by Kim Newman
Have you done what Dorakuraya intended? Taken everything of hers? Declared yourself empress?
Yuki-Onna shook her head. A rainbow rippled across her glossy hair.
She smiled Christina’s smile, but with black teeth.
We have come to an arrangement. That’s all I ever intended. With her and with Japan.
So we’re a country now? We have diplomatic relations?
If we must. And we must.
What are we called? Macedonia is taken. The Queendom of Eternal Light, pardon me, the Commune of Vampire Equals, Which Happens to Have a Princess in Charge?
Hush, Gené, you’re hysterical.
What about Majin? He’s still set on destroying Yōkai Town.
Yuki-Onna looked up at the ceiling. More frost fell around her.
We could feel the tremors now – no longer distant, no longer intermittent. A shaking, all the time. Even here, in the fastness of the ice tomb. I sensed the quakes in my teeth, like a form of red thirst.
Yes. Majin. The time has come to deal with him.
At that moment, I didn’t think I could feel colder but Christina’s tone – if words relayed without voice have a tone – chilled me.
In a flash that I will see for all days whenever I close my eyes, they were gone.
Yuki-Onna and the Princess.
The tomb was dark. Water trickled nearby.
‘You’ll have to help me up,’ I told Kostaki and Mr Bats. ‘Someone stabbed me and I can’t walk as well as I used to.’
29
YOKAI TOWN, DECEMBER 22, 1899 (CONTINUED)
Mr Bats held the trapdoor up and Kostaki helped me manage the stairs. In the dispensary, Kurozuka tried to kill us with a lancet. When she saw we weren’t a threat, she looked at my wounds. Kostaki stood aside, not saying anything as I explained – without mentioning his name – what had happened. I was healing naturally, and getting feeling back in my side and leg. Kurozuka slapped fungus poultices on me front and back and cinched a bandage around my waist. Then she gave me a crutch and sent me on my way. She didn’t have the most amenable bedside manner, but I didn’t die of her ministrations. Should she wish to study medicine at the University of France, I would sponsor her application. She can apply experimental poultices to M. Modéran with my blessing.
Throughout the temple, yōkai were stirring. Christina had passed through as a ray of light, still wrapped around Yuki-Onna. Flashing from one reflective surface to the next, she thawed everyone in her way. The ice walls were gone, evaporated when Yuki-Onna woke. Dravot had organised Yōkai Town’s scratch defences – everyone still alive who could pick something up and fight with it – to fall back to the temple. We found him in the courtyard, commanding a rag-tag troop of riflemen. Most of their weapons were scavenged from recently killed Black Ocean masked men. Lady Oyotsu’s head was up in the air like an observation balloon. She relayed information to a busy group of intelligent folk – Abura Sumashi, the mirthlessly smiling Watson, double-faced Ryomen, a humbled Lord Kawataro – who were operating mortars jury-rigged from fireworks equipment. Dravot was in his element, ducking projectiles, striding back and forth, shouting orders and profane encouragement, and firing pistol shots at the creeping enemy.
‘You’ve missed everything,’ said Dru, who had exchanged her spiked parasol for Kasa-obake – and was presumably responsible for covering his blistered hide with sticking plasters. ‘Christina’s perfectly killed that bigsy-bugsy spider… oh, no, that hasn’t happened yet. You’ve not missed it at all. I shouldn’t have spoken. Just wait and see.’
A mammoth eight-legged juggernaut pushed through barricades of earthquake rubble towards the temple. The jorōgumo Clare Mallinger was too big to take in all at once. Black Ocean troops – hardy survivors after a few hours in this killing field, and likely the enemy’s best men – advanced under cover of her bulbous abdomen. A battle had been fought and won inside the yōkai. Clare’s head was five times the size of the spider’s. She was in command. Moth-wings the size of battleship sails, wet and not fully formed, grew from her anterior cephalothorax. Eventually, she would fly!
‘Peek-a-boo!’ she shouted. ‘I see you.’
A rocket burst against her forehead. Clouds of coloured smoke mushroomed. Strings of firecrackers popped. Some shrapnel had been stuffed in, but the pyrotechnics were more entertainment than ordinance. Clare shook off the burning fragments.
