The Lotus War - Kinslayer Part 16

"Don't be. So how'd you hurt it?"

It had been over a month since the bloodbath during Masaru's rescue from Kigen jail, but the sword-blow wasn't healing well. Akihito knew he should have been resting, changing his dressings more often, but circ.u.mstances being what they were, he was just glad it hadn't gone gangrenous. When Michi had gone back to the palace in search of Lady Aisha after the jailbreak went sour, she'd abandoned him with nothing but a tourniquet and vague directions to the sky-ship that was supposed to ferry everyone out of the city. Akihito hadn't even limped halfway to Spire Row before the bushi' locked Kigen down, sky-spires, rail yards and all. He'd returned to the Kage safe house he'd sheltered in before the prison break, hooking up with Gray Wolf and other members of the city cell. His thinking was simple enough-if he couldn't get to Yukiko, he'd do his best to help her from where he was.

Masaru would have wanted it that way.

Kasumi too.

"Just ... helping a friend," he said.

She nodded. "Well, I'll see if I can find some bandages at the palace tomorrow."

He scowled, turned his eyes back to the wood in his hand, carved off another chunk. A Guild sky-ship cut through the smog overhead, its engines rattling the windows. He thought of the ambush in Kigen jail, Kasumi's blood glistening on the floor. The betrayal that had killed her. Killed Masaru. Almost killed him too.

"How did you know those bushi' were coming tonight, Hana? You said your lookout spotted them before ours did, but who was your lookout? How did he get word to you?"

The girl peered at him, one dark eye gleaming between disobedient locks of hair. Standing slowly, she padded across the room to tug the window open. A faintly toxic breeze drifted inside, the bustling city song beyond nearly drowned by the soundbox wail. The girl stood back, folded her arms, staring at the cat perched on the windowsill above. For his part, the big tom seemed too intent on his not-so-privates to notice.

"Go on!" the girl finally yelled. "Get!"

The cat unfolded himself from his knot, made something close to a huffing sound and dropped to the lower sill. After a languorous stretch, he spared Hana a dagger-sharp stare, and finally slipped into the daylight. The girl slunk back to her mattress, her tread soundless. Sinking down with crossed legs and a challenging stare, she continued braiding her hair.

"How long have you been with the Kage?" he frowned.

"Two weeks."

"What made you join?"

"The Stormdancer."

"Stormdancer?"

The girl looked at him as if he were a simpleton.

"The girl who tamed the thunder tiger? Brought it back from the Iishi single-handed? You must have heard of her. She's all over the Kage broadcasts. Someone's even written a kabuki play about her; I saw it outside a brothel in Ibitsu Street last week, before the bushi' started cracking skulls."

"Oh, I've heard of her," Akihito nodded. "I'm still just getting used to the name, to be honest. I always called her Yukiko."

Hana's eye narrowed. "You know her?"

Akihito considered the girl staring at him. Defiance. Suspicion. She was so wretchedly thin; fingers almost skeletal, pale skin covered in grime. He focused on that single dark eye, almost too large in her emaciated face. He wanted to trust her, but couldn't quite fathom why. Was it because she was somehow familiar? Female? Young? How old could she be, anyway? Seventeen? Eighteen?

Almost the same age as ...

"I hunted with her father, Kitsune Masaru."

"The Black Fox of Shima?" Hana's voice was awed, and she leaned forward, braids forgotten. "People lay spirit tablets for him near the Burning Stones!"

The big man held up the wood he'd been carving. "Who do you think started putting them there?"

"My G.o.ds, you knew them?" Hana breathed. "Did you meet her thunder tiger?"

"Meet it?" Akihito's chest puffed out a little. "I helped catch the b.l.o.o.d.y thing."

"Oh my G.o.ds!" Hana was back on her feet, hands over her mouth. "So help me, if you're talking out of your-"

"I helped catch it. On the sky-ship Thunder Child, neck-deep in the worst storm I've ever seen." The big man's eyes shone. "Ryu Yamagata knew how to fly a ship, for G.o.dsd.a.m.n certain. He was a good man." The light in his eyes dwindled and died. "They were all good men."

"What's she like?" Hana's eye was bright, her imagination afire. "The Stormdancer?"

"A clever girl." Akihito nodded. "Strong. h.e.l.lsborn stubborn. But sugar-sweet. Truth be told, she's a lot like you, Hana-chan." He glanced up at the windowsill where the tomcat had been perched a few minutes before, scratched the whiskers on his chin.

"She's an awful lot like you."

11.

DESOLATION'S EDGE Yukiko had forgotten how beautiful the world could be.

