Endsinger: The Lotus War Book Three

by Jay Kristoff

  She’s beautiful, Buruu.

  The Khan turned to watch his mate, swooping up and over the Honorable Death’s inflatable. Yukiko could feel the smile in his mind.

  SHE IS.

  You have a family. Shima is my home. But you have your own home now.

  I DO NOT DO THIS FOR SHIMA. I DO NOT DO IT TO BE REMEMBERED IN SONGS, FOR A FUTURE OR AN IDEAL OR EVEN BECAUSE IT IS RIGHT.

  He turned to look at her, and she could see her reflection in the bottomless black of his pupils, ringed by circles of molten gold.

  I DO IT FOR YOU.

  She put her arms around him, wrapped in the warmth radiating from his body and mind. The home, the brother, the life she’d lost. All of it, she’d found inside him. This soul tied to her own, so far entwined she could no longer tell where she ended and he began. Part of her always.

  Forever and always.

  I don’t know what we’ll find in the hellgate. I don’t know how we’re supposed to close it. But no matter what happens, whatever comes, we’ll face it together.

  TOGETHER.

  Do you promise?

  I PROMISE. TOGETHER.

  He stared southward, black reflected on black, the darkness staring back.

  UNTIL THE END.

  * * *

  They marched through sunlit hours, Lady Amaterasu’s light dying as they drew farther south. The ashfall grew heavier, tumbling drifts coating everyone and everything in gray. The flies were legion, clustered on each soldier’s back, so thick on the kerchiefs over their mouths it seemed every man had grown a beard overnight.

  When darkness fell along with the temperature, the flies would mercifully flee, and they’d bivouac down, huddling around roaring fires and listening to the dark. They could hear things moving beyond the fleet floodlights; a shapeless gibbering and a broken clock rhythm, snatches of a dark tongue no man could understand. Some swore they could hear voices of people they knew to be dead, bidding them leave the firelight and come out into the dark. The gaijin marked their foreheads with the sigil of their goddess—a circle drawn in blood on every brow to keep the evil at bay. The Shimans burned offerings in Lord Izanagi’s name, begged him to stay his wife’s hand in the battle to come. Prayers and pleas and grim vows.

  Just words in the midst of that freezing black.

  The sun would rise each morning, each dawn fainter than the last, and they’d discover more of their number missing—seemingly vanished in the night. Nerves were stretched to breaking beneath the corpsefly hum. Morale unraveling one thread at a time.

  The warband leaders met on the Kurea—Ginjiro for the Kitsune, Hiro for the Tora, Misaki for the rebels, Kaori for the Kagé, Aleksandar of the Morchebans, the Khan of the arashitora, and the stormdancers themselves. It was decided to march through the night, so they’d arrive at the Stain mid-morning and fight with whatever advantage lay in daylight.

  Every face was smeared with ashes, every hand trembling from the marrow-deep cold. Yukiko looked over each one in turn, even the Daimyo of the Tiger clan, watching her with his sea-green eyes. She wished them luck, bid them remember what it is they fought for.

  As the meeting concluded and the members drifted away, Hiro caught Yukiko’s gaze, opened his mouth as if he wished to speak. He stood motionless, staring at the girl staring back at him, the space between them filled with flies.

  “I wish…”

  His voice faltered and he stared at his clockwork arm, the iron hand clenching and unclenching. He met her eyes again, tongue frozen to the roof of his mouth.

  He shrugged helplessly.

  The ice in Yukiko’s stare cracked. Just a hairline. Just a sliver.

  “They’ll know,” she said. “It’s all I can give you. But they’ll know, Hiro.”

  She left him standing there in the snow, staring at his hand.

  Fingers closing one by one.

  * * *

  The warriors were gathered in the floodlight glow, Morcheban and Shiman alike, an army the likes of which the island had never seen. Yukiko flew down from the Kurea on Buruu’s back, surrounded by arashitora of black and white, all of them smudged with gray. Spiraling to the frozen earth, the chill seeping into her very core. Slipping from Buruu’s back, she surveyed the crowd around her, the thousands of expectant stares.

