by Jay Kristoff
The only living thing he had ever created stood behind him, her tears disappearing in the rain.
When it was done, he stood back and surveyed his work with a critical eye. Clean cuts, not too close to the blood vessels, but enough that the beast wouldn’t be capable of much more than a feeble glide until its next moult. He nodded his head.
“Good work,” agreed Akihito.
They removed the needle shafts from the beast’s flanks and slapped a thick green poultice over the punctures. Crimson stained its fur, dripping onto the deck, covering their hands. The blood smelled of ozone and rusted iron.
They heard a low growl, a rumble that shook their insides. The beast began to stir, claws flexing, gouging foot-long scores into the hardened oak deck. The hunters stood and left the cage, Masaru slamming home the door’s thick iron bolts. The arashitora growled again, the shifting of tectonic plates beneath ice-white fur.
Lightning flashed, bright as the dawn, dangerously close. Small fingers of it arced through the roiling cloud around them, cracks spreading out across its black mask, poised to crumble away into terrible violence. The wind was a pack of wolves, all lolling tongues and razor-sharp frozen teeth.
Without looking at his daughter, Masaru turned and walked away.
* * *
Its fury was terrible.
Yukiko sat on the sodden deck and stared as the beast clawed its way back to waking. Its eyes were the color of honey, crystallized, pupils dilated in the blacksleep hangover. She was struck by the complexity of its thoughts; a fierce intelligence and sense of self she’d not encountered in a beast before. She could sense its confusion, the weight of its wings lessened, a strange sense of vertigo as it flapped them for balance and regained its feet.
It thrashed its wings again, staring at the blade’s work, glancing down to the severed feathers beneath its feet. And then it roared, an ear-splitting scream of rage and hatred, a fury that tore its throat and flecked its tongue with blood. It cracked its pinions but no Raijin song would come, electricity sputtering and dying on the butchered tips of its quills. It slammed its body against the bars, once, twice, the dull sound of flesh on iron drowned out by the raging storm.
I’m sorry.
Yukiko poured the thought into its mind to comfort, to console. The beast recoiled from her touch, a howl of psychic fury almost knocking her senseless. It smashed itself against the cage again, tearing at the iron impotently with claws and beak, giving voice to its rage, the violation it had suffered at the hands of these wretched men.
KILL YOU.
I did not want this. If I could undo it, I would.
RELEASE ME.
I can’t.
LOOK AT WHAT THEY HAVE DONE.
I’m so sorry.
DESPOILERS. USURPERS. LOOK AT THE COLOR OF MY SKY. THE SCARS ON THE GREEN BELOW. PARASITES, ALL OF YOU.
The beast fixed her in its furious gaze, and she felt tiny and afraid reflected in that bottomless black. She knew how pathetic her overtures must sound. She had stood by and let her father mutilate this magnificent creature, hadn’t lifted a finger to stop him. And for what? A spoiled princeling’s command? A dream born of ego and blind hubris?
This, the last great yōkai beast on the whole of Shima. And what had they done to him?
The beast shut off its mind, forcing her out into empty blackness. Its hate was palpable, a dark radiance that burned like the summer sun. It stared in unblinking, wordless challenge, and though it said not a thing, she could read every thought as surely as if it had spoken them aloud.
Look at what they have done to me. At what you allowed them to do. Look me in the eye, be you not ashamed of yourself and your entire wretched race?
Thunder rolled cold fingers down her spine.
Shuddering, Yukiko lowered her eyes and looked away.
* * *
Her father was lying in his hammock when she returned, staring at the ceiling. His sodden clothes hung on the walls, an old hakama tied about his waist, tattoos crawling on his arms and chest. The ink was old, black running to blue, edges blurred under the press of time. His flesh was hard, but carved from sickly chalk, gleaming with fresh sweat and the stink of lotus.
He didn’t look at her as she entered.
