by Jay Kristoff
The Phoenix sky-fleet was now attacking the Kitsune fleet from behind, shredding their crews with bursts of shuriken fire. The arashitora fell on them like hammers from the sky, talons shearing through inflatables, the shriek of venting hydrogen layered over the roar of the thunder tigers as they fell on this tiny swarm of wood and flimsy metal, ripping it to tatters.
Enemy corvettes swarmed to engage, and an arashitora named Eii was caught in a three-way burst of fire from the incoming ships, shredded in the hail, dropping from the sky. The rest of the pack shook the clouds with their outrage, turned from the larger ships to pursue the smaller craft, the pilots trying to maneuver the thunder tigers onto the heavier ship guns. Razored steel filled the air, cutting the snowflakes to black mist.
Yukiko and Buruu flew east, over the plains outside Yama. Looking down, she saw a horde of gaijin storming toward the Tora assault bridges over the Amatsu, siege-crawlers roaring in the vanguard. Looking back, she could see the Earthcrusher slowly crunching toward Kitsune-jō, the Fox sky-ships tangled with the Guild fleet, boarding parties engaged in brutal hand-to-hand. But Hana’s pain was like a fresh wound in her skull, the girl’s grief amplifying Yukiko’s own—impossible to ignore. She could see Kaiah and Hana moving like a chainblade amongst the gaijin rotor-thopters, smashing them from the air with bursts of Raijin Song. Their formation in utter disarray, Kaiah and Hana pursuing the ships and opening them like love letters, remnants fluttering to the earth in clouds of burning perfume. And still the pilots fought on, spitting lightning, seemingly filled with suicidal rage.
And then they spotted Yukiko and Buruu swooping from the clouds—a second hellsborn girl on the back of a second thunder tiger, the sight turning all valor to water. One by one the remaining ’thopters fled, tearing back east across the smoking skies.
“Hana!” The cry spilled from her lips into the Kenning, echoing in the red warmth between them. “Hana, listen to me!”
The girl turned in her saddle, lightning gleaming on the edges of her armor. Her face was contorted, goggles dragged down around her throat, tears frozen on her cheeks.
“They killed him!” she screamed. “They killed Akihito!”
Yukiko could almost taste the girl’s grief in the air. She could see fragments in Hana’s mind; the pair lying together in the dark, her head on his chest, wrapped in gentle strength. Tears welled in her eyes—for her friend, for Hana who’d lost him almost as soon as she found him. But there was no time for grief now, not unless they wished to mourn the entire country along with him.
“Hana, I know what they did. But thousands more are going to die if we don’t stop this.”
“I don’t give a shit about any of them! At least Akihito won’t be in the Hells alone!”
“What about your brother? What about Yoshi?”
“He’s not here…”
“Hana, if we fail today, the entire country is lost, do you understand that? No one is safe. The Guild will live on and everything that was good or pure in these islands will be gone. Everything. Do you think Akihito would have wanted that?”
“You didn’t know him like I did…”
“I knew him since I was seven. He held my hand at my brother’s funeral. And though I didn’t love him like you did, don’t you dare tell me I didn’t know him. He’d want you to fight now, Hana. Not to avenge him, but to save these islands and the good left in them.”
They stared at each other across the snow-filled sky, the smell of black smoke and fire and blood, the cacophony of sky-ship engines and the Earthcrusher’s march, the stampede of gaijin drawing closer to the Tora river crossings. Hana was still crying, shoulders heaving as she struggled for breath. Kaiah cut the air in sweeping circles, tail stretched like a whip.
- SHE SPEAKS TRUE, HANA. THOUGH PRECIOUS FEW, THERE ARE THINGS HERE WORTH SAVING. HE WOULD HAVE YOU FIGHT. -
The girl hung her head, scraping frozen tears from her lashes. Yukiko could feel her fighting with herself, the grief and rage and spite locked tooth and claw with Kaiah’s words, Yukiko’s, Hana’s own sense of right. Wavering on the brink; the same abyss that had almost swallowed Yukiko when her father died. But in the end, Hana caught her grief and swallowed it, rusted and sharp. And Yukiko could see the reason Akihito had loved her.
“I’m with you,” the girl nodded.
