by Claire Luana
“You don’t think we can just…walk out the front gates?” Hiro asked.
“Sure.” Emi looked back at him, rolling her eyes. “If you want Kai to know exactly where we’re going and why.”
He followed silently, content to let her lead the way. It was fortunate this area hadn’t collapsed completely from the earthquake. It must have been sturdily made.
Ryu had grudgingly agreed to stay behind after a significant amount of cajoling. He was too conspicuous. Hiro had dressed in nondescript clothing and had loaned Emi a cloak. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they were recognized as burners, but it was better if they went without notice.
As they made their way through the dark crypt, Hiro reveled in the cool air on his skin, despite the musty smell. It was still unnaturally hot outside. As they reached the corner of the crypt, Emi whispered a word while pressing on a stone statute of a sleeping woman. With a grinding noise, a piece of the wall slid back obediently.
“Afraid to give away all your secrets?” he joked.
“We have to keep some mystery,” she retorted smoothly, but her cheeks had colored under the light of her moon orb. Old prejudices were hard to kill.
The dark tunnel from the crypt opened into a stone courtyard nestled in the shadow of the citadel’s white walls.
Hiro fought down his growing sense of unease as he followed Emi out of the tunnel. Kyuden had never been a utopia, even in the best of times. But now, it seemed degraded, its civilization unraveling even in the few days since the earthquake.
Many of the oldest buildings had been shaken off their foundations, crumbling into the streets. People had moved the rubble to open narrow paths through the mess, but Emi and Hiro found themselves clambering over fallen stones, mortar and wood. There was no way a horse, let alone a cart, could get through the city, and they were trying to follow a once-busy road.
They passed through a market square and the scene was even more troubling. Many of the stalls sat empty and hollow, others smashed or upended. Those vendors that remained offered no more than limp vegetables or small bags of grain. Burly bodyguards bristling with steel were necessary to keep the hungry masses from even these meager offerings.
As Hiro watched, a young boy darted past one guard and managed to grab a small, sickly crab apple. Retribution was swift. The guard neatly bludgeoned the boy with a stout stick the length of his meaty forearm, and the boy crumpled to the ground like a paper doll.
Hiro halted, eying the bodyguard, who now stooped to retrieve the apple. Hiro could take him.
Emi grabbed Hiro by the arm and tried to pull him along. “We can’t get involved in every sob story,” she said. “The boy should have known better than to try something with the guard right there.”
“He’s hungry,” Hiro said. “He’s only a boy.”
“They’re all hungry,” Emi said. “The kid won’t last five minutes on the street if he doesn’t learn to use his brain. He’s probably new hungry. He’ll either learn or die, whether we help him or not.”
Hiro raised an eyebrow at Emi as she dropped his arm and continued up the street. Her cold regard for the boy’s foolish gamble gave him new insight into her past. With a final guilty glance at the boy moaning on the cobblestones, he jogged after Emi.
As they passed through the Meadows, the normal foul smell of the area was compounded. For now there was not just human waste in the street, but bodies.
He covered his mouth, feeling the bile rise in his throat.
“Spotted fever,” Emi said. “They’re supposed to be burning the bodies. I’ll have moonburners sent in here to move them.”
As they continued walking, Hiro grew numb to the suffering around him. Hungry. Homeless. Dying. Displaced. Angry. He saw sorrow and weariness in many eyes, but in others he saw violence. Outrage. Those emotions always found an outlet.
And it seemed they had found it as they rounded a corner into a large square filled with a torch-wielding mob. A dirty man was standing on a chair at the far side of the square addressing the crowd.
Emi pulled her hood lower over her silver hair. “The bar Daarco’s at is right through here.”
“Let’s stick to the shadows,” Hiro said. He took her hand. “Stay close.”
As they wove along the edges of the crowd, Hiro caught snippets of the speech.
“These natural disasters, the hunger, the heat—they are a divine judgment against us! Tsuki has turned her back on us because we have displeased her! We have abandoned our divine calling to kill the sunburners! Tsuki commanded us to destroy them and instead we lay with them!”
