Sacred Hollow

The first time I saw the cave, I was picking bellflowers on the ridge above the village. The petals were good for fever, and old Rui had been coughing all week. I had my sleeve tied back with a cord and a basket on my arm, and I was thinking about nothing at all, which is the only way to find anything worth finding.

The mouth of the cave was a dark seam in the rock face, low and narrow, like a wound that had closed wrong.

I should have walked past it. I was twenty-four years old, a shrine maiden with a duty roster and a list of ailments to treat and a grandmother who expected me home before the afternoon rain. I had no business in a cave.

But the air coming out of it smelled of cedar smoke and something older, something like iron left out in the rain. And I had never seen it before, though I had walked that ridge a hundred times since I was a girl.

That was the first wrong thing.

The second wrong thing was the footprints. One set, going in. Bare feet, long and narrow, the heels dug deep like whoever left them had been running. I put my palm flat beside one print. My hand looked small against it.

I followed them.

The cave swallowed the light three steps past the entrance, and I stood in the dark with my basket of bellflowers and listened to my own breathing come back to me off the walls. Somewhere ahead, water dripped. The sound had a rhythm to it, slow and even, like a pulse.

I lit the paper lantern I always carried in my sleeve. It was meant for lighting shrine lamps, not for exploring holes in the mountain, but it did the job. The flame guttered, then steadied, and the walls came out of the dark around me, slick with moisture and veined with something that glittered when I moved the light.

Not mineral veins. Writing.

Characters, I should say. Old ones, cut into the stone in columns that ran floor to ceiling, so dense and overlapping that I couldn't tell where one ended and another began. I knew maybe a hundred characters in the old script. These were not those. These were older, and they were not carved. They were burned.

I touched one. The stone was cold, colder than the air around it, and the character under my finger felt raised, like a scar.

My grandmother would have told me to turn around. She would have told me that some doors are locked for a reason, and that a shrine maiden who pokes her nose into the mountain's business comes home with the mountain's business attached to her.

I kept walking.

The passage narrowed, then opened suddenly into a chamber that smelled of cedar smoke and rain. There was a fire in the center, small and low, burning without wood that I could see. A kettle sat beside it, and a man sat beside the kettle.

He was older than me. Mid-thirties, maybe. His hair was black and cut short, and he wore the gray traveling robe of a mendicant monk, though the robe had seen better decades. His hands were folded in his lap, and his eyes were closed, and he did not look up when I came in.

"You took your time," he said.

His voice was low and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and intended to spend it on me.

"I don't know you," I said.

"No." He opened his eyes. They were the color of wet slate, and they did not blink. "You don't."

I set my basket down. I don't know why. It wasn't a decision, exactly. My arm just got tired, and the basket was there, and the bellflowers spilled a little onto the stone floor, and neither of us looked at them.

"Are you the one who left the footprints?" I asked.

"I am."

"Why were you running?"

"I wasn't." He smiled, and it was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a man who has just watched you walk into something. "I was being chased."

The fire popped. Somewhere behind me, back the way I had come, I heard a sound. Not water. Not wind.

A bell. One of ours. The shrine bell, the one that hangs above the main gate and rings when someone crosses the threshold.

Nobody crosses the threshold at this hour. Nobody crosses it without ringing it twice.

"That," the monk said, "is why I was running."

I turned toward the passage. The bell rang again, closer now, and the characters on the walls began to glow, faintly, like embers under ash. The man stood. He was taller than I had thought, and when he moved, the fire moved with him, leaning toward him like a dog toward its master.

"You should decide quickly," he said, "whether you came here to find something or to hide from something. Because whatever is coming down that passage will not care which."

I looked at him. I looked at the glowing walls. I looked at the bellflowers scattered on the floor, and I thought of old Rui coughing in her bed, and my grandmother's warning, and the fact that I had walked past the mouth of this cave a hundred times and never seen it before today.

"I came to find something," I said.

"Good." He picked up the kettle and poured water over the fire, and the flame went out without a hiss. "Then you won't mind if I borrow you."

The dark came down like a hand closing. I felt his fingers close around my wrist, cool and dry and certain, and then we were moving, and the bell behind us rang a third time, and the walls stopped glowing, and I understood, too late, that I had made a choice I could not unmake.

The last thing I heard, before the passage bent and the sound fell away, was my own voice, small and stupid and brave, asking, "Borrow me for what?"

And his answer, close against my ear, so soft I almost missed it: "For the same thing I came here for. To end something that should have ended a long time ago."