Stormdancer (31 page)

They descended two more flights of stairs, smooth stone beneath their feet, their breathing too loud in the humid dark. Michi led the way through the tunnels, past the rusting iron bars and cramped cells, the pitiful moaning scarecrows inside. She stopped at each cell with an occupant and unlocked the door, but the emaciated stick-men inside could barely raise their heads at the sound of freedom. At the sixth cage down, a rat twice the size of Aisha’s dog raised its head from its feast and shrieked, bloody mouth open wide.

The rag-men reminded Michi of the children in her village: flesh draped like translucent cloth around their bones, all elbows and knuckles and hollow cheeks amidst the fat rice fields. Little boys and girls, starving to death, surrounded by so much food. Sometimes she still had nightmares about them; silent waifs standing in the burning village, watching her uncle’s execution.

When all this was over, when the Guild and the Shōgun were nothing but a bad memory, she would write a book. A true history for Shima’s children to read and feel and remember, that they would know the real price their country had paid for fuel and power. That they would know the names of those who stood in defiance of tyranny, who fought and died so that they might one day be free.

“The Lotus War.”
She couldn’t imagine a name more fitting.
They arrived at Masaru’s cell. Kasumi knelt at the bars and stretched her

hands toward him, voice wet with tears. The rice and dried fruit Michi had smuggled in had done him good; he looked stronger and sharper, the flesh on his bones wasn’t so gray. But he was still weak, drunk on stinking heat and lack of sunlight, clothed in grime and tattered rags. She unlocked the cell, turned to Akihito.

“Can you carry him?”

The big man didn’t answer, just shouldered past and picked up Masaru in a bear hug, a grin slapped onto his face to hide the anguish at his friend’s condition. Kasumi held tight to Masaru’s hand, kissed him on the lips. Michi wrinkled her nose at the thought of what he must taste like.

“We need to go,” she hissed, eyeing the corridor.
“Indeed you do.”
A match flared in the gloom, a bright hiss of sulfur illuminating a wrinkled

face, hard, sunken eyes. Minister Hideo puffed at his pipe, flame pulsing between his fingers, light rippling across the banded armor of the bushimen surrounding him. Naked kodachi glittered in their hands; short, single-bladed swords ideal for close-quarter fighting. Though there were no Iron Samurai among the soldiers, the conspirators were still outnumbered by at least a dozen.

The sound of footsteps from the stairs made Michi’s heart sink. More bushimen poured down from the entrance, cutting off their escape.
So many.
Too many.
“We are betrayed,” she whispered.

“Kin, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t.” The Guildsman held up one gauntlet, stabbed at the release clasp
about his throat. His helmet peeled away in its tiny ballet and he tore it from
his head, unplugging it from his skin before dashing it against the ground.
Face gleaming with sweat, cheeks blotched with anger. “I feel enough of a fool
already. Don’t make it any worse.”
“Kin, I wanted to tell you . . .”
“But you were afraid if you did, I wouldn’t help you, right?”
“I suppose, but—”
“So you lied instead. Well, congratulations. You got your way. I hope you
get everything you deserve.”
“I didn’t lie to you, Kin. I just didn’t tell you the whole—”
BEWARE.
Yukiko frowned, the sounds of metal footfalls ringing at the edge of hearing.
What is it?
INSECTS. MANY. THEY ARE COMING.
The sound grew louder, Kin breaking his stare and glancing about as the
din of ō-yoroi and chainkatana rose. Chattering steel and hissing chi. “Oh no,” Yukiko breathed.
Two dozen Iron Samurai charged into the arena from east and west: heavy,
steel-shod footsteps, golden jin-haori, neo-daishō filling the air with the growl of serrated metal teeth. Yoritomo stalked at their rear, yards of red silk billowing behind him, one hand resting on the hilt of his katana. His face was torn, four long gouges running down his cheek to his throat. Spattered in blood, hands and face, eyes glazed white in a pale mask splashed with red. Another
Iron Samurai walked by his side.
“Oh, Kin, no.”
She turned to him, disbelief in her eyes.
“You told them?”

