Atsushi—A young member of the Kagé rebellion. Isao’s partner in crime during the “Affair of the Bathhouse Wall.”
Last known whereabouts: the Kagé stronghold in the Iishi Mountains.
CONTENTS
Title page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Mons of Shima Imperium
Map of Shima Islands
Map of Kigen City
Epigraph
Lotus War character refresher
Part 1: Skin
Prologue
1. The Girl All Guildsmen Fear
2. Drowning
3. The First and Only Reason
4. Doppelganger
5. Chrysalis
6. Downside Up
7. A Pale Inferno
8. No One
9. A Heart Exhausted
10. Salt and Copper
11. Desolation’s Edge
12. Acres of Skin
13. Proposal
14. Intoxication
Part 2: Tempest
15. The Hour of the Phoenix
16. Undertow
17. The Sweetest Poison
18. Contours
19. Catching the Sky
20. A Sigh or Two
21. Webs and Spiders
22. Skinned
23. Deluge
24. Mercies
25. Impetus
26. Footprints in the Snow
27. A Mountain of Bones
28. Moving Pictures
29. A Trembling Earth
30. A Moment of Empty
31. Precipice
32. Tremors
33. Between Bending and Breaking
34. The Jagged Shore
35. Children of the Grave
36. Take
Part 3: Ashes
37. Offerings
38. Terminus
39. Fragile
40. Fodder for the Judge
41. A Thousand Diamonds
42. Pulse
43. Not Falling
44. The Hammer Falls
45. Ten Thousand Years
46. One Hundred Degrees
47. Crescendo
48. Stillness
49. Addition and Subtraction
50. Sensation
51. The Quiet Dark
52. Illumination
53. Phoenix Fire
54. The Cruelest Storm
55. Army of the Sun
56. Womb
Epilogue
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Also by Jay Kristoff
About the Author
Copyright
PART 1
SKIN
“The prelude was Void,
And unto Void they return. Black as mother’s womb.”
So spoke he the first; holy Lord Izanagi, Maker and Father, Unto the second; great Lady Izanami, Mother of All Things, Not his to foresee, the doom of all mortal men, Would also be hers.
—from the Book of Ten Thousand Days
PROLOGUE
Now witness the end of the beginning.
A ghost-pale girl, sixteen years old, wisps of dark hair and warm scarlet scrawled across her face. A smiling tyrant, stained with his own sister’s blood, a smoking iron-thrower in a white-knuckle grip. The pair standing in the crowded Market Square as children’s ashes swirl and dance in the gulf between them. And she stretches out her hand, and opens her mouth, and speaks the last words the tyrant will ever hear.
“Let me show you what one little girl can do.”
Fifty-five days ago. Almost two months since the last son of the Kazumitsu Dynasty perished at her hands. So much chaos since then. The earth shifting beneath our feet. The threads beginning to unravel. One by one by one.
Our war of conquest against the round-eyed gaijin collapsed as news of the Shōgun’s death spread, the threat and promise of a now-empty throne coalescing in every clanlord’s mind. And as the shadow of civil war reared over the Seven Isles, the Lotus Guild urged only calm. Obeisance to their puppets in the Tiger clan. Threatening embargoes of their precious fuel—the blood-red chi driving the Shōgunate’s iron heart—to any who disobeyed their will.
Then came the truth of how that fuel was made.
The words that would begin the avalanche were transmitted over the pirate radio frequencies of the Kagé rebels. The Shadows revealed that inochi—the wondrous fertilizer used on blood lotus fields across the Seven Isles—had been manufactured with the remains of gaijin prisoners of war. And Shima’s people awoke to the horror that the Imperium, the technology driving it, their entire way of life—all had been watered with innocent blood.
Like flames on long-dead leaves after a breathless summer, or ripples on still water after rain’s first falling, the riots took seed and spread. Outraged. Bloody. But brief. Brutally suppressed beneath the heels of Iron Samurai still loyal to the vacant throne. Uneasy peace settled over the clan metropolises, broken glass crunching underfoot, as the forty-nine days of official mourning passed in shivering, breathless silence.
Until she returned.
Yukiko. Arashi-no-odoriko. Stormdancer. Astride the mighty thunder tiger Buruu, fire in her eyes, lightning crawling along his clockwork wings. Flying to every capital, from the Floating Palace in Danro to the Market Square in Kigen city. Her voice a clarion call. Urging the people to open their eyes and open their minds and close the fingers on their hands.
How I wish I could have been there.
How I wish I could have heard her speak. But since the moment Yoritomo’s corpse hit the cobbles, I have been running. Fleeing Kigen in a trail of blue-white flame. Abandoning the burnished brass I had worn all my life in some fallow field, my touch lingering on its surface as if I were saying farewell to my oldest friend. Long miles of empty road under my bleeding feet, endless skies of bloody red before my burning eyes, flesh hardened and torn from the weeks it has taken to make it back to the Iishi wilds.