Stormdancer (12 page)

The mournful whine of the Child’s remaining engine dragged the cloudwalkers from their moment of joy. Many of them glanced at the torn rigging or at the smoking hole in the Child’s flank, fear plain in their eyes. The storm pounded their ship without mercy; a child’s toy adrift on a raging ocean. The portside engine was gone, severed fuel lines still spitting blood-red chi into the abyss below as the sailors struggled to shut down the valves. Even with the starboard motor at full burn, Yamagata couldn’t maintain course. The Child plunged deeper into the tempest, compass spinning, silhouettes of black crags looming out of the darkness.

Masaru clambered up to the pilot’s deck, pushed the rain- soaked hair from his eyes.
“Is it bad?”
“It’s a far cry from bloody good!” Yamagata shouted, leaning into the wheel, his face as grim and pale as a hungry ghost’s. “I can’t see a godsdamned thing!” He turned to his navigator. “Toshi, get on that floodlight on the port side, and get somebody up here to take the starboard. We’re too low. We could fly right into one of these bastard mountains and wouldn’t even know it until we’re dead. Where the bloody hells is Kioshi?”
The navigator stumbled away toward the ladder, yelling for one of the crew. Masaru leaned in closer to Yamagata, shouting to be heard over the snarling wind.
“Can you get us out of the storm?”
“No chance!” The captain staggered as the Child bucked beneath them, wiped his eyes on his sleeve and spat on the deck. “We’re at the mercy of the wind with only one motor. Even if we had a spare port engine, we couldn’t fix it in this shit.”
“Can you take her up?”
“I’m trying, godsdammit! We’re carrying a lot of extra weight.”
As if it could read their minds, the arashitora reared up in its cage, letting loose a groggy roar. The rain pooling across the deck danced skyward amidst the subsonic vibrations. Cloudwalkers backed away from the cage as the beast tried to gain its feet, tearing at the netting with claws and beak, steel-strong lotus fibers snapping like rotten wool.
“Izanagi’s balls,” Masaru breathed, shaking his head. “I put enough blacksleep into it to kill a dozen men.”
“How much do you have left?”
“Not nearly enough for the trip home.”
The sound of shearing cord rang out under the rumbling thunder and howling wind. The creature bellowed in answer to the clouds, the hairs on Masaru’s arms standing rigid, air charged with static electricity. The beast shook itself, remnants of the net sloughing off its wings. Its claws dug great furrows into the deck beneath its feet, the planks cracking like dry leaves.
Kasumi called his name, and Akihito’s face appeared at the top of the ladder to the pilot’s deck moments later. The former quarrel between the men was forgotten, the big man still charged with the elation of their victory.
“It’s waking up, Masaru! Seven darts and it’s on its feet! Have you ever seen the like?”
There was a sound like thunder, close and deafening, splitting the air in two and rolling down their spines. Loud as the crack of an iron-thrower, a bullwhip snapping in the air. The ship rocked as if it had been uppercut, thrashing back on it haunches, cables groaning. A scream of pain rang out from below. Several cloudwalkers were rolling on the wood, covering bleeding ears with trembling hands.
The air split again, Masaru wincing as the ship bucked beneath his feet. He blinked through the rain at the beast, watching as it tried to rear up on its hind legs in the confines of the cage. The mighty wings flapped again, a burst of blue electricity arcing along its flight feathers, accompanied by that same, deafening thunderclap. The ship dropped a good twenty feet in altitude, Masaru’s stomach staying behind to admire the view.
“Gods above, what is that?” Yamagata cried.
“Raijin song,” breathed Masaru.
Truth be told, he had thought it was a mere tall story. Gaudy trimming on the tales of the Stormdancers, one more magical power to elevate them from bedtime stories to legends. The old tales spoke of the song of an arashitora’s wings, the deafening thunderclap that sounded as they wheeled in the storms above, sending the front lines of enemy armies scattering or curled in fetal distress on the battlefield. A gift from their father, the Thunder God himself, the stories said, to mark his children as his own. But it was only an old wives’ tale.
As if in answer, the thunder tiger cracked its wings again, making the same head- splitting noise. Arcs of raw current seethed down the iron cage, bright, impossibly blue. The ship bucked again, rivets groaning, ropes unravelling one thread at a time.
“She can’t take this!” cried Yamagata.
Masaru’s thoughts were quiet. The faint trace of lotus smoke left in his system brought a strange calm, even when all hells were breaking loose around him. He narrowed his eyes, watching the beast as it flailed: the cruel beak, the proud glare in its eye. It beat its wings against the cage, tiny arcs of lightning racing along its blood quills and out into the span of its flight feathers.
Don’t think of it as a living legend. Think of it as a beast, like every other you have hunted. It wants to fly. To be free. Like any other bird of prey.
The thunder tiger roared, as if it knew his heart.
How do you train a wild bird? Reel in that desire and make it see you as the master?
Masaru swallowed.
“Akihito, did Kasumi bring the nagamaki blades that Shōgun Kaneda gave us?”
The big man blinked away the storm. “Of course.”
Masaru’s face was a mask, hard as stone, rain washing over him as if he were granite. He clenched his fists, eyes never leaving the arashitora, drawing the back of his knuckles across his lips.
“Fetch me the sharpest.”

