Kinslayer (13 page)

The tide came rolling in.

The walls trembling, the floor beneath her rolling. She sank to her knees, clutching her temples, heard the clatter of the tiny ornaments on Daichi’s shelves, chess pieces tumbling and falling. People on their feet, shouting, their thoughts impossible to keep at bay, flooding into her and out of her nostrils in scarlet floods. A teacup smashing on the boards. Daichi’s sword falling from the wall. Cries of alarm from the villagers outside as the trees literally trembled in their roots, and in her head a tangle, a briar, thorned and tearing, all of their thoughts, their hopes, their fear (gods, their fear), everything they were and could have been and wanted to be filling her up and pulling her down to the dark beneath her feet.

YUKIKO!

Buruu, help me!

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

I can’t keep it out!

It rose up on black wings, like some forgotten beast beneath the bed in the days when blankets were armor and her father’s voice the only sword she needed to keep the dark at bay. But he was gone, gone to his pyre, gone to the great judge Enma-ō. She could see him now; the ashes of offerings daubed on his face, cadaverous skin hanging loose from his bones, black blood still leaking from the hole in his throat. Her hands on the wound, trying to stop the flow, but it was too much, too deep, too late. Heat and thoughts and screams and floods, and as it rose up to swallow her, she felt Buruu in the black, groping toward her, burning in her mind.

HOLD ON TO ME.

Buruu!

HOLD ON TO ME, SISTER.

A tracery of blood vessels pulsing across the backs of her eyelids, strobing light beyond.

Reaching for him, her rock, her anchor, all that held her still in that gnashing swell.

His wings about her, ozone and feathers and warmth, soft as pillows.

And into the dark, she fell.

8

NO ONE

No matter the shape of the shoreline, or the color of the horizon, there are three breeds of drunk to be found beneath the rising and setting of the sun.

There’s the jovial kind who takes to the bottle when he has cause to celebrate, who has a few too many at festival feasts and revels in the rush of blood to his cheeks. He slurs his songs and argues with his friends about the gaijin war or the last arena match, grinning to the eyeteeth all the while. And though he might swim deep in the bottle, he doesn’t drown, and when he looks at the bottom he can still see his own reflection and smile.

Then there’s the kind who drinks like it’s his calling. Hunched silent over his glass, charging headlong toward stupor as fast as lips and throat can take him. He takes no joy in the journey, nor solace in company upon the road, but he keens for his destination with an intensity that leaves shadows under his eyes. Oblivion. A sleep where the dreams are so far submerged beneath Forgetting’s warm embrace that their voices are a vibration rather than a sound, like a mother’s lullaby in the blurred days before words had shape or meaning.

And then, there was No One’s father.

Seven shades mean, the kind who saw the bottle as a doorway to the black inside. A solvent to peel the paint from his mask, the luster of bone and blood beneath. A mumbled excuse for what had happened the last time, and the unspoken promise why it would happen the next.

The bottle’s lips pressed against his own like a mistress, a balm discovered in empty days after he returned from the war overseas. A tranquilizer to silence the cries of the gaijin that still haunted his dreams, numb the pain of the parts he was missing. And though he was a gambler too, hopeless and helpless, the bottle was his first and truest love.

But he loved her too, in his own stumbling, ugly way. He called their mother “bitch,” her brother “bastard.” But his daughter? His dearest? His flower? Even at his worst, he still called her by name.

Hana.

Her earliest memories of her mother were of tears spilling from swollen eyes, irises of gleaming blue. Of slumped shoulders, trembling hands and broken fingers. Of screamed abuse. Open palms and bloody lips and spitting teeth. Long days without a crumb to eat. Brief periods of plenty, of laden tables and tiny toys (dolls for her, soldiers for her brother) that he would give them with his broad, broken-toothed smile, and hock to the pawnman a few weeks later.

