by Jay Kristoff
Hana was bleeding, wound at her thigh, another on her forearm. But the red, red pulse thundered in her veins and the smoke and death filled her lungs and she knew, she knew with every ounce of herself that though this might not be right, at least it was just, and though the walls and ceiling might be painted red, this was the closest thing to a home she’d ever known.
Propellers surged at the sky-docks, the Guild fleet casting off and pushing their engines into the redline. The Kitsune fleet was moving from their own spires on the western bank, firing their net-throwers and snarling engines, ships on both sides listing and crippled.
The Guild ironclads laid down withering fire, forcing Buruu and Kaiah back from the largest and grandest of the sky-ships. A hundred and fifty feet long, name painted down its flanks in bold kanji: Lotus Eater. It was a floating fortress studded with shuriken turrets, lumbering upward and filling the skies around it with death.
“That must be the Second Bloom’s sky-ship!” Yukiko shouted.
“Should we let him get away?”
Kaiah snarled, her bloodlust flowing into Hana and pounding in her chest.
– SHOULD KILL NOW. STRIKE WHILE WEAK. –
“I don’t think we could get close!” Yukiko yelled. “It’s too well armed. Besides, we have to regroup. Speak to the rebels. Dozens of them died today because of Kaori’s bullshit—we have to mend that bridge. Having them as allies is going to be more useful than killing the Second Bloom of a ruined chapterhouse.”
Hana nodded, sitting up on Kaiah’s back and fighting against the impulse to tear anything moving from the sky. The Kitsune fleet shadowed the fleeing Guild ships, but they seemed more interested in protecting the city than preventing the Guild’s departure. Two crippled Guild ships were being boarded, crews resisting with suicidal abandon. The skies echoed with chatter of shuriken fire.
“We should help the Kitsune,” Hana said. “Those Guild crews aren’t going—”
“Hana…” Yukiko pointed to the Lotus Eater. “Look.”
Hana found herself falling behind Kaiah’s eyes without thinking, her vision knife-sharp though the glare and smoke. She could see figures at a shuriken turret on top of the Lotus Eater’s inflatable—two Guildsmen struggling with a third. As she watched, the lone fighter kicked one assailant in the chest, sending him tumbling out into the open air. The falling Guildsman fired his rocket pack, bringing himself level with the deck. He shouted to the apparently oblivious crew, pointed at the struggle going on above their heads.
The arashitora circled closer, watching as a half-dozen Lotusmen leaped over the railings and rocketed up toward the melee. In the meantime, the struggling Guildsman had gained the upper hand, tearing a handful of cable from his opponent’s backpack and kicking him out into the void. His atmos-suit was stained with soot and smoke, but certainly not painted red.
Hana shouted over the wind and engine roar. “If he’s not a rebel, why are they fighting?”
Yukiko shrugged, shouted back. “Infiltrator?”
The Guildsman climbed into the shuriken-thrower turret and aimed the barrel at the inflatable. The ’thrower fired, punching through reinforced canvas. The air was filled with the screech of escaping hydrogen as the compartment began deflating. Standing at the tear’s edge, the Guildsman tore the mechabacus from his chest in a blinding shower of red-hot sparks.
“Death to the Serpents!” he cried.
“Oh Gods…” Hana breathed.
A tiny flare of light; a bubble of flame, white hot. A split second of not-sound, nothing like silence. And then an explosion, a jagged shear of flame spreading faster than a brushfire on a summer’s day. Hana held up her hand to blot out the light, the Lotus Eater shrieking with a voice of breaking timber and burning hydrogen and dying men. The great ship plummeted downward, trailing a skyful of smoke, ending with a screaming, nose-first dive into a fallow field two miles south of Yama’s walls. The earth shook as the pair embraced like hateful lovers, the tremor lasting a good thirty seconds longer than it should have, dust and tiles skittering from the Yama rooftops and smashing on the cobbles below.
The rest of the Guild fleet tore away as fast as their engines would take them, south toward the Tōnan mountains and the fortress of First House.
He killed himself.
