Steel Crow Saga

by Paul Krueger

  “One day toward the end, mom calls me and my siblings in and says, ‘I think I’m about done playing this part.’ So we all have a cry about it. Does fuck-all for the blood pooling in her lungs, but at least it feels nice, you know? No one ever talks about that,” she added suddenly. “How nice a good cry feels. Like ten stiff drinks, without the hangover.”

  Xiulan’s smile was small and encouraging. “I’ll have to do it more often. Please continue.”

  “Oh. Right,” said Lee. “Point is, when we’re all done crying, she pulls us close. She’s got a mask on, so she won’t cough blood on us, but she pulls it down off her mouth and says to us, ‘Next time around, I’m gonna be a dog. I know it.’ ”

  Xiulan blinked, and was surprised to feel tears against her lashes.

  “She didn’t die then. Held on for a good week longer. And when we went up on the roof to scatter her ashes, I’d swear up and down I heard a dog howling as the last of her faded into the air.”

  Xiulan’s fingers twitched. She wanted to reach out and comfort Lee, but that was stupid. Childish. Lee had been carrying this around every day for more than half her life. It was arrogance, Xiulan berated herself, to think her touch could magically fix everything.

  “Look, Princess,” Lee said. “I know all that stuff about spirits and roles is a big, steaming load. For one thing, how’s that idea track with exponential population growth?”

  Xiulan kept her tone mild. “I suspect such matters were not on the minds of the ancient Jeongsonese.”

  “Right. Like I said: a big, steaming load.” Lee’s voice softened slightly. “But just in case, you know?”

  Xiulan smiled to herself. She tried not to let herself get too excited, but she’d just learned something about Lee. More than just a clinical statistic she could’ve read in the woman’s criminal record, Xiulan had managed to glean something real.

  Feeling bold, she pressed ever so gently: “Where are your sisters and brothers now?”

  Lee’s expression dimmed slightly. “Not sure. I took off a few years later. They weren’t keen on a thief in the family, you see.”

  Her tone made it perfectly clear she didn’t want to delve into the matter any further. Panic shot through Xiulan once more.

  But then Lee said, “Since we’re playing ‘asked and answered,’ then, tell me: that kiss. The first one, back in the cell. Why’d you do it, Princess?”

  Xiulan’s face flushed so suddenly and forcefully, she felt like her entire head was glowing. It’d been foolish to hope she could elide the subject entirely, but she had, just the same.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, Inspector Lee.” And she had: often, and with detailed extrapolation of what might’ve followed. But she pushed that speculation to the back of her mind and continued: “And I’ve come to the conclusion that I owe you an apology.”

  Lee favored her with an amused slant of her eyebrow. “Do you now?”

  Don’t get flustered, Xiulan told herself as she descended into the deepest bowels of being flustered. Bai Junjie would’ve handled this with a cool head, like he had in his sixth case, The Color of Drying Blood. So she told herself: Be cool. Be Junjie.

  “I’ve employed you as an inspector of the Li-Quan, and as my partner in this personal enterprise,” Xiulan said, painfully aware of how fast she was talking. “Those are both professional entanglements, which I regard with the utmost respect. Furthermore—”

  “Oh, good,” Lee said with a smirk, “there’s a ‘furthermore.’ ”

  “—I’m a member of the House of Shang, and bear the blood of a queen in my veins,” Xiulan plowed on. “That status creates an unfair imbalance in the power dynamic when I fraternize with one of my own subjects.”

  “Like me.”

  “Like you,” Xiulan agreed. The end of her well-rehearsed speech lay in sight now. “So I wish to apologize for muddying those waters with my, ah, inappropriate advances. They were an aberrant behavior, and one that I promise will not happen again.”

  Lee nodded, absorbing this. Then she said with a smile, “Nice try, Princess.”

  Xiulan frowned. “ ‘Nice try’?”

  Lee smiled wider. “You didn’t answer my fucking question.”

  The fading flush in Xiulan’s cheeks came roaring back with full force. Her head felt like a paper lantern attached to a body. “Inspector Lee—!”