Hiro glanced at Emi, whose look of disgust mirrored his own. “This guy knows nothing,” she growled. “He’s riling everybody up for no good reason.”
“People grasp for power where they can,” Hiro whispered.
They passed through the crowd unmolested and slipped through the thick tavern door of the bar.
Hiro’s eyes adjusted to the dim light of the tavern after a moment, but he couldn’t say the same about his nose. Smells of stale beer and urine, unwashed bodies and pipe smoke assailed his senses.
“There,” Emi said, seemingly unfazed by the dingy bar or its even dingier patrons.
Hiro followed her finger and saw Daarco, his cloak dark in the grimy candlelight.
They wove through the tables, boots crunching on nutshells and gods-only-knew-what-else.
They sidled up to the bar on either side of Daarco. His eyes were closed and his head hung.
Hiro placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Daarco.”
Daarco whirled upright, laying a wicked-looking blade against Hiro’s throat in a blink.
CHAPTER 26
Hiro held his hands aloft, not daring to move. “Easy, friend. We come in peace.” The sour smell of whiskey lingered on Daarco’s breath, exuded from his very pores.
Daarco’s bloodshot eyes registered recognition, and he returned the knife to a sheath hidden in his sleeve. When he turned around and saw Emi, he grunted in surprise, smoothing a hand over his greasy hair.
“What’re you doing here?” Daarco said.
“We’re here to bring you back to the citadel before anyone realizes you’re missing,” Hiro said.
“Back?” Daarco said. “Why would I go back? They think I freed that moonburner general. They’ll string me up.”
“By disappearing, you look doubly guilty,” Emi said with an exasperated sigh. “We were ready to plead your case, find out who really did it, and now you go running off, making it seem like you have something to hide.”
“Nothing to hide,” he said. “Just done. Besides. If I got anywhere near that general, I wouldn’t have freed her. I woulda killed her.”
“There’s truth to that,” Hiro muttered.
“What do you plan to do?” Emi asked, forging ahead. “Where will you go? You don’t even have money to buy your own whiskey.”
Daarco shrugged. “I’ve got a sword. There’s always work for a man who can kill.”
“Come back with us,” Hiro pleaded. “Kai has a necklace that tells truth from lies. If you truly didn’t free Geisa, she’ll believe you.”
“Even if she did believe me, what’s the point? Nothing for me there. I’m a liability. The forest showed me that. Had to be rescued by women.”
“The forest kicked all of our asses,” Emi said. “I almost died. You don’t see me slinking off.”
Daarco rounded on her, his voice steely. “All I’m good at is killing moonburners. And if I can’t do that, it’s time for me to go.” Their noses almost touched now, but Emi didn’t back down. Hiro found he had his hand on the dagger at his waist.
“Just because you’ve never done something else doesn’t mean you can’t,” Emi said, her voice strangely kind, considering the menace in her posture. “Doesn’t mean you couldn’t find something new to live for.”
“I’m a soldier without a war,” Daarco said. “It’s better I leave.”
“There’s a war l
eft to fight,” Hiro said, his voice low and hard. “The war that’s been waged against us for centuries, but we were too ignorant to see it. You didn’t see the seishen elder, but it explained everything to us. The tengu have been pitting the sun and moonburners against each other for generations. The very reason we were at war, that we hated each other, was because of them. They’re trying to destroy our world, and we’re the only thing that can stop them. So they turned us against each other. The reason your father was killed by a moonburner…was because of them. Because they desired our suffering, our destruction,” Hiro said. “And now they mean to finish the job. Unless we stop them.”
“We were enemies,” Emi said. “But only because we were too blind to see who the real enemy was. No longer.”
“Help us kill the tengu,” Hiro said. “If you truly believe that all you can do is kill, then you were born for this. This will be the most important battle we ever fight.”