Yukiko crouched in the bow, the pale boy beside her, watching the beast rail against its prison. She reached out with the Kenning again, feeling only an unassailable rage tinged with a faint ozone scent. She gave it her regret, her pity, flooding its mind with helpless overtures. She tried to make it feel safe, warm. Her every plea was rebuffed; the buzzing of a troublesome insect.

Kin crouched low whenever a cloudwalker approached the bow. Yukiko gradually became aware that he was terrified of the men, skulking low, fear plain in his eyes.

“What’s the matter?”
“They can’t see me like this,” he hissed.
“Like what? What are you talking about?”
“Like this!” he cried.
Yukiko frowned.
“Who are you, Kin?”
A dizzying arc of lightning cracked the sky a handful of feet away from the

Thunder Child , blazing a trail through the thousand- span darkness to the waiting earth below. Yukiko flinched, pressed herself against the chi barrels. She cast a fearful glance at the balloon swaying above their heads, straining against its moorings in the grip of the monsoon.

“What happens if lightning hits us?” she whispered.
“That depends. If it ignites the fuel, we’ll burn up. If it strikes the inflatable . . .” The sentence trailed off into a brief pantomime, pale, slender hands indicating a wobbling descent into the deck and an explosion on impact.
Yukiko squinted through the rain. Her father approached the arashitora’s cage, halting a few feet away and taking the needle-thrower from Kasumi’s arms. The beast roared and cracked its wings again, sending several cloudwalkers sprawling across the deck. Her father took careful aim and emptied an entire magazine of blacksleep into the creature’s flank.
She felt a stab of sympathetic pain, overshadowed by near- mindless outrage. She could feel the beast’s hatred, burning a picture of her father into its brain and vowing to tear him limb from limb, to bathe in him as if he were a fresh mountain stream. But the poison rose up on wings of tar; a smothering, reeking blanket that dragged him back down into oblivion.
Akihito appeared from below deck, carrying the long haft of one of the Shōgun’s nagamaki. He removed the leather sheath from the blade, steel glittering like a mirror as lightning flashed dangerously close to the starboard side. Fear clutched Yukiko’s gut and she stood, Kin forgotten, running down the deck toward the cage as her father unbolted the door.
“You’re going to kill it?” she cried. “You can’t!”
Masaru glanced over his shoulder, eyebrow raised.
“Where did you come from? Get below deck!”
“It hasn’t done anything!”
“We’re not killing it.” Kasumi shook her head. “But it’s going to crash the ship if it keeps up with the Raijin song.”
One of the lookouts shouted a warning, and Yamagata tore the wheel sharply to starboard. A towering spire of jagged mountainside loomed out of the darkness in front of them, the ship’s keel barely clearing a spur of sharp rock. The crew hung on for dear life, the hunters ducking low as the captain flooded more chi into the struggling engine. The Child rose a few precarious feet above the stone fangs.
The hunters stood slowly, uncertain, the deck rolling beneath their feet. Yukiko looked deep into her father’s eyes, unable to banish the dread despite Kasumi’s assurances.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked, fearing the answer.
Masaru hefted the nagamaki.
“Clip its wings.”