Hana’s eye was locked on the Lotus Eater’s ruins, the smoking hole in the earth now serving as a mass grave. Kaiah’s thoughts rumbled in her skull.
– WHAT? –
That Lotusman on the inflatable. He sacrificed himself to kill Yama’s Second Bloom.
– BRAVE. –
I wouldn’t call it brave. I’d call it sad.
She turned to Yukiko. “How could he do that?”
The Stormdancer’s eyes were fixed on the smoking wreckage, her face pale as ash. She seemed older then—the weight of the world smothering the girl whose skin she wore, leaving her weary beyond all years and sleep. She raised her voice above the howling wind.
“This is war, Hana,” she said. “It’s bloody and ugly and people are going to die. Maybe you. Maybe me. Hells, maybe no one here gets out alive.”
“Could you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Kill yourself like that? Walk gladly into the fire for a small victory?”
“I’m not sure there are small victories in a fight to the death. With stakes this high, every step closer to the finish is worth it.”
“But could you die for it? Knowing you’ll never see the end?”
Hana looked across the blackened skies to the girl on the back of her thunder tiger—this girl who’d slain a Shōgun, ended a dynasty, prompted a nation to rise. She saw Yukiko’s hand pressed to her stomach.
“I don’t know.”
The hand dropped to her side.
“I’m guessing we’ll find out before the song is sung.”
7
IN THE SHADOW OF COLOSSUS
Fifteen days.
Hiro stood on his bedchamber balcony, watching the city twitching below. The orchestra of engines and traffic and people was occasionally interrupted by a pitiful song—the sparrows who’d survived the Kagé attack, clipped feathers now singed from the fires that had almost gutted the Shōgun’s palace. No matter how he tried, Hiro couldn’t get the stink off his skin. He’d scrubbed so hard in the bathhouse last night the water was tinged red when he finished.
This city was a shell, people wandering the streets in a daze. Hiro had ordered the imperial coffers opened to alleviate the suffering, but the bakery lines still stretched around the block, prices spiraling higher as Chapterhouse Kigen pumped every drop of chi north to fuel the Earthcrusher. The black market was thriving, the yakuza gangs who ran it growing more daring by the day. And Hiro could spare no thought for any of it.
North. A fifteen-day march in the shadow of a colossus, into the depths of the Iishi mountains. An ending. To the weight of this false arm they’d drilled into his body, to this circlet of shame they’d placed on his head. Fifteen days would see the end of it all.
Gods, it seemed a lifetime.
Why did he still care? Why did the thought of choking the life out of her fill his dreams? He was dead already—the ashes of funeral offerings painted on his face every morning. Death’s hue painted onto the armor he’d worn with such pride in fleeting yesterdays. It had meant so much to him once. But what had Yukiko meant?
An infatuation was all it had really been. An intoxication faded in the light of next dawning. And yet, it had brought the nation to war. Clan against clan. Blood against blood. This avalanche that had started so small—with a tear-stained kiss after Yoritomo littered the arena with severed feathers. They were teenagers. Maker’s breath, they were children.
Who in the name of the gods did they think they were, to drag the nation to ruin?
The rap of soft knuckles on hard wood. The feather-light breath of his major-domo.
“Forgiveness, Daimyo. You have honored guests.”
“I am about to depa
rt for the staging grounds and war. You wish me to have tea with some bureaucrat before I leave?”
“No, great Lord. Forgiveness but—”
“Who is it?” Hiro turned on his cowering servant. “Some fat neo-chōnin wailing about the rising cost of slaves?”
“Lord Tora Orochi.”
Hiro’s belly flopped into his boots, blood drying up in his veins. The world was suddenly several shades too bright. Too loud. Too real.
After all this time …
His voice was a whisper under the broken sparrow song.
“Father…”
* * *
The throne room was as silent as Yoritomo’s tomb. Muddy light filtered through tall windows, long slabs of illumination painted by a clumsy brush in the pall of ashes. A blood-red carpet marked the path to the Shōgun’s throne, a charred breeze thumbing through the high tapestries. The throne itself was immense; a gaudy lump of golden tigers and silken cushions throwing a clawed shadow across the floor.
