The Kaisho (26 page)

He reached for the doorknob, but she held him back. “Wait!” she whispered urgently in his ear. “I don’t want to go in there!”

“We have to,” Nicholas said fiercely. “We have to find out who’s been following us.”

She clung to him, trembling slightly. “There must be another way. I’m frightened of what might be inside.”

“Take my hand.”

She slipped her hand into his as he turned the knob and opened the door. They slipped inside as silently as smoke, closed the door behind them.

They were in utter darkness. There was the faint smell of ashes, and a heavy, bitter scent that was not readily identifiable to Celeste. They took several steps away from the door and it was as if they had traveled miles. All sense of being in a room—of being
inside
—vanished. There was a rushing, as of a wind sweeping across a prairie, cold and desolate, and they experienced a quick, wrenching paroxysm of vertigo.

They heard—or perhaps more accurately felt imprinted on the membranes of their eardrums—a rising series of vibrations, becoming louder or perhaps only more distinct. Soon this evolved into a discernible rhythm that, after a short time, seemed to alter to its own cadence the very pulse of blood through their arteries.

Celeste stifled a shriek.

Ahead of them appeared as if through a viscous mist an arching bridge that seemed composed entirely of bones. They gleamed palely, with here and there a hint of red, as if only recently they had been picked clean of flesh.

The bridge seemed to connect the darkness, as if it were a central point, the only substantial structure in an otherwise amorphous and terrifying void.

Celeste, her fist jammed hard against clenched teeth, turned to try to find her way back to the door, but Nicholas pulled her back, close to him.

“I know this place,” he said under his breath. “Or at least I recognize it.”

“My head hurts,” Celeste said. “I’m having trouble breathing, as if we’re underwater.”

Nicholas stood very still, concentrating. Celeste felt a ripple in her mind, and the sensation of relief one experiences when poking one’s head outside the door at the end of a long, bitter winter. Slowly, her head began to clear. She was about to ask him what happened when he pulled her forward, toward the near end of the bridge.

It was, in itself, a frightening artifact, for the bones were certainly human. Now that they were only a step away from it, they saw it was an exceedingly narrow affair. Certainly, were they to attempt to cross it, they would have to do so single file, and then very carefully indeed, for its “railings” were composed of ribs arching inward, whose ends had been honed to razor sharpness.

It seemed to be raining—at least the sound of rain could be heard, traveling toward them from some direction, passing across the plane of their hearing, then falling swiftly beyond their ken, but they felt nothing.

“Where are we?” Celeste asked. “Is this a hallucination or are we dreaming?”

“Neither,” Nicholas said.

“Then this…” She shook her head. “I refuse to believe this skeleton bridge exists.”

“It’s real enough,” Nicholas said, gripping her hand. “But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t disappear at any moment. Do you remember that smell as we came in here? It’s the burning flesh of a kind of mushroom, the
Agaricus muscarius.”

“Like peyote. Then this
is
a hallucination.”

“No. The use of hallucinogens is a corruption; they aren’t ingested by the true mystic, whose trance is pure, manifesting itself solely from his own highly trained will.” He dragged her behind him as he stepped onto the bridge. “This mushroom is used in certain rituals. It concentrates the ethereal power of the necromancer, allowing him to make real things that exist but are rarely seen.”

The “floor” of the bridge was only nine bones in width, and the gauntlet of wickedly honed rib ends was scarifying. He could sense her fear as if it were a living presence, a third figure hanging behind them like a dangerous shadow, ready to impale them upon one of the points of the ribs. It was this fear that could prove deadly to them, he knew. He needed to distract her, to make her forget her terror.

“Celeste,” he said softly, “I meant it when I said I know where we are. This is the Kanfa bridge—the center point of the universe; the place where heaven and earth meet, where life and death collide.”

As he spoke, he continued to move forward, drawing her carefully after him.

“On the Kanfa, time ceases to exist—or at least to behave as you believe it does. It does not tick off in seconds and minutes; it does not move in one direction only.”

Another step, and she gasped behind him as she swayed slightly, her cheek almost brushing against one of the razor-sharp points. Nicholas paused and gripped her hand more tightly.

