Stormdancer (14 page)

He’s all right. You’re worrying for nothing. Everyone will be all right. Hours passed, the mushrooms in her belt disappearing one mouthful at a time. She lost the trail again as the forest grew darker, cursing herself and stumbling over the uneven ground. Stopping beneath a towering maple, she re-tied her braid, damp wisps of hair clinging to her forehead. The forest had grown noisy as the sun rose, alive with chattering birds, spattering rain, small scuttling feet. She had felt their tiny pulses with the Kenning, searching for the fear that might linger in the arashitora’s wake. But now, as dusk fell, she reached out and felt no sparks, no clusters of warm, furry bodies or sleek feathered heartbeats. Silence had descended: a sweaty hush that fell heavy as a mouldy blanket.
Something’s wrong.
Creeping through the undergrowth, she crouched low, her footfalls barely a whisper. Eyes darting about the gloom, pulse quickening at every snapping twig or shifting shadow. Steam rose up from the rain- soaked earth, cloaking the forest in mist. She could sense the faint glow of the setting sun through the canopy above, the chill of night creeping with slow, measured tread through the wildwood. No bird calls. No wind. Just the heavy patter of fat raindrops and the faint scrape of her heels on dead leaves.
Predator?
Touching the fox tattoo on her arm for luck, she reached out again, searching for the arashitora, or perhaps some hungry carnivore stalking her through the green curtain.
Nothing. A vast emptiness, creaking with the echo of old wood, the breath of the slumbering earth. Even when the wolf came, even after the snake strike, she had never felt more frightened or alone in all her life.
She crept onward.
A shape loomed out of the mist. Ragged walls of raw granite, covered with creepers and a thick fur of moss. A temple. Twisted. Timeworn. Rising from the forest floor to squat glowering and grim on the mountain’s flank, surrounded by thick scarlet tangles of wild blood lotus. Yukiko swallowed, averting her eyes from the blasphemous kanji gouged into the stone; dark words calling to darker hearts. There was a palpable sense of wrongness about the place, something decidedly unnatural that took root at the base of her spine. The carvings lingered in her mind, shadows lurking in the dusk, dripping malevolence. A name.
Lady Izanami.
A long piercing scream sounded off in the mist; some animal or bird in the distance giving voice to her terror. Yukiko’s heart thumped in her chest, frigid sweat beading on her skin.
This is a temple to the Dark Mother.
She turned to leave, and a nightmare shape swung down from the trees behind. Twice as tall as a man, long arms like an ape, rippling with ropes of sinew. Its skin was as blue as cobalt. Its face mirrored the fearsome masks of Yoritomo’s Iron Samurai, but instead of polished metal, this face was carved in flesh, twisted and evil. A wide grinning mouth was flanked by two iron- shod tusks, a long black tongue lolling from between serrated teeth. Twin embers burned in dark eye sockets, spilling a ruddy glow across its jagged grin. A studded iron war club was clutched in shovel-broad hands, a rope of spherical beads was strung about its neck, each as big as her head. The blasphemous kanji on the temple walls was repeated on polished onyx.
It dropped to the ground in a crouch, one vast palm flat on the earth, regarding her with those awful, glowing eyes. Then it bellowed; a choir of screaming children reverberating across a rusted sky.
Amaterasu, Lady of the Sun, protect me.
Monsters from legend, the stuff of nightmare, a threat to disobedient children from exasperated parents. Never in her blackest dreams did she think they might actually exist.
In the distance, Yukiko heard another bellow in answer.
Oni.

Hungry.
Belly growling. Footsore.
Stinking snarl of heat and green. Storm singing above his head, primal and

complete, making his chest ache with want. Its pull like gravity, like moon to tide, urging him upward. But his wings wouldn’t work. Couldn’t fly. Wretched monkey-things maimed him. Scarred him. Cut him to pieces.

