Kinslayer

making the sound of thunder. But no matter how hard her captain willed it, no matter how loud her engines bellowed, she simply wasn’t fast enough to outrun the hounds on her tail.

“What happens when the corvettes catch us?” Kaori asked.

“They’ll hit our engines to wound us, slow us down enough for the ironclads to catch up. Then they’ll board. They’ll want to take us alive.”

“That can’t happen,” Kaori said.

“I know,” he nodded. “I know.”

“What is your name, Captain-san?” Michi said.

“They call me the Blackbird.” He tipped his hat.

Michi nodded. “A pleasure to die with you, Blackbird-san.”

She could see the corvettes clearly now; a pair, just a few hundred feet off their stern. Their inflatables were flattened, shaped like the leaves of a beech tree or an arrowhead, hulls streamlined to cut through the wind like blades. Their small crews were gathered on deck; brass suits and glowing eyes, peering at them through the lenses of telescoping spyglasses. She drew in a shuddering, hateful breath at the sight of the Guildsmen, remembering Aisha chained to those wretched machines, that wretched life.

The Kage gathered their weapons, Kaori beside her, Daichi’s wakizashi in her hand. The older woman looked at Michi, nodded once, loose strands of raven hair whipping about her eyes. As good a place as any, she supposed. And better company, she couldn’t hope to find.

The corvettes closed in, the claw heads of their fore-mounted net-throwers springing open as if fingers on iron hands, heavy wire cable slung between each digit like strands of spiderweb. The Guild gunners bent low over their sights, thumbs poised on firing studs.

Michi licked her lips, tasted the wind, thick with chi-stink. She looked down at the land below, vast stretches of lotus fields barely visible in the predawn light. She imagined sleepy farmers rising from their beds, wives cooking breakfast, men heading out into crops choking the very life from the soil. Too busy with their tiny lives to realize what they were doing, who they were robbing, where the road they walked would lead. And in the skies above their heads, men and women who’d decided to stand up, to resist, were about to die for their sakes, and none of them would ever know they had lived at all.

She thought of poor Ichizo. Of the choice he’d offered. Of the life she could have lived. And then she looked at the people beside her, her brothers and her sisters; the family she had chosen to stand beside in defiance of the Guild and its tyranny.

The wrench among the gears. The buzzing in their ears. The sum of all their fears: that no matter how much they smothered, how much they lied, how much they owned, there would still be people willing to defy, to stand tall, to fight and bleed and die for the sake of the strangers below, the tiny lives, the people who would never know their names, the children yet unborn.

And Michi held her chainkatana high and screamed; a single clear note of challenge, taken up by the men and women around her, until Kurea’s deck was nothing but open mouths and bared teeth and raised, glittering blades. Fists in the air. Cries roiling in altitude’s chill, each breath taken freely in the sunlight worth a thousand drawn in the shadow of slavery.

And their scream was answered.

A harsh cry, a shriek of winter wind, high and fierce. A second joining it, underscored with the rumble of thunder across autumn skies. And the hair on Michi’s arms stood up and her eyes grew wide, and the breath caught in her lungs as her heart began singing inside her chest.

“I know that sound…” she breathed.

A white shape streaked out of the clouds, down the Kurea’s starboard side; the rumble of a storm in its wake. Wings as broad as houses, feathers as white as Iishi snow. A second shape followed down the port side, floodlights glinting on iridescent metal, highlighting the figure on its back; a pale girl in mourning black, a dark ribbon of hair whipping in the wind behind her. And Michi screamed again, screamed at the top of her lungs, eyes full of tears as the arashitora thundered past, circled back around and bore down on the Guild ships like lightning hurled from the hands of the Storm God.

“Yukiko!” she screamed. “Yukiko!”

The decks of the corvettes moved like insect hives kicked from their perches, the Guildsmen rushing about as panic took hold, pointing toward the shapes swooping toward them, the nightmare that woke them sweating in the dark. Slayer of Shoguns. Ender of empires.

The Girl all Guildsmen Feared.

The net-throwers fired, spools of metal singing in the air, the arashitora moving like poetry between the wailing cables. Buruu and Yukiko swept beneath the keel of the right corvette, coming up on her port side and tearing her engine loose in a bright plume of rolling flame. The sky-ship spun on its axis, listing hard to one side, her crew leaping out into the dark, rocket packs arcing in the brightening night as their vessel tumbled earthward. The second arashitora sailed over the inflatable of the sister corvette, reaching down with ebony claws and shredding the canvas; peeling it away from the framework spine like bloated corpse-skin. Hydrogen shrieked as it escaped into the dark, the corvette plummeting from the sky like a broken bird, spiraling down toward its end, Lotusmen fleeing its ruins amidst plumes of blue-white flame.

The Kage roared in triumph, weapons raised to the sky as the white shapes wheeled about and returned to the Kurea’s flank. Yukiko sat up straight, held her hand high in the air, fingers curled into a fist. Dozens of fists were raised in answer, Akihito leaning over the railing and bellowing Yukiko’s name, hand outstretched. Buruu roaring like colliding thunderheads, his cry echoed by the second thunder tiger on their starboard side as the light of Lady Sun finally cleared the eastern horizon and set the skies aflame.

Michi sheathed the chainkatana at her waist, exhaustion and relief and bitter, black sorrow, Aisha’s passing weighing heavy on her heart. But at the sound of the Kage cheers, the joy shining on Akihito’s face, the sight of fists rising into the air as the Guild ships fell back, she found a faint smile blooming on her lips. Breathing just a little easier. Happy for a moment just to be alive, in the space where death had loomed just moments before. When all had seemed lost. When all hope was gone.

The second thunder tiger bellowed loud enough to set the Kurea’s rivets chattering, descending in a broad spiral around the sky-ship, the Kage’s eyes alight with wonderment. And as Yukiko and Buruu swept around the stern amidst their triumphant cries, fingers balled tight and thrust in the sky, as their eyes met across that howling trail of blue-black smoke and Yukiko called her name, Michi found herself grinning, raising her fist into the air.

And together, the arashitora and the Kurea turned north, toward the shadow of the Iishi on the horizon, bathed in the light of a dawn long overdue.

Not a victory. Not even close.

But perhaps …

Michi nodded.

Perhaps soon.

56 WOMB

The cage stank of dried blood. Of failure and fear. The soup-thick reek of lotus smoke and stale human waste made Kin’s eyes water, the boiling thrum of the chapterhouse above reverberating into tired bones. The manacles were cutting off his circulation, and he wriggled the numbness from his fingers. Sweat burning his eyes, fumes burning his lungs, he hung his head and waited in the aching dark.

His cage was one of hundreds, row upon row of iron bars, running the ribs of a vast, gloom-soaked room. The wall at his back was dirty yellow, armpit-moist with condensation, slick and warm to the touch. Not so long ago, the chapterhouse cells would have been filled with flesh—the old and the infirm, women and children with fair skin and wide, round eyes and blond and red and auburn hair, all waiting their turn to shuffle meekly into the inochi vats and meet their boiling end. But now the cages were empty, one after another, bare, sweating stone picked out by pinpricks of flickering halogen.