  “The question wasn’t ‘should,’ ” Lee said. “It was ‘why.’ And until you answer it head-on, I’m going to be a complete pill to you about it. You can’t use your fancy courtly doublespeak on me. I’m too much of a rube to fool.”

  “You most certainly are not,” Xiulan said, suddenly fierce. “Your wisdom and boldness are the only reasons we’ve made it as far as we have. And I envy your social acumen so much. I always calculate my every word with great care, in service to being the best version of myself for every given moment. But despite your skill in deception, I’ve never seen you be anything but yourself, and that person has fascinated me from minute one of our partnership.”

  Her eye went wide as she realized how much she’d just said. Her mouth hung open stupidly.

  Lee slipped her hands out of her pockets. “Anything else?”

  Xiulan resisted the urge to hang her head. She would meet her embarrassment like a princess. “Yes,” she said. “You’re also…really, really funny.”

  Bootstrap abruptly stopped and sat down. Xiulan opened her mouth to ask what was the matter, but suddenly Lee Yeon-Ji filled her vision, their faces inches apart.

  “Now, that was a proper answer,” the thief said. “But I’ve still got a problem with your apology: Second time around, which of us did the kissing?”

  Xiulan shifted her weight from foot to foot. “You did.” She made to raise her pipe back to her mouth, but a hand on her wrist stopped it from rising above hip level.

  “Who was it who put her arm on your waist?” Lee said, toying with the lapel of Xiulan’s coat. “Was it you, prowling predator that you are?”

  The challenge in her voice put fire in Xiulan’s fingers. They dropped her pipe then slid around Lee’s slender waist. She only trembled slightly as she felt the soft folds of Lee’s dress, and the warmth of the skin lying in wait just beneath it. “I suppose this time, it is.”

  “Finally,” Lee said, leaning in until their lips met.

  Xiulan had kissed her first girl at the age of ten: Song Lihua, daughter of one of her mother’s many retainers. To Xiulan, it had been a magical, transportive experience, everything books had told her it would be, and also so much more than the page could ever encompass.

  Afterward, Lihua had said to her, “You’re not very good at that, are you?”

  Since then, opportunities for practice had been fleeting at best. Shang didn’t mind Xiulan’s preferences, exactly. But with the Crane Emperor’s official heir yet undesignated, there was still more prestige in offering up one’s daughter to a royal son in the hope of getting a royal grandchild. As long as that hope was on the table for the various noble families of Shang, it left no prospective women of appropriate status for Xiulan. Consequently, like all other exciting prospects in life, kissing had become more of a theoretical pursuit for Xiulan than a practical one.

  But with Lee, her lack of practice didn’t matter.

  The woman tasted like the world: the grit of its streets, the depth of its oceans, the weight of its history. Her fingers skillfully roamed Xiulan’s body, dancing while Xiulan’s own barely had the confidence to crawl. Her eyes closed as she let go of all the artifice she’d constructed around herself. Lee had no idea, but the woman she held in her arms was the real Xiulan—not the princess, not the detective, not even the sister or daughter. She was holding a woman who belonged to no one else.

  Lee’s fingers brushed through her hair and gently peeled her long bangs away from Xiulan’s left ey
e. Slowly, Lee pulled away from their kiss. “Look at me.”

  Xiulan’s pulse doubled. Her eyelids fluttered uncertainly as they opened, revealing a brown eye on her right, and a pure white one on her left. In place of an iris and pupil, it instead bore a black square divided into quarters, like a windowpane. It was the most visible part of her soul, and she’d grown out her hair specifically so no one could ever see it.

  And now Lee Yeon-Ji was staring right into its depths.

  Instinctively, Xiulan moved to brush her bangs back down, but once again Lee clamped down on her wrists. “I’m not done with those eyes yet.”

  Xiulan had read in books that to truly enjoy an intimate encounter, it was best to let go of one’s thoughts and relax. And indeed, she’d felt herself begin to do just that a moment ago. It was a simple thing, she told herself as they slipped back into their kiss, to remove any barriers between oneself and the purity of an experience.

  Naturally, she told herself this because her mind was racing.

  This is hardly the time or place, said one voice.

