Toshi nodded. He turned his face into the wind. Nearby, Godo shrugged and led his yak back down the path.
Toshi felt the weight bearing down on him again. He felt bloated and diffuse. The tears were lurking in his throat, just waiting for the chance to escape through his eyes.
“If I ever see him,” he said, “I’ll be sure to pass that along.”
CHAPTER 16
The Heart of Frost stood among the dramatic Tendo Peaks, a day’s hike from where Toshi met Godo. Like all the Sokenzan Range, the Tendo’s most infamous mountain was a tall, narrow spire of rock that connected the drab soil with the clouds above. None of the locals would go more than a few hundred paces up the ragged trail, for the Heart of Frost was cursed by the yuki-onna. No people meant no victims, and in a few decades she became little more than a potent folk tale told on a snowy night.
That was before Toshi came. As he had several weeks before, the ochimusha ascended the base of the Heart of Frost, bound for the clearing the yuki-onna called home. It was there he had performed his ritual, bound the winter spirit, and taken her power for his own. It was there he intended to return, to restore the snow-woman and surrender what he stole.
The morning air was frigid and the trail narrow, but Toshi did not waver. He felt a hollowness in his stomach and a great weight on his back that had nothing to do with the cold or fatigue, but he took some pleasure in the monotony of the hike. Walking in a straight line was about as much as his dulled senses and distracted thoughts could handle.
He made steady progress until about a third of the way up the mountain. There, he found the first of a series of kanji he’d carved along the path several weeks ago. The character was meant to draw the yuki-onna in and keep her away from Toshi long enough for him to complete his preparations farther up the trail.
It had worked spectacularly well-somewhere, the spirits of dead kanji masters were toasting him. No one had ever managed to do what he had done. It was the equivalent of catching a lightning bolt and tying it into a bow. Even in his maudlin state of mind, Toshi took a small shred of pride from the novelty of his achievement. People would talk about it forever if they knew. They might not say nice things about him personally, but they would talk about the grand, terrible thing he’d done.
Pride evaporated when he came within reach of a trail marker carved into the bark of an evergreen. Toshi stared at the symbol for a moment. Then he pulled his jitte and set to excavating all the bark around the symbol, changing a series of lines and curves into a square blank patch of naked wood. When he was through, Toshi scooped up the shavings from the base of the tree and scattered them into the wind.
He repeated the process on the next kanji he found. This second one had been drawn on a smooth rock in his own blood, so Toshi poured some of his water on the rock and scrubbed it with the edge of his hand until the flesh was raw. With the kanji washed away, Toshi washed embedded bits of rock from his flesh and went on up the trail.
He had been very careful about making the marks so it was easy for him to remember where they were. He spent the better part of the day hiking, finding kanji, and obliterating them. Each time he erased a trail marker, he felt some the fog in his brain lift and the heaviness of his limbs ease. He didn’t feel right … none of this felt right … but he did feel better.
It occurred to him that he could have skipped the hiking and just gone directly from kanji to kanji by travelling through shadow. He barely considered the idea before continuing on foot. Something about the effort of walking soothed him almost as much as removing the symbols.
Overhead, the sun had set, and darkness colored the sky. Last time, it had taken him days to reach his destination. Today, he had covered almost all the ground he needed to in a few hours. This was another unexpected benefit of his fuzzy-mindedness: he had no sensation of time passing, no other weariness than what he’d started with. The entire day had blurred into one long, slow moment, from meeting Godo to scratching out the kanji in front of him now.
Toshi shivered under the blanket Godo had given him. It got much colder on the Heart of Frost at night, even without the yuki-onna prowling for victims. Cold enough to kill anyone who didn’t take shelter.
Toshi went on to the next kanji. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to settle in for the night, either. The idea of falling asleep filled him with dread. Better to press on and finish the job while he still had the wits to focus.
Toshi wiped clean another kanji, and then another. The moon rose, peaked, and started to set before he stumbled and fell heavily to the cold, hard ground. Something cracked on his face, and at first he thought he had ice in his hair. A touch-inspection of his face revealed that it was the skin on his forehead that had dried and split. Blood trickled from the split flesh on his face, staining his fingers.
The sight of his own blood brought Toshi closer to consciousness. He hated to see it go to waste. The stuff was even more precious to kanji mages than it was to everyone else, for characters drawn in blood were always the most powerful.
Though his fingers were thick and clumsy, Toshi dragged them across his forehead again until they were smeared with crimson. He forced himself to stand and lumbered toward a rocky overhang that would blunt the cutting wind. For a moment he stood swaying in the quiet alcove. Then, he leaned forward and drew a ragged pair of symbols on the rock face.
The alcove quickly warmed as if he had lit a fire. The sensation returned to his face and hands, stinging as his nerves registered the damage done by the cold. Barely able to stand upright, Toshi wrapped the heavy blanket around him and leaned against the rock. He was asleep before his body finished sliding to the ground.
He dreamed not of the gray granite plain, but of the Heart of Frost. He found himself trudging up the same mountain trail as the same scathing wind tore at him. Now there was definitely ice in his hair, and his eyebrows, and crusted across his lashes.
He had lost track of how many symbols he had eradicated and how many yet remained, but he recognized the section of trail he was on. Over the next rise was the clearing where he had trapped the snow-woman. Almost done, he thought.
Toshi cinched the blanket around his neck and shoulders and proceeded over the rise. The large circular clearing was bounded by a series of sheer cliffs with a narrow opening on the north side that led to the peak of the mountain. Frequent snowfall had covered the floor of the clearing in a light dusting of white, but Toshi knew that the snow concealed a ring of kanji carved into the rock. He ought to know: he had spend hours making it.
He trudged through the ankle-deep snow and wondered why this dream was so different from the others yet so similar to the waking time he had spent on the mountain. He caught his foot on a hidden rock and fell onto his hands and knees. Was this his afterlife, then? An endless trek to erase the things he had done, with nothing to look forward to but an ever-increasing numbness of body and brain?
Toshi dug his hands into the ground and clenched two fistfuls of dirt and snow. No. This would not be his fate. This would end here. He straightened his arms and his back and continued toward the hidden ring of symbols on all fours. It took almost an hour, but as the purple-black sky lightened to cobalt blue on the horizon, he finally reached his goal.
He carefully crawled around the edge of the circle, wiping dusty snow off the kanji until he had exposed the entire ring. Taken together, the symbols laid out a long, clumsily worded sentence that described their purpose and effect. Destroying one of the symbols would break the spell, but he would have to remove them all to completely restore what he had altered.