Running in the gutters of Yama city with other orphans of the bottle or the smoke or the war, she and Yoshi, both harder than a Lotusman’s skin by the time she was six. Violence and grime and bloody knuckles, wrapped in the stink of chi and shit. Fistfights. Broken glass. Blacklung beggars rotting in drains, or coughing their last in the squeezeways where the children played and laughed and forgot, if only for a moment. But through it all, they had each other. At least she and Yoshi had each other.

Blood is blood.

And then Father bought the farm. Literally. A tiny crop of lotus near Kigen city, snatched on a triple-nine hand in some yakuza smoke house. War hero turned man of the land. And so they left Yama, caught an airship south to Kigen; the first and only time in her life she’d ever flown. The engines were a thrum in her bones, and the wind a shower of gentle kisses on her cheeks, and she stood at the prow and watched the world sailing away beneath them, wishing they would never, ever have to come down from the clouds.

Yoshi hated him. Hated him like poison. But even when the beatings became too numerous to count, when the bottle had stolen all he was and would ever be, she loved him. She loved him with all her heart.

She couldn’t help it.

He was her da.

*   *   *

She’d rolled out of bed before the sunset and dragged on her servant’s clothes, the taste of stale exhaust buttered on her tongue. Washing her face in their bucket of tepid water, she felt at her cheek, her eyebrow, the scar tissue smooth beneath her fingers. Her memory awash with the gleam of candlelight on broken glass. Spit and blood. She straightened the patch over her eye, smoothed her unruly bob down as best she could and prepared to inhale her night. A glance into Yoshi and Jurou’s bedroom showed both boys asleep, sprawled across grubby sheets, mercifully free of cat excrement.

Bye, Daken.

The tom was sitting at the windowsill, a black silhouette against the slowly darkening sky, watching her with piss-colored eyes.

… careful …

No One picked up the iron-thrower, lying amidst the empty bottles and scattered playing cards. She slipped the weight into a hidden pocket beneath her shoulder, patted its bulk.

I’m always careful. See you tonight.

… will see you first …

Out the door and down the stairs into dirty streets and long shadows, hundreds of people scurrying about their business before the nighttime curfew fell. The city’s stink was waiting for her—human waste, black seawater and chi fumes. Autumn’s chill was a welcome relief after the blistering summer, but the scarlet sunset was still bright as a blast furnace, and she slipped her decrepit goggles over her eye to spare it the burn.

She could feel the noise pressing on her skin, the bustle and murmur of people hurrying to end their day, the hum of motor-rickshaw, generator growls. Beneath it all, more a vibration than a sound, she could sense the subtle ring of discontent. Of anger. Broken glass crunching underfoot, the straw-dry crackle of tinder, ready to ignite. Graffiti splashed over army recruitment posters; the same message on almost every street.

A
RASHI-NO-ODORIKO COMES.

She walked over the tar-black Shoujo and Shiroi rivers, into the cramped symmetry of Upside. Here the mood shifted; neo-chōnin merchants scurrying about, hunched shoulders and nervous glances, market stalls standing empty. The sun was kissing the horizon by the time she made it to the palace grounds, bowing low before the gate guards, proffering her permit with downcast gaze. The lowly Shit Girl was unworthy of evening salutations, of course, and the men simply opened the gate and stood aside. The thought of speaking to a Burakumin would no more have crossed their minds than the thought of addressing raw sewage floating in the gutter.

Courtiers gathered in multicolored knots, murmurs hidden behind breather and fluttering fan, watchful eyes narrowed to paper cuts as she made her way to the royal wing to begin her nightly duties. A trio of wretchedly thin tigers strained against their chains in the gloom-soaked courtyard, wheezing in the poisoned air. Once she entered the Daimyo’s wing, everywhere she walked, the chirp and skritch and creak of nightingale floors followed like a shadow.

