Steel Crow Saga

by Paul Krueger

  That was when he’d put his foot down. “I’m the Iron Prince,” he’d said, nose pointed skyward. “I’m the future of Tomoda. I don’t do these things.”

  He’d steeled himself for his mother’s disapproval. But she’d reacted with something much more unsettling: a genuine smile. Perhaps in other families, that would’ve been a sign of approval. But young as he’d been, Jimuro had known then that he’d just walked into a trap.

  “Tomoda does these things,” she’d said. “Every day, while you enjoy sweets, and run around causing trouble with your sister, the people you serve are up with the sun, working with their own hands.”

  He’d frowned. He’d grown up in Hagane, a glittering jewel of progress. The food there came from stores and restaurants. The streets were lined with cars. The heat came from natural gas, the light from electricity.

  His mother had listened patiently as he went on about this. And then she’d calmly asked him the question that he’d known would doom him the moment he heard it: “And where do you think all that comes from?”

  He’d sat there, stunned by his inability to answer such a simple question. After a moment, his mother took mercy on him.

  “To me, this place is the greatest treasure the Steel Lord has,” she said.

  “Not the Mountain Throne?”

  “No,” his mother said, shaking her head. “Not the Mountain Throne.”

  “Not the sword of Steel Lord Setsuko?” She’d been the first Steel Lord, and Jimuro had treated himself to more than one daydream of what he would do with its bright blade.

  His mother snorted. “No, not the sword, either. This place.”

  Jimuro frowned. How could this dump possibly be better than that sword?

  His mother seemed to sense the question. “I appreciate this place because here, I’m not the Steel Lord,” she said, stroking his cheekbone with her thumb. “Here, I can regain sight of how things are for the people I serve.”

  Jimuro had blinked. There was that word again. “Serve?”

  “Serve,” his mother repeated sternly. “The petty chiefs of the Sanbu Islands. The gluttonous Crane Emperors of Shang. The greedy merchant-lords of Dahal. Those people do what’s best for themselves and pray that their people will follow. But the Steel Lord is a servant with a thousand masters. My life is dedicated to putting all their needs before my own.”

  He’d stared up at her, eyes wide as the weight of all this sank into his head. But she’d just smiled again, and knelt down so that they were eye level.

  “And someday, my sweet son,” she’d added as she ran a finger along his cheek, “yours will be, too.”

  * * *

  —

  After Jimuro finished his story, Dimangan sat there, rocking back and forth as it chewed on the prince’s tale. But then its huge shoulders shook. A low rumble rose in his throat. Jimuro’s eyes darted to the prone sergeant, thinking her condition must have been deteriorating. But her breathing was still steady, if labored and shallow.

  And then Prince Jimuro realized.

  The slave was laughing at him.

  He felt a rust settle all over his body. “What is it that you find so funny?” he said in controlled, careful tones.

  “That’s what you think your subjects live like?” Dimangan said, shoulders still shaking with unkind laughter. “You chopped some wood, man. How horrible for you.”

  Jimuro’s face twisted into a snarl. “The Steel Lord wanted to impart to me the virtues of wisdom and humility—”

  “If that bitch wanted you to know what it feels like to be a subject of Tomoda, she should’ve thrown you into an iron mine and never let you out,” said Dimangan. “She should’ve rounded up your friends in the town square and executed them in front of you, just because rumors said they had relatives in the resistance. That’s your civilization.” It practically spat the last word.

  Jimuro was acutely aware of the danger he was in, but his hackles rose all the same. “She was the Steel Lord of Tomoda!” he roared. “She was my mother! What she and her servants did, they did for the good of the empire, and I will not allow you to talk about her in that—”

  But his rage had taken him too close to Dimangan, and so he was helpless when a massive hand shot out and wrapped two fingers around his throat. Effortlessly, Dimangan lifted him into the air, Jimuro’s legs kicking futilely.

  “Give me a reason, steelhound,” it said, its voice low and thin. “Don’t doubt I’ll do it.”

  Desperation for breath drove Jimuro to flail his limbs, even as his strength bled from them. His glasses fell askew on his face, but this close even his damaged eyes could clearly see the face of the thing that would end him. If Dimangan was a slave to Tala’s subconscious will, was this what Tala really wanted to do to him? He’d gone out of his way to save her, but had he just entrusted his life to someone all too happy to just take it?

  “Hoy,” said a soft voice. “Mang.”

  Immediately the slave’s giant head whipped around. “Lala,” it breathed, dropping Jimuro to the floor. Jimuro scrambled to his feet, doing his best to maintain his dignity while gasping greedily for air. He had all manner of choice words for the slave, but by the time he’d regained his senses (and his breath), he saw her sitting up, propped up by her brother’s huge hand. It looked down at her with deep concern, all its previous malice gone.

  “Report,” she said groggily. Despite the golden-brown of her skin, she looked deathly pale. Her lips were chapped and dry, her hair limp with sweat. Her eyes, when she could keep them open, were unfocused—a worrying departure from their normal hawklike sharpness.

  “I brought you to my safe house, but this creature tried—” Jimuro began, but he saw Dimangan had spoken at the same time. The two abruptly stopped.

