by Jay Kristoff
“Do you have a machine to help you fly, Guildsman?”
Kin wheezed, tasted blood, clutching the hand at his throat. He could feel the forest breeze, cool and crisp, leaves the color of fire tumbling from the canopy and falling into the space below. Would he flutter as they did? Spinning end over end, down to sudden rest, closing his eyes and dreaming no more? Was this how he ended?
Was the Chamber of Smoke all a lie?
Hundreds of eyes, red as sunset, aglow and unblinking and staring up at him with as much adoration as glass could muster.
His own face, but not his at all.
“Do not call me Kin. That is not my name.”
Stray sunlight glinted through the canopy, a lance of bloody red, dazzling his eyes.
Yukiko, where are you?
He felt a wet spray across his face, heard a scream over whistling, silver music. Isao released his grip, lurched away, Kin crumpling to his knees as sharp cries of fear and pain filled the air. He blinked into the shifting light, saw Ayane standing over him, bloody face, hands outstretched, trembling fingers splayed as if feeling the air. The spider limbs were arched at her back, each one glazed with a thin film of scarlet.
Isao was backing away, clutching his face, fingers painted red, eyes fixed on the swaying silver at Ayane’s back. Atsushi was behind him, howling like a hungry baby, fingers shredded, forearms and biceps punctured as if he’d tangled with a needle-thrower. Takeshi lay curled on the bridge, clutching his arm, thin ribbons of scarlet trailing up toward his shoulder, spattered on the wood beneath him.
Ayane’s lower lip trembled, dark eyes wide with fear.
“Stay away from him.” Her voice small, shaking. “Do not touch him.”
“Monster,” Isao spat. “Abomination.”
The girl glanced at the boy behind her, back to Isao, cheeks wet with tears and blood.
“Just leave us alone,” she whispered.
Takeshi pulled himself to his feet, dragging himself away, scarlet footprints left behind. Isao and Atsushi also retreated, eyes fixed on the trembling girl, brimming with hatred. Leaves fell from the branches above, filling the gulf between them with patterns of orange and yellow and soaking blood-red, a slow and beautiful dance spiraling down, down toward the place they all knew it would end.
They were gone.
Ayane took hold of Kin, helped him to his feet. She was shaking so badly she could barely manage his weight. His stomach felt like it had been put through a meat grinder, every breath a battle, copper marching on his tongue. She slung his arm around her shoulder and led him away. Her voice was small and fragile as snowflakes.
“You told me the Kagé were good people, Kin-san. That they believed in what was right.”
Kin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, brought it away bloody. It hurt to speak the words. More than he could imagine. And yet he spoke them all the same.
“Maybe I was wrong.”
31
PRECIPICE
Blistered palms and aching muscles and sweat burning her eyes. The scarred flesh where Yukiko’s tattoo used to be a knot of constant pain, arms shaking with fatigue as she turned the hand cranks and propelled herself over the thirty-foot drop to the raging ocean below.
They were twelve hours and twenty-seven cables deep into the network now, the lightning farm a distant smear of light, blinking behind the rise and fall of the waves. The first half of each run was an effortless journey; the natural sag in the lines would propel them as if they were rolling downhill, the flying foxes giving off a high-pitched whine. But halfway, inertia would pull them to a halt, and they would have to turn the hand cranks along the rest of the line, up the steepening incline to the next tower. The few final feet were always the worst, and the ascent to the last tower had almost beaten her.
The wind pushed her back, rain trickling down her oilskin’s sleeves, the rope coiled over her shoulder a soaking, leaden weight. Headache swelling in her skull, a thing of knives and rust and broken glass. And all the while, she sensed long, sleek shapes coiling through the water below, staring up with hungry, slitted eyes.
A hush fell; a split second of stillness as if the storm itself was drawing breath. An arc of brilliant blue-white hit a tower not two hundred feet east of theirs. Yukiko watched raw current crackling across the neighboring cables, off toward the lightning farm. She wondered if she’d be fast enough to pull the pin on her harness if their line actually got struck.
