Kinslayer (25 page)

He raised the saké bottle with an inquiring eyebrow.

“Never seen the black market this busy.” Jimen nodded, held out his cup. “The Guild will lift the embargo soon. If this Tiger pup secures the Daimyo’s chair, he might even start the trains running to let people attend his bloody wedding. So we’d best make the most of it while it lasts.” Jimen scowled. “And the White Crane are still a problem.”

“Not for long,” the Gentleman said. “Downside is ours now. Docktown is next.”

“Scorpion Children.” Jimen raised his glass. “The last crew standing.”

“Banzai.” The Gentleman nodded, taking another small sip.

As he swallowed the saké, the Gentleman heard floorboards creaking outside his office, soon followed by a soft knock on the door. Heavy breathing. The smell of cheap liquor and sweat. The clink of a tetsubo’s studs against iron rings. Hida and Seimi.

“Come,” he said.

His lieutenants entered the room, eyes downcast. He looked up, ready to rebuke them for their tardiness, stopping short when he saw the looks on their faces. The Gentleman took note of the faltering steps. The hands clasped before them.

The
empty
hands clasped before them.

“An interesting morning, brothers?”

*   *   *

A single iron kouka in Kigen city could buy you a woman for the night. Not some gutter-trash from Downside, mind. A quality courtesan—the kind of lady who could recite the poetry of Fushicho Hamada, debate matters theological or political, and round out the evening with a finale to make a cloudwalker blush. It could buy you a night in a good inn with a warm meal, a cool bath and a bed with a remarkably low quotient of lice per square foot. It could buy you a bag of decent smoke, a bottle of top-shelf rice wine (local of course, not Danroan) or the promise of discretion from an innkeeper about the nocturnal habits of his guests.

Yoshi was staring at over a hundred of them.

Scattered across the mattress in their bedroom, illuminated by a splinter of sunlight piercing the grubby window. Jurou was crouched beside them with a grin as wide as the Eastborne Sea, dry pipe hanging from the edge of his mouth.

“Izanagi’s balls, how much you figure is here?”

“There’s enough. That’s all we need to know for now, Princess.”

Yoshi’s hat was sitting on the mattress beside the kouka piles, and Jurou fingered the four-inch gouge through the brim.

“I’m wondering if it’s ‘enough’ for you to splash out on a new shappo.”

“That’s my lucky hat. I’d sell you before I sold it.”

Jurou made a face, muttered something unintelligible.

The boys hunkered down by the light of the risen sun, listening to the hymns of the waking streets outside. The sweat from their dash across town was still drying on their skin, smiles still tripping in their eyes. It had been so much easier than he expected. So much cleaner. For all their weight, those yakuza had melted like wax. Like godsdamned
snow
. All thanks to a tiny iron lump in the palm of one little hand—

“Yoshi?” Hana’s sleep-drunk voice from outside the bedroom. “You back?”

“Shit!”
he hissed, lunging for a pillow as his sister knocked gently and opened the door. He threw himself and his thin, feather-stuffed shield over their haul, a strangled “oof!” slipping through his lips as Jurou sat on top of him, the pair drawing more attention to the coins than if they’d lit them on fire.

Daken followed Hana into the room, regarding Yoshi with a glittering stare.

… smooth, boy …

“What the hells?” Hana breathed, sleep-crusted eye growing wide. “Where did you—?”

Yoshi rolled to his feet, pulled her inside. Glancing across the living space at his sister’s bedroom door, he pushed his own shut, quick and quiet. Hana was fully awake now, her frown building up a slow head of steam.

“Where did all this money come from, Yoshi?”

“A friendly kami gave it to me,” he whispered. “Maybe if you sing louder, it’ll flit back with second helpings.”

She fixed him in that paint-flaying, one-eyed glare. “I’m serious.”

“So am I,” he hissed, glancing at the closed door. “Volume down. Unless you want your lump of mattress-meat to overhear?”