  She was a tiny thing amidst the warriors—slender limbs clad in black cloth and scars, loose hair drifting amidst the falling ash, like fingers of smoke painting the lines of her face. Each man could see the swell at her stomach; the new life growing amidst this ocean of flies. Some took heart, knowing if a mother would carry her children into the battle to come, there must be some hope of victory. Others felt their hearts sinking in their chests, knowing if the girl risked her unborn babes in this gambit, their plight must be more desperate than any supposed.

  She thought back to the day they’d left Kigen at Yoritomo’s command, barely six months ago now—gods, it seemed a thousand years. Akihito and Kasumi and her father beside her, friends and family, loved ones all. All of them dead now. She pictured Michi braiding her hair in front of the looking glass, speaking in fierce whispers of the will it took to swim against the flow. Aisha’s deadly beauty and deadlier mind. Daichi … gods, poor Daichi, his wisdom and his rage and his righteousness in perfect balance, her sensei in her darkest hours.

  So much death.

  EVERYTHING DIES, YUKIKO.

  But so soon? So young? Some of these people aren’t old enough to have lived at all. And at the end of this story, all of them could be dead.

  ALL STORIES END. ALL SONGS CEASE. ALL OF US HAVE OUR ONE FRAGILE MOMENT IN THE SUN, THEN SLEEP FOREVERMORE. BUT MOST SPEND THAT MOMENT OF WARMTH IN MUTE DESPAIR, NEVER KNOWING WHAT IT IS TO LIVE A LIFE EXTRAORDINARY. NEVER KNOWING A SINGLE BREATH WHERE THEIR BLOOD WAS FIRE AND THEIR HEARTS WERE SINGING, A MOMENT THEY COULD GAZE BACK ON AND SAY IN TRUTH “THEN, IF NEVER AGAIN, I WAS ALIVE.”

  He smiled into her mind, and her blood became fire in her veins.

  SPEAK YOUR HEART. THEY WILL SEE THE TRUTH OF IT.

  She drew a breath, staring into the black behind her eyes. She could feel Buruu’s warmth, even here in the cold belly of winter, the darkest depths of night. The stone she set her back against. The mountain never crumbling. And she raised her voice, and began to speak.

  “I’m not a hero,” she said.

  She looked at the faces around her, expectant, ashen pale. She heard Aleksandar’s voice amidst the wind, translating her words for the sake of his countrymen. Out in the dark beyond the ship lights, gibbering voices whispered in tongues too black for men to know. She raised her voice over them, over the storm above, the rolling thunder and crackling lightning.

  “I know you want me to be. You think me to be. But I’m not. A hero would speak great words to you now. True words. Fierce words. Words that would ring in the ages, long after everything of us is dust. A hero would have words to turn your sword arms to steel and your hearts to iron, crown your shoulders with wings. And you’d march toward the enemy with the song of those words in your souls.”

  She shook her head.

  “But I’m not a hero.

  “I’m just like you. Just as lost. I’m small and afraid and I wonder if anything I do here will make the slightest difference. If it’s worth trying at all. I wonder if any victory could be worth the price we’ve already paid. I’ve lost so many people I loved, so much of who and what I was. I look to the sky and I can’t see the sun. I look in the mirror and I can’t see myself.”

  Her gaze roamed the crowd, the eyes locked on her own.

  “But I look around me. And I see all of you. Just like me. Just as small and just as lost. But when we stand side by side, we are twice the size. Twice as brave. Twice as loud. Look around you now, and see there are not just two of us, but thousands. Thousands of voices. Thousands of fists and minds and dreams, all of us together, in this moment. Because we believe.

  “We can light a fire to burn through this dark. We can scream loud enough t
o be heard over this storm. We can say ‘no.’ We can say ‘enough.’ And hand in hand, stronger than we could ever be alone, we can change the shape of this world. All of us. Together.”

  She walked into the crowd, the soldiers parting before her, every heart stilled, every breath held. Yukiko took the hand of a Kitsune bushiman—a young boy barely older than she, his ash-smeared face alight with awe. With her other hand, she clutched the gauntlet of a gaijin hammerman—a mountain of muscle and scars and plaited blond hair. She squeezed each hand tight, looked each man in the eye, her voice as fierce as a thunder tiger’s roar.

  “All of us.” She looked between them. “Together.”

  “Together.”