  This is the greatest feeling in the world, another chimed in.

  Am I doing this right?

  We have important work to do.

  How hard would it be to undo that dress?

  Why is she doing this?

  Why am I doing this?

  No, seriously, am I doing this right?

  She broke contact and stared up into Lee’s face again. The thief’s canine charm was still there, but she looked off-balance in a way Xiulan hadn’t seen before, as if Lee were as surprised by all of this as she was.

  As one, they both turned to look at Bootstrap. The dog-shade sat patiently but expectantly with her gaze on them. Her tongue flapped from her open mouth like a pink banner, while her three tails thumped the trail excitedly.

  They both burst out laughing. And as they laughed and laughed and laughed, they didn’t let go.

  But eventually, Xiulan sighed and said, “We should resume our pursuit.”

  “Reckon so.”

  They walked on in giddy, comfortable silence. At least, it was giddy to Xiulan, who felt as if her whole body were vibrating. Lee would flash her the occasional wolfish grin, though, and it would give her footsteps that much more spring as Xiulan took them.

  Abruptly, Bootstrap stopped again. Her hackles rose, and she let out a thunderous bark into the distance.

  A chill ran through Xiulan’s body. She hadn’t realized it until Bootstrap had barked, but the air around them had grown quiet. No birds sang. No squirrels scrabbled in the undergrowth. The world was too still.

  The tight, searching look in Lee’s face told Xiulan her partner was thinking along similar lines. “Best get your rat out,” she said tightly. “Girl’s smelling blood.”

  Xiulan’s lips thinned as she whispered Kou’s name and he appeared at her side. “We should find another way around.”

  “You’ll get no disagreement here.”

  Despite their efforts, though, they soon came upon the source of the quiet just the same. When they saw the car through the trees, Xiulan’s whole body tensed up, but then she saw the familiar white crane on its door. This was a Shang car. She felt a momentary trickle of relief. Much as she would’ve wanted to avoid all detection, at least Shang troops would be easier to deal with than Dahali or Sanbuna ones. They, at least, could be relied upon to respect her badge.

  But as they drew closer, she saw the car’s open door. Its shattered windshield. The long gouges and deep dents in its metal chassis. And of course, the mangled bodies of its occupants, who littered the ground around it like spent shells. Their limbs were snapped, their joints twisted, their faces carved by tooth and claw.

  Her relief froze back into dread. She thought frantically of the many passages she’d read in her books, where Bai Junjie came upon a grisly crime scene and converted all his sorrow and disgust into some poetic insight that would inevitably end up helping him catch the killer. But here, Xiulan’s prodigious wit and outsized vocabulary failed her.

  “Lee,” she said softly. “In your myriad criminal dealings, have you ever encountered anything like this?”

  “You rescued me from an organ seller,” she said. She kept her tone nonchalant as usual, but her ashen face betrayed her. “No two ways about it though, Princess: This is all kinds of fucked up.”

  Xiulan swallowed a long breath to calm her roiling stomach. She wanted her brain to start analyzing the scene before her, to construct the narrative that would explain this crime, but her eyes couldn’t see any deeper than its viscera-slick surface.

  “What does Bootstrap smell?” she said quietly.

  “She’s not getting a clear picture,” Lee said, clearly disturbed. “Neither am I. She’s smelling a lot of shades, though.”

  Kou’s sense of smell wasn’t nearly so strong as Bootstrap’s, but what it could pick up fit with what Lee just told her. Xiulan could feel it beneath her own sense of smell, a steady bass line beneath her nose’s treble. She smelled a suffusion of magic, possibly even an oversaturation. A truly remarkable amount of arcane energy had been unleashed in this area, in the form of a small horde of shades. It was the kind of thing Xiulan would have expected to find at the site of a pitched battle, not an ambush.

  But as she switched her focus back to her own senses, she noticed something odd: only a single set of footprints in the dirt. A quick study of the corpses’ boots told her they weren’t a match.

  “The footprint thing?” Lee said. There was a crispness to her demeanor that Xiulan hadn’t seen before. She realized: This was Lee the professional. Xiulan had never seen her before. Not really.