The pair fell into a silent staring contest, which Yoshi eventually broke from. Hana felt around her eyepatch, touched her forehead, running fingertips across pale, grubby skin. She snatched up the tiny looking glass on Yoshi’s dilapidated dresser and made a show of squinting at her reflection, still pawing at her brow.

Jurou frowned up at her. “What the hells you doing, girl?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She glared at Yoshi again. “I just figured someone had tattooed ‘idiot’ on my forehead while I was sleeping. You take the ’thrower out for the night and just happen to find a Daimyo’s fortune in iron? What are you in, Yoshi?”

“I was all set to ask you the same yesterday before I remembered whose business I’m supposed to mind.”

“Me?” Hana flipped hair from her eye. “Chamber pots are about the size of my affairs.”

“Must be some scary brown in that palace, if you have to go around shooting at it.” Yoshi folded his arms. “Or did you think I wouldn’t spy the ’thrower was one shot light? And who the hells is that lump of beef in your room? Your whole life, I’ve never seen you bring anyone back home for a roll, and that cripple has been here two days straight.”

“Don’t talk about him that way.”

“You don’t tell me how to talk, little sister. I’m the man in this pit.”

“Keep running that mouth, you’re gonna wake up a lady, brother-mine.”

Yoshi grinned, despite himself. “All sweet. You keep your secrets. But this coin is mine. I’ll air my skeletons when you decide you’ve got some. Until then, no questions asked. I’m taking care of us. All of us. Blood is blood. That’s about the measure of the knowing you need.”

Hana glowered, looked to Jurou for backup and received only a helpless shrug. With a muttered curse, she turned and stalked from the room. Daken remained behind, wriggling what was left of his ears. The cat sniffed the air, nose wrinkled with contempt.

… this room stinks, boy …

Yoshi glanced around the grubby little space, into the living room beyond. With all this coin, they could afford something in a nice part of town, far from where the Scorpion Children did their business. A few more rips, they’d have enough to go wherever they wanted. No more scrounging or small-time scams. No more slinging rich man’s shit for Hana. No more looking over their shoulder or wondering where the next meal might come from.

He nodded at Daken.

This whole place stinks, little brother. You just keep helping me do what needs to get done, and we’ll be scampering from this hole with no looks back.

… have Hana help? seven eyes better than six …

Hana can’t know, you hear? Not about any of this. I’d never hear the godsdamned end of it. I’m the man of this family. I take care of us.

… not understand …

You don’t need to. If she asks, don’t say anything at all.

… how long will that work …

Yoshi peered through the tiny window, out into the swelling shift and roll of the city beyond. He could hear Jurou counting coin, feel the prickle of Hana’s glare on his skin. The weight of a fistful of iron in the small of his back. The tingling promise of coin in the palms of his hands.

Freedom.

Long enough, my friend.

He closed the bedroom door.

Long enough.

16

UNDERTOW

Three days.

Three days of screaming gales and blinding rain. Of aching muscle and bitter-sharp cold. Of red water and black fear and snow-white knuckles. Three days long. And in the midst of those endless dark hours, there came a single, awful moment that threatened to break Yukiko entirely.

Not the moment she swallowed her last morsels of food, her final mouthful of water. Not tying her hands around Buruu’s neck for fear she might fall asleep and tumble into the void. Not in the wind whipping her across his back like a doll of rags. Not even the complete absence of anything but clouded sky and blood-red ocean, stretching to the brink of every horizon.

It was the moment she realized her best friend in the world was a complete stranger.

She begged him. Pleaded. Screamed into his mind until her nose bled and her head split. He could barely manage monosyllabic replies beneath the rush of blood in his veins, the arousal that spilled into her mind if she lingered more than a moment in his. He was an imposter wearing an all-too-familiar skin, like one of those automated Guild criers, set to a single series of functions.