  It spread like a ripple across mirror-still water, like a flame across the bone-dry leavings of a breathless summer. One hand grasped another, and another, and another, each man and woman latching hold of the one beside them. Up on the sky-ship decks, on the Earthcrusher, every hand finding another and squeezing tight, strength found in the press of another’s grip on their own. Silencing the whispers in the dark, black voices fading beneath the vow, the prayer, the hymn, repeated amidst fierce smiles and glowing faces. Over and over again.

  “Together.”

  “Together.”

  Up on the Kurea, the Blackbird closed his eyes, burning the picture below in his memory—a portrait to be repainted in black ink on rice-paper scrolls, testament to a night that must surely live in people’s hearts and minds for a thousand years.

  “Maker’s breath.” A wistful sigh. “And she says she’s not a hero…”

  51

  ENDSINGER

  Dawn approached like a thief, nothing but a skulking glow to herald its arrival. The army marched through knee-high snow and ash, beset by swarms of accursed corpseflies. The ground trembled beneath the shreddermen legion, the Earthcrusher plodding behind, the true terror of what awaited them coalescing from the gloom before Yukiko’s horrified eyes.

  Where once the Stain had lay, there was now only a bottomless hole, cracked at its edges like sores at a beggar’s mouth. Rolling mist clung to the rim for a few hundred feet, shrouding it in a pall reeking of dead flowers and burning hair. She found her eyes slipping away when she looked at the pit, headache flaring, chill gripping her bones. The air was a sea of frozen swords, so cold her tears froze on her lashes, her hair crackling whenever she turned her head.

  An awful fear took root inside her, the warmth in her belly diminishing to a dull ebb. She pressed her hand there, feeling for them in the Kenning. The heat of the Lifesong beyond her wall was faded, a dull, sullen tempest rather than the inferno she’d grown accustomed to. She reached out, felt the dim pulses of the people around her; fireside sparks dying between winter’s teeth. The thunder tigers still burned strong enough to hold, and she caressed each mind with her own, willing them to be strong. But the soldiers were too muted and dim to cling to.

  Whatever strength the lives inside her had brought was gone—negated by the awful chill emanating from that wound in the world.

  And then of course, there were the things born from it.

  A legion of horrors arrayed at the hellgate’s edge: malformed children clinging to a dead mother’s kimono. But gods above, what children. Nightmare forms, hundreds upon hundreds, dragged screaming from the depths of subconsciousness into strangled light. Blinking and stupefied, fixing glazed stares on the humans marching out of the wastes, gurgling hatred. The smallest were the oni she knew—blue-skinned, humanoid monstrosities. Some no bigger than human children, the skulls they wore still crusted with fresh meat and skin and hair, openmouthed and silently screaming. The larger ones stood twelve feet high, tree-trunk warclubs in their hands. Features pierced with iron rings, twisted, as if their Dark Mother had taken a fistful of each face and squeezed. But they were nothing compared to the horrors looming beside them.

  Abominations in the blackest sense of the word. Parodies of life, of forms once gracing the living world. Great hawks made of bone and corpsemeat, rotten feathers and worm-ridden flesh stitched together by blackened tendons. They rose in a great swarm, circling the hellgate like flies over a fresh cadaver, clad in the reek of open graves.

  Towering goliaths of dripping flesh, piles of corpses, mashed and pulped together into shambling monstrosities. Yukiko saw the skinless shapes of beasts long gone from the Isles—what might be pandas or monkeys or big cats, crushed together like putty around frames of tree-trunk bones, mouths like fanged furnaces, burning blue with awful cold.

  Other horrors amidst the mob—pale, naked men with skins several sizes too big, sloughing and dripping as they shuffled, keening and eyeless. Bone-thin things with too many joints and too many fingers, eyeless faces with flat noses, snuffling at the air, long red tongues darting across needle-lined maws. Others still without static form—just writhing mountains of worm-ridden meat, trails of congealing blood left in their wake as they dragged their carcasses along frozen ground. When they roared, clouds of corpseflies spewed from their mouth amidst the wails of screaming children.

  A brood born in utter darkness, suckled at a breast turned black with hatred.

  The children of the Endsinger.

  A song hung like mist in the air, growing louder with every passing moment. Echoing from the hell in which She’d been abandoned—the hymn heralding the end of the world.