‘Pook-a-bee!’ she shouted. ‘Can’t hurt me!’
A bright light shone and a chill wind passed. The giant spider-woman stiffened, hair frosted white, icicles bursting from spinnerets, face frozen.
Arcueid Moonstar loosed a stone from her slingshot.
Clare didn’t just fragment into ice shards. The metamorphic processes inside her conglomerate body must have generated enormous heat… for she exploded. Molten innards burst through her flash-frozen skin, showering the troops beneath and around her. They screamed as they died of fire and ice. Some were crushed as her bulk collapsed on them. Clare’s ice-sculpture face survived intact, the last remnant of a broken sphinx. A stray giant spider-leg – a nunchaku made from chitinous telegraph poles – thrashed, killing even after she was dead.
No one was in a mood to feel sorry for her.
* * *
It was hard to take in what Christina had become.
Yuki-Onna was there, twenty feet tall but insubstantial, skirts and cloaks of snow whirling about her. More like an apparition than a physical being. She still had Christina’s eyes – one dead and red, the other alive and a small sun.
Yōkai rallied behind the Woman of the Snow.
The rest of us made do with Queen Christina.
‘By the square, by the level,’ said Dravot.
‘By the plumb rule, by the compasses,’ answered Kostaki.
‘And by the all-seeing eye!’ they said together.
Did I mention they were Masons?
Evidently, it was now revealed that the entire purpose of Freemasonry – as conceived by Solomon the Great in times of old – was to worship Christina Light and bring about her apotheosis.
Don’t be ridiculous, Gené.
So you’re still listening. I thought you might be too busy.
I am. You have no idea. Excuse me…
A bat-winged man-lifting kite swooped out of smoke clouds. Hanging beneath, an archer swaddled in green furs unloosed silver-tipped arrows. Suzan Arashi fell, her shoulder pierced. The Green Bat must have an eagle eye to hit an invisible target. I hobbled to the next snowdrift and did my best to treat a patient I couldn’t see. Even her wound was invisible, though I could tell the arrow had gone clear through. I snapped off the barb and extracted the shaft, then used the headband of a dead Black Ocean soldier as a bandage.
The kite swooped again… towards the column of cold light.
And its wings were frozen and shattered. The Green Bat plunged into a chasm.
There… that’s his little hash settled.
So, Christina could talk to me and fight a war at the same time.
I had to be content with doing my best to save lives.
Suzan Arashi would be all right. She asked if she’d have a scar. I admired her for joking under the circumstances then realised she was serious. She is vain about her perfect skin, even if it can only be appreciated by the sighted when she stands in the rain or pours a bucket of flour over herself.
I felt a tug at my elbow and turned, ready to swing with my crutch. A kappa I didn’t recognise – a junior officer, bedraggled and bloodied – held out my medical bag.
I took it and checked my stocks. Insufficient, but I would make do.
Next under my care was a Black Ocean soldier who’d had the fight knocked out of him and his head nearly knocked off. A warm man, terrified among vampires. I attempted a reassuring smile and set to work.
Dravot shot me a disapproving glare as I cleaned the dent in the unmasked man’s head with snow.
‘Sorry,’ I shouted. ‘Hippocratic oath.’
; ‘Just fang the fellah and be done,’ the Sergeant said. ‘You need the blood!’
He was not wrong. Red thirst was making me light-headed and see page from Kurozuka’s fungus poultices altered my perceptions. Matters that should have been solemn and solid were hilarious and liquid. I hadn’t thought to ask the mad midwife about side effects.
My patient tried to reward my conscientiousness with a knife in the stomach but was too feeble to do more than dimple my haori. My father told me a battlefield surgeon’s duty was to treat a wounded enemy as if he were one of our own but secure le salaud Anglais with rope before cutting his arm off. I smiled at the ungrateful Black Ocean boy, glad of his blade-point spur to memory. I love my father and still resent his eclipse in my life by my father-in-darkness. The daggerman fell unconscious. With his own knife, I cut his arm and tippled. My red thirst abated a little. I tasted ergot in the soldier’s blood and was more than tipsy.
