The Last Stormdancer (the lotus war )

by Jay Kristoff

  “Khan spoken. Skymeet ended. We leave Shima this day. It over. Khan’s word is law.”

  I felt the words as a blow to my chest, souring my belly, sinking down into my paws. It had been spoken. The Khan’s words could not be rescinded. The Skymeet would not disobey him. And old though he was, afraid of this new world and the terrors therein, still he was respected. Twenty years, our leader. Two decades beneath his wisdom. He was beloved. He was feared. There would be none brave enough to stand against him.

  I looked to Jun, standing there in the snow, fear in his eyes. He knew it was not his place to speak. That his words here would only provoke further rage. And yet the need boiled inside him. The belief. Faith in the words of some old monkey-crone, probably moon-touched or speaking to him out of pity. Still, I did not believe. And yet, all she had foreseen was within our reach. With the arashitora onside, the Tiger Lord below could win his war. Purge the Guild. End the sickness. If only one were brave enough to cast the Khan down from his throne.

  “Then I challenge it,” I growled. “I challenge Khan’s law. And I challenge Khan.”

  My grandfather snorted, amusement bubbling among the Skymeet.

  “Foolish child. Only males challenge. Female not be Khan.”

  “Kill me then, Grandfather. Throw my scraps down with the remains of my kin. Your daughter. Your grandson. Leave behind when you flee, tail tucked between your legs.”

  A roar, tail lashing, hackles bristling down his spine. All thought fleeing at my challenge, his pride and his rage swelling past his love for me, his last remaining kin. And as he tensed to charge, a buck stepped from the crowd of onlookers and roared at the top of his lungs.

  “I challenge.”

  My friend. My brother, not my brother.

  Rahh.

  He glanced at me. All that lay between us. That might lie before us. And he turned to the Khan and spoke again.

  “I challenge.”

  * * *

  Two white shapes. Falling like meteors in the skies above our heads. Blood like rain amidst the thunderclaps. Lightning at the edges of their wings. Crackling across hulking clouds as they collided, screaming and roaring and tearing.

  Heart in my throat. Pulse running quicker. Fear for him, my friend, my brother not my brother. A feeling for him, running deeper than I had known. Where did it come from? The monkey-child now inside my mind? His softness spilling into me? Had I always known this, and only now acknowledged it, when he might be taken away? The flood of it, the confusion of it, all a-tumble in my mind. Jun beside me, hand upon my shoulder, bringing more comfort than I could have believed but a day or two ago.

  A strange thing, monkey-child. Your clumsy words failing me again. I felt I had awakened from a dream. I felt the proximity of gods. The hands of fate. So many intersections here, on the ground below, in the skies above. So many possibilities stretched before us. Only one outcome certain.

  Death.

  Rahh roared, kicking loose of my grandfather’s embrace, a spray of blood trailing from the old Khan’s claws. Rahh was quicker, stronger, younger. Yet the old Khan had wisdom on his side. Patience and cunning. Rahh’s was the charge, the strike, the bellow. But the Khan’s was the feint, the riposte, the deathly silence. Gravity and momentum, muscle and bone, majestic gleaming arcs of trajectory across the roiling black, collision and escape, and blood, blood, blood.

  I prayed. Yes, we pray, monkey-child. To the father, Raijin. The God of Lightning and Thunder. To bring Rahh back to me. To show us a sign. That we were meant to remain, to fight for this place, once our home, now taken away by the sickly hands of metal and greed. I did not know if he heard. Or if he did, if he listened. If the outcome of this battle, as all battles, was preordained. If there was such a thing as fate. A part of me wished to believe so—in destiny and such. For if such existed, Rahh would not fail. Could not fall.

  And yet, the part of me that had awakened in those last few days, roaming free, flying with the boy on my back—that part of me hoped beyond hoping that there was no hand at play here. That we were all free to do as we wished. That, if Rahh won, he won because he willed it more, not because some god upon some cloud intended it so.

  The pair collided again, roars and shrieks, orphaned feathers falling from the sky. I squinted as the lightning flashed, Jun’s fingers clutching my feathers. The old Khan had his talons dug into Rahh’s chest, kicking with his back legs, claws like sabers. The pair plummeting from the sky. And yet, locked tight in that embrace, the Khan had left himself exposed. Rahh proved himself the stronger, arresting their fall with thunderous beats of his mighty wings, flipping the Kahn over onto his back. Rahh caught the Khan’s hind legs with his own, struck once, twice with his beak, tearing the tendons at the join of wing and shoulder, the Khan roaring in agony. And as they fell closer and closer to the jagged rocks below, Rahh clawed loose of the Khan’s grip, bloody spray and tattered fur, leaving the old beast to fall.

