Stormdancer

by Jay Kristoff

  The buildings of Downside were a multi-storied, ramshackle affair, piled on top of one another without forethought or planning; a constantly swelling blister of cracking clay and bleached wood. The Upside architecture across the river was just as decrepit, but the compositions at least held something close to symmetry. The city’s broad cypress-bark roofs were desiccated and gray, stripped of paint by the merciless sun and polluted black rains that fell in Shima’s winter months. Windows of clouded beach glass or rice-paper stared out with blind, vacant expressions onto the churning crush of flesh on the cobbles below. At each twisted intersection crouched a small stone shrine to Fūjin, the God of Wind and Ways. Temples to the Lady of the Sun, blessed Amaterasu, and her father, Lord Izanagi, the great Maker God, stood shoulder to shoulder with towering brothels, gambling pits and the smoke-filled, tar-stained walls of lotus dens. Each north-facing window was scattered with a small handful of rice; an offering to appease the hunger of the Dark Mother, dread Lady Izanami, the Earth Goddess corrupted by the Yomi underworld after the birth of Shima.

  Three rivers clawed sluggish paths through the city’s bowels, their waters as black as tar. Kigen jail sat hunched on the crumbling banks of the Shoujo, glowering at the rusted metal skeleton of the rail yards across the way. Chapterhouse Kigen loomed at the black, foaming collision of the Shiroi and Junsei, a five-sided fist of yellow stone, punching skyward through broken cobbles. It stretched four stories into the reeking air, pentagonal, windowless walls set with five rusted iron gates around the base, throwing a dark shadow over Kigen’s pockmarked face. The vast, charred chimney stacks of the refinery to the south retched their filth into the sky, black fingers of greasy stink and acrid taste worming their way down the throats of the seething masses. The din of metal upon metal, thousands of hungry voices, the squeal of rutting corpse-rats. High, pitched roofs thrust their peaks at the red skies above, lending the smoking city skyline a jagged, saw-toothed shape.

  Shouldering her way through a mob of rickshaw runners on a smoke break, Yukiko caught sight of the barometric apparatus of a weatherpriest bobbing through the crowd. The whirling, multi-armed periscope disappeared through the door of a noodle store and her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten today.

  “You want some breakfast?” She looked back at Akihito, still wading through the masked mob a good distance behind.

  “I thought we were hunting thunder tigers?” he yelled.

  “You want to do that on an empty stomach?” Yukiko smiled, stepping into the crowded bar and pulling down her kerchief.

  A short boy with a pimpled face and a small tiger tattoo asked her desire, and was soon scooping spoonfuls of thin black crab and tofu into rice-cracker bowls. The air boiled, thick with steam. Yukiko glanced around the store as she waited, listening to the sound box reporting on the day’s crop yield (bountiful, all praise the Shōgun), the war with the gaijin overseas (after twenty years of glorious battle, inevitable victory would soon be at hand) and last week’s refinery fire (an accidental fuel leak being the cause). A greasy film coated the army recruitment posters plastered over every inch of wall. Illustrations of stern-faced boys shouted silent slogans against a backdrop of imperial suns.

  “Be all you can be.”

  “The best and brightest.”

  “For Bushido! For honor!”

  Yukiko watched the weatherpriest, a wizened little man in a rubber suit of buckles and straps. Small arcs of red current danced up the apparatus on his back as he shook his divining rod at the posters and cackled. His sort were an uncommon sight in the clan metropolises—most weatherpriests spent their time in the rural provinces, bilking superstitious farmers from their hard-earned kouka in exchange for prayers and invocations to Susano-ō, God of Storms.

  “Bring the rain,” they would cry. “Stop the rain,” they would pray. The clouds would come and go exactly as they pleased, the weatherpriests would enjoy the blessings of serendipity or shake their heads and speak of “unfavorable portents,” and the farmers would stand a few coins lighter either way.

  Nodding her thanks and paying the lad behind the counter with a few braided copper kouka, Yukiko stepped back into the babbling street and handed a bowl to Akihito. The big man was busy slapping away the hands of a rag-swathed pickpocket. A sharp boot to the backside sent the boy running off into the crowd, shouting colorful criticisms of Akihito’s sexual prowess.

