Always.
A black shape stood tall and fierce on the spire of stone ahead, burning green eyes, vast wings spread in threat, edged with the light of molten stone.
IF I FALL …
You won’t.
BUT IF I DO …
You can’t.
The strength of him. Flooding her mind as Yoritomo took his feathers. As they defeated the Red Bone Warlord and his legion of oni. As they tore ironclads to flaming tatters, brought the nation to its feet, thousands of eyes alight with wonder as they soared overhead. She reminded him of it all, flooding him with images of every triumph, every moment they’d shared since all this began, since she first reached out from the Thunder Child and touched his mind.
It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. Who you were. All that counts is what you’re doing. Who you are. Right now. This moment.
AND WHO AM I?
You know as well as I do.
The black shape roared; a challenge echoing amidst smoking stone, rising steam, cinder rain. To challenge the new Khan of Everstorm was to challenge to the death. No quarter. No mercy. He could flee now, back into exile, back into shame. Turn from the scene of his failure, the ruin he’d made, the bloodstains he’d left behind on the stone.
*I KNOW WHO YOU ARE, KINSLAYER.*
The black shape rose from its throne, vast and cruel and cold. Yukiko squeezed him tight, pouring all she had inside him as Buruu opened his beak to roar above the endless storm.
YOU KNOW WHO I WAS. NOT WHO I AM.
AND WHO ARE YOU, THEN?
The song of the Thunder God filled the sky.
The thunder tiger roared in answer.
I AM BURUU.
PART THREE
DEATH
“You cannot leave, love!”
Her scream echoed in the black. “Stay you here with me!”
The Maker God wept, for Yomi had marred his bride, claimed her as its own.
Spurned, she spit her troth; one thousand deaths, every day. Her solitude’s price.
“Then I will give life,” great Lord Izanagi vowed, “To fifteen hundred.”
—from the Book of Ten Thousand Days
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.
*