Kinslayer (32 page)

The pair kept to the deepest shadows, the girl taking the lead, quiet as whispers. The smell of Kigen Bay crawled up from the city’s nethers, the hiss and stutter-clank of the refinery, strangling the glow of distant stars. Chi lanterns lined the streets; tiny pinpricks of light burning in braziers shaped like lotus blooms. A Guild crier trundled past on rubber treads; looking like a short, faceless fat man of riveted metal, spine dotted with exhaust pipes, bells clutched in each stunted hand.

The smoke in the mechanoid’s wake made Akihito’s throat burn as they passed by. The scent reminded him of Masaru’s pipe, stained fingers, his friend’s eyes alight with laughter.

You should never have left them.

He looked down at his leg, the dull pain of his wound flaring every time his right heel struck the ground. He could still see them in his mind’s eye; Masaru crouched in the jail cell, hands and lips smeared with red. Kasumi lying against the wall, pool of blood swelling all around her, bubbling on her lips as she spoke her last words to him.

“Fight another day, you big lump.”

The last time he’d ever seen either of them alive.

At least Yukiko had taken Masaru’s body with her when she flew north. At least he would’ve received a decent burial. But would the Shōgun’s dogs have burned offerings for Kasumi to Enma-ō? Would they have painted her face with ashes, as the
Book of Ten Thousand Days
commanded? Or did they just throw her body into some dank alleyway to be gnawed by corpse-rats? Would the Judge of the Nine Hells have weighed her fair, with no rites held in her name? Would the spirit stones Akihito left in Market Square be enough to see her soul through?

Curse you for a coward. You should’ve died with them. And if she was cast into Yomi to languish as a hungry ghost, at least you would’ve been with her. At least she wouldn’t be alone.

Hana grabbed his hand, tearing him from gloomy thoughts and back into the deeper gloom of Kigen’s streets. She dragged him into a narrow alley between a grubby textile store and a small temple. Slipping in beside him, she pressed against his arm, breathing low and measured.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Hssst!” A finger on his lips.

Akihito frowned, remained mute. The girl was staring directly at the wall, eye curling up inside its socket, lashes flickering. He heard the sound of heavy boots, peered out into the street, saw two bushimen emerging from an alley half a block away; black iron and blood-red tabards. They were pushing a young woman before them.

Their voices were low, just snatches beneath the refinery’s groan and clank, Akihito’s heart pounding in his chest. The first bushiman shoved the girl again; a small, pretty thing, clutching a torn servant’s kimono at her throat. Tear-streaked face, kohl running down her cheeks, hair tangled across bloodshot eyes.

“Be off.” One bushiman was retying his obi, war club under his arm. “You’ll find no more sport here, girl. Your master should know better than to send you into Downside before dawn.”

The girl ran weeping, back in the direction of the Upside mansions on the hill. The second soldier yelled after her.

“We catch you out again after curfew, we’ll send you home with more than a limp!”

Akihito glanced at Hana as the servant passed by, torn clothes, sobbing and wretched. The girl met his stare, shrugging as if it meant nothing—a mask of indifference learned from a life at the bottom of the pile. But he could see the clenched jaw. Trembling fists.

The two bushi’ meandered past the narrow alley mouth, chuckling between themselves, passing by without so much as a glance. When their footfalls and rough talk had faded to a whisper, Hana nodded to Akihito, and the pair hurried on through the dark.

“How did you know they were there?” The big man spared a passing glance down the alleyway the serving girl would never forget. Two fat corpse-rats peered at him across shin-high piles of trash. One snuffled the air, baring crooked yellow daggers in black gums.

“I heard them.” Hana didn’t look back, kept her voice low.

“Funny that I didn’t.”

“Try losing an eye. See how much your hearing improves.”

They flitted on through the haze, stopping several times at Hana’s signal, slipping into shadows or squeezeways to avoid bushimen patrols or sky-ships rumbling overhead. The soldiers cut across the streets in random patterns, but Hana never failed to hear them, to hiss a quiet warning and drag him from the light. She moved like a fish through water, falling still as stone when the bushi’ drew close, melting away like smoke. It was uncanny. Unnerving.

