Jay Kristoff - Kinslayer

She stared at the boy on the deck of his ship, watching him roar and rage and rev his blades. All that was. That could have been. That would never be again. The memory of a tablet in a garden of stone, marked with her own father’s name. The memory of his loss, real and sharp in her mind. Hand slipping from her belly to the blade he’d given her, all she had left of him save fading memories. And she stared at the boy she once loved, the arms that had once encircled her waist as he pressed his lips to hers—one of flesh, and one of cold, dead iron. She reached across the gulf between them, into the burning fire of his thoughts, acutely aware of how little effort it would take to simply … squeeze. And there, amidst that impossible tangle, curled at the edges by rage and despair, she caught an impression. A single revelation. A fragment of knowledge, consuming, inundating, immolating all he was.

Aisha gone.

Dead.

So much blood .

And looking down on the ruins of the city below, the smoke and the bodies, the scarlet in the streets deep enough to sink in, the thought of adding one more drop filled her to sickening.

What we came here to do has been done for us.

WHAT?

The wedding has been stopped, Buruu. The dynasty is in ruins. The Guild’s plan is undone.

She ran one hand through his fur.

Enough for today .

She sheathed the katana at her back. Put away her anger and tossed her head. The boy in his ash-pale iron roared and spat and screamed, and her hands drifted once more to her stomach, to the dread and horror and enormity she felt swelling there. Fire burning in her mind. The city burning below. The Shōgun’s peace in tatters, the civil war inevitable now. Tiger against Dragon. Dragon against Fox. Fox against Tiger. The Guild amongst it all.

“Good-bye, Hiro…”

And as they turned away from Kigen, cutting through the air back to the north, a single thought burned like a star in her mind. A promise on a not-too-distant horizon, so close she could taste it in the very air. A certainty, light as iron, warm as ice, that Buruu’s river would swallow them all now, no matter what they did.

The Lotus War has begun.

The wolves had almost run them to ground.

Michi hovered by the railing on the captain’s deck, watching the pursuing floodlights grow larger. The running lights of the corvettes were smaller, brighter, the drone of their engines of a higher pitch. She fancied she could make out something of their shape in the glow of their floods and the hint of a distant dawn; sleek and sharp, like knives flung through the air, speeding right toward them.

The Kurea ’s captain stood by the wheel, occasionally looking back over his shoulder and spitting, knuckles white on the controls. The ship’s engines were at full burn, temperature gauges hovering in the red, her aft shuddering with the strain. Smoke poured from her exhaust, her four propellers 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 Kagé 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 Shōguns. Ender of empires.