Endsinger

  27

  THE BOY WHO DOES NOT ASK

  In the heart of the city sits a Boy.

  A rooftop, damp and greasy, overlooking Market Square. The cobbles below glimmer with a black rain sheen, streetlights painting Kigen’s filthy avenues with feeble stars. The clouds overhead move like oceans, and the dark is filled with eyes. And the Boy sits in the spaces between it all, palms upturned, head bowed.

  Listening.

  They come to him, one at a time. Like supplicants before a tumbledown throne. They know him, though they know not how or why. But the Boy calls, and they come, and they speak, whispering inside his skull with the tongues of sewer and broken cobble and alleys like scabbed and open mouths. Flea-ridden, yellowed teeth and flint black eyes. Yet he knows their names, old and young alike. And as they scuttle forward and speak, one by one by one, he reaches out and touches them, gently, like their fathers never did.

  They tell him secrets. The seeings they have seen. The thieving and killing, the lawlessness rife, people fleeing the city in droves. The brass men in their yellow tower, calling for the Impure to be put to pyre at weeksend in exchange for a few drops of reeking fuel. The Boy looks down into the Market Square at this, dark eyes affixed on the four Burning Stones in the sunken mall, echoing with forgotten screams. And the Boy’s face grows hard, and his fingers clench. But in the end he turns away.

  More sewer-children come forward, offering morsels.

  A Market Square baker murdered his wife and dumped her body in the Shiroi.

  The guards who patrol Spire Row raped a streetwalker two nights past.

  Three boys and a woman with arms like silver spiders are stockpiling weapons in a Downside flat.

  Eyelids fluttering, filtering each snippet, searching for a particular loose thread.

  A beggar keeps a bag of iron kouka beneath a stone near Railyard Bridge.

  The Second Bloom of the Guild Chapterhouse is up and walking again.

  The railyard master has been selling chi to black marketeers.

  Finally, his voice cuts the clamor; a knife in the base of their skulls. He seeks news of painted men. The ones who rule Kigen from Wolf to Phoenix hour, now the boys in iron clothes have gone north to fight and die. And so they speak of a warehouse near the bay. There are traps there; poisoned meat that cut a bloody, heaving swathe through their number, and now the sewer-children stay away. But the tattooed men go there, with bags full of not-food, that clank and clink like the iron clothing of the boys who have gone north to perish.

  And the Boy asks them, one by one by one, if they will help. Asks in a way that is Not Asking. Asks in a way that makes them fear. This Boy. This beggar prince. This lord returned.

  And they bow.

  And they scrape.

  And they do as he Not Asks.

  * * *

  Jimen was in the parlor, counting out his money.

  Stacks of it. Piles of it. Dull gray mountains of it. Rectangular braids of iron, stamped with the imperial seal. The little accountant pored over every one, stacking them into neat towers, counting off on his antique abacus. The spoils of war and markets black, growing ever higher as any semblance of order in Kigen disintegrated, and the yakuza gangs that had long suffered under the Shōgun’s law stepped in from the dark to claim what was theirs.

  The lieutenants would come and go, delivering more satchels, smelling of smoke and blood and alley sex. Jimen would barely look up from his ledgers. He supposed he could have pulled in more hands to help with the count, but the Shinshi’s trust had all but evaporated in the wake of the robberies they’d suffered last month. That filthy rat-speaker and his friends …

  The boy and his sister had escaped in the chaos of the rebel attack. And though they’d be fools to return, the Gentleman had demanded security be the Scorpion Children’s watchword from here on. Thinking of the money and men they’d lost to that boy-child and his iron-thrower, Jimen couldn’t help but agree.

  The hour was late, and his eyes felt full of sand. Jimen stretched and yawned, listening to the rain, looking at the mural of Lord Izanagi on the wall. The Maker God was rendered in a familiar pose; stirring the ocean of creation with his spear, Lady Izanami beside him.

  Life was never simple, Jimen thought. Such was man’s fate. Even when he got what he wanted, it was seldom what he thought it would be. He could climb the tallest peak he sees, and still there would be another beyond, yet higher to climb. Only Lord Izanagi stood above all, higher than any mortal could ascend.

