The Lotus War - Kinslayer Part 8

"Then why do you stay?"

It was a long time before Kin answered; a wordless s.p.a.ce filled by faint rain drumming on the canopy, as if a distant army were pounding earth with hollow bamboo. Yukiko could see him watching her, walking there in front of him, Buruu beside her. He looked at the forest, slowly turning the color of rust, cupped in the palms of autumn's chill. And finally, he shrugged.

"Because there are things here I love. Because I'm part of this world, and I've sat by and watched it falling away for far too long, hoping someone else will save it."

"So now you will save it, Kin-san? All by yourself?"

"Not by myself." He shook his head. "We're all in this together. We need more people to realize that. More people willing to stand up and say 'enough.' No matter what it costs."

Ayane glanced at Kin and smiled, and her eyes sparkled like dew on polished stone. Beneath the fear, there was a strength in her voice, old as the mountains looming around them, deep as the earth beneath their feet.

"Enough," she said.

The pain crested and swelled, hot and sharp, too much, too harsh. Yukiko broke away, slipped back into her own thoughts like a thief, wiping the blood from her lips. Buruu cast her a sideways glance, saying nothing, saying everything. She sniffed thickly, spat salty scarlet into the underbrush.

Hundreds of eyes followed them as they walked away.

6.

DOWNSIDE UP.

The other servants never called her by name.

The girl was short for her eighteen years, famine-thin, her impish face set with hollow cheeks and pointed chin. Raven-black hair was cut in a messy bob, damp with sweat. Her right eye was covered with a patch of dark leather, the faint stippling of scar tissue in her cheek, a deep hairless gouge bisecting her eyebrow. Her good eye was large, almost too round, so dark as to be nearly black.

A visitor to the Shgun's palace would have taken one look at her winter-pale complexion and wagered the girl was Kitsune-born-pasty as all the Fox clan were. But a glance beneath the cotton covering her right shoulder would have revealed no clan ink on her skin; shown her to be a lowborn mongrel, unfit for all but the most menial and unclean of labors.

Hence her nickname.

"You!" a voice called. "s.h.i.t Girl!"

The girl stopped in her tracks, sandals scuffing on polished floorboards. She turned to face the approaching house mistress, her gaze downcast, hands clasped together. As the plump, over-powdered woman stopped before her, the girl focused on the floor between her toes. Night was falling out in the palace grounds, but she could hear a lone sparrow singing-choking, really-its lungs full of oily lotus haze. The leaves in the wretched gardens were failing, autumn creeping into Kigen city and painting all with gray and rust-red during the sunlit hours. But the s.h.i.t Girl only roamed the palace after dark-the less seen of her in the harsh light of day, the better.

"My Lady?" she said.

"Where are you going?"

"The servant's wing, my Lady."

"The chamber pots in the guest wing need emptying when you're done."

She bowed. "Hai."

"Go on then," the woman waved. "And bathe tomorrow, for the Maker's sake. There may be no Shgun, but this is still the Shgun's palace. Serving here is an honor. Especially for one of your breed."

"I will, my Lady. Thank you, my Lady."

Bowing low, the girl waited for the mistress to retreat before continuing on her way. She shuffled to the servants' quarters, the loose boards of the nightingale floor chirping and squeaking beneath her feet. Outside each door, a chamber pot awaited-black kiln-fired clay, a little smaller than an armful, with gifts inside just for her. She would carry each pot to a night soil drain at the rear of the grounds and dump the reeking contents. Wash them out and trudge back though the palace. Watching the slow, orchestrated chaos around her, ministers and soldiers and magistrates, scrabbling for power and gathering in tiny, muttering knots.

And she, beneath it all.

The house mistress had spoken truth-serving in the palace was an honor few lowborns ever enjoyed. Burak.u.min like her were the bottom of the barrel in Shima's caste system, only employed at tasks regular citizens found unwholesome. Male clanless could join the army, of course, serve out a ten-year stint in exchange for genuine clan ink at the end of his tour. But that wasn't an option for the s.h.i.t Girl, even if she felt the suicidal urge to serve as fodder for the gaijin lightning cannon. Besides, that plan hadn't worked out so well for her father ...

So here she was, slinging chamber pots in the Shgun's palace. Derided. Shunned. Constantly reminded she was unworthy of the honor. But lowborn or no, in the two years she'd worked those opulent halls, she'd learned a simple truth she'd suspected her entire life-no matter how honorable the backside producing it, s.h.i.t never fails to stink.

