The ironclad Blessed Light was a thumbprint on the waking dawn, smoking black against bloody red as Lady Amaterasu crested the horizon and set fire to the sky. Hiro stood at her prow, half a dozen Iron Samurai looming around him, the sunrise tinting their bone-white armor immolation-red. The Daimyo of the Tora clan clasped his hands behind his back, sea-green eyes upon the tortured soil of Jukai province below.
The snowcapped spires of the Tōnan Mountains lay to the west, and Hiro knew somewhere amidst those peaks crouched the impregnable perch of First House—the heart of the Lotus Guild in Shima. It was there the Guild had begun, two centuries ago, just after Kazumitsu I took his throne. When the Tiger, Dragon, Phoenix and Fox zaibatsu began consuming the lesser clans; the blood of Falcon, Panda, Serpent and their fellows just a feast for the Four.
The first production-grade crops of blood lotus had been cultivated here, centuries ago. Once this had been the most fertile region in all of the Imperium, but now all was ashen earth and black smoke curling from the cracks—as if a master painter had spent his last on a landscape of rarest beauty, and some jealous lover had smudged inch-thick handfuls of charcoal onto the canvas, drying and splitting in the noonday sun. On maps, the ruined land was still named Jukai province—a name meaning “Evergreen.” But Shima’s citizens knew it by another name.
The Stain.
“It’s getting worse.” Hiro glanced at the Guildsman beside him. “So much worse.”
Second Bloom Kensai refused to look down, bloody eyes fixed on the proving grounds ahead. The rising sun kissed his perfect, metal cheek, the smooth features of a gilded youth retching up breather cables, his hulking atmos-suit spitting fumes and hissing with every breath. A child’s head atop a monster’s body.
“All will be well once inochi supplies are restored.” Kensai’s voice rumbled in Hiro’s gut. “But now you see why the war must be renewed. We need more prisoners, Shōgun. More gaijin to feed the lotus. And more land to plant it.”
Hiro frowned, his mind turning to dark places. “Is there no other way? Some other—”
“No.” Kensai folded his arms. “Sacrifices must be made. The lotus must bloom.”
“It troubles me to think—”
“Nature knows not of mercy. The blood of the meek slakes the conqueror’s thirst. This is not a law unique to the Guild. This is the way of all things, Shōgun.”
“Do not call me that.”
“And why not?”
“Because I am not Shōgun. Just because two clanlords have deigned to attend my wedding, does not guarantee they will swear allegiance.”
“They will kneel before you, young Lord. All of them.”
“And if not? How will the clans fight the Kagé or the gaijin if we spend our strength fighting each other? You wish to craft me a throne of my countrymen’s bones?”
“You need not fight the other clans, Shōgun. All they require is a rallying point. A banner grand and terrifying enough to stand behind.”
Kensai pointed into the distance.
“And so we give it to you.”
Hiro looked at the proving grounds, coalescing out of the ashen haze ahead. Forges and smelting plants rising like blood blisters behind a barbed-wire forest, wreathed in smoke. Trains rolling on rusted tracks, hauling iron and coal from the Midland mines, broad roads of black gravel, dotted by watchtowers. The grounds swarmed with activity; atmos-suits moving to and fro, a hundred cutting torches twinkling like stars in the long-lost sky. Row upon row of armored machines, like soldiers at muster, fifteen feet high even in repose, scythe arms ending in sawtoothed chainblades. Four legs apiece, each one thick as tree trunks, skin gleaming yellow in the light of the scorching sun. Hundreds of them.
Hiro raised his eyebrows.
“Shreddermen suits?”
“The Kagé feather their nests in the Iishi forest,” Kensai said. “So we will leave no forest standing in our wake.”
Hiro squinted through the pall to the far end of the grounds; gantries and walkways built around a towering shadow. Cutting torches arced and spat, Lotusmen trailed bright blue flames around the hulking figure, rocket packs blazing. The Guildsmen were insects beside it—some vast sleeping giant, nodding off in a sea of mosquitoes, too enormous to feel their sting. Three hundred feet high, eight legs curled up beneath its bloated metal belly like a waiting spider. Saw-blade arms with teeth big as men, pistons tall as houses, great chimney stacks running down its spine and piercing the sky like blades. The sound of its engines was a choir of earthquakes.
A machine. A colossus. A behemoth of black iron and blacker smoke.
Hiro stared in wonder. “What in the name of the gods…”
“Look now upon the doom of the Kagé.”