Kiku went first.
She left two days before them, on foot, with a basket on her back and a Buddhist rosary on her wrist instead of the other kind, because a woman alone on a mountain road was nobody and a foreigner and a swordsman were a parade. She went to the village under the three pines and told the headman that she'd been sent by the Hosokawa magistrate, which was a lie, to warn of bandits in the hills, which was true, and that on the night of the new moon the women and children and old people should sleep at the temple on the far side of the valley, which was the only part that mattered.
"He didn't believe me," she told John, when he and Musashi came up the road on the third evening. She was sitting on the temple step with her basket beside her. "Then I told him who was coming to help, and he believed me so fast he nearly fell over."
Musashi grunted. He didn't like being a name that opened doors.
"How many will stay?"
"Eleven men," said Kiku. "The headman, his sons, some others. They have two spears and a bow and a great many hoes." She looked at John. "And the rest are at the temple. Sixty-three. I counted them in."
* * *
They came in the second hour after midnight, as the Branch had shown.
John was on the roof of the headman's house with the mask on, flat on the cold thatch, with Musashi lying beside him like a log. Below, the village was dark. Forty houses in a fold of the hills, the paddies white with frost between them, the little bell hanging silent in its frame by the shrine.
Through the slits he saw them come down off the ridge. Black clothes. Cloth masks over the lower face. Fourteen, then seventeen, moving well, spread out, not bandits from the look of it: ronin, masterless men, the kind who'd been soldiers until the wars ended and had nothing to sell now but the one thing. Each with two swords. Three with torches, unlit.
She paid them, he thought. With coins that say 2041.
He looked up at the ridge. The three pines. The place in the Branch where she'd stood.
Nothing. Just pines against the stars.
"Now?" he whispered.
"Wait," said Musashi. "Let them light the torches. A man with a torch has one hand."
The first torch flared at the edge of the village. Then the second.
Musashi slid down off the roof without a sound. John went after him.
* * *
For the first minute it went the way John had hoped it would, all through the walk up from Kokura, lying awake.
He came round the corner of the headman's barn into the torchlight with the mask on and the Hold already down, and it lay over him like water, steady, and the bronze hummed against his face, and he could see. Three men in the lane. The torch in the first one's left hand, lifting towards a thatch, its flame standing up stiff and orange. The second with his sword half drawn, the steel coming out of the scabbard a finger's breadth at a time. The third turning his head.
John walked into them.
He'd brought the oak sword. Not steel. Musashi had asked him, at the start of the road, whether he meant to kill anyone, and when John said no, not if I can help it, Musashi had looked at him a long time and then given him the oak. Then you'd better be fast.
He was fast. Inside the Hold his body moved at its own speed, the speed Musashi had built over two years of mornings, and the world moved at the speed of honey, and the difference was enough. He took the torch out of the first man's hand and threw it in the frozen paddy. He hit the second across the wrist with the oak so the half-drawn sword stopped where it was. He took the third man's legs from under him with a sweep from the kata, the fourth movement, the one he'd done ten thousand times.
He let go.
Three men fell down at once in the lane, one with his wrist broken, one with his legs gone, one staring at his empty hand. Not a drop of blood on his lip. He'd held twenty counts and felt nothing but the cold.
Somebody shouted. Musashi was in the next lane with his own oak sword, and there was a sound from there like a man beating carpets.
John turned towards the shrine, where the other torches were.
And the Hold went.
Not snapped back. Went. As though someone had pulled the plug from the bottom of a bath. He was halfway through pushing, reaching for it, the way he'd reached for it a thousand times, and there was nothing to reach for. The world stayed at full speed. The bronze on his face had gone dead and silent and was only metal.
A man came at him out of the dark with a sword.
John saw him late. Without the Hold, with the slits narrowing his eyes to two strips, he saw him very late, and his body moved before his mind did, the groove, a step to the left, and the cut that should have opened him from collarbone to hip went into his left arm above the elbow instead, deep, and scraped bone.
He went down on his knees. The man drew back for the second cut.
Musashi came out of nowhere and broke the man's collarbone with the oak, and kicked him into a ditch, and crouched beside John.
"The trick?" he said.
