A small pause.
Another pause.
No One heard creaking footsteps, the low murmurs of two approaching bushimen.
Standing quickly, the girl scooped up the chamber pot and shuffled down the corridor, heart pounding in her chest. She forced her hands to be still, her breath to slow. But the guards gave her and her stinking armload a wide berth, neither of them sparing her a glance. Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew to ignore her. This was the fate of the clanless in Shima—to be treated as less than a person. All her life, she’d been a walking, breathing absentee. Seldom spoken to. Never touched. For all intents and purposes, invisible.
It had worked out well, all things considered.
When she was a little girl, No One thought the smokestacks made the clouds. She remembered playing around the walls of Yama refinery with her brother, watching filthy children tramp in and out of wrought-iron gates to a steam whistle tune, jealous they got to work in a place so magical. Trudging home through the wretched streets of Downside, she felt a pang of remorse for that childish ignorance.
The chi refinery grew like a tumor off Kigen Bay; a tangled briar of swollen pipes and bloated tanks, glowering over the labyrinthine alleys with grubby glass eyes. Chimneys dotted with burning floodlights spattered the sky with tar, smothering the broken-back tumbledowns about it in a blanket of choking vapor. A corroded pipeline as tall as houses wormed out of the refinery’s bowels, north across the sluggish black depths of the Junsei River. Ramshackle apartment stacks and crumbling lean-tos lined the oil-slick streets of Downside—the cheapest and meanest stretch of broken cobbles in all of Kigen. A body had to be poor or desperate to even consider hanging her hat there.
Truth was, she’d spent eighteen years being both.
A threadbare cloak was slung around her servant’s clothes, grubby kerchief over her face, a broad straw hat pulled low over her good eye, narrowed against the rising sun. As she rounded the corner to her tenement tower, a figure prowled out of the gloom to meet her, quiet as final breath. A hulking shape, almost toddler-sized, missing both ears and half its tail, blue-black as lotus smoke. It had a mangled, snaggletoothed face, patchy fur stretched over crisscrossed scars. Its kind were rare as diamonds in Kigen these nights. Its eyes were the color of piss on fresh snow.
A cat. A demon-born bastard of a tomcat.
She knelt on the cobbles, scratched the creature behind one of its missing ears.
“Hello, Daken. Miss me?”
No One stomped up the tenement’s narrow stairwell, Daken trailing behind. The walls were plastered with posters for the Kigen army, slapped up just days after Yoritomo-no-miya died; a recruitment drive targeting the city’s poor and clanless, promising three squares a day, a clean bed, and a chance to die defending an empty chair.
Out onto the fourth-floor landing, she stepped over a crack-thin, crumpled figure, passed out in a puddle of his own waste. Gray skin, lotus-red eyes rolled back into his skull. It amazed her to think some fiends were still smoking now everybody knew how blood lotus was grown. Without sparing the wretch a glance, she unlocked her door and slipped inside.
“Sis.” Yoshi looked up from his card game. “How do?”
Her brother sat on the floor beside a low table scattered with cards and coins. His hair was tied in rows of elaborate braids, spilling around his shoulders in black, knotted ripples. He was terribly pale, sharp-edged and handsome, the same pointed chin and dark, round eyes as his sister, glittering like shuriken beneath his brows. The shadows of his first whiskers were a pale dusting on his upper lip and cheeks. He was grubby as a cloudwalker, clothed in dirty rags. A conical straw hat with a jagged tear through the brim sat crooked on his head. One year older than she, but still a youth—gutter-lean, hard muscle and long-limbs, slowly filling out into the man beneath his surface.
“I’m all right,” she sighed. “Can’t believe you’re still awake…”
“You’re not so old I can’t wait up for you, girl.” Yoshi hefted the bottle of cheap rice wine from the table. “Besides, there’s still a third left.”
She made a face, turned to the other boy. “You winning, Jurou?”
Jurou glanced up from the other side of the table, fingers hovering close to his stack of copper bits. He was around Yoshi’s age, shorter, darker in complexion. Softly curling bangs of black hair hung about shadowy eyes, cheeks flushed with wine. An empty smoking pipe dangled from pursed lips. A beautiful tiger tattoo coiled around a well-muscled arm; the kind you didn’t usually see in Downside unless it was attached to a corpse with very empty pockets.
“Winning? Always.” Jurou shot her his heartbreaker smile, turned over a maple card and flicked the straw brim back from Yoshi’s eyes. “Lucky hat my ass.”
Yoshi swore and pushed across his coin. The flat was claustrophobic, furnished with a low table and moldy cushions, dirty light guttering from a tungsten globe. A soundbox sat on the floor beside the boys; cheap tin and tangled copper wires, stolen from some peddler’s wagon last winter. A tiny window ushered in the pitiful breeze, the sounds of the rising dawn outside: the city stretching its limbs, automated criers trawling the streets, steam whistles from the distant refinery.
No One splashed a handful of copper kouka on the table amidst the playing cards. The coins were rectangular, two strips of plaited metal, dulled from the press of a thousand fingers.
Jurou whistled. “Izanagi’s balls. A month of slinging brown for that pittance? You’d be better off begging in the street, girl.”
“I’d be better off pimping you down at the sky-docks, too, if you’re that worried about it.”
“And we’d retire rich as lords in a fortnight.”
She laughed, and Jurou grinned around his empty pipe—the boy had quit smoking lotus once the origins of inochi fertilizer had broken, but chewing the stem had proven an unbreakable habit.
“Forgetting something?” Yoshi asked, raising a lazy eyebrow.
No One sighed, sinking down onto her haunches and scratching at the stippled scar below her eyepatch. She slipped a chunk of metal from inside her kimono, hefted it in her hand. The lump was snub-nosed with a thumb-broad barrel, matte-black and ugly as a copper-kouka whore. There was no symmetry to the design; it was all pipes and rivets and leaden menace. The handle was polished oak, inlaid with golden tigers, a deep scar in the wood from where its former owner had dropped it onto the cobbles at her feet as he died.
Shogun Yoritomo’s iron-thrower.
It was heavy in her hand, seemingly cold and dead. But she’d been there in the Market Square when its
