Steel Crow Saga

by Paul Krueger

  Her vision slipped. When she blinked, it was the man in the purple coat choking her. She blinked again, and it was Maki. She blinked, and it was Mang, with his arms like oaks. She blinked, and it was her mother. The man again. Her father. Kurihara Kosuke. The man again.

  And then she blinked, and saw Prince Jimuro pinning her, rapturous and ecstatic pleasure etched onto his face.

  Whatever he was doing, it would be over soon, she knew. The pain hadn’t tapered, but she felt her ability to perceive it dimming. Perhaps this wasn’t something that would have killed her normally. But after everything else she’d been dragged through, she knew she wouldn’t have the strength to continue.

  Was this what I did to you? she thought. Was this how it felt when I last touched you? Surely, it couldn’t have hurt so much. And yet here she was, her every nerve aflame.

  She stared up into the prince’s face. She tried to will herself to see her killer for who he really was. But her mind was gone, and it’d taken her eyes with it. So she was doomed to die, staring into the face of Prince Jimuro, while the stranger who wore it twisted it into something unrecognizably cruel.

  But something stirred in her as that thought skittered across her dying mind like a roach. She’d seen Iron Prince Jimuro be arrogant, nationalistic, proud, and flinty to the point of stupidity. But she’d never known him to be cruel.

  She felt as if she’d had a bag over her head, and someone had just yanked it off. She was splayed out on the train’s kitchen counter, staring up into the eyes of the man in the purple coat, as his tears leaked down onto her. His teeth were gritted, the lines in his face drawing deeper by the second.

  She turned her head to the left, and saw abandoned cooking tools. To the right, she saw the same. Frantically, she searched: for pans, for pots, for particularly pointy chopsticks, for—

  There. Not perfect, but it would have to do.

  She thrust out her right hand, and her fingers wrapped uneasily around the metal-and-wood hilt of a square-bladed vegetable knife. She only had enough strength in her left for one swing, and she squeezed her eyes shut with effort as she spent it at last.

  Tomodanese steel was sharp, but brittle. She expected its blade to bite into his flesh and stop at the bone. But then her nose filled with the familiar unpleasant odor of burning flesh, and she felt the vegetable knife pass effortlessly through sinew and bone alike.

  The man in the purple coat staggered back with a scream, and Tala felt the hand drop off her neck like tags with a broken chain. As it fell to the floor, Tala saw one of the shades in the dining car abruptly disappear.

  Coughing and sputtering, she forced herself upright. Every part of her still burned, but she felt that fire inside cooling to embers.

  The man in the purple coat stood mere feet from her, staring in disbelief: at his stump of a wrist, and at her.

  No, Tala realized. At the knife in her hand.

  Whose blade was still red with heat.

  The Steel Cicadas were still fighting the remaining shades, but she saw Kurihara looking on, similarly stricken.

  “What are you?” said the man in the purple coat.

  Staring down at the knife in her hand, Tala had the same question.

  But just as the steel in her grip cooled, so too did her curiosity. It could wait.

  She raised the knife and leveled a glare at him that was just as steely and sharp. She snarled. “The last thing you’ll ever see.”

  The blade flashed as she clutched it tight and charged. The man in the purple coat growled, then turned and fled for the door.

  “Kurihara!” Tala shouted. “He’s getting away! Shoot him!”

  “I will not take orders from—!”

  “Just shoot him, you upper-class twit!”

  Kurihara opened fire, as did the other Cicadas. But the man was zigzagging, the way Tala had learned to as a jungle-runner. Without even breaking stride, he threw himself out the door in a dive, his coat fluttering behind him like wings. In a flash of light, his owl-shade appeared again, yanking him away from the rails and up into the night sky.

  Tala charged to the door. She glared out at his retreating form. And in that moment, she decided that she had no intention of fighting another day.

