by Jay Kristoff
Ilyitch sighed, glanced at the doorway behind him. Avoiding her eyes, the boy stood, pointed at Red and spoke a stern command. Red lay flat and wagged his tail.
“W-wait.” Yukiko sat up straighter, frowning. “Where are you going?”
The gaijin spoke a handful of words, held up both hands as if urging her to be still. Then he turned and clomped out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
Where is he going, Red?
don’t know i stay here am gooddog
Yukiko listened to Ilyitch’s footprints receding down the hall. She had no idea if she’d convinced him, no clue as to whether he was headed to get supplies to help her, or to turn her in to Danyk. But for the first time since she’d arrived here, she found herself alone with Red.
So either way, she wasn’t going to wait to find out.
* * *
The dog had gnawed through one of the tethers binding her wrists and was halfway through the second when she heard stealthy footfalls in the corridor. She looked at Red, paused with his teeth upon the leather, one ear pointing to the sky as his tail started wagging.
Is that Ilyitch?
The dog blinked.
Your Boy? Is that your Boy coming?
… no
Yukiko strained against the weakened strap, finally tearing it loose, tugging at the bindings on her ankles as the footsteps arrived in the hallway outside. She was up and coiled in the shadows as the handle turned and the door opened wide.
A figure limped into the gloom, and she struck, wrapping the bedsheet over its head and kicking the back of its knee. The figure dropped to the ground with the whine of pistons and a muffled cry of pain. She grabbed the contraption on his belt and tore it from its holster. The figure pulled the tangled sheet away from his face and turned to face her, and she recognized Piotr, pale as the sheet she’d wrapped him in, hands reaching for the ceiling.
“Stop!” His one good eye locked upon the device in her hand. “Don’t!”
Yukiko realized the man was drunk; the reek of liquor on his breath and skin so strong he might have bathed in it. She pointed the contraption at his head, finger poised over what she hoped was the trigger.
“What are you doing here?” she growled.
“Please.” He motioned to the hallway. “Please. I am wanting for you.”
“Why? What do you want with me?”
“Using you.” He licked his lips, gaze roaming from head to toe. “The body. Using for the body.”
“My body?”
He reached up, put his hands on her shoulders, ran them down over her breasts. Yukiko took a step back, lip curling in disgust.
“Please.” Piotr looked her up and down, put his finger to his lips. “Wanting you. Come for me. We must come.”
“You sick bastard,” she growled.
“Sick?” The man frowned. “No get sick, is—”
Her knee collided with his crotch midsentence, her elbow with his jaw. His head twisted across his shoulders, spittle and blood spraying between split lips, eyes rolling up in their sockets as he hit the concrete with a wet thud. Red hopped off the bed and snuffled at the man’s face, licking his nose with a hopeful wag of his tail.
killed!?
No, I didn’t.
She massaged the pain in her knuckles, stared at the gaijin with utter contempt.
Although I should. Godsdamned pervert. He’s old enough to be my father.
A quick search of the man’s clothing revealed his carved fish pipe, a satchel of the strange leaf that gaijin all seemed to smoke, and a ring of iron keys. She was eyeing off the strange weapon in her hand when Red heard Ilyitch’s footprints in the corridor. She stood and pointed the device at the doorway, not knowing how her benefactor might react upon seeing his unconscious comrade.
Ilyitch stopped at the threshold, frowning. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw Yukiko and the contraption coiled in her hands. He raised one eyebrow, letting the three satchels he was carrying fall to the ground. Catching sight of Piotr collapsed beside her, he shuffled forward with hands raised, crouching and searching for the man’s pulse. A stream of nonsensical words followed, hissed through clenched teeth, accompanied by furious hand gestures.
Yukiko pushed the picture of Piotr’s attempted assault into his mind, the image of his hands pawing her chest. The boy fell silent, looked at his fallen comrade with an uneasy expression. He put a comforting hand on her shoulder but she shied away, and Ilyitch let his arm drop. Turning to the satchels he’d brought with him, he knelt and rummaged inside the largest. He tossed Yukiko a dirty red coverall, heavy boots, and a yellow rubber rainskin. Not needing to be told, Yukiko slipped into the coverall and rainskin (too big), sat on the bed and buckled up the boots (also too big). She pulled the hood over her head, tugged the hem-ties as tight as she could.
