drawing. It was real, and it was descending toward them.

  Even with its feet higher than Kotaro’s head, the monster’s outspread wings filled his field of vision. Its wingspan was—twelve feet?

  And its height—seven feet?

  Maybe more.

  It descended in excruciating slow motion. The air beaten down by those enormous wings struck Kotaro full in the face.

  The monster fixed its eyes on him. He was paralyzed, yet the first thought that entered his mind was wildly at odds with his predicament.

  She’s beautiful.

  The creature was definitely female. Mana’s sketch was faithful. She had a good eye. A winged woman, with long black hair streaming in the wind. Her wings were a deeper black, a muted obsidian sheen, yet her skin was almost translucent in its whiteness. Her bare right shoulder and arms were covered with an intricate network of black, tattoo-like arabesques.

  The first word to cross Kotaro’s mind was warrior. The woman wore leather leggings and tough leather boots reaching almost to the knee. A broad strap crossed her torso from left shoulder to waist. The thick leather belt was studded with metal that glinted in the dimness. Well-worn creases slanted across the surface of her black leather battle gear.

  Intense surprise can make a person burst into laughter. Kotaro was laughing, though his vocal chords were paralyzed. His mouth and eyes were locked open in silent hysteria.

  The warrior’s face was an unblinking mask. Her black pupils drilled into him. He felt as though they were sucking him in.

  He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move. Even his lungs were paralyzed.

  Her feet touched the roof. She flexed her knees slightly touching down, proof that she was a living being. She flapped her wings once more and extended them to their full reach.

  Her right arm moved swiftly to her shoulder and grasped something. Kotaro heard a slicing sound as his body was blown sidewise. His shoulder slammed against the low rampart encircling the roof. There was a hard metallic crash and a spray of sparks.

  For an instant he blacked out. When he came to, he found himself splayed on his back, head and shoulders jammed upright against the wall. It was an unnatural position and his neck hurt. He was trapped.

  A sharp blade was embedded in the wall inches from his neck, a crescent-shaped blade longer than his arm, bound to a stout handle by thick strips of hide.

  A scythe.

  Shigenori had told him about the blade. The Grim Reaper. He was its prey. She had paralyzed him. Now she would kill him.

  Shigenori’s head was just visible above the open hatch. He was frozen in place, and not only out of surprise. The fingers of the warrior’s left hand were leveled at his face. Parallel with her fingers, four needle-sharp darts extended from the leather gauntlet that sheathed the back of her hand. Her eyes remained fixed on Kotaro. She cocked her head slightly in puzzlement, or perhaps derision.

  The tips of the darts and the crescent blade glimmered in the darkness.

  A creature of fantastic appearance, a monster. Yet a woman, so beautiful one could scarcely look away. A mythical race of giants might have had women warriors such as this.

  The bloodless lips moved. “Who are you?”

  That’s what I want to ask you.

  Kotaro didn’t answer. He couldn’t move a muscle. His eyes were fixed and unblinking, watering from the cold. He was paralyzed and trembling. No laughter now. He trembled to his very bones from cold and terror.

  He stared deep into the creature’s eyes. Those pupils—something was wrong. He wasn’t sure what it was.

  Head still cocked, the warrior spoke again. “Who are you?”

  She speaks our language. She can communicate with us.

  The voice had a curious resonance; her words lingered like the vibration of a tuning fork, each with its individual pitch. The vibration was inaudible, but it penetrated to the center of Kotaro’s heart, where it sought and found an answer from his body, a sympathetic resonance that moved outward in response like ripples in a pond.

  She was scanning him. He knew it instantly. He needed no explanation. She was probing.

  “He’s a child.” Shigenori’s face above the hatch was deathly pale. His voice was inflected with fear. “He’s just a kid. Please don’t hurt him.”

  The leonine head pivoted smoothly over and down, taking in Shigenori whole.

  “Rise up.”

  A violent tremor passed through him.

  “Show me,” the warrior said. Kotaro couldn’t grasp the meaning, but Shigenori did.

  “All right! I’m not armed.”

  Kotaro heard Shigenori’s feet slipping on the metal rungs as he climbed. I almost forgot. His leg. Can he make it?

  Shigenori hauled himself up onto the roof and knelt on the concrete, shoulders heaving with exertion. He held up his hands, palms outward, fingers spread, before clasping them behind his head. The black mantle and its needles never wavered from the center of his forehead.

  “I have a question.” He squeezed the words out between ragged breaths, yet his face was fierce. “Who are you?”

  There was no answer. The three figures on the roof were motionless. Kotaro’s crowbar lay useless, out of reach.

