Steel Crow Saga

by Paul Krueger

  She resisted his pull. “Mang,” she said. “That boy in the streetcar. The one with the glasses. Who was he?”

  Dimangan couldn’t say for sure, since the Steel Lord forbade any photographs of the Iron Prince or Princess from being published. But unless the Steel Lord herself had been hiding in that streetcar, there was only one boy in Imperial Tomoda important enough to warrant the personal protection of the legendary Kobaruto.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said, pulling her along. “We can’t be out here anymore.”

  As they walked the remaining blocks, murmurs followed and preceded them everywhere. Shell-shocked bystanders like them were telling tales to anyone they could, while old men on stoops blustered on about the state of this country.

  “ ’Sthat damnable Erega,” one of them said to the friends that had gathered on his porch.

  At the mention of that name, Tala stiffened up and stopped walking. Dimangan closed his eyes, exasperated. They didn’t have time for this now. He tried to tug at his sister, but she wouldn’t be moved.

  “Kicking up dust, starting these fights…and who gets hurt, neh? If she knows what’s good for us, she’ll turn herself in and be done with it.”

  “Lala,” Dimangan whispered urgently, “please don’t—”

  “They weren’t Erega’s troops,” she called to the old man.

  “—do that exact thing,” Dimangan muttered, hanging his head.

  The old man, a sun-wrinkled piece of leather if Dimangan had ever seen one, turned to regard her with bemused, patronizing curiosity. “And what would you know about it, batang?” It was a diminutive—affectionate when used by family, but dismissive when it came from the lips of anyone else—and it only succeeded in raising Tala’s hackles more.

  “I know that Erega’s the smartest general in the world, and she wouldn’t just attack at midday like that,” Tala said. “She’s a strategist, and attacking the shoto in an open place with such low numbers isn’t strategic. And,” she went on, to Dimangan’s despair, “she wouldn’t start a fight when it might put Sanbunas in danger. She’s fighting for freedom for all of us. Even you, you ungrateful—”

  “Forgive us, she’s very excited still!” Dimangan called over her, forcibly steering her back on their way. The old man hurled insults at their backs as they walked on, but Dimangan didn’t care about the opinions of the old. As far as he was concerned, it had been their job to fight for his and Tala’s freedom, and they’d failed. Better to let the man have his words while he waited to die.

  “You should know better,” Dimangan hissed, briefly pinching Tala’s upper arm tight as a reprimand. “You can’t just talk about Erega like that. People are listening.” The woman had been Sanbuna gentry, and for a long time she’d been the rumored mastermind of the local resistance. But with the anti-Tomodanese uprisings in Dahal and Shang, she had stepped up her operations and openly identified herself as an enemy of the Mountain Throne. In the Sanbuna sphere of Imperial Tomoda, she was now public enemy number one.

  “People need to listen,” Tala said. “Erega isn’t a rebel; she’s a revolutionary. And someday I’m going to pact with a shade of my own and join her.”

  When Tala had been two or three, Dimangan had tried it himself. He’d read the old texts on shadepacting and tried it in secret with animal after animal. After his fifth or sixth try, he’d realized that he just didn’t have the affinity. He’d told himself not to be embarrassed about it; in the old days, boys like him would’ve had teachers and masters to help him with this, part of the proud tradition of shadepacting schools that Tomoda had eradicated. He’d made peace with it, even.

  But his heart broke a little to hear Tala so set on the same thing. For all his desire to preserve her childhood and innocence, he was starting to think that perhaps it had departed long ago, and he’d just failed to notice.

  “Please keep your voice down when you talk that way,” he said, as earnestly as he could. “By the time you’re a woman grown, maybe we’ll already be free. And if we’re not…please think about the other things you could do to help our people instead, Lala. Let me protect you.”

  Tala stared up at him for a long moment, serious beyond her mere ten years. And then she smiled—so rare a sight, that was—and shook her head. “No, Mang. You’re my kuya, and I love you. But the one who’ll do all the protecting here…that’ll be me.”