  “None for Masaru?” The giant swiped at the sea of flies around his head.

  “He can buy his own.”

  “You gave all his winnings to the yak’,” Akihito made a face. “Mine too, I should add.”

  Yukiko smiled sweetly, “That’s why I’m buying you breakfast.”

  “What about Kasumi?”

  Yukiko’s smile disappeared. “What about her?”

  “Well, has she eaten, or…”

  “If Kasumi wants to eat, I’m sure she’s taken care of herself. She’s never had trouble with getting what she wants before.”

  The giant pouted and shouldered his way through the crowd, sipping the piping-hot noodles with care. Masaru groaned on Akihito’s shoulder.

  “I think he’s coming round.”

  Yukiko shrugged.

  “Knock him out again if you like.”

  The crowd in front of them parted, stepping out of the path of an iron motor-rickshaw marked with the kanji symbols of the Lotus Guild. Yukiko stayed in the street as the sputtering metal beast rolled toward her on thick rubber tires, bulbous headlights aglow, spewing blue-black fumes into the air behind. It creaked to a stop a few inches short of colliding with her shins. The driver sounded the horn, but Yukiko refused to step aside.

  The driver blasted the horn again, waving at her to get out of the road. His profanities were muffled behind the beach glass windshield, but Yukiko could still make out the best of them. She plucked a noodle from her bowl, popped it between her lips and chewed slowly.

  “Come on.” Akihito grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out of the way.

  The rickshaw driver stomped on the accelerator. The machine belched a cloud of fumes into the already choking haze of street-level exhaust and began rolling again. Yukiko could see the silhouette of a Lotus Guildsman in the rear seat.

  Like all its brethren, the Lotusman was encased head to foot in a brass atmos-suit, studded with fixtures and gears and spinning clockwork, shielding it from the pollution the rest of the populace breathed daily. Its helmet was insectoid, all smooth lines and sharp curves. A cluster of metallic tentacles spilled from its mouth, plugged via bayonet fixtures into the various contraptions riveted to its outer shell: breather bellows, fuel tanks and the mechabacus that every Guildsman wore on its chest. The device resembled an abacus that had been dipped in glue and rolled around in a bucket of capacitors, transistors and vacuum tubes, and the Lotusman clicked a few beads across its surface, staring at Yukiko with red, faceted eyes as the vehicle cruised past. Although the rank-and-file members of the Guild were referred to as “Lotusmen,” their gender was actually impossible to determine.

  She blew it a kiss anyway.

  When the motor-rickshaw was a good distance away, Akihito released his grip on Yukiko’s arm and sighed. “Why do you always get in their way?”

  “Why do you always move?”

  “Because life out here is better than life in Kigen jail, that’s why.”

  Yukiko scowled, and turned away.

  They walked on, past the pentagonal walls of the Guild chapterhouse, passing in silence over wide stone archways bridging the slime-smeared banks of the Shoujo and Shiroi. Yukiko glanced over the railing at the black river water below, saw a dead fish floating in the choking muck, two beggars wading out through the filth toward it. A street minstrel was bent over his instrument in the shade on the other side of the bridge, singing an out-of-tune song about the spring wind, the threadbare rug before him scattered with a few meager copper bits. The crowd grew thicker, street volume rising, hundreds of voices join
ed together to form a constant, rolling hum.

  Yukiko and Akihito squeezed through the mob and out into the broad, bustling expanse of the Market Square. The plaza stretched one city block on each side; a vast, crowded space lined with store facades of every variation under the sun. Spice merchants hocked their wares alongside flesh pedlars and textilemen. Food stalls and clothiers and herbalists, holy men from various temples selling blessings for copper bits next to street courtesans and thugs for hire. Dozens of performers amazing the crowds while cutpurses weaved among the flesh with sharp, smiling faces. Goggle vendors everywhere, selling mass-produced lenses from wooden boxes slung around their necks. Beggars in the gutters, swaying before their alms bowls, the flint-eyed stares of grubby children with growling bellies and shanks of sharpened iron hidden in their rags. The scarlet jin-haori tabards of the city soldiers were everywhere amidst the mob; red sharks cruising for wounded meat.

