Endsinger: The Lotus War Book Three

by Jay Kristoff

  Except the Earthcrusher wasn’t doing anything that resembled exploding.

  “Shouldn’t we be seeing fireworks by now?” Blackbird roared from the pilot’s deck.

  Michi grit her teeth, watching the Guild fleet draw ever closer. A dozen ironclads, fat and heavy and armed to the nines. The air swarmed with three-man corvettes, crisscrossing the skies like swallows on the mate. The Phoenix fleet was amassed to the west, sleek and beautiful ships armed for slaughter, circling to starboard. If the Kitsune fleet sat still for much longer, if the Earthcrusher didn’t pop its cork soon, they’d be crushed like a thumb in a vise.

  Her heart skipped as the behemoth groaned; a shuddering, rumbling exhalation, a mile-high spray of black from the chimney spires dotting its spine.

  “Here it comes!” she yelled, covering her ears.

  Poor choice of words, as it turned out.

  The behemoth lifted four of its massive limbs, smashing them earthward in quick succession. The ground split asunder, clods of freezing black as big as boulders spraying in all directions. The remaining legs rose up, stretching and groaning. And with dread clutching her innards, Michi realized the Earthcrusher wasn’t exploding.

  It was charging.

  Warning sirens howled amongst the Kitsune fleet, the Yama walls rang with the panicked peals of a hundred iron bells. Michi turned to the Blackbird, roaring over the din.

  “Look alive, Captain-san! You might not have the chance much longer!”

  “What the bloody hells is happening?” Blackbird roared.

  “We have a war after all!”

  Michi looked left, saw the Lucky Fox engage its propellers and lunge forward, followed by the other Kitsune ironclads. The Fox corvettes swarmed west to engage the Phoenix, Isamu standing on the pilot deck and waving his sword above his head, pointing toward the enemy.

  Michi drew her chainblades, thumbed the ignitions. The motors roared to life, sending warm vibrations through her forearms. She searched the line of incoming Guild ships, eyes narrowed in the falling snow. But at last, she saw it, fresh painted and adorned with flags of the Tora Daimyo, deck glittering with a hundred blades. Down her bow, Michi could see her name in fresh kanji—a threat or promise that right now seemed about the best she could hope for.

  The Honorable Death.

  “There!” she screamed. “Full ahead, Blackbird. Right at that flagship!”

  She could see him on the pilot deck, standing tall and proud amidst his samurai.

  Hiro.

  She remembered him sitting in the bleachers of Kigen arena as Yukiko pretended to train Buruu, the mock frowns she’d throw in his direction when she caught him staring too long at the Kitsune girl. She remembered teasing him, gathered with the other handmaidens and whispering as he passed, giggling as he smiled. So young, all of them.

  And then she remembered Aisha. Chained to that awful half-life by those Guild machines, breath rattling in her lungs. What they’d done to her.

  What he’d let them do.

  “The line of Kazumitsu needed its precious son. The Guild needed to cement their Shōgun’s legitimacy. So do you know what they used?” Aisha grit her teeth, spit the words. “A metal tube. A handful of lubricant. As if I were cattle, Michi. As if I were livestock.”

  Blackbird was bellowing over the engines, the opening salvos of ’thrower fire, battle cries splitting the air. “You want us to ram the Daimyo’s flagship? Have you gone mad?”

  Michi licked her lips, eyes locked on Hiro.

  “Not mad, Blackbird-san,” she growled. “Just thirsty.”

  * * *

  Burning.

  Lungs. Eyes. Skin. Throat.

  All.

  Burning.

  She tumbled out into the void, up and down and left and right, abstracts with no real meaning. Instinct bidding her reach for a handhold, something, anything to slow her fall. Because Kaori knew she was falling, some tiny reptilian part of her brain screaming above the blur of chi fumes and vertigo and nausea and fear.

  She hit the surface in a spray of bloody red, plunging down into treacle-thick darkness, kicking and thrashing with everything left inside her. Breaking into the vapor soup that passed for air, spewing and heaving, clinging to slick walls with trembling arms, struggling to regain what she could of her breath. Blinking in the near dark. Trying to understand where she was.