She closed the door and sat beside the hammocks on a small wooden stool, rocking it back on its hind legs. Her eyes glittered in the lamplight, hooded, almond-shaped; the one gift she’d been allowed to keep from the mother who had abandoned her all those years ago. The eyes that had welled with tears in the Shōgun’s gardens, staring at her father with dumb disbelief as he told her that her mother was gone.
“I wish I had gone with her.” She kept her voice low, calm; she refused to allow him to think that this all came from hysterics. But the words were intended to make him bleed. “I wish I were anywhere but here with you.”
A long pause, pregnant with anger and the sound of falling rain.
“Wishing for the impossible,” Masaru said softly. “You get that from her.”
“I pray that’s not all I get.”
Another pause. Masaru took a deep breath. “If you’re going to hate me, at least hate me for the mistakes I could have avoided.”
“Like mutilating that poor thing?”
“Its feathers will grow back. Like any other bird. It will moult soon enough.”
“You’re going to give it to him, aren’t you? The Shōgun.”
Masaru sighed. “Of course I am, Yukiko. I swore I would.”
“He’s just a greedy boy. He doesn’t deserve anything that beautiful.”
“Sometimes we don’t get what we deserve. We play the cards we are dealt instead of whining about what might’ve been. Therein lies the difference between an adult and a child.”
But I am a child, she wanted to scream.
“I know about you and Kasumi,” she said.
He nodded, eyes never leaving the ceiling. “Your mother told you?”
“No. I see the way you look at her.”
“Kasumi and I are over. I ended it when your mother—”
“Is that why she left? Without even saying goodbye to me?”
He paused for a long moment, licking at dry lips.
“Your mother left for many reasons.”
“You blamed her for Satoru.” Yukiko blinked back the tears. “You drove her away.”
Masaru’s expression darkened, as if clouds had covered the sun. “No. Satoru was my fault. I should have been there. I should have been a father to you. I was never very good at that, I’m afraid.”
“You are afraid,” she growled. “All your life you’ve been running away. You left us alone to go on your mighty hunts. You left your wife’s bed for another woman’s. You leave me every time you suck down a lungful of that stinking weed. You’re a coward.”
Masaru sat up slowly, swung his legs over the edge of the hammock and dropped to the floor. His eyes betrayed his rage, flashing like polished jet, clear of smoke. He stepped closer.
“If I were a coward, I would have run as your mother bid me.” His voice was soft, dangerous. “I would never have returned to Shōgun Yoritomo’s side after Sensei Rikkimaru died. She bid me to become an oath-breaker. Dishonored. Shamed.”
“And if you had, she would still be here.”
“Yukiko, I am warning you…”
“Satoru would still be alive.”
He slapped her then, an open hand across her face, the crack of flesh on flesh seeming louder than the song from the arashitora’s wings. She lost her balance on the stool and toppled over backward, head slamming into the wall, hair splayed across her face.
“Godsdamn you, girl,” her father hissed. “I was sworn to the Shōgun. I still am to this day. If I break my word, he will take everything from me. Everything, do you understand?”
What about me, she wanted to cry. You’d still have me.
He stared down at his hand, at the palm print on her cheek. He looked suddenly wretched, an old man, body slowly tu
rning to poison, life ebbing away one fix at a time.
“One day you will understand, Yukiko,” he said. “One day you will see that we must sometimes sacrifice for the sake of something greater.”
“Honor.” She spat the word, unwanted tears welling in her eyes.
“Among other things.”
“You’re a godsdamned liar. There’s no honor in what you do. You’re a servant. A rent boy who butchers helpless animals at the behest of a coward.”
Masaru hung his head, teeth gritted, hands curled into fists. His breath was low and measured, trembling in his nostrils. His eyes flickered to hers, glazed with anger.
“I hate you,” she hissed.
Masaru opened his mouth to speak, and the world turned sideways. A tremendous boom rang out above the ship, shattering the small glass porthole and making Yukiko wince. They were both tossed across the room, walls rushing forward with outstretched arms to embrace them, unforgiving, hard as stone. Her forehead split on the wood, stars in her eyes as she and her father tumbled to the ground.