KILL YOU ALL.
Game fleeing at his clumsy approach. Claws crunching on fallen leaves and brittle twigs, wings dragging through soaking underbrush, making more noise than Raijin himself. Small fleshlings could hear him coming from too far away. No hunt. No food.
SO HUNGRY.
So he walked. Many steps. Too many for counting. Water flowed downhill, so downhill he stumbled, hoping for a river and fat, slow fish. Ignoring his growling belly. Ignoring the lessened weight of his wings, the flat shapes of his maimed feathers. The fury at what they had done to him swelling for hours at a time, until at last it would boil up and over and he would lash out with hooked talon and razored beak. Tearing saplings from their roots and fallen logs from their rotting beds, roaring his frustration at the rumbling clouds above.
No answer.
He would stand there afterward, chest heaving, tail lashing from side to side, head bowed with the weight of it all. And deep inside him, a single thought would raise its serpent head and whisper with forked and darting tongue, a truth so far beyond denying that it might have been carved into the bones of the earth itself.
SHOULD NEVER HAVE COME HERE.
He walked on. Stumbling through the curtain of emerald green, clumsy as a newborn cub. The same cycle of rage and release, building and breaking, over and over again. And then, amidst the fading echoes of his roars and the crash of black clouds and the voice of the howling wind, he heard it among the boughs of the ancient trees.
A scream.
It took a second for him to recognize it for what it was: the wail of the monkey-child. The one who had spoken in his mind, freed him from the cage, saved him from burning death. She was calling out in terror, breathless, desperate. And in answer to her wavering song of fear, he heard an echoing bellow. Deep as the grave. Twisted and gurgling. Behind him. Back toward the ruined stone and stink of grave soil that he had known well enough to avoid.
He sniffed the air. Smelled death. Heard the sound of running feet in the distance; one set as light as the dreams of clouds, another, pounding heavy upon the earth. Falling trees, a roar of anger and pain. And he thought of the monkey-child in the rain, flooding his mind with her wretched, unwelcome pity as he awoke to find his wings mutilated. He thought of her trembling fingers on the lock to his prison, sliding the bolt free as the flames reached toward them with hungry hands. He thought of debts unpaid, heard her voice in his mind; a memory of old words that filled him now with a faint and nagging guilt.
“I wasn’t the one who maimed you. You’d be a smear on the mountainside right now if it weren’t for me.”
Blinking up at the ceiling of leaves and the hidden sky beyond, he flexed his crippled wings. The rain and wind caressed his ruined feathers as the monkey- child’s words played over and over inside his head. He heard faint, gurgling laughter over the storm, dripping and malevolent. A black voice speaking, the tongue of the Dark Ones, poisonous and vile. Lightning stabbed at the gloom, the predator’s instinct quickening his pulse. And then he was running, loping through the scrub, bounding over fallen logs and clawing branches toward the fading sounds of battle, azalea petals falling like perfumed snowflakes in his wake.
Figures between the trees. Smell of black blood. A raised sword. A demon, Yomi-spawn looming twelve feet tall over the fallen monkey-child, skin of polished midnight blue, ready to spill her open on the acres of swaying green. Thunder rolled across cloud, Raijin hammering his drums in the skies above, hollow, booming echoes sounding in the depths of the temple ruins at his back. He leaped on the oni’s shoulders, a flurry of razors, broken blue sparks and

The taste of charnel pits and ashes. The stink of burning hair and open graves.
A war club scythed toward him from the darkness. He sprang from the demon’s back and took to the air for a few brief and wondrous seconds, almost forgetting, tiny whirlwinds of falling leaves dancing in time to the thrashing of his wings. Weightless. Flying.
He heard the crunch of breaking spine behind him, the spittle-thick death rattle of the pit demon as it crumpled to the ground. He landed hard, unsteady on maimed wings, digging bloodstained claws into the earth. Turning his eyes toward the remaining oni, he breathed deep, inhaling the stench of black gore amidst the steaming green rot. The oni glanced at its companion’s corpse, shifting the war club from one hand to the other.
CAN SMELL THE FEAR IN YOU, LITTLE DEMON.
A bellow. A war club raised high. Lightning arced across the skies, bathing the whole scene in fleeting, brilliant white: the endless wilds, the stranded arashitora, and the pit demon poised to cave in his skull.
A charge across broken ground and the pair collided, crashing earthward and tumbling about in a flurry of feathers, petals and screams.
Dark splashes staining the white azalea blossoms.
A crunch, a choking gurgle, and then a vast, empty silence.
He emerged from the shadows, feathers stained black with blood. He saw the monkey-child laid out in the dark, face spattered with gore. A tiny splinter of sharpened metal lay near her outstretched hand. He stalked toward her and lowered his head, a growl of challenge building in his throat. She groped toward the steel, even as her world began fading to black.
She was weak. Frail. No real threat at all.
If this was victory, it was his alone.
Gravity returned as the rush of battle faded, the weight of his flesh and bones painfully real. The wind and rain sang a melody he had known since birth, too distant now to be of any comfort. He felt like a child torn early from its womb, bound to wretched earth, helpless in the grip of its hateful pull. Longing to fly, he spread his wings, sparks breaking on the edges of mutilated quills. Listening to the song he was no longer a part of, he felt it calling like iron to lodestone. As a victim calls to vengeance.
He roared at the skies, emptying his lungs, a hurricane scream of rage and longing.
At his feet, the girl surrendered to darkness.