"Gone." John's arm was pouring. He could feel the heat of it going down to his fingers. "Something's stopped it."
He looked up at the ridge, through the slits.
There was a light on it now. Very faint, very blue, among the three pines. Not a torch. A steady small glow, the colour of the light in the basement in 1920 when the coil went.
She's switched me off, he thought. She can switch me off.
"How many?" said Musashi.
John counted the torches. "Eleven. Twelve."
Musashi nodded. He pulled the cord off his own hair and tied it hard round John's arm above the cut, pulled it tight with his teeth, and stood up.
"Then do it without," he said, and walked towards the torches.
* * *
John took off the mask.
It was no use to him dead, and it was making him blind. He shoved it inside his shirt and the world came back in at the sides, all of it, the burning thatch on the shrine roof and the frost and the dark houses and the shapes moving between them, and no Branches. That was gone too. The blue light on the ridge had shut them off as well, all of it, every trick he had. He was a man with an oak sword and one arm and the body Musashi had made.
Hawk tied to a pig, he thought. Without the hawk.
He got up and went after Musashi.
He never remembered that fight properly afterwards. It came back in pieces, the way the Somme did. A man's face very close with his cloth mask slipping. The oak in his right hand jarring to the shoulder. Running, along a frozen dyke between two paddies, with someone running after him, and turning, and the man running onto the end of the oak with his own speed. The bell rope by the shrine, which he grabbed for no reason except it was there, and swung on, and kicked a man in the chest with both feet, and the bell rang, cracked and flat, over the whole valley. The headman's sons coming out of the dark with their spears and their hoes, shouting, eleven men who'd been told to hide and hadn't.
His body knew what to do. That was what he remembered most. He didn't Hold, he didn't see, he didn't think. His feet went where the groove took them and his arm came round where it had come round ten thousand mornings in a yard in Kokura under a cherry tree, and when he was too slow, which was often, Musashi was there.
And then there was nobody standing who wasn't theirs.
* * *
They'd killed no one. John didn't know how. Musashi said afterwards it was because John wouldn't, and so Musashi had had to be careful not to make him look bad. Seventeen ronin lay in the lanes and the ditches with broken arms and broken heads and their masks pulled down, and the headman's sons tied them with rice rope. Two houses had burned. The shrine roof was smoking. The village was there.
John sat down on the shrine step. His arm had soaked the rope and his sleeve to the wrist.
Musashi stood in front of him, breathing hard, with a cut on his forehead running into his beard.
"The woman," he said.
John looked up at the ridge. The blue light was moving. Going away, along the crest of the hill, towards the south.
He got up.
* * *
He caught her where the ridge path dropped into a gully, because she was carrying something heavy and he wasn't carrying anything but blood.
She heard him on the stones and turned. A tall woman of about forty in a long dark coat of some fabric that didn't move like wool, short grey-brown hair, a narrow, tired face. A metal thing in her hands the size of a hatbox, with a blue light glowing through a slot in its side, and a wound coil inside the slot turning slowly round a spindle.
"Stay there," she said.
In English.
He stopped. He hadn't heard English in two years. It went through him like cold water. Scottish, Edinburgh perhaps, educated, very precise.
"You're Moira," he said. He didn't know how he knew. It was a name off a Branch, maybe, a glimpse in the basement in 1920, a woman's name on a lab door in 2045.
"Doctor Vance, to you." She held the device a little higher. The blue light pulsed. He felt it in his teeth, a dead flat pressure, like being underwater. "I've got you damped to nothing, Mr Ashford. Don't make me turn it up. At the high settings it stops hearts."
"You burned a village."
"I paid seventeen men to burn a village. You stopped them." She said it flatly, as if reporting a result. "I thought you would. I needed to see what you'd do without your tricks. I needed to see if you'd learned anything I could use." Her eyes went to his arm. "You're bleeding out, by the way."
"Why?"
"Why are you bleeding?"
"Why any of it."
She looked at him for a long moment. In the starlight she looked very tired, and not cruel at all, which was worse.
"Because I've watched you in forty-one branches," she said. "With this." She tilted the device. "Built from your professor's notes. You should have burned that notebook, you know. You thought about it. I've seen you think about it. And in thirty of those forty-one branches you go to Egypt, and you make it into something it never was, and in two thousand years it eats the world, and the world I live in is the one that's left over." Her mouth tightened. "I'm not here to be your enemy. I'm here to be your brakes."