  And even the Maker had an insane bitch of a wife to deal with …

  Something moved in the shadows of the ceiling beams above, making Jimen start. The little accountant squinted at the shape and cursed, reaching for the tantō at his belt. A corpse-rat peered at him with eyes of black glass, gleaming and empty, lantern light flickering in their depths. The thing was over a foot and a half long, mangy ears, yellow teeth bunched in its mouth like an arena crowd. It snuffled the air, head tilted, blinking.

  “Little bastard…” Jimen hissed. “How did you get past the baits?”

  Shouts from the warehouse outside, dulled by distance and old timber. Jimen turned just as the door opened, a tattooed lump of muscle poking his head around the frame.

  “Trouble,” the gangster said. “Stay here, Jimen-sama.”

  The accountant flourished his knife, backed into a corner. The rat peered down at him with empty doll’s eyes, black and dead. Jimen flinched as he heard a loud boom, a man’s scream. Glancing at the knife in his hand, he set it aside, hefting a long tetsubo club sitting by the door. Four feet of studded iron, comforting and heavy in his hand. The rat on the ceiling tilted its head.

  Blinked.

  A second boom, then a third. Another scream, like a babe ripped from mother’s womb—the tune of an ending no man really deserved. Jimen blinked sudden sweat from his eyes, backed farther into the corner and, despite the knowledge there were a dozen of his fiercest between him and whatever “trouble” approached, found himself wishing his office had more than one exit.

  The wall pressed hard against his back.

  Scuffling and screaming drawing closer, beating now on the door, hinges cracking. Silence followed, dark and cold and bottomless, broken only by the soft chittering of the rat above his head, the drip-drip-drip of something thick and viscous just beyond the door. Leaking in across the landing. Gleaming dark.

  The handle turned slowly.

  The door opened slower still.

  Eyes. A legion of eyes. Jet-dark and shining in the gloom, a hundred tiny orbs reflecting the paper lanterns. A boy stood amongst them, tall and spattered red. Ghost-pale skin and shaven head, a blood-soaked bandage over a missing ear. An iron-thrower, ugly and smoking, clutched in one white-knuckle fist. Running a slow tongue along bloodless lips.

  The boy spoke, voice dripping murder. “You know who I am?”

  Jimen glanced at the corpse-rat sea around the boy’s feet. “Hai.”

  “The Gentleman. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Laughter. Grim and mirthless. Ending as suddenly as it began.

  “What do I look like to you?”

  “A dead man,” Jimen spat, hefting the warclub.

  The boy raised his finger, blood-slicked, eyes narrowing. And the horde rippled like black swell on a midnight bay, and forth they came, open mouths and bloody teeth, a swarm from some far-flung nightmare in the days when prayers were answered and the dark had eyes and monsters were oh, so very real.

  The boy stood and watched. Listened as they began to chew. Smiling soft and deadly as Jimen screamed his mother’s name, his own voice only a whisper.

  “What do I look like now, motherfucker?”

  * * *

  This was his moment of triumph.

  The Gentleman dashed back another mouthful, wiped the sting from his lips. He stared at the irezumi on his flesh—the koi fish and cherry blossoms and geisha girls marking him as clanless trash. Not lucky enough to b
e born one of the four mighty zaibatsu, no. A child of gutters and a nameless family. He wondered who his people were. Where they’d come from, in days before the Empire crushed two dozen into four. Panda? Mantis? Cat? Monkey? Dog?

  None of it mattered anymore. Tonight, he was Oyabun of the Scorpion Children. Master of the largest band of cutthroats, pimps, drug dealers and extortionists in all of Kigen. From lowborn trash, to a lord of the city. And all it had taken was a few hundred murders …

  Eri stood in the doorway, the lantern behind throwing a long shadow on the floor. “Will you say good night to your son, Husband?”

  “Soon, love.”

  She touched his face, swept the graying hair back from his brow and kissed his cheek. Tiptoeing up the hall to their son’s room, to coo and sing the child into pleasant dreams.

  How long did he sit there, drinking in the dark and dreaming of empire? A kingdom of shadows, wrought with his own bare hands. Eri’s voice finally roused him, thin and trembling. There was something in her tone. Something close to …

  The Gentleman pulled himself to his feet, padding up the stairs to the babe’s room, door ajar, flickering with the dull flame of a single night light. He could hear little Kaito laughing—his firstborn son, the boy’s voice high and bright, filling him with momentary joy.