Yet all flowers fade.
Lady Izanami’s life, childbirth’s labor stole.
To reclaim love lost, Lord Izanagi walked deep, to black

Underworld,
Yet to slay cold death, and break Yomi’s bleak embrace, no
power had he.
And there she dwells still; the broodmare to all evils,

Playing in the bamboo every day, she and Satoru, their favorite game. He the brave hunter Masaru, she the Naga Queen, arrows of venom and snakes for hair. She would topple the imaginary forms of the squires Akihito and Kasumi, slay the Hunt Master Rikkimaru and stand poised over Shōgun Kaneda, ready to end him. And with a fearsome shout, Masaru, Rikkimaru’s brave apprentice, would snatch up his sensei’s spear and thrust it into her heart, and she would sink to the cool ground, cursing his prowess, vowing that her children would avenge her.

Serpent Empress. Mother to All Vipers.
Almost a year to the day after the Naga Queen’s death, their father had come home to stay at last. And though they didn’t really know him, they loved him fiercely.
It was their mother who raised them, who forced them to do their chores and eat their vegetables and punished them when they misbehaved. Masaru had always returned from his long treks with trinkets and stories and broad smiles. Sometimes Uncle Akihito or Aunt Kasumi would come too, bringing small mechanical marvels from Kigen: music prisms or glittering spring-loaded contraptions that mapped out the path of the hidden stars. Masaru would sit by the fire and tell hunting tales. Satoru’s eyes would fill with pride and he’d say, “One day I will be like you, father.”
Masaru would laugh and tell his son to work harder at his numbers. But when he had time, he would take the twins out into the bamboo to hunt the small game that grew more scarce every season, or to fish the stream that flowed like crystal down from the Iishi crags. He would love them for a day or two, then disappear for months on end.
They loved him back. It’s easy to lose yourself in the idea of a person and be blinded to their reality. It’s a simple thing, to love a stranger.
But now, for the first time in as long as they could remember, he was home for more than a handful of days. At night he would sometimes tell the story of the Renshi swamps, the hunt Shōgun Kaneda promised would be his last. Satoru asked why the village minstrels sang tales of Kaneda the nagaraja slayer, and barely mentioned the brave apprentice Masaru, who saved his Lord’s life. Their father said that it did not matter what the minstrels sang, that pride was the province of men who did not understand what was truly important.
Playing and fishing and breathing, a blessed handful of months beneath the scorching summer sun. Sometimes the twins would dance together in the dappled shade between the bamboo stalks, and he would simply sit and stare, motionless, his smile reaching all the way to his eyes. He was home. He was happy.
And then the letter arrived.
After fourteen months of agony, Shōgun Kaneda had succumbed to the nagaraja’s toxin and gone to his heavenly reward, succeeded by his thirteen- year-old son, Yoritomo. The new Shōgun commanded Masaru to move his family to Kigen and take up Sensei Rikkimaru’s old role: Hunt Master of the Shōgunate court.
Their mother refused to go. Naomi loathed the thought of leaving Kitsune land for Kigen’s polluted labyrinth and choking fumes.
“Besides,” she argued, “what is there left to hunt? The last of the Black Yōkai is dead. What need does the Shōgun have of hunters now, aside from indulging foolish pride?”
Masaru had been torn between love and duty; his wife and his honor. And so they fought, shouting matches that went on for hours, driving their children into the comforting veil of long emerald leaves and swaying stalks and cool dark earth. There they would play hunters, or chase the few remaining butterflies flapping on feeble, near- translucent wings. Even this close to the mountains, the lotus was beginning to leave its stain; the fields were encroaching further north every year, choking exhaust rolling among the morning mist. Every so often they would catch the scent of smoke on the air, and Satoru would decide they were hunting Kagé today, crashing off through the undergrowth. Yukiko would follow, whooping like a wild thing.