  In the center of the market lay a large mall of gray brick, sunk one or two feet below street level. Four columns of scorched stone rose out of the ground, one at each cardinal point, towering above the milling crowds. Each one stood ten feet high, studded with pairs of charred iron manacles. The official name for the mall was the “Altar of Purity.” Locals called them the “Burning Stones.”

  Four Lotus Guildsmen were stacking bundles of dry tinder around the northern pillar, eyes glowing the color of blood, red light gleaming on the sleek surfaces of their mechanized atmos-suits. Segmented pipes connected the blackened fixtures at their wrists to large tanks mounted on their backs. Yukiko stared at the white jin-haori tabards they wore over their metal shells, the kanji symbols that denoted their sect within the Guild.

  “Purifiers,” she spat.

  She caught a glimpse of color on the steps leading down to the Burning Stones; a small freestanding slab of polished flint, no more than four inches high. It was an ihai—a spirit tablet laid to mark the passing of a loved one. Real flowers were impossible to find in the streets of Kigen, so the mourner had arranged a delicate circle of rice-paper blooms at its base. Yukiko couldn’t make out the name carved into the stone. As she craned her neck to get a better look, one of the Purifiers clomped up the stairs, stamped on the tablet and scattered the flowers with its boot.

  Yukiko stared at the ashes beneath the blackened columns, at the crushed paper petals blowing in the wind, gnawing at her lip. Her heart was pounding in her chest.

  Akihito kept his voice low, shook his head.

  “The Guild must have caught another one.”

  A crowd was gathering around the edges of the mall; a mix of the morbidly curious and the genuinely fanatical, young and old, men and women and children. Their heads turned as a wail rang out across the market, an anguished cry, threadbare with fear. Yukiko saw a small figure being dragged through the square by two more Purifiers, a girl only a few years younger than her. Kicking and thrashing as she came, dressed in black, hair tangled about her face. Her eyes were wide with terror as she struggled against that cold, mechanized grip; a child’s fist against a mountainside. She stumbled, knees dragged bloody across the cobbles as the Purifiers hauled her to her feet again.

  “Impure!” A cry went up from a few of the zealots among the mob, echoed across the square. “Impure!”

  The girl was dragged down the steps, screaming and sobbing all the way. The Guildsmen hauled her onto the tinder, pressed her back against the northern Burning Stone. As two Purifiers closed a pair of manacles about the girl’s wrists, a third stepped forward and spoke in a mechanical rasp, a voice that sounded like the song of a hundred angry lotusflies. The words flowed as if known by rote; a snatch of scripture from the Book of Ten Thousand Days.

  “Soiled by Yomi’s filth,

  The taint of the Underworld,

  Izanagi wept.

  Seeking Purity,

  The Way of the Cleansing Rite,

  The Maker God bathed.

  And from these waters,

  Were begat Sun, Moon and Storm.

  Walk Purity’s Way.”

  Another Purifier stepped forward, lit twin pilot flames at the blackened fixtures on its wrists and held them aloft to the crowd.

  “Walk Purity’s Way!” it bellowed.

  Approving cries rang out across the Burning Stones, the voices of fanatics among the mob drowning out the uneasy murmurs of the remainder. Akihito clenched his teeth and turned his back on the grim spectacle.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  Yukiko tried to tell herself it was rage that turned her stomach to water, made her legs shake and stole the spit from her mouth.

  She tried to tell herself that, but she knew better.

  She looked up at Akihito, her face a mask, drawn and bloodless. Her voice trembled as she spoke.

  “And you ask why I get in their way.”

  5

  BLACKENING

  The heat was blistering.

  Yukiko and Akihito made their way through the squeezeways, over the refuse-choked gutters, past the grasping hands of a dozen blacklung beggars and down into Docktown; a cramped and weeping growth of low-rent tenements and rusting warehouses slumped in the shadow of the sky-ships. A broad wooden boardwalk stretched out over the black waters of the bay, hundreds of people shoving and weaving their way across the bleached timbers. The docking spires were thin metal towers, corroded by black rain. Hissing pipes and cables pumped hydrogen and the volatile lotus fuel, simply called “chi,” up to the waiting sky-ships. The towers swayed in the wind, creaking ominously whenever a ship docked or put out to the red again. Lotusmen swarmed in the air about them like brass corpseflies, the pipes coiled on their backs spitting out bright plumes of blue-white flame.