  And gods, she’d made it …

  An enormous tank, cylindrical, at least a hundred yards across. The interior was lit by a circle of tiny red globes, burning sun-bright after the pipeline’s constant darkness. She saw rivet-studded walls, an outflow spewing intermittent blood-red jets into the sea of fuel all around her. The ceiling hung thirty feet above—only gods knew how deep the chi below her ran. A service ladder scaled the wall, up to the circle of lights she finally recognized as an access hatch.

  A figure in black plummeted from the outflow mouth, tumbling down into the chi with a splash. Kaori swam over, dragging him to the ladder. She recognized Maro, his long braids soaked through with fuel.

  “Izanagi’s balls,” he gasped, coughing thick inside his breather. “Next time, we take the bloody front door…”

  Another body tumbled through the outflow and down into the darkness. This time it was a girl, Megumi, her breather flooded to the eyeholes with bloody-red, floating facedown in the fuel. More bodies followed, some breathing, most not, crushed flat or torn to pieces. The empty ones slowly spinning in the outflow’s vortex, sinking down into the dark—people who had dreamed and laughed and died for something worth fighting for.

  Did she still really believe that?

  At the last, they counted each other by the light of that morbid red, discovering only five of them left. Kaori. Maro. Botan. Fat Yuu. Little Eiko.

  Five of two dozen.

  They climbed the ladder onto a suspended walkway leading to the access hatch. Waterproofed satchels were peeled open, explosives lifted out onto iron mesh. Maro looked them over with a critical eye, Kaori’s head cocked as she listened to the dull sounds outside the tank. Motors and propellers, the latter growing louder by the moment.

  The reservoir walls began trembling, what sounded like a sky-ship passing overhead. Maro glanced up sharply as several thuds sounded on the ceiling above. Kaori motioned for silence, drew her wakizashi. The other Kagé followed suit, blades drawn softly, smeared with lamp black to hide their sheen.

  She could hear voices, hushed and metallic. A claxon in the distance. The red globes circling the access hatch winked off, one by one, and the six-studded lock contracted, the circular handle turning slowly, almost soundless in the oily air.

  “Go!” Kaori hissed. “Go!”

  Fat Yuu and Eiko had resealed their explosives, descending the ladder and slipping back into the chi below. Maro affixed climbing claws to his boots and palms, swung below the gantry and hung inverted, like some black, dripping spider, Botan behind him. Kaori followed suit; rolling over the gantry, she swung beneath, hung beside Maro with sword in hand.

  The access hatch opened slowly, hinges buttered black with grease. A blinding spear of light flooded the tank. She made out a silhouette, burning eyes peering down into the dark. And as soundless as anyone wrapped head-to-foot in brass could move, three figures swung through the access hatch and climbed down to the gantry.

  Guildsmen.

  Two Artificers and a False-Lifer, gleaming chrome arms unfolding from her back. The sight of the arachnoid limbs put Kaori in mind of Ayane, of the spider drone in the village, deceit and betrayal curdling on her tongue. She glanced at the Shadows hidden below, Maro and Botan beside her, well aware that if it came to blows, any luxury they’d had in stealth would be gone.

  The False-Lifer spoke, bubbling and sibilant.

  “Be swift, brother.”

  One of the Artificers pulled a large package from a satchel: a fat blob of sticky, black resin, sealed in wax paper. He clomped to the wall, pressing the substance against a seam. The resin held in place, malle
able as warm dough. The False-Lifer’s hiss echoed in the dark.

  “Set the timers for fifteen minutes, just in case radio control fails.”

  “In case we’re captured, you mean?” asked one Artificer.

  Kaori could see Maro’s frown through his breather’s viewports. Just as baffled as she.

  “We cannot be captured, brother. We know too much. Defiance or death.”

  “Defiance or death,” the second Artificer nodded, made a fist.

  What in the name of the gods?

  The second Artificer was unwrapping small sticks of what looked like copper, topped with radio receivers. Though she was no expert, Kaori knew enough to recognize a detonator when she saw one. The black, taffy substance was chi residue mixed with sulfur and sawdust—the same explosive that filled their own chi bombs.

  They’re planning to blow the tanks?

  Could it be true? These were the rebels Yukiko spoke of? And now they were in First House with exactly the same plan as the Kagé?

  Could it be?