Hiro hadn’t ever mustered the courage to actually sit in it.
Two figures waited at its feet. A woman, arrayed in a jûnihitoe as red as heart’s blood, embroidered with golden flowers. Her face was painted white, jet hair swept into a layered coil pierced with glittering needles. She glanced up as Hiro entered the hall, and he met her eyes for the briefest of moments, dull pain in his chest.
Mother.
His eyes fell on the figure to her left, and all sense of joy or sadness fled, black nothingness in their wake. A voice from childhood, harsh with rebuke. A raised hand, and the memory of shameful tears.
Father.
He sat in the chair. That cursed chair that was his home, his concubine, his sentence. The breather over his face was a heavy, graceless thing of rubber and brass, affixed with fat buckles behind his head, long, graying hair still swept back in warrior’s braids. But no warrior sat in that chair, no. A shell of one, perhaps, who dreamed of days before the gaijin rotor-thopters blasted his ship from the skies, left him twisted in the wreckage on some Morcheban plain.
His face was a knot of scars. His left arm desiccated, strapped in place. A bulky knot of pipes and bellows was affixed to his little iron throne, his thin chest moving with a measured cadence, like clockwork, like the arm at Hiro’s side, like the voice in Hiro’s head.
“Lord Orochi-san,” he said. “Lady Shizuka-san. You honor me with your presence.”
“Great Daimyo.” His father’s voice was a tortured wheeze, each pause punctured by a metallic rasp. “Blessing of Lord Izanagi … to your house.”
His mother sank to her knees, pressed her forehead to the floorboards. “Great Daimyo.”
Hiro stepped forward, hand outstretched. “Mother, do not—”
A sharp glance from his father, halfway between outrage and horror. The look dragged Hiro to a halt, caught him by the seat of his pants and hauled him to his feet, the pain of the skinned knee or bruised knuckles or aching back forgotten.
“A samurai does not show emotion. No pain. No fear. Never.”
Hiro covered his fist and bowed.
“Lady Shizuka-san. You honor your Daimyo. Rise, please.”
He could see it in her face: how she longed to throw her arms about him and shower his face with kisses as she’d done when he was a boy. But instead, she rose slowly, eyes to floor, mouth pressed firmly shut. As was fitting. As was proper.
“To what do I owe the honor of your presence in the Tiger’s Palace?” Hiro said. “The journey from Blackstone province could not have been easy given your … condition.”
“It is no trouble, great Daimyo.” Orochi waved his good hand as if shooing away an insect. “News has reached us that you have consigned yourself to suicide … after the Shōgun’s assassin is dispatched…”
Hiro looked at his mother then, but her eyes were still downcast. Could they have come here to talk him out of it? To step aside and leave all this behind?
“I … that is to say we…” Orochi drew a shivering breath, “… wished you to know…”
Could they?
“Your actions make us proud … Make me proud.”
No.
Hiro found himself speaking in a voice that sounded nothing like his own.
No, of course not.
“You honor me, Lord Orochi.”
“The shame of your failure … has been difficult … for your mother and I to endure. Many nights I sat with blade in hand … contemplating my own seppuku in protest that you … had not followed your Lord into death.”
Orochi pressed the control lever beneath his withered hand, the chair trundling forward on fat rubber wheels. He stopped close enough for Hiro to see the gleam in his eyes.
“But I knew you would do … the honorable thing. That you and the Elite would spare your families the disgrace … of your failure.”
Wooden swords in the yard outside their home. Wind blowing in the lotus stalks. No room for tears. No place for pain. To wield the long and the short swords, and then to die.
“I will not fail, Father. Our honor will be restored.”
“I know it.” A nod. “You are samurai … my son.”
“Gracious husband,” said his mother. “The letter?”
A cold glance over Orochi’s shoulder silenced her like a slap.
“Letter?” Hiro looked between the pair. “What letter?”
“You sent it in the summer,” Orochi finally wheezed. “But with news of Yoritomo’s assassination … we presumed you would have committed suicide. Thus, we did not reply.”
