Chapter Four

I just fell into water! Marisa had been right; the falling river had accumulated into a pool down here. The noise and pressure of another body splashed nearby. The wave of her hitting water above pushed me deeper.

I waved my arms around, trying to get my head pointed to the surface, and I opened my eyes to find Marisa’s hatlight. I saw nothing, just pitch black. Her spell must have been extinguished in the water.

“Mmph!” I made a frustrated noise, pushing a few bubbles out of my nose. I squeezed my eyes shut, then tried to let my body’s natural buoyancy carry me up. My chest was already burning from holding my breath. My heart pounded. My face wasn’t hitting air soon enough. I didn’t want to rush up and bang my head on the wall, but I needed to breathe now. So I kicked my legs and scooped my arms into a graceless swim.

I clawed up through more water than it felt like I had fallen into. Just as spots of white began swimming through my vision, my face breached the surface. I sucked in a gasp of dank, muddy-tasting air.

“M-Marisa!” I yelled into the darkness, then I coughed once and sprayed water out of my nose. These sounds returned me in a quick, shrill echo. My arms and legs worked hard to keep my head above water. Waves lapped at my neck and chin.

I heard another person reaching the surface, sputtering and gasping, behind me and to my left. I turned in that direction.

“Marisa!” I yelled again. “Are you all right?”

“Rei-Reimus!” She croaked out my name, then hacked once to cough out some water. “Fox-girls dropped us!”

“I don’t think-” a wave splashed into my mouth, and I spat. “I don’t think she did it on purpose. Can you light up again?”

She recast the hatlight spell. This time it took longer for the ball of light to reach its full brightness. Marisa was the first thing I saw since the light came from her, but she had lost her hat. The light stood just above her wet-slicked hair, and lit the opaque brown water we swam in.

I looked up and around, expecting to see a pinhole of daylight far above us, up where Ran still stood near the mouth of the pit. There was no stone shaft. The ceiling was a rough dome of solid rock. Stalactites shed drops of water that fell to the pool.

“What?” I said. “Where did the hole go?”

“Reimus!” said Marisa, swimming up to and passing me. “Land over heres.”

I looked in the direction she was swimming in, saw a slope of mud rising up from the water to a wall of the cave. I swam after her, but it took a couple of minutes for us to reach land. Swimming in daytime clothes isn’t easy. Our dresses took on a lot of water weight.

Finally my hand hit the earthen slope with one of my forward strokes. It felt more like tight-packed sediment than mud. Marisa had already dragged herself up out of the water, so she grabbed my hand and helped me up.

“Well!” I turned around to plop my butt onto the ground. “We made it down the pit without dying. That’s better than I expected.”

“That’s the spirits,” said Marisa. “Gotta take icy-cold waters with non-broken bones. By the ways, where are wees?”

We sat there, catching our breath and surveying our surroundings. There wasn’t much to see; it was just a cave, probably carved out by millennia of underground rivers. I couldn’t see an exit. I scanned the ceiling again to make sure I hadn’t missed the entry shaft, but there was nothing – just a dome of stalactite-spiked rock.

I raised a hand to point this out, but felt a drag on my upper arm. The rope harness was still mostly tied around us, so I began pulling it off. Marisa noticed and did the same. I coiled it up as we untied it. The tail of the rope still drifted in the water.

“Look at this.” I pulled the frayed end out of the water, held it up for us to see in the light. “It’s like it snapped under too much weight.”

“Doesn’t seem rights,” said Marisa. “Don’t think fox-girls would use ropes can’t hold us and itselfs.”

I set the coiled-up rope on the ground at my feet, and that’s when my teeth started chattering. Once the panic of falling and almost drowning had worn off, my body realized it had just swam through freezing underground water. My dress was soaked and stuck to me. The air was still but cold, and so was the packed silt we sat on.

“No Reimus!” Marisa took my hand in hers, as if trying to share body heat. “Will start shivering toos, if you starts.”

We hugged, our bodies shaking, like a pair of stranded mountaineers in a high-elevation blizzard. Holding each other didn’t help at first; we were both cold and wet.