  I watched my grandfather’s end. Many turned away, but I forced myself to see. The end of an era. The death of an age. Trying to flap with broken wings, deny gravity’s grim embrace, refusing to cry out, admit defeat, shriek his fear. Crashing into the rocks, jagged and unforgiving, crushing and tearing and pulping to nothing, the grand old beast reduced to blood and feathers and fur. Thunder split the skies, echoing the roars of triumph below, the answer above. Rahh circling above us, bloodied but unbroken, bellowing his victory for the Thunder God to hear. Jun beside me, fist raised high, grinning and cheering, hugging me, telling me he told me so. That all this had been said and done. That all this was as it should be.

  Rahh came in to land, the Skymeet gathered about him, singing his name.

  The first new Khan of Shima in twenty years.

  What would his first command be?

  * * *

  Tatsuya cursed beneath his breath, retreating to the caves, his soldiers and his bride beside him. Riku’s forces were marching up the hill, row by orderly row. No heedless charge for the Bear’s men, no. Not with those Guild vessels overhead. They tromped over the broken ground, up the steep incline in the shadow of the sky-ships, knowing full well if Tatsuya charged out to meet him, the Guild’s bombardment would blow them to bloody pulp. A grim advance, hemming the Bull’s forces in against walls of stone. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

  “Form up on me!” Tatsuya bellowed.

  “Form up!” The cry echoing down the line. “To the Bull! For the Imperium!”

  Tatsuya turned to Ami, drawing his katana.

  “Go back to the caves, Ami-chan. You will be safe there. If Riku breaks through, throw yourself upon his mercy. You are his sister-in-law. He will not harm you.”

  “No kiss farewell, husband-mine?” Ami said. “No last tearful embrace?”

  Tatsuya glanced at the soldiers gathering about him. The blades drawn. The flags unfurled.

  “It would be unseemly. Go wait in the cave, Ami-chan. I will return presently.”

  Ami licked her lips. Bit her tongue. Bowed.

  “As my Lord commands.”

  Riku’s forces closing in. Tatsuya’s gaze fixed on his brother, spotted now amidst the swell of bright steel and black iron and rolling, rippling red. The same banner at his back. The same armor on his skin. So much alike, they were. To think it had come to this …

  “Make your peace with the Maker, my brothers!” Tatsuya called, raising his sword high. “And take these bastards with you to the hells!”

  “Banzai!” his men roared. “Banzai!”

  “Charge!”

  A great shout rolling down the line, the thousandfold trample of running feet. A thunder, tumultuous, the katana raised high in Tatsuya’s hand as he stormed down the incline, the crush and press of bodies all about him, cold dread in his belly as the Guild vessels accelerated and Riku’s army came to a full halt. The shadows of the advancing sky-ships fell over the Bull, his muscles tensing as he waited for the bombardment to begin.

  A blast fell amongst his men, the
n another, blinding, deafening, tearing through his soldiers as if they were paper dolls. Men blown to cinders and pieces, the blast as loud as thunder, rattling the teeth in his skull. But as quickly as it began, the explosions stilled, the ringing silence in the aftermath setting Tatsuya’s teeth on edge. What was happening? Those ships should be ripping them to shreds …

  More thunder overhead, rolling across the skies above the drone of propellers, the cries of terror. And Tatsuya looked up at the screams above, the cries of wonder from the men about him, and saw the sky was filled with thunder tigers.

  Awe and amazement. Openmouthed shock. Dozens of the beasts filling the air above him, falling on the Guild ships with claws sharp as swords, hard as steel. The flank-mounted cannons opening fire, not with black powder, but with a burst of silvered death, shuriken shredding the skies and the arashitora unlucky enough to be in their sights. Beasts fell tumbling and torn, blood pattering on his helm and spaulders as four bodies crashed among his lines in quick succession, roars of pain and bellows of despair. But by then, Tatsuya’s charge had cleared the shadow of the sky-ships, thundering down into Riku’s lines, smashing through the rows of spearmen with momentum and gravity behind them. The screams of the wounded, the cries uncurling behind vicious deathblows, the ring of steel on steel.

