She spoke aloud, but her voice rang in the Kenning, in each arashitora’s mind, burning with the heat of a pale white flame.
“Each of you know what you must do.”
Kaiah growled, long and low.
- WE KNOW THE PATH. WE WILL MARK IT FOR YOU IN DEMON BLOOD, YUKIKO. -
“When the gate is closed, the iron giant will incinerate all around it. Go no farther than you have to, risk nothing more than you need to. Your lives are precious, and I would see each of you back in Everstorm, to tell the tale of this day to your children.”
Shai circled alongside Buruu.
*WE WILL TELL THEM. THEY WILL REMEMBER.*
The voices of the pack echoed in the Kenning, their thoughts as one.
THEY WILL REMEMBER.
Sukaa growled low and deep, emerald eyes on the rising dark.
~ LET US WASTE NO MORE TIME. LET THERE BE AN ENDING. ~
Yukiko looked to Hana and Yoshi, calling to them above the howling wind.
“You two, stay as close to Buruu and I as you can. If we fall before we get to the hellgate, one of you will have to enter Yomi instead. I have no idea what awaits you there or how to fight it. But one of us must finish this story!”
“We will!” Hana cried. “Whatever happens, one of us will see it done!”
Kaiah was flying close-by, gaze fixed on Buruu. She reached out with her thoughts into the bridge, her words echoing in Yukiko’s mind, laced with something close to regret.
- CAN YOU HEAR THE THUNDER, KINSLAYER? OUR FATHER RAIJIN IS PROUD. THE STONES AND THE SKY WILL SING OF YOUR COURAGE FOR A THOUSAND YEARS. -
THAT MATTERS NOT TO ME, KAIAH. IT NEVER HAS.
- I SEE THE TRUTH OF IT. THE LACK OF SELF. THE WILL TO DO WHAT OTHERS WILL NOT. TO PLACE YOUR PACK ABOVE YOURSELF. THE MARK OF A TRUE RULER. -
She nodded, pushed warmth into his mind.
- MY KHAN. -
Buruu purred, nodding once. Yukiko smiled, reached out and touched the mind of every thunder tiger, one by one. Finally she settled on Shai, looked at the pale boy clinging to the Shakhan’s shoulders. She called out, the wind snatching her words from her lips.
“You’re awfully quiet, Yoshi.”
The boy blinked, the corner of his mouth curling into a smile.
“Makes a pleasant change, I’ll wager.”
“There’s no need to be afraid.”
“Can’t say I’m not, Stormgirl. I’d be a liar if I did. But it’s not fear that’s got me stilled.”
“Then what is it?”
He shrugged, looked toward the gathering black.
“Seems a time for doing, not talking…”
Yukiko turned to the Yomi hordes below, the swarms of hellspawn clustered around the blackened pit. The corpse-hawks were a seething cloud, the skinthings and corpsefly maws filling the air with blood-thick roars. She fixed her gaze on the darkness, narrowing her eyes and trembling as the headache bloomed and the tuneless, mournful song echoed in her mind.
That was it. The utter dark. Where they must go.
She nodded.
“Not talking. Doing.”
She drew her katana and held it aloft, the blade’s edge gleaming as lightning arced overhead. Thunder shook the sky, Susano-ō and Raijin gathered to cheer on their struggle against the Endsinger’s horde. The Thunder God’s drums rolled across the clouds, echoed by the gaijin wardrums below, roaring sky-ship engines, thousands of hammers pounding on shields, revving of chainsaw katanas. The army below rippled, rearing back and tensing for the spring.
Yukiko drew a deep breath, the song of the storm filling the sky.
“Not alone!” she roared. “Together!”
She leveled her sword at the enemy.
“BANZAI!”
* * *
The Earthcrusher roared and lumbered forward, retching lungfuls of billowing black. The army cried out with one voice, charging headlong through the mist and snow toward the Yomi horde, shreddermen in the vanguard, scythesaw arms chattering and raised for the kill. The sky-fleet engines thundered, propellers shredding the soup-thick air, steam and exhaust spewing from their flanks. The Honorable Death came first, flanked by the fair Kurea. Captain Blackbird stood at his ship’s helm and roared into the storm. Kaori beside him, manning a shuriken-thrower, eyes fixed on the incoming swarm.