As they neared the drop box, she pushed him into an alcove beside a baker’s shopfront, cracked awnings and cloudy beach glass. Pressing in beside him, she stared off into space. Again, her eyelid fluttered as if in a breeze, iris rolling up in her head. Daken leaped over the space between the rooftops above, his grace belying his bulk.

Akihito thought of Masaru then, stalking the last of Shima’s monsters together in long-gone days, Sensei Rikkimaru and Kasumi by their sides. The big man could see his friend clearly, as if the great hunts were only yesterday: yew bow held in stone-steady hands, string taut, arrow nocked, the Black Fox’s eyes rolling up in his head as he fired.

Never missing.

And looking now at this slip of a girl beside him, head tilted on a pale, slender neck, eye rolled back in her socket, he knew. Knew why that tomcat clung to her and her brother like iron to a lodestone. Why rats never squeaked at their approach. Why she reminded him so much of Yukiko.

He
knew
.

“We’ll have to wait.” Hana pulled her kerchief down to spit. “More bushi’ ahead.”

He nodded. “As you say, little fox.”

“‘Little fox’?” Her smile was crooked. “I’m not Kitsune.”

“Well, you remind me of a few I’ve known. You move like them. And gods know you’re pale enough to be Fox clan. Even we Phoenix have a little color about us.” He poked her on the chin, and she smiled again. “But you’re white as Iishi snow.”

“We used to live in Kitsune lands,” she shrugged. “There’s probably some Fox in our blood, way back down the line.”

“You father was lowborn too?”

“Soldier,” she nodded. “Fought the gaijin in Morcheba.”

Looking out to the street, she scowled and muttered.

“Fought them back here too…”

Akihito frowned, unsure what she meant. “So when did you come to Kigen?”

“When I was ten. We flew on a Kitsune merchant ship. So high we could almost see the whole island.” Her face lit up as if the sun had stolen out from behind the clouds. “The people below looked like children’s toys. I’ll never forget it. What I wouldn’t give to live up there…”

“What happened to your parents?” he asked. “Where are they?”

“Gone.”

“Don’t you have family somewhere?”

“Yoshi and Jurou are my family. The only ones I need. Anyways, why do you care?”

“Well, because this is no way for you children to be living, that’s why.”

She turned on him, a scowl darkening her face, eye narrowed near to shutting.

“Children?” Her expression was disbelieving. “Is that what you think of me?”

“Well—”

“Do you know what it takes to live in Shima’s gutters, Akihito-san?” Her voice hardened, became a thing of cold stone. “Have you ever had to break someone’s skull for a scrap of food or a dry corner to sleep in? Ever watched your friends selling their bodies for copper bits? Has your life ever been so awful that a job slinging shit in the royal palace sounds like paradise?” She glanced at the beggars, the bloodstains and rot around them. “You honestly think children live here anymore?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant. Oh, and before you spit on the way I live? In case you didn’t notice, you’re living right there with me, Akihito.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know me.” Her lips were tight across her teeth. “You don’t know anything about me. The things I’ve seen. The things I’ve done. I’m risking my life every day in that palace, and the two people I love most in this world don’t even know I’m doing it.
Most
people in this city wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire, and I do it anyway. Because it’s right. Because no one else will. Fuck you, calling me a godsdamned child…”

He put his hand on her shoulder, squeezing tight as she tried to flinch away. He could feel the too-thin flesh beneath new cloth, the bird-brittle bones beneath that.

“I’m sorry, Hana.”

She stared at him, mute and unblinking, jaw clenched. The breeze blew sweat-damp locks about her eye, bright in the dark, too large in that gaunt and bloodless face. A long minute ticked by in silence, and Akihito saw the truth of her words; the way she stood, fierce and unafraid, fingers curled to fists at her side, muscles overwound, staring him down. There was nothing left of a child inside her. Kigen had stolen every part of it away. And finally, after a breathless span in the chi lamps’ flickering light, she relented. Gifted him with a sharp nod. Breathed deep.

“Come on.” She crooked a thumb. “The bushimen are gone. If we’re quick, we can be in and out before they’re back.”