Yukiko’s jaw dropped, eyes wide and bright with outrage.
“What? But why?”
“It’s like any other bird, girl,” Masaru snapped. “If we were breaking in a

falcon, we’d do the same. Anything with wings asserts dominance through superior altitude. Take that away, it breaks their spirit. We need to break this beast, and quickly. We don’t have enough blacksleep to knock it out until Kigen. It’s torn the ship to shreds.”

“You’re just going to make it angrier!”
“Aiya, girl. You don’t know what the hells you’re talking about.” “It’s not just a beast, it thinks like we do. I fel—”
She glanced around quickly and lowered her voice, taking her father by the

arm.
“I felt it.”
“You Kenned it?” Masaru hissed, eyes narrowed.
“Hai.” She lowered her gaze to the deck. “I couldn’t help it. It was so beautiful. Like nothing I’d ever seen before.” Her eyes shone as she looked into Masaru’s face. “Please, father, there must be some other way.”

Masaru stared at his daughter, his stony facade softening for a brief moment. She reminded him suddenly of her mother. He could see Naomi in the curve of her cheek, the determination in her eyes, that gods- awful stubbornness he had so adored. But just as quickly as it had come, the softness inside him was gone, replaced with a hunter’s pragmatism and the knowledge that the beast would send them all to their graves if it wasn’t calmed. His daughter among them.

“I’m sorry, Ichigo. There is no other way.”
“Please, father—”
“Enough!” he barked, and the thunder rolled in answer, making Yukiko

flinch. He turned without another word and stalked into the cage, Akihito following with an apologetic glance. Kasumi placed one restraining hand on Yukiko’s arm, but the girl shrugged her off. Hugging herself tight, she stared at her father’s back, numb and silent, rain spattering across her skin.

Knowledge that the beast could wake at any second bid Masaru to work swift and sure. Akihito knelt among the ruined nets beside the thunder tiger’s right shoulder. The arashitora’s wing structure was similar to an eagle’s: twenty-three primary feathers, each as long as Masaru’s legs and just as broad, glinting with an odd metallic sheen. Twenty-three secondaries, white as new snow. The greater and primary coverts were speckled gray, darkening to charcoal among the lesser coverts. Even slack in the blacksleep repose, Masaru could sense the terrible strength in each wing, enough to propel this impossible beast through the storm-tossed skies like a koi fish beneath the surface of a smooth millpond.

Akihito spread the primaries out in a fan. Masaru drew in one steady, measured breath, brow furrowed, exhaling softly. He gripped the nagamaki tight, knuckles white on the scarlet cord binding the haft. His fingers drummed upon the hilt.

My hands must be as stone. My hands and heart.
The blade fell. A clean slice. Razor-sharp, folded steel, hard as diamond. A faint tearing sound, barely a whisper in the wind. Feathers parted as if they were made of smoke, sheared back to half their length. The severed ends drifted to the deck, looking pathetic and fragile beneath the falling rain.
Behind him, Masaru heard his daughter begin to weep.
He nodded to Akihito, and the men moved to the other wing, repeating the procedure, swift and clinical. Despite the turbulence, the motion of the deck beneath them, the nagamaki fell true, cleaving the feathers like a hot blade through snow. Masaru pushed aside the feeling that he was cutting away a part of himself. He watched the scene as if in a dream, rolling with the motion of the ship, the long blade an extension of his own hand. A hand bloodied by the life of a hundred beasts. The hand of a hunter. A destroyer.
The only living thing he had ever created stood behind him, her tears disappearing in the rain.
When it was done, he stood back and surveyed his work with a critical eye. Clean cuts, not too close to the blood vessels, but enough that the beast wouldn’t be capable of much more than a feeble glide until its next moult. He nodded his head.
“Good work,” agreed Akihito.
They removed the needle shafts from the beast’s flanks and slapped a thick green poultice over the punctures. Crimson stained its fur, dripping onto the deck, covering their hands. The blood smelled of ozone and rusted iron.
They heard a low growl, a rumble that shook their insides. The beast began to stir, claws flexing, gouging foot-long scores into the hardened oak deck. The hunters stood and left the cage, Masaru slamming home the door’s thick iron bolts. The arashitora growled again, the shifting of tectonic plates beneath ice- white fur.
Lightning flashed, bright as the dawn, dangerously close. Small fingers of it arced through the roiling cloud around them, cracks spreading out across its black mask, poised to crumble away into terrible violence. The wind was a pack of wolves, all lolling tongues and razor-sharp frozen teeth.
Without looking at his daughter, Masaru turned and walked away.

