The Lotus War - Kinslayer Part 52

He looked at the boy.

"Take no pride in this discord we now sow. It is an easy thing, to destroy. Be proud of the world you build after this is done."

The old man coughed then, a long, wracking spasm that bent him double, one hand over his mouth, the other on his belly. His face twisted with the ache of it, teeth gritted, finally spitting black and viscous onto the boards beneath their feet. He wiped one hand across his mouth, turning his knuckles the color of burnt oil. Isao placed a hand on his shoulder, expression pained.

"You should head outside and keep ... watch with Atsus.h.i.+ and Takes.h.i.+. We will signal the strike on the palace after ... the refinery is ablaze."

"Hai." The boy nodded, covered his fist and stole down the stairwell.

Daichi turned to the pair who remained behind. The girl watching him, nervous hands and sunken eyes, machine chattering on her chest. Kin beside her, head down, stare locked with his. The boy looked old, worn thin, the skin on his bones almost translucent. Expressionless.

"Can you ... feel it, Kin-san?"

"I feel it," the boy replied.

Daichi turned back to the window, to the fire burning beyond the gla.s.s. He coughed once, hand over his mouth, watching the dancing flames.

"It has begun," he said.

The Kage dropped like falling leaves into the alley, flitted down cracking cobbles without a sound. Each wore black, only their eyes showing between cloth folds, straight-edged swords upon their backs. Kaori led them onto the levee, crouched low, eyes on the stone bridge crossing the river fifty feet away. Behind her crouched a lieutenant of the local cell; a thin, pock-faced man known as the Spider, who moved like wisps of clouds across moonlight.

The waters of the Junsei river were thick as mud, jet-black, reeking of excrement and caustic salt. Twelve shadows slid down the concrete bank and waded into the flow, quietly as they might. The sounds of flames and bells and marching boots masked the splas.h.i.+ng and cursing, the smell growing so bad one man was forced to stop and tread water while he vomited.

They made the southern sh.o.r.e, crawled along the waterline until they reached the refinery outflow pipe; a four-foot-wide tunnel barred by a corroded iron grille. Reeking effluent dribbled between its rusted teeth. Kaori crouched at the tunnel mouth, drew a hacksaw and set to work on the corroded spot-welds. The Spider and the others gathered about her, crouched low, eyes never leaving the bus.h.i.+men on the bridge.

Two dozen children were gathered on the northern banks, hurling stones and bottles at the guards. Kaori recognized the leader; a girl with the handle of Butcher, her shrill voice ringing across the water, rife with profanities that would make a cloudwalker gasp. She smiled, despite herself.

A sky-s.h.i.+p thundered overhead, the blast from its prop-blades whipping ash into her eyes. Speakers mounted on the s.h.i.+p's flank bellowed a warning for all law-abiding citizens to return to their homes, bright spotlights aimed at the gaggle of dissent near the footbridge. The children turned their rocks and bottles on the sky. Phoenix corvettes buzzed and dodged, letting off a few warning bursts of shuriken-thrower fire.

On a quieter night, the saw blade's rasp would have brought every bus.h.i.+man in the city running, but it was lost beneath the engine's din. Kaori pulled a corroded bar away from the crosspiece, the s.p.a.ce just narrow enough to squeeze through. She motioned the others forward, and one by one, the Kage wriggled through the gap, down into near-darkness and a deathly chemical reek. Kaori found herself alone on the bank, slipping her wakizas.h.i.+ off her back and sparing one last glance to the clouds above. Rolling black, illuminated with thick fingers of firelight and floodlights from the shouting sky-s.h.i.+ps.

She could smell it on the wind above the river's stench; the faint perfume of smoking timber and spice, the sharp tang of chi burning in the Docktown warehouses, spitting from the power units of the Iron Samurai marching to defend them.

The music of chaos.

Smiling, she turned and crawled into the black.

47.

CRESCENDO.

In years to come, Hana would remember the night the Kage attacked Kigen city as one of the darkest in her life. Not the worst. Not by far. But dark enough to leave a scar that would never truly heal.

There she stood, just at the beginning of it, unaware of what lay coiled and waiting in the hours ahead. She could hear the crowds outside their apartment walls, the clash of steel, the war-drum rhythm of running feet. Yos.h.i.+ was crouched in a corner, iron-thrower in hand. She hovered by the window, peering into the charcoal haze, the flickering glow of growing flames reflected on the goggles strapped across her brow.