They ran through forest that day, Satoru swinging his stick of bamboo like a double-handed daikatana, hacking at imaginary foes. She raced along with him, flitting among the swaying green, eyes alight.
“Let’s play nagaraja,” Satoru said.
“Not today.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m always the Naga Queen.” She made a face. “I always get killed.”
“Well, that’s how it happened.” He was busy hacking at a thick tangle of akebi vines. “You slay Sensei Rikkimaru, though. You give Uncle Akihito his scars.”
“Why don’t you be the Naga Queen, then?”
“Because I’m a boy,” he laughed, stabbing at the vines again. “Boys can’t be queens. And you do the voice better than me.”
Yukiko smiled and crouched low, pawing at the air.
“My children will avenge meeeeeee,” she hissed.
Satoru’s laughter was bright. Short-lived.
The snake was green as grass, fast as lightning. It uncoiled from the akebi vines and struck like quicksilver, fangs buried to the gums in Satoru’s hand. The boy cried out, stumbling away as the terrified serpent struck again, punching twin holes in his forearm. The bamboo sword dropped to the moist earth. The viper slithered away from the noise and motion, its scales gleaming like polished glass. Yukiko watched her brother fall, eyes wide, mouth open.
“Satoru!”
She ran to his side and he blinked up at her in confusion and shock, jaw slack.
“Jade adder,” he mumbled.
Yukiko took off her obi, tying the fabric above the wounds as tight as her little hands could. She heard her father’s voice in her head, careful, methodical:
“You must cut the wound, draw the poison out with your mouth and spit. And you must be swift. Swift as the snake that bit you, or you will find yourself standing before the Judge of the Nine Hells, fearsome Enma-ō.”
“But I don’t have a knife,” she wailed, cradling her brother’s head.
Satoru was staring at the sky, holding her hand, a thin sheen of sweat rising over his body. He began trembling, first his fingertips, then his lips, breath coming in shallow gasps.
“Tell me what to do!” she pleaded. “Tell me what to do, Satoru!”
His tongue was swollen, lips turning blue. She made to stand and run for help, but he held onto her hand, refusing to let go. And in that moment she felt the world drop away beneath her, fell down into the warm darkness of his thoughts; the first and only time she had touched another human mind. Awash with poison, metallic tang in the back of her throat, muscles palsied. But she could hear him, feel his voice, like the wind up the valley in the warmth of spring.
Don’t go.
But I have to get help.
Please don’t leave.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, spattering across his upturned face. He couldn’t feel his feet, his fingers were a distant blur. She was inside him and staring down at him at the same time, a glittering myriad of pathways in his mind, slowly choking closed with the onset of the venom. He was terrified, but he reached out and found some solace in her warmth, her touch, squeezing her hand as best he could.
I don’t want to die, sister.
She screamed for help, screamed until her throat seized closed, grabbing him by his collar and dragging him through the brush. But he was so heavy, and she was so little. The rush of his thoughts was overcome with lethargy, spilling over into her mind and turning her hands and feet to lead. She dragged him and screamed, snot spilling from her nose, cheeks wet with tears, unable at the end to even find words. Inarticulate, shapeless sounds; a howling, threadbare wail until her throat could take no more.
And nobody came.
I’m sorry, brother.
He died in her arms.
I’m so sorry.
And for the first time in her life, she was truly alone.

