The Lotus War - Kinslayer Part 59

What her father had died for?

The Floating Palace groaned, her inflatable crumpling under its own weight as hydrogen hissed into the burning night. And with a fierce cry they hurled the flare, not toward the sinking sky-ship, but out into the bay, down into the black water beneath them, the tiny trembling spark swallowed in the dark. The flagship fell, slow if not graceful, the bladder that had once kept her afloat now streaming behind her in tatters. And their voice echoed in their own minds, uncertain where hers ended and his began, his gentle smile on her lips.

LET US HOPE THIS FLOATING PALACE LIVES UP TO ITS NAME.

Kaiah called, a roar filling the empty s.p.a.ce before the ship's thunderous impact into the mouth of the Junsei, the black foaming flow gushing up over the banks in a great rushing wave and dousing the smoldering houses at the water's edge. The Palace sank down to its railings, sc.u.mmed water flooding the decks and streaming back out in a hundred waterfalls as the hulk resurfaced, her balloon falling over her like a shroud, steam rising from the banks. Wallowing in her own ruins as the Phoenix corvettes scattered like rats when the corpse runs out. The Phoenix princelings on their knees, smeared in black and screaming with impotent rage. But alive.

Alive.

Through the smoke and billowing flames they wheeled, falling back inside one another again, Buruu and Yukiko, Yukiko and Buruu, the city's pyre setting their eyes aglow. Lightning flickered in the clouds overhead, through the haze of bitter-black smoke, a pulse setting their own pulses to quickening. The remaining Guild ships had gathered in tight formation, bristling with death-awaiting the girl they all feared. Bated breath, bellows falling still, dry mouths and sweat-soaked flesh hidden beneath skins of gleaming bra.s.s. Chattering mechabacii. Chattering mouths. Setting their teeth on edge.

Hackles rising. Smoke in their mouths. Decks crawling with chi-mongers. Bloodl.u.s.t pulsing, swelling, wanting, spilling from each thunder tiger into the Kenning, amplified and purified, doubling and trebling and feeding upon itself. They stared at this tiny pack of metal insects, blind grubs who thought themselves so far above the h.e.l.l they forged that its flames would never reach them. Each ship crewed by soldiers and Lotusmen; no innocents here, just killers, all. And through the smoke, they saw it, saw it for the first time-the hulking ironclad daubed in Tiger red, three flags streaming from its stern marked with the Daimyo's seal.

Through his eyes they gazed, sharp as new pins and twice as bright, onto the choked deck. Through the crowd of little boys in their smoking armor, stained with the color of death, there, there to the littlest boy of all. The boy they had given themselves to. The boy they had loved (she had loved) and the sight of him, daubed corpse-white with his ashen face, set the bloodl.u.s.t swelling again, gripping her tight, dragging her in. Buruu's need to kill, pure and primal, rushing over her like a flood. Filling her. Fighting her. Dragging her down to drown.

But she kicked. Fought. Seethed. To pull herself free, rip herself out, back from the oneness and into herself, the taste of her own blood on her lips and the pain flooding through the cracks in her wall. Just herself again. Just Yukiko.

Unwhole.

Buruu reared up into the air, metal wings spread wide, Yukiko sitting up tall on his back. Delirium and vertigo, the sense of her own body for a moment utterly alien, her flesh shivering and cold. The thunder tiger beneath her roared, time slowing to a crawl as she felt the blood flee her face, lips parted as she struggled for breath. Eyes fixed on the tall figure standing on the bow, even now drawing his swords, pointing his chainkatana at her, screaming challenge.

"Hiro," she breathed.

Lips peeled back from her teeth. Eyes locked with his. The green of Kitsune jade. The green of lotus fronds. But not the green of the sea, no, not the green she had named them for. Because the seas around this island she called home were red, red as lotus, red as blood, poisoned scarlet by these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and their stinking, wretched weed.

She could see Hiro's face, twisted with rage, gesturing for his samurai to clear a s.p.a.ce on the foredeck. To back away, let him stand alone. His words were lost in the drone of the engines, the howl of the flames, but his gestures made his intent clear. Calling Yukiko out. Demanding a duel. Satisfaction. Vengeance. He beat one fist upon his chest-an iron fist-gestured for his samurai to step farther back. Holding his arms wide, eyes locked on the girl and her thunder tiger. Actions speaking louder than any words.