Sick with fear. Hands shaking. Somehow, some tiny part of her sensing the tremors of the incoming hurt. And as the dread rose up inside her, a slick, ice-cold bellyful, so too did the memory. Just like always.

The pain of it. The taste of it. In a life full of awful, crus.h.i.+ng days, the yardstick by which all days would be measured.

The Worst Day of Her Life.

It began like every other. Rising with the sun, was.h.i.+ng in brackish water and slipping into threadbare, third-hand clothes. Hana shuffled to the kitchen, cold rice leftovers serving as breakfast. Yos.h.i.+ sat opposite, told her a dirty joke he'd heard in town that made her spit a mouthful all over the table. He couldn't laugh with her, much as he wanted to; the inch-long split in his lip was still healing. The bruise under his eye was a toxic, sickly yellow, knuckles torn with the pattern of Father's teeth.

Funny thing was, Da had never laid a finger on her.

She could never figure out why. He beat their mother until she couldn't walk. Beat Yos.h.i.+ like he was a pillow. But not once in her entire life had he ever raised his hand to her.

Not his little flower. Not his Hana.

It was autumn, and their pitiful lotus crop had already been stripped of blooms for the chi refineries. The ground was in terrible shape; blackening and beginning to crack in the worst of it. They stayed well away from the charred soil as they worked-Hana had tripped and fallen onto the dead ground the previous summer, spent an entire week vomiting and delirious, weeping black tears. The temperature was scalding, and the siblings were exhausted and filthy by sunset, creeping back to the house like kicked dogs slinking to their master's feet.

The table was set with cracked plates and a posy of dried gra.s.s. Their father knelt at the head, already halfway into his bottle, cheeks and nose aglow with broken capillaries. The stump where his right hand used to be was unwrapped, s.h.i.+ny and pink. Medals hung on the wall behind him, remnants of an old life, gleaming like seash.e.l.ls on a deserted beach. Trophies for the hero; the lowborn Burak.u.min translator who saved the lives of seventeen Kitsune bus.h.i.+men. A platoon of blooded clansmen saved by the heroism of a clanless dog.

Their mother stood in the tiny kitchen, boiling rice with some seasoning she'd scrounged from G.o.ds knew where. Pale skin, vacant blue-eyed stare, black ink under her fingernails from when she'd last dyed her hair.

Just another trophy for the hero.

Hana washed up, knelt to await the meal in silence. The fear was there, always, hovering in the back of her mind. She listened to her father pour another shot, shadows in the room growing longer, the darkness at the head of the table slowly deepening. A weight sat on her shoulders, the question always hanging in the air waiting to be answered.

What will set him off tonight?

Yos.h.i.+ knelt opposite her, shappo on his head, tied beneath his chin. He'd won the hat from a city boy in a game of oicho-kabu three days ago and he was terribly proud of it, strutting in front of her like an emerald crane in a courting dance, laughing as hard as split lips would let him.

"Take that thing off," their father growled.

Here it comes.

"Why?" Yos.h.i.+ asked.

"Because you look like a d.a.m.ned fool. That's a man's hat. It's too big for you."

"Aren't you always telling me to be a man?"

No. Don't push it, Yos.h.i.+.

"I think he looks very handsome."

Mother smiled as she placed a pot of steaming rice on the table. Tired blue eyes, full of love, crinkled at the edges as she stared at her son. Her Little Man.

Father glanced at her, and Hana saw the look on his face. Her heart sank into her belly, tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth.

"What the h.e.l.ls would you know?"

Clenched teeth. A spray of spittle.

Oh, G.o.ds ...

Mother turned paler still, bottom lip quivering. She took a half step back, terrified and mute. To say anything at that point would be making it worse-to beg or apologize, even to whimper. As helpless as a field mouse in the shadow of black wings.

Da s.n.a.t.c.hed up the sake bottle in his good hand, knuckles white as he rose to his feet.

"You worthless gaijin wh.o.r.e, I said what would you know?"

And just like that, just for that, he swung.

Hana saw the bottle connect with her mother's jaw, time slowing to a crawl, watching the spray of red and teeth. She felt something warm and sticky splash onto her cheek, saw her father's face twisted beyond reason or recognition. Screaming he should have left her there, in her accursed homeland with her b.a.s.t.a.r.d people, and he flourished the stump where his sword hand had been and roared.