  Steam whistles shrieked in the distance; breakfast break for the workers slaving in Kigen’s sprawling nest of chi refineries. It was a well-known truth that most of the wretches sweating inside those walls were expected to die there. If the toxic fumes or heavy machinery didn’t end them, working twenty-hour shifts for barely more than a beggar’s salary probably would. The laborers were known as “karōshimen”—literally, men who kill themselves through overwork. It was ironic, given that many of them were little more than children. Flitting among grinding cogs and crunching gears that could snag and chew a stray lock of hair or an unwary hand without skipping a beat, soft flesh withering in the shadow of hard metal and blue-black smoke. Children turned old and feeble before they ever had a chance to be young.

  “Vwuch vwyy?” Akihito asked.

  Yukiko sipped her broth and found she’d completely lost her appetite.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she murmured.

  The giant stuffed the last of his cracker bowl into his mouth. Yukiko pointed in the direction of the eastern docks, furthest away from the cloud of smog and ash and reeking exhaust fumes.

  “Is that … crab I smell?” The voice was weak, muffled against Akihito’s ribs.

  “He lives!” The big man grinned, slinging his friend down off his shoulders and planting him in the street. Masaru squinted, eye swelling shut, long pepper-gray hair a bedraggled mess. His face was smeared with blood.

  “Izanagi’s balls, my head.” He winced, rubbing the back of his skull. “What hit me?”

  Akihito shrugged.

  “Saké.”

  “We didn’t drink that much…”

  “Here, eat.” Yukiko offered her father the remainder of her breakfast. Grabbing the bowl, Masaru gulped it down as the crowd seethed around them. He swayed on his feet, looking for a moment as if the crab might make a break for freedom, then patted his stomach and belched.

  “What the hells are we doing down here?” Masaru glared around the docks, one hand aloft to shield his eyes from the hothouse light while he fished out his goggles.

  “We’ve been summoned,” Yukiko said.

  “Summoned to what? Breakfast?”

  Akihito snickered.

  “A hunt.” Yukiko frowned at the big man.

 
“A hunt?” Masaru scoffed, checking to see if his ribs were cracked. “For the Shōgun’s slippers?”

  “I thought you’d be at least a little happy about it.” Yukiko looked back and forth between the pair. “It’ll give you both something to do besides smoking your money away in card houses all day.”

  Akihito frowned. “I don’t smoke…”

  “There’s nothing left out there that’s worth hunting.” Masaru rubbed at the saké bottle-imprint on the back of his head. “The Shōgun should just bloody dismiss us and be done with it.”

  “He’s sending us after an arashitora,” Akihito muttered.

  Masaru scowled up at the big man.

  “I thought you just said you didn’t smoke. Did you start when I wasn’t looking? Bloody fool, it’s a filthy habit, I’ll not—”

  “The scroll arrived last night, father,” Yukiko said. “Set with the seal of the Shōgun himself. A thunder tiger has been spotted by cloudwalkers past the Iishi Mountains.”

  “Damned cloudwalkers,” Masaru shook his head. “Drunk on chi exhaust twenty-four hours a day. They’d say they saw the cursed fruit of Lady Izanami’s black loins, the thousand and one oni dancing naked in the lotus fields, if they thought it’d get them a free meal or into some harlot’s bed…”

  Masaru caught himself and pressed his lips shut, cheeks reddening.

  “We’re commanded to bring it back alive.” Yukiko steered the subject away from sex as fast as she could. She was still occasionally woken by nightmares about the day her father had tried to sit her down for “the talk.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” Masaru asked. “They’re extinct!”

  “That would be your bloody problem, wouldn’t it? Or was someone else appointed Black Fox of Shima and Master of Hunters when I wasn’t looking?”

  “Don’t swear,” Masaru scowled.

  Yukiko rolled her eyes behind her goggles. She wiped the lotus ash from the polarized lenses with her kerchief, then tied the cloth around her face to filter out the stench. With a flick of her long dark hair, she turned and walked toward the eastern docks, hands stuffed into the black obi about her waist.