The corpse-hawks shrieked, beaks of bloody bone open wide, milk-pale eyes bulging in rotting sockets. The fleet opened fire, cutting a swath through the cloud, black blood spraying as razored steel tore the air. The beasts came on, not slowed by mortal wounds, only tumbling from the sky when their wings were too shredded to keep them aloft. The Everstorm pack swooped through them, cutting like chainblades, ripping heads from necks and wings from backs. The sky was filled with screams, with the popopopopopop of the shuriken-throwers, the hiss and woosh of flame-spitters lighting the dark. Above it all, Raijin pounded his drums, lightning spreading across the clouds like cracks in the face of the sky.
The Earthcrusher hit the Yomi horde like an avalanche, cutting a swath through a dozen demons with one sweep of its arm. Blood like a river, an ocean, gurgling screams and shearing bones. But where one demon fell, another two took its place, charging headfirst into flame-spitter fire, withering bursts of shrapnel from the iron-throwers. One gigantic, headless monstrosity collided with the ’Crusher’s belly, latching hold with tentacled arms as long as buildings. The behemoth staggered, a hundred smaller gibbering demons hitting its legs and climbing; a rising tide of open, shrieking mouths.
Inside the cockpit, Kin cursed, fighting to keep control of the war-machine beneath the weight of the demonic tide.
“Portside hydraulic pressure dropping!” roared Misaki from her console. “They’ve sundered one of the lines!”
Damage reports came one after the other.
“Shrapnel-throwers seven and ten disabled!”
“Legs seven and five unresponsive!”
“Loading bay! Get to the loading bay!”
“Godsdammit!” Kin swung one of the Earthcrusher’s arms, feeling the impact rock the goliath, painting the viewing portals with great sluices of black blood.
Shinji’s voiced crackled over the PA. “Kin, demons are at the loading bay doors! If they breach, there won’t be anything left of the Earthcrusher to blow!”
Kin blinked the sweat from his eyes, swung at the seething mob again and again. His voice was a whisper. A prayer. Not to the gods roaring in the skies above, but to the girl who now held all their fates in their hands.
“Hurry, Yukiko…”
* * *
Yukiko pressed low to Buruu’s back, watching him tear a corpse-hawk’s head clean off its shoulders as they flew past, wheeling and spinning through storms of rotting flesh. The sky was black with them, screaming, shrieking nightmares on leather wings, claws like knives. The thunder tigers were faster, fiercer, but there were so many of the creatures that individual might meant nothing. The pack split apart, sweeping and diving through the air, dismembering one foe only to be pursued by a dozen more. A Morcheban dam fell from the sky, half a dozen hawks tearing at her belly and ripping at her eyes. Tuake had his wing sheared off at the shoulder, roaring in agony as he tumbled to his ruin on the ashen earth below.
The pack regrouped near the fleet, keeping close to the withering hail of death spewing from the shuriken-throwers. Yukiko could see Ginjiro at his flagship’s prow, roaring commands to his crew. A Phoenix corvette called Flameburst lived up to its name, exploding into a billowing cloud of fire as it was torn from the clouds. The Honorable Death loomed close by, Hiro storming across the deck with his Elite Samurai, hacking at the corpse-hawks who’d managed to break through the ’thrower fire and attack his crew. The Guild ship Resplendent Glory was spiraling out of control, her decks overrun by seething black, the piercing screams of men being devoured alive rising above the roar of engine and storm.
Hana screamed over the slaughter. “Yukiko! The Earthcrusher is being overrun!”
“I c
an see it. But there’s too many of these godsdamned things!”
Spiraling through the scent of ozone and death, thunder crashing in time with her pulse. She could feel wind in her feathers, blood on her claws, the acrid tang of the kill in her mouth. Sweeping through the sky as easily as fish through a rushing stream, Buruu’s heart pumping in her chest, her eyes in the back of his head. Rolling and swooping and roaring, feathers crackling with wisps of lightning, blasting dozens of horrors from the skies with each burst of Raijin Song. Hana chopping and slicing with her chainkatana, Yoshi blowing withered heads off rotting shoulders with his iron-thrower. Slow and bloody work, but on they flew, the girl and her thunder tiger and the pack around them, closer to the deepening dark.
And then the darkness moved.
