“Do you see it?” she breathed. “Gods above, it’s beautiful.”
Closing her eyes, she reached out through the storm, feeling the world fall away beneath her feet. She pawed through the blackness, a blind girl in search of the sun. And then she touched it, searing hot, fury coiled among the soporific gravity of the poison, clouded and dark. She felt the need to destroy. To rend. Animal rage layered over ferocious intelligence, indignant that it had been challenged by this wooden insect, this slug with no wings, dragging itself through the sky and reeking of dead, burning flowers.
And then it felt her. Confusion. Aggression. Curiosity. Its voice bounced around the inside of her skull, as deafening as the peals of thunder crashing through the skies around her.
WHO ARE YOU?
Yukiko.
Intrigue overcame anger, wheeling closer, and in that moment it returned her touch. A ghost of a whisper, the strength of a steel spring coiled behind it, waiting to be unleashed.
WHAT ARE YOU?
The wind rushed beneath them, the raging storm nothing but a summer breeze, electricity tingling on their flesh as the lightning flashed. And then they felt pain, a series of deep thuds into their belly, piercing, venomous. Sleep curled out along their veins, and rage rose to challenge it, a scream building in their throats and spilling forth to fill the skies.
* * *
“You got him!” Akihito cried, swinging the blinding light overhead.
The creature roared again, a faint tremor of fatigue underscoring the anger. Kasumi leaned over her sights, braced the net-thrower against her shoulder.
“Now!” Masaru yelled.
A sharp burst of compressed air. Sixty feet of tightly bound lotus hemp spilled out into the night, gossamer threads as strong as steel, a choir of locusts buzzing in their ears. The line spooled out from beneath the weapon’s belly, weighted strands engulfing the bellowing thunder tiger like a spider web. Masaru was already leaping down to the deck, sending the motorized winch spinning. Kasumi fired the second net-thrower, another volley of lines closing over the beating wings, pressing them tight against flanks now heaving with fear, fight giving way to flight.
But too late. Too late.
The beast plummeted from the sky, blacksleep pounding in its veins and knocking it senseless. It dropped away below the starboard railing, falling down into the dark. The Child lurched sideways, dragged down by the colossal weight as the winch lines snapped taut, motors screaming in protest. Cloudwalkers cried out in panic as the remaining engine strained to recover, Yamagata pouring on the fuel and pressing down on the wheel with the aid of his navigator. The storm battered the ship, as if Raijin himself were furious at their attack on his offspring. Several crew disappeared over the side, dangling by their lifelines over the whistling drop to the ground hundreds of feet below. But stubbornly, gradually, the sky-ship righted itself, limping back onto an even keel.
“Get him up on deck, he’ll tip us over!” Yamagata bellowed.
The winches groaned and began reeling in the weight, lines smoking, engines spitting fumes into the rain. The cloudwalkers hauled their stricken brethren back on deck and then pitched in to help with the thunder tiger, reaching down with gaff hooks to catch hold of the nets. Gradually the shape came into view, curled tight in strands of black swaddling, narrowed eyes staring at the men with toxin-clouded hatred.
Sweating and heaving under the weight, the crew eventually employed the Child’s motorized cargo crane to heft the beast onto the deck. Rain sluiced down in waves, freezing cold and relentless. Lightning arced dangerously close, their ears splitting with the peals of thunder.
It took twenty men to drag the beast into the cage. Masaru urged caution, warning the crew to be careful with the tiger’s wings. Akihito was foremost among them, muscles stretched and humming, joy plainly written on his face. Kasumi stood to one side, needle-thrower in her hands, watching for any sign of awakening. She radiated a quiet pride, lips pressed into a tight smile.
When the beast was locked behind bars, the bedraggled men gathered around and cheered, slapping each other’s backs and saluting the brave hunters and their grim captain, still hanging onto the wheel of his wounded ship. Yamagata saluted back, managed a weary grin. Masaru beamed like a proud father, eyes aglow, disbelief still etched plainly on his face.
They had hunted an arashitora. A beast of legend, only a dream. And they had bested it.