Daarco looked back and forth between Emi and Hiro. He took a deep breath. “It’s true what you say? About why we fight?”
“Yes,” Hiro said. “I swear it on my honor.”
“You’re not going to give me a choice in this, are you?”
“No,” Emi said, her eyes dark. “We aren’t.”
Hiro downed the whiskey remaining in Daarco’s glass. “Let’s head back, my friend, and clear your name.”
Emi threw a coin down on the bar and headed for the door. Hiro and Daarco followed her, Daarco unsteady on his feet.
As Emi pulled open the door, a cacophony washed over them.
“The crowd’s getting out of control,” Emi remarked, trying to wind her way through men shouting and lofting torches and weapons in the air.
The man at the front of the crowd had reached a fever pitch. “The sunburners are an abomination! If our queen will not destroy them, she is not fit to rule!”
The crowd roared in agreement, the people pumping their fists in the air, pounding their chests and makeshift shields with fists and weapons.
“Men,” Emi said in disgust, but Hiro barely heard her as her comment was borne away by the sounds of the crowd.
“Outta my way,” Daarco’s slurred voice said from behind him. Hiro whirled around, just in time to see Daarco’s fist connect with a man’s jaw. The man dropped like a stone. But the damage was done. The movement had caused Daarco’s hood to fall back.
“Here’s a sunburner right here!” a man exclaimed. Daarco was now standing in a semi-circle of hostile men, looking in shock upon their fallen companion. The man who had shouted was thin and pale, but his hand looked strong enough as it tightened on the handle of his carving knife.
Hiro tried to push back through the crowd but couldn’t make it through before Daarco, with a look of withering disgust, punched the man in the gut. The weight and power of Daarco’s blow toppled the man like a tree, and he stumbled over the other fallen man, crumpling to the ground.
“Who’s next?” Daarco asked, cracking his knuckles.
Hiro took advantage of the stunned silence of the crowd to leap into the opening and grab Daarco’s arm. “Time to go,” he said.
They plunged through the crowd as the men behind them came to life with a roar. Daarco and Hiro slipped through the press of bodies while their pursuers tangled with the masses.
Emi, who was waiting with wide eyes, took off as they reached her, elbowing her way through the crowd. She cut into an alley at the side of the square and they fled at full speed, the voices of the crowd biting at their heels. “Burner spies amongst us! Don’t let them get to the citadel!”
Emi seemed to have a sixth sense for the twists and turns of the Meadows. Though the back streets all looked the same to Hiro, he could tell they were steadily approaching the white walls of the citadel.
To their left, the sounds of the roiling mass of people echoed—shouts, stomping feet, and even sporadic screams as an unfortunate bystander got in their way.
Just when Hiro thought his lungs would burst, Emi came to an abrupt stop in a doorway behind a pile of trash. Daarco stopped behind them and vomited wetly onto the cobblestones. He gasped for breath, his hands on his knees and his head hanging.
“The tunnel is past the mob,” Emi said, biting her lip. “Maybe we can go over. I’m going to scout.”
She shimmied up the side of the building, making handholds of the jutting pieces of brick and mortar. Daarco had righted himself and wiped his mouth, not taking his eyes from Emi’s retreating form.
Emi’s face peeked over the roof. “Come on,” she said. “I think I can get us across.”
“I think I’ll stay here and let them kill me,” Daarco muttered, eying the climb.
“Come on,” Hiro said, pulling Daarco to the wall.
Hiro climbed up the side of the building with less agility than Emi. Daarco barely made it up, losing his footing and dangling for a precarious moment before he regained it.
Emi and Hiro reached over the roof and hauled him over the side.
The three of them lay there for a moment, panting. Emi popped up first. “Come on. No time for rest.”
She led them across several uneven rooftops until they reached a point where two old buildings leaned towards each other.
Emi got a running start and leaped across the gap, stumbling to her knees. She stood and dusted herself off, motioning for them to follow.
Hiro wiped his brow and took a deep breath, following her. The gap looked farther than it was, but he made it across with room to spare.
