by Jay Kristoff
“Impure!” cried one of the Guildsmen.
“Impure!”
The old man cried out, arms twisted behind his back as he was marched to one of the Burning Stones. Wrists dragged above his head, slapped hard into hungry manacles smeared in charcoal leavings of the hundreds before him—women and children and young and old. The fanatics in the crowd raised their voices, fists to the sky. The merchant smiled and bowed as the Purifiers handed him his chi in small metal drums. Bought and paid for in blood.
“Burn him!”
“Impure! Impure!”
“Are there any more who would level accusation this day?” A Purifier held up his hands, calling to the crowd. “Any more tainted by the Spirit World’s stain, haunting this world of men? Bring them forth, that they may be tested and found as wanting as this wretch!”
An accusing finger was leveled at the old man, now shaking with terror.
“I only wanted to make the children smile! Gods have mercy!” He caught Yoshi’s eyes amidst the mob, pinned him in that terrified stare. “Please! Mercy!”
Mercy …
Yoshi felt the tsurugi’s hilt beneath his fingertips, hard and cool. His right hand around the iron-thrower at the small of his back, staring with stolen eyes at the tinder waiting beneath the old man’s feet. It’d be mercy to put a shot to him. Flat-out end him before the sparks started to fly. But then what? There might not be many bushi about, but a mob would see to him straight, and the Purifiers would make him squeal. Probably chain him to that stone in the old man’s place to sing in time while the flames danced over his skin.
The smart step was to ghost. Back to Kigen Station. Buy passage north with this yakuza iron. Get back to Hana and the war that would decide the future of the entire country …
And then what?
Lead an army? March in line? Send a corpse-rat horde against the Earthcrusher?
What then, boy?
A gutter-rat was what he was. This was his war. This city. This hole. This beautiful, ugly whore who’d suckled him when nowhere in the world felt like home. And if he was going to cash, it might as well be on home ground rather than some ash-choked battlefield. Might as well be for one of his own instead of a clan who would’ve gladly lit him up three months past.
Impure. Cursed. Tainted. Whatever. Something in this old man and Yoshi were the same. Something in the both of them, something the Guild wanted to eliminate. And whatever the reason, if the Guild wanted it gone, that meant it was worth fighting for.
Dying for?
Yoshi swallowed. He remembered the look in the woman’s eyes—the Gentleman’s wife screaming at the monster he’d almost become. He could still become. Even here. Even now.
MUCH CHANGES WITH THE SEASONS.
Buruu’s voice ringing in his skull, tinged with the taste of thunder.
THE SHAPE OF HEROES, CERTAINLY.
A sigh from the depths of his chest.
Fuck it, then.
He engaged the iron-thrower pressure.
Fuck it all.
Shoving through the mob, paper parasols and straw hats, black clothes and yellow grins. Feeling the sewer-children around him; a hundred eyes in back of his head. And he pushed out onto the mall’s edge, treading down the steps as the Purifier turned to glare with its glowing, blood-soaked eyes. Stare at this boy stepping lean and filthy toward him, bringing up his right hand, one little fistful of steel, and pulling gentle as a first kiss on the trigger.
The iron-thrower roared. A glass eye shattered, went dark. The Guildsmen spun in place and crumpled. The crowd roared. Panic. Outrage. Shock.
And then the world stopped making any kind of sense.
A burst of white light, spherical and blinding, right in the center of the Burning Stones. A soundless explosion, edges tinged with translucent, bloody red. A sudden stench of evaporating chi, the fuel lines in the Purifier’s atmos-suits splitting wide, spewing plumes of blue-black vapor. The Guildsmen spasmed, dropped to their knees beneath brass deadweight, the chattering mechabacii on their chests falling silent as shapes loomed out of the crowd.
Half a dozen in all. Three boys around Yoshi’s age—the first, sharp and quick with an angular face. The second, tall and swarthy, crooked features and a protruding lower jaw, as if someone had dropped him one too many times as a babe. A third, small and wiry—and none-too-hard on the eyes, if you’ll indulge for a moment—dark hair drawn back in braids.