Towering mountains beneath them, ancient and unchangeable. Making her feel like a brief and tiny thing; a spark escaping the rush of a twilight fire, speeding into the sky even as it burned away to nothing. Trees arrayed in gowns of b.l.o.o.d.y scarlet and shining gold, of bright rust and fading rose, like dancers awaiting the moment autumn's music would falter. And then they would shed their finery in a flurry, sleep naked in winter's arms, and wait for spring to wake them with warm and gentle kisses in all their softest places.

Yukiko rested her head against Buruu's neck and watched it all grow smaller and smaller. She'd closed herself off from the Kenning, just she and the wind in her hair, the world diminishing beyond lenses of polarized gla.s.s.

Yofun lay strapped across her spine with a length of braided cord. She'd found the katana clapped and sc.r.a.ped against the tant at the small of her back, threatening to ruin the lacquer on both. Deciding the knife and sword made an argumentative pair, she'd stuffed her tant into the bottom of one of Buruu's satchels, melancholy thoughts of her father with it.

The sake had worn off, the memory of Kin's cold farewell a hollow ache inside her. She reached out to Buruu, eyebrows knitted together, opening herself up just a hair's breadth. A burst of heat, blinding, pulses in the forest below flaring bright-lives she'd never have been able to feel at this distance just a month ago.

She clenched her teeth, tried to make the Kenning contract, like an iris as the sun crests the horizon. Trying to build a wall of herself, brick by brick. A bulwark of will to hold the fire at bay, something stronger than the insubstantial numbness granted by a gutful of liquor. Images of her childhood. Memories and moments-anything that would tether her, anchor her, shield her from the inferno waiting beyond. Her breath came shorter, headache cinching tight.

Can you hear me, brother?

YES.

His voice was tiny, as if he stood on a distant mountaintop and called across a valley of burning red.

Don't hold back. Speak like you would normally.

I DO NOT WANT TO HURT YOU.

No, I need to control this. I need your help. Please, Buruu. Do as I ask.

VERY WELL.

She hissed in pain, wincing, slumping forward across his shoulders. Her grip faltered as his thoughts crashed inside her skull, smashing her wall to splinters, her whole body aching. Buruu whined, holding his wings steady so as not to throw her from his back. Blood dripped from her nose, bright and gleaming, smeared through his feathers and upon her cheek.

It's all right ... I'm all right ...

She felt him pull himself back, whispering across the link binding them together.

SMALL STEPS FIRST, AGREED?.

She wiped the blood from her nose, a slick of crimson on her knuckles. She sniffed hard and spat, salty, bright red.

All right, agreed. Small steps first.

GOOD.

The thunder tiger nodded.

EVEN STORMDANCERS MUST WALK BEFORE THEY FLY.

They ascended, clouds rolling back across a b.l.o.o.d.y gray sky. The sun was a harsh glint on the edges of her goggles, sharp enough to cut her eyes from her head. The forest pulse receded as they rose above it all, the island shrinking beneath them as the air grew thin and brittle, blood-red ocean stretching all the way to the horizon.

Looking far behind them, miles upon miles to the south, she could see the Iishi Mountains melting into low foothills. And beyond them? Blood lotus. Everywhere. The blooms had been plucked as summer died, red fields stripped to undergarments of miserable green. The weed with a hundred uses, or so the Guild claimed. Proof the G.o.ds existed. But squinting across endless fields rippling in the toxic wind, Yukiko only saw proof of her people's greed.

Deadlands. Great, smoking tracts of earth, stripped of life by the poison in the lotus roots-an infection spreading across Shima's flesh. From this alt.i.tude, they could see how bad it had become, how far the soil-death had spread. Countless miles of ashen earth, rent with fissures as if the island was bursting; some sepsis forcing its way up through a broken crust. Dark mist drifted snot-thick over the deadlands, never straying far from the desolation's edge.

Yukiko found herself wondering if Kin was right. If there was anything they could do to save the land. Some way to undo all the damage they'd wrought ...

Buruu lurked behind her eyes, a gentle, cotton-pawed prowl. Feline grace, even in his thoughts, trying his best not to awaken the pain he could feel coiled and ready. She nodded to the southern fields, blurred by smog and distance.

That's Kitsune country. My homeland. The valley I grew up in was filled with bamboo once. Bamboo and b.u.t.terflies. And now it's nothing but that accursed weed.

WHERE WILL YOUR PEOPLE GO, WHEN ALL THEIR SOIL IS ASHES?.

Over the oceans. To steal others' lands with the power chi gives them.

AND WHEN THOSE LANDS ARE ASH? WHEN EVERYTHING BENEATH THE RED SUN IS GONE TO DUST?.

Unless we put an end to it? They'll go to the h.e.l.ls, Buruu. And all of us with them. That's why we must be swift. Hiro cannot marry Aisha. The dynasty cannot be reforged.