34 Stormdancer

Rats screeched in the darkness, their cries echoing among the stink. “Lay down your weapons,” Hideo exhaled, the air swimming with cloying
lotus smoke. “Or die here and now.”
“Bastard whoreson,” the big one spat. “I’ll kill you and all your little girlfriends.”
The giant set the Black Fox down on the cell floor, stepped into the corridor.
Hideo noted with faint satisfaction that the fool had chosen his weapon poorly;
the corridor was too narrow to swing the kusarigama’s chain. Neither the sickle
nor the woman’s bo- staff would be a match for a cadre of bushimen with kodachi. The girl with the tsurugi might prove problematic, however, and of all these
traitors, Hideo wanted her alive to question. He had been trying to uncover the
Kagé cell within Kigen for years, and suspected there might be more rats in
the cellar. A few days in the torture cells, and her singing would put a nightingale to shame.
“There is no need for violence,” the old man smiled. “Yield now and we will
show you mercy.”
“Like you showed at Daiyakawa?” the girl spat.
“Or to Captain Yamagata?” sneered the woman.
Hideo sighed, leaned on his walking stick. He was getting too old for this
nonsense. All things being equal, he’d rather be taking a nice, cool bath. He
turned to the bushiman captain, drawing slowly on his pipe as the man met his
stare. The lotus in the tiger’s mouth flared bright, reflected in tired, bloodshot
eyes.
“Bring me the girl alive.”
The dragon uncoiled upon his tongue. “Kill the others.”

The Iron Samurai fanned out around the periphery of the arena floor, weapons drawn and ready, all growling teeth and rumbling motors. They glared out from behind their horned oni masks, the black enamel on their ō-yoroi gleaming a bloody scarlet in the light of the smothered sun. Buruu roared in warning, setting the iron plates squealing. The air was filled with static electricity, broken fingers of blue current running along the iridescent skeleton of his wings. He set his eyes on Kin, ready to end the boy for his betrayal.

“Kin, how could you do this to us?” Yukiko demanded.
“What?” A whisper.
“How could you tell them?”
“. . . You think I betrayed you?”
“How else did they find out?”
“I gave you my word.” Wounded eyes. Voice catching in his throat. “I gave

Buruu his wings. I would never betray you, Yukiko. Never.”

Yukiko blinked, breathing hard, searching that knife-bright stare and finding only truth. She glanced back at Buruu, ashamed of her suspicion, unable to look Kin in the face. At that moment, she realized the boy had risked everything for them. He had discovered the truth about Hiro, known that she had deceived him. Despite all of that, he had stayed true to his promise.

But if it wasn’t Kin who betrayed them . . .
THE SISTER.
“Aisha?” Yukiko frowned at the Shōgun.
Yoritomo sneered, wiped one hand across the bloody gouges on his cheek. “No, my sister refused to betray you. And still she dared beg for mercy. His

eyes danced with the memory. “She found none.”
Bloody fingers curled into a fist.
“Nor will you.”
Yukiko swallowed.
“Then how did you know?”
The Iron Samurai standing next to Yoritomo reached into the folds of his jinhaori. He hurled a small, glittering object across the arena floor, bouncing and skidding to rest amidst the dirty straw. Kin’s gift: the tiny, mechanical arashitora.

“Little escapes the attention of Minister Hideo,” Yoritomo smiled. “Or his spies. Lord Hiro was most eager to make amends for his failure after your first round of treachery.”
Yukiko narrowed her eyes, sucking in a long, trembling breath. “Hiro?”
“So pretty on the outside.” The Iron Samurai’s voice sounded hollow and

breathless within his oni helm. His eyes were green glass. Empty, flat mirrors. “But inside you’re black and rotten. A liar and a whore. Kitsune trash.” She took a step back, as if he’d struck her.
Buruu growled and dug his claws into the floor, flagstones cracking to rubble. GIVE HIM NOTHING. HE DESERVES EVEN LESS.
“Kitsune trash is good enough for a Tora samurai to lay down with though,
right? Good enough to sleep with to get what you need?” She shook her head,
her voice a low hiss. “You’re the whore, Hiro. Living your whole life on your
knees, never once looking up from your master’s shadow to see what’s happening to the people around you. Serving a throne that fills its land with ashes and
its children with cancer.”
Yoritomo laughed, slapping Hiro on the broad, flat spaulder covering his
shoulder.
“She still has some spirit, eh? Peasant fire?”
“And you?” Yukiko turned on the Shōgun. “You make a wasteland and call
it an empire. You’re a parasite. A leech, bloated with the blood of your people.”
She spat on the ground at his feet. “Baby killer.”
Yoritomo’s smile died on his lips. He slowly drew his katana from its scabbard: three feet of gleaming steel, patterns of light rippling across the metal
like sunlight on rushing water. He levelled the blade at Yukiko’s head. “Leave the arashitora alive,” he growled. “Kill the others.”