  Tatsuya cut some poor spearman from neck to privates, took another’s throat out, ear to ear. Cleaving and hacking through the chaos, intent only on his brother, on that banner waving above the mob, on the voice shouting above the discord. Smashing a blow aside, divesting his attacker of his hands, then his life. Knocked down to his knees by the press and crush around him, helped up by some loyal soul who died for his trouble, cut to bubbling pieces by an enemy’s growling chainkatana. Riku’s elite were amongst them now—the samurai who had cut his own to shreds, wearing the very armor of the men they’d slaughtered. No fuel shortage for Riku’s troops though, no. No failing of the growling steel in their hands. And fury took Tatsuya—fury at his betrayal, at his own stupidity for trusting those serpents, at his brother for taking their hand. He became a dervish, death itself, roaring, breath burning in his lungs, spittle flying from his teeth, gore caked thick upon his blade, his hands, his face. Chaos all about him, the copper perfume of blood entwined with the sharp stink of shit, screams and roars layered upon the off-key notes of armor and katana and tetsubo and naginata. Thunder tigers amidst the samurai now, bellowing, shrieking, falling on the only soldiers they knew were foes—the ones clad in the Guild’s hissing suits, carrying the Guild’s growling steel. Tearing them limb from limb, all the power of the chi-mongers laid to ruin in the face of Raijin’s children, their fury terrifying to behold.

  A rain of arrows fell, Riku ordering his archers to fire into his own troops and Tatsuya’s beside. Men falling about him like flies, clutching broomstick-thick shafts protruding from throats or chests or eye sockets. Blood everywhere. On his face. In his mouth. Slicked over the stones at his feet. Stepping over broken ground and soft, broken bodies, a slush of intestines and mud. But finally Tatsuya saw him—his brother, surrounded by his men. The face he saw every time he looked into the mirror. Death all about him, inside him, the lives of innocent and loyal men—men of both sides—spilled onto this hungry ground in the name of an empty chair. His brother’s words on the day of his father’s death ringing in Tatsuya’s ears. A truth so far denying it filled him to sickening.

  “Better it be just you and I, brother. Just the two of us, without the nation beside us.”

  Tatsuya would have lost. He knew it then. He knew it now. His brother was ever the better swordsman.

  But still, he should have listened …

  “Riku!” he roared. “Riku!”

  His brother turned to face him, eyes wide and red-rimmed. The echo of crashing sky-ships somewhere behind him. The roar of thunder tigers all about him. The Stormdancer’s voice, high above it all, his blade whistling in the air. And Tatsuya raised his katana and bellowed, charging across the broken stone, eyes narrowed to knife-cuts, intent on only one goal.

  Murder.

  Black and bloody murder.

  * * *

  A hailstorm of arrows about us. Jun swiping them from the air with his tiny sliver of polished steel. A shaft protruding from his shoulder, pain flowing into me. A deep gouge at my throat, just a few inches to the left of my death, my agony seeded inside him. And still we moved like a blade through water, cutting a swathe through the men and their growling swords, the stink of sickness spilling from their crumpling suits. The wingless slugs had already been ripped from the skies by my brethren. Our Khan circling above, still torn and bleeding from my grandfather’s claws, yet unwilling to let us fight without him. My thoughts drifting to him along with my eyes, my heart swelling at the sight of him. So fierce. So brave. So—

  Friend Koh! Keep your eyes on the battle! I cannot see without you!

  An arrow sank into Jun’s leg and he cried out, the pain ripping my gaze from my Khan overhead and back to the chaos about me. I bounded into the air, sailed over the mob and landed amidst the little men with their bent sticks, filling the skies with volleys of death. And into them, we tore like a cyclone, like the thunder and lightning crashing overhead. They fled screaming, cast aside their little bows and tumbled away, a swathe cleared through them by another of my kin, falling on them as they fled. Riku’s armies were defeated, crushed beyond recovery, his Guild allies slaughtered. But if his brother fell in the battle …

  Tatsuya! Where is Lord Tatsuya?

