Kinslayer (The Lotus War)

by Jay Kristoff

Her hand strayed to her belly.

  I don’t think I can, brother …

  WE KILLED HIM ONCE. WE CAN DO IT AGAIN.

  Yukiko sat tall on his back, katana clutched in her hand.

  I let anger and vengeance cloud my judgment before. We’ve killed hundreds of people and what has it gotten us? Where has it led us? We killed Yoritomo and simply made more chaos. We had a hand in all of this, Buruu. We helped set this city, this whole nation, on fire.

  We have to be more than this. More than rage. More than revenge. Or else we will drown, Buruu. You. Me. All of us. Just like you said.

  The beast growled, hackles rippling.

  HE DESERVES IT FOR WHAT HE DID TO YOU. THIS BOY DESERVES TO DIE.

  Yukiko sank down on his shoulders, a fire wind whipping hair across her eyes.

  Everything dies, brother.

  She stared at the boy on the deck of his ship, watching him roar and rage and rev his blades. All that was. That could have been. That would never be again. The memory of a tablet in a garden of stone, marked with her own father’s name. The memory of his loss, real and sharp in her mind. Hand slipping from her belly to the blade he’d given her, all she had left of him save fading memories. And she stared at the boy she once loved, the arms that had once encircled her waist as he pressed his lips to hers—one of flesh, and one of cold, dead iron. She reached across the gulf between them, into the burning fire of his thoughts, acutely aware of how little effort it would take to simply … squeeze. And there, amidst that impossible tangle, curled at the edges by rage and despair, she caught an impression. A single revelation. A fragment of knowledge, consuming, inundating, immolating all he was.

  Aisha gone.

  Dead.

  So much blood.

  And looking down on the ruins of the city below, the smoke and the bodies, the scarlet in the streets deep enough to sink in, the thought of adding one more drop filled her to sickening.

  What we came here to do has been done for us.

  WHAT?

  The wedding has been stopped, Buruu. The dynasty is in ruins. The Guild’s plan is undone.

  She ran one hand through his fur.

  Enough for today.

  She sheathed the katana at her back. Put away her anger and tossed her head. The boy in his ash-pale iron roared and spat and screamed, and her hands drifted once more to her stomach, to the dread and horror and enormity she felt swelling there. Fire burning in her mind. The city burning below. The Shōgun’s peace in tatters, the civil war inevitable now. Tiger against Dragon. Dragon against Fox. Fox against Tiger. The Guild amongst it all.

  “Good-bye, Hiro…”

  And as they turned away from Kigen, cutting through the air back to the north, a single thought burned like a star in her mind. A promise on a not-too-distant horizon, so close she could taste it in the very air. A certainty, light as iron, warm as ice, that Buruu’s river would swallow them all now, no matter what they did.

  The Lotus War has begun.

  55

  ARMY OF THE SUN

  The wolves had almost run them to ground.

  Michi hovered by the railing on the captain’s deck, watching the pursuing floodlights grow larger. The running lights of the corvettes were smaller, brighter, the drone of their engines of a higher pitch. She fancied she could make out something of their shape in the glow of their floods and the hint of a distant dawn; sleek and sharp, like knives flung through the air, speeding right toward them.

  The Kurea’s captain stood by the wheel, occasionally looking back over his shoulder and spitting, knuckles white on the controls. The ship’s engines were at full burn, temperature gauges hovering in the red, her aft shuddering with the strain. Smoke poured from her exhaust, her four propellers making the sound of thunder. But no matter how hard her captain willed it, no matter how loud her engines bellowed, she simply wasn’t fast enough to outrun the hounds on her tail.

  “What happens when the corvettes catch us?” Kaori asked.

  “They’ll hit our engines to wound us, slow us down enough for the ironclads to catch up. Then they’ll board. They’ll want to take us alive.”

  “That can’t happen,” Kaori said.

  “I know,” he nodded. “I know.”

  “What is your name, Captain-san?” Michi said.

  “They call me the Blackbird.” He tipped his hat.

  Michi nodded. “A pleasure to die with you, Blackbird-san.”

