Stormdancer (13 page)

Staggering. Blood and swelling gluing her eye closed. Her father’s hands on her shoulder, firm. Deck bucking beneath their feet. A stumble, a fall. Hands dragging her up. Her father’s voice, from far away.

Onto the deck. Light blinding above them, bright as the sun. Too close, heat curling the ghost-pale hair on her arms, leaving behind tiny black cinders. A roar, terrifying, crackling across the rigging with ruinous, hungry hands. The nightmare sound that woke cloudwalkers in the dark, stomachs in knots, soaked in sweat. Fire.

Fire in the sky.
The balloon was ablaze. The canvas had spilled wide open, the hydrogen within clasping hands with the lightning strike and giving birth to a conflagration, sucking the very breath from their lungs. The heat of a funeral pyre beat upon their backs. Screaming men, feet running across the deck, panicked voices. The hiss of rain, great gouts of pitch-black smoke rising in a veil from the marriage between fire and water. Vertigo swelled, the clutch of gravity denied by the speed of their descent. Falling.
They were falling.
Dragged up the ladder to the pilot’s deck, vice grip on her wrists, press of bodies all around her. Across the shifting wood, steering wheel spinning free, Captain Yamagata’s voice rising above the din.
“Masaru-san! Quickly!”
She felt hands on her, dragging her through a metal hatchway, the volume of the world dropping to a dull, reverberating roar. The smell of sweat, tang of iron in her nostrils, copper on her lips. Yukiko blinked away the blood, looked around her, trying to focus. She was surrounded by heaving, sweating bodies, packed into the confines of the life raft fixed to the Thunder Child’s stern. It was filled to capacity, two frantic cloudwalkers working to uncouple the small beetle- shaped pod from its burning mother.
“Hurry up, we’re going down!”
“Lord Izanagi, save us!”
Hissed curses. The sound of iron crashing against iron. And then she heard it. A vibrato scream of fear, of rage. Louder than the thunder, tipped with electricity, grating across the back of her skull.
“Oh no,” she whispered.
She turned to her father, pawing the blood from her eyes.
“Father, the arashitora!”
Masaru’s expression darkened. His eyes showed no trace of dread; simply dismay at the loss of his prize. She could see the hunter in him, pragmatic and cold as steel. He glanced up as the beast screamed again, wiped the soot off his face with the back of his hand. His skin was damp with sweat, and he left one long black smear across his cheek.
“We can’t.” He shook his head, looked back and forth between Yukiko and Kasumi. “There’s no time.”
“Gods, listen to it,” breathed Akihito, crammed against the far wall.
The cry was piercing, dripping with outrage: a trembling note of fear and anger, of disbelief that it could end like this. They heard the scraping of claws on metal, flesh pitting itself against iron in a repeated frenzy of terror. Rage. Red and boiling.
One coupling came loose with the snap of iron jaws, and the life raftswung as if on a hinge, crashing hard against the polished hull. The rain poured through the open door, soaking the miserable knot of humans huddled in the boat, blinding, blistering white as the lightning flashed. Raijin rejoiced at the Child’s destruction, his howl of triumph and the beating of his drums echoing across the clouds.
Yukiko could feel the thunder tiger’s thoughts, its terror. She imagined its final moments: plummeting from the sky like a falling star, feathers and fur charring, praying for the impact that would end its burning agony. She shook her head.
Not like that. He cannot die like that.
Masaru sensed his daughter’s intent, reached out toward her.
“Yukiko, no! You stay here!”
Too late. She leaped from the raft as the final coupling sprang loose, the small ship spinning off into the darkness with a brittle, metallic sound. Her father’s anguished cry drifted off into the throat of the storm as the belly of the life raft lit up in a halo of blue flame, propelling the small craft away into the tempest.
Yukiko stumbled across the pilot’s deck and down the ladder, smoke burning her eyes, the wood beneath her an untamed, living thing. She felt numb, head still swimming from the kiss on the cabin wall. The wind tore at her skin, burning hot from the inferno raging overhead, embers entwined with the falling rain and smoldering on the sleeves and shoulders of her uwagi. The balloon had been reduced to a blackened skeleton, lit from within by the blaze; a corpse lantern on the feast day of the dead. The Child began to roll toward its wounded port side, starboard engine still at full burn, shadows of sharp rock swelling up out of the darkness before them.
Down the ladder, holding on for dear life as the ship clipped a spur of mountain stone, tearing half its belly out with the roar of splintering timber. On the main deck she slipped and stumbled, lunging across to the cage and using its bars to hold herself upright. The arashitora was lost in a frenzy of fear, near mindless as she reached out to it, almost overcome with primal terror of the fire above. It roared, a thundering, metallic screech, pupils glazed with panic.