Only Yukiko hung back from the throng, sorrow welling in her eyes. She watched the men dance and caper around the beast, feeling for its mind amidst the blacksleep haze. Only the barest whisper of it remained beneath a blanket of thick sleep, a smoldering cinder, a spark of blinding rage that burned her mind when she strayed too close.
Indignity. Disbelief. Fury.
KILL YOU.
She could feel it fighting off the poison, fueled by a purity of intent. A promise to itself, to her, which bore it up slowly out of the blackness on a wind of hate and rage. Not yet.
Not yet. But soon.
KILL YOU ALL.
* * *
The celebrations were short-lived.
The mournful whine of the Child’s remaining engine dragged the cloudwalkers from their moment of joy. Many of them glanced at the torn rigging or at the smoking hole in the Child’s flank, fear plain in their eyes. The storm pounded their ship without mercy; a child’s toy adrift on a raging ocean. The portside engine was gone, severed fuel lines still spitting blood-red chi into the abyss below as the sailors struggled to shut down the valves. Even with the starboard motor at full burn, Yamagata couldn’t maintain course. The Child plunged deeper into the tempest, compass spinning, silhouettes of black crags looming out of the darkness.
Masaru clambered up to the pilot’s deck, pushed the rain-soaked hair from his eyes.
“Is it bad?”
“It’s a far cry from bloody good!” Yamagata shouted, leaning into the wheel, his face as grim and pale as a hungry ghost’s. “I can’t see a godsdamned thing!” He turned to his navigator. “Toshi, get on that floodlight on the port side, and get somebody up here to take the starboard. We’re too low. We could fly right into one of these bastard mountains and wouldn’t even know it until we’re dead. Where the bloody hells is Kioshi?”
The navigator stumbled away toward the ladder, yelling for one of the crew. Masaru leaned in closer to Yamagata, shouting to be heard over the snarling wind.
“Can you get us out of the storm?”
“No chance!” The captain staggered as the Child bucked beneath them, wiped his eyes on his sleeve and spat on the deck. “We’re at the mercy of the wind with only one motor. Even if we had a spare port engine, we couldn’t fix it in this shit.”
“Can you take her up?”
“I’m trying, godsdammit! We’re carrying a lot of extra weight.”
As if it could read their minds, the arashitora reared up in its cage, letting loose a groggy roar. The rain pooling across the deck danced skyward amidst the subsonic vibrations. Cloudwalkers backed away from the cage as the beast tried to gain its feet, tearing at the netting with claws and beak, steel-strong lotus fibers snapping like rotten wool.
“Izanagi’s balls,” Masaru breathed, shaking his head. “I put enough blacksleep into it to kill a dozen men.”
“How much do you have left?”
“Not nearly enough for the trip home.”
The sound of shearing cord rang out under the rumbling thunder and howling wind. The creature bellowed in answer to the clouds, the hairs on Masaru’s arms standing rigid, air charged with static electricity. The beast shook itself, remnants of the net sloughing off its wings. Its claws dug great furrows into the deck beneath its feet, the planks cracking like dry leaves.
Kasumi called his name, and Akihito’s face appeared at the top of the ladder to the pilot’s deck moments later. The former quarrel between the men was forgotten, the big man still charged with the elation of their victory.
“It’s waking up, Masaru! S
even darts and it’s on its feet! Have you ever seen the like?”
There was a sound like thunder, close and deafening, splitting the air in two and rolling down their spines. Loud as the crack of an iron-thrower, a bullwhip snapping in the air. The ship rocked as if it had been uppercut, thrashing back on it haunches, cables groaning. A scream of pain rang out from below. Several cloudwalkers were rolling on the wood, covering bleeding ears with trembling hands.
The air split again, Masaru wincing as the ship bucked beneath his feet. He blinked through the rain at the beast, watching as it tried to rear up on its hind legs in the confines of the cage. The mighty wings flapped again, a burst of blue electricity arcing along its flight feathers, accompanied by that same, deafening thunderclap. The ship dropped a good twenty feet in altitude, Masaru’s stomach staying behind to admire the view.
“Gods above, what is that?” Yamagata cried.
“Raijin song,” breathed Masaru.