Ilyitch had made the next tower, jumping down onto the small island it sprouted from. He turned back to her, shouted words she couldn’t understand. She gritted her teeth and kicked her legs as if she were running, hands shaking, gaining inch by agonizing inch.
In the last few feet, her arms were trembling so violently she could barely turn the cranks. Ilyitch climbed the tower and held out his hand. She snatched at it, fingers slipping on his own, wind buffeting her as if she were a dandelion seed. Lunging, he caught her sleeve, dragged her toward him, wrapping strong arms around her chest and pulling her in tight. She could smell him; cinnamon and honey, mixed with the faint scent of grease and rubber. They struggled to unhitch her flying fox from the cables, Ilyitch’s boots slipping on the tower as the contraption finally came loose. The pair tumbled onto the stone in a tangle of limbs and curse words, Yukiko landing atop the gaijin, her hair draped over his face. The flying fox landed beside them with a clang.
She rolled off him and they lay together on rain-drenched rock, breathless, too tired to move. Reaching out with the Kenning, pushing the bricks of her wall far enough apart to reach through, fumbling in the dark as her head throbbed. She could feel the female arashitora circling above, reveling in each peal of thunder. She could feel the cold shapes of the sea dragons circling the island, filling her with dread. She could feel Ilyitch beside her. And in the distance, she felt a surge of bright warmth that wore a familiar shape.
“Gods, Buruu…” she breathed.
Ilyitch was busy rubbing a bruised shin. Yukiko grabbed his arm and screamed over the storm.
“We’re close!”
She pointed north, dragged herself to her feet, pain and fatigue forgotten. Closing her eyes, reaching out beyond her barricade, she threw her thoughts into the void.
Buruu, can you hear me?
A long silence, empty and awful.
YUKIKO.
Gods, yes, it’s me! Are you all right?
FALSE WINGS BROKEN. BUT MY MIND IS MY OWN AGAIN. I AM SO SORRY …
It’s all right.
HER SCENT. I COULD NOT—
I’m on my way, just stay where you are.
NOT MUCH CHOICE.
We’ll be there soon. Just hold on.
BE WARY.
I know, I feel the dragons.
NOT DRAGONS. THE OTHER ARASHITORA. HE IS HERE WITH ME.
Is he hurt?
YES. AND HE IS HUNGRY.
* * *
Buruu had curled up in the shelter of an obsidian splinter, curved against his back, shielding him from the wind. His belly had long ago ceased grumbling, his hunger reduced to a gnawing, hollow ache, clutching fistfuls of his insides. His thoughts still swam with the female’s scent, driving him near to madness, the stone around him gouged with frustrated desire. But even though he could smell her lingering in the storm above, the impulse had weakened over the last day: her mating time must be very close to its end.
Yet still, her musk made his blood sing when the wind blew the right way, breath coming quicker, shuddering need filling his mind. He fought it down, clung to the knowledge that he’d failed Yukiko, endangered her by giving himself over to it. He’d lost too much to the beast inside him, in darker days beyond the desire for recollection.
He’d almost lost her too.
The minutes ticked by like hours; rain and thunder and snarling ocean the only sounds, until a long, low growl shook him from his melancholy. Lifting his head from beneath his wing, blinking in the downpour. He caught the scent of old blood, a breath-brief
snatch of ozone amongst snarling winds. He heard talons ring upon razored stone, shale crumbling beneath titanic weight. And then, piercing the dark, a long roar of challenge.
LICKED YOUR WOUNDS ENOUGH, I SEE.
Buruu rose from his shelter, padded out into the open. The island they’d crashed on was perhaps three hundred feet across, crooked sheets of black glass slanting up toward the north. The copper lightning catcher rose on the southernmost tip, seven or eight feet from the ocean’s surface. The northern shore stood perhaps forty feet above sea level, a bluff dropping into the teeth of the sea. It was from here the male approached.
Buruu answered the roar, all thunder and spittle, the stones beneath him quavering. He saw a shadow slink across the tumbledown stone on the bluff, saw the play of faint lightning across his wings. He didn’t recognize the scent, doubted any of his former pack would have flown this far south anyway.
A NOMAD, THEN.