If the floors were not enough to dissuade potential assassins, the Guild had released a swarm of what were apparently called “spider-drones” inside the palace a week ago. The devices were fist-sized, set with a windup key and eight segmented legs, needle-sharp. They crawled the halls, the ceilings, delicate clockwork innards
tick-tick-ticking
. She’d picked one up out of curiosity when they first appeared, and it had vibrated in her hand and sang
tang!tang!tang!
until she put it down again. A fellow servant had warned her the devices transmitted everything they saw to their Guild masters, and from that day forth, No One had been looking over her shoulder for the accursed little machines. Between the floors and the Guild’s eyes, Lord Hiro’s claim to the throne was looking more secure by the day.

Stopping outside the Daimyo’s suite, she bowed low to the Iron Samurai guarding his door. Their golden tabards declared them members of the Kazumitsu Elite—the guardians of the royal line, wreathed in the shame of failure after the Shōgun’s assassination. They stood seven feet tall in their suits of ō-yoroi armor, all pistons and clockwork and roof-broad spaulders, chainsaw katana and wakizashi crossed at their waists. In the days before Yoritomo’s death, their suits had been enameled black, but now the armor was painted bone-white; the color of death daubed onto living men.

She’d heard rumors about the night of the Inochi Riots, when news of the Guild’s atrocities against gaijin war prisoners had first broken over the wireless. Stories about a legion of pale ghosts issuing forth from the royal palace to crush the uprising into the dust. A young captain leading their charge, flames glinting in eyes as green as hellsfire.

An almost imperceptible nod told No One she was allowed inside. Bowing low, she pulled aside the double doors, gaze downturned, shoulders hunched.

“Try now,” said a metallic, sibilant voice.

She stepped into the room, taking in the lantern-light scene before dropping to her knees and pressing forehead to floorboard. Three Guildsmen were gathered around a hospice chair. The first pair were indistinguishable; vaguely feminine in form, clad in skintight, earth-brown membranes and long, buckle-studded aprons. Silver orbs were affixed to their spines, eight long, gleaming limbs unfolding in a razor-sharp halo about them. They had featureless faces and bulbous eyes, glowing heartsblood red.

She recognized the third Guildsman immediately—Kensai, Second Bloom of Chapterhouse Kigen, voice of the Guild in the Tiger capital. A hulking figure over six feet tall, muscular lines shaped into the atmos-suit of burnished brass covering his flesh. Eyes aglow. Mechabacus on his chest, stuttering and chattering the indecipherable language of the machine. Disconcertingly, the face molded into the Second Bloom’s helm was that of a perfect, beautiful boy, segmented iron piping spilling from a mouth frozen in a perpetual scream. As always, the sight of him unleashed a slick of cold fear in the girl’s belly.

“Lord Hiro, please.” Kensai’s voice was an iron rasp. “Try again.”

No One glanced up swiftly, focused on the figure reclining in the hospice chair. Long dark hair and a pointed goatee. Piercing green eyes, like Kitsune jade. High cheekbones and smooth skin, bronzed and well-muscled, six small hills on an abdomen that seemed carved of kiri wood. She thought he could have been handsome in a different place, a different time. But sleepless nights had drawn gray circles around those beautiful eyes, and lack of appetite (she’d noted his meals were always untouched) had left him gaunt and stretched.

Lord Hiro lifted his right arm, frown darkening his brow, closing his fingers one by one.

No matter how many times she saw it, she had to admire the artistry. The ball-joint digits with their case-hardened tendons. The intricate lace of machinery, at once awful and beautiful. A hissing, whirring construct, cogs and interlocking teeth, crafted of dull, gray iron.

A clockwork arm.

“Excellent,” Kensai breathed. “Your response speed is most promising.”

“Will I be able to wield a sword soon?” Lord Hiro’s voice came from far away.

“Certainly.” A spider-woman nodded, silver limbs flexing. “The prosthetic is far stronger than mere meat and bone. But the finesse with which you wield a weapon is up to you. Practice, Hiro-sama. Skin is strong. Flesh is weak.”