Masaru could barely stand.

He slumped against the wall, breath rattling in his lungs, watching the shapes dance in the dark. Michi was a blur, a shadow melting from one spot to the next, tsurugi glinting in the glow of Hideo’s pipe. She lashed out, catching one bushiman across the throat with her blade. The man spun like a top, clutching the red spray at his neck. The girl slid down into a split, kimono riding up around her hips, plunging her weapon into another soldier’s crotch.

Akihito was bleeding from a slash across his shoulder, back to back with Kasumi as she struck out with her bo, sending a bushiman’s blade clattering from nerveless fingers. She broke the man’s leg and pushed his face in with two rapid-fire blows, sending him back into his fellows with a bloody gasp. Another two bushimen launched a savage riposte that she barely deflected, and three fingers from her left hand sailed off into the dark. She cried out, barely able to keep a grip on her staff, leaning back into Akihito. The floor was slick with blood, treacherous beneath their feet. Though the trio was making a brave fight of it, their foes were too many. It would only be moments before they were overrun.

There in the dark, with death a few breaths away, Masaru thought of his daughter. He thought of her arms wrapped around him as she gave him her forgiveness, here in this very cell. He thought of her as a little girl, running in the woods with her brother, pure as new snow, stretching out with the fresh, trembling gift toward the faint sparks of life that lingered in the dying bamboo.

The gift he had urged them to hide.
The gift he had passed to them both.
Yōkai blood.
Hunt Master. Black Fox of Shima. He had hidden it well, ever since he was

a boy, even from his sensei. Even as he eclipsed his master and became the greatest hunter in the Empire. Rikkimaru had often joked that Masaru was gifted. If only the old man had known . . .

Naomi knew. She had loved him for it, thought of the Kenning as a blessing from the Gods. He still treasured the memory of the joy in her eyes when she told him he had passed it to their children. But by then, the “gift” had seemed a curse to him. A blessing he had squandered, used only to make himself a more efficient killer. Forcing the wolves into his pits, the foxes into his snares. The last eagle he had ever seen died on the tip of one of his arrows. At his command, the serpent children of the Naga Queen had turned and devoured each other in front of their own mother, the last of the Black Yōkai blinded by tears of grief as he ended her. The gods had not intended it to be so. Kitsune would have been ashamed of him.

And so when Naomi died, he drowned his grief and the Kenning both, in liquor, in the cloying stink of lotus smoke. To forget what he had become, his abuse of the gift he had turned to butchery. Like a prisoner, he closed it off in a dark room in his mind, hoping it would atrophy and fade, the memories of all the blood he had spilled along with it.

But the long hours of sweating de-tox in this pit had cleared the cobwebs from his skull. He could see the doorway clearly now, the one he had closed and locked so many years before.

He watched the steel dance in front of him, heard Michi cry out. He saw Akihito take a blade to the thigh, opening a gash that was almost bone-deep. A sword sank up to the hilt in Kasumi’s gut, another into her chest, blood spraying from between her teeth. And Masaru walked down the long dusty corridor in his mind, and stood before that rusted iron door. Reaching out with shaking fingers, he turned the handle and opened it.

Off in the dark, the prison rats pricked up their ears, and listened.
The Iron Samurai charged.

The bloodlust swelled within Buruu, spilling over into Yukiko, minds instinctively reaching toward each other. Two sets of eyes, six feet planted on the earth, the strength of their wings knotted tight at their shoulder blades, tantō in their hand. They were in the Iishi again, Lady Izanami’s Red Bone Warlord roaring in the rain, the taste of black blood on their tongue. She leaped up onto on his back, slipped into his mind. They bared their teeth and screamed their challenge, a roar drowning out the growling swords, the hiss of armored death charging at them headlong.

Too many to defeat.
But not too many to fight.
Kin removed a brass cylinder from his belt and stabbed one end against his

chest. There was a sharp cracking noise, a red light sprang to life at one end of the tube, and he hurled it at the oncoming samurai.

