The Book of Heroes (16 page)

“Yes,” the Archdevout replied, then fell silent. Yuriko heard the sizzling of the wick. “Though there are some,” he continued, “who after seeing what you are about to witness, leave our land and never return.”

Yuriko’s heart shuddered in her chest. “Is…it scary?”

“Well now,” the Archdevout said, smiling gently. “That depends on what you find fearful, what you find joyous, and what is in your heart. These things are yours alone.”

While they were speaking, the Milky Way of torches had passed them by and was now receding into the distance. The tail end of the procession was even with the balcony now, and the head of the line had already gone through the central gardens. The devout appeared to be heading toward the single large gate she had seen earlier that day.

And what lies beyond that?

“I’ll go. Please show me.”

Without a word, the Archdevout turned and went down the stairs. The young monk waved a hand indicating she should follow. She did so, trying to keep her knees from buckling beneath her as she went down the steps.

Now she could hear a song echoing from the ranks of the nameless devout ahead. It started quietly, like a whisper, but soon swelled louder.

“That song—”

It was the same song the three nameless devout who had come to greet her had been singing.

“That’s the invocation, right?”

“You are correct.”

When they had caught up with the procession, the Archdevout and the young devout with her both joined in the chorus. Yuriko passed through the large gate, enveloped in their echoing voices, and with the nameless devout she left the Hall of All Books.

There were no stars in the nighttime sky. The line between the gray-black of the sky and the jet-black of the land was the only indication of her surroundings. The wind blew, carrying with it the scent of grass. The night dew wet her shoes. There was no road to speak of—certainly nothing paved. They were stepping on the grass, cutting along a natural course through the same rolling dunes she had seen upon her arrival. The grass was bent down where they walked—pushed into the ground by the passage of countless bare feet.

The wind tugged at the torches of the nameless devout walking in front of her, sending sparks up into the sky. One spark whirled high, then fell back down, making a sharp pinprick of pain where it landed square on Yuriko’s forehead. She lifted her hand and rubbed, noticing the pale light of the magic circle on her forehead reflecting off her fingers.

She glanced at the Archdevout walking next to her. He didn’t seem to notice it was glowing, or perhaps he didn’t care.
Maybe they’re used to seeing people like me.
Yuriko wondered how many
allcastes
had come to the nameless land.

Eventually, the path began to climb, a steady rise though not steep.

“This is a path we use often,” the Archdevout began, leaning toward Yuriko. “It leads to the Threshing Hill where we perform our labors.

“Of course,” he went on, “nothing in the nameless land has a true name. One of your kind—an
allcaste
who visited here—named the hill when he departed, having fulfilled his task.”

The nameless devout had been calling it that ever since, he told her. Yuriko detected something like reverence toward this
allcaste
in the Archdevout’s voice.

“He was a boy only a few years older than you, with golden hair.”

Not Japanese, then.
“Why did he come here?”

“Like you, he was searching for someone close to him.”

And he fulfilled his task.
“So it went well? He was able to find who he was looking for?”

Someone from his family, his girlfriend maybe—someone taken by the King in Yellow.

“Yes,” the Archdevout replied simply.

Yuriko found herself a little short of breath from the walking, but the Archdevout and the other devout with her never slackened their pace or seemed to breathe any harder than normal.

Yuriko considered this story of the golden-haired boy who had named the Threshing Hill. It was a bit like giving your blessing to a place, Yuriko thought—to give a name to something that had no name. The boy had given this hill his blessing. A moment later, the thought struck Yuriko as incredibly odd, coming from her. It wasn’t the sort of thing she ever would’ve thought about before.
Why, it’s like I’m a little more grown-up all of a sudden.
What if, when this mark got pressed into my forehead, I became another version of myself—a better version?

The Archdevout spoke again, his voice as calm and steady as his pace. “The
allcaste
I spoke of said that the view from this hill was much like a place where he had grown up. All it lacked, he said, was a river flowing by it and a waterwheel and millhouse.”

A millhouse?
Yuriko didn’t think they even had those anymore.
Maybe the golden-haired boy came here a long time ago?
Yuriko tried to think when they would have last had millhouses.
A hundred years? Two hundred?

I wonder if I’ll get to name something here.
She could find her brother, and the two of them could leave the nameless land together. But just before she left, she would give the land her blessing.
That,
she thought,
would be a fine thing to do.
As she walked along through the dark, the dew clinging to her feet, Yuriko felt her determination grow. Her hands clenched into little fists. Next to her, the Archdevout remained silent. She wanted him to say something like “good luck,” or “I pray for your success.” She had turned to him to tell him about her plan when she felt the ground tremble slightly beneath her feet.

An earthquake?
No—it didn’t feel like that.
But the ground was trembling. Maybe it had been trembling from a while before, but she just hadn’t noticed it. She looked at the Archdevout, but he seemed not to have noticed anything unusual. Ahead of her, the processions of nameless devout were still singing their invocation, their pace unchanging.

As they continued climbing the hill, Yuriko noticed a faint squeaking noise that seemed to match the vibrations she could feel beneath her feet. Something large was moving on top of the hill, hidden in the darkness ahead of them
. That’s what’s making that noise,
Yuriko finally realized.

“What is that?”

The Archdevout looked up, squinting into the flurry of torch sparks. “This is our task,
allcaste
.”

Atop the Threshing Hill, Yuriko saw a scene that staggered the imagination. The top of the hill was a wide plateau thronged with black-robed nameless devout.