  “Like I was saying,” Jimuro went on, “I was in the process of figuring out how best to treat your—”

  But once again, Dimangan had spoken up, then stopped when he did. Jimuro glared death at the slave, and the slave returned the look with interest.

  “Mang,” Tala rasped.

  “No,” Jimuro said, cutting across Dimangan. “I am the Iron Prince of Tomoda. Three years a prisoner of Sanbu have not changed that, and now I have been returned to my country. When I open my mouth here, all others close.”

  Tala simply stared at him, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she’d just heard. Dimangan was far more expressive; it looked as if it wanted nothing more than to pulp Jimuro’s entire head with its fists.

  But neither of them said a thing.

  “You’re in the first royal safe house at Kinzokita, per phase one of Operation: Grand Tour,” said Jimuro. “But while I was able to get us here, we can’t go any farther while you have that venom in your system.”

  “I’ve had worse,” the sergeant said, wincing. She tried to stand, but Dimangan put a firm hand on her shoulder and shook its head.

  “I don’t care what you’ve had,” said Jimuro. “Thanks to that visit from our plum-colored friend, you’ve become the entirety of my security detail. I’m not going anywhere unless I know you can run and fight.”

  Tala glared at him now. It occurred to him that he perhaps shouldn’t have been so blasé about the deaths of her comrades, but he set the thought aside. He’d have plenty of time to make amends. The generosity of a Steel Lord paid rich dividends.

  “We don’t have time to wait for me to heal up,” she said. Her voice sounded more ragged with every word she squeezed out. Nonetheless, she was right. He had to get back to Hagane. His people were counting on him. Each moment he delayed was a moment when he was letting every single citizen of Tomoda down.

  Jimuro fidgeted irritably with his glasses as he racked his brain. From here, they were supposed to have driven south to Hagane in the cars that had been stowed in the hold of the Marlin. That had also been where their other key suppl
ies had been: Munitions. Rations. Money. And of course, medical kits.

  “We don’t have enough resources here,” he said eventually. “There’s a town five kilometers away. I could walk that in an hour. Once I’m there, I could get medicine.” Tomoda had its own native spiders: bright-yellow creatures with pointy, banded legs. The spider-shade that had attacked the sergeant didn’t have the same coloring, but it was the only antivenin he was likely to find without breaking into a hospital.

  Sergeant Tala’s face hardened.

  “And not just antivenin,” Jimuro continued, as if he hadn’t noticed. “We need food. You need new clothing. We’ll need weapons. Money. Even a car. I just need to know: Do you trust me?”

  “No,” Tala and Dimangan chorused, at once.

  Jimuro sighed. He should have expected as much from these shortsighted savages. He’d already lost a war he’d barely even fought in, yet they insisted on putting him on trial just the same.

  “Well, I suggest you reconsider your position, Sergeant,” he said, his glasses flashing. “Because at this point, your only other option is to die.”

  When Lee thought of royalty, she thought of the photos of the Shang family palaces she’d seen in the newspapers. The floors were tiles of polished stone. Their walls and furniture were made of shiny, lacquered wood. If Lee were ever to set foot in a place like that, she’d often thought, she would’ve taken a hammer and chisel and made off with as many fixtures as she could.

  But the palace at Kohoyama was a study in sparseness and restraint. For a place built by a people so obsessed with metal, Lee was surprised by how little of it she saw in evidence. The floors were simple polished wood, as were the elegant frames of the walls and doorways. The light fixtures were made of metal, though, and the lightbulbs in them looked sleek, like they’d been made in a year Shang hadn’t experienced yet. The ceilings were wide, tall, and inviting, in a way that made her feel as if she were already thinking more clearly beneath them. The strangest thing she noticed, though, was that the doors appeared to be made of…

  “Paper?” Lee said, wrinkling her nose. She prodded at a nearby doorway, pushing right up to the brink of tearing it before she relented. She frowned at it. “What’s a paper door supposed to keep out?”

  “Nothing,” said Xiulan. “That’s what household guards were for. Remember, this was a palace, not a fortress. It was a place of quiet contemplation and pleasure.”

  Lee’s frown deepened. “Not really seeing the overlap there.” She slid a door open to reveal a wide room with an almost completely bare floor. There were low wooden chairs and tables, but they were so spread out that to Lee’s eyes they looked like islands. “Wood, wood, more wood. I thought the steelhounds were nuts about…well, steel.”

  “They are,” Xiulan said. “The stuff is quite scarce on Tomoda. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to learn that its scarcity was why it became sacred to them in the first place. Even in matters of faith, you can always depend on the constants of supply and demand.”

  Lee smiled and just let her talk when she got like this. Xiulan had never met a three-word thought she didn’t want to turn into a ten-word sentence, but in the short time they’d known each other Lee had grown fond of her partner’s circular way of talking.

  “Besides,” Xiulan continued, “metal is closer at hand than you realize.” She flipped a switch on the wall, and the lights up and down the hallway flickered on. “The walls are full of metal wires and ducts, to give this palace light in the darkness and heat in the cold. Metal pipes snake their way beneath these floors, to bring them hot and cold water at their whim. This palace’s face may not be made of metal, but her skeleton is. And in my mind,” she added with a mischievous glance Lee’s way, “it’s the bones that make something truly beautiful.”