Truth be told, he had thought it was a mere tall story. Gaudy trimming on the tales of the Stormdancers, one more magical power to elevate them from bedtime stories to legends. The old tales spoke of the song of an arashitora’s wings, the deafening thunderclap that sounded as they wheeled in the storms above, sending the front lines of enemy armies scattering or curled in fetal distress on the battlefield. A gift from their father, the Thunder God himself, the stories said, to mark his children as his own. But it was only an old wives’ tale.
As if in answer, the thunder tiger cracked its wings again, making the same head-splitting noise. Arcs of raw current seethed down the iron cage, bright, impossibly blue. The ship bucked again, rivets groaning, ropes unravelling one thread at a time.
“She can’t take this!” cried Yamagata.
Masaru’s thoughts were quiet. The faint trace of lotus smoke left in his system brought a strange calm, even when all hells were breaking loose around him. He narrowed his eyes, watching the beast as it flailed: the cruel beak, the proud glare in its eye. It beat its wings against the cage, tiny arcs of lightning racing along its blood quills and out into the span of its flight feathers.
Don’t think of it as a living legend. Think of it as a beast, like every other you have hunted. It wants to fly. To be free. Like any other bird of prey.
The thunder tiger roared, as if it knew his heart.
How do you train a wild bird? Reel in that desire and make it see you as the master?
Masaru swallowed.
“Akihito, did Kasumi bring the nagamaki blades that Shōgun Kaneda gave us?”
The big man blinked away the storm. “Of course.”
Masaru’s face was a mask, hard as stone, rain washing over him as if he were granite. He clenched his fists, eyes never leaving the arashitora, drawing the back of his knuckles across his lips.
“Fetch me the sharpest.”
12
TEARS IN RAIN
Yukiko crouched in the bow, the pale boy beside her, watching the beast rail against its prison. She reached out with the Kenning again, feeling only an unassailable rage tinged with a faint ozone scent. She gave it her regret, her pity, flooding its mind with helpless overtures. She tried to make it feel safe, warm. Her every plea was rebuffed; the buzzing of a troublesome insect.
Kin crouched low whenever a cloudwalker approached the bow. Yukiko gradually became aware that he was terrified of the men, skulking low, fear plain in his eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
“They can’t see me like this,” he hissed.
“Like what? What are you talking about?”
“Like this!” he cried.
Yukiko frowned.
“Who are you, Kin?”
A dizzying arc of lightning cracked the sky a handful of feet away from the Thunder Child, blazing a trail through the thousand-span darkness to the waiting earth below. Yukiko flinched, pressed herself against the chi barrels. She cast a fearful glance at the balloon swaying above their heads, straining against its moorings in the grip of the monsoon.
“What happens if lightning hits us?” she whispered.
“That depends. If it ignites the fuel, we’ll burn up. If it strikes the inflatable…” The sentence trailed off into a brief pantomime, pale, slender hands indicating a wobbling descent into the deck and an explosion on impact.
Yukiko squinted through the rain. Her father approached the arashitora’s cage, halting a few feet away and taking the needle-thrower from Kasumi’s arms. The beast roared and cracked its wings again, sending several cloudwalkers sprawling across the deck. Her father took careful aim and emptied an entire magazine of blacksleep into the creature’s flank.
She felt a stab of sympathetic pain, overshadowed by near-mindless outrage. She could feel the beast’s hatred, burning a picture of her father into its brain and vowing to tear him limb from limb, to bathe in him as if he were a fresh mountain stream. But the poison rose up on wings of tar; a smothering, reeking blanket that dragged him back down into oblivion.
Akihito appeared from below deck, carrying the long haft of one of the Shōgun’s nagamaki. He removed the leather sheath from the blade, steel glittering like a mirror as lightning flashed dangerously close to the starboard side. Fear clutched Yukiko’s gut and she stood, Kin forgotten, running down the deck toward the cage as her father unbolted the door.
“You’re going to kill it?” she cried. “You can’t!”
Masaru glanced over his shoulder, eyebrow raised.
“Where did you come from? Get below deck!”
“It hasn’t done anything!”
“We’re not killing it.” Kasumi shook her head. “But it’s going to crash the ship if it keeps up with the Raijin song.”
