No One stomped up the tenement’s narrow stairwell, Daken trailing behind. The walls were plastered with posters for the Kigen army, slapped up just days after Yoritomo-no-miya died; a recruitment drive targeting the city’s poor and clanless, promising three squares a day, a clean bed, and a chance to die defending an empty chair.
Out onto the fourth-floor landing, she stepped over a crack-thin, crumpled figure, passed out in a puddle of his own waste. Gray skin, lotus-red eyes rolled back into his skull. It amazed her to think some fiends were still smoking now everybody knew how blood lotus was grown. Without sparing the wretch a glance, she unlocked her door and slipped inside.
“Sis.” Yoshi looked up from his card game. “How do?”
Her brother sat on the floor beside a low table scattered with cards and coins. His hair was tied in rows of elaborate braids, spilling around his shoulders in black, knotted ripples. He was terribly pale, sharp-edged and handsome, the same pointed chin and dark, round eyes as his sister, glittering like shuriken beneath his brows. The shadows of his first whiskers were a pale dusting on his upper lip and cheeks. He was grubby as a cloudwalker, clothed in dirty rags. A conical straw hat with a jagged tear through the brim sat crooked on his head. One year older than she, but still a youth—gutter-lean, hard muscle and long-limbs, slowly filling out into the man beneath his surface.
“I’m all right,” she sighed. “Can’t believe you’re still awake…”
“You’re not so old I can’t wait up for you, girl.” Yoshi hefted the bottle of cheap rice wine from the table. “Besides, there’s still a third left.”
She made a face, turned to the other boy. “You winning, Jurou?”
Jurou glanced up from the other side of the table, fingers hovering close to his stack of copper bits. He was around Yoshi’s age, shorter, darker in complexion. Softly curling bangs of black hair hung about shadowy eyes, cheeks flushed with wine. An empty smoking pipe dangled from pursed lips. A beautiful tiger tattoo coiled around a well-muscled arm; the kind you didn’t usually see in Downside unless it was attached to a corpse with very empty pockets.
“Winning? Always.” Jurou shot her his heartbreaker smile, turned over a maple card and flicked the straw brim back from Yoshi’s eyes. “Lucky hat my ass.”
Yoshi swore and pushed across his coin. The flat was claustrophobic, furnished with a low table and moldy cushions, dirty light guttering from a tungsten globe. A soundbox sat on the floor beside the boys; cheap tin and tangled copper wires, stolen from some peddler’s wagon last winter. A tiny window ushered in the pitiful breeze, the sounds of the rising dawn outside: the city stretching its limbs, automated criers trawling the streets, steam whistles from the distant refinery.
No One splashed a handful of copper kouka on the table amidst the playing cards. The coins were rectangular, two strips of plaited metal, dulled from the press of a thousand fingers.
Jurou whistled. “Izanagi’s balls. A month of slinging brown for that pittance? You’d be better off begging in the street, girl.”
“I’d be better off pimping you down at the sky-docks, too, if you’re that worried about it.”
“And we’d retire rich as lords in a fortnight.”
She laughed, and Jurou grinned around his empty pipe—the boy had quit smoking lotus once the origins of inochi fertilizer had broken, but chewing the stem had proven an unbreakable habit.
“Forgetting something?” Yoshi asked, raising a lazy eyebrow.
No One sighed, sinking down onto her haunches and scratching at the stippled scar below her eyepatch. She slipped a chunk of metal from inside her kimono, hefted it in her hand. The lump was snub-nosed with a thumb-broad barrel, matte-black and ugly as a copper-kouka whore. There was no symmetry to the design; it was all pipes and rivets and leaden menace. The handle was polished oak, inlaid with golden tigers, a deep scar in the wood from where its former owner had dropped it onto the cobbles at her feet as he died.
Shōgun Yoritomo’s iron-thrower.
It was heavy in her hand, seemingly cold and dead. But she’d been there in the Market Square when its trigger was pulled on the Black Fox of Shima. She’d seen what it could do. What one little girl could do too.
That was where it had started.
“Give it here,” Yoshi said. “You’ll blow your foot off.”
She passed the weapon back with a scowl, mumbled a threat about Yoshi’s privates.
“Not sure why you insist on carrying that thing around with you,” Jurou mused.
“You try being a girl walking alone in this city at night,” she replied.
“We should sell it. Make a fortune.”
“There’s fortunes to be made without selling anything.” Yoshi fixed Jurou in a pointed stare. “Besides, what pawnman would be crazed enough to turn grist on the Shōgun’s property?”
Her brother took a long pull from the bottle, glanced at her.
“So how was work?”