Be calm. I will free you.
OUT. AWAY. FLY.
The bolts on the door were slippery in her hands, palms sweaty in the shocking heat. She thrust them away from their housings, fear turning her arms to jelly. Blood dripped into her eye, sticky and thick on her lashes. The Child’s roll grew more pronounced, and she struggled to keep her footing as the deck listed, floods of rain spilling over the brink in a doomed, lonely waterfall. The snaggle- toothed face of a mountain appeared out of the darkness directly in front of them, jaws of jagged stone open in welcome.
The final bolt slid free and the door swung wide. The arashitora burst from the cage, talons scrabbling across sodden boards, half- sparks flaring on its ruined wings. As it thundered across the shifting deck, Yukiko reached out, desperate, snagging her fingers into a clump of sodden feathers and swinging herself up onto its shoulders. Wood shredded like rice-paper beneath razored claws, sinew and muscle snapped taut like iron cable as it spread its wings and plunged over the side of the burning sky-ship.
Fly! Fly!
The blaze dropped away behind her in a rush of freezing wind, flaring bright as the Child plowed into the mountainside. The barrels of chi lashed in the bow split and ignited like fireworks at Lord Izanagi’s feast: a damp, thunderous explosion that sent burning timbers spinning off into the darkness. They plummeted out of the smoke toward the ground, burning embers falling bright between the raindrops. One flared blue-white, spiraling down into the yawning black below them.
The arashitora shrieked, pounding the air with its ruined wings. Yukiko was almost thrown from its shoulders, entwining her fingers in its feather mane and gripping tight with her thighs. Exhilaration and terror fought for her attention. The beast’s muscles seethed beneath her as its wings tore at the air, futile, furious. Sharp spires of rock rose out of the storm around them, rushing toward them as a blur, rain hissing across the stone in freezing squalls. The beast spread its wings to their full breadth and managed to bank away from the fangs of black granite, spiraling into a clumsy glide. It rolled from side to side, trying to maintain equilibrium without the use of its primaries. Yukiko could feel a grim determination rise up and engulf the fear inside it: a refusal to fail, to lie down or roll over. It screamed in the face of death, defiant and proud as a king upon a wind-tossed throne.
They wheeled away in their broken glide, green treetops rising out of the rain curtain ahead. The beast was unable to maintain altitude; every flap of its wings simply sent them falling faster. The green fingers of giant cedars and maidenhead trees clutched at the beast’s belly, pulling them down toward ruin.
GET OFF ME.
The arashitora bucked, trying to throw Yukiko from its back.
What?
GET OFF, INSECT.
You can’t throw me off. I’ll break my neck!
OFF. NOW.
The beast rolled from side to side, twisting through the air. Yukiko shrieked, daring a glance down through the treetops to the ground rushing away fifty feet below them. She clung to the tiger’s shoulders, teeth gritted, knowing a fall from this height and speed would mean her death.
I just saved your life!
WOULD NOT NEED SAVING IF NOT FOR YOU. GET OFF ME NOW.
I wasn’t the one who maimed you. You’d be a smear on the mountainside right now if it weren’t for me. You want to kill me?
MY WINGS CANNOT HOLD US BOTH ALOFT. YOUR PACK SAW TO THAT.
I’ll die!
BETTER ONE THAN TWO.
They descended below the canopy in a flurry of severed leaves, branches whipping at her face and snapping beneath the impact of the arashitora’s wings. It banked sharply between two tightly spaced maples. Her stomach lurched up into her throat, and a thick bough caught her full in the chest. Yukiko’s breath spewed from her lungs. The branch whipped her backward, she lost her grip on the arashitora’s neck and sailed off between the raindrops. She screamed, spinning down through the branches, skin torn, tumbling toward her death. The world spun over and over itself before her eyes.
She shrieked as a branch snagged in her obi, ripping a long gash up her back. The green wood split but held, arresting her fall and leaving her suspended twenty feet above the ground, dangling like fresh meat outside the abandoned slaughter mills of Kigen city.
She gasped, white pain rushing up and spilling wet from the gouge in her back. The branch swayed, making ominous noises as she looked down at the stone below. Reaching up, wincing, she tried to pull herself off the snag, and with a sound of splintering wood and a despairing shriek, the branch snapped and sent her plummeting down into the black.
Lightning arced across the skies, illuminating the smoldering ruin of the cloudwalkers’ vessel, strewn upon the mountainside in a thousand flaming fragments. Long streaks of burning chi were scored across the mountain’s face—a halo of blue-white illuminating the swirling mists of rain, running through to orange as the foliage around it caught and burned.
The girl hit the stone hard. The thunder echoed across the trees like booming laughter.
Raijin was pleased.