One of the lookouts shouted a warning, and Yamagata tore the wheel sharply to starboard. A towering spire of jagged mountainside loomed out of the darkness in front of them, the ship’s keel barely clearing a spur of sharp rock. The crew hung on for dear life, the hunters ducking low as the captain flooded more chi into the struggling engine. The Child rose a few precarious feet above the stone fangs.
The hunters stood slowly, uncertain, the deck rolling beneath their feet. Yukiko looked deep into her father’s eyes, unable to banish the dread despite Kasumi’s assurances.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked, fearing the answer.
Masaru hefted the nagamaki.
“Clip its wings.”
* * *
Yukiko’s jaw dropped, eyes wide and bright with outrage.
“What? But why?”
“It’s like any other bird, girl,” Masaru snapped. “If we were breaking in a falcon, we’d do the same. Anything with wings asserts dominance through superior altitude. Take that away, it breaks their spirit. We need to break this beast, and quickly. We don’t have enough blacksleep to knock it out until Kigen. It’s torn the ship to shreds.”
“You’re just going to make it angrier!”
“Aiya, girl. You don’t know what the hells you’re talking about.”
“It’s not just a beast, it thinks like we do. I fel—”
She glanced around quickly and lowered her voice, taking her father by the arm.
“I felt it.”
“You Kenned it?” Masaru hissed, eyes narrowed.
“Hai.” She lowered her gaze to the deck. “I couldn’t help it. It was so beautiful. Like nothing I’d ever seen before.” Her eyes shone as she looked into Masaru’s face. “Please, father, there must be some other way.”
Masaru stared at his daughter, his stony facade softening for a brief moment. She reminded him suddenly of her mother. He could see Naomi in the curve of her cheek, the determination in her eyes, that gods-awful stubbornness he had so adored. But just as quickly as it had come, the softness inside him was gone, replaced with a hunter’s pragmatism and the knowledge that the beast would send them all to their graves if it wasn’t calmed. His daughter among them.
“I’m sorry, Ichigo. There is no other way.”
??
?Please, father—”
“Enough!” he barked, and the thunder rolled in answer, making Yukiko flinch. He turned without another word and stalked into the cage, Akihito following with an apologetic glance. Kasumi placed one restraining hand on Yukiko’s arm, but the girl shrugged her off. Hugging herself tight, she stared at her father’s back, numb and silent, rain spattering across her skin.
Knowledge that the beast could wake at any second bid Masaru to work swift and sure. Akihito knelt among the ruined nets beside the thunder tiger’s right shoulder. The arashitora’s wing structure was similar to an eagle’s: twenty-three primary feathers, each as long as Masaru’s legs and just as broad, glinting with an odd metallic sheen. Twenty-three secondaries, white as new snow. The greater and primary coverts were speckled gray, darkening to charcoal among the lesser coverts. Even slack in the blacksleep repose, Masaru could sense the terrible strength in each wing, enough to propel this impossible beast through the storm-tossed skies like a koi fish beneath the surface of a smooth millpond.
Akihito spread the primaries out in a fan. Masaru drew in one steady, measured breath, brow furrowed, exhaling softly. He gripped the nagamaki tight, knuckles white on the scarlet cord binding the haft. His fingers drummed upon the hilt.
My hands must be as stone. My hands and heart.
The blade fell. A clean slice. Razor-sharp, folded steel, hard as diamond. A faint tearing sound, barely a whisper in the wind. Feathers parted as if they were made of smoke, sheared back to half their length. The severed ends drifted to the deck, looking pathetic and fragile beneath the falling rain.
Behind him, Masaru heard his daughter begin to weep.
He nodded to Akihito, and the men moved to the other wing, repeating the procedure, swift and clinical. Despite the turbulence, the motion of the deck beneath them, the nagamaki fell true, cleaving the feathers like a hot blade through snow. Masaru pushed aside the feeling that he was cutting away a part of himself. He watched the scene as if in a dream, rolling with the motion of the ship, the long blade an extension of his own hand. A hand bloodied by the life of a hundred beasts. The hand of a hunter. A destroyer.