Kinslayer (41 page)

Ilyitch laughed and handed her the contraption, took another from the storage locker at the base of the lightning spire. Yukiko stared at the device he’d given her, stomach sinking toward her toes.

It was solid iron, slippery with rain and grease. Four grooved rubber wheels lined up along a cross-shaped bar, fixed at either side with what looked like crank handles. A leather harness was affixed to a clip at the bottom of the crossbar, and Ilyitch was already strapping himself in. Yukiko had a dreadful feeling she knew where this was going, buckling herself into her own harness as the storm raged about them. She leaned against the railing as the wind buffeted her like a plaything. Lightning struck a spire out on the ocean to the south, raced along the cables up to the building’s roof. Yukiko flinched, shielding her eyes against the blue-white burn seething through the vast machine behind them. Goosebumps trawled her skin.

Ilyitch looked to the sky, then scampered up the lightning spire, using the copper coils like a ladder. He slung the contraption onto the double lengths of cable, grooved rubber wheels fitting snugly around the circumference of each. In one smooth motion he kicked off the tower, the device whizzing along the cables, sending him thirty feet out into the gloom. He dangled from the harness beneath the crossbar, reached up to the hand cranks and began turning them. The contraption wheeled slowly back toward the tower. Ilyitch spun the cranks the other way as if to demonstrate, the contraption traveling in the opposite direction. He looked at her and smiled.

It’s a flying fox.

Yukiko yelled over the wind.

“What happens if lightning hits our cables?”

A raised eyebrow.

“Lightning!” She pointed at the sky, then along the iron, gave her best impression of an explosion.

Ilyitch held his finger aloft, then hooked it through a metal pin at the front of his harness. Without a sound, he yanked the pin free and fell down into darkness.

Yukiko screamed, reached out for the falling gaijin, knowing he was too far away to save. But five feet into the fall, a rubber thong in the harness snapped taut, and Ilyitch jerked to a sudden halt. He held out both hands and grinned, twisting in the storm like a wind chime.

“You bastard,” Yukiko muttered.

Ilyitch climbed the tether hand over fist, swung up and hooked his legs over the cables to give himself enough slack to reinsert the pin.

He beckoned with one hand, yelling over the wind.

Yukiko licked her lips, tasted fresh salt, clean rain. Her knuckles were white on the railing, heart pounding against her ribs, fear-born nausea slicking her insides. Lightning arced across the clouds above, and she made the mistake of looking down. The ocean was a black, thrashing snarl, roaring and crashing in towers twenty feet high. But in the split second before the lightning faded and the blanket of gloom fell again, she saw the glint of a long, serpentine tail cutting through the waves.

Sea dragons.

Reaching out with the Kenning, she felt them below. Smooth as polished steel, cold and sharp and hungry. Their shape was ancient, stirring a primal fear inside her, much deeper than the thought of lightning striking the cables or the journey to come. Her mind shied away instinctively; a child fleeing into the safety of a parent’s bed.

Her hands were shaking.

But then she pictured Buruu, alone and bleeding, somewhere out there in the dark. And she grit her teeth and snatched up the flying fox, climbed the lightning spire and slung the device over the cables without another thought.

Holding her breath, eyes wide, she kicked out into the windswept dark.

29

A TREMBLING EARTH

Sometimes Hiro could still feel his hand.

He would wake in the deep of night, troubled by some itch or spasm, reaching toward it and finding only an empty mattress, the slippery kiss of silken sheets. In the dark, he would search the place where his arm should have been, groping about until he found the nub of flesh they had left him with: the puckered suture scars, the gristle-twisted knot of meat studded with bayonet fixtures, not even half a bicep remaining below the swell of his shoulder. And in the quiet and the still, he would picture her face and dream of all the ways he could break it.

“Yukiko.”

He breathed her name as if it were a toxic fume. And every time he woke to that nub of flesh, every time his hand itched and he couldn’t scratch it, he was poisoned anew. She was inside him. A cell-deep sepsis. A wound refusing to heal. Like the scars of blackened ash drifting away below his feet, the thrum of motors settling like cancer in his bones.