“Here time flows in all directions at once, often overlapping itself, pooling and eddying, repeating like echoes the past, present, and future, until they cease to be discrete entities, until they are merged into the ocean of time.”

He urged them on, but at a slower pace. Feeling her turning her head, leaning over between the ribs, he said, “Don’t look down. The Kanfa is built to the height of a hundred men. Below it lies the place that Christians have named hell, though the priests of Tau-tau know it by another, far more ancient name.”

Celeste looked straight ahead, at the back of his head. “Is this bridge some form of Tau-tau magic?”

Nicholas found it interesting and curious that she should know about Tau-tau and that he was
tanjian.
He said, “Only in the most peripheral way.” He paused for a moment. “The Kanfa bridge is a creation of the oldest of the psycho-necromancers. They were known as Messulethe, and they are so ancient no one can say for certain where they came from. But perhaps it doesn’t matter, because certainly they were nomads, braving the vast wastes of the Gobi Desert, the steppes of what would eventually become Siberia, the high mountains of Tibet and Bhutan.”

The bones beneath their feet rattled and hummed, treacherous with curved surfaces made slick by the absence of flesh or sinew.

“They were bronze-skinned people with the heavy epicanthic folds and straight black hair of certain tribes who are now strung out through northern China, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Polynesia. But they all have one thing in common: a mark upon them, a blue vertical crescent, like the waxing moon, tattooed on the inside of their left wrist.”

It was very narrow on the Kanfa, and the rattling of the bones their passage set up was disturbing, triggering perhaps an ancient race-memory in the primitive brain of the death of the soul.

“It is said that their name, translated again and again into other languages, finally became Methuselah, and so the Messulethe—personified into a single ancient wise man—were woven into the fabric of the Bible.”

They were approaching the apex of the Kanfa bridge, and the way grew more difficult as the pitch of the arc increased.

“Centuries later, the Persian mystic Zarathustra came across records of the Kanfa and incorporated it into his teachings. In his version, the righteous, who believed in him, would cross the bridge and be lifted up to heaven by a guardian spirit.”

“What about the unbelievers?” Celeste asked.

“According to Zarathustra, crossing the Kanfa was an ordeal—something like an initiation into his faith. It symbolized the cosmic struggle for the soul of man. I think you can guess the rest. The impious were refused crossing. They were met at center span by a demon out of hell who cast them over the side.”

Celeste started as she gave a little cry.

Ahead of them, the way was blocked by a figure. It was masked, a cruel face of bulging eyes, high brow ridges, and a hideously grinning mouth. There was about the whole a vaguely insectile aspect that played upon the deepest antipathies common to all humans, and behind him, Nicholas could feel Celeste cringing away, tugging on the bond of their clasped hands. He struggled to keep that bond whole, knowing instinctively that if it was broken, their chances of stepping off the other side of the Kanfa would be virtually nil.

With the psychic extension of Tau-tau he had known what was almost certainly awaiting them even before he stepped through the loggia doorway. Far from being daunted, he was intrigued—and puzzled. While he had read about the basics of the Kanfa, he had not been aware that it could actually be manifested by Tau-tau or any other form of magic currently known. The Messulethe had been subjects of intense study by the priests of Tau-tau, but the fact remained that even their knowledge of this ancient sect of numinous mages was at best incomplete and, often, contradictory.

He found it interesting that the Kanfa should manifest itself here in Venice. Interesting but not incomprehensible. Hadn’t Celeste mentioned the Scythians at their first meeting in the Church of San Belisario? The Scythians, too, had practiced the ancient sorcery of the Messulethe, even before the time of Zarathustra. According to Celeste they were one of the refugee peoples who founded Venice.

Nicholas faced the masked demon. “I know what you want,” he said. “You won’t get it.”

“You don’t know anything.” Laughter, deep and booming, emanated from the ridged hole in the mask representing a mouth of some sort. The sound rumbled through the black space, creating a frisson against their skin.