<
seek
>

<
mate
>

<
repeat
>

Storm clouds mustered to the north, glowering black, and as they’d drawn closer, the need inside him had grown worse. The scent was a drug; a curling heat spreading through his system, rushing toward a terrifying high. Yukiko felt some tiny spark of him behind the thunder in his veins, almost extinguished by the absolute need filling every other part of him. And as hours stretched into days, and she hunched shivering and miserable on his back, she’d realized there was a part of Buruu she didn’t know at all.

In days past, she’d only caught glimpses of the animal inside him. Her humanity had leaked through the Kenning from the first time she’d shared his eyes, changing what he was. Even in the darkest hours of their imprisonment, it had tempered the pure, primal edge of him. But now that veil was torn away, ripped to shreds and left drifting in the storm, wings pounding at the air, muscles taut, eyes bright, lungs straining as his heart thrashed against its moorings.

She remembered his promise sailing above the Iishi, the words that warmed her soul.

“I will never leave you. Never forsake you. For you are the heart of me.”

It terrified her, how easily she’d been cast aside. But if the thought made her cry, for its part, the rain did its best to hide her tears.

In the gray, blurry dawn of the third day, she spotted jagged islands in the swell beneath them. Some as big as houses, others no more than slivers. It was as if some great beast lurked beneath the water, mouth open to the sky, baring teeth of dark stone. Toward noon, she spied wreckage; a sky-ship’s remains bent and broken over a small island, Guild kanji on the inflatable. Later, as the sun slunk below the horizon like a kicked hound, she could have sworn she saw the ruins of another sky-ship; heavier, armed for war, more Guild markings scrawled across her balloon. She couldn’t tell if either were the ship they’d followed into the tempest.

These storms would mean death for any cloudwalker crew, Guild or not. What madness drove them up here over and over again?

The wind was a pack of snarling wolves, howls of thunder and teeth of frost. Sleep came in fitful moments—no sooner would she doze off than it would snatch her like a child’s toy, fear flooding her insides as she clung to Buruu for dear life. Lightning intensifying as they flew farther north; dazzling, carpet-bomb barrages that left her comatose, black streaks in her vision, ears ringing in the aftershocks. The rain was a numbing deluge, soaking her lips blue.

On the morning of the fourth day she’d woken from dreams of falling to the sight of islands in the distance. Some were towers, higher than any building, twisting at impossible angles like fingers broken back and forth at every knuckle. Others were flat, squat, as if beheaded by the sword of an angry god. They were made of what seemed to be black glass, glittering like razors as the lightning kissed their edges, veiled in rain and mist.

Buruu, can you hear me? Are these the Razor Isles?

No reply, save the swell of the lust in his mind, the poison of weariness mirroring her own desperate fatigue. The female was close—so close he could taste her. But he could feel her mating time was almost done, scent fading like flowers at the end of spring, and the desperation to find her before she cooled filled every vein, every muscle, every corner of his mind.

Long, cold hours swept by, flying low through the salt-spray sting. At first she thought them a mirage; a fever vision brought on by sleep deprivation and the storm’s relentless assault. But as Yukiko squinted into the blood-red water beneath them, she realized
things
were pursuing them below the ocean’s surface. Serpentine tails slicing the swell, mouths full of needles gnashing at the waves, spines down their backs like the dorsal fins of deep tuna. Eyes as big as her fist, yellow and slitted like a cat’s.

She’d seen their pictures painted on drinking-house walls, the backs of playing cards, tattooed down the arms of her countrymen. She’d thought them long dead and gone. But then, she’d thought the same of thunder tigers.

Sea dragons.

The beasts were infants by the look, only twice as long as a man was tall. Bright scales, rolling eyes and serrated grins. And though they couldn’t keep pace with Buruu, falling behind and whipping the ocean into angry foam, the very sight of them filled Yukiko with cold terror, enough for her to open up the Kenning and scream into his mind until her nose bled and her whole body shook. And in the end, when he ignored her, when every cry fell on deaf ears, she found herself taking hold of him and squeezing tight, chin and lips slicked with blood at the effort, eyes screwed shut, heart hammering, skull creaking,
forcing
him to pull away from the surface and the monstrosities lurking beneath it.