The ironclad
Blessed Light
was a thumbprint on the waking dawn, smoking black against bloody red as Lady Amaterasu crested the horizon and set fire to the sky. Hiro stood at her prow, half a dozen Iron Samurai looming around him, the sunrise tinting their bone-white armor immolation-red. The Daimyo of the Tora clan clasped his hands behind his back, sea-green eyes upon the tortured soil of Jukai province below.

The snowcapped spires of the Tōnan Mountains lay to the west, and Hiro knew somewhere amidst those peaks crouched the impregnable perch of First House—the heart of the Lotus Guild in Shima. It was there the Guild had begun, two centuries ago, just after Kazumitsu I took his throne. When the Tiger, Dragon, Phoenix and Fox zaibatsu began consuming the lesser clans; the blood of Falcon, Panda, Serpent and their fellows just a feast for the Four.

The first production-grade crops of blood lotus had been cultivated here, centuries ago. Once this had been the most fertile region in all of the Imperium, but now all was ashen earth and black smoke curling from the cracks—as if a master painter had spent his last on a landscape of rarest beauty, and some jealous lover had smudged inch-thick handfuls of charcoal onto the canvas, drying and splitting in the noonday sun. On maps, the ruined land was still named Jukai province—a name meaning “Evergreen.” But Shima’s citizens knew it by another name.

The Stain
.

“It’s getting worse.” Hiro glanced at the Guildsman beside him. “So much worse.”

Second Bloom Kensai refused to look down, bloody eyes fixed on the proving grounds ahead. The rising sun kissed his perfect, metal cheek, the smooth features of a gilded youth retching up breather cables, his hulking atmos-suit spitting fumes and hissing with every breath. A child’s head atop a monster’s body.

“All will be well once inochi supplies are restored.” Kensai’s voice rumbled in Hiro’s gut. “But now you see why the war must be renewed. We need more prisoners, Shōgun. More gaijin to feed the lotus. And more land to plant it.”

Hiro frowned, his mind turning to dark places. “Is there no other way? Some other—”

“No.” Kensai folded his arms. “Sacrifices must be made. The lotus
must
bloom.”

“It troubles me to think—”

“Nature knows not of mercy. The blood of the meek slakes the conqueror’s thirst. This is not a law unique to the Guild. This is the way of all things, Shōgun.”

“Do not call me that.”

“And why not?”

“Because I am
not
Shōgun. Just because two clanlords have deigned to attend my wedding, does not guarantee they will swear allegiance.”

“They will kneel before you, young Lord. All of them.”

“And if not? How will the clans fight the Kagé or the gaijin if we spend our strength fighting each other? You wish to craft me a throne of my countrymen’s bones?”

“You need not fight the other clans, Shōgun. All they require is a rallying point. A banner grand and terrifying enough to stand behind.”

Kensai pointed into the distance.

“And so we give it to you.”

Hiro looked at the proving grounds, coalescing out of the ashen haze ahead. Forges and smelting plants rising like blood blisters behind a barbed-wire forest, wreathed in smoke. Trains rolling on rusted tracks, hauling iron and coal from the Midland mines, broad roads of black gravel, dotted by watchtowers. The grounds swarmed with activity; atmos-suits moving to and fro, a hundred cutting torches twinkling like stars in the long-lost sky. Row upon row of armored machines, like soldiers at muster, fifteen feet high even in repose, scythe arms ending in sawtoothed chainblades. Four legs apiece, each one thick as tree trunks, skin gleaming yellow in the light of the scorching sun. Hundreds of them.

Hiro raised his eyebrows.

“Shreddermen suits?”

“The Kagé feather their nests in the Iishi forest,” Kensai said. “So we will leave no forest standing in our wake.”

Hiro squinted through the pall to the far end of the grounds; gantries and walkways built around a towering shadow. Cutting torches arced and spat, Lotusmen trailed bright blue flames around the hulking figure, rocket packs blazing. The Guildsmen were insects beside it—some vast sleeping giant, nodding off in a sea of mosquitoes, too enormous to feel their sting. Three hundred feet high, eight legs curled up beneath its bloated metal belly like a waiting spider. Saw-blade arms with teeth big as men, pistons tall as houses, great chimney stacks running down its spine and piercing the sky like blades. The sound of its engines was a choir of earthquakes.