"Look what they took from me!" Face purpling, skin taut and blood-flushed. "Look at it! And all I have to show for it is you!"

He loomed over their mother, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, Hana saw rage burning in those brilliant blue eyes.

"You pig." Mother's words were slurred around her broken jaw. "You drunken slaver pig. Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea what I was?"

Spit on his lips as he raised the bottle again. "I know what you're going to be..."

Yos.h.i.+ opened his mouth to yell, rising from his knees, hands outstretched.

The bottle fell, a long, scything arc ending in her throat and a spray of blood, thick and hot and bright. And Hana did what any thirteen-year-old girl would have done at that moment.

She started screaming.

Explosions tore across the night, dragging Hana from her reverie, back into the world beyond the window gla.s.s. She saw the harbor was ablaze, firelight spray-painted across southern skies. Great walls of black cloud rumbled and crashed above the city, the smell of burning chi entwined with the growing promise of rain.

"Izanagi's b.a.l.l.s," Yos.h.i.+ shook his head. "Someone's riled about not getting invited to the Shgun's wedding..."

Hana tried to shake off the dread, closed her eye, frowned. "I can't see much. Can't feel many rats around."

"Fire is making the little ones nervous. Big ones are opening shop on a fresh corpse two blocks north. Dinnertime."

Hana left her vantage point near the window, knelt by the table, rocking a little, back and forth. She stared at Yos.h.i.+'s straw hat, at the jagged, broken-bottle cut running through the brim. Refusing to remember.

"Where the h.e.l.ls is this boy?" Yos.h.i.+ hissed.

"Maybe we could go look for him?"

"You fixing to go outside in all this?"

"Jurou's been gone all day, Yos.h.i.+. Aren't you worried?"

"Safe to say."

Yos.h.i.+ chewed a fingernail, falling mute. Hana looked toward the window again.

"G.o.ds, it sounds like the whole city's coming apart..."

She reached out again with the Kenning, felt dozens of tiny sparks converging to the north. She could feel their hunger, taste their stink at the corners of her mouth. She reached toward Daken, prowling western rooftops, just on the edge of word-range.

There's a group of rats north of the hotel.

... so . .?

So be careful on the way back.

... i am a cat ...

There's a lot of them.

... meow . .?

All right, fine. If you get eaten, don't b.i.t.c.h to me. What can you see?

... people running fighting men in white iron with growling swords ...

Can I use your eyes?

... of course ...

Lashes brushed her cheeks as she slipped behind Daken's pupils. He was looking down into a cramped alley three floors below his perch, and she clutched the table, fighting off a sudden rush of vertigo. The docks around Kigen Bay were ablaze, black smoke and seething flames. The clouds were full of Phoenix sky-s.h.i.+ps, darting and weaving like swallows, occasionally opening up with barrages of shuriken-thrower fire into alleys and houses.

chug!chug!chug!chug!

They could smell stagnant water, urine and trash below, ripe with flies' eggs. Chi exhaust, ash and dust, the reek of pollution that had seeped into the city's skin. And high above it all, drifting arm in arm with the smoke came the stink of charred fat. The reek of burning hair.

Hana could hear the crowd through his ears, roaring flames, ringing bells.

Be careful out there, little brother.

... still have one or two lives left ...

She broke the contact with half a smile, mind drifting over the city. Feeling around one last time for corpse-rats, trying to catch a glimpse of the Kage who must be behind these attacks. She found most of the Upside vermin gathered in that swarming knot two blocks north. They were a mult.i.tude, too grizzled to fear the flames, knuckle-deep in fresh meat and fighting amongst the guts. But a short spit from the edges of the feast, Hana felt a faint spark of distress.

The girl frowned. Pressed her lips into a bloodless line. Focusing tighter, she centered on the pain's source. Felt the tear of broken gla.s.s in his insides, rolling onto his back, tail tucked between his legs as he screeched. Tasted his blood on his tongue, lolling from their mouths, clawing at their own belly to make the agony go away.

She pulled back, felt more of them-other fading sparks crawling into storm drains and writhing in the gutters. Rolling over and clawing at the sky, twisting into little b.a.l.l.s of mangy fur and slowly turning cold.

Something was wrong.