I bandaged the ungrateful wretch and left him. Fortified by what I’d taken from him, I no longer needed the crutch.
Out of consideration for my feelings, Dravot didn’t shoot the soldier in the head. When this was over, we would have precisely one live prisoner. The story of our terrible strength and cruel mercy would get about, Dravot said, disinclining other likely lads from putting on masks and giving us trouble. I didn’t mention that the youth would most likely be obliged to commit seppuku or, at best, become a bonze and take a vow of silence.
Hah! Or get better and try to stab you with a longer knife!
Christina was still in my head.
* * *
Tremors continued. The temple grounds were riven by jagged cracks. Yuki-Onna’s spells were weakened under the onslaught of the avatar of Taira no Masakado. Black rifts opened like wounds. Snow tumbled over the edges. Higo Yanagi shrieked, roots suddenly exposed. A party of yōkai worked to pull her out of the earth. She could be replanted. Popejoy was cradled in her branches, sleeping through the rififi, life in the balance.
Can you turn off the earthquakes, Christina?
All will be well.
And all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Trust. Hope. Faith.
Leaving her to it, I took my medical bag and Hippocratic oath where they were needed. The temple antechamber was exposed to the elements with its wall shredded but still shaded by a roof. I made it my field hospital. Kage-Onna, a yōkai usually seen only as a shadow on screens, manifested as a dark shape and volunteered as a nurse. Kurozuka brought a selection of dubious remedies. It struck me that the opiates in her poultices were palliative not therapeutic. She was used to easing the pain of the dying.
I didn’t give up as easily. I had a family reputation to consider and also, the honour of the ghouls, snubbed by better-connected medical students as meddlers with the dead rather than doctors to the living. Those boobs would be put in their place if they could see me now!
I tore the tiniest strip of bandage to make a sling for one of the miniature singers. Her arm snapped like a twig when she thawed. She and her sister trilled thanks in unison.
Ryomen was brought in, shot in his lower head. I prised the bullet out of his sternum-skullbone, but the angry face was dead. The placid upper head awoke, inconsolable. Yelling in a language I don’t know, he took up a pike and rushed out into the fray.
Albert Watson – the Smiler – came to me with shaking hands, saying he couldn’t hold a rifle any more. He had no obvious wounds. He kept looking over his shoulder at Kage-Onna, jumping each time he saw the shadow woman. I fished aspirin out of my bag and told him it was a miracle remedy. For a moment after he swallowed the pills he believed me but his hands still shook. I diagnosed a bad case of the terrors.
The Smiler turned vampire in the hope of stilling a worm that crawled into his gut after a hard campaign on the North-West Frontier. Armies call his condition cowardice because generals and politicians can’t afford to admit that seeing and doing things seen and done in war can break a man as surely as torture. Watson wore a Victoria Cross ribbon – a charm to prove his fled valour. And being a vampire was no more use to him. I knew from Dravot that the Smiler more than earned Britain’s highest honour, given only to those who display extraordinary courage in time of war. But his rope had run out. In all fighting forces, his sickness is known. In the Royal Navy, the favoured treatment is the rum ration. If symptoms persist, the medicine preferred by senior officers is summary execution.
Dravot poked his head into the clinic and shouted, ‘Smiler, we need you at the line!’ Watson looked at me, imploring. His mouth couldn’t close over his huge fangs.
I didn’t know what to say. My heart was stabbed. I saw glowing shapes. Christina’s light was in my head. Dru sang ‘Twiggy-Voo’. Dravot yelled ‘The British Grenadiers’ with dirtier words.
The Smiler turned and bumped into a veiled woman. He recoiled in terror, as if she’d stuck a tent peg in his heart. She unwound her veil to show her ruin of a mouth.
‘Do you think I’m pretty?’ asked Kuchisake, brazen.
Watson’s eyes goggled.
Kuchisake raised gardening secateurs.
‘Do you think I’m pretty?’ she repeated, shy.
A long pause.