  I searched for the monkey-child Khan amidst the chaos, the blood, the din. Sweeping aside one tin man with my talons, the wretch rolling away in a steaming coil of his own innards. A blast from my wings clearing a dozen spearmen as if they were green saplings, uprooted in a howling gale. And there, atop an outcropping of blood-drenched stone, we saw him. Them. The two Tiger brothers, locked together in grim struggle, the fate of their nation hanging in the balance. Katana in their hands, blades locked, sparks flying as they danced. Both of them masters, smooth as river stones, spattered in scarlet, clad in more besides.

  WHO IS WHO? I CANNOT TELL.

  Jun shook his head, teeth gritted.

  Nor I. They are brothers from the same womb. The same hour. But fear not, friend Koh. Tatsuya cannot fall. The prophecy is true, do you see? A child of Foxes. An army of thunder tigers at his back. Today we save the nation. You and I!

  BATTLE NOT OVER YET, MONKEY-CHILD.

  We watched the pair clash, the carnage about us stilling to a hush. The two armies—the pitiful remnants of Riku’s forces, Tatsuya’s grim-faced butchers, even the blood-drenched members of my own pack—falling still, as there on that bloody ground, in the shadow of the sisters four, twin brothers fought for the fate of the nation. They were an even match to my eyes; neither really the other’s better. Both chests heaving. Both drenched in sweat and blood. Hands trembling on the hilts of their blades. But sooner or later, one had to fail. Sooner or later, if nothing else, fate would decide for us all.

  Did I believe that now?

  Had I become as he?

  It was the simplest thing. Not even an error, really. But as one brother shifted his weight, stepping up onto a small outcropping to seek height’s advantage, the stone beneath him crumbled. Set him stumbling. Just an inch or two. Just a second’s span. But in that moment—a lifetime long it seemed—his twin struck, landed a splintering blow on his brother’s forearm, cleaving iron and cutting deep into the flesh and bone beneath. The wounded brother gasped in pain, stumbled back, bringing his sword up to guard in his one good hand.

  I could see it in his face—cursing pitiless luck. That of all times for that stone to fail, in all the storms and floods and years, it had chosen now to split. But had it chosen? Had not all those storms and floods and years brought it to here? This moment? Had it not been meant to happen? Had that not been its fate?

  The wounded brother warded off a handful more blows, katana trembling in his off-hand with every rin
ging blow. But at last, his twin smashed the steel aside, cut deep into his sibling’s thigh, dropping him to one knee. The wounded one held up his hand then, terror in his eyes, and though his lips did not move his eyes spoke all

  wait

  wait

  WAIT

  Yet the blow fell, splitting his throat from ear to clavicle, a gout of dark crimson, a choking, gurgling cough. The sword fell again, puncturing the iron breastplate, into his brother’s heart. And tearing loose his sword, the victor staggered back, near-retching, face drenched in salty red. Ragged breath spilling from cracked lips as he gazed at the absolute stillness about him; a thousand eyes fixed now upon him, the ruins of armies crumpled in the dust, the blood of brothers on all their hands.

  “Good-bye, Riku,” he gasped.

  * * *

  Jun stood before Rahh, bloodied and bruised in the hush of the aftermath. Joy gleamed in those sightless eyes. Spilled from his thoughts into the gathering of thunder tigers around us.

  You have done us a service we can never repay, great Khan. We are forever in your debt.

  Rahh’s voice was thunder, echoing inside Jun’s head, inside mine.

  * THANK KOH, MONKEY-CHILD, NOT I. *

  The boy turned to me, a smile upon his face. He reached out and touched my throat, smoothed the bloodied feathers.

  I suppose this is good-bye, great Koh.

  NOT GOOD-BYE, MONKEY-CHILD. GUILD LINGERS. WILL NEED OUR HELP TO PURGE THEM TRUE.

  Too many of your kind have fallen this day. We can ask no more of you.

  THIS IS WHAT FRIENDS DO, IS IT NOT? THEY ASK.

  … Friends?

  I nodded.

  FRIENDS.

  A slow purr rumbled in Rahh’s chest.

  * WHEN HAVE NEED, CALL ON US AGAIN, LITTLE JUN. WHILE I KHAN, SHIMA OUR HOME. WHILE I KHAN, WE REMAIN. WE FIGHT. *

  Jun put his arms around my neck and embraced me, cheek pressed to my feathers, tears in his eyes. I wrapped him in my wings, this little monkey-child, whose thoughts in my head were now as welcome as my own. What would I be without him? Could I go back to what I was?