  The fissure in Dimangan’s heart cracked open another inch. But then he found his resolve and, like liquid steel, poured it into that gap. In time, he knew, that resolve would cool and harden, and the machine it had welded together would have one purpose: to ensure that Tala would come of age in a nation where she was free, and that she wouldn’t have to fight to secure her place in it.

  He would come back to this marketplace tomorrow, he promised himself. And at a moment when he was certain the wrong eyes were turned away from him, he would buy himself a green bandanna.

  This wasn’t Lee Yeon-Ji’s first time in a jail cell, but unless the executioner changed their mind, it was looking to be her last.

  The kingdom of Shang had never expected much from women like Lee, and she’d never expected a whole lot from Shang, either. All she’d ever wanted was enough room to slip about, pulling the small jobs and scams that had always kept her stomach and her pockets…well, not full, but at least more than empty. That’d been easy enough to manage during the Tomodanese occupation, and she figured it should have been even easier now that the Shang kingdom was rebuilding itself. For the most part, she’d even been right.

  She just hadn’t accounted for the depths to which some people would stoop to be a prick.

  She didn’t bother getting to her feet as two officers appeared beyond the bars of her cell. They were a tall woman and a short man, in scarlet guard uniforms of fine Shang wool. The tall guard rattled the cell’s bars with her baton. “On your—”

  “—feet?” Lee said, with a quirk of her eyebrow. It was thin and long and sharp, like the rest of her face, like the rest of her everything. “That was what you were going to say, right? Figured I’d save you some breath, considering you Shang are about to save me a lot of mine.”

  “Mouth off all you want,” said the short guard. “See what kind of mercy that gets you.”

  “Oh, come on,” Lee pouted. “Could you convict and execute a face like this?”

  The tall guard sneered. “Get on your feet, or I’ll summon my shade and leave it in there with you. You’re just a dogfucker. I wouldn’t even get in trouble.”

  There was a time when the slur dogfucker would have hurt Lee’s feelings. But for any of the thousands of Jeongsonese living in Shang, that particular slur lost its impact by their third birthday. And Lee was a good eighteen years removed from her third birthday; she barely even registered the term now.

  So in the face of the woman’s threat, Lee just shrugged. “Fuck it. Go ahead. If your shade’s a dog, I’d probably find a way to enjoy myself.” The thought of actually fucking a dog made her skin crawl. But if these puffed-up Shang were dead set on seeing her as nothing more than a dogfucker, why not play the role to the hilt on her way off the stage?

  The woman was unamused by Lee’s performance. “You don’t want me to do that, girl. She bites.” She held up a hand, which was missing its last two fingers.

  Lee considered pointing out it was extremely unlikely that the shade had done that, since shades were supposed to contain part of their human partner’s soul, and vice versa. But rather than annoy this guard who’d just as soon do the executioner’s job for them, she sighed and stood at last. “Lead the way, Officers,” she said, and let them take her on one last walk through the Kennel.

  The prison hadn’t always been called the Kennel. Under Tomodanese control, it had been called Fort Asanuma, after the daito who’d once ruled Jungshao. And before that, in the days of the first Shang kingdom, it had been
called the Temple of Justice. Even now, with Tomoda defeated and Shang ascendant once more, it had just been renamed Jungshao Prison. But the locals on both sides of the bars called it the Kennel, and who was Lee to argue with custom?

  Besides, in her book there were worse things to be compared to than a dog.

  The Kennel’s corridors were open air, the cellblocks forming separate buildings within a larger courtyard. This meant her cell got sunlight most days, but today there were only thick gray clouds and a thin, steady drizzle. The rain collected between the slate tiles underfoot, and they sloshed faintly with each step Lee took toward her impending death.

  Some of her fellow inmates sat in their cells and stared at their feet as she passed, slouching like beaten circus animals. Others shouted things at her: Obscenities. Jeers about the gibbet that awaited her. Variations on the same four slurs she’d been hearing her whole life. She found it easy to ignore them all. Her stay in the Kennel had been so brief that if she were a man, she wouldn’t have even had the time to grow decent stubble.