Making her way back to the servant's wing, she would slip the chamber pot through a slot in the bedroom doors, working her way down the row. Each room was sealed with a shiny new lock-Lady Aisha's maidservants were all under house arrest, recently moved from Kigen jail. In fact, more than a few of the palace serving staff had been imprisoned after Shgun Yoritomo's death, suspected of either a.s.sisting the plot, or failing to stop it. But the s.h.i.t Girl? The clanless, worthless, bloodless mongrel wrapped in third-hand servant's clothes? She swam as she always did. Beneath their contempt. Beneath their notice.

It had worked out well, all things considered.

She knelt by the final door in the row, reached inside her servant's kimono and retrieved a small pad of rice-paper, a stick of charcoal. Glancing up and down the darkened corridor, she scrawled some hasty kanji on the paper, slipped it through the door slot.

"Daiyakawa," it said.

The name of a little-known village somewhere in the northern Tora provinces, where years ago, a peasant uprising had been quietly quashed by Shgunate troops. To most, the name would mean nothing. To the girl imprisoned within the room, everything.

Moments later, a note was slipped back through the slot, kanji marked in lipstick.

"Who are you?"

And so it began. Paper slipping into the hall, her eye scanning the notes, replies marked on the flip side. Listening for approaching footsteps as the girl imprisoned within the room scratched a new message, pa.s.sed it through the s.p.a.ce between doorframe and nightingale floor.

"Call me No One, Michi-chan. Kaori sends regards."

"Do I know you?" came Michi's response.

"Have served in palace two years, but you would not know me. Joined local Kage a few weeks ago."

"Why join now?"

"Saw Stormdancer speak in Market Square. Told me to raise my fist. So here I am."

A small pause.

"And here I am."

"Can you escape room?"

"Tried. Ceiling panels bolted in place. Window barred."

"Why return here after Yoritomo died? Must have known you would be arrested."

"Could not leave Aisha behind."

"Brave."

"Overheard rumors. Wedding? Lord Hiro?"

"True. Invitations sent to clanlords. Date set. Three weeks."

"Aisha would never agree."

"No choice."

"Can speak to her?"

"Royal wing guarded like prison. Aisha never leaves rooms."

"I must get out of here."

"Magistrate Ichizo has only key."

Another pause.

"Not for long."

No One heard creaking footsteps, the low murmurs of two approaching bushimen.

"Must go. Light red candle in window when free to speak."

Standing quickly, the girl scooped up the chamber pot and shuffled down the corridor, heart pounding in her chest. She forced her hands to be still, her breath to slow. But the guards gave her and her stinking armload a wide berth, neither of them sparing her a glance. Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew to ignore her. This was the fate of the clanless in Shima-to be treated as less than a person. All her life, she'd been a walking, breathing absentee. Seldom spoken to. Never touched. For all intents and purposes, invisible.

It had worked out well, all things considered.

When she was a little girl, No One thought the smokestacks made the clouds. She remembered playing around the walls of Yama refinery with her brother, watching filthy children tramp in and out of wrought-iron gates to a steam whistle tune, jealous they got to work in a place so magical. Trudging home through the wretched streets of Downside, she felt a pang of remorse for that childish ignorance.

The chi refinery grew like a tumor off Kigen Bay; a tangled briar of swollen pipes and bloated tanks, glowering over the labyrinthine alleys with grubby gla.s.s eyes. Chimneys dotted with burning floodlights spattered the sky with tar, smothering the broken-back tumbledowns about it in a blanket of choking vapor. A corroded pipeline as tall as houses wormed out of the refinery's bowels, north across the sluggish black depths of the Junsei River. Ramshackle apartment stacks and crumbling lean-tos lined the oil-slick streets of Downside-the cheapest and meanest stretch of broken cobbles in all of Kigen. A body had to be poor or desperate to even consider hanging her hat there.

Truth was, she'd spent eighteen years being both.

A threadbare cloak was slung around her servant's clothes, grubby kerchief over her face, a broad straw hat pulled low over her good eye, narrowed against the rising sun. As she rounded the corner to her tenement tower, a figure prowled out of the gloom to meet her, quiet as final breath. A hulking shape, almost toddler-sized, missing both ears and half its tail, blue-black as lotus smoke. It had a mangled, snaggletoothed face, patchy fur stretched over crisscrossed scars. Its kind were rare as diamonds in Kigen these nights. Its eyes were the color of p.i.s.s on fresh snow.

A cat. A demon-born b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a tomcat.

She knelt on the cobbles, scratched the creature behind one of its missing ears.

"h.e.l.lo, Daken. Miss me?"