Ilyitch had two coils of thick rope looped over his shoulders. He peeled one off and hung it around her neck, hefted one of the satchels, handed her another. The bag was heavy, stinking of raw fish. She guessed it was Buruu’s dinner, and she was momentarily overcome with gratitude for this strange boy with tarnished silver eyes.
She stepped up and kissed his cheek, careful of the swollen, purple bruise. His skin was salty smooth against her lips.
“Thank you, Ilyitch,” she said.
The gaijin shot her a pretty smile, scratching at the base of his skull and blushing. She stooped to pat Red, let him lick her nose.
You stay here, all right?
can’t come with you?
Not unless you can fly.
flew here
You did?
from houses on the water
Houses?
so many so loud!
“Yukiko.”
Hearing Ilyitch say her name pulled her from the dog’s mind. The boy nodded toward the door, motioned for her to follow.
Good-bye, Red. I’m sorry about before. For making you be bad.
She gave him an affectionate scratch behind his ears.
You’re a gooddog. Always.
you goodgirl too
A faint, grim smile.
Not that good.
Hood pulled low over her eyes, she followed the gaijin from her cell.
* * *
“You can’t be serious!”
Shrieking gales snatched the words from her mouth, dragging them off to drown in the sideways rain. Cautious feet had brought them up an auxiliary stairwell near the catchment room and from there onto the roof. The storm was so heavy it seemed night had fallen, and the glow of grubby tungsten was all that stood between them and almost pitch blackness.
Black clouds rolled overhead, thunderous, flashes of lightning catching the world in freeze-frame. All around them, copper spires stretched into the sky, twin cables as thick as her wrist leading off into the dark. She could hear the ocean below, waves crashing against the structure and shivering it in its moorings. The cables hummed in the wind; a lonely, metallic dirge over the percussion of Raijin’s drums.
Ilyitch laughed and handed her the contraption, took another from the storage locker at the base of the lightning spire. Yukiko stared at the device he’d given her, stomach sinking toward her toes.
It was solid iron, slippery with rain and grease. Four grooved rubber wheels lined up along a cross-shaped bar, fixed at either side with what looked like crank handles. A leather harness was affixed to a clip at the bottom of the crossbar, and Ilyitch was already strapping himself in. Yukiko had a dreadful feeling she knew where this was going, buckling herself into her own harness as the storm raged about them. She leaned against the railing as the wind buffeted her like a plaything. Lightning struck a spire out on the ocean to the south, raced along the cables up to the building’s roof. Yukiko flinched, shielding her eyes against the blue-white burn seething through the vast machine behind them. Goosebumps trawled her skin.
Ilyitch looked to the sky, then scampered up the lightning spire, using the copper coils like a ladder. He slung the contrapt
ion onto the double lengths of cable, grooved rubber wheels fitting snugly around the circumference of each. In one smooth motion he kicked off the tower, the device whizzing along the cables, sending him thirty feet out into the gloom. He dangled from the harness beneath the crossbar, reached up to the hand cranks and began turning them. The contraption wheeled slowly back toward the tower. Ilyitch spun the cranks the other way as if to demonstrate, the contraption traveling in the opposite direction. He looked at her and smiled.
It’s a flying fox.
Yukiko yelled over the wind.
“What happens if lightning hits our cables?”
A raised eyebrow.
“Lightning!” She pointed at the sky, then along the iron, gave her best impression of an explosion.
Ilyitch held his finger aloft, then hooked it through a metal pin at the front of his harness. Without a sound, he yanked the pin free and fell down into darkness.
Yukiko screamed, reached out for the falling gaijin, knowing he was too far away to save. But five feet into the fall, a rubber thong in the harness snapped taut, and Ilyitch jerked to a sudden halt. He held out both hands and grinned, twisting in the storm like a wind chime.
“You bastard,” Yukiko muttered.
Ilyitch climbed the tether hand over fist, swung up and hooked his legs over the cables to give himself enough slack to reinsert the pin.
He beckoned with one hand, yelling over the wind.