  The ebony wings folded behind the warrior’s back without a sound. She lowered the hand that was pointed at Shigenori.

  Kotaro was still paralyzed. He was chilled through, but the glint of the scythe buried in the wall inches from his neck was colder still.

  The woman spoke to Shigenori. “I am sorry.”

&nbs
p; This was the last thing Kotaro expected to hear. An apology?

  “I am not of this … region. Once my mission is fulfilled, I will be gone.”

  Whenever she spoke, the strange resonance lingered, but now the sensation of being scanned was gone.

  Shigenori and Kotaro would’ve been hard-pressed to describe that voice. The pitch was neither high nor low, its texture neither gentle nor coarse. It was characteristically female, but with a faintly metallic timbre. There was also something of raw nature in her voice, like the sighing of the wind.

  “What do you mean, region?” Shigenori’s expression was still fierce. His voice was stronger now.

  “What you call a world.”

  “This world?” Kotaro had somehow found his voice, though his neck was bent up against the wall. “The world we’re from?”

  Her head swiveled to gaze at him once more. His breath caught in his throat. She truly was beautiful, too beautiful even for the word. It was the beauty of something beyond earthbound reality, almost celestial, like a solitary nebula of stars.

  Something seemed to jostle his shoulders. In an instant the scythe was back in her hand. She spun its handle with practiced ease and anchored it behind her back before the zephyr from its motion died away. The crescent glowed like ice above her head.

  With a single giant stride and a soft clashing of metal fittings, she closed the distance to Kotaro, leaned toward him, thrust out a gauntleted hand and held it there, waiting.

  Later, whenever he remembered this moment, Kotaro Mishima was so filled with shame and embarrassment that he wanted to dig a hole and hide in it. For the first time since childhood, he almost lost control of his bladder.

  Still sprawled on his back, he looked up into those black pupils. Now he knew why her eyes had bothered him.

  The left eye had a double pupil, two black windows side by side, overlapping like an illustration of set theory in a textbook. A circle and a crescent.

  “Can you rise?”

  The outstretched hand was enormous, at least twice as large as his own, its back sheathed with thick black leather. But the white fingers were slender, the nails long and regular. A woman’s hand and a woman’s fingers.

  Teeth chattering, holding his breath, and without taking his eyes away from hers, Kotaro reached out a hand.

  Instead of pulling him to his feet, she pulled him completely off his feet, as if he weighed nothing. She turned smoothly and flung him toward the hatch. Shigenori made a brave attempt to catch him, but they both went sprawling.

  “Oh, my.”

  The creature’s reaction was so bizarrely human that Kotaro almost laughed. She was seven feet tall and had wings, she was immensely strong and armed to the teeth—and yet, bizarrely human.

  A random thought crossed his mind. I wonder if she ever laughs?

  The woman’s face remained an impassive mask. Again he heard that bloodless voice with its strange resonance. “Interesting. So you know nothing of the Circle.”

  Both men struggled to their feet. Still leaning against each other for support, they exchanged glances and looked up at her.

  “The Circle?” Shigenori said angrily. “Come again? You know our language but you speak in riddles.”

  “Then riddles they shall remain to you.” She paused to gaze out at the city spread beyond the roof. “I am sorry I disturbed you. I will leave this place. I was already weighing the merits of a new base.”

  The resonance of her voice was not unpleasant. In fact, it was almost delightful. If dappled sunlight or a cool breeze on a late summer afternoon were transformed into sound that reverberated in the heart, it might have felt something like this.

  “A base for what?” Shigenori asked. His tone was aggressive. Kotaro gasped. Didn’t he feel the resonance?

  “An old man disappeared near here. He’s gone and no one can find him. What do you know?” he insisted.

  Man, would you please chill out? She’s packing, okay?

  “Someone else is missing too—a young man, about this one’s age.”

  He gripped Kotaro by the shoulder, stared at the creature and stood his ground. He was a detective interrogating a suspect.

  “What are you doing here? You said you had a mission. What kind of mission would bring you here?”

  The warrior gazed down at them. She threw her head back lightly, tossing her hair away from her face.

  Kazumi and Mika were both growing their hair long. They said it saved them time, despite their constant grumbling about split ends. They often made precisely the same movement of the head. Kotaro again had the strange feeling that he was in the presence of a human female.

  “I am sorry.” The resonance that lingered after her apologies was somehow unique. It was silky and pleasing. “You shall forget this encounter.”

  “That doesn’t work for me.” Shigenori started to take a step forward. Kotaro had to restrain him.