Come on.

He bellowed, pointing his chainkatana at her again.

Come and get me.

Buruu growled, low and long, their hatred spilling into each other and gleaming in his eyes. It could all end. The Guild's ambitions for Hiro's rule. The threat of war still looming large over Shima. The storm clouds gathering on distant horizons. All of it could end, here and now.

WHY DO WE FALTER?.

Buruu's thoughts in her head, as always, echoing the deepest recesses of her own.

THE PHOENIX I UNDERSTAND. THERE WERE INNOCENTS ABOARD THAT SHIP. BUT HIRO WANTS YOU DEAD. THE GUILD BACK HIM TO THE HILT. THIS IS KILL OR BE KILLED, YUKIKO.

She struggled for breath, clawing her hair from her eyes.

And then what? If we kill him, the Guild will just choose another puppet. Another thrall.

THIS IS THE PATH YOU CHOSE. THIS IS THE RIVER OF BLOOD I PROMISED.

And weren't you afraid I would drown in it?

ALL YOU NEED DO IS DIVE IN AND SWIM.

I ...

She wiped her fist across her nose, brought it away b.l.o.o.d.y. Kaiah wheeled through the sky, circling them, roaring again, fairly trembling with antic.i.p.ation.

Her hand strayed to her belly.

I don't think I can, brother ...

WE KILLED HIM ONCE. WE CAN DO IT AGAIN.

Yukiko sat tall on his back, katana clutched in her hand.

I let anger and vengeance cloud my judgment before. We've killed hundreds of people and what has it gotten us? Where has it led us? We killed Yoritomo and simply made more chaos. We had a hand in all of this, Buruu. We helped set this city, this whole nation, on fire.

We have to be more than this. More than rage. More than revenge. Or else we will drown, Buruu. You. Me. All of us. Just like you said.

The beast growled, hackles rippling.

HE DESERVES IT FOR WHAT HE DID TO YOU. THIS BOY DESERVES TO DIE.

Yukiko sank down on his shoulders, a fire wind whipping hair across her eyes.

Everything dies, brother.

She stared at the boy on the deck of his ship, watching him roar and rage and rev his blades. All that was. That could have been. That would never be again. The memory of a tablet in a garden of stone, marked with her own father's name. The memory of his loss, real and sharp in her mind. Hand slipping from her belly to the blade he'd given her, all she had left of him save fading memories. And she stared at the boy she once loved, the arms that had once encircled her waist as he pressed his lips to hers-one of flesh, and one of cold, dead iron. She reached across the gulf between them, into the burning fire of his thoughts, acutely aware of how little effort it would take to simply ... squeeze. And there, amidst that impossible tangle, curled at the edges by rage and despair, she caught an impression. A single revelation. A fragment of knowledge, consuming, inundating, immolating all he was.

Aisha gone.

Dead.

So much blood.

And looking down on the ruins of the city below, the smoke and the bodies, the scarlet in the streets deep enough to sink in, the thought of adding one more drop filled her to sickening.

What we came here to do has been done for us.

WHAT?.

The wedding has been stopped, Buruu. The dynasty is in ruins. The Guild's plan is undone.

She ran one hand through his fur.

Enough for today.

She sheathed the katana at her back. Put away her anger and tossed her head. The boy in his ash-pale iron roared and spat and screamed, and her hands drifted once more to her stomach, to the dread and horror and enormity she felt swelling there. Fire burning in her mind. The city burning below. The Shgun's peace in tatters, the civil war inevitable now. Tiger against Dragon. Dragon against Fox. Fox against Tiger. The Guild amongst it all.

"Good-bye, Hiro..."

And as they turned away from Kigen, cutting through the air back to the north, a single thought burned like a star in her mind. A promise on a not-too-distant horizon, so close she could taste it in the very air. A certainty, light as iron, warm as ice, that Buruu's river would swallow them all now, no matter what they did.

The Lotus War has begun.

55.

ARMY OF THE SUN.

The wolves had almost run them to ground.