  The first Artificer knelt on the walkway directly above her head, rigging a timer. Perhaps it was light refracting off her breather. Perhaps the faint labor of their breath. But the Artificer looked down through the mesh, sucked in an astonished gasp as he spied them hanging below, and within the beat of a sparrow’s wing, all thought vanished from her mind.

  Kaori kicked off the wall, pivoting on her palms and swinging up over the railing. Her heel connected with the False-Lifer’s jaw as Maro took one Artificer’s legs out from under him. The Guildsman wobbled and tumbled off the walkway, brass-gauntlets shrieking on the railing as he arrested his fall, clinging like a tick over the drop.

  The second Artificer drew an iron-thrower, aimed it at Kaori’s head just as she seized the False-Lifer’s throat, wakizashi ready to strike. Eight razored needles uncurled in the dark, gleaming in the garish light spilling through the access hatch. Poised at Kaori’s throat, chest, eyes, just like the blade she pressed at the False-Lifer’s jugular. Maro raised his katana, ready to strike at the Artificer aiming at Kaori’s head.

  Six of them, frozen in place, each hovering a breath away from murder.

  The False-Lifer’s voice was a whisper.

  “You would be the Kagé, I presume?”

  * * *

  The Earthcrusher hit the walls of Yama like an avalanche, shearing through battlements as if they were dry grass, the men atop them mere dandelion seeds. Chunks of masonry were tossed about like a child throwing unwanted toys, Kitsune soldiers falling like black snow onto crushed granite below.

  Each blow from its chainsaw arms was accompanied by a tortured metal shriek, a bubbling blast from its chimney stacks. Kitsune corvettes swarmed around it like mosquitoes, the pilots trying to draw the behemoth away from the city. But the Earthcrusher ignored them, kicked its way through the outer walls of Yama and stomped slowly toward Kitsune-jō.

  The shreddermen poured in through the breached walls, each suit a giant in its own right. Ten feet high, legs as thick as old sugi trees, long, chainsaw arms hooked like scythes. Pilot lights shearing through smoke, glittering on the swords of the Tora bushimen who stormed in their wake. Howling fury, Tiger banners whipping in the wind. And having no chance of stopping the Earthcrusher, the men and women manning Yama’s walls screamed their challenges in return and dropped into the storm of blades.

  Iron Samurai leaped from the walls and crashed onto the shreddermen roll cages, stabbing and hacking at the pilots within. Shuriken-throwers singing poppopopopopop, spraying death into the Tiger warriors, hoping to stem the red tide. But on they came, like blood from a wound in Yama’s skin, flooding her streets with mayhem and screams.

  In the skies above, the fleets were joined, shuriken fire filling the air. The first Kitsune ironclad to charge the Guild fleet had been cut down on all sides by withering hail. As it tumbled earthward, it had fired its grapple lines into a Guild ship, dragging it to its doom, the pair exploding in a rush of wailing hydrogen. The Kitsune Daimyo’s flagship Lucky Fox had followed into the breach, firing its own grapple lines into the Guild ship Blessed Light. Their crews were already locked in deadly battle across the decks.

  Michi roared aloud as the Kurea plummeted toward the Honorable Death. The sky between them was filled with dueling corvettes, the glittering rain of shuriken spray, flurries of black snow. A glance west revealed the Phoenix fleet cutting around the Kitsune, encircling despite the desperate charges of the Fox corvettes. Surrounded on all sides, the Kitsune captains had no choice but to charge into the enemy’s open arms.

  At least one other sky-ship—Kitsune’s Courage—seemed to have the same idea as the Kurea. Her engines roared as she charged, firing a storm of grapples before plowing into the Death’s flank. Her crew withered under a battery of shuriken fire, cloudwalkers and bushimen left minced across the deck. Kurea collided with the Death a few moments after, and Michi was already leaping across the gap, chainswords shrieking.

  The clash of steel all around, the growl of ō-yoroi, chaindaishō, screams of dying men, shrieks of sundered metal. Iron Samurai from the Courage were also boarding, roaring challenge in their Daimyo’s name. She moved swift and sure, cutting along the railing toward the pilot’s deck until three Iron Samurai intercepted her advance. She lashed out, plunging her chainwakizashi through the eyehole of a samurai’s oni mask. The man was dead before he had a chance to cry out, the bone-white demon’s face drenched red.