"Mreowwwwl," he said, purring like a chainblade.

No One stomped up the tenement's narrow stairwell, Daken trailing behind. The walls were plastered with posters for the Kigen army, slapped up just days after Yoritomo-no-miya died; a recruitment drive targeting the city's poor and clanless, promising three squares a day, a clean bed, and a chance to die defending an empty chair.

Out onto the fourth-floor landing, she stepped over a crack-thin, crumpled figure, pa.s.sed out in a puddle of his own waste. Gray skin, lotus-red eyes rolled back into his skull. It amazed her to think some fiends were still smoking now everybody knew how blood lotus was grown. Without sparing the wretch a glance, she unlocked her door and slipped inside.

"Sis." Yoshi looked up from his card game. "How do?"

Her brother sat on the floor beside a low table scattered with cards and coins. His hair was tied in rows of elaborate braids, spilling around his shoulders in black, knotted ripples. He was terribly pale, sharp-edged and handsome, the same pointed chin and dark, round eyes as his sister, glittering like shuriken beneath his brows. The shadows of his first whiskers were a pale dusting on his upper lip and cheeks. He was grubby as a cloudwalker, clothed in dirty rags. A conical straw hat with a jagged tear through the brim sat crooked on his head. One year older than she, but still a youth-gutter-lean, hard muscle and long-limbs, slowly filling out into the man beneath his surface.

"I'm all right," she sighed. "Can't believe you're still awake..."

"You're not so old I can't wait up for you, girl." Yoshi hefted the bottle of cheap rice wine from the table. "Besides, there's still a third left."

She made a face, turned to the other boy. "You winning, Jurou?"

Jurou glanced up from the other side of the table, fingers hovering close to his stack of copper bits. He was around Yoshi's age, shorter, darker in complexion. Softly curling bangs of black hair hung about shadowy eyes, cheeks flushed with wine. An empty smoking pipe dangled from pursed lips. A beautiful tiger tattoo coiled around a well-muscled arm; the kind you didn't usually see in Downside unless it was attached to a corpse with very empty pockets.

"Winning? Always." Jurou shot her his heartbreaker smile, turned over a maple card and flicked the straw brim back from Yoshi's eyes. "Lucky hat my a.s.s."

Yoshi swore and pushed across his coin. The flat was claustrophobic, furnished with a low table and moldy cushions, dirty light guttering from a tungsten globe. A soundbox sat on the floor beside the boys; cheap tin and tangled copper wires, stolen from some peddler's wagon last winter. A tiny window ushered in the pitiful breeze, the sounds of the rising dawn outside: the city stretching its limbs, automated criers trawling the streets, steam whistles from the distant refinery.

No One splashed a handful of copper kouka on the table amidst the playing cards. The coins were rectangular, two strips of plaited metal, dulled from the press of a thousand fingers.

Jurou whistled. "Izanagi's b.a.l.l.s. A month of slinging brown for that pittance? You'd be better off begging in the street, girl."

"I'd be better off pimping you down at the sky-docks, too, if you're that worried about it."

"And we'd retire rich as lords in a fortnight."

She laughed, and Jurou grinned around his empty pipe-the boy had quit smoking lotus once the origins of inochi fertilizer had broken, but chewing the stem had proven an unbreakable habit.

"Forgetting something?" Yoshi asked, raising a lazy eyebrow.

No One sighed, sinking down onto her haunches and scratching at the stippled scar below her eyepatch. She slipped a chunk of metal from inside her kimono, hefted it in her hand. The lump was snub-nosed with a thumb-broad barrel, matte-black and ugly as a copper-kouka wh.o.r.e. There was no symmetry to the design; it was all pipes and rivets and leaden menace. The handle was polished oak, inlaid with golden tigers, a deep scar in the wood from where its former owner had dropped it onto the cobbles at her feet as he died.

Shgun Yoritomo's iron-thrower.

It was heavy in her hand, seemingly cold and dead. But she'd been there in the Market Square when its trigger was pulled on the Black Fox of Shima. She'd seen what it could do. What one little girl could do too.

That was where it had started.

"Give it here," Yoshi said. "You'll blow your foot off."

She pa.s.sed the weapon back with a scowl, mumbled a threat about Yoshi's privates.

"Not sure why you insist on carrying that thing around with you," Jurou mused.

"You try being a girl walking alone in this city at night," she replied.

"We should sell it. Make a fortune."

"There's fortunes to be made without selling anything." Yoshi fixed Jurou in a pointed stare. "Besides, what p.a.w.nman would be crazed enough to turn grist on the Shgun's property?"