Yukiko licked her lips, tasted fresh salt, clean rain. Her knuckles were white on the railing, heart pounding against her ribs, fear-born nausea slicking her insides. Lightning arced across the clouds above, and she made the mistake of looking down. The ocean was a black, thrashing snarl, roaring and crashing in towers twenty feet high. But in the split second before the lightning faded and the blanket of gloom fell again, she saw the glint of a long, serpentine tail cutting through the waves.
Sea dragons.
Reaching out with the Kenning, she felt them below. Smooth as polished steel, cold and sharp and hungry. Their shape was ancient, stirring a primal fear inside her, much deeper than the thought of lightning striking the cables or the journey to come. Her mind shied away instinctively; a child fleeing into the safety of a parent’s bed.
Her hands were shaking.
But then she pictured Buruu, alone and bleeding, somewhere out there in the dark. And she grit her teeth and snatched up the flying fox, climbed the lightning spire and slung the device over the cables without another thought.
Holding her breath, eyes wide, she kicked out into the windswept dark.
29
A TREMBLING EARTH
Sometimes Hiro could still feel his hand.
He would wake in the deep of night, troubled by some itch or spasm, reaching toward it and finding only an empty mattress, the slippery kiss of silken sheets. In the dark, he would search the place where his arm should have been, groping about until he found the nub of flesh they had left him with: the puckered suture scars, the gristle-twisted knot of meat studded with bayonet fixtures, not even half a bicep remaining below the swell of his shoulder. And in the quiet and the still, he would picture her face and dream of all the ways he could break it.
“Yukiko.”
He breathed her name as if it were a toxic fume. And every time he woke to that nub of flesh, every time his hand itched and he couldn’t scratch it, he was poisoned anew. She was inside him. A cell-deep sepsis. A wound refusing to heal. Like the scars of blackened ash drifting away below his feet, the thrum of motors settling like cancer in his bones.
The ironclad Blessed Light was a thumbprint on the waking dawn, smoking black against bloody red as Lady Amaterasu crested the horizon and set fire to the sky. Hiro stood at her prow, half a dozen Iron Samurai looming around him, the sunrise tinting their bone-white armor immolation-red. The Daimyo of the Tora clan clasped his hands behind his back, sea-green eyes upon the tortured soil of Jukai province below.
The snowcapped spires of the Tōnan Mountains lay to the west, and Hiro knew somewhere amidst those peaks crouched the impregnable perch of First House—the heart of the Lotus Guild in Shima. It was there the Guild had begun, two centuries ago, just after Kazumitsu I took his throne. When the Tiger, Dragon, Phoenix and Fox zaibatsu began consuming the lesser clans; the blood of Falcon, Panda, Serpent and their fellows just a feast for the Four.
The first production-grade crops of blood lotus had been cultivated here, centuries ago. Once this had been the most fertile region in all of the Imperium, but now all was ashen earth and black smoke curling from the cracks—as if a master painter had spent his last on a landscape of rarest beauty, and some jealous lover had smudged inch-thick handfuls of charcoal onto the canvas, drying and splitting in the noonday sun. On maps, the ruined land was still named Jukai province—a name meaning “Evergreen.” But Shima’s citizens knew it by another name.
The Stain.
“It’s getting worse.” Hiro glanced at the Guildsman beside him. “So much worse.”
Second Bloom Kensai refused to look down, bloody eyes fixed on the proving grounds ahead. The rising sun kissed his perfect, metal cheek, the smooth features of a gilded youth retching up breather cables, his hulking atmos-suit spitting fumes and hissing with every breath. A child’s head atop a monster’s body.
“All will be well once inochi supplies are restored.” Kensai’s voice rumbled in Hiro’s gut. “But now you see why the war must be renewed. We need more prisoners, Shōgun. More gaijin to feed the lotus. And more land to plant it.”
Hiro frowned, his mind turning to dark places. “Is there no other way? Some other—”
“No.” Kensai folded his arms. “Sacrifices must be made. The lotus must bloom.”
“It troubles me to think—”
“Nature knows not of mercy. The blood of the meek slakes the conqueror’s thirst. This is not a law unique to the Guild. This is the way of all things, Shōgun.”
“Do not call me that.”
