scorching sun. Hundreds of them.
Hiro raised his eyebrows.
“Shreddermen suits?”
“The Kage feather their nests in the Iishi forest,” Kensai said. “So we will leave no forest standing in our wake.”
Hiro squinted through the pall to the far end of the grounds; gantries and walkways built around a towering shadow. Cutting torches arced and spat, Lotusmen trailed bright blue flames around the hulking figure, rocket packs blazing. The Guildsmen were insects beside it—some vast sleeping giant, nodding off in a sea of mosquitoes, too enormous to feel their sting. Three hundred feet high, eight legs curled up beneath its bloated metal belly like a waiting spider. Saw-blade arms with teeth big as men, pistons tall as houses, great chimney stacks running down its spine and piercing the sky like blades. The sound of its engines was a choir of earthquakes.
A machine. A colossus. A behemoth of black iron and blacker smoke.
Hiro stared in wonder. “What in the name of the gods…”
“Look now upon the doom of the Kage.”
Hiro wiped the ash from his goggles, stared at the metal giant. It was beyond anything he’d dreamed. A looming, rumbling, cast-iron impossibility.
“The Shadows have their standard bearer,” Kensai continued. “Now we have ours. Our creation will be the rallying cry to unite the zaibatsu. Dragon, Phoenix, Fox: none are foolish enough to field an army against such a machine. They will fall into line, one after another, with you at their head. And you will lead them into the Iishi, and level every tree, crush every stone, until there are no more holes for the rebels to hide inside. You will avenge your Lord and restore your honor. You will kill the Impure one and the fools who follow her.”
Hiro licked his lips, tasted chi smoke. Adrenaline sour in the back of his throat. He struggled to swallow.
“It’s incredible.”
“It will be ready to march within weeks. All of Shima will tremble at its approach. You will march in the vanguard, that the other Daimyo will have no illusions about where the Guild’s allegiance lies. We will end this petty civil war and set the clan armies to task. The Kage must be eliminated. And that Impure abomination must burn.”
Behind that perfect mask, Hiro could hear the smile in Kensai’s voice.
“And you said you did not enjoy surprises.” He bowed, hand over fist. “Shogun.”
Hiro looked at the towering colossus of iron and smoke. He closed his eyes, inhaled the fumes, savored the taste on his teeth and tongue. He could feel the fingers on his missing hand itching, the iron arm they’d given him trembling in sympathy. A phantom reminder of all she’d taken from him. The promise of everything he would take from her.
“Does it have a name?” he asked.
“Of course.”
Kensai spread his arms wide.
“Behold the Earthcrusher.”
The ground was a sea of ashes wreathed in blackened fumes. Every step raised a cloud of vapor, swirling about their ankles and hanging from their shoulders like shrouds. Dawn struggled to pierce the haze; sickly, vomit-gray, the air cold as winter snow. They were somewhere east of the Guild bastion of First House, miles deep into the plains where the first production-grade lotus crops had been grown, centuries ago, the earth ruined beyond repair.
Ryusaki knew now why this place was called “the Stain.”
The Kage captain’s breather was choked and useless, the device like a stone about his face. The internal mechanism had failed yesterday, and only the filter scrims kept the deadly fumes at bay now. He felt dirtier than he could ever remember; like he’d taken a bath in fresh sewage and dried off by rolling in rotting corpses. Every breath was a black ache, eyes scummed with charcoal tears behind his goggles, throat parched, lips cracking. But he dared not remove the breather to drink, not even for a second. Not even for a mouthful.
He knew the Guild had built their factory here in the Stain for that very reason—an aerial approach would be intercepted by ironclads, the roads and rail lines were a bottleneck, always watched, and an approach overland through the deadlands was virtual suicide. The soldier in him had to admire the bastards.
“How you faring, boys?”
Ryusaki looked back at his fellow Kage and saw Shintaro and Jun both looked like hell. Faces hidden beneath breathers and goggles, swathed head to foot, heavy gloves and boots, tied off at the hemlines. But their postures showed both were feeling the effects of the deadlands just as much as Ryusaki was. Jun in particular was doing it hard—he’d puked into his breather last night and had to take the mask off to clean it, sucking down a few lungfuls of fumes. His eyes were so bloodshot, Ryusaki could almost see them glowing behind his goggles.
A weary thumbs-up from Shintaro was all he got, so he turned and slogged on, earth crumbling beneath his weight as if the surface was a rotten, hollowed shell. Deep footprints marked their trail from the northern rail lines; the trio had stowed away on a freight train loaded with iron, hitching as close to the staging grounds as they dared before leaping off into the deadlands the night before last.
Daichi had asked for volunteers, and Ryusaki had known the risks when he stepped forward. But the message from the Kigen cell was clear: the Guild was building something in the Stain, and at this stage of the game, the Kage couldn’t afford to be blind. If the Stormdancer had returned, the council could have used her eyes. As it was, they had to do it the hard way. The way they’d been doing it for years before the girl arrived on her thunder tiger.
Suited Ryusaki just fine.
The three Kage trudged through the wasteland, following sky-ship exhaust trails. Chill winds howled across the desolate plains but utterly failed to stir the vapor: the fumes clung to the soil like a toddler to its mother’s kimono. The rents in the earth were worse than he’d ever seen; some stretching ten feet deep, and the trio was forced to climb down into the fissures if they proved too wide to leap across. The vapor hung heavy within these cracks; a tar-thick, sticky smog, deathly cold, choking daylight utterly. In the deepest of them, he swore he could hear a voice, lilting and sweet, whispering just beyond the edge of understanding.
A woman’s voice …
They marched on, one shuffling step at a time, until his feet bled and his legs trembled. At last Jun could walk no more, sinking to his knees. He retched again into his breather, black and vile, filling the eyeholes. And Ryusaki was forced to watch, helpless, as the young man tore his mask away and puked again; a gurgling fountain of gray and scarlet, slumping face-first into the corrupted earth.
His eyes had turned black.
They whispered a prayer to Enma-o, begging the Great Judge to weigh the boy fair. They had no offerings, no wooden coin or incense to burn for him. Looking at the deadland ashes already caked on the boy’s face, Ryusaki hoped they would be enough to grant his soul a hearing at the Court of Hells. The entire countryside had been burned to produce them, after all. That should be offering enough for any judge.
Miles. Hours. Fumes so thick his vision swam, head buzzing, the taste of death chalked on his tongue. Shintaro stumbled behind him, fell under the weight of his pack, and Ryusaki dragged him upright and slapped his back, promising a decent cup of Danroan sake when they returned to civilization. The boy was nearly delirious, but he nodded and kept walking, shoulders slumped, like a man on his way to the executioner’s scaffold.
They crested a small hill near dusk. And across the sea of fumes, they saw it.
The Guild staging grounds.
Ironclads hanging in the air like bloated lotusflies. Walls of razor wire, halogen lamps and cutting torches burning as Lady Amaterasu slipped toward her rest. Ryusaki fumbled with the spyglass at his belt, thumbed the ash from the lenses, cursing beneath his breath as he held it to his eye. Squinting into the Guild compound, blinking black tears, he caught sight of hulking machines lined up in formation, close to a hundred in all. Four legged, brittle-yellow, chainsaw blades for hands. It took a few moments to realize they were shreddermen