The night wind kissed the sweat on her skin. The air was rank with the smell of burned blood and shit, two oni crumpled like broken statues and bleeding out black onto the snow-white azaleas.

The beast glowered down at her, pupils dilated, a thin, brilliant band of amber glittering like a ring of fireflies around bottomless pits. Its flanks heaved, breath snorting from its nostrils, talons and fur painted with steaming demon blood. Splashed with thick gore and gobbets of flesh, its beak looked sharp enough to cut through bone as if it were butter. It growled, deep and grating, echoing the clash of dark clouds slung high overhead.

AWAKE. GOOD.
It turned to leave, long tail swishing across the leaves. The ground crunched beneath its feet, wings curled back on its sides, sleek and pale. The scales on its forelegs were the color of iron, each talon as long as her tantō, sharp as any blade of folded steel. Lightning dappled its fur, the shadows in the leaves creating shifting patterns among the stripes across its back.
Wait. Wait!
The beast paused, aiming a narrowed stare over its shoulder.
Why did you help me?
DEBT OWED. NOW REPAID.
The image of small hands struggling with the cage door flitted across their minds. The beast turned and stalked into the darkness, moving with an unsteady, feline grace.
GOODBYE.
Please don’t leave me.
Yukiko struggled to her feet, wincing at the bruises, the gashes up her back and across her ribs. Her hair was a ragged tangle over her eyes. She fumbled in the gloom, finally grasping the bloody tantō and slipping it into the scabbard at her back.
It had been a gift from her father on her ninth birthday.
OWE YOU NOTHING, MONKEY-CHILD. GO BACK TO YOUR SCAB.
Scab?
ANTS” NEST. WOOD AND STONE. SPEWING POISON INTO MY SKY.
We call them cities.
SCABS. BOILS ON THE LAND. YOU ARE SEPTIC.
If you leave me here alone, I’ll die.
DO NOT CARE. DEBT REPAID. MILLIONS OF YOU. ONE LESS IS NOTHING. A GOOD START.
We thought your kind extinct. Where do you come from?
RAIJIN.
The beast looked up at the sky, wings twitching across its back. She could feel the anger, the distrust clouding its mind. Instinctual aggression, the aftermath of the battle with the oni still singing in its veins. But behind that, she sensed a tiny sliver of something more primal, blooming in its gut and crawling across the inside of its ribs.
You’re hungry.
The beast glared.
STAY OUT OF MY MIND, INSECT.
You can’t fly, can’t swoop on prey.
The arashitora growled, pawing the earth with its hind legs. Its anger flared bright and hot at the reminder of its mutilation, the faces of her father and Akihito flashing in its mind’s eye, dipped in the color of murder.
I can help you. I am a hunter.
DO NOT NEED YOUR HELP.
You can’t hunt here. Game will hear you coming. You’re too slow on your feet to catch them. You’ll starve.
SWIFT ENOUGH TO CATCH YOU, MONKEY-CHILD.
Its eyes glittered in the dark like the long-lost stars.
We can help each other. I’ll hunt for us. You protect me. Together we can get out of this. Up to higher ground.
DO NOT NEED YOU.
But I need you. I’ll pay for your protection with tribute. Flesh. Hot and bloody.
The beast purred, the vibration thrumming in her chest, mulling the word “tribute” over in its mind. It was unsure of the exact meaning, but liked the sound, the mien of subservience Yukiko had adopted. She kept her eyes downturned, shoulders slumped, hands before her like a penitent at temple. She could feel its stare, the knowledge that it could smear her across the forest with a casual wave of its talons banishing the realization that she was right; that it would starve to death without her help.
She would be a pet, it decided. She could atone for the insults of her pack with servitude. And if not, she could serve at the last by lining its belly.
VERY WELL. COME.
It stalked into the undergrowth, long tail whipping from left to right. Yukiko fell into step alongside, stumbling over roots and scrub in the dark. Off in the black she heard an owl call, the soft patter of the rain on broad leaves. Small sparks of life fled before them, unsure who these interlopers were, but certain they had little wish to know more. The arashitora’s head was level with her own, and it eyed her with disdain as she blundered about, tripping and cursing in the gloom.
HUNTER OF BEASTS WITH NO EARS, PERHAPS.
I’m sorry. It’s so dark. I can’t see.
WRETCHED MONKEY-THING. WEAK. BLIND.
May I use yours?
MY WHAT?
Your eyes. I can see through your eyes.
A long pause, heavy with the sound of its breathing, the girl stumbling in the dark, the whisper of small, fleeing feet. Its stomach growled.
YES.
Yukiko slipped inside its mind, felt its muscles flexing, the damp warmth of its fur. The ground was uneven beneath them, and she realized how difficult it was for the beast to walk with forelegs simply not designed for land travel. But it held itself proudly, unwilling to stumble, a stubbornness that immediately put her in mind of her father. Arrogant. Arrogant and proud.
We need to find somewhere to rest. Away from that temple. Then I can craft some snares. What do you eat?
WE FISH. FROM THE MOUNTAIN STREAMS. NOTHING ELSE IN THIS PLACE. LAND CHOKED WITH YOUR WEED.
There are others like you? More arashitora? We thought you had died out.
NOT YOUR BUSINESS, INSECT.
Yukiko fell silent, walking as if in sleep, eyes half-closed as she stared through the arashitora’s. She put a hand out to steady herself, laying her palm flat on the thunder tiger’s side. Broad quills flowed down its flanks and belly, growing thinner and finer until it was almost impossible to tell where they ended and the lustrous tiger fur began. She marveled at its softness beneath her fingertips, thick and wonderfully warm despite the rain, sticky with oni blood. The beast smelled strange, a heady mix of pungent feline musk, gore and ozone. Its mind was alien: the sharp, predatory instincts of a bird intertwined with the sensual, vibrant impulses of a cat.
Its curiosity finally got the better of it.
HOW CAN YOU HEAR MY MIND?
A gift from my mother’s people. I am a fox child.
KITSUNE.
She felt a vague approval radiating from a distant corner of its psyche.
WE REMEMBER KITSUNE.
My name is Yukiko. Do you have a name?
A long pause, filled with the voice of the storm.
. . . NO.
Then what should I call you?
MATTERS NOT TO ME.
She ran her fingers along its flanks, touched the tips of its feathers. She remembered the wolf coming down from the mountain with a belly full of hunger, so many winters ago. She remembered the friend who rose to defend her, to save her life without having ever been asked. The sense of safety she felt when he was nearby. Her protector. Her brother.
Her friend.
Then I will call you Buruu.