“All right.” Yukiko pointed to the assault bridge over the Amatsu, the gaijin army charging toward it. “We stop the gaijin getting into Yama. Then we deal with the Tora fleet. Then we take out the Earthcrusher.”
“Hai,” Hana sniffed.
Yukiko slipped into Buruu’s thoughts, all warmth and folded steel.
Are you ready, brother?
ALWAYS.
All right. Let’s cut this thing off at the root.
* * *
His name was Vladimir Grigori. Seaman, second ribbon. Fifteen years old.
His application to enter the service had been a string of half-truths held together by lies, although in fact, the recruiters didn’t question too vigorously once they discovered he was from Krakaan. The slaughter perpetrated by the slavers, the abduction of every woman, child and half-hale man from the city … well, the tale had already become legend before Vladimir and the ragtag bunch of survivors had limped east to Tarnow. For a boy to want revenge after everything he knew had been destroyed? Anyone could understand that, fifteen or no.
Vladimir was a fisherman’s son, and he supposed if he were to serve in the Imperatritsa’s forces, a ship would be the sensible place to do it. He just hadn’t realized it would be so accursedly boring.
The muster had been magnificent to be sure. The assault on Kawa city glorious. But now the landing was done, there was precious little for seamen to do. They were moored in the smoking ruins of the slaver harbor, awaiting the return of Marshal Sergei’s forces. Vladimir’s days were spent on games of chance, listening to battlefield reports, or, as he found himself now, standing on a watchtower, smoke in one hand, spyglass in the other.
The skies were black and the sea iron-gray, the wind as cold as ice devil’s breath. Someone had told him the slavers called this place the “Bay of Dragons.” Staring down into the water, Vladimir exhaled a plume of smoke and shook his head at their folly.
Something silver moved in the depths, long and whiplike. A flash and it was gone.
Vladimir blinked, frowned at the swell, smashing against the hull in crests ten feet high. Another flash of silver passed beneath the bow, quick as Old Man Frost, twenty feet long if it was an inch. Vladimir dragged the smoke off his freezing lips and drew breath to shout, glancing up at the horizon. The words died in his throat, panic hitting him like a pail of ice water. Reaching down, he began grinding the warning siren, yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Stations! All hands to stations! Tidal wave!”
Cries of alarm running the ship’s length, the siren’s wail echoing in his head. Vladimir felt the engines start, the drumbeat of hundreds of boots as the crew scrambled. The Grigori began shifting, propellers churning waves to froth as the bow swung slowly about, the entire fleet following suit, helmsmen leaning hard on their wheels and gunning the engines to set the ships facing the threat cresting the horizon. Vladimir could see it with his naked eye: a vast, churning wall of water, black and cold as night. He peered through his spyglass, breath catching in his lungs. He wiped away the frost on the lens and peered through it again, a wondering curse on his lips.
“Living Goddess, save us.”
A wave bigger than any he’d ever seen, made not only of water, but of teeth. A thousand serpentine shapes swirling in its depths, cresting and crashing through its face—shapes the battery farm crews spoke of with fear and awe.
Sea dragons.
But deeper within the wave, he saw two vast shadows, longer than the entire fleet end to end. Creatures so huge and terrifying they beggared belief; teeth as tall as houses, eyes like great glowing suns. Something primal awoke at the sight, something born in long winter nig
hts of his childhood; a fear so bottomless his heart almost failed in his chest. And as they crested the wave, one serpent of gleaming silver, the other so black that light seemed to die inside it, Vladimir found himself screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Abandon ship! Goddess help us, abandon ship!”
Dragons.
Dragons such as the world had not seen for a thousand years.
And they were coming.
* * *
She could feel them, reaching out across the island between her and the eastern seas. To the things she’d awakened, the slumbering giants curled in Everstorm’s warmth, held still by Susano-ō’s lullaby. But she’d been loud enough. Strong enough. The fires in her belly giving her the power to hear it all, every pulse, every heartbeat; the Lifesong of the World. And she’d reached into their minds and shouted, echoing in the black, until eyes as big as sky-ships had cracked open, until hearts as big as castles began to pulse faster, until that which had slept for as long as any had lived roused in the depths and demanded to know her name.
She had told them.
And they told her they had been waiting.
She saw them now in her mind’s eye, rising from the deeps.
In their wakes, whirlpools.
Their heralds, tsunami.
The Bay of Dragons, men called it?