The other three were a motley crew: a tall man with lean muscles and skin like a hungry ghost. A young boy, also pale as death fresh warmed. And the third, a woman—gods, an old woman—casting aside her cloak as eight long, chromed arms unfurled from her back.
But Yoshi’s eyes were on the three boys, raising their warclubs high. Each wore short-sleeved uwagi beneath their cloaks, heedless of the toxic rain, as if they wanted people to see the burn scars where their irezumi used to be.
No clan. No lord. No master.
Kagé.
The crowd rippled with panic, shock and dismay rising as the boys fell to with their warclubs, pounding up and down on the helpless Guildsmen until their helms split and the glowing eyes cracked black, and red, red, red seeped across the flagstones at their feet.
“We are the Kagé!” the first boy cried. “The clenched fist! The raised voice! The fire to burn away the Lotus Guild, and free Shima from the grip of their wretched weed!”
He pointed to the other three in his gang—the boy, the man, the woman and her razors.
“These folk were once Guild, now risen against the evil that breeds within that five-sided slave pit! If those born to the Guild and its lies have seen the truth of it, why can’t you?”
The boy looked amongst the crowd, narrowed stare finding the merchant who had turned the old man over, still clutching his barrels of chi.
“Why can’t you?”
Yoshi stumbled down the steps, ears ringing, eyes fixed on the iron boxes. As the crooked-faced boy unfastened the old man’s manacles, Yoshi pried the lid from one of the untouched vessels, peering inside. He ran his hand through it, dark particles rising off the surface and dancing like dust. Black and greasy, reeking of old blood and burning hair.
Ashes …
He looked at the box sundered by the Purifier’s testing ritual, split at the seams and spilling its guts over the benchtop. Scooping up a handful, he let it run from his fist, crumbling dry, turning to mud in his palm beneath the spattering black rain.
Dirt.
He blinked, giving an experimental sniff.
Just ordinary dirt.
What the bleeding hells …
“Bushimen.” The old woman’s warning to her comrades pulled Yoshi from his confusion. “More Guild. They’re coming.”
“Let’s go,” slurred the boy with the crooked face.
Yoshi reached out to the flint-black eyes stretched across the city, the thousand mongrel shapes in alleys and on corners, seeing all. The men in iron breastplates converging from north and east. The shapes in glittering brass, blue-black plumes trailing east to the chapterhouse that had spit them into the air. And he grabbed the boy who’d spoken to the crowd, pulling him up short as he turned to run.
“No,” Yoshi said. “That’s the way they’re coming from.”
The six rebels stared hard, eyes drifting from the iron-thrower still smoking in his hand to the Purifier whose brains he’d splattered across the cobbles.
“Do I know you?” said the boy.
“No, Kagé boy.” Yoshi tipped his hat. “But I know you. And Yukiko. And Kaori. And pretty little Michi. You and yours, all.”
The three boys blinked in amazement, shared a handful of confused glances.
“Time enough for the chit and the chat later, friends.”
Yoshi nodded south, back toward Docktown.
“For now, follow me.”
31
SEEING AND BELIEVING
The tent was as big as any house Hana had seen. A small palace suspended by poles as br
oad as tree trunks, the floor covered in dirty rugs and furs, fire burning bright in a pit of blackened stones. She blinked in the gloom, scarcely remembering to pull off her goggles as her eye adjusted to the darkness. A faint pink glow spilled into the dark as the storm swelled outside.
Hushed whispers. Hungry. Feminine.
Piotr stood behind her, the gaijin called Aleksandar beside her. It was still too much to think of him as her uncle. Too bizarre to look him in the face and see her own eyes, Yoshi’s lopsided smile. She’d left Kaiah standing watch outside, glaring at the ten thousand warriors the way a cat watches a legion of hungry mice.
- WALK CAREFULLY, HANA. -
Don’t worry. If I need you, I’ll call in a heartbeat.