"You told Musashi to kill me."
"Yes. He was the best chance. He didn't." She almost smiled. "Nobody ever does what they're told about you."
He moved.
Not fast. He had nothing fast left. He simply walked forward, the way he'd walked into the stair at the shrine, without waiting for permission, and she raised the device, and he saw her thumb go to a dial on its side, and she hesitated. A tiny hesitation, a scientist's, the high settings stop hearts. That was all he needed. He put his good hand flat on the metal box.
There was no Hold. No Branches. The thing was damping all of that.
But the Turn wasn't in his head. It was in his hands. It didn't need time to slow down. It needed time to move.
He pushed forward. All forward. Fifty years. A hundred.
The box went hot, then cold. The blue light flickered. The coil in the slot, turning, went brown, then green, then crumbled into a sort of greasy black lace, and the spindle seized, and the light went out.
The pressure in his teeth stopped.
The Hold came back like a man coming up for air. The Branches came with it, all at once, a flood, and he nearly fell.
Moira Vance stared at her dead device.
"Oh, you idiot," she said softly. "You absolute bloody idiot. That's the only..."
She dropped it. It hit the stones and cracked open, and something inside it was still faintly warm. She looked at John, and he saw her decide. She pulled back her coat sleeve. On her wrist was a smaller thing, a band of the same dull metal with a single dim light on it, crude, soldered, ugly.
"The spare," she said. "It doesn't steer for toffee. I'll land somewhere horrible." She looked up the gully at him with her tired eyes. "So will you, Mr Ashford. Every time. I'll be there."
She pressed the light.
There was a sound like a struck wire, and a smell of hot copper, and the gully was empty.
* * *
Musashi found him on the stones an hour later, with his arm wrapped in her coat. She'd left it behind. It was the warmest thing he'd ever touched.
They carried him down to the temple. Kiku sewed his arm in the lamplight with silk thread from her own sleeve while the headman held the lamp and sixty-three people watched in silence, and he didn't make a sound because he'd bitten through a strip of leather.
In the morning, Musashi came and sat beside his mat.
He didn't speak for a long time. He looked at John's arm, and the stitches, and then out through the door at the village under the three pines, at the two burned houses and the smoking shrine and the women coming back down the valley path from the far temple with their children on their backs.
"I went to the island," he said at last, slowly, so John would get every word, "to kill a man. Always, I go to kill a man. Sixty times." He nodded at the women on the path. "You came here for them. With a stick. With nothing." He was quiet for a moment. "You have surpassed me, John."
He'd never used John's name before.
"Rubbish," said John. "You saved my life four times last night."
"Five," said Musashi. "That's not what I mean."
* * *
He left at the end of the month, when the arm would hold.
Kiku came to the beach where he'd washed up, two winters before. She wore her cross on the outside of her kimono, on its cord, in plain sight, and when he looked at it she lifted her chin.
"Somebody asked me," she said. "To my face. Yesterday. So I decided."
"Kiku."
"Go away, John. You're bad luck and I'll miss you." She put something in his hand. Her old Buddhist rosary, the one she'd worn up the mountain. "For the next place. In case you need to look like nobody."
Musashi didn't come. He'd said goodbye in the yard that morning, by not saying it. He'd done the kata beside John under the cherry tree, all nine, once, and then gone inside. When John went back to his own room there had been a bundle on the mat: a suit of old armour in black lacquer and blue silk cord, scarred, mended at the shoulder, the armour Musashi had worn as a boy at Sekigahara and never since, and a sword in a plain black scabbard. No note. Kaneshige, carrying it over, had said only, He says you'll land somewhere horrible.
So he stood on the sand in the armour, with the sword at his hip and Moira's coat rolled on his back, feeling like a man in fancy dress.
He took the mask out of his shirt and put it on.
Through the slits, the sea. And far off, very loud, so loud the bronze hummed with it against his cheekbones: a great harbour, and a tower of white stone on an island with a fire on top of it, and a city so bright it hurt, and somewhere in the middle of it, a young woman laughing.