“You mentioned…” The woman looked at her son, desperate hope in her eyes. “You mentioned a girl you had met? Someone you wished to court?”
Orochi cleared his throat. “Understand, we enquire to determine if there were any … promises made … Promises your family must honor once you are dead.”
She lay in his arms in the sweat-stained dark, cheek pressed against his chest. He could smell her hair, her perfume, the taste of her still wet upon his lips.
“When the Shōgun has calmed down,” he had said. “I will petition him for permission to court you. I have sent a letter to my father—”
“Court me?” Yukiko said. “What the hells for?”
“So I can be with you.”
“Hiro, you’re here with me right now,” she laughed.
Her kisses had tasted like summer …
“No,” Hiro said. “No promises were made. She is of no concern to you.”
“Good,” his father nodded. “This is good.”
They stood there, silence washing against him like black salt water in Kigen Bay. Corroding. Eroding. Wave after wave breaking on him with each passing breath, taking a piece of him away as it rushed back out to sea.
Riding on his father’s shoulders when he was too small to see above the lotus stalks, marveling at the world beyond their estates. Hefting his father’s sword for the first time, watching light kiss the blade. The day he’d been accepted into the Kazumitsu Elite, the only time he’d seen tears in his father’s eyes. All of it washing away, leaving only the stain. The burden. The failure he’d been taught to never, ever accept.
“I must leave for the staging grounds,” he found himself saying. “My men await.”
“Of course, Daimyo,” his father nodded. “Do not let us detain you.”
He swallowed. Bowed. “Good-bye, Father.”
Orochi bowed in return. No light in his eyes. No tremor in his voice.
“Good-bye, my son. Lord Izanagi give you the strength … to die well.”
He turned to the woman who had brought him into the world.
“… Good-bye, Mother.”
She broke then. Sank to her knees and wept, face hidden in her hands. Everything inside pressed him forward, the need to wrap her in his arms and tell her it would be all right, that it was not her fault. Everything inside him screamed he should move, speak, do something. Four whispered words from his father held him back.
“You shame me, w
oman…”
The weeping stopped, a door slammed shut, silence falling again. The moments ticking by in waves, every second spent standing there washing one more piece of him away. And when it was gone, when all he was had fled, what would be left?
What then would remain?
Without another word, he turned and stalked from the room.
8
LORD OF FOXES
The Guild rebels stood silent on the Kurea’s deck, Yama city still echoing with the explosions that had heralded their unveiling. A cluster of brass and blood. Scarlet splashes on their spaulders and faces, smudged with soot and smoke. No more than a dozen remaining.
Yukiko stood with Buruu, Akihito and Michi beside her. Hana and Kaiah were perched on the stern, the Blackbird’s crew and Kagé refugees gathered in a knot as far from the Guildsmen as possible. Yoshi sat alone, up on the foredeck, looking out over the ravaged metropolis below. Smoke-scent whispered in the air, tongued the back of Yukiko’s throat, clinging to Buruu’s feathers amidst the promise of impending rain.
Thunder rumbled to the north.
I should speak with them.
YOU WILL NEED TO DO MORE THAN SPEAK, SISTER.
Come with me?
ALWAYS.
They stepped forward, slow, Yukiko’s hands held up and out. The thunder tiger moved ahead, close enough that they still touched, tail curled upward as if he were stalking prey. She could feel him, hard as steel beneath feline grace, a roar bubbling just below his surface.
“I’m sorry,” she said, eyes upon the gathered Guildsmen. “I didn’t mean for it to be this way. I never wanted this to happen.”
They were a motley bunch. Three Lotusmen, stained with blood and ash. An Artificer with his single rectangular eye and toolbox skin. Two False-Lifers clad in glistening membranes of earth-brown, spider limbs unfurling from their backs.
Behind them stood a clutch of smaller figures clad in simple atmos-suits of soft leather and gleaming brass. Half a dozen in all, some no bigger than toddlers. Yukiko heard one snuffling; faint weeping distorted within its helm.
My gods, they’re children …