  Lady Izanami’s song.

  Commanders yelled up and down the line, gaijin wardrums pounding in time with the Earthcrusher’s tread. The army formed up—a legion of folded steel and embossed iron and grim, bloodless faces. First came the shreddermen, their scythesaw arms cutting at the air. They were backed by infantry—Shiman and Morcheban. Standards waving proud in the corpseflesh wind, sigils of Fox and Tiger and Phoenix side by side with the stags and gryfons and frostlions of the gaijin Houses. The sky-fleet gathered above—lumbering ironclads, bristling with shuriken-throwers and flame-spitters. Gaijin rotor-thopters and Phoenix corvettes weaving between them. Amidst the DOOMDOOMDOOMDOOM of its colossal tread, the Earthcrusher stomped into position on the right flank, vomiting black tar into the skies.

  Yukiko stood on the war-machine’s bridge, staring through cracked viewing portals to the horrors beyond. Her hand found her tantō—the blade her father had given her for her ninth birthday. She could almost feel him beside her, smell the smoke from his pipe. If he were here, he’d smile, call her “Ichigo,” press his lips to her brow and tell her to be brave.

  But he wasn’t here. He’d died for her, fighting for what he loved. For something greater. Just as Tora Takehiko had done before her, flying beyond the hellgate and somehow sealing it closed. What awaited her beyond that black? Would she ever return to the ones left behind?

  She turned to Kin, strapped into the pilot’s harness, his brass skin gleaming in the light of the control boards. The suit looked strange without a mechabacus on its chest—stranger still without the helmet, the boy inside watching her with his knife-bright eyes. He’d refused painkillers for fear they’d dull his wits. A sheen of sweet gleamed on his brow. His face was pale, etched with fear.

  But not for himself.

  “I don’t want you to do this,” he said.

  “I have to.” Her smile trembled at the edges. “Time to be the hero.”

  “Did you ever notice our heroes never live to be happy? Kitsune no Akira, Tora Takehiko, all the stormdancers of legend. None of them died in their beds. None of them got to enjoy the victories they fought for, or live in the world they defended.”

  “Would we love them as much if they came home when the war was done?”

  “I would,” he sighed. “I’d love them more. With every breath I took. With every beat of my heart. I’d love with everything I had to give if she came back to me.”

  “She?”

  He whispered then, a single, tiny syllable as wide as the sky.

  “You.”

  Yukiko stepped up to the pilot’s harness, to the boy encased in brass. The boy who’d
suffered like no other for the sake of his heart. A boy who’d do anything, risk everything for the one he loved. For her.

  She stood on tiptoes, cupped his cheeks with her hands. And drifting close, so close she could feel the heat radiating from his skin, she pressed her lips to his.

  Her eyelids fluttered closed and the world fell away. The noise and light, the grief and fear. Only them, the pair of them, her mouth on his, soft as the dreams of clouds, lighting a flame inside her, melting away the frost, leaving only an aching, blissful warm. The taste of him, the feel of him, his breath in her lungs, sighing from the depths of herself and breathing into his mouth. A declaration. A farewell. A kiss that would burn in her mind, that would make her ache every moment she had left beneath this poisoned sky.

  A kiss worth dying for.

  She drew away slowly, reluctantly, Kin lunging forward and keeping his lips pressed against hers for just a few more desperate seconds. But at last they parted, looking into each other’s eyes. So much unsaid between them. No time left to say any of it.

  “Come back to me,” he whispered. “Please.”

  She said nothing, tears welling in her eyes. He took her hand in his, the brass gauntlet engulfing her fingers, gentle as falling snowflakes. And then she pulled away, feeling her heart tearing in her chest, a pain so real she could taste blood in her mouth.

  “Good-bye, Kin.”

  “Don’t say that…”

  “Too late,” she smiled, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Too late.”

  Head bowed, eyes flooding, she turned and walked away.

  * * *

  The Everstorm pack greeted them with roars of approval as they rose into the air, their Khan and the girl upon his back. They could see adoration in the eyes of the monkey-children on the sky-ships, fixed upon this slip of a thing clinging to their Khan’s back—this tiny girl who moved entire nations with the sound of her voice. If anyone could return from the black and freezing depths, it would be her.