  Melting into fear.

  It hit him like a hammerblow as he stepped into the room, seeing the boy in his crib, plump and rosy-cheeked, pawing at the sleek black shapes coiled around him. His crib infested with them, the smallest at least two feet long, dead doll’s eyes and crooked yellow fangs.

  The gasp caught in his teeth as he lunged forward. “Kaito!”

  “Far enough, friend.” A hiss. Behind.

  He turned, caught sight of him then, standing in the far corner with hands in sleeves, Eri trussed at his feet like a corpse-rat in a butcher shop window. Blank expression. Pale and still. Only the eyes gave him away, swimming with the empty solace of murder. The eyes of a killer in a pretty boy’s face—a face the Gentleman had last seen weeping and screaming as he tore his sister’s eye from her socket.

  The rat-speaker.

  Rage flooded him, hot and blinding. He took two swift steps forward, tantō somehow already in his hands as the boy held up his finger and the corpse-rats shrieked, one sawing note that set Kaito to screaming, surrounded by hungry, open mouths.

  “You think they’ll fret or froth?” The boy glanced at the bedful of vermin. “If the fellow holding their leash slacks his grip?”

  The boy nodded to the knife in the Gentleman’s hand.

  “Best be dropping that shiv. Supposing we can be gentlemanly about this. Gentleman.”

  “You threaten my family—”

  “Oh, don’t step there, little yakuza. Don’t even dare.”

  A corpse-rat stood tall in the crib, licking Kaito’s tears with a long, gray tongue. Eri’s weeping was a distant waterfall. The tantō thumped into the floorboards, point down and quivering.

  The boy’s voice was soft as velvet. Black as night.

  “There once was a clever boy named Yoshi. And being who he was, which was no one of much account in the grandest of schemes, and not half so clever as he thought, he took what wasn’t his, and lost almost everything that was.”

  The boy stepped closer, footsteps lost under corpse-rat whispers.

  “And at the last, with empty pockets and empty chest, he paid a visit to the man who’d taken all of it away. Because good or bad, favors are just like kisses. They taste sweeter when you give them back.”

  The boy unfolded hands from sleeves. The Gentleman was not the least surprised when he saw what he held in his fists.

  A claw-tooth hammer and a rusted pair of pliers.

  “Get on your fucking knees.”

  “Suppose then,” the Shinshi said, “that I do not.”

  “Then I suppose you can listen to your son die.”

  The Gentleman blinked, gaze flickering from the rusted tools to the boy’s eyes. No trembling in the gutter-rat’s voice. No hint of fear or hesitation. An impressive display.

  A peacock before wolves.

  The Gentleman tilted his head, felt the vertebrae pop. His cheeks were saké warm, his tongue slightly too big for his mouth. Edges numb. Heavy as lead. But there was no pup on earth he couldn’t whip, no matter how blurred the lines.

  “Yoshi, isn’t it?”

  The boy made no reply. It would not matter if he had.

  “It takes a peculiar kind of emptiness to murder children, Yoshi-san. I’ve seen the eyes of men who kill babes. It leaves a mark, that callousness. A stain, if you will. And forgive me, child, but for all your crowing, I do not see that mark in you.”

  Fists clenching.

  “I called you coward once.”

  “Don’t—”

  “And to that measure I hold.”

  A quick step, feint and lunge, fist slipping past the boy’s guard and into his solar plexus. A damp explosion of air, spittle-thick, the boy bending double, cheeks running red. The Gentleman lifted a knee into his throat, the boy dropping hammer and pliers, intertwining his fingers to stop the blow just short of turning his windpipe to sauce. The impact lifted him back, crashing against the wall. Coughing. Gasping.

  A shrieking filled the room, tar-black and flea-ridden, little Kaito singing falsetto above their wails. The corpse-rats swarmed off the bed toward the yakuza boss, and the Gentleman dispatched a few in quick succession with his heel. Crunching skulls and spines, one, two, three, before a bucktoothed fellow with a mouthful of knives latched hold and started worrying his Achilles like old rope. He roared, tore the vermin away in a shower of bright red.