The whole ship trembled, her timbers shaking beneath their feet as if in the grip of an earthquake. The sound of boiling vapor filled the sky.
Yukiko opened her eyes, blinking away the blood as the Child rocked beneath them. Through the tiny cracked porthole, she could see the clouds were painted with flickering orange.
The acrid tang of smoke stained the air.
They were on fire.
13
DESCENDING
Staggering. Blood and swelling gluing her eye closed. Her father’s hands on her shoulder, firm. Deck bucking beneath their feet. A stumble, a fall. Hands dragging her up. Her father’s voice, from far away.
“Keep moving!”
Onto the deck. Light blinding above them, bright as the sun. Too close, heat curling the ghost-pale hair on her arms, leaving behind tiny black cinders. A roar, terrifying, crackling across the rigging with ruinous, hungry hands. The nightmare sound that woke cloudwalkers in the dark, stomachs in knots, soaked in sweat. Fire.
Fire in the sky.
The balloon was ablaze. The canvas had spilled wide open, the hydrogen within clasping hands with the lightning strike and giving birth to a conflagration, sucking the very breath from their lungs. The heat of a funeral pyre beat upon their backs. Screaming men, feet running across the deck, panicked voices. The hiss of rain, great gouts of pitch-black smoke rising in a veil from the marriage between fire and water. Vertigo swelled, the clutch of gravity denied by the speed of their descent. Falling.
They were falling.
Dragged up the ladder to the pilot’s deck, vice grip on her wrists, press of bodies all around her. Across the shifting wood, steering wheel spinning free, Captain Yamagata’s voice rising above the din.
“Masaru-san! Quickly!”
She felt hands on her, dragging her through a metal hatchway, the volume of the world dropping to a dull, reverberating roar. The smell of sweat, tang of iron in her nostrils, copper on her lips. Yukiko blinked away the blood, looked around her, trying to focus. She was surrounded by heaving, sweating bodies, packed into the confines of the life raft fixed to the Thunder Child’s stern. It was filled to capacity, two frantic cloudwalkers working to uncouple the small beetle-shaped pod from its burning mother.
“Hurry up, we’re going down!”
“Lord Izanagi, save us!”
Hissed curses. The sound of iron crashing against iron. And then she heard it. A vibrato scream of fear, of rage. Louder than the thunder, tipped with electricity, grating across the back of her skull.
“Oh no,” she whispered.
She turned to her father, pawing the blood from her eyes.
“Father, the arashitora!”
Masaru’s expression darkened. His eyes showed no trace of dread; simply dismay at the loss of his prize. She could see the hunter in him, pragmatic and cold as steel. He glanced up as the beast screamed again, wiped the soot off his face with the back of his hand. His skin was damp with sweat, and he left one long black smear across his cheek.
“We can’t.” He shook his head, looked back and forth between Yukiko and Kasumi. “There’s no time.”
“Gods, listen to it,” breathed Akihito, crammed against the far wall.
The cry was piercing, dripping with outrage: a trembling note of fear and anger, of disbelief that it could end like this. They heard the scraping of claws on metal, flesh pitting itself against iron in a repeated frenzy of terror. Rage. Red and boiling.
One coupling came loose with the snap of iron jaws, and the life raft swung as if on a hinge, crashing hard against the polished hull. The rain poured through the open door, soaking the miserable knot of humans huddled in the boat, blinding, blistering white as the lightning flashed. Raijin rejoiced at the Child’s destruction, his howl of triumph and the beating of his drums echoing across the clouds.
Yukiko could feel the thunder tiger’s thoughts, its terror. She imagined its final moments: plummeting from the sky like a falling star, feathers and fur charring, praying for the impact that would end its burning agony. She shook her head.
Not like that. He cannot die like that.
Masaru sensed his daughter’s intent, reached out toward her.
“Yukiko, no! You stay here!”
Too late. She leaped from the raft as the final coupling sprang loose, the small ship spinning off into the darkness with a brittle, metallic sound. Her father’s anguished cry drifted off into the throat of the storm as the belly of the life raft lit up in a halo of blue flame, propelling the small craft away into the tempest.