A ripple in the impossible black, the shriek of a thousand tortured gulls across a bleeding sky, a knife of burning ice in her mind. Yukiko hissed, Buruu and the pack broke away as a thing rose up from the hellgate, too horrifying for her eyes to focus on.
A vast winged shape, hundreds of feet across, twisted and monstrous. Its stink hit Yukiko like a punch to the face, vomit rolling in back of her throat. It was a horror wrought of corpses—the bodies of dead birds, maggot-riddled, two eyes burning with freezing blue flame, the beating of its wings like a hurricane laden with the suffocating aroma of death. And she knew it for what it was: the tortured spirit of every sparrow that had fallen choking from blood-red skies. Every crane or eagle that had spiraled from the clouds with a lungful of poisons and a bellyful of blood, reborn in the Hells, bringing death now to those who had destroyed them and all their kind.
It screamed again—the agonized wail of ten thousand denizens of the air, dying in pain beneath a burning red sun.
“Great Maker,” Yukiko breathed. “Protect us now.”
* * *
Aleksandar smashed the skull of a wailing, faceless horror with his lightning hammer, bursting the creature’s head apart in a spray of bone and brain. The Kapitán kicked the flailing corpse back into the oncoming wall of flesh, introducing another abomination’s face to his shield. His arms were slicked in black blood, the ground beneath him a mire of melting snow and gore, the stench bringing tears to his eyes. All around him, men were fighting and screaming and dying, swords and hammers falling, the crunch of bone and the spray of blood interspersed with the buzzing choir of chainsaw katanas. Shreddermen were reaping demons by the armful, but for every dozen that fell, a brave man was borne to the ground and torn asunder, a shredderman was toppled and the pilot inside ripped limb from bloody limb. There seemed to be no end to the hellspawn, all glowing eyes and reeking flesh and snik-snak claws. His lungs burned and his sight blurred, and every step felt a tortured mile.
Worse, there was the song. Rising in intensity, so loud he could almost hear the words. It was bloody fingernails drawn across a chalkboard of skin. A sliver of metal behind his eyeball, a constant, conscious, breathing wrongness in the marrow of his bones. Some men fell still at the sound, stupefied, staring into the gaping wound in the island’s face and lifting not a finger as the demons fell upon them, smiling like simpletons as they were dismembered.
Aleksandar recognized it—the dulcet tones he’d not heard since he was a boy. The voice of his mother, calling across long and empty years. He felt the need to be held, cradled to a warm breast as he’d been as a babe, when all the world revolved around her, her, the one who bore him, who carried him inside her, who would always be a part of him no matter how tall and strong he grew. He felt the wrongness of it all, the mother betrayed, left alone in darkness to rot and plot and dream of revenge. A revenge now come unto the world she had died birthing.
But he knew it was a lie. Some evil magik born of the Shiman’s hell. Whatever this Dark Mother was, she was not his Goddess. And so he clutched the pendant about his throat and prayed for vision, for clarity and will, and smashed another demon’s head from its shoulders.
“Do not listen!” he roared. “Do not listen to the song!”
The ground shook, the abyss rippling as if a stone had been dropped into black water. He looked beyond the demon lines and saw the vast carrion bird rising from the pit, the reek of old death and worms like a hammerblow to his face. A vast and terrifying shadow fell over the battlefield, throwing all into chaos and darkness.
“Everliving Goddess,” he whispered. “Protect us now.”
* * *
The mighty carrion bird screamed, swooping across the smoke and rolling black, a cyclone reeking of open graves beneath its wings. The repeating chatter of shuriken fire rang in Yukiko’s ears, the revving of sky-ship engines pushed to full burn. Blackbird, Kaori and the crew of the Kurea were engaged in bloody battle with a deck full of the smaller corpse-hawks; the Lotus Wind had been overrun, but the rest of the fleet had set course for the beast, scrawling exhaust across the sky as they charged. At the forefront, Yukiko could see the Honorable Death, Hiro standing at the prow with chainswords drawn, roaring at the top of his lungs.
Hiro …
THEY BUY US TIME. WE CANNOT WASTE IT.
Hana screamed into the choking wind. “Yukiko, go! Go!”
Sukaa swooped past, first into the breach, the buck’s words burning in her mind.