  She could see the corvettes clearly now; a pair, just a few hundred feet off their stern. Their inflatables were flattened, shaped like the leaves of a beech tree or an arrowhead, hulls streamlined to cut through the wind like blades. Their small crews were gathered on deck; brass suits and glowing eyes, peering at them through the lenses of telescoping spyglasses. She drew in a shuddering, hateful breath at the sight of the Guildsmen, remembering Aisha chained to those wretched machines, that wretched life.

  The Kagé gathered their weapons, Kaori beside her, Daichi’s wakizashi in her hand. The older woman looked at Michi, nodded once, loose strands of raven hair whipping about her eyes. As good a place as any, she supposed. And better company, she couldn’t hope to find.

  The corvettes closed in, the claw heads of their fore-mounted net-throwers springing open as if fingers on iron hands, heavy wire cable slung between each digit like strands of spiderweb. The Guild gunners bent low over their sights, thumbs poised on firing studs.

  Michi licked her lips, tasted the wind, thick with chi-stink. She looked down at the land below, vast stretches of lotus fields barely visible in the predawn light. She imagined sleepy farmers rising from their beds, wives cooking breakfast, men heading out into crops choking the very life from the soil. Too busy with their tiny lives to realize what they were doing, who they were robbing, where the road they walked would lead. And in the skies above their heads, men and women who’d decided to stand up, to resist, were about to die for their sakes, and none of them would ever know they had lived at all.

  She thought of poor Ichizo. Of the choice he’d offered. Of the life she could have lived. And then she looked at the people beside her, her brothers and her sisters; the family she had chosen to stand beside in defiance of the Guild and its tyranny.

  The wrench among the gears. The buzzing in their ears. The sum of all their fears: that no matter how much they smothered, how much they lied, how much they owned, there would still be people willing to defy, to stand tall, to fight and bleed and die for the sake of the strangers below, the tiny lives, the people who would never know their names, the children yet unborn.

  And Michi held her chainkatana high and screamed; a single clear note of challenge, taken up by the men and women around her, until Kurea’s deck was nothing but open mouths and bared teeth and raised, glittering blades. Fists in the air. Cries roiling in altitude’s chill, each breath taken freely in the sunlight worth a thousand drawn in the shadow of slavery.

  And their scream was answered.

  A harsh cry, a shriek of winter wind, high and fierce. A second joining it, underscored with the rumble of thunder across autumn skies. And the hair on Michi’s arms stood up and her eyes grew wide, and the breath caught in her lungs as her heart began singing inside her chest.

  “I know that sound…” she breathed.

  A white shape streaked out of the clouds, down the Kurea’s starboard side; the rumble of a storm in its wake. Wings as broad as houses, feathers as white as Iishi snow. A second shape followed down the port side, floodlights glinting on iridescent metal, highlighting the figure on its back; a pale girl in mourning black, a dark ribbon of hair whipping in the wind behind her. And Michi screamed again, screamed at the top of her lungs, eyes full of tears as the arashitora thundered past, circled back around and bore down on the Guild ships like lightning hurled from the hands of the Storm God.

  “Yukiko!” she screamed. “Yukiko!”

  The decks of the corvettes moved like insect hives kicked from their perches, the Guildsmen rushing about as
panic took hold, pointing toward the shapes swooping toward them, the nightmare that woke them sweating in the dark. Slayer of Shōguns. Ender of empires.

  The Girl all Guildsmen Feared.

  The net-throwers fired, spools of metal singing in the air, the arashitora moving like poetry between the wailing cables. Buruu and Yukiko swept beneath the keel of the right corvette, coming up on her port side and tearing her engine loose in a bright plume of rolling flame. The sky-ship spun on its axis, listing hard to one side, her crew leaping out into the dark, rocket packs arcing in the brightening night as their vessel tumbled earthward. The second arashitora sailed over the inflatable of the sister corvette, reaching down with ebony claws and shredding the canvas; peeling it away from the framework spine like bloated corpse-skin. Hydrogen shrieked as it escaped into the dark, the corvette plummeting from the sky like a broken bird, spiraling down toward its end, Lotusmen fleeing its ruins amidst plumes of blue-white flame.

