The Daimyo had painted his face with ashes.
A thick white pall covered his features, clung to his eyelashes, like the face of a corpse before it was assigned to the pyre. He glared at the assembled Daimyo as his Elite removed their helms, revealing faces as white and ash-streaked as their Lord’s. Michi felt a cold fear in her gut at the sacrilege—an instinctive revulsion at the perversion of traditional funeral rites.
“Honorable Daimyo,” Haruka growled. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Of what do you speak, Haruka-san?”
“To paint the faces of living men with ashes is to invite the deepest misfortune,” the Dragon clanlord replied. “This is a practice reserved for corpses. It will bring death’s touch to the ones so marked.”
“But we are dead.”
“… Daimyo?”
“Every samurai in the Kazumitsu Elite has disgraced himself for allowing his Shōgun to perish. As our noble Phoenix cousins have said, we should already have committed seppuku. But first we must turn our blades to the execution of she who laid noble Yoritomo low.”
He stared at the other clanlords, toxic wind whipping hair about his ashen face.
“Therefore, we have consigned our souls to Enma-ō. Burned our offerings of wooden coin and incense to the Judge of all the Hells, begged him to weigh us fairly, and painted our faces with the ashes left behind. As is the way with any dead man.
“We are the Shikabane.” He eyes were dark jade against ashen white. “We are the Corpses.”
Michi watched the clanlords glance at each other, uncertain. Perhaps even fearful. All the pretense of their grand entrances stripped away, left naked before those burning green eyes.
“I wish to be clear upon this.” Hiro’s gaze flickered from one Daimyo to the next. “I will honor our fallen Shōgun. I will marry Lady Aisha, sire a new heir to the Kazumitsu line, see this nation’s future assured. But once this duty is served, I will set about hunting and executing Yoritomo’s assassin and all who abet her. I will serve this nation as Shōgun until the Impure whore, Kitsune Yukiko, is dead.”
Hiro blinked like a man who had forgotten how.
“Your oaths bind you to the Kazumitsu house. Once my beloved and I are wed, I will be as a son of that noble line. And my sons shall carry the name into this nation’s future. So know this…”
Hiro replaced his mempō, covering his ashen features. The iron face of a bone-white tiger snarled at the nobles, and the voice within was the ringing of footfalls in an empty tomb.
“If you choose to dishonor your vows and stand against me, I will kill your families. Your wives. Your sons. I will kill your neighbors, your servants, your childhood friends. I will burn your cities to the ground, sow your fields with salt, make a desolation of everything you know and care for. And at the last, when all you love is ashes, I will kill you.”
Silence. Soft as baby’s breath.
“Now.” Hiro gestured with his clockwork arm to the palace glowering on the hill. “I believe welcome drinks are being served in the dining hall.”
Ichizo’s hand was back on Michi’s arm. She tried not to stiffen at his touch.
“I should return you to your room.”
“If that is your wish, my Lord.”
There was no anger in his voice as he spoke. “Do you think me a fool, Michi-chan?”
She looked into his eyes then, gleaming above coiled breather pipes. Were they the eyes of a serpent, toying with its prey? Or the eyes of a loyal man, torn by duty to Lord and heart?
Who are you?
“No,” she said. “I do not think you are a fool, my Lord.”
Ichizo looked at the Tiger Daimyo, climbing back into the palanquin, taking his fiancée by the hand. The faces of the shocked crowd, pale and drawn and stricken with fear. The faces of the Dragon and Phoenix entourages, all bluster and pomp evaporated, taking their seats in the motorcade, silent as berated children. The faces of the Iron Samurai, caked thick with funeral ashes. And the face of Lord Hiro, a walking dead man, only a heartbeat away from dominion over the entire Imperium. His cousin. His blood. His Shōgun.
Ichizo’s face was as pale as his Lord’s.
“I think perhaps we both are.”
*
She had hated Aisha at first. From the very core of her soul. Here was a woman who had everything. Born to privilege and power. Spoiled by her parents, indulged by her brutish pig of a brother, never lifting a finger all the days of her life.