  “Beaky!” she shouted, only to feel a tiny pulse on the pactmark on her chest. It was an indicator that her crow-shade still hadn’t recovered enough of his magical energy to sustain a physical form. But that was fine. Now that she remembered, he wouldn’t have been any help against the man in the purple coat anyway. No, there was only one shade for this job.

  She gripped the cleaver in her hand tightly and shouted: “Dimangan!”

  She waited for the burst of light, or else the pulse of pressure on the back of her head that would tell her he was still in recovery, like Beaky.

  But when she invoked her brother’s name, she felt nothing at all.

  A tiny flame of panic sparked to life inside Tala. “Dimangan!” she tried again.

  Again, she felt nothing.

  Her panic roared into a full inferno. She remembered aboard the Marlin, seeing shades like Sunny and Tivron stolen from their rightful partners. Hell, she had more than just witnessed shades being stolen; she’d done it herself.

  “Dimangan!” she shouted into the night sky, at the receding figure of the man in the purple coat. “Mang! Di—”

  At last, she felt something on the back of her head. But it wasn’t something magical; it was the familiar weight of a pistol butt, rammed right into the base of her skull.

  The cleaver clattered to the iron landing, and Tala’s limp body followed.

  Dimangan heard his name and came when he was called.

  He careened into the world with a scream. Something about this journey had been different. Suddenly existing after long periods of not existing was rarely a smooth experience, but this one was rougher than most. It was the difference between a car stopping because someone had slammed on the brakes, and one stopping because it had run headlong into a wall.

  The first thing he noticed was the pain: his constant companion since that fateful day. He’d fled his body, desperate to escape the agony visited upon him by that Tomodanese bomb, only to wake to something far, far worse. He’d never said anything about it, to spare Lala, but he knew she felt it, too. It was the weight they carried between them, and now it settled on him once more.

  The second thing he noticed was that he was nowhere near the train car he last remembered standing in, before he’d been overwhelmed by the splintersoul’s personal army. He stood in what appeared to be a run-down Tomodanese house, its contents in disarray. The sun was just beginning to rise out the window, and the rain appeared to have finally stopped.

  As a magical being, he no longer had a stomach. Nonetheless, he felt it twist as he considered how long he’d been out. Lala had been fighting for hours without his help, and he’d promised to protect her.

  Easy, he reminded himself. He was still standing here. That meant she’d gotten out all right. And of course she had. His sister was the most stubborn survivor he’d ever known. At the end of the world, there would be the cockroaches, and there would be Tala, their fearsome warrior-queen.

  But when he turned around with a relieved grin and said, “Report,” it wasn’t the sight of his sister that greeted him.

  It was the other splintersoul.

  Without hesitation, Dimangan launched himself at the man with a roar, eager to get his huge hands around the man’s head so he could pop it like a melon.

  But then something shuddered in his veins, cold like poison. He still wanted to kill this man, but suddenly he…also didn’t. He came to a hard stop, and his arms fell placidly to his sides. He hunched forward onto his forearms in a restful, bestial crouch.

  He tried to move his legs. Nothing. His head: nothing. Not even his eyes could twitch. They
had to remain fixed on the man in the purple coat, and on the house around him. A house that Dimangan now saw was not run-down after all; its furniture was too freshly smashed, its walls too recently gouged by claw and fang. In the center of the floor, amid their broken things, an old man and woman lay together in a bloody heap.

  The breath left Dimangan’s throat. He felt a sharper, renewed horror as his attention slid back to the man in the purple coat.

  He tried to contort his face with fury, but found he couldn’t even do that. “What did you just do to me?” he thundered. “Where’s Tala?”

  “Tala.” The man repeated the name, as if tasting it. The flavor wasn’t to his liking, because he grimaced. When he did, hatred sliced through Dimangan’s mind like a red-hot Tomodanese blade. The pain of it was so intense, even against the backdrop that was his existence, it forced him to his knees.

  “Get up,” the man growled, and though Dimangan wanted to defy him, he also wanted to obey. Shaking, he stood. Panic bubbled up in Dimangan’s mind like water in a hot pot.