Michi hovered by the railing on the captain's deck, watching the pursuing floodlights grow larger. The running lights of the corvettes were smaller, brighter, the drone of their engines of a higher pitch. She fancied she could make out something of their shape in the glow of their floods and the hint of a distant dawn; sleek and sharp, like knives flung through the air, speeding right toward them.

The Kurea's captain stood by the wheel, occasionally looking back over his shoulder and spitting, knuckles white on the controls. The ship's engines were at full burn, temperature gauges hovering in the red, her aft shuddering with the strain. Smoke poured from her exhaust, her four propellers making the sound of thunder. But no matter how hard her captain willed it, no matter how loud her engines bellowed, she simply wasn't fast enough to outrun the hounds on her tail.

"What happens when the corvettes catch us?" Kaori asked.

"They'll hit our engines to wound us, slow us down enough for the ironclads to catch up. Then they'll board. They'll want to take us alive."

"That can't happen," Kaori said.

"I know," he nodded. "I know."

"What is your name, Captain-san?" Michi said.

"They call me the Blackbird." He tipped his hat.

Michi nodded. "A pleasure to die with you, Blackbird-san."

She could see the corvettes clearly now; a pair, just a few hundred feet off their stern. Their inflatables were flattened, shaped like the leaves of a beech tree or an arrowhead, hulls streamlined to cut through the wind like blades. Their small crews were gathered on deck; bra.s.s suits and glowing eyes, peering at them through the lenses of telescoping spygla.s.ses. She drew in a shuddering, hateful breath at the sight of the Guildsmen, remembering Aisha chained to those wretched machines, that wretched life.

The Kage gathered their weapons, Kaori beside her, Daichi's wakizashi in her hand. The older woman looked at Michi, nodded once, loose strands of raven hair whipping about her eyes. As good a place as any, she supposed. And better company, she couldn't hope to find.

The corvettes closed in, the claw heads of their fore-mounted net-throwers springing open as if fingers on iron hands, heavy wire cable slung between each digit like strands of spiderweb. The Guild gunners bent low over their sights, thumbs poised on firing studs.

Michi licked her lips, tasted the wind, thick with chi-stink. She looked down at the land below, vast stretches of lotus fields barely visible in the predawn light. She imagined sleepy farmers rising from their beds, wives cooking breakfast, men heading out into crops choking the very life from the soil. Too busy with their tiny lives to realize what they were doing, who they were robbing, where the road they walked would lead. And in the skies above their heads, men and women who'd decided to stand up, to resist, were about to die for their sakes, and none of them would ever know they had lived at all.

She thought of poor Ichizo. Of the choice he'd offered. Of the life she could have lived. And then she looked at the people beside her, her brothers and her sisters; the family she had chosen to stand beside in defiance of the Guild and its tyranny.

The wrench among the gears. The buzzing in their ears. The sum of all their fears: that no matter how much they smothered, how much they lied, how much they owned, there would still be people willing to defy, to stand tall, to fight and bleed and die for the sake of the strangers below, the tiny lives, the people who would never know their names, the children yet unborn.

And Michi held her chainkatana high and screamed; a single clear note of challenge, taken up by the men and women around her, until Kurea's deck was nothing but open mouths and bared teeth and raised, glittering blades. Fists in the air. Cries roiling in alt.i.tude's chill, each breath taken freely in the sunlight worth a thousand drawn in the shadow of slavery.

And their scream was answered.

A harsh cry, a shriek of winter wind, high and fierce. A second joining it, underscored with the rumble of thunder across autumn skies. And the hair on Michi's arms stood up and her eyes grew wide, and the breath caught in her lungs as her heart began singing inside her chest.

"I know that sound..." she breathed.

A white shape streaked out of the clouds, down the Kurea's starboard side; the rumble of a storm in its wake. Wings as broad as houses, feathers as white as Iishi snow. A second shape followed down the port side, floodlights glinting on iridescent metal, highlighting the figure on its back; a pale girl in mourning black, a dark ribbon of hair whipping in the wind behind her. And Michi screamed again, screamed at the top of her lungs, eyes full of tears as the aras.h.i.tora thundered past, circled back around and bore down on the Guild ships like lightning hurled from the hands of the Storm G.o.d.

"Yukiko!" she screamed. "Yukiko!"