Its fury was terrible.
Yukiko sat on the sodden deck and stared as the beast clawed its way back to waking. Its eyes were the color of honey, crystallized, pupils dilated in the blacksleep hangover. She was struck by the complexity of its thoughts; a fierce intelligence and sense of self she’d not encountered in a beast before. She could sense its confusion, the weight of its wings lessened, a strange sense of vertigo as it flapped them for balance and regained its feet.

It thrashed its wings again, staring at the blade’s work, glancing down to the severed feathers beneath its feet. And then it roared, an ear-splitting scream of rage and hatred, a fury that tore its throat and flecked its tongue with blood. It cracked its pinions but no Raijin song would come, electricity sputtering and dying on the butchered tips of its quills. It slammed its body against the bars, once, twice, the dull sound of flesh on iron drowned out by the raging storm.

I’m sorry.
Yukiko poured the thought into its mind to comfort, to console. The beast recoiled from her touch, a howl of psychic fury almost knocking her senseless. It smashed itself against the cage again, tearing at the iron impotently with claw and beak, giving voice to its rage, the violation it had suffered at the hands of these wretched men.
KILL YOU.
I did not want this. If I could undo it, I would.
RELEASE ME.
I can’t.
LOOK AT WHAT THEY HAVE DONE.
I’m so sorry.
DESPOILERS. USURPERS. LOOK AT THE COLOR OF MY SKY. THE SCARS ON THE GREEN BELOW. PARASITES, ALL OF YOU.
The beast fixed her in its furious gaze, and she felt tiny and afraid reflected in that bottomless black. She knew how pathetic her overtures must sound. She had stood by and let her father mutilate this magnificent creature, hadn’t lifted a finger to stop him. And for what? A spoiled princeling’s command? A dream born of ego and blind hubris?
This, the last great yōkai beast on the whole of Shima. And what had they done to him?
The beast shut off its mind, forcing her out into empty blackness. Its hate was palpable, a dark radiance than burned like the summer sun. It stared in unblinking, wordless challenge, and though it said not a thing, she could read every thought as surely as if it had spoken them aloud.
Look at what they have done to me. At what you allowed them to do. Look me in the eye, be you not ashamed of yourself and your entire wretched race. Thunder rolled cold fingers down her spine.
Shuddering, Yukiko lowered her eyes and looked away.

Her father was lying in his hammock when she returned, staring at the ceiling. His sodden clothes hung on the walls, an old hakama tied about his waist, tattoos crawling on his arms and chest. The ink was old, black running to blue, edges blurred under the press of time. His flesh was hard, but carved from sickly chalk, gleaming with fresh sweat and the stink of lotus.