Nicholas began to project outward with his mind, then abruptly stopped. Instinct warned him, and now he began to suspect the reason for the resurrection of the Kanfa bridge. He tucked away the powers of Akshara he had learned at the knee of Kansatsu—his Tau-tau
sensei
and his implacable enemy; the man he had been born to destroy. How he wished he possessed Shuken, the full range of Tau-tau—Akshara and Kshira—inside him, for he suspected he would be far better prepared for the mortal dangers to come.

He let go of Celeste’s hand and, in a semicrouch, rushed headlong at the masked demon. He feinted to his right with a vicious
atemi
—aikido’s main percussive blow—whirled himself on the fulcrum of his left foot, moving as he did so from his semicrouch to his full height.

The demon figure dodged the blow.

He feinted again with another
atemi,
swung his right leg inside the demon’s stance. As the demon moved to counter his blow, he shifted his weight, slammed the side of his right foot into the inside of the demon’s ankle.

Immediately, he jammed his elbow into the demon’s right kidney, moving past him now and swinging around and behind as the demon turned to face him. He drove the heel of his hand forward, missed, caught the demon an
atemi
on his lowest and most unprotected rib.

The demon let go an explosive breath, and Nicholas felt as if he were moving underwater. His lungs labored to breathe air suddenly thicker than silt. There was a buzzing filling his ear canals, boring into his mind.

He knew what this was. The Tau-tau adept was summoning his psychic power by exciting the membrane of
kokoro
at the heart of the cosmos. This was the rhythm they had “heard” when first entering this place, the magic that had conjured up the Kanfa bridge.

Now his intuition was borne out. This was no demon drawn out of Zoroastrian hell, but a
tanjian,
the Tau-tau adept who Celeste believed had been sent to murder Okami. And—somehow—he had access to the lore of the Messulethe!

He felt the rhythm of Tau-tau beating its incessant, hypnagogic rhythm upon his consciousness, but he refused to project his own power. Instead, he kept up his physical assault on the demon, while methodically shutting down the pathways for the adept’s Tau-tau to work on him.

But something more than Tau-tau was at work here, and Nicholas felt it beginning to insinuate itself between the beats at
kokoro,
and like a vine or briar that uses a host plant to bring it into sunlight, he knew that the ancient magic of the Messulethe was now just blossoming like an evil flow, dense with putrefaction.

Celeste saw these two locked together, muscles bulging, the sweat running down them, in a titanic struggle. She broke out of the strange paralysis that had gripped her and rushed to help Nicholas. As she neared them, she felt a cold wind stirring, not against her bare flesh, but inside her mind, and she recoiled. And then she understood that this conflict encompassed not only the physical, but the mental as well.

A gale arose, gyring and shrieking through the skeletal bridge, so that Celeste stumbled back and was thrown to her knees. A furious burst of cold green light blinded her, and she screamed, believing her bones bleached, her soul seared beyond recognition. Then even that sound ceased as she fell, insensate, to the floor roiling with involute energy.

A dome of diffuse sunlight hovered over Tokyo like the immense turbine of a UFO. Shadows, pale, prone to disappear at a moment’s notice, followed Justine and Rick Millar as they left the thronged heart of the city behind them.

But perhaps shadows were not the only thing following them. While Rick continued a monologue about how the working relationship among the senior partners of the advertising agency would change once she was brought on board, Justine was watching her rearview mirror, where a nondescript white Toyota was hanging three cars back.

She was not yet worried. Though she seemed to recall the same Toyota right behind her at one of the large Tokyo intersections, this car could just as well be one of a thousand others that were no doubt on the city’s streets right now.

Still, she couldn’t help feeling a sense of foreboding about this particular white Toyota. Was she becoming paranoid? It was not guilt that fueled her paranoia, but the past.
Well, why shouldn’t I be nervous?
she asked herself as she checked her rearview mirror again for the white Toyota.
With the dangerous people Nick deals with I should have a bodyguard with me all the time.
In fact, Nicholas had broached this very topic a number of times. Of course she had refused. She had had no desire to have her every move scrutinized by anyone, especially a stranger. This did not stop her from time to time looking over her shoulder when she went into Tokyo. Hence her heightened awareness of the white Toyota.