Soul of the Sword (Shadow of the Fox #2) - Julie Kagawa Page 0,124

arguing about what to do next, I started walking toward the cliff. The massive wall of rock and stone loomed before me, ancient and unyielding, but I didn’t stop. I heard Okame call after me, wanting to know what I was doing, but I kept walking until I was a mere two paces away from the side of the mountain.

I blinked in surprise. I’d been bracing myself, expecting to run straight into the wall, but now that I was this close, I could see I stood in the mouth of a fissure, a narrow crack in the side of the mountain. It had been so well hidden that, had I not literally walked into it, I would have never known it was there.

“Minna,” I called, addressing the group over my shoulder. With a flick of my hand, a ball of kitsune-bi sprang to life, illuminating the walls and floor of a narrow tunnel that snaked away into the darkness. “I think I found something.”

The rest of them crowded behind me, gazing down the passageway. “That doesn’t look like the entrance to an ancient temple to me,” Okame mused, as a centipede scuttled away from the sudden glow of foxfire, vanishing into a crevice. “But I guess it’s better than standing out here in the cold.” He peered dubiously into the tunnel, then shivered as a sharp gust of wind at our backs tossed his ponytail and nearly blew the hat off his head. “Brrr. Right, into the dark we go.”

We stepped into the tunnel, following the ball of kitsune-bi as it floated and bobbed ahead of us, throwing back the darkness. The passage was narrow, and sometimes so low we had to crouch down to keep going. I envied Chu, trotting down the tunnel without a care, and though it was tempting to change into my fox form, transforming so blatantly in front of other people made me uneasy. They knew I was kitsune, yes, but there was a difference between knowing someone was yokai and walking down a dark tunnel with said yokai beside you. While I was Yumeko, my kitsune nature could almost be forgotten. Not so if I became a fox.

After many long, cramped minutes in the dark, the only light coming from the hovering ball of foxfire, the tunnel opened up, and we stepped into an enormous cavern. The walls soared overhead into darkness, so high you couldn’t see the roof of the cave. But the ground below us was of worked stone, not rough cavern floor. I sent my kitsune-bi farther into the room, and in the ghostly blue light, we could see crumbled steps, broken walls and shattered pillars scattered over the ground, indicating at one point, this chamber had been inhabited.

“What is this place?” I wondered, as we ventured warily into the cavern. My voice echoed into the vastness around me, and I suddenly felt very small. “Is this…the Steel Feather temple?”

Behind me, I heard Okame sneeze in the dust cloud that wafted from our footsteps. “If it is,” he muttered, “we might have a problem. This place looks like it’s been abandoned for decades.”

“This cannot be the temple,” Reika said, gazing around in dismay. “There must be a mistake. Master Jiro would not send us to the Steel Feather temple if it had been abandoned.”

“Unless he didn’t know,” mused Okame, his voice drifting between columns and stirring centuries of dust and cobwebs. “I mean, it’s been a thousand years since the night of the last Wish, right? Perhaps the guardians have all died, or moved to another temple.”

“No,” Reika said firmly, and a half dozen nos echoed all around us. “That cannot be true,” she insisted, but her voice was quietly desperate. “The guardians are here, they must be. What are we missing?”

As I rounded a pillar, a figure suddenly appeared, looming above me in the darkness. I let out a squeak and jumped back, as the foxfire washed over the stern visage and fixed gaze of a stone samurai, fully armored and wearing a magnificent horned helmet. He carried a sword in each hand. One of the helmet’s stone antlers had been snapped off, and time had eroded the samurai’s features, but he still stood proud and stern on his pedestal, frozen in a stance of eternal readiness.

“Magnificent,” Daisuke said at my back, making me jump again. The noble stepped forward, gazing up at the statue in open fascination. “I believe this is Kaze Yoshitsune,” he said in a voice of