  The boy hit him from behind, spine hyperextending, Eri screaming at the top of her lungs. The boy was on his back, a fistful of fringe in one hand, the other curled tight and slamming repeatedly into his head. The Gentleman howled as half a dozen rats seized hold, one tearing his face, another at the fingers scrabbling for the tantō he’d dropped. The boy sensed his intent, lunged for the blade himself, just a second too slow.

  Knife in hand, whirling and stabbing, flailing at the scabby mongrel snapping at his eyes. He felt the knife bite the boy’s forearm, shallow but long, spattering the walls scarlet. The boy rolled away, the Gentleman snapped up to a crouch as mangy shadows scrambled up his leg, onto his back, digging in between his shoulders, the screams of his wife and son filling his ears as the boy snatched up the rusty claw hammer and came to his feet, gods the noise, the pain, flailing at the razored shapes chewing his spine, slamming himself into the wall to dislodge them as the boy loomed, hammer raised, lips drawn back and grinning …

  The rusted claw connecting with his jaw.

  Bone splintering.

  Teeth flying.

  Spinning like a dancer, the world upending as he toppled backward, felt another blow, dim and distant on the back of his head. And the boy was cursing, spitting bile, raising the bloody iron for another blow and his legs went out from under him and he toppled earthward and between each blow, falling now like leaden rain, he heard the boy (gods, just a boy) spitting, hissing, voice thick with tears. The same refrain, over and over, like poetry laid over the splitting percussion etched into his skull.

  Verse.

  “You killed my boy.”

  Chorus.

  “You killed my boy.”

  Finale.

  “You.”

  Thump.

  “Killed.”

  Thump.

  “Me.”

  * * *

  Hush.

  Yoshi stood amidst the ruins, hammer dripping onto the boards at his feet. The rats were poised around the corpse, salivating. Always hungry. Always.

  Hush now.

  The woman was weeping, muffled behind her hair, eyes averted. The baby was screaming, red faced and snot-nosed. And Yoshi stood in the middle of it all and felt salty warmth cutting down his cheeks, smile like a tear across his face, trying to rid himself of the sight still hangin
g disembodied before his eyes—Jurou lying split and chewed in that alleyway. Crystal clear, tinged blood-red by the knowledge that all the killing in the world wouldn’t bring him back, wouldn’t make it stop, wouldn’t fill the hole he left behind.

  “Motherfucker,” he breathed. “You motherfucker…”

  The hammer fell from nerveless fingers, thumping onto the boards, slicked with ruby red. And Yoshi stepped over the corpse-rats, picked up the baby, the Gentleman’s son, holding him at arm’s length while the woman began screaming anew.

  “Not my son, gods no! NO!”

  He turned slowly, staring at her trussed on the floor. Holding the wriggling child, watching him wail. So tiny. So fragile.

  “Murderer!” she screamed. “Don’t touch him!”

  And he saw it then, as if for the first time. The way she saw him. The thing he was. Had become. Death to more death. How the boy in his arms would one day grow to hate the one who killed his father. How eighteen years from now, it might be Yoshi smashed on the floor beside some screaming lover as this boy completed the circle. Began a new one. Violence upon violence upon violence. No kind of ending. Just a different beginning. And for what?

  For what?

  What would make it stop?

  There was silence then. In his head. For the first time in as long as he could remember. And the corpse-rats looked up at the chubby squalling thing in his hands, gray tongues licking blood-matted whiskers, and he knelt amongst them with the babe in his arms.

  Breathing hard.

  Blinking sweat from his eyes.

  All the world standing still.

  Husssssh.

  He lifted the bloody tantō from the floor. Cut the woman’s bonds. Handed over her son. And as she crawled back into the corner, clutching the wailing babe tight to her breast, teeth barred and fierce as tigers, he felt something unwind inside him. Something release.

  “Figure he might come stalking for me one day.” He pointed to the boy. “Figure I’d probably deserve it. Just like your man deserved it.” A shrug. “Assuming any of this is still here, I mean. Can’t say as I’d pitch blame at either of you for that.”

  Yoshi walked toward the door, boots squeaking in the gore. The woman stared, saying nothing, pressing her son to her cheek.