  The man began to pace, cradling his right hand close to his body. Except no, there wasn’t even a right hand to be found; just a messy, burnt stump. “My sister did that to you?”

  The man didn’t answer, but more seething hatred spilled over into Dimangan’s mind. He felt as if his brain were being struck by lightning, over and over. But the man had bade him to stand, and so this time he did not fall.

  He couldn’t.

  “Where’s my sister?” he said. He forced his voice into a tightly controlled register, the sort of deadly calm meant to communicate that he meant business.

  Once again, the man did not answer. But eventually, he did speak: “I took you from her.”

  Dimangan’s whole body seized up as he fought to break free of the man’s thrall and throttle the life out of him. He was desperate for even one of his fingers to move, to so much as twitch.

  He remained crouched.

  The man narrowed his eyes at Dimangan, unimpressed. “You’d end my life, even knowing our souls are now tethered?”

  Dimangan hadn’t even considered that aspect of things, but it didn’t give him any pause. He fought all the fiercer, certain that if he just tried hard enough, he could overwhelm the geas on him…

  “Your resolve’s admirable,” said the man, eyeing him carefully. “It’s the hardness in both of our bones that’s allowed us to endure a world that would pulverize us if we were even slightly weaker. That’s why you and I were able to pact.”

  Dimangan’s eyes widened. “I never pacted with you.”

  “Your soul cried out for revenge, and I promised it,” said the man, flexing the fingers of his remaining hand. A rainbow of magical energy arced between his fingertips. “You found resonance within me. Otherwise, our union would be impossible. I’ve bonded with dozens of souls. Do you have any idea how many hundreds I’ve left behind?”

  Horror spread through Dimangan’s mind like blood through water.

  “I was asleep when she took him from me,” the man said. He tapped his temple, which bore a small blotch of scar tissue that stood naked in his hair, like an island in black water. “Shrapnel to the skull. Not enough to kill me, but enough to hollow me out. They put me in a hospital bed in Lisan City with other soldiers who would never wake up, and they left me there to sleep.”

  As he spoke, fleeting images coursed through Dimangan’s head, each one bitter and wholly without warmth. He saw burned-out cityscapes, the buildings riddled with bullet holes and blood spatters. He smelled burning hair and flash-boiled blood. His mouth filled with the taste of soot and steel. And at the center of it, he saw the man: not in his purple coat, but in the ratty, soiled fatigues and drab green bandanna that marked him as a jungle-runner. He fought against a tide of Tomodanese like a demon: first with his gun, then with his machete, and eventually with his bare hands.

  And ever at his side was a familiar black bird: a crested crow-shade with a trio of interlocking purple rings splashed across his breast feathers.

  “Every day I slept, I dreamed of that,” said the man. “Every day, I fought that battle. And no matter how I fought it, no matter how many enemies lay dead at my feet, I could never win it. But one day, my fighting stopped. One day, a Tomodanese officer got past my guard, put her gun to my head, and pulled the trigger. But instead of dying again…I woke up.”

  The memories were less distinct now: the hospital bed. The orderly who came in at the wrong moment. The clatter of his falling tray as his patient lunged forward, hunger in his heart and hate in his veins…

  “I’ve lived two years with a starving soul,” the man said, glaring balefully up into Dimangan’s eyes. “I’ve followed the thin thread that ties my soul to hers, the cord she couldn’t sever. And when someone stood in my way…”

  More images flitted through Dimangan’s head. Ones he wished he could shut out.

  “I dreamed of finding her and making her suffer exactly as much as she had made me.” He stopped pacing to look Dimangan over again. “But I never dreamed I’d find someone like you waiting for me at the end of my trail.”

  Dimangan found himself free to move his head at last, and he shook his head in disgust. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you’re the first person who can feel that hunger as closely as I do,” the man said with sudden intensity. He surged toward Dimangan, grabbing his paralyzed forearm with his one remaining hand. “You’re the first person I can be honest with. The first person who has no choice but to understand me, because now you and I are one.”

