Jay Kristoff - Kinslayer

Kaori looked at the Spider, he at her, watching her eyes grow wide.

“Oh gods…”

“What are you doing?”

The voice pulled Ayane from her trance, mechabacus fading to a whisper as she opened bloodshot eyes and saw Isao in the doorway. The boy’s face was flushed, fist curled around the haft of a wickedly sharp kusarigama, muscles taut along his forearm. He advanced toward her.

“You’re only supposed to be receiving, not transmitting. What are you doing?”

Ayane was on her feet, razored arms at her back unfolding with a bright, silver sound. The boy paused, one hand creeping up to his cheek; the thin red scar she’d given him on the bridge. Eyes on her fingers, still dancing on her mechabacus. He drew breath to shout for help.

A hand snaked over his mouth from behind and his eyes grew wide, a muffled, choking cry spilling through the fingers covering his lips. A knife gleamed red in the gloom.

“What’s my name, Isao?” Kin whispered.

Isao bucked, clawing blindly at Kin’s face. Kin stabbed again, red floods pouring down Isao’s back as he crumpled to his knees and toppled forward onto dusty concrete. Kin fell upon him, plunging the knife down again and again, scarlet spraying across the walls. Chest heaving, sucking breath through clenched teeth, finally pushing himself away from the corpse and spraying it with a mouthful of spittle, hands painted red, face white as snow.

Ayane watched him as if hypnotized. The silver at her back gleamed, long, razored needles rippling like branches in a gentle breeze. She walked up beside him and peered at Isao’s body, the blood pooling around him.

“You stabbed him in the back,” she said.

“So?”

Ayane reached out with one spider limb to poke the meat cooling on the basement floor. Kin grabbed her arm, glaring.

“I’m just touching…” she said.

“Well, don’t.”

“What was it like?” Head tilted, eyes a little too wide. “To kill him? How did it feel ?”

“This isn’t the godsdamned time, Ayane.”

“Where are the others? Takeshi and Atsushi?”

“Already gone.” He gestured to the mechabacus on her chest. “Is it done?”

“Hai.” Ayane reached out ever so slowly, touched the blood on Kin’s cheek. “It is done.”

Kin sheathed his knife, walked up the stairs. “Then let’s get this over with.”

Ayane lingered, watching the punctured carrion cooling on the ground in front of her. She looked at the droplets of blood, winding in random paths down the walls, smeared on her fingertips. Her tongue emerged from between bee-stung lips and she touched it to her fingers, just once, shivering as she tasted copper and salt.

Licking her lips, she turned and followed Kin up the stairs.

He hadn’t moved from the window.

A silhouette against rising flames, sky-ships roaring overhead, the calls for calm, obedience, dispersal, hanging in the air with the smoke. He didn’t even look at them as they entered the room; Kin standing in the doorway, smeared in blood, Ayane leaning into a corner, a halo of silver needles fanned out along the walls.

“I wonder how history will remember us, Kin-san,” Daichi said, voice frail with pain. “I wonder what they will say.”

Kin’s reply was flat. Dead.

“They’ll probably call me traitor.”

Daichi nodded at the flames. “Probably.”

“They won’t call you anything at all.”

Daichi raised an eyebrow, turned toward the boy, and froze. He took in the unblinking eyes, the blood smeared across fingers and face, the dead-man expression.

“Nobody will remember your name, Daichi,” Kin said.

“What…” Daichi licked his lips, eyes fixed on those bloody hands, “… what have you done, Kin-san?”

“I told you,” Kin said. “I found a way for all of it to end.”

The window exploded at Daichi’s back, a rain of shattered glass and roar of blue-white flame. A Lotusman collided with the old man, knocked him off his feet, the pair crashing to the floor and tumbling across the boards. Another half-dozen suited shapes blasted in through the broken window, the roar of their burners almost deafening, filling the room with choking smoke.

Daichi kicked at the Guildsman tackling him, rolling away and drawing the old katana at his back from its battered scabbard, teeth gritted in agony. A second Lotusman advanced, brass fingers outstretched, and the old man struck with the blade, a dull note ringing out as folded steel connected with case-hardened brass. The hiss of breather bellows, the sound of metallic chuckling as the figures surrounded the old man, his sword raised high, gleaming in the light of bloody eyes.

They lunged and he moved; an ebb tide, flowing back then crashing forward, his katana’s point skewering one Guildsman through the glowing red glass over his eye. The Lotusman screamed, a high-pitched, agonized squeal, thick with reverb as he fell, blood streaming down a blank, motionless face. A quick strike severed the breathing tubes of two more Lotusmen, and the old man staggered back, one hand pressed to his ribs, the other still clutching his blade, knuckles white upon the hilt. Gasping for breath. Blood at his lips.

Swordmaster the old man might have been, but he was one, beaten and sick, and they were six, hard and cold. More still rushing up the stairs now; heavily armed Guild mercenaries with Kobiashi needle-throwers. And they fell on him, just a dull weight of numbers without finesse or craft, bearing him down as he thrashed, stabbing and punching, cursing them with every ragged, gasping breath. Curling up under their blows and finally falling still as they plunged the blacksleep needles into his flesh, his stare locked on the boy who even now sat slumped at the table, bathed in blood, flames reflected in knife-bright eyes.

Kin heard his father’s voice, the knowing rebuke amidst the workshop’s thrum. The words he’d heard so many times, the simple rote that had been as much a part of his life as breathing. And in that moment, he finally understood their truth.

Skin is strong.

Flesh is weak.

“Godsdamn you, Kin,” the old man whispered. “Godsdamn you to the hells.”

The boy watched the light in the old man’s eyes fade as the blacksleep dragged Daichi down into unconsciousness. He felt pale hands on his shoulders, insectoid clicking as eight silver arms encircled him, holding him tight.

“I’m sure they will,” he said.

Michi sheared through the ceiling of Aisha’s chambers and down into a spray of bright red. Her chainkatana parted a head from its shoulders as she tumbled into a crouch, taking a second foe’s legs off at the knees. Metallic screeching. Spattered walls. Rising into a faceful of silver needles.

The air about her sang, whipped into bright, cutting notes, pain behind it. Stepping backward, she lashed out with the chainwakizashi, heard jagged teeth sparking on metal, blinking the blood from her lashes. Gasping, eyes burning, sweat slick on her skin, gown weighing her down like the air in a tomb.

They had the seeming of demons: featureless faces, bodies clad in skintight, gleaming brown, long skirts studded with fat, gleaming buckles, eight impossibly thin arms arrayed about each in a gleaming halo. But Michi saw mechabacii on their chests, recognized them from the palanquin at the sky-docks, and she knew at last the hell they’d been spat from.

“Guildsmen,” she hissed.