He looked back at Daarco, who looked even more green than he had after vomiting.
“Come on,” Emi said. “It’s not that far.”
“I don’t think I can make it,” he said flatly.
Hiro looked down. The street below them was filled with a roiling mass of people holding aloft torches and makeshift weapons.
“You can’t go down,” Hiro hissed. “It’ll be just like the palace back in Kistana! Remember the jump to the cherry tree?”
“I was fifteen years younger and several stone lighter back then,” Daarco said, shaking his head.
“You going to let a moonburner show you up?” Emi taunted.
Daarco growled and backed up.
Fifteen years older but just as easily goaded, Hiro thought with a smile.
Daarco ran towards the edge and leaped, but his foot slipped as he took off. He thudded against the other edge, his arms grasping at the dusty rooftop. Hiro and Emi lunged forward, grabbing his arms before he slipped over the edge. He was heavy, but they managed to pull him onto the roof.
They crossed the roof and made their way down a pile of rubble, dropping into a courtyard. In the center of the courtyard stood a fountain of a woman pouring water into the mouth of a kneeling man. It was where the passage from the crypt connected. He breathed a sigh of relief. They were safe.
They hurried back through the passageway and burst out of the crypt onto the citadel grounds.
Emi sprinted towards the front gate. The sounds of the mob were swelling outside the walls.
“Close the gates!”
CHAPTER 27
Kai had tossed and turned for hours in frustration after discovering that not only had Daarco vanished from his rooms, but Hiro was missing as well. But it seemed that she had eventually fallen asleep, for when she woke, there was moonlight streaming through the windows. Quitsu was nowhere to be found.
She crawled out of bed, feeling just as groggy as when she had laid down. How long had she slept? She padded out of her room into the hallway, looking for one of her maids. The hallway was deserted, the moon orbs dark.
Her senses fired in alarm. This was not her hallway. She was in the spirit world.
Kai’s heart hammered as a scraping noise sounded down the corridor. In the pool of moonlight coming through the window at the far end of the hall, a black shadow stretched across the floor. A taloned hand curled around the corner, followed by a tall black shape.
Kai’s scream caught in her throa
t and she fled towards the stairs, flying down them two at a time. An inhuman scream roared behind her as the tengu took up the chase, its taloned feet scratching and scrambling for purchase on the polished wood floor.
Kai burst out the front door of her quarters in a blind panic, her head whipping around, searching for a safe place. A hard hand clamped down on her face from behind and another hand pulled her backwards into the tall bushes to the left of the building. She screamed into the hand and struggled like a wild thing, all reason fleeing in her panic. Her burning, her weapons training, all of it had given way to the primal urge to free herself.
“Quiet,” hissed a feminine voice. “It’s me!”
Kai looked over her shoulder to the welcome sight of Hamaio. Kai relaxed and nodded in response to the woman’s questioning look.
“You scared—“ Kai began, but the woman hissed softly and pointed.
They both fell silent in the bushes, sinking down as low as they could, stilling their breathing. The tengu had emerged from the building and was sniffing the air with its misshapen snout. Perhaps it had once been a large cat, but now it was a twisted black thing of bone and membrane hulking on two legs, its padded paws split into ghastly toes.
It turned towards them as it continued to snuffle, its red eyes shining with a perverse intelligence. Kai held her breath, wishing she could stop her heart from beating. Its tempo droned so loud in her ears that she feared the tengu could hear the very blood pumping in her veins.
It took a step towards them and Hamaio tensed.
Another tengu across the courtyard barked, somehow communicating with its brethren. The tengu near them yowled in response, and their would-be attacker dropped onto all fours and ambled across the courtyard.
Both women let out sighs of relief.
“Come on,” Hamaio whispered.
They kept to the shadows as they crept through the darkened citadel.
“There are so many of them,” Kai whispered. “I thought you said the citadel was protected. That I shouldn’t be able to come to the spirit world when I’m here.”