She pawed away the darkness some time later, hours slipping by like shadows between sleep and the slow opening of her eyes. One was sealed shut by a scum of blood and dirt; she had to prise her lids apart with trembling fingers. The pain in her back was a dull ache. Merciful numbness had spread through her body, spurred on by the falling rain and bitter, brittle cold of altitude. It urged her back to sleep, to simply close her eyes and drift away, to worry no more.

She shook her head, forcing the thought back into the gloom where it had been born. Time enough to sleep when she was dead.
Yukiko pushed herself up on her elbows, wincing at the bruises all over her body. The forest floor was covered in a thick blanket of dead leaves and lush green moss; even the stones were bearded with great growths of it. She ran her fingertips across the spongy surface and touched her fox tattoo in thanks: a fall onto bare rock would have broken her bones, possibly killed her outright.
Kitsune looks after his own.
She climbed to her feet, brushing the sodden hair away from her face. Her dark eyes surveyed the surroundings, glittering with the occasional faint burst of lightning across the hidden clouds above.
Trees with trunks as thick as houses stretched up to blot out the sky. Rain dripped through the knotted canopy, drumming upon leaves in a thousand discordant beats. The trees were ancient and gnarled: bent old men, their skin crawling with fingers of thick moss, mushrooms clustered about their feet in multicolored growths. Her stomach growled and she picked several of the safer-looking fungi, stuffing a few into her obi for later. Panic bloomed as she groped at the small of her back, and she breathed a sigh of relief when her fingers brushed the polished lacquer hilt of her tantō.
She blinked about the darkness, each direction looking no worse or better than the rest. So, with a shrug, she set off down the slope in the direction the arashitora had flown.
“Ungrateful shit,” she muttered.
Her father would have scolded her for the unladylike language. She looked around the darkness, and realizing that there were no adults nearby to chastise her, she began shouting every bad word she could think of. A rainbow of profanity rolled between the trees, gutter-talk bouncing among walls of wood and fern, beneath a ceiling of shadowed green. Spirits slightly buoyed by her tiny rebellion, Yukiko tromped off into the gloom.
Her thin sandals were soon sodden and torn, and she slipped and stumbled across the forest floor. The storm raged above, its volume muted by the lush canopy over her head, the great trees reaching out to entwine their branches like the hands of old, dear friends. There was a strange scent on the air, a smell that lay so far back in her childhood that she took a while to recall what it was.
The absence of lotus.
Everything in Kigen was polluted by it, lending its acrid tang to the food she ate, the water she drank, the very sweat on her skin. But here in the deep Iishi Mountains, there was almost no trace. The fields encroached closer every year, but she sensed there was still a purity here; the last stretch of true wilderness in all of Shima. She wondered how long it would take before the shreddermen set their sights on these ancient trees, this fertile soil, and put their blades to work. The motto of the Guild rang unbidden in her head, and she whispered it once into the darkness, fingers to her lips.
“The lotus must bloom.”

Dawn had spread its gloomy pall across the forest before Yukiko stumbled across the arashitora’s trail: fresh gouges in the earth marking the broken gait of a creature unused to spending much time on the ground. She found no blood, and took solace that the beast wasn’t injured beyond the suffering it had already endured.

She followed the trail for hours down the crumbling mountainside, stopping occasionally to rest and eat, to lick rain off the broad green leaves. Sandals torn, feet bleeding, dripping with the humidity trapped beneath the ceiling of overhanging leaves. She lost the trail several times on stony ground; she wasn’t half the tracker her father was. If only he were here . . .

The memory of her final words to him echoed in her head. She could still feel the sting of his slap on her cheek, hear the anger and hurt in his rebuke. But beneath it all lurked the fear that he might have died in the crash, that the life raft and everyone aboard had lost the way in the storm and plowed right into a mountainside. Hot tears welled in her eyes, and she pawed them away with the heels of her hands.