Time it lived up to its name.
* * *
Yukiko and Buruu swooped down through the snowstorm, Hana and Kaiah beside them, hovering above the troop bridge crossing the Amatsu. The arashitora seized hold of the railings, trying to drag it sideways off the riverbanks. The structure was impossibly heavy, Buruu and Kaiah straining for all they were worth.
- YOU ARE WEAK, KINSLAYER. NOT EVEN TRYING. -
THAT IS NOT MY NAME.
- IT IS YOUR TRUTH. -
I AM KHAN OF EVERSTORM NOW.
- AND THIS IS NOT EVERSTORM. SO LIFT, CURSE YOU. -
Even their combined might wasn’t enough to shift the structure, so Yukiko called to the rest of the Everstorm pack. The arashitora responded, black and white, peeling away from the airborne melee and speeding toward them. But the gaijin troops were almost on them, archers setting up on the hills above, hammermen and blood-drinkers howling as they charged. Every one of them knew if the structure was dragged away, they’d have to call in their own engineers to forge a crossing. The battle for Yama would be over before they arrived. And so they threw themselves down the hill, intent on cutting the stormdancers to pieces.
“Get back!” Hana shouted to Yukiko. “Buruu has no armor!”
Yukiko and Buruu leapt into the skies, away from the storm of falling arrows, Hana and Kaiah charging the gaijin troopers. Kaiah clapped her wings together, gaijin clutching their ears and falling like saplings under a shredderman’s blades. Arrows rained amidst black snowflakes, blasted to splinters by the thunderclap. Kaiah unleashed another burst, timing it with the archers’ second volley, shivering the arrows to pieces as another wave of gaijin dropped like lotusflies. But the handful of blood-drinkers stumbled on, blinking and blinded, blood pouring from their ears even as they raised their mallets to attack.
Buruu roared warning, plowed into the wave, a flurry of talons and beak, Yukiko swinging her katana from atop his shoulders. When Daichi had given her the blade, he’d named it “Anger.” The embodiment of Yukiko’s rage at her father’s death, the land dying all about her. But as she wielded it, she felt only sorrow that it had come to this—that all this blood was being spilled for no reason, that everyone on this field was fighting for the same thing.
She reached out into their minds, past the pain, into the song of the world. If she could see them, she could touch them, reach through the storm of death and hurt filling her head. And she flooded the minds of every man she could see with images of ancient dragons thundering into the Bay of Ryu, gaijin sailors fleeing in tiny boats, tsunamis made of teeth smashing the bayside buildings to splinters. Taking hold of the leviathans’ primal fear and flooding the soldiers with that same terror; that fear born in the minds of little boys, huddled beneath their blankets as the winter winds blew outside their windows and the monsters beneath their beds dragged long fingernails on the undersides of their cots.
Run.
A single word in every mind, chilling the marrow of every bone, halting the charge of every man, breaking, turning and screaming from the girl atop her thunder tiger, hair whipping around her eyes as the winds howled and the snows fell and thunder tore the skies.
RUN.
The Everstorm pack arrived in a hail of black snowflakes, half a dozen landing on the troop bridge. Kaiah and Buruu turned from the routed gaijin, grasping the railings with their foreclaws. Each thunder tiger beat their wings, keening with the strain. And between them, ever so slowly, they tore the bridge from the banks, frozen earth ripped away, the iron walkway screeching at its joins, twisting beneath its own weight, the arashitora roaring as they dragged it up, back, finally releasing it and allowing it to fall, welds snapping, metal groaning as it hit the tar-black Amatsu in a blinding spray and sunk down into the depths.
The gaijin army was in utter disarray, halfhearted arrow fire falling about them like feeble rain. Yukiko looked down on them, stepping into the Lifesong, filling their thoughts. The sorrow of Akihito’s death, the loss of her friend, gentle and kind and brave, gone now forever. Like the gaijin mothers and sons and daughters taken into the slave-ships’ bellies, never to be seen again. The same pain, the same grief, no matter the color of their skin or the names of the gods and goddesses they believed in. The simple pain of a thing loved—a thing taken, never to return, no matter the blood spilled in revenge. All of them the same.
All of us the same.
And those who were not fleeing with the shapes of dragons in their minds hung their heads, tears filling their eyes without knowing why. Bows falling from numb fingers, breathing the names of mothers or daughters, fathers or sons, struck to the heart and bleeding anew.