“D-do you have a sp-spell that could w-warm us up?” I said.

“S-surelies, but without somethin’ to b-burns, could roast us to d-deaths.”

“Th-that’s fine! A funeral p-pyre sounds great.”

Little by little, our body heat overcame the cold, and the chill lost its edge. My teeth slowed from chattering – and as that sound faded, we heard a new one. The noise of soft skittering and a squeak-squeak came from above us. We both looked up.

“Is that a mouse?” I said.

“No, I’m not a mouse!” a high-pitched voice snapped. “Don’t be rude!”

Marisa’s light showed far up the cave wall. I could see a seam open in the rock, shedding some dust downward. A contraption poked out: a rope-and-pulley suspended from a mechanical arm. It stayed anchored to the wall inside the porthole opening up.

“How many more of you people are coming here today?” said the voice.

Marisa and I both stood up, our heads tilted back so we could stare at the youkai who emerged from the hole in the wall. She pulled a length of rope back over the pulley in a snap, which carried her into open air above us, suspended from the mechanical arm. She held herself up with a pair of fists clenched on the rope.

“Look,” she said. “I don’t care anymore, all right? I got too many hours today. There’s a limit on how much overtime Yamame will pay me for.”

This youkai didn’t have the rope tied around herself in a harness, or around her waist, or even holding onto a loop with one hand. She sat in a wooden-plank bucket with a pair of studded metal bands around the outside. The bucket was just big enough to hold her, at the size of a human child. Her hair was green, tied on the sides in twintails, and her face wore a look of exhausted frustration.

“Has anyone else been down this way today?” I called up to her.

“Yeah, six people! I’m trying to get some well-deserved rest up here, and you two come splashing and shining the brightest thing in the world.” She held up a hand to shield her eyes from the light spell. “Would you please turn that off?”

Marisa reduced the light’s power, but didn’t drop it entirely. It was half as bright as before. I could see Marisa and the youkai overhead, and not much more.

“From the surfaces,” said Marisa. “Needs lights or blind down heres. Nice to meet yous, by the ways. We’re Marisas and Reimus, adventurers extremes. What’s your name, bucket-girls?”

“I’m Kisume,” said the youkai. She let out some slack on the rope, lowering herself toward us. “And I’m done hefting you people to the Grand Uphill. It’s bad enough that everyone before you was unconscious. I haven’t even gotten—”

Her voice caught in her throat, then she lowered herself faster. The pulley squeaked and clattered.

“Look at that!” Kisume hung herself down low enough that I could have jumped and smacked the bucket with one hand. She stared at the ground by my feet. “That’s gorgeous! Excellent craftsmanship. Where did you get it?”

“What?” I said, then realized she was talking about the coiled up rope. I nudged it with one foot. “This? We lowered ourselves down with it.”

“I’ve never seen one that nice,” said Kisume, lowering herself down to my eye-level. “And I go through a lot of ropes in my job.”

“Do you want it?” I said. “We’ll give it to you, if you help us out.”

Kisume pulled in a breath, rolled her eyes and sighed, like a human kid exasperated when her parents tell her to do chores.

“You want me to lift you up to the Grand Uphill, don’t you?”

“Probably,” I said. “First tell me, what is the Grand Uphill?”

“It’s the path up to the oni city. That’s where the bad humans and good youkai go after... you know.” Kisume tilted her head to the side, rolled her eyes up and stuck out her tongue – pantomiming a dead person.

“After they kick the buckets?” said Marisa.

Kisume twisted to glare at her. “Don’t make jokes like that! That’s offensive!”

“She apologizes.” I knelt down, picked up the rope, held it up for Kisume to take. “The oni city is where we’re headed, so this is yours if you can get us to the Grand... Uphill? Did you say the city was up from here?”

“Yeah, I did. Put it in.” Kisume nodded down at her bucket. I dropped the rope coil onto what I assumed was her lap.

“That can’t be right,” I said. “We haven’t fallen that far down. Jigoku would have to be a lot deeper than this.”