~ FLY, MONKEY-CHILD. FLY! ~
The thunder tigers banked left and cut through a small swarm of corpse-hawks, buffeted by blasts from worm-riddled wings. Thunder rolled about them, ruined bodies falling from the sky as they wove between the snapping beaks and slashing claws. Yoshi’s iron-thrower roared, blasting the face off a snarling monstrosity swooping toward Yukiko’s back. Hana circled high, burning bright in Yukiko’s mind, overcome with the battle around her, the fury of the arashitora she rode. The girl was laughing, if one could believe it—laughing as she and Kaiah split half a dozen corpse-hawks into ribbons, black blood falling like rain. A brutal symbiosis, a oneness Yukiko couldn’t help but find beautiful, reaching out to Buruu and feeling the same, the pack tearing away over the bottomless black, the clouds above lit by blinding blue-white.
She heard an explosion behind her, a rush of boiling air around her, as if she walked on the face of the sun after days of freezing cold. A roar of rage and agony, a glance over her shoulder to see the giant shadow aflame, wings smoldering as it screamed. The air about her awash with black and teeth and talons, bursts of iron-thrower fire, roaring chainswords, writing a poem in blood across a canvas of smoking cloud. Buruu inside her, around her, above and between her, so close she felt she wore his skin, saw the world through his eyes, focused now on the rippling darkness before them, growing wider, colder, deeper, the song scratching at her eyeballs, rising above the wall between her and the Lifesong, seeping through the cracks she allowed herself to have. She could hear the tuneless song, twisting the vertebrae up her spine one by one by one until it lodged like a splinter in the back of her skull. And in the midst of that awful, soulless dirge, she heard a voice calling from the dark.
“Ichigo…”
She knew it. That voice. Still graveled from a lotus pipe kiss, the countless days spent in sunless bars. The pet name he’d called her since she was a little girl, running with her brother through the bamboo valley, sitting on his shoulders and feeling as tall as the clouds.
“Ichigo, I’m here…”
Tears in her eyes. The word lodging in her throat like a splinter of black glass.
“Father…”
52
THE ART OF RUIN
It loomed out of the black before him, bringing the darkness with it.
A horror from the muddy mists of childhood, dragged kicking and screaming from beneath his bed into sullen light. Real as he’d always known it to be. Bearing down on his ship, blotting out the lightning’s glow with the maggot-clad breadth of its impossible wings.
Hiro glanced past the ironclads to his port, the arrow-sleek flight of Phoenix corvettes beyond, at last finding the thunder tiger pack. Yukiko had taken her chance, cutting her way through smaller fli
ghts of demons, around this looming horror fresh from the world’s ruptured womb. He stared for a moment at all that could have been, gradually growing smaller. And smaller. And then he tore his gaze away. No time for regrets, for good-byes, for dreams of paths untrodden. This is what it came to. All that was left.
Here.
Now.
The few remaining members of his Elite stood around him, eyes locked on the foe. Their presence was a comfort, here at the last—his brothers, ready to die for something real. Not a dream of Shōguns or dynasties. Not the dream of a father drowning in regret, embroidered with faded tigers. For a future unborn. For something to be proud of, if not remembered for. Here at the ending of the world, standing before the edge and saying “No.”
Saying “Never.”
And so he roared it. Raised his chainkatana and screamed it, staring into the swelling eyes of the monstrosity before him, its beak splitting open to reveal a pit as black as the rift below. The Honorable Death and all her crew would scarcely be a mouthful, the sword in his hand no more than a humming splinter on its tongue. But still he roared, lips peeled back from his teeth, face twisted in a maddened, howling smile. The beast seemed not to notice, blotting out all sight and sound, a perfect dark intent on swallowing them utterly.
And there, as the black swelled and the chill shivered his bones, he pictured his mother’s letter. Her tears at their parting. Her final, desperate plea.
“Open your eyes, my son.”
He turned to the pilot, gave his signal. An Artificer belowdecks cranked an oil-slick handle. The winged abomination opened its maw.
“Wake up.”
The Honorable Death’s engines coughed once, spat flame, the chi within her belly igniting as the thing’s beak closed on her inflatable. A dull roar filled the sky, the Death’s hull splitting apart in a superheated ball of flame, a savage kiss to the lips of escaping hydrogen, right into the mouth of the monstrosity closing all about them.
A brief burst of blinding, beautiful daylight.
A second of dawning’s dazzling beauty.