She made out figures in the dark; a man in iron armor with a face too small for his brick-shaped head. He was surrounded by gaijin hammermen, wreathed in pelts of wolves and bears and beasts whose shape she didn’t know. At his feet sat six enormous hounds—the only living dogs she’d ever seen—growling softly. She held up her hand, touched their thoughts, and they stilled at once, stubby tails between their legs. They whined to her about the dirty rain, the poisoned air, how they missed their birthlands. She pushed comfort into their minds, a smooth and soothing caramel warmth, laced with the scent of Iishi green.
She saw two figures near the fire, standing so close they touched. A woman, perhaps thirty, clad in the beaten brass skins of Guildsmen, lightning etched into cheeks and chin, glaring at Piotr as if she wanted to gut him. But it was the other who’d spoken: a woman near fifty, face patterned with claw scars, too symmetrical to have been the work of an actual beast. Ash-blond hair was entwined with bone and polished teeth, black feathers about her shoulders.
Aleksandar took Hana’s hand, and with a reassuring squeeze, brought her into the firelight. Dozens of stares followed her, but her own was fixed on the women before her, their right irises glowing with the same watered-rose as her own.
“Hana Mostovoi,” Aleksandar said, and Hana barely recognized the name as hers. “I present Holy Mother Natassja, and Sacred Sister Katya.”
Hana stood tall despite the fear, her palms soaked to the wrists. The older woman spoke words she couldn’t comprehend; a language tangled in faded snatches of childhood memory.
“The Holy Mother says you are welcome here,” Aleksandar said. “Daughter of Anya, daughter of Sascha, daughter of Darya, Matriarch of House Mostovoi.”
“Gods above…” she breathed.
Aleksandar translated and the women hissed between themselves, shaking their heads. The old one stepped forth, squeezing Hana’s arms, poking her ribs as if she were meat in a market stall. And finally, as the girl flinched beneath her touch, the old woman pulled down the leather patch covering Hana’s missing eye. She felt naked, heat rising in her cheeks.
- I AM HERE. FEAR NOTHING. NO ONE. -
The old woman spoke again, Aleksandar speaking afterward.
“The Holy Mother says you have the look of your grandmother. She sees her strength in you. Great things in your future. Great and terrible things.”
“My grandmother?” Hana glanced at Aleksandar.
“A great woman. A true daughter of the Goddess. And your mother after her. Zryachniye, we call them. Those who See.”
“See what?”
“Each is different.” Aleksandar nodded to the fierce woman wearing the Lotusmen skin. “Sister Katya sees the riddle of the weather, sunlight and stormpulse. The Holy Mother what may come, and what should not.”
“Piotr said your ruler was Sighted too.”
“Imperatritsa,” Aleksandar nodded.
“What does she see?”
“The truth of men’s souls.”
“What will I see?”
Aleksandar repeated the question, and the Holy Mother smiled and replied in Morcheban. The language didn’t seem as harsh in Hana’s ears anymore. Surrounded by it, she found a deep music in the cadence and tone, tangled impressions of younger days, her mother singing to her and Yoshi when Father was passed-out drunk—
“The Holy Mother says that is for the Goddess to decide.”
“You said my mother was a daughter of these Sighted. But her eye didn’t glow.”
“The Goddess flows in our family,” Aleksandar said. “But she only manifests every few generations. Darya, your great-grandmother, she was Sighted. Priestess of our House. After many years of service, she left the Holy Order to take rule of House Mostovoi. To pass the gift of the Goddess to her unborn children. The bloodline had to be preserved.”
“I don’t understand…”
“You are daughter of a great tradition, Hana. Goddess-touched. We thought the Mostovoi bloodline broken. The gift is passed only to daughters. The hope of our House rested in your mother. My sister. When she was taken…” Aleksandar shook his head. “And now to find you amidst these murdering pigs, not only alive but Touched…” He caressed her right cheek, gentle as a first snow. “Goddess be praised, it is a miracle.”
He turned to the assembled gaijin, shouted some kind of prayer. The cry was repeated among the men, murmured by the priestesses. Each woman stepped forward and embraced Hana, kissing her cheeks and lips, glowing eyes warming loving smiles. Like long-lost sisters.
Like family.
“Gods, I don’t understand any of this,” Hana breathed.