A machine. A colossus. A behemoth of black iron and blacker smoke.

Hiro stared in wonder. “What in the name of the gods…”

“Look now upon the doom of the Kagé.”

Hiro wiped the ash from his goggles, stared at the metal giant. It was beyond anything he’d dreamed. A looming, rumbling, cast-iron impossibility.

“The Shadows have their standard bearer,” Kensai continued. “Now we have ours. Our creation will be the rallying cry to unite the zaibatsu. Dragon, Phoenix, Fox: none are foolish enough to field an army against such a machine. They will fall into line, one after another, with you at their head. And you will lead them into the Iishi, and level every tree, crush every stone, until there are no more holes for the rebels to hide inside. You will avenge your Lord and restore your honor. You will kill the Impure one and the fools who follow her.”

Hiro licked his lips, tasted chi smoke. Adrenaline sour in the back of his throat. He struggled to swallow.

“It’s incredible.”

“It will be ready to march within weeks. All of Shima will tremble at its approach. You will march in the vanguard, that the other Daimyo will have no illusions about where the Guild’s allegiance lies. We will end this petty civil war and set the clan armies to task. The Kagé must be eliminated. And that Impure abomination must burn.”

Behind that perfect mask, Hiro could hear the smile in Kensai’s voice.

“And you said you did not enjoy surprises.” He bowed, hand over fist. “Shōgun.”

Hiro looked at the towering colossus of iron and smoke. He closed his eyes, inhaled the fumes, savored the taste on his teeth and tongue. He could feel the fingers on his missing hand itching, the iron arm they’d given him trembling in sympathy. A phantom reminder of all she’d taken from him. The promise of everything he would take from her.

“Does it have a name?” he asked.

“Of course.”

Kensai spread his arms wide.

“Behold the Earthcrusher.”

*   *   *

The ground was a sea of ashes wreathed in blackened fumes. Every step raised a cloud of vapor, swirling about their ankles and hanging from their shoulders like shrouds. Dawn struggled to pierce the haze; sickly, vomit-gray, the air cold as winter snow. They were somewhere east of the Guild bastion of First House, miles deep into the plains where the first production-grade lotus crops had been grown, centuries ago, the earth ruined beyond repair.

Ryusaki knew now why this place was called “the Stain.”

The Kagé captain’s breather was choked and useless, the device like a stone about his face. The internal mechanism had failed yesterday, and only the filter scrims kept the deadly fumes at bay now. He felt dirtier than he could ever remember; like he’d taken a bath in fresh sewage and dried off by rolling in rotting corpses. Every breath was a black ache, eyes scummed with charcoal tears behind his goggles, throat parched, lips cracking. But he dared not remove the breather to drink, not even for a second. Not even for a mouthful.

He knew the Guild had built their factory here in the Stain for that very reason—an aerial approach would be intercepted by ironclads, the roads and rail lines were a bottleneck, always watched, and an approach overland through the deadlands was virtual suicide. The soldier in him had to admire the bastards.

“How you faring, boys?”

Ryusaki looked back at his fellow Kagé and saw Shintaro and Jun both looked like hell. Faces hidden beneath breathers and goggles, swathed head to foot, heavy gloves and boots, tied off at the hemlines. But their postures showed both were feeling the effects of the deadlands just as much as Ryusaki was. Jun in particular was doing it hard—he’d puked into his breather last night and had to take the mask off to clean it, sucking down a few lungfuls of fumes. His eyes were so bloodshot, Ryusaki could almost see them glowing behind his goggles.

A weary thumbs-up from Shintaro was all he got, so he turned and slogged on, earth crumbling beneath his weight as if the surface was a rotten, hollowed shell. Deep footprints marked their trail from the northern rail lines; the trio had stowed away on a freight train loaded with iron, hitching as close to the staging grounds as they dared before leaping off into the deadlands the night before last.