  “That young guy who disappeared is a friend of mine. His name is Kenji,” Kotaro said.

  For the first time the creature blinked. Her pupils—one on the right, two on the left—darted once, uncertainly.

  “He’s a nice, straight-arrow guy. I’m very worried about him. If you could just—”

  Light glinted from the crescent blade above her head. It was not the light of dawn. The sky was still dark; first light was far off. The eastern horizon was a curtain of black, fringed with the faintest gray.

  The light came from the blade itself. Something moved inside it.

  Kotaro’s eyes widened in astonishment. Shigenori groaned as Kotaro involuntarily gripped his arm.

  It was Kenji. His eyes peered out of the blade. Kotaro knew those eyes. There was no mistake.

  “Kenji!” He was shocked at how high-pitched his voice was.

  Kenji’s eyes, visible in the blade. It was as though the crescent were a window and he was looking through it. The eyes reacted to Kotaro’s voice and blinked with surprise. They moved away and out of sight, as if he wanted to hide.

  “Kenji!”

  Kotaro screamed again and charged the warrior. She flexed her knees and sprang away, alighting on the edge of the roof. Kotaro tripped head over heels and pitched onto the concrete.

  Dazed, he rose halfway and looked toward the scythe. Another pair of eyes was looking out at him. He saw the faces of strangers. They disappeared quickly.

  Kotaro called over his shoulder. “Did you see? Did you see that just now?”

  Shigenori’s reply was a groan. He’d seen it too. “Was that Morinaga?

  “Yes!”

  “What did you do to him?” Shigenori growled at the warrior. He was struggling to remain standing.

  The giant figure perched lightly at the edge of the roof. The parapet was only six inches wide, but she stood there with ease, looking down at them. There was flicker of emotion in those three improbable pupils. Was it compassion? Kotaro couldn’t be certain.

  “I came to this region to gather power. I have my mission.” The voice seemed to radiate sympathy. Kotaro felt the resonance again in his heart. Each word was enunciated precisely, for the benefit of children. With each word, there was a wave of vibration.

  “I know what it is to lose a compatriot. I am sorry. But I did not harvest them.”

  Kenji’s alive.

  “What did you do to Morinaga? Is Kozaburo there too? In your—inside that blade?” Shigenori said.

  How could a flesh-and-blood person be trapped in a weapon?

  “Enough. No more questions.” The woman shook her head slowly. “Do not pursue me.” She peered at Shigenori. “You were once a fisher on an ocean of evil.”

  Shigenori’s face went slack with surprise. “What do you mean?”

  Did the warrior know he’d been a detective?

  “You have turned your back on its sin-tainted break
ers. You are old and sick.”

  Shigenori dropped to his knees again and pitched forward. He put a hand on the concrete for support, gasped for breath, and clutched his chest with his free hand. His fingertips jammed into his ribs.

  It was the resonance. She was scanning him. He was in agony.

  “Stop it! Stop, please!” Kotaro tried to charge her again. His knees were like water. She kicked off lightly from the wall and evaded him easily. Shigenori was frozen in the same position but turned his head to watch, breathing raggedly.

  “Old man,” the creature said. “You understand the virtue of prudence. Do not pursue me. Nor allow this little one to pursue me.” She nodded at Kotaro. “I am not in this region to harvest lives. That is not my mission. But if you pursue me, if you hinder me, I will harvest yours.”

  Harvest. With one swing of her scythe. Like cutting grain.

  “I—” For a moment, the warrior hesitated. “My region is the birthplace of the souls of words. Just as you know friends by their voices or their form and face, I will know you when you speak. I will read the flow of your words and seek you out wherever you are, even as you seek to conceal yourself from me.”

  Kotaro’s mind was racing. His heart was beating so hard that he couldn’t concentrate. What was she saying?

  “To be born in the Circle is to live as a heap of words, spawned by the souls of words.”

  What is she talking about?

  “Pursue me and I will know. Scheme to hinder me and I will know. I will find your words and trace them. I will hunt them down. I will find you and harvest you. I am a warrior. Whoever challenges me must fall.” The scythe glinted coldly with each word. “Do not pursue me.” And then, more softly: “I am sorry.”

  “Yes. I understand,” Shigenori rasped. His face was ashen. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. His right hand clutched his chest as if he were trying to rip his heart out. “I won’t come after you. I won’t tell a soul.”

  The creature jerked her head lightly, swinging her windblown hair away from her eyes and over her shoulder. Shigenori gasped and coughed convulsively, like someone pulled to the surface of the ocean at the point of drowning.