He roared again, asking who it was that challenged.
The nomad shrieked its name.
The arashitora prowled closer, and a flash of lightning overhead gave Buruu a good look at his foe. Smaller. Younger. Barely past his blooding by the looks, the stripes on his haunches indistinct, claws still smoke-gray. The feathers at his neck were matted with gore, and he favored his right side. Buruu could see the nomad’s wings were intact, but long gashes trailed from his shoulder into the muscle across his spine. The nomad had avoided flight with the wound still fresh, but territoriality and the female’s failing scent had forced him to challenge as soon as he felt strong enough to win.
Buruu remembered what it was like to be a slave to that instinct, the monster within. He’d thought himself beyond it, that his bond with Yukiko had laid that demon to rest and washed the taste of his own from his tongue. But how easily he’d fallen back inside. How quickly he’d taken up the mantle of who he used to be.
He deserved what they’d done to him. What they’d taken from him.
Buruu roared warning that he would give no quarter. That this was not a ritual fight for mate or pride of place in a pack. That there was no Khan’s law here. That this would end in death.
Yours, came the reply.
Yours.
* * *
Yukiko had taken the lead, energized by the knowledge that Buruu was close. The agony in her muscles, sweat burning the raw blisters on her hands, all of it faded beneath an electrifying rush of adrenaline. She pushed herself across three more cables, barely stopping to rest between them. Ilyitch was lagging behind, and she would stop occasionally to look back and scream over the storm, begging him to hurry in words she knew he couldn’t comprehend.
Nothing mattered. Not the pain. Not the sorrow. Not thoughts of her father, or of Hiro or Kin or the Guild. She was an engine, a machine, cranking along iron cables one desperate foot at a time. Wind in her face, pushing her back, howling she was too small, too weak. Her flesh trembled and her fingers bled, weak and human and threatening to break at every hard-won foot.
But something inside wouldn’t let her stop; a fire burning within her chest that made her grit her teeth, suck down one more desperate lungful, force her arms to move one more foot when everything inside her screamed to stop, to rest, to buckle. And she saw it for what it was, saw that within it lay a strength far deeper than the watered promise found in hatred or fear or even anger. Saw in it a light that left no substance to the shadows she’d filled herself with after her father died. Saw it as the strength behind the wall she’d built in her mind, the bulwark to keep the Kenning’s fury at bay. And she saw it was all that mattered.
Love.
Inch by inch. Foot by foot. The flailing, grasping hands of the wind, the rain pounding like a nail-thrower upon her skin. Lightning struck a tower to the west, cascaded down the cables back the way they’d come. Too far away to remember now. Too much effort to think what lay behind. Worse backward than forward. Standing still meant lying down.
And then she saw it through the spray and hissing downpour. A hulking fang of obsidian shale, rising like an upraised fist out of the ocean ahead. She reached out with the Kenning, flinching away from the serpents beneath her feet, sensing three bright sources of heat to the north. The dimly remembered shape of the arashitora who had struck them, rippling with challenge. The blade-smooth lines of the female overhead, tinged with curiosity, drawn to the conflict despite herself. And the shape of her friend. Her brother. Her one constant in a world that had shifted and spun so violently over the last few months, she’d lost any and all sense of direction. She’d lost herself—in anger, in liquor and guilt. She had lost her way completely.
Forward, she realized.
The way is forward.
Buruu, I’m here.
* * *
The pair touched the way black powder touches naked flame.
A charge across broken stone, sparks curling on their wings and the glass at their feet. The nomad pounced into the air, talons spread like a fan of knives, roaring challenge. Buruu rose to meet him, sheared feathers and narrowed eyes, colliding with the force of a hurricane. The nomad seized a talonful of harness and kicked out with his hind legs as Buruu raked at his throat, blood purchased on both sides, crashing earthward amidst broken shards of obsidian.
Raijin pounded his drums as they rolled apart, Buruu lashing out with his claws and sending the nomad springing back with a growl. Fresh blood at his throat, repainting old gore, eyes alight with fury. Buruu’s own neck and gut were torn, water-thinned scarlet dripping from his fur.