  Right by the front gates of the prison stood a gibbet. On one end of it was a high gallows and a trapdoor; on the other, a polished wooden block whose surface was slick with rain. This was the custom in Shang: that condemned citizens would be allowed to take ownership of their death by choosing how they got to make their exit. Lee just wished Shang custom included options like “drowning yourself in soju” or “death by a thousand naked women.”

  A few prison guards were there to oversee the execution. A white-robed executioner stood atop the gibbet, leaning on a huge, heavy saber. And waiting at the foot of the stairs was the strikingly handsome Magistrate How, arguably the most powerful man in the newly liberated province of Jungshao. He hadn’t been the first enemy Lee had made in her life, but apparently he was going to be the last.

  Lee smiled mirthlessly to herself. He’d come to see her off personally. How thoughtful of him.

  A squat woman fell into step next to her: Warden Qu. She looked oddly at home in the rain, but perhaps it only seemed that way because of her toadlike appearance. “What will it be, Lee?” she said. “The rope or the blade?”

  “Don’t suppose you’d let me order off the menu?” Lee said. She kept her tone even, but her traitor heart started to race as she eyed her two choices. It’d been easy to remain cool and detached before now, hiding behind smirks, snark, and silence. But you couldn’t exactly smile your way out from under the shadow of a gibbet.

  “You’re hardly the first guest to make that comment.” The warden sighed. She always referred to the inmates as guests, as if they were all friends bunking together at a roadside inn. “Have you made your choice?”

  Lee did the math. Escape was impossible. If she made a break for it, they’d either shoot her or sic their shades on her. And it wasn’t like she had one of her own to summon; her native Jeongson was a vassal state of Shang, and only Shang-born citizens were allowed to know the secrets of shadepacting. Not that the steelhounds had been better, the bastards. Some of the Jeongsonese had actually welcomed Tomoda when they’d first arrived on Shang’s shores, eager to see their oppressors given a taste of their own medicine. But as far as overlords went, the Tomodanese had been more of a lateral move than an upgrade.

  She sighed, as if choosing the manner of her death were little more than an annoying household chore. “Sword,” she said. “Any chance he can warm it up before he swings it? My neck’s cold.”

  The warden rolled her eyes, then waddled over to the gibbet to let the executioner know. Lee prepared to follow her up the stairs, but the magistrate held up a hand. “A moment,” he said in the bouncy tones typical of Shang’s public servants.

  “You mind, Magistrate?” Lee said. No point in observing pleasantries now. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

  “I just wanted to remind you,” said Magistrate How, “that everyone has their betters, and this is what happens when you test them. There’s a natural order to things, and Heaven forbids that it be upset.”

  Lee shrugged. “I’ll lodge a complaint when I get there. Get right to the heart of the matter.”

  Magistrate How, born pale enough, went even paler.

  “What?” said Lee. “Can’t stomach a friendly chat in the rain?”

  All the color had drained from the magistrate’s face. Lee could practically see the veins and capillaries in his cheeks. “How dare you!” he shrieked, then slapped her across the face. He didn’t have a lot of strength in him, but he had a lot of rings on his fingers, and they stung fiercely when they connected with her cheekbones.

  The warden came running. “Magistrate How!” she said. “What—?”

  “Don’t mind him,” Lee said. “The man’s just venting his spleen. I’ll have me that sword now.”

  Magistrate How scoffed. “As if I’d ever allow you a clean death,” he said, his imperious tones back in full force. “Warden, executioner, you shall hang her!”

  The warden shook her head. “Apologies, Magistrate,” she said. “The law’s clear: We must honor her choice of the sword.”

  “I am the law,” the magistrate said, rounding on her. “I have been appointed by His Most August Personage the Crane Emperor himself. If I say I want her hanged, I will have her hanged.” Seeing him carry on, it surprised Lee how much the right kind of sneer could unmake even the handsomest face.

  Warden Qu shot an apologetic look Lee’s way, then cupped a hand to her mouth. “Bring the rope!”

  As the executioner fitted Lee for the noose, the warden read aloud the final rites. There was a promise in there to clean her bones and return them to whatever kin she had left in Danggae, but Lee figured they’d just as soon heave her into a ditch. That was just as well, honestly; the way she and her family had left things, there was a good chance that, on receiving her bones, they would’ve done the exact same thing.