  The Kagé roared in triumph, weapons raised to the sky as the white shapes wheeled about and returned to the Kurea’s flank. Yukiko sat up straight, held her hand high in the air, fingers curled into a fist. Dozens of fists were raised in answer, Akihito leaning over the railing and bellowing Yukiko’s name, hand outstretched. Buruu roaring like colliding thunderheads, his cry echoed by the second thunder tiger on their starboard side as the light of Lady Sun finally cleared the eastern horizon and set the skies aflame.

  Michi sheathed the chainkatana at her waist, exhaustion and relief and bitter, black sorrow, Aisha’s passing weighing heavy on her heart. But at the sound of the Kagé cheers, the joy shining on Akihito’s face, the sight of fists rising into the air as the Guild ships fell back, she found a faint smile blooming on her lips. Breathing just a little easier. Happy for a moment just to be alive, in the space where death had loomed just moments before. When all had seemed lost. When all hope was gone.

  The second thunder tiger bellowed loud enough to set the Kurea’s rivets chattering, descending in a broad spiral around the sky-ship, the Kagé’s eyes alight with wonderment. And as Yukiko and Buruu swept around the stern amidst their triumphant cries, fingers balled tight and thrust in the sky, as their eyes met across that howling trail of blue-black smoke and Yukiko called her name, Michi found herself grinning, raising her fist into the air.

  And together, the arashitora and the Kurea turned north, toward the shadow of the Iishi on the horizon, bathed in the light of a dawn long overdue.

  Not a victory. Not even close.

  But perhaps …

  Michi nodded.

  Perhaps soon.

  56

  WOMB

  The cage stank of dried blood. Of failure and fear. The soup-thick reek of lotus smoke and stale human waste made Kin’s eyes water, the boiling thrum of the chapterhouse above reverberating into tired bones. The manacles were cutting off his circulation, and he wriggled the numbness from his fingers. Sweat burning his eyes, fumes burning his lungs, he hung his head and waited in the aching dark.

  His cage was one of hundreds, row upon row of iron bars, running the ribs of a vast, gloom-soaked room. The wall at his back was dirty yellow, armpit-moist with condensation, slick and warm to the touch. Not so long ago, the chapterhouse cells would have been filled with flesh—the old and the infirm, women and children with fair skin and wide, round eyes and blond and red and auburn hair, all waiting their turn to shuffle meekly into the inochi vats and meet their boiling end. But now the cages were empty, one after another, bare, sweating stone picked out by pinpricks of flickering halogen.

  He closed his eyes, sought his center, the emptiness of self he’d found in the workshop, the long silence within the press of his metal shell. He could feel sweat creeping into the plugs studding his flesh, the pull of cable beneath. He tried to block out the half-remembered echo of the mechabacus in his head, the stink of the smoke and the shit, to remember why he’d come here. Why he’d chosen this.

  He thought of the girl, felt the lead-lined wings of butterflies in his stomach, heart thumping in his chest. He pictured her standing on a rope footbridge in the Iishi village, a silhouette etched against ancient trees as the moon took his throne, wind running its fingers through her hair.

  To be the wind …

  He remembered the kiss in the dark, shrouded in wisteria perfume. He could still feel her body against him, the soft, insistent press of her lips against his. He remembered how she’d looked, crying in the gloom, moonlight glittering in her tears. He remembered the taste of them. The heartbroken sigh.

  “We don’t belong here.”

  Guilt tied his stomach in knots, and choked his butterflies one by one.

  Kin felt him before he heard him, more an absence than a presence; a dead-blossom scent or the empty in an echo’s wake. He opened his eyes and saw the figure lurking at the halogen’s cusp, serene as a sleepwalker. Small and slender, sun-starved skin, shaved head, loose dark cloth. Sleek black filters of a mechanical breather, bottomless eyes so scrawled with capillaries there was nothing but red around his irises. Hands clasped, long, clever fingers intertwined like a penitent before a shrine. If it were not for the soft rise and fall of his chest, the chi smoke spilling from his mask with every exhalation, Kin would have thought him a statue.

  His voice was soft as lullabies, a metallic whisper behind the breather.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “No,” Kin said.