The arashitora took to the skies, a swarm of black and white, eyes of burning amber and brilliant green. Flying west, Yukiko could see the Earthcrusher cutting through Yama like a slow avalanche, concrete dust and screams in its wake. She could see the Guild fleet above Yama city, entwined with the Kitsune, all smoke and fire and gleaming steel. A swarm of shreddermen had cornered a crowd of Fox bushimen near the broken wall, cutting through them like a hot blade through black snow. Behind the soldiers, a crowd of helpless civilians cowered in the ruins, just a minute or two from slaughter.
YUKIKO …
I see them.
FOX NOT LOOKING AFTER HIS OWN, IT SEEMS.
She grit her teeth, clutching her katana so hard her fingers hurt. And at last, she felt the anger Daichi had named the blade for. Flooding up her throat and bubbling over her tongue, one hand pressed to the iron at her belly, knuckles white on the sword’s hilt.
All right, then. Let’s look after them instead.
* * *
He’d felt his fingers twitching as the pair flew past, Yukiko and her thunder tiger, roaring east toward the gaijin horde. Not the fingers of the prosthetic—the flesh they’d taken away. A phantom reminder of the battle in Kigen arena, repaying her betrayal with his own, casting aside love for the sake of honor. Loyalty. Servitude.
Only hatred left behind.
“There she is!” Hiro tore his chainkatana from its scabbard. “Can we pursue?”
“My Lord, we can’t move!” the helmsman spat. “The Kitsune have us entangled!”
Hiro looked down on the Honorable Death’s deck, the brutal melee between Fox and Tiger samurai. Chainsword kissed chainsword in bright bursts of growling sparks, gore slicked over polished wood as men fought and screamed and died in puddles of themselves. But the Death was wedged firmly between two other sky-ships—a Kitsune ironclad and some Ryu merchantman. Boarding tethers were tangled in her rigging, grapples embedded in her hull.
Hiro turned to his personal guard—six Elite standing nea
rby. “Get down there and cut us loose. Yoritomo’s assassin flies free while we flail amongst Isamu’s rabble. We should be wetting our blades in her, not these Kitsune dogs!”
“Hai!”
The samurai drew their swords, charging into the storm of blades. Hiro turned back to the Eastern skies, watching the tiny shape flying farther and farther away.
She hadn’t even looked at him.
“Soon you will,” he whispered. “And I will be the last—”
Soft footsteps across the deck, the ignition of chainblade motors behind him, a cry of pain. Hiro turned with a gasp, bringing up his chainkatana and parrying the blow aimed at his head, feeling a chainwakizashi slice deep into his left arm. Blood sprayed, hot and thick, and he spun away from the railing as the wakizashi scythed toward him again, shearing clean through the wood. Skipping back, he raised his katana into guard position, left arm hanging useless and bleeding by his side, staring at the girl who had almost decapitated him.
Small and light and sharp as knives. Black hair chainsawed into a jagged bob. Plump, beestung lips twisted in a snarl as she tore the chainwakizashi from the railing, revved the motor. The last he’d seen of her, she was wrapped in a beautiful scarlet robe, flitting through the Shōgun’s palace. Now she wore black, a breastplate of dark iron. But still he recognized her instantly. Recognized the swords in her hands—once wielded by his cousin, dear Ichizo, found dead in her room after the insurgents burned his city to cinders.
“Michi,” he hissed.
“My Lord Daimyo.”
He glanced up at the inflatable she’d dropped from, down at the helmsman she’d cut near in half. He couldn’t feel his left hand; blood dripping from numb fingers to spatter at his feet.
“An impressive entrance.”
“Your exit will put it to shame.”
The girl charged across the deck, sliding down onto her knees and aiming her shrieking blades at his legs. Hiro leaped into the air, flipping over her head and landing in a crouch behind, aiming a blow at her exposed back. Michi blocked blind, spun up to her feet and launched a flurry at Hiro’s face, neck, chest. His prosthetic was a blur, moving faster than any flesh, twisting at the joints in ways a real arm never could as he parried each strike. Bright sparks burst in time with each kiss, each impact marked with sub-harmonic notes of tumbling frequency, as if they played a tune on each other’s swords.