  Lee raised her eyebrow and smirked. She thought she saw the specter of an identical smirk on Xiulan’s face, but then the princess turned away from her and used her pipe to point down the newly lit corridor. “Onward.”

  Though Lee wanted to poke around some more, Xiulan seemed to have a very specific room in mind that the two of them needed to visit.

  But she didn’t know where the room was, so they ended up poking around anyway.

  In the kitchen, they came upon a wide array of metal pots and pans for cooking, as well as knives, chopsticks, and any other accoutrements a royal chef might need. But Lee noticed something strange right away: In place of cooktops, there were only flat slabs of steel. It took her a second to understand: The Tomodanese didn’t need gas flames when they could just metalpact heat directly into their pots and pans.

  “I suppose it was too much to hope that we might find something of note in the kitchen,” Xiulan said, sighing as she cast an eye over the neglected gear and countertops. “I’d hoped we might at least ascertain some insight into what the Iron Prince enjoys at mealtimes.”

  “Which we were absolutely going to find in a kitchen he probably never went inside, in a palace he hasn’t been to in at least four years, and that’s most definitely been picked clean by every soldier that got here before us,” Lee said.

  Xiulan tried to look annoyed instead of amused, but Lee knew better.

  It took them another hour of careful exploration to find the room they actually wanted: Prince Jimuro’s. It was located on the second-highest floor of the tower, where the walls weren’t enough to keep out the sound of the howling wind outside. Lee felt a jolt of unease. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to her while she was climbing all the steps to get here, but now that she was up here, she realized this was the highest up she’d ever been in her entire life.

  Xiulan beamed at her as if she could read Lee’s mind. “I told you life in the Li-Quan would take you far, didn’t I?”

  “I don’t remember you telling me anything like that,” Lee said.

  The inspector chuckled softly. “It was last night.”

  It had been hours, but Lee’s temples still throbbed gently whenever she looked at bright lights. “What else did we talk about last night?”

  As she slid the bedroom door open, Xiulan’s smile was small and sly as a baby fox’s. “A variety of things.”

  Lee was disappointed to see that there was nothing particularly interesting or valuable up here, either. At first, she would’ve said that the place had been cleaned out by the Dahali who conquered it, but it took only a moment’s glance to realize that wasn’t the case. There were no telltale signs of breakage, nothing overturned, nothing chipped off the wall. The place still felt sparse, but purposely so. It didn’t feel like any piece of it was missing.

  Prince Jimuro’s room was just as orderly as the rest of the house, but here Lee got the feeling this wasn’t its natural state. The bed was immaculately made, and a fine rug was neatly centered in the middle of the floor, but the bookshelf told a different story. The volumes there were crammed in haphazardly, with no discernible order or system. Some were shelved sideways, some lay horizontally atop rows of other books, and a couple looked as if they’d been read so often that their spines needed repair. Those ones, Lee noticed, were the ones positioned closest to the bed.

  “What do you think, Inspector Lee?” said Xiulan. “Demonstrate to me that observational acumen that carried you unerringly down Lefty’s path.”

  Lee bristled slightly at being commanded to dance like some pet. But the truth was, she kind of liked getting a chance to show this highborn what she could do. “The bed’s made. The rug’s centered. The art on the wall’s specially hung so it doesn’t spend all day in the sun and it won’t fade. Everything here’s been arranged just so…and then, there’s this bookshelf.”

  Xiulan had the pleased expression of a teacher who’d just heard the answer she was hoping for. “Good,” she said.

  “This thing is just plunked right down here, next to the bed,” Lee continued. “The feng shui doesn’t make an
y sense at all. And what’s more: It’s dustier than everything else in the room.”

  “Very good,” Xiulan said.

  “So the servants were cleaning this room right up until the palace was taken,” said Lee. “But they weren’t cleaning that bookshelf there, weren’t straightening it up. If I had to guess? Probably because someone told them not to, and they were the kind of boring people who listened.” She patted the bookshelf, dislodging a fair amount of dust. “Anything you want to know about the princeling, this shelf here’s your best bet.”

  “Sterling detective work,” said Xiulan. “Now if you’d be so kind as to take the top shelf, while I start at the bottom…”

  They flipped through the prince’s personal library, book by book. Xiulan was very deliberate in her search, eyeing particular pages that had been dog-eared or looked particularly well worn. Lee, on the other hand, just held each book open and gave it a good shake. When nothing interesting fell out, she tossed it into the pile that was rapidly accumulating atop what had once been the prince’s bed. She eyed it scornfully, even as she polluted it further. Dusty and neglected as it was, that bed was still a damn sight better than anyplace she’d ever laid her head in her life.

  She reached for a green-bound volume next and was surprised to see that its pages looked to be adorned with only drawings. The page she’d opened to, in particular, showed a surprisingly lifelike dog with short, pointed ears and a curled-up tail. The dog was mostly gold, but its legs were black up to the knees, so that either it had just trampled through a mud puddle or it was wearing boots.