They’d stripped him naked and scrubbed him clean, ridding him of sweat and filth, the dried blood from the Kigen raid and his torture still crusted on his skin. The bathhouse steam had loosened the phlegm in his chest and he’d fallen to coughing—awful, wracking fits that shuddered his core. The Inquisitors watched with bloodshot eyes, saying nothing at all.
They checked his hair, his mouth, every orifice that might conceal a blade. Dressed him in black cloth, combing his hair into a simple knot affixed with black ribbon. They were taking no chances, leaving him nothing with which to strike at the First Bloom in his house of lies.
Daichi closed his eyes. Washed the black from his mouth with a cup of almost clean water. The first Inquisitor’s voice was a paper-thin sigh.
“You will not speak unless spoken to by the First Bloom.”
“You will not look into the eyes of the First Bloom,” said the second.
“You will show the respect that is due to the First Bloom,” said the third.
Daichi’s whisper was rough as gravel road. “Or what?”
The first Inquisitor titled his head. Shifted. One moment he was standing half a dozen steps away, the next he stood before Daichi, coalescing out of a cloud of blue-black smoke. His fist was a blur, the impact sending Daichi back several feet, down to his knees, lips wet with the taste of death and the tears he couldn’t help but shed.
“Or pain,” they said.
*
A darkness so complete Kaori couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, nor the sweat fogging the glass over her eyes. The breather was strapped painfully tight around her head, but chi stench still drenched her tongue, seeping into every pore. Her head swam, echoes tumbling up and down the pipeline serving only to disorient her more. She could hear the other Kagé behind her—Maro and the rest. Two dozen in all, wading in the shallow, blood-red flow.
The pipeline was twenty feet in diameter, two inches thick, oxide clad. After the Phoenix captain had dropped them off beside the rusted serpent, they’d taken half a day to cut through the outer shell, finally slipping inside. After Yama refinery was destroyed, the Guild had drained as much chi from the northern pipeline as possible, but an ankle-deep river of dregs remained. The fumes were so thick Kaori could almost clutch handfuls from the air. But wading through the pipeline’s innards was better than walking the deadlands outside. She swore she could hear voices out there. Claws scrabbling against the pipe.
Whispers.
The Kagé couldn’t risk any illumination for fear of igniting the vapor. And so they walked in blackness, up to their shins. Sound was amplified, twisted until it was almost impossible to think. But on they pressed, knowing there was no wrong turn to make—only one destination the pipe could lead.
First House.
Kaori had no idea how long they trudged in that perfect darkness, footsteps like a funeral march. Forcing their way through heavy, one-way valves, into the vast chambers of silent pumping stations, the machinery standing motionless now the pipeline was empty.
The group would stop only when she could no longer breathe, when the fatigue threatened to bring her to her knees. No hunger in her, save to crawl from this pipe and into the Guild’s blackened heart. No desire, save to rip First House burning from the mountainside. The explosives on her back were leftovers from the Kigen raid—the raid that had ended in failure, Kin’s subterfuge and her father’s surrender into Guild hands.
Gods, why didn’t you trust me?
She came to a stop in the dark, cradled like a babe in mother’s womb. Maro bumped into her, reached out to steady himself, his voice a tenfold whisper muffled by his breather.
“Kaori, are you well?”
She shook her head in the dark, eyes narrowed against the chi burn.
None of it matters anyway.
“Look to yourself, brother,” she replied. “I am fine.”
None of it matters at all.
And on she walked.
*
Dawn was a sulfur smear on the eastern horizon, echoing with the screams of freezing mountain winds. Storm clouds jostled overhead, laced with blinding cracks, each peal of the Thunder God’s drums shivering the stone beneath him.
Akihito stood on the balcony, staring at western skies, praying for winged silhouettes to crest the walls of Five Flowers Palace and fill the air with Raijin Song. If he listened, he fancied he could hear it in the distance—faint, but growing stronger with each passing moment.
DOOMDOOMDOOMDOOM.
DOOMDOOMDOOMDOOM.
Night was slowly fleeing, the warmth of his bed with it. The chill bit bone-deep, stoking the pain of the old wound in his leg. He pulled up his goggles against the black drizzle, wondering what the day would bring. Trying not to think of the night before, to banish the freezing chill with memories of the warmth between Hana’s thighs. Lover’s thoughts were liable to get a man killed on the battlefield. And he was only a man. No samurai. No stormdancer. Just a hunter turned … what? Warrior? Babysitter? Fool?