“And why not?”
“Because I am not Shōgun. Just because two clanlords have deigned to attend my wedding, does not guarantee they will swear allegiance.”
“They will kneel before you, young Lord. All of them.”
“And if not? How will the clans fight the Kagé or the gaijin if we spend our strength fighting each other? You wish to craft me a throne of my countrymen’s bones?”
“You need not fight the other clans, Shōgun. All they require is a rallying point. A banner grand and terrifying enough to stand behind.”
Kensai pointed into the distance.
“And so we give it to you.”
Hiro looked at the proving grounds, coalescing out of the ashen haze ahead. Forges and smelting plants rising like blood blisters behind a barbed-wire forest, wreathed in smoke. Trains rolling on rusted tracks, hauling iron and coal from the Midland mines, broad roads of black gravel, dotted by watchtowers. The grounds swarmed with activity; atmos-suits moving to and fro, a hundred cutting torches twinkling like stars in the long-lost sky. Row upon row of armored machines, like soldiers at muster, fifteen feet high even in repose, scythe arms ending in sawtoothed chainblades. Four legs apiece, each one thick as tree trunks, skin gleaming yellow in the light of the scorching sun. Hundreds of them.
Hiro raised his eyebrows.
“Shreddermen suits?”
“The Kagé feather their nests in the Iishi forest,” Kensai said. “So we will leave no forest standing in our wake.”
Hiro squinted through the pall to the far end of the grounds; gantries and walkways built around a towering shadow. Cutting torches arced and spat, Lotusmen trailed bright blue flames around the hulking figure, rocket packs blazing. The Guildsmen were insects beside it—some vast sleeping giant, nodding off in a sea of mosquitoes, too enormous to feel their sting. Three hundred feet high, eight legs curled up beneath its bloated metal belly like a waiting spider. Saw-blade arms with teeth big as men, pistons tall as houses, great chimney stacks running down
its spine and piercing the sky like blades. The sound of its engines was a choir of earthquakes.
A machine. A colossus. A behemoth of black iron and blacker smoke.
Hiro stared in wonder. “What in the name of the gods…”
“Look now upon the doom of the Kagé.”
Hiro wiped the ash from his goggles, stared at the metal giant. It was beyond anything he’d dreamed. A looming, rumbling, cast-iron impossibility.
“The Shadows have their standard bearer,” Kensai continued. “Now we have ours. Our creation will be the rallying cry to unite the zaibatsu. Dragon, Phoenix, Fox: none are foolish enough to field an army against such a machine. They will fall into line, one after another, with you at their head. And you will lead them into the Iishi, and level every tree, crush every stone, until there are no more holes for the rebels to hide inside. You will avenge your Lord and restore your honor. You will kill the Impure one and the fools who follow her.”
Hiro licked his lips, tasted chi smoke. Adrenaline sour in the back of his throat. He struggled to swallow.
“It’s incredible.”
“It will be ready to march within weeks. All of Shima will tremble at its approach. You will march in the vanguard, that the other Daimyo will have no illusions about where the Guild’s allegiance lies. We will end this petty civil war and set the clan armies to task. The Kagé must be eliminated. And that Impure abomination must burn.”
Behind that perfect mask, Hiro could hear the smile in Kensai’s voice.
“And you said you did not enjoy surprises.” He bowed, hand over fist. “Shōgun.”
Hiro looked at the towering colossus of iron and smoke. He closed his eyes, inhaled the fumes, savored the taste on his teeth and tongue. He could feel the fingers on his missing hand itching, the iron arm they’d given him trembling in sympathy. A phantom reminder of all she’d taken from him. The promise of everything he would take from her.
“Does it have a name?” he asked.
“Of course.”
Kensai spread his arms wide.
“Behold the Earthcrusher.”
* * *
The ground was a sea of ashes wreathed in blackened fumes. Every step raised a cloud of vapor, swirling about their ankles and hanging from their shoulders like shrouds. Dawn struggled to pierce the haze; sickly, vomit-gray, the air cold as winter snow. They were somewhere east of the Guild bastion of First House, miles deep into the plains where the first production-grade lotus crops had been grown, centuries ago, the earth ruined beyond repair.