She stepped from the shadows, smoke-soft footfalls on hard stone. He limped behind, beneath the cramped archway of a small arcade. The stores were barred, windows boarded up. The cobbles were newly stained; dry blood turned to muddy brown, broken glass glittering in the flagstone seams. They kept to the gloom, Akihito bending with a wince and shifting a loose brick near the storm drain while Hana kept watch, lashes fluttering against her cheek.

He pawed through the dirt, heart lurching in his chest as he felt a small scrap of paper crumpled in one corner. Unraveling it, he quickly scanned the contents. Address. Time. Tomorrow’s date. Someone else had made it out from Kuro Street, gotten in touch with the Iishi cell. That meant they still had radio capability. That meant they were still in business.

Thank the gods …

Committing the address to memory, he stuffed the paper into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. Replacing the brick, he stood, grimacing, nodded to Hana. He heard the soft whisper of padded feet above, saw Daken flitting back over the rooftops toward the tenement tower. As he and the girl faded into the shadows and followed the tom, Akihito couldn’t stifle his grin despite the pain in his leg.

“Good news?” Hana whispered.

“It’s news,” he nodded. “So it’s good. I’ll tell you all about it somewhere safer.”

As the pair melted into the gloom, a tiny fistful of chrome uncurled from its hiding place in a downspout and stood to watch them go. Eight silvered spider legs clicked softly as it ticked its way across the roof tiles, windup key spinning along its spine. A single glowing eye marked their passing, its light burning softly in the poisoned dark.

Blood-red.

22

SKINNED

Sometimes a bowl of puke-warm slop can seem the greatest gift in the world.

The scarred, dark-haired gaijin sat across from Yukiko’s cot, feeding her heaped spoonfuls of seafood chowder, wiping her greasy chin with a rag. After four days on Buruu’s back with almost nothing to eat, even with her nausea, her ice-pick headache, the constant fear that every hour she spent trapped here was another hour Hiro’s wedding drew closer, the meal tasted more delicious than any Yukiko had eaten in her life.

The man loosened her restraints when he noticed her fingernails were purple, careful to do it one bond at a time. She watched him, eyes flitting over the insignia at his collars, the pistons and brace strapped around his crippled leg. A short knife hung from his belt, flanked by a tube of coiled copper and delicate glass globes that reminded her of Yoritomo’s iron-thrower. When he’d entered the room with her meal, his shoulders had been wrapped in an animal skin, but he’d shrugged it off and hung it up as soon as he’d shut the door. She looked at it now; shawl of dark fur, long tail dragging on the floor. Yukiko thought it might be a wolf pelt, but if so, it had belonged to the biggest wolf she’d ever heard of.

The occasional crack of thunder shook the walls, lightning flashing through the small glass window high above her. The room’s lights would glow brighter then, buzzing in their sockets as the building vibrated around her.

Catching the sky …

“Piotr.” The gaijin pointed to his chest. “Piotr.”

“Yukiko,” she said, pointing to herself as best she could.

Piotr brushed his fingers across the same cheek he’d slapped. She could feel it bruising. His touch made her skin crawl.

He seemed about to speak again when heavy footfalls rang down the corridor. The gaijin stood with a wince, pistons hissing. He snatched the animal skin off the wall and threw it around his shoulders, just as the blond boy who had saved her life appeared in the doorway.

The boy stumbled forward as if shoved, and a huge gaijin appeared behind him. The man looked in his mid-forties, as tall and broad as Akihito. A thick beard tied in three plaits, short copper hair, hint of gray at the temples, a tanned, windswept face, nicked with scars—chin, eyebrow, cheeks. He held a long cylindrical object wrapped in oilskin. A heavy dark red jacket was smeared with black grease, insignia on his collars trimmed with frayed golden thread. The skin of some enormous animal rested over his coat; bristling fur, front paws as big as Yukiko’s head, knotted around his neck. The pelt might have belonged to a panda bear once, save that it was rust-brown all over. A set of heavy welding goggles sat above pale blue eyes, dark lenses glinting the same color as the disembodied shapes mounted upon his shoulders.