“It is,” said Kisume. “Both of you, grab on. Let’s get this over with.”

I looked at Marisa. She met my glance, but she just shrugged. She grabbed onto the edge of the bucket with both hands. I did the same.

Kisume pulled down hard on her rope, showing greater strength than any human her size would have. The bucket slowly rose, pulling Marisa and me up with it. Our feet lifted from the packed silt. All of my weight hung from my hands clutched on the bucket’s edge. I’m taller and heavier than Marisa, so my weight tilted the bucket town my way, which lifted Marisa slightly higher.

The physics of this made no sense. No matter how strong Kisume was, she should have been lifting herself out of the bucket as she pulled the rope down – unless the bucket was a part of her body, maybe? I didn’t want to know. Youkai can be disturbing and weird.

---

Slowly, with a lot of dramatic grunting, Kisume pulled us up to the porthole she had popped out of. The handle of her bucket clanked up against the pulley; we could go no higher.

“Watch your fingers,” said Kisume. “We’re going in.”

She reached out to the mechanical arm holding us all, and hit a switch on it. The whole contraption retracted into the porthole, pulling us in along with it. My hands were throbbing from holding my weight. As soon as the rock floor was beneath me, I let go and dropped to my feet. Marisa did too, and we both shook out our hands.

“Welcome to my home,” said Kisume. “I’ll show you to the back so you can get out of here and leave me alone.”

I’ve never seen a monkey swinging through treetops, but I imagine that’s what Kisume looked like as she swung off the pulley and hooked her bucket to a rope track embedded in the ceiling. Hand over hand, she pulled herself deeper into the cave. Her bucket swooped past my and Marisa’s heads.

“Follow me,” she said, and we did.

We passed circular tunnels on either side, and these had their own branches of the ceiling-track that Kisume used to move through her home. Marisa’s light didn’t show far down any tunnel, but one tunnel probably led to a bedroom, another to a cellar, and another had the sound of running water echoing out: probably a bathroom.

“Nice little place,” I said as we walked along. “So it’s your job to... what was it? Send the good youkai and bad humans on to the oni city?”

“Yep,” said Kisume. “Usually the job doesn’t require as much heavy lifting as today though.”

“Six peoples came through befores,” said Marisa. “They weren’t dead, rights?”

“No, not dead,” said Kisume, “but they weren’t helpful either.”

We rounded a corner and stopped at what looked like a dead end, a solid rock wall. There was another mechanical arm and switch assembly here. Kisume smacked the switch with one hand. The wall before us slid to the left, opening in another porthole. Dust and flakes of moss fell loose as rock ground against rock.

“Take the slide here,” said Kisume. “This will get you to the chamber my boss uses as her hideout.”

I stepped forward, looked out the porthole. A slope dropped into darkness, too steep and smooth to walk on.

“Fair warning,” said Kisume. “If my boss sees you, she’s going to try to eat you.”

I looked back at her. “Eat us? I don’t want to hear that.”

“Oh yeah,” said Kisume. “That’s why she started living here in the first place. She liked to scavenge the leftovers from oni on their way back from raids in Gensokyo. The pickings have been slim for a long time, though.”

“We ain’t getting eatens, bucket-girls.” Marisa punched a fist into her palm. “Any ones tryin’ eat us’ll get smackeds.”

Kisume shrugged, as well as she could while holding onto the ceiling-track with one hand. “Not my problem. I got my rope. Now you two can get out of my house.” She pointed out the porthole.

“No point staying here, I guess.” I sat on top of the slide, ready to push myself down, then glanced back at Marisa. “You can wait to hear if I scream in agony before following me.”

“Nope, Reimus!” Marisa hopped over and sat behind me, hugged her arms around my middle as if we were riding horseback together. “Here we goes!”

She pushed off the top of the slide, and down we went. Cool cave air blew against my face. Rock ground against the bottoms of our dresses. I struggled to keep my skirt from riding up.

“Bye!” yelled Kisume above and behind us. “Try not to get sick!”