  “Do you know what I am?”

  “Of course, Inquisitor.”

  And so they began to speak.

  EPILOGUE

  Now witness the beginning of the end.

  A ghost-pale boy, seventeen years old, tendrils of blue-black vapor and drying scarlet scrawled across his face. A motionless figure, swathed in black, the boy’s fate held in the palm of his hand. The pair speaking in the chapterhouse bowels as countless hours swirl and dance in the gulf between them. And the Inquisitor finally nods, and opens his mouth, and speaks the words the boy has longed to hear.

  “Welcome home, young brother.”

  So here I sit. Back again. The Lotus Guildsman who betrayed all he knew, and all he was. Who gifted his brethren with the leader of the Kagé cabal. Who helped a lone girl undo the rebellion, and drag this nation back from the tempest. Traitor is the name I will wear in the histories. Kioshi was the name I inherited after my father died.

  But in truth, my name is Kin.

  I remember what it was to be encased in metal skin. To see the world through blood-red glass. To stand apart and above and beyond and know there was so much more. And even now, here in the depths of the chapterhouse that birthed me, the only home I have ever truly known, I can hear the whispers of the mechabacus in my head, feel the phantom weight of that skin on my back and on my bones, and part of me misses it so badly it makes my chest hurt.

  I remember the night I learned the truth of myself—my future laid bare in the Chamber of Smoke. I remember the Inquisitors coming for me, swathed in black and soundless as cats, telling me it was time to see my What Will Be. I try to recall the certainty I felt as I walked from that chamber, try to recall what it was like to be proud of who I was. To feel the flesh tingle beneath my skin as I accepted my Truth. Stepping into a new life. A bright and gleaming future.

  The What Will Be.

  My What Will Be.

  Thirteen years old and they call you a man.

  I had never watched the sun kiss the horizon, setting the sky on fire as it sank below the lip of the world. Never felt the whisper-gentle press of a night wind on my face. Never known the feel of her skin against mine, the touch of her lips lighting fires on my own. Never known what it was to belong or betray. To refuse or resist. To love or to lose.

  But I knew who I was. I knew who I was supposed to be.

  Skin was strong.

  Flesh was weak.

  I wonder now, how that boy could have been so blind.

  GLOSSARY

  GENERAL TERMS

  Arashi
tora—literally “stormtiger.” A mythical creature with the head, forelegs and wings of an eagle, and the hindquarters of a tiger. Thought to be long extinct, these beasts were traditionally used as flying mounts by the caste of legendary Shima heroes known as “Stormdancers.” These beasts are also referred to as “thunder tigers.”

  Arashi-no-odoriko—literally “Stormdancer.” Legendary heroes of Shima’s past, who rode arashitora into battle. The most well-known are Kitsune no Akira (who slew the great sea dragon Boukyaku) and Tora Takehiko (who sacrificed his life to close Devil Gate and stop the Yomi hordes escaping into Shima).

  Blood Lotus—a toxic flowering plant cultivated by the people of Shima. Blood lotus poisons the soil in which it grows, rendering it incapable of sustaining life. The blood lotus plant is utilized in the production of teas, medicines, narcotics and fabrics. The seeds of the bloom are processed by the Lotus Guild to produce “chi”; the fuel that drives the machines of the Shima Shōgunate.

  Burakumin—a lowborn citizen who does not belong to any of the four zaibatsu clans.

  Bushido—literally “the Way of the Warrior.” A code of conduct adhered to by the samurai caste. The tenets of Bushido are: rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect, honesty, honor and loyalty. The life of a Bushido follower is spent in constant preparation for death; to die with honor intact in the service of their Lord is their ultimate goal.

  Bushiman—a common-born soldier who has sworn to follow the Way of Bushido.

  Chan—a diminutive suffix applied to a person’s name. It expresses that the speaker finds the person endearing. Usually reserved for children and young women.

  Chi—literally “blood.” The combustible fuel which drives the machines of the Shima Shōgunate. The fuel is derived from the seeds of the blood lotus plant.

  Daimyo—a powerful territorial Lord that rules one of the Shima zaibatsu. The title is usually passed on through heredity.