Aleksandar took her hands, gave her fingers a reassuring squeeze.
“Understand at least that you are safe, my blood. That you are home.”
“I have a brother. Yoshi…”
“He will be welcome also. You are my blood, and I am yours. And when we have cleansed the slavers from this land, we will—”
“Cleansed?” Hana frowned. “What do you mean cleansed?”
“… When the Shimans are dead.”
“Dead? No, there are good people here—”
“Good people?” A frown. “Those people who stole our women and children? Who turned their island into a wasteland and now seek to steal ours? There is no goodness here, Hana.”
“No, Alek—” She frowned. “Uncle. Listen. There is evil here. A group called the Lotus Guild. A clan who bear the Tiger flag. They’re the ones who’ve driven us to war against you.”
“Us?” Aleksandar blinked. “Hana, you are not one of them—”
“There are good people here. A clan who stands against the Guild. People who are risking everything, preparing to fight the chi-mongers even now. You have to help them.”
Aleksandar glanced at his commander, the Holy Mother following the exchange with tilted head, Sister Katya beside her, swaying as if she heard hidden music.
“Help them?” Rage burned in his eyes. “Hana, we are here to annihilate them. To ensure they never steal another daughter. Another sister. Another son.”
Hana looked among the group—the glowing eyes of the Sighted, the flint-black stares of the warriors. And taking Aleksandar’s hand in her own, the Holy Mother’s in the other, she brought them to the fire’s edge and pulled them down beside her.
“You should get comfortable. This is going to be a long story…”
* * *
“You’re out of your godsdamned mind!”
The Blackbird stood on the deck of his ship, the fair Kurea, arms folded across his belly, broad and round as a drum. He was nose-to-nose with a furious, red-faced Akihito, refusing to bat an eyelid. Breath hung in frozen clouds between them, the drone of the ship’s engines underscoring their shouts. Michi leaned against the railing nearby, hands behind her back. Up here above the clouds, the skies were a brilliant, bloody red, but the temperature was still low enough to freeze the tears in her eyes. Wind draped her hair across her face, goggles spattered with frozen residue from the Kurea’s exhaust. Black ice gleamed on the boards under her feet.
Akihito and the Blackbird were both the size of small houses, rumbling like a couple of very angry motor-rickshaws. Akihito was pure muscle beneath his winter wools, but his leg would put him at a disadv
antage if forced to brawl on the swaying deck. If the tiff turned violent, Michi honestly wasn’t sure which man she’d lay odds against.
“Hana is down there amongst those gaijin!” Akihito shouted. “We have to help her!”
The Blackbird crooked one eyebrow and spat, saliva crystallizing on the deck. “First off, you effete Phoenix bastard, nobody tells me what I ‘have to’ do on my own ship. Second, we don’t even know she’s down amongst those round-eye bastards—”
“Because you won’t fly close enough for a look—”
“And THIRD, if your little slip was stupid enough to fly off alone and land in the middle of ten thousand gaijin berserks, that’s her own fault. I’m not flying this ship within spitting range of those ’thopters, and I’m sure as hells not taking her below the clouds in this storm!”
“Little slip?” Akihito’s eyes grew dangerously wide. “You son of a ronin’s whore—”
“Leave my mother out of this, little man. Liable to hurt my feelings.”
“She could be in trouble. She could be dead.”
“Best to grab yourself an umbrella then, Akihito-san. In case all the shits I don’t give start falling from the sky.”
“Gentlemen.” Michi placed a restraining hand on their forearms. “I think everyone needs to breathe deep and think some happy thoughts. Spring days … The laughter of a carefree child … A woman with cleavage you could hide a boat inside…”
Akihito ignored her, still glowering at the captain. “Why fly us here if you were going to shit yourself five miles short of the mark?”
“You’re welcome to get out and walk the rest of the way, if you think the leg can take it.”
“It can take anything you dish out and more, you fat bastard.”
“That so? Do you think it could take you kneeling down to suck my—”
“Izanagi’s balls, will you two just kiss and get it over with?” Michi shouted.