  She sighed. She’d never appreciated how useful the sigh was as a communication tool, and now she was trying to savor the last few she had left in her.

  “Do you have any final words?” Warden Qu said.

  Lee mulled it over a moment. At last, she settled on what she wanted to say, and opened her mouth to speak. “I—”

  “Would anyone mind terribly if I speak for the incipient deceased?” called a new voice. As one, every head turned to see its owner striding up cheerfully through the rain. She was a small woman, wearing a high-collared white coat that was a bit short in the tail but overlong in the sleeves. Her trousers billowed like skirts. Her white trilby hat sloped low onto her forehead, covering her left eye. In fact, nothing she wore appeared to fit her right, except for her shiny new boots. These individual aspects of her appearance were all off-kilter, but somehow they blended into a whole that Lee found surprisingly appealing.

  The warden started. “I don’t know how you got in here, madam,” she said, signaling to the guards. “But you have no business staying.”

  “In point of fact, this shiny badge here says I have business wherever I so please,” the newcomer said. Her hand plunged into the depths of her coat, and from it she withdrew…well, a shiny badge, in the distinctive shape of a bronze pentagon.

  “I don’t care what your badge says!” said Magistrate How. “I am the law here, not some upjumped lapdog of the Snow-Feather Throne, or—”

  Lee cracked a genuine smile of recognition, if not disbelief. “An inspector of the Li-Quan.”

  The Li-Quan. Shang’s highest police, who directly enforced the will of the Crane Emperor. There weren’t that many Li-Quan these days, since Shang was only just getting back on its feet in the wake of the Peony Revolution, but the few that still existed were able to operate with complete unilateral authority.

  Warden Qu pressed her fists knuckle-to-knuckle, then offered them forward with a bow. “Apologies. An agent of the Snow-Feather Throne will of course have our full coopera
tion.”

  “I’ve the fullest confidence of that,” said the newcomer cheerfully. “And to you, Lee Yeon-Ji, I apologize for stealing the spotlight during your big moment. I promise, we’ll return to the matter of your death shortly. But first, I would like to tell everyone here a story.

  “Once upon a time,” she began, “there was a young woman named Lee Yeon-Ji. Say,” she added in mock surprise, “that sounds an awful lot like your name!”

  The magistrate seethed. His cheeks were burning so red, it was a wonder the rain didn’t steam off his face. “Can we please move it along…Inspector?”

  “I’m afraid not,” the inspector said gravely, before brightening up and plowing on with her story. “Now, thanks to the marginalized position of the Jeongsonese people in the fabric of Shang society, Lee Yeon-Ji didn’t grow up with many opportunities. She had to do what she could to survive. That meant a little graft and petty thievery, but never anything that drastically disturbed the Crane Emperor’s peace. So on one such endeavor, she opted to go into business with a Shang man named Zheng Lok. Is that right?”

  Lee had no idea what to expect of this oddball, but every second she was talking was a moment Lee wasn’t hanging from a gibbet. “He went by Lefty when I knew him.”

  The newcomer brightened. “Lefty. How folksy. I love it. Now, when their business was concluded, Lefty did something very stupid: He attempted to abscond with Lee’s half of their ill-gotten gains—a sum of six hundred yuan, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Lee nodded to let her know that she was not.

  “He was quite astute in the way he went about it,” said the inspector. “He took great care to leave no trail or word of where he’d gone, and arranged his departure to happen in such a way that Lee wouldn’t even notice what had happened until he was already long gone. But that didn’t change the fact that what Lefty had done was very, very stupid indeed.

  “You see, it didn’t matter that Lefty had only left behind the barest of clues that he’d ever been in Lee’s life at all. Because Lee took the tiniest shreds of evidence, and from them was able to unerringly track Lefty here to Jungshao. But there was a problem: When she arrived in town, she discovered that her erstwhile comrade Lefty had run afoul of some of the local toughs, who it turned out were involved in a rather lucrative ring of illegal organ-selling and had been looking to…expand their inventory.”