  She deflected three lightning-quick strikes, dancing backward until her backside was pressed against the railing, sparing a quick glance for the drop below. Another samurai stepped up to replace the one she’d slain, and Michi realized she’d bitten off more than she could chew. Not simple bushimen like the kind she’d slain in Yoritomo’s palace here. These were men born to soldiering, bigger and stronger, and thanks to their ō-yoroi, just as fast as she was. She could see Hiro on the pilot’s deck, but there was no way she was cutting her way through twenty Elite to get to him. Best to seek another path to the prize.

  She relieved one samurai of his chainkatana as he lunged, another of any chance he had of having children as he slipped on the blood-slick deck. Seizing her chance, she flipped back onto the Death’s railing, sheathed her swords and began climbing the rigging, two Elite close behind.

  Monkey-swift, she pulled herself up onto the Death’s inflatable. The skies were a storm of corvettes, dark snow and darker smoke. Fire gleamed on her goggles as another Kitsune ironclad went up in flames, dropping like an anvil, her captain steering her into the Tora soldiers below as his final act of defiance. A dull explosion tore the air to ribbons, the rumble of collapsing buildings and the Earthcrusher’s tectonic tread, the chatter of a hundred propellers, screams of the dying, cries and curses and prayers.

  The Elite behind her climbed up onto the inflatable, cresting the balloon’s gentle curve. She turned and charged toward them, a soundless howl on her lips. Using the inflated canvas like a springboard, she leapt toward one Samurai’s chest, planting both feet on his breastplate. The man grunted, lost his balance and spilled backward into the void, silent as he fell. Kicking off the samurai’s chest, Michi bounced back onto the taut canvas, flipping up to her feet as the second Elite swung at her head, once, twice, shearing clean through her braid and filling the air with wisps of long black hair.

  Michi fell back under the onslaught, parry and riposte, feint and lunge, her swords a blur. She could see the samurai’s eyes through slits in his demon helm—dark and narrowed, his skin crusted with ashes. The man was a master, pressing her back over the spongy surface, giving no opportunity to launch a counterattack. Heart thundering in her chest. Sweat clawing at her eyes. Feeling suddenly small and alone, up here in the storm.

  Just we two …

  The wind howled like hungry wolves, teeth of ice and lolling tongues. She sheathed her katana, reached into her obi as she ducked one scything blow, sidestepped another, growling blades shearing through the cloth at her
elbow. And drawing out a tiny clay bottle from her sash, she snapped off the cork and hurled it, an arcing stream of jet black, right into the samurai’s face.

  The ink splashed across the oni mask, into the samurai’s eyes. The man staggered back, blinking furiously, but it was already too late. The girl moved, like a scalpel, a razor, a double-handed blow with her chainwakizashi shearing through his wrist. Spinning on the spot as he fell, collecting him just beneath the chin, where the long cheek guards of his helm kissed the iron collar at his neck. A spray of blinding red, great gushing gouts of it falling like rain as the samurai clutched the new smile she’d carved, dead before he fell.

  She stood panting, mouth dry as dust, looking at the empty ink bottle in her hand and hurling it into the void with a roar.

  “And you said a bottle of ink never won a battle, Blackbird-san!”

  The sky ablaze, ironclads roaring as they plummeted from the clouds, metal groaning, shuriken fire and propellers chewing the haze, blue-black smears daubed across it all. And beneath the cacophony, below the shrieking orchestra of metal and bone and blood, she heard distant shrieks, thunder like the pulse in her veins, heart pounding in her chest.

  Distant shrieks.

  Thunder like a pulse.

  Growing closer.

  “About godsdamned time. This dramatic entrance bullshit is getting out of hand…”

  A roar splitting the air, the song of lightning and thunder, the rhythm of mighty wings. The cry echoed through the valley, the city, bouncing amidst burning streets, off broken walls, repeating amidst the clash of steel, the war cries and death rattles, curses and prayers. And glancing up into the lightening western skies, Michi realized there was no echo—no trick of feeble sound in the hollow, bloody places. Instead of one thunder tiger descending from the black above, there was almost a dozen, filling the sky with their cries. Yukiko and Buruu at their head, screaming together as they fell, the air about them flooded with shrieking arashitora.