Yukiko blinked black light from her eyes, reaching toward Ilyitch’s mind with the intention of crushing it to pulp. He aimed a savage kick at her ribs and the wind left her lungs, accompanied by a spray of spittle and the clap of iron-capped boots on bone. He kicked her again in the back of the head and she curled into a ball, stars bursting and falling behind her eyes.
Ilyitch fished around in his satchel, weapon pointed lazily at the stunned arashitora. Yukiko struggled to roll onto her belly, get her wind back, ignore the broken-glass pain in her skull. Ilyitch growled a warning, weapon aimed at her face, shaking his head. Thunder rumbled above, lightning crackled across roiling black. The boy produced another flare and fired it shrieking into the sky. Yukiko rested her cheek against the obsidian beneath her, wonderfully cool, slick with rain. It called out to her with a voice as old as the earth.
Sleep.
Sleep now, child.
She clenched her jaw, voice strangled. “Why are you doing this?”
Ilyitch snarled incomprehensible words, waved the brass tube, finger to his lips.
Ignoring the pain blooming bloody across her thoughts, she reached out to Buruu through the Kenning. She could feel his warmth, run through with vertigo; the sparkling numbness of a newly landed fish, cracked across the stern to render it senseless. Skraai was in a similar state, clawing back toward waking from a darkness lined with coils of brass and tiny glass globes.
But they were alive.
“Godsdamn you…” Yukiko clawed sodden hair from her mouth, tried to pull herself up. “I saved your life. Why are you doing this?”
Ilyitch’s shout was as good as fingers around her throat, squeezing tight. Yukiko pressed her hands to her bruised ribs, arms wrapped around herself. Moments passed—minutes or hours, her concussion fading all to gray. But finally, beneath the storm’s howl, she realized she could hear a rhythmic pulse, a dull whumphwhumphwhumph, swelling at her back, drawing ever closer. She didn’t even need to turn to see what it was—the flying machine from the lightning farm’s roof. The metal dragonfly.
She reached out through her wall and touched the boy’s thoughts again, resisting the impulse to squeeze. But what would it cost her to kill him? How much would she spend of herself? How much would be left to fight the gaijin headed toward her in the belly of that metal insect?
He used me. Used me to catch them both. But why?
She watched Ilyitch rummaging in his bag again, stare falling on the pale wolf pelt across his shoulders. Yukiko thought back to the brown bearskin on Danyk’s back, the samurai helms bolted on his broad shoulders, the flayed Lotusman skin over Katya’s leathers. Every gaijin soldier she’d seen wore the skin of an enemy or an animal.
But nothing so fantastic as an arashitora.
Oh gods, no …
The thought turned her stomach, filled her with a fear that dwarfed anything felt in Yoritomo’s clutches.
He couldn’t …
The boy found what he was looking for, dragged it from the satchel with his right hand. It gleamed as a flash of lighting lit the sky, at least a foot long, hooked and cruel.
A knife.
“No, you can’t…”
She tried to claw her way to her feet, her skull ready to split open, seizing hold of his thoughts and squeezing tight. His eyes widening in pain and flooding bloodshot, Ilyitch stepped up and kicked her in the head, the world falling away as she briefly flew, shoulders crashing upon broken black glass. She blinked at the storm above, only dimly aware of the boy grabbing her hands, binding them tight. He punched her in the face again and again, consciousness threatening to flee on dark wings.
Buruu …
She could hear the gaijin flying machine drawing closer, its engines like the pulse throbbing at her temples, the beating of distant drums.
Whumpwhumpwhump.
She flopped over onto her stomach, vision blurred, watching Ilyitch crouch beside Buruu. The twitching tail was the only sign of life, but she could feel him, struggling toward the surface, the rippling light of a distant sun above. She tried to reach into the Kenning, but her thoughts slipped away between the cracks in her skull, bleeding from her ears.
Buruu, WAKE UP!
Ilyitch scowled as he inspected the metal wings, running his fingers over iridescent metal, ball joints, pistons and false quills. Lifting the canvas covering, he pawed at the blunt, severed feathers that were Yoritomo’s legacy, hacked off in Kigen arena ten thousand lifetimes ago. And with a muttered curse, the gaijin boy stood, spat on the ground and stalked over to Skraai.
Boots crunching on shattered obsidian.
Howling wind.
Thunder.
Whumpwhumpwhump.
The nomad was stirring, talons that could rend an ironclad like cloth curling into fists, leaving gouges in the black glass beneath. Ilyitch ran his fingers through the feathers at the arashitora’s neck, over the mighty wings, breathing deep, a slow smile alighting on his face. The quills glowed with a faint luster; the charge of static electricity lighting his eyes with hunger.
He nodded.
Whumpwhumpwhump.
“No,” she moaned. “Don’t…”
Ilyitch straddled the arashitora’s head, one boot on either side, face turned to the sky.
“Imperatritsa, butye svidetilem!” he cried. “Moya dobicha! Moya slava!”
Whumpwhumpwhump.