‘Yes, miss,’ said the Smiler. ‘I does… I thinks yer beautiful.’
She pressed the tips of her shears to the tears on his cheek.
I wasn’t fast enough to intervene. And we were short of iodine. Watson’s smile would be wider – but Kuchisake’s eye was moist.
‘Do you?’ she asked. (In English – she had hidden talents.)
‘Not ’alf,’ said Watson.
She dropped the shears and kissed him, swarming the flaps of her mouth around his whole jaw. He returned her embrace.
Was I dreaming?
I had been wrong about Kuchisake’s question. I thought she cut your face whether you said she was pretty or not. But there was a correct response, one only a madman could give. To tell her she was pretty and mean it.
That kiss lasted for minutes. I’ll be seeing it long after Christina’s light-flashes have faded from my eyes. Some of the wounded – those not close enough to see properly – cheered.
In the end, the Smiler kissed Kuchisake on the forehead, said, ‘Goodbye, Dolly,’ and asked for his gun. For once, his smile looked real. His fear worm yanked out, he snapped to and followed Dravot’s orders. Kuchisake primped and wound her veil back round her mouth.
‘Happy now?’ I asked.
She didn’t answer, but did help with the wounded.
Several weren’t reassured, but she didn’t ask her question and used her shears only to cut bandages.
* * *
One Thousand Monsters.
However many of us there were – and I didn’t ask Dru for a running total, for fear she’d give it – we outnumbered the Black Ocean masked men. They were easier to kill than us. They were cut off from supply lines. The ergot was wearing off. Many in our ranks were so horrible I’d be afraid to face them myself.
O-Same.
Mr Yam.
Kostaki.
Dravot.
Mr Bats.
Albert Watson, VC.
Tsunako Shiki.
Arcueid Moonstar.
Yuki-Onna.
And Christina Light, who could win battles on her own.
Why ever should I want to?
To get the job done?
I have always believed in collective action.
But you went behind our backs when you gave sealed orders to Marit Verlaine?
You remember her? Good. All this is distraction.
A distraction with a high cost in corpses.
Yes – the fallen will be mourned. When we have time.
Very gracious, I’m sure.
Verlaine has been successful. Provided we do the Emperor a trifling service, we have won concessions. Our mission here will light a beacon. It’ll illuminate the world. Yes, even London.
Trifling service? When emperor
s ask for those, you start digging graves.
That’s not an inaccurate assessment. But, for once, the graves are not our own.
* * *
I stepped out, leaving my infirmary to the Three Ks: Kage-Onna, Kurozuka and Kuchisake.
Majin’s statue stood outside the temple grounds.
The thing had walked from the gate. A stone war machine. Steam belched from its lower face, knees and elbows. Maxim guns stuck out of its eyeholes. Blasts of flame poured from vents in its sides. Lieutenant Majin was still perched on its helmet, arms raised, a violet crackling arc between his glowing hands.
The guns opened fire. The entrenchments Dravot had ordered dug in snow were pocked with silver.
The noppera-bō Go master Kokingo was stitched across the blank curve where he didn’t have a face. The gouges looked like bloody eyes. He melted to nothing.
Death stones on the board!
Arcueid Moonstar was cut to pieces, but not killed.
Dravot gave orders to pile the dead – theirs, ours, anyone’s – and use them as sandbags.
Mr Yam leaped up at the walking statue. I’d wanted to see him matched against Majin.
A plume of flame shot out and the jiang shi was blasted into the air, robes and pigtail on fire. O-Same streamed across the sky, took hold of Mr Yam, and pulled him to safety on a rooftop. She flew at the statue, drawing another fire jet into herself. The statue’s midriff exploded. Oni-soldiers died. There were men in there, working the machinery. It wasn’t all magic.
With horrible deliberation and a creaking slowness, the giant stepped onto the temple grounds and stamped across the courtyard, crushing everything under its feet. The torii gate, the dragon fountain, the dead, a Black Ocean soldier who was playing dead. Where the colossus trod, the ground split. Sulphur smoke belched from below. Lava bubbled and snow melted.
In the middle of Yuki-Onna’s winter, I felt heat.
