The groan of tortured metal caught her ears next, Yukiko looking up to see the Earthcrusher toppling to its knees, great clouds of smoke spilling from its belly. The scythe-arms still twitched amidst the splintered walls of Kitsune-jō, but the behemoth seemed incapable of walking any farther. Elation filled her heart, the sky about her now ablur with the bloodied remnants of the Everstorm pack, calling to each other across the smoke and ash. Blood-smeared. Amber and green eyes alight with victory. Even Sukaa seemed aglow with it.
“Do you see, Hiro?” She smiled down at the Daimyo, on his knees, face painted in blood. “First House is gone. Earthcrusher paralyzed. Yama still stands. Everything. All you’ve done. All for nothing.”
The Honorable Death hit the ground, gouging a furrow through the Market Square. The ship trembled, crashing nose-first into a temple to Amaterasu. Yukiko clutched the railings as the skip came to a shuddering stop. Clouds of dust, the sound of distant fighting, crackling flames.
She lifted her hand, brow creased in concentration as the Daimyo of the Tora zaibatsu clutched his temples and curled up in a ball on the deck.
“Good-bye, Hiro…”
A tremor.
Just a whisper at first, the faded echo of a quake long past. The ground aflutter beneath them, small stones dancing on broken cobbles, roof tiles falling to their end. But growing louder now, stronger, the earth shaking, bucking, a rumbling, crumbling groan seeping up from underground. Sukaa’s voice rang in her mind.
~ BEWARE. ~
Buruu roared, eyes flashing.
YUKIKO, GET ON MY BACK!
Yukiko leapt onto his shoulders, the mighty thunder tiger taking flight as the ground roared, like a spoiled child in a tantrum, flat on its back and screaming its displeasure.
Yama’s walls split and crumbled, the entire city shaking, houses collapsing, dust pall rising, flagstones splitting wide and tumbling down into new fissures, grinning like toothless smiles. Terror spilling across the city, taller buildings now crumbling to ruin, the five-sided tower of Chapterhouse Yama listing, sky-spires toppling into twisted wreckage, the ruins of the Amatsu bridge dropping away into black, shivering water.
What in the name of the gods …
EARTHQUAKE.
Like none I’ve ever seen …
They flew above the city, looking south toward the Kitsune deadlands, the great swathes of choking, ashen earth. Yukiko felt dread in her chest, cool and sickening, watching the pall of ash-gray fumes roiling as the cracks in the tortured earth split wider and wider, crumbling into a darkness her eyes wanted to slip away from, faint screaming in the back of her mind.
… WHAT IS THAT?
You hear it too?
THROUGH YOU. WHAT IS IT?
Gods …
She remembered the Everstorm, the darkness she’d glimpsed as she looked toward Shima through the Lifesong. She reached into the Kenning, into the fire of every living thing around her, the storm of self and spirit and breath, feeling the pulse of the world.
The screaming grew louder in her ears, Buruu roaring in fear, the other arashitora echoing his unease. Distress in her womb, her hand pressed against the swell of warmth and life growing there. She focused on the sound—that horrid, glistening wail, like bloody nails drawn shrieking down the chalkboard of her skull—and amidst the terror, the primal, paralyzing fear of it all, she heard an inverted rhythm, drummed onto the skin of madness by the claws of stillborn children. And she realized it wasn’t the sound of screaming at all. Not a wail or a howl or a cry. It was …
IT IS A SONG.
A mother’s voice, black with hate and longing, drifting from the edges of time. The blind Inquisitor’s words echoing now in her head, his grin that of a corpse-mask.
“The little ones are already here, after all…”
And looking into the deadlands fissures, guts clawing the insides of her throat in their bid to escape, she saw them. Silhouettes against a deeper darkness, crawling up from the cracks, coated in ashes, eyes glowing bloody red. Humanoids with midnight blue skin, long, sinuous arms, underbites overfull with grinning teeth. But beyond them, dragging themselves up out of the widening pits leading down to gods knew where i
know
where
came shapes carved of nightmares, all mouths and eyes and skinless meat, things of wings and fangs and ash-smeared flesh, backward fingers and razor smiles and names all children know in the deep black of night and grow in the light and choose to forget.
Oni …
They rose in a swarm, only a handful, but still, but still … Voices raised with Hers, with Hers, and looking to the south, to the Stain, to the heart of the corruption humanity had planted in its own skin, Yukiko knew the true shape of fear.
She knew at last where all this had been leading.
What was coming.
Who was coming.
She knew.
“Lady Izanami,” she breathed. “Great Maker, save us…”
*