He didn’t look at her as she entered.
She closed the door and sat beside the hammocks on a small wooden stool, rocking it back on its hind legs. Her eyes glittered in the lamplight, hooded, almond- shaped; the one gift she’d been allowed to keep from the mother who had abandoned her all those years ago. The eyes that had welled with tears in the Shōgun’s gardens, staring at her father with dumb disbelief as he told her that her mother was gone.
“I wish I had gone with her.” She kept her voice low, calm; she refused to allow him to think that this all came from hysterics. But the words were intended to make him bleed. “I wish I were anywhere but here with you.”
A long pause, pregnant with anger and the sound of falling rain.
“Wishing for the impossible,” Masaru said softly. “You get that from her.”
“I pray that’s not all I get.”
Another pause. Masaru took a deep breath. “If you’re going to hate me, at least hate me for the mistakes I could have avoided.”
“Like mutilating that poor thing?”
“Its feathers will grow back. Like any other bird. It will moult soon enough.”
“You’re going to give it to him, aren’t you? The Shōgun.”
Masaru sighed. “Of course I am, Yukiko. I swore I would.”
“He’s just a greedy boy. He doesn’t deserve anything that beautiful.”
“Sometimes we don’t get what we deserve. We play the cards we are dealt instead of whining about what might’ve been. Therein lies the difference between an adult and a child.”
But I am a child, she wanted to scream.
“I know about you and Kasumi,” she said.
He nodded, eyes never leaving the ceiling. “Your mother told you?”
“No. I see the way you look at her.”
“Kasumi and I are over. I ended it when your mother—”
“Is that why she left? Without even saying goodbye to me?”
He paused for a long moment, licking at dry lips.
“Your mother left for many reasons.”
“You blamed her for Satoru.” Yukiko blinked back the tears. “You drove her away.”
Masaru’s expression darkened, as if clouds had covered the sun. “No. Satoru was my fault. I should have been there. I should have been a father to you. I was never very good at that, I’m afraid.”
“You are afraid,” she growled. “All your life you’ve been running away. You left us alone to go on your mighty hunts. You left your wife’s bed for another woman’s. You leave me every time you suck down a lungful of that stinking weed. You’re a coward.”
Masaru sat up slowly, swung his legs over the edge of the hammock and dropped to the floor. His eyes betrayed his rage, flashing like polished jet, clear of smoke. He stepped closer.
“If I were a coward, I would have run as your mother bid me.” His voice was soft, dangerous. “I would never have returned to Shōgun Yoritomo’s side after Sensei Rikkimaru died. She bid me to become an oath-breaker. Dishonored. Shamed.”
“And if you had, she would still be here.”
“Yukiko, I am warning you . . .”
“Satoru would still be alive.”
He slapped her then, an open hand across her face, the crack of flesh on flesh seeming louder than the song from the arashitora’s wings. She lost her balance on the stool and toppled over backward, head slamming into the wall, hair splayed across her face.
“Godsdamn you, girl,” her father hissed. “I was sworn to the Shōgun. I still am to this day. If I break my word, he will take everything from me. Everything, do you understand?”
What about me, she wanted to cry. You’d still have me.
He stared down at his hand, at the palm print on her cheek. He looked suddenly wretched, an old man, body slowly turning to poison, life ebbing away one fix at a time.
“One day you will understand, Yukiko,” he said. “One day you will see that we must sometimes sacrifice for the sake of something greater.”
“Honor.” She spat the word, unwanted tears welling in her eyes.
“Among other things.”
“You’re a godsdamned liar. There’s no honor in what you do. You’re a servant. A rent boy who butchers helpless animals at the behest of a coward.”
Masaru hung his head, teeth gritted, hands curled into fists. His breath was low and measured, trembling in his nostrils. His eyes flickered to hers, glazed with anger.
“I hate you,” she hissed.
Masaru opened his mouth to speak, and the world turned sideways. A tremendous boom rang out above the ship, shattering the small glass porthole and making Yukiko wince. They were both tossed across the room, walls rushing forward with outstretched arms to embrace them, unforgiving, hard as stone. Her forehead split on the wood, stars in her eyes as she and her father tumbled to the ground.
The whole ship trembled, her timbers shaking beneath their feet as if in the grip of an earthquake. The sound of boiling vapor filled the sky.
Yukiko opened her eyes, blinking away the blood as the Child rocked beneath them. Through the tiny cracked porthole, she could see the clouds were painted with flickering orange.
The acrid tang of smoke stained the air.
They were on fire.