Yukiko stumbled across the pilot’s deck and down the ladder, smoke burning her eyes, the wood beneath her an untamed, living thing. She felt numb, head still swimming from the kiss on the cabin wall. The wind tore at her skin, burning hot from the inferno raging overhead, embers entwined with the falling rain and smoldering on the sleeves and shoulders of her uwagi. The balloon had been reduced to a blackened skeleton, lit from within by the blaze; a corpse lantern on the feast day of the dead. The Child began to roll toward its wounded port side, starboard engine still at full burn, shadows of sharp rock swelling up out of the darkness before them.
Down the ladder, holding on for dear life as the ship clipped a spur of mountain stone, tearing half its belly out with the roar of splintering timber. On the main deck she slipped and stumbled, lunging across to the cage and using its bars to hold herself upright. The arashitora was lost in a frenzy of fear, near mindless as she reached out to it, almost overcome with primal terror of the fire above. It roared, a thundering, metallic screech, pupils glazed with panic.
Be calm. I will free you.
OUT. AWAY. FLY.
The bolts on the door were slippery in her hands, palms sweaty in the shocking heat. She thrust them away from their housings, fear turning her arms to jelly. Blood dripped into her eye, sticky and thick on her lashes. The Child’s roll grew more pronounced, and she struggled to keep her footing as the deck listed, floods of rain spilling over the brink in a doomed, lonely waterfall. The snaggle-toothed face of a mountain appeared out of the darkness directly in front of them, jaws of jagged stone open in welcome.
The final bolt slid free and the door swung wide. The arashitora burst from the cage, talons scrabbling across sodden boards, half-sparks flaring on its ruined wings. As it thundered across the shifting deck, Yukiko reached out, desperate, snagging her fingers into a clump of sodden feathers and swinging herself up onto its shoulders. Wood shredded like rice-paper beneath razored claws, sinew and muscle snapped taut like iron cable as it spread its wings and plunged over the side of the burning sky-ship.
Fly! Fly!
The blaze dropped away behind her in a rush of freezing wind, flaring bright as the Child plowed into the mountainside. The barrels of chi lashed in the bow split and ignited like fireworks at Lord Izanagi’s feast: a damp, thunderous explosion that sent burning timbers spinning off into the darkness. They plummeted out of the smo
ke toward the ground, burning embers falling bright between the raindrops. One flared blue-white, spiraling down into the yawning black below them.
The arashitora shrieked, pounding the air with its ruined wings. Yukiko was almost thrown from its shoulders, entwining her fingers in its feather mane and gripping tight with her thighs. Exhilaration and terror fought for her attention. The beast’s muscles seethed beneath her as its wings tore at the air, futile, furious. Sharp spires of rock rose out of the storm around them, rushing toward them as a blur, rain hissing across the stone in freezing squalls. The beast spread its wings to their full breadth and managed to bank away from the fangs of black granite, spiraling into a clumsy glide. It rolled from side to side, trying to maintain equilibrium without the use of its primaries. Yukiko could feel a grim determination rise up and engulf the fear inside it: a refusal to fail, to lie down or roll over. It screamed in the face of death, defiant and proud as a king upon a wind-tossed throne.
They wheeled away in their broken glide, green treetops rising out of the rain curtain ahead. The beast was unable to maintain altitude; every flap of its wings simply sent them falling faster. The green fingers of giant cedars and maidenhead trees clutched at the beast’s belly, pulling them down toward ruin.
GET OFF ME.
The arashitora bucked, trying to throw Yukiko from its back.
What?
GET OFF, INSECT.
You can’t throw me off. I’ll break my neck!
OFF. NOW.
The beast rolled from side to side, twisting through the air. Yukiko shrieked, daring a glance down through the treetops to the ground rushing away fifty feet below them. She clung to the tiger’s shoulders, teeth gritted, knowing a fall from this height and speed would mean her death.