They were moving, undulating. Countless black robes turned in dark circles under the dark sky. When the dark circles moved, the ground shivered. She could feel it in her gut and in her bones. The sound seemed to vibrate up from her kneecaps, passing through her entire body before shooting out into space from the top of her head.

The nameless devout were turning a pair of giant wheels lying flat on either side of the plateau. They were enormous. Yuriko immediately thought of the Tokyo Dome. Her father was a Yomiuri Giants fan, and he took the family to the ball games a couple times a year. They’d watch games in the dome, eat hot dogs and ice cream, and cheer along with the other fans through tiny megaphones they sold in the stands. Once you were inside the dome, you hardly noticed its size—but Yuriko remembered being impressed when she saw it from the walkway outside, or when she saw the great arc of the dome from the train window on the way there. She often wondered how people had managed to make such a giant building.

The Tokyo Dome is big, but these wheels are even bigger!

On closer examination, Yuriko noticed that the giant wheels had no rims. A pillar about the size of a small building stood in the center of each, and from there radiated incredibly long spokes—too many for her to count. The nameless devout stood along each spoke, pushing them to turn the wheels.

For some reason, the wheel on the right and wheel on the left were turning in opposite directions. The left appeared to be going clockwise, while the right went counterclockwise. Where the two wheels met, the spokes seemed so close together that the sleeves of the nameless devout’s robes brushed against one another as they passed.

The invocation had stopped somewhere along their journey up the hill. The devout pushed in silence, their only accompaniment the rumbling in the ground and the creaking of the two giant wheels. The nameless devout pushed with their hoods back, heads bent low, arms extended ahead of them to grip the spokes.

The torches she had seen them carrying had been placed into simple stands set into the ground, tracing two larger circles of light around the dark circles of the wheels.

As Yuriko stood there, dumbfounded, first one nameless devout then another broke from their positions at the spokes, retrieved torches from the stands, and began to walk toward the path leading down the hill. Nameless devout from the procession that had come here with Yuriko stepped into their places, setting their torches in the empty holders. It was a changing of the shift, yet the wheels never stopped their turning. There was no break in their work.

Before Yuriko had fully realized what was going on, the departing monks had formed a full procession heading down the hill behind her. She heard their song rise again, snippets of verse reaching her ears over the relentless creaking of the wheels.

“What’s this all for?” Yuriko asked, her voice dry with shock. Next to her, the Archdevout stood silently watching the rotation of the wheels. Yuriko tried raising her voice. “What are they doing? Are they creating power for something?”

The Archdevout pulled back his hood, turned to Yuriko, and bowed. “
Allcaste
, these are the Great Wheels of Inculpation.”

The Great Wheels,
Yuriko whispered to herself, though she could not even hear her own voice through the rumbling.

The Archdevout’s black eyes reflected tiny pinpricks of light from the torches floating in a sea of darkness. “The right wheel sends stories out into the Circle, while the left wheel receives those stories that have lost their power. All stories leave from here, and to here return. It is our duty to ensure that the motion of the Great Wheels never ceases.”

The Archdevout lowered his head once again. He was not bowing to Yuriko, but to the wheels.

“But where are the stories?”

From what he was telling her, she half expected the stories to pass through the spokes like thread on a spinning wheel.

“Stories cannot be seen by the human eye—not as they are,” the Archdevout added with a smile. Oddly enough, Yuriko had no trouble hearing him, calm and quiet though he was, over the noise of the wheels. “It is only those people living within the Circle who can give form to the stories sent from here. It is the power of humans that brings the stories toward a true existence. All we do is maintain the flow.”

Yuriko couldn’t believe it. The picture books she had loved when she was little, the things she and her classmates thrilled over now—schoolgirl romance manga, the blockbuster movies her family went to see—all the stories that had touched her life came flooding back to her. Her head was full of them. The characters she had fallen in love with reading late into the night. Those great lines that had brought tears to her eyes. The fantastic CG scenes that came back to visit her dreams.

And all of them, every single last one, began here, at the source, these two wheels that creaked as they turned. And the countless nameless devout kept it going. They kept the flow of the stories constant, their bald heads glistening with sweat, the black hem of their robes bound tight to their calves as they silently pushed the spokes. Each with the same face, the same pointed chins, in their simple clothes and bare feet slapping against the ground.

How could something as beautiful, fun, and lively as a story have its origin here?

“No way…” Yuriko breathed, her lips curling into a lopsided smile. “No way. I don’t believe it. This is some sort of joke, isn’t it? You’re playing a game with me?” Stories were fun. They were beautiful things. Things of value. “People make stories themselves! We create them, imagine them, write them! I can’t believe they come from
this
!”

Yuriko’s shouts were lost in the grinding of the wheels. Only the sparks of the torch flames seemed to react to her at all by dancing even higher into the night sky.

The Archdevout cupped his aged hand lightly on Yuriko’s shoulder. “You may recall that I told you some of the
allcastes
choose to leave this land after witnessing the nameless devout at our task. They all said the same thing that you say now.”

Yuriko could feel the Archdevout’s gaunt hand on her shoulder. A wizened little old man.

“Will you leave us too? If you wish to, no one will stop you.”

It was a serious question. Should she go forward or go back? A difficult choice offered in gentle words.

The question was easy to answer.
This is ridiculous. I’m out of here. I’m going home!
All she had to do was shout that and it would be over. The Archdevout wouldn’t stop her. But something inside Yuriko wouldn’t let her do it. She couldn’t just turn away. A voice from deep in her belly told her not to jump to conclusions, and above all else, not to turn her eyes away from what she saw here.