  Dimangan couldn’t move his arm, but he did turn his head away. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t I?” shouted the man. “When I called you, you came. When I bid you stay, you stayed. And when I reached into your sister’s soul to find what was mine, I found your hatred and pulled it out of her like a beating heart.”

  Dimangan squeezed his eyes shut, as if that would stop things somehow. For so long, his problems and Tala’s had been one and the same, and he’d only needed his two fists to solve most of them. But with that taken from him, he had no idea what to do now.

  “Look at me,” the man said in a low, deadly voice.

  Dimangan squeezed his eyes tighter. He felt the desire to obey on the fringes of his mind, like a wolf pawing at his door. He had to have this. He had to have some shred of resistance, because if there was so much as a seed of it within him, one day it could flower into something breathing and alive. And when it bloomed, he could find Tala again at last.

  “Dimangan.” His name sounded like a curse on the man’s chapped, bloody lips. “Look. At. Me.”

  The desire to obey was overwhelming now, a smell that choked away all the air in the small room. It was the only thing he could breathe, and after several long moments, his eyelids slowly fluttered open. His huge head turned, until the man in the purple coat was the only thing he saw.

  The man’s nod was long, slow, and satisfied.

  Dimangan nodded to the scorched stump of his right wrist. “If you don’t get that treated,” he said, “infection may set in. You’d die.”

  “So would you,” said the man.

  “Infection would be too gentle a death,” Dimangan spat.

  The man in the purple coat smirked. “Nothing will kill me until I’m whole again,” he said with an unshakable confidence that Dimangan could feel in his own gigantic bones. “I could follow the thread your sister trails everywhere, but I’d rather you just tell me where she’s going. So tell me: Where in Tomoda is Sergeant Tala headed?”

  I’m sorry, Lala, Dimangan thought, while his traitor tongue immediately answered: “Hagane. The Palace of Steel in Hagane.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s escorting Iron Prince Jimuro of Tomoda. He’s set to take the throne tomorrow. My sister was charged w
ith making sure he gets there in one piece.”

  The man considered this, then at last examined his stump more closely. Dimangan could feel the wheels turning in his head. “Dahali magic can treat this,” he said at last.

  “And if we found a Dahali hexcrafter,” Dimangan sneered, “how exactly do you expect to get her to cooperate with you…Mayon?”

  The man raised a thick eyebrow. “What did you…?”

  “I saw your memories,” Dimangan said. “Including the name on your dog tags. Mayon.”

  Mayon took no apparent pleasure in hearing the name. “That was a name given to a boy and inherited by a man,” he said. “I’ve become much more than either.”

  “Whatever,” Dimangan said. “That still doesn’t answer my question.”

  Mayon sneered. “You enjoy getting in my head, boy? How do you like it…now?”

  And just like that, the pain that engulfed Dimangan’s body reached torturous new heights.

  Though he no longer had true lungs, he found his breath completely taken from him as the room spun. The curse of his monstrous form had come with the gift of incredible strength, but now he felt like thin, flimsy paper being undone fiber by fiber.

  He gasped. “You feel it,” he said with what was left of his voice. “Not just for me. For…”

  “Every single one.” Mayon slowly crossed to him. The light shifted with each step, so that he looked like an ever-changing monster.

  Through the miasma of hurt, that stray line from Dimangan’s reading floated to the top of his mind.

  Sanbuna lore had countless monsters, but the worst of them wore a human face.

  “This is my everyday, Dimangan,” said Mayon. “This is the life I have left. It tests me every day, and every day I prove I’m stronger: stronger than my fractured soul. Stronger than the remnants that rattle inside me like shrapnel. Stronger than you.”

  The shreds of humanity Dimangan held on to fled him. He tilted his head back and screamed until he felt the floorboards shake beneath him.

  And then, just like that, the man in the purple coat gestured, and Dimangan stopped. The pain was still there, but now his voice was caged inside his throat, rattling ineffectually at the bars.