The decks of the corvettes moved like insect hives kicked from their perches, the Guildsmen rushing about as panic took hold, pointing toward the shapes swooping toward them, the nightmare that woke them sweating in the dark. Slayer of Shguns. Ender of empires.

The Girl all Guildsmen Feared.

The net-throwers fired, spools of metal singing in the air, the aras.h.i.tora moving like poetry between the wailing cables. Buruu and Yukiko swept beneath the keel of the right corvette, coming up on her port side and tearing her engine loose in a bright plume of rolling flame. The sky-ship spun on its axis, listing hard to one side, her crew leaping out into the dark, rocket packs arcing in the brightening night as their vessel tumbled earthward. The second aras.h.i.tora sailed over the inflatable of the sister corvette, reaching down with ebony claws and shredding the canvas; peeling it away from the framework spine like bloated corpse-skin. Hydrogen shrieked as it escaped into the dark, the corvette plummeting from the sky like a broken bird, spiraling down toward its end, Lotusmen fleeing its ruins amidst plumes of blue-white flame.

The Kage roared in triumph, weapons raised to the sky as the white shapes wheeled about and returned to the Kurea's flank. Yukiko sat up straight, held her hand high in the air, fingers curled into a fist. Dozens of fists were raised in answer, Akihito leaning over the railing and bellowing Yukiko's name, hand outstretched. Buruu roaring like colliding thunderheads, his cry echoed by the second thunder tiger on their starboard side as the light of Lady Sun finally cleared the eastern horizon and set the skies aflame.

Michi sheathed the chainkatana at her waist, exhaustion and relief and bitter, black sorrow, Aisha's pa.s.sing weighing heavy on her heart. But at the sound of the Kage cheers, the joy shining on Akihito's face, the sight of fists rising into the air as the Guild ships fell back, she found a faint smile blooming on her lips. Breathing just a little easier. Happy for a moment just to be alive, in the s.p.a.ce where death had loomed just moments before. When all had seemed lost. When all hope was gone.

The second thunder tiger bellowed loud enough to set the Kurea's rivets chattering, descending in a broad spiral around the sky-ship, the Kage's eyes alight with wonderment. And as Yukiko and Buruu swept around the stern amidst their triumphant cries, fingers balled tight and thrust in the sky, as their eyes met across that howling trail of blue-black smoke and Yukiko called her name, Michi found herself grinning, raising her fist into the air.

And together, the aras.h.i.tora and the Kurea turned north, toward the shadow of the Iishi on the horizon, bathed in the light of a dawn long overdue.

Not a victory. Not even close.

But perhaps ...

Michi nodded.

Perhaps soon.

56.

WOMB.

The cage stank of dried blood. Of failure and fear. The soup-thick reek of lotus smoke and stale human waste made Kin's eyes water, the boiling thrum of the chapterhouse above reverberating into tired bones. The manacles were cutting off his circulation, and he wriggled the numbness from his fingers. Sweat burning his eyes, fumes burning his lungs, he hung his head and waited in the aching dark.

His cage was one of hundreds, row upon row of iron bars, running the ribs of a vast, gloom-soaked room. The wall at his back was dirty yellow, armpit-moist with condensation, slick and warm to the touch. Not so long ago, the chapterhouse cells would have been filled with flesh-the old and the infirm, women and children with fair skin and wide, round eyes and blond and red and auburn hair, all waiting their turn to shuffle meekly into the inochi vats and meet their boiling end. But now the cages were empty, one after another, bare, sweating stone picked out by pinp.r.i.c.ks of flickering halogen.

He closed his eyes, sought his center, the emptiness of self he'd found in the workshop, the long silence within the press of his metal sh.e.l.l. He could feel sweat creeping into the plugs studding his flesh, the pull of cable beneath. He tried to block out the half-remembered echo of the mechabacus in his head, the stink of the smoke and the s.h.i.t, to remember why he'd come here. Why he'd chosen this.

He thought of the girl, felt the lead-lined wings of b.u.t.terflies in his stomach, heart thumping in his chest. He pictured her standing on a rope footbridge in the Iishi village, a silhouette etched against ancient trees as the moon took his throne, wind running its fingers through her hair.

To be the wind ...