He shook it off; his face tightened painfully.
Bad enough living in a cell with those memories; on the outside, there's a thousand reminders of your every failing. And as it turns out, a whole lot more disgust about your old selfish ways than you ever knew was inside you, ain't there, Frankie boy?
Was that Molly's voice or his own? He'd been hearing Molly more and more inside his head. Helpful words, teasing and gentle, the way he liked to remember her. Did that mean he was just turning soft or going crazy? Was she dead and rone or riding shotgun in his mind?
Shit. Did it matter?
His eyes picked up light and movement inside the fence to his left; what was that? Long way off. He took out the field classes, scanned for the flickering he'd seen.
Torches. A wide column of white shirts giving off a faint glow in the early moonlight. Carrying rifles, parade formation, a hundred of them at least, and a big man in a long duster tilling alongside, watching like a drill sergeant.
Whatever the hell this added up to, it was a damn sight worse than some crazy Chinaman running around with a meat cleaver.
The dark-haired gal was in there.
Frank began to reach for the wire cutters in his saddlebag but stopped short when he heard Molly's voice:
You want to think you're doing it for the girl, that's fine, Frankie. But let's be clear about something: You got some serious scores to settle up with yourself first. You can go right ahead and make a martyr of yourself, Buckskin McQuethy, but nobody's insisting you have to be an ox about it. Cut your way through that fence and in ten minutes you're like to have a hundred rifles staring at your face. And be honest, Frank: talking your way out of trouble ain't never been your long suit.
Never could sneak a nickel past Molly; she knew him inside and out.
Frank turned his horse and rode down the fence line, looking for the next gate.
As Buckskin Frank bunked down outside to wait for the sunrise, Kanazuchi was using his hands to separate two strands on the inner fence. His long knife would have cut through the wire without trouble, but he couldn't leave tracks, and with only five minutes between patrols, he couldn't hesitate; the moon would be high soon and take away his only advantage.
He pulled open the wires like strings of a long bow and slipped smoothly through the narrow opening. The wound on his left side throbbed painfully as he called on the muscles around it to complete the difficult maneuver, careful not to snag his shirt on the razor-sharp barbs; if this had been his fence, he would have coated them with poison.
Easing the wires back into place, he erased his footprints in the sand and set off at a dead run for the nearest shelter, a shed one hundred yards away across open ground. If a patrol had been watching all they would have seen was a blur.
Folding into the shadows against the wall, he opened his senses; sounds from all over the town reached him here, two blocks off the main street. One-room shanties built nearly on top of each other stretched Out in every direction; wood fires burning in stoves, smoke rising from crude chimney pipes.' Food cooking. Chickens in backyard coops. Horses moving in stalls of a nearby stable. Smell of urine from a nearby latrine. Someone passed by; a white shirt, carrying yoked pails of water. Kanazuchi erased himself in the darkness. Waited for the footsteps to recede.
The tower stood half a mile off, its blackness carving an even darker hole in the night sky. Construction continuing; bright lights, hammering and scraping of rock. He could pick his way among the shacks to get there, avoiding the main street altogether.
He dodged down alleys, retreating into hollows and shadows whenever anyone approached. Occasionally he caught glimpses of the white shirts in shacks through open windows, sitting motionless before their fires, silently at tables, lying on crude cots with their eyes open. As he stepped through a narrow gap between houses, he heard weeping: Through an open door he saw a woman sobbing, curled up on the floor; a man sat at a table, ignoring her, quietly eating from a bowl.
No dogs bothered him as he moved between the shacks; these people kept no pets. Strange in a community this size. And he heard no laughter; always a keynote in the night sounds of any city; families, lovers, people gathering, drinking. None here. Something else missing: He had seen no children. Many couples, but no children.
Turning a corner, he came face-to-face with the youngest person he'd seen, a boy perhaps fifteen, wearing the white shirt and carrying a bucket of slops. Neither of them moved; the boy stared at him without interest, dull and lifeless, then turned and trudged away.
Kanazuchi picked up a rock from the ground, glided around the next building, and waited; moments later, two adult males appeared from the direction the boy had gone, carrying cudgels and lanterns, raising them high, searching for an intruder. Kanazuchi threw the rock far in the opposite direction, rattling a tin roof; the men turned and headed toward the noise.
Soon Kanazuchi reached the edge of the settlement; a quarter mile of open ground inclined up a gradual rise to the construction site. The church's two wings extended out from either end of the building, in the shape of a capital "E" laid on its side; above its center section rose the black tower from his dream.
Spiraling minarets adorned the spired reaches of the structure; walls covered by a mass of irregular forms and shapes he could not distinguish from so far away. Stonemasons chiseled away at these forms from scaffolds wrapped around the wings.
The tower in the middle, as high as the building was long, looked closest to completion. Oblong slits perforated a bulging capsule at its peak, perhaps a bell tower, a black slate roof above.
Immense, narrow doors yawned open at the tower's base; sheets of suspended linen prevented Kanazuchi from glimpsing-its interior. Paths in the dirt circled the church and led out to work and supply stations; quarried squares of rock, a lumber mill, tool sheds, firing ovens for the bricks. The entire site teemed with an army of workers. He saw no overseers in the group; each man and woman seemed purposeful and self-directed.
A quarter mile behind the building rose a sheer mountain of smooth rock, a pale monolithic dome reaching twice again as high as the central tower. When viewed straight on, the rock provided a dramatic backdrop that accentuated the tower's stark visage. Between the construction site and the rock lay its rear entrance, less heavily trafficked.
He waited for the moon to drift behind a cloud, then left the cover of the shanties, moving into the open, away both from the tower and the town, then circled back to the outcroppings of the massive rock formation. The back of the church came into view; nowhere near the same level of activity back here. The rear facade exhibited nothing like the front's refinement and detail; its builder had designed his church to be viewed from the front.
Kanazuchi observed the workers' routines as white shirts periodically pushed wheelbarrows of debris out the back entrance, dumping their loads into a widespread area of waste a hundred paces toward the dome. He crept down to the edge of the site and concealed himself behind a mound of dirt.
When the next worker approached, Kanazuchi waited until he lifted the barrow to empty it, then snapped his neck with a single blow and dragged the body behind the dirt. He stripped the dead man's clothes, put them on over his own; white tunic, pants, and boots. A rough cotton weave, the pullover shirt had an open collar and hung to the middle of his thighs, leaving room for him to tuck the long knife, the wak-izashi, in the back of his belt. Pulling down the dirt with his hands, he quickly buried the body.
Retrieving the wheelbarrow, he encountered a second worker arriving with another load; the pale, slender young man dumped out his barrow, hardly noticing him. Kanazuchi grabbed the handles of his wheelbarrow and followed the man along the path back toward the rear doors. As they approached, the immense scale of the black cathedral came clear to him; the largest building he had ever seen. From its base, Kanazuchi looked up and could not see the summit of the central tower.