A soundless explosion, a white sphere of light, tinged at the edges with translucent, bloody red. The sphere expanded in the blink of an eye, catching four of the charging samurai in its arc. There was a sudden stench of evaporating chi, the sound of fuel lines expanding and bursting, a rush of blue-black vapor. The samurai collapsed under the dead weight of their ō-yoroi, chainkatana falling silent as their motors stalled.

Buruu and Yukiko charged at the gap in their circle, pouncing onto a samurai and disassembling him completely, the pieces flying apart like dry leaves in a storm. They leaped into the air, feeling the heat beneath their wings, soaring across the row of growling swords. Coming down behind the knot of warriors, swiping at their backs, metal shredding like paper. Blood spraying in the air, on their faces, scent filling their lungs. Eyes in front and behind, moving like water, severing arms and opening throats and leaping into the air again, wings a blur, roaring in defiance. Choking sounds. Wet bubbling writ upon broken stone.

A flash from Kin’s second grenade burst in the middle of the samurai thicket, armor dying in the aftermath. Boiling clouds of blue-black rushed from the ruined ō-yoroi, the men inside howling in frustration as lifeless iron bore them to the ground.

Yukiko and Buruu flew up above the melee, leash snapping taut, groaning but holding fast. They swooped down again, the chain sweeping through the samurai like a scythe. They were a slingstone on a tether of metal, cutting through the assembled men, a hot blade through snow, all hissing steam and spraying blood. The sun glinted off the metal on their wings, the tantō in their fist, the murder painted on their skin.

They turned their eyes to the traitor, sea-green stare alight with rage, neodaishō snarling in his hands. He dashed forward and kicked Kin in the chest, katana glancing off the Guildsman’s armor, a rain of sparks against the brass. Kin deflected the blows with his forearms, staggering beneath the flurry. The loading crane on the Guildsman’s back uncurled and snapped at Hiro’s head, a hissing viper with iron jaws, catching the samurai’s chainwakizashi and tearing it from his grip.

The Guildsmen of Shima were many things, but they were far from fools. They had gifted the Iron Samurai with weapons to cut through flesh and bone in the blink of an eye. To lay entire armies of meat to waste. But against a Guildsman’s skin? Hiro’s weapons were butter knives against a brick wall.

Still, the Iron Samurai was an adept, honed by years of training that Kin had spent crouched over a workbench. And so the boy’s feet were swept out from under him and he crashed to the floor amidst a burst of chi fumes. Blue sparks spilled from his armor, Hiro stomping up and down on his chest. The samurai raised one black enameled foot to crush Kin’s unprotected head.

They roared, a boom of thunder across the arena floor, setting the plates of Hiro’s armor squealing. He turned to face them, chainkatana in a double-handed grip, breath heaving in his lungs. He tore the helmet from his head so they could see his face, damp with sweat, fearless, fierce eyes, teeth clenched.

Yukiko’s voice was a low, dangerous growl.
“You can’t win this, Hiro.”
He drummed his fingers across the hilt, spat on the ground.
“To wield the long and the short sword,” he hissed, “and to die.” They bounded into the air, wings spread, blue lightning playing across the

edges of their feathers. The hands that had held them in the night, that had sent goosebumps shivering down their spine, now swinging the growling sword toward them, an unrecognizable mask of hatred for a face.

Their flesh separated, what had been Yukiko springing from the back of what had been Buruu. They took Hiro’s right arm off just below the shoulder, beak shearing through black iron in a shower of sparks and bright red. Their knife sank up to the hilt in the gap in his breastplate, just below his armpit. Sticky warmth flooded over their hands as they held him tight, lowering him to the ground in ruins.
“Goodbye, Hiro,” they whispered.
Their breath rasped in their lungs, hearts thundering in their chests. They

wiped their hand across their faces, smearing the blood across pale skin, and turned to face Yoritomo.
The Shōgun dropped his katana and ran.
A chittering horde, eyes of red, jagged teeth glittering in the dark.

They scampered from the shadows, all thick tails and mottled fur and sharp claws, a fly-blown legion grown fat and fierce on corpse-meat. The vermin of Kigen’s gutters, now rising to consume its best and brightest.

Minister Hideo screamed as a beefy black fellow with knives for teeth scampered up the folds of his sokutai robe and began tearing strips off his legs. Bushimen around him began crying out, sleek, mongrel shapes sinking little fangs into the unprotected flesh behind their knees, gnawing at their heels. Screams echoed down the black corridors, the sound of night-terrors and sweat, shrieking, childhood fear.