MY KIND WERE RIGHT TO LEAVE THIS PLACE. TO GO WHERE YOUR KIND CANNOT FOLLOW.

North?

He nodded.

EVERSTORM.

Everstorm?

THAT IS WHAT WE CALL IT.

What's it like?

BEAUTIFUL. I WISH YOU COULD SEE IT.

Will you take me there one day? When all this is done?

She felt sadness in him then, a hint of something usually buried in the darkest corners of his mind. A glimpse was all she saw with the Kenning's new strength, the shadow of something vast, some leviathan moving beneath black waters. And just as quickly, it was gone.

NO.

He sighed.

NO, I WILL NOT.

North across the Iishi wilderness, the sawtoothed peak and drop of the mountain range, turning to slow gold in autumn's grip. They cleared the coast of Seidai Island, and she could see Shabishii in the distance; sheer granite cliffs rising like broken teeth from the b.l.o.o.d.y sea. The storm grew in ferocity, thunder rocking her bones. They slept as night fell, Yukiko's arms bound around Buruu's neck, the thunder tiger falling into a trancelike state; the not-quite unconsciousness of migratory birds who spend months with nothing but the sea for company.

By morning they were floating high above the water, the isle of Shabishii looming out of the mist. The ocean wandered away below them, getting lost before it reached the horizon and melting into the sky. She had never seen the sea before, save the black sc.u.m of Kigen Bay. It was nothing like the old paintings; not the color of deep forest or Kitsune jade or even the eyes of a samurai boy whose smile had filled her stomach with b.u.t.terflies. It was red as blood, a seething swell reflecting the crimson sky above. And before it filled her heart with aching and she turned from the thought, she realized how childish it had been; to love a boy she didn't even know. To name the shade of his eyes after a color she'd never seen. And how long ago it all seemed.

She thought of Kin. Eyes closed. Sighing. Running her fingers across her lips, the memory of his kiss lingering like the- YOU ARE DOING IT AGAIN.

What?

I AM GOING TO START COMPOSING BAD POETRY SOON.

G.o.ds, I'm sorry ...

A GOOD THING THERE ARE NO MONKEYS AROUND.

They'd begun to find a balance between them: Buruu holding himself back enough that his thoughts didn't make her headaches worse, but loud enough to constantly test her control. She still worked at the wall inside her head, pushing the pieces of herself into place like masonry onto budding ramparts, a dam to bear the brunt of the Kenning's noise and heat. But her grip would often falter, bricks cracking and splintering, his words squealing inside her head like a feedback loop, her nose spitting blood. She felt the Kenning growing stronger; a tide swelling behind her eyes, dashing itself over and over against her slender defenses. And still, she had no answers why.

Circling for endless hours around Shabishii island, she finally spied the place she might find them. Glowering upon a natural plateau, rooted so well in the stone it was difficult to tell where the brickwork began and nature's work ended. A skulking cl.u.s.ter of ancient buildings, sheltered against a sheer cliff face, outer walls dropping into the raging sea. Broad curving roofs, like decapitated pyramids stacked atop one another. Dark brick and black tiles.

The Monastery of the Painted Brethren.

No light gleaming in thin windows, no movement on high walls. The buildings were intact but overgrown, long vines working their way decade by dusty decade through the brick. The storm swelled overhead, a splinter of lightning stabbing the horizon, thrust blade-first into that blood-red sea as thunder broke the sky.

Can you see anyone?

NOT A SOUL.

Closer?

They circled. Lower. Nearer. She could see tangled fields in a vast quadrangle, what might have been food crops now trying to run wild in the vaguely poisoned air. A rope and pulley hung forlorn over a natural harbor, gnawed and slapped by the swell.

How the h.e.l.ls did they build this place?

They landed in the overgrown courtyard, cobbles choked by weeds, rain flooding in cackling waterfalls over the battlements. There was no sign of struggle-the outer doors were still whole and barred, the stonework unmarred by siege or fire. But slipping lightly off Buruu's back and surveying the surroundings, Yukiko's heart sank. Whoever lived here had done so long ago. n.o.body builds a fortress in climes so inhospitable and then lets nature reclaim it.

Buruu surveyed the surrounds with unblinking, molten eyes, head tilted, puzzlement in his gaze. With a faint disquiet, Yukiko realized the world inside her head was almost completely silent. No blazing tangle of human thoughts, not even the burning sparks of birds or beasts. A few lonely gulls wailed at the very edges of her senses, but that was all. The monastery, the scrub-brushed cliffs, the entire vista felt almost entirely bereft of life. The storm was the only sound, the shushing of constant rain, a whip-crack of thunder setting Buruu to purring, thin fingers of lightning racing each other across the clouds.