He was bigger. Stronger. But weak from starvation. Still exhausted from his flight. And the nomad was faster. Younger. Hungrier.
Buruu, I’m here.
He glanced over his shoulder, saw Yukiko working her way along the cables, perhaps fifty feet away. He glimpsed someone behind her, fell backward as the nomad sprang to attack, aiming a flurry of talons at his face. Buruu thrashed his wings, the broken mechanism along his spine groaning in protest, canvas feathers torn loose, gaining a few precious feet. Landing on a broken outcropping, retreating as the nomad lashed out again, sparks flying. Clapping his wings together, giving birth to a thunderous peal of Raijin Song; a sonic boom blasting the younger arashitora back across the stone. He clapped his wings again, raindrops shearing sideways in the shock wave, spraying into the nomad’s face.
The attacker circled away, roared in defiance.
Buruu retreated, put the lightning tower to his back, getting between Yukiko and two tons of furious thunder tiger.
She was drawing closer. Thirty feet now.
STAY AWAY.
Are you mad?
HE WILL KILL YOU.
The nomad took to the sky, bloody wings launching him high into the air, swooping down into a razored dive. Buruu stepped aside, ground shattering on impact, lunging at the nomad’s wing and tearing away a mouthful of feathers. They fell into a snarling tangle again, talons locked as they reared up on their hind legs, flashing feathers and snapping beaks, low rumbling snarls of fury.
He felt Yukiko at his back. Stubborn as a mountain runs deep. Pain of her aching muscles in his head. Blisters on their hands. Desperate need.
Twenty feet away.
STAY BACK.
I can help you!
Buruu thrust the smaller arashitora away with a thundering roar, sending him twisting over onto his back. Pressing the advantage, he tore the nomad’s ribs, trying to seize a mouthful of throat as the young one rolled away. Wings thrashing, snarling as he scrambled to his feet, bright red droplets flying between the raindrops and painting snow-white fur the color of slaughter. It was the nomad’s turn to use the Raijin Song now, blasting Buruu back as the thunder from his wings threw puddles high into the shivering air. The downpour bent like a bowstring, droplets as fat as lotusflies splitting into blinding steam-thin spray.
The thunder tigers circled each other, both blooded and wary. The nomad crouched low, gathered for a spring. He looked beyond the crest of Buruu’s wings, caught sight
of Yukiko on the cables, the gaijin struggling behind her. Eyes flashing. Pupils dilating. A guttural snarl of outrage.
Interlopers. Monkey-children. Meat.
He spread his wings, springing skyward, eyes on the girl.
NO.
Buruu leaped into the air, beating broken wings with all his fury, rivets and ball joints shrieking. He collided with the younger buck and held him close, bore them both down into the stone. The nomad landed on his back, breath spraying from his lungs, snarling, screeching, all flashing claws and thrashing wings. The thunder tigers rolled across the shale in a tumble of twisted metal and orphaned feathers.
Buruu felt Yukiko crank across the last few feet of cable, hook her legs around the tower and pull herself in. She turned to help the gaijin, elbow crooked around the copper spiral, fingers outstretched. They grasped hands and she pulled him closer, one leg hooked in the spire as they struggled to uncouple him from the contraption connected to the cables above.
The nomad’s roar was an earsplitting bellow of rage. But beneath that, Buruu heard Raijin suck in a breath, felt faint electricity tingling down his spine.
YUKIKO, GET OFF THE TOWER.
I’m trying, the harness is—
YUKIKO, GET OFF NOW!
An arc of impossible blue crackled across the clouds above, reached down with a single, crooked finger. Yukiko had time to scream a warning and push the boy away before she jumped backward, hair streaming in a long, sodden ribbon. The world stilled in the split second before impact, frozen and silent and perfect. The bolt struck copper with a metallic whump and the hiss of superheated vapor. She threw her arms up over her face to blot out the light, brighter than the sun. Crashing onto black stone, head cracking against broken glass.
The aftershock sucked the air from Buruu’s chest, scorching his fur, crackling across his own wings and his foe’s as they broke apart in a spray of rain and blood.