  She nodded. “One man—based on the size of the boot—walks in, offering himself up as bait. While he distracts the troops, his cohorts launch their attack from the safety of the trees.” But even as she narrated it, the story didn’t quite add up. The soldiers’ weapons were intact, as were their pockets. They even still had their boots on their feet. There was no plundering here. These attackers had just wanted to kill.

  “Think it’s those masked fellas from the news?” Lee said. “The Steel Beetles?”

  “Cicadas,” Xiulan said. They would’ve been her first thought, too, but even with Tomoda laid low like this, she’d yet to hear any report of the Tomodanese capitulating on their beliefs and resorting to shadepacting. And she was going to trust that this hadn’t been an act of treason, where Shang turned against Shang.

  No, there was only one group of shadepacters in Tomoda that could have done this.

  “I do believe, Inspector Lee,” Xiulan said, “that we’ve stumbled upon the handiwork of the Iron Prince’s honor guard.” Her gut squeezed unpleasantly as she cast a fresh eye on the bloodshed. It took on a whole new sinister light when she considered that it could have been at General Erega’s behest. Even though Xiulan sought to undercut their esteemed ally, she’d always held the general in high regard. To order such base slaughter…this was an act worthy of Ruomei, not the fabled Typhoon General.

  “Bootstrap doesn’t smell him here,” Lee said uncertainly.

  But the sight of her own dead countrymen had stirred something in Xiulan. While Ruomei was off playing pirate on the Sea of Tomoda, Xiulan was the only one with boots on the ground. The only one who could put an end to this madness and secure the future Shang and its people deserved. And it started with putting an end to Erega’s scheme before it claimed any more Shang lives: whether here on the road…or once that despot had been restored to his throne.

  “Point me in the direction she does smell him,” Xiulan said. “We haven’t another minute to waste.”

  At dawn, Tala’s eyes opened, to her great surprise. And when she’d determined that her throat hadn’t been slit in the night, she sat up and set about getting dressed.

  Sanbuna clothes were looser, made to be shed and d
onned quickly to accommodate the island weather’s wild mood swings. But Tomoda was a different sort of island, with a climate and a people that were both temperate. So its clothes were complex things: elaborate kimonos donned in a process that had calcified over centuries of history, multilayered suits with endless buttons, clasps, and zippers. In Sanbu, clothing was a matter of practicality. But in Tomoda it was, like seemingly everything else, a ritual.

  And more than that: It was a great way to piss Sergeant Tala off.

  She swore fluently as she finished fumbling with her tie, only to see that it fell unevenly across her chest again. She kept cursing as she undid it for the third time, all while ignoring the growing throb of discontentment in the back of her head. If Mang wanted to weigh in on her vocabulary, he could go fuck himself.

  She directed some of that ire to the prince down the hall. At first, as she lay on her lumpy, misshapen pallet—a gift from Kurihara himself, she was sure—she’d thought her anger stemmed from her proximity to the Steel Cicadas, and to Kurihara in particular. But the more she examined those feelings, the more she’d realized that it all came back to Jimuro.

  Her feelings regarding the Iron Prince were always going to be complicated. But even though he was a smug, puckered asshole of a man, and even though he’d lived his life in a comfort bought with Sanbuna lives and suffering, he’d also proven his mettle in a fight. He’d saved her life several times over, once at the cost of his own heirlooms. He’d demonstrated a surprisingly big heart, at least when it came to his own people. He’d been brave enough to reveal to her the pain he carried with him, and either sly or persuasive enough to get her to do the same.

  And to top it all off, he’d made adobo.

  Mushroom adobo.

  But adobo nevertheless.

  She would’ve hesitated to call the man a friend, but she’d just started to come around to the idea that he might be a comrade. Sure, he hadn’t stormed the shores of Katagawa at her side, running full-tilt across mortar-glassed sands. But the two of them had survived a hell of their own, and there was a special kind of bond that came along with that. Her comradeship with the 13-52-2 had been fire-forged; her bond with Jimuro, just an ember. Small, yes, but even the smallest ember could start a wildfire.