She twisted to look behind them. Shabishii Island and the monastery were nowhere to be seen. Nothing but blood-dark ocean now, as the sun’s last light guttered and died. Howling wind all around, the break and hiss of vast seas below, and fear raised its cold, smooth head in her belly, spread fingers through her insides. Throwing her arms around Buruu’s neck, she pressed her face into his warmth. Tasting the echo of his thoughts, the intoxication filling his veins, like a junksick lotusfiend in a burning valley of smoke. And there, amidst his heartbeat’s pounding song, the blood-drunk rush of desire, she caught a hint of it. The thing that spurred him on, robbed him of all reason, reduced him once more to the beast she’d met in the shadows of the Iishi, prowling from the darkness, smeared with oni blood.
Somewhere north, a trace hanging on the wind, knotting itself amongst his feathers and dragging him onward, like lightning toward a spire of copper.
It was a female.
A female in heat.
PART 2
TEMPEST
Yet pitiless Death,
Claimed Izanagi’s pale bride, as night claims frail day.
And in Yomi’s depths, pure love turned to darkest hate, her thoughts to revenge.
The Maker God failed, night swallowing all his hopes, his bride left behind.
Black kiss on his lips, Izanagi put to law, The Rites of the Dead.
—from the Book of Ten Thousand Days
15
THE HOUR OF THE PHOENIX
Father was just another word for failure.
Slumped at the table with a bottle in his hand, shrouded in old sweat and liquor. Medals on the wall behind, bright ribbons and tarnished bronze, engraved with kanji like VALOR and SACRIFICE. Empty eyes in a bloated, sunburned face, a spit-slick sheen on the whiskers at his chin. An ugly stump where his hand used to be, forearm mangled, shining skin. Hair like a scarecrow in a crowless field, shoulders buckled under the weight of regret. Knuckles scabbed from their mother’s teeth. The land outside running to ruin while he drank himself stupid and blamed the weather, the blood in his veins, the gods, the war. But never himself.
Never himself.
“Where’ve you been, Yoshi?” he growls.
The boy is drenched in sweat, pollen fogging his goggles, skin blistered from his day in the sun. He hasn’t even had time to wash his face, drink a mouthful of water, and already it’s begun.
“Where do you think?” He holds up his hands, black dirt under broken fingernails.
“And now you’re off to town, eh?” his father slurs. “Prancing about with your pretty little friends? You think I don’t know what you do? Who you do it with?”
“Who and what I do is my business.”
“You act like lowborn trash, that’s all people are ever going to see.”
“You’d know, right Da?”
“I made something of myself, you little bastard. I was a soldier. A hero. Lowborn or not.” He waves at the medals on the walls. “I proved to those Kitsune bastards it doesn’t matter what blood flows inside a man. It’s the heart that beats in his chest.”
“Gods, spare me…”
“You’re old enough now,” he spits. “Time to grow up. Be a man. Be a soldier.”
“Tell me more, Da. Tell me all about the man I’m supposed to be.”
“Watch your mouth.” He sways upright, the first unsteady steps of a familiar dance routine. “You act like a woman, I’ll treat you like one.”
Yoshi’s mother is in the kitchen, head down, bright blue eyes squeezed shut. Hana comes in from the fields, clad in threadbare cotton and lotus pollen. She pulls her goggles down around her throat and glances back and forth between her father and brother. The boy sees the look on her face. The fear. Her eyes are bright with it, brimming with the terror that darkens her every day. Twelve-year-old girls weren’t supposed to have eyes like that.
“Have another drink, war hero,” Yoshi says. “You look thirsty.”
The man stalks toward him. Hana starts pleading to her father, begging. His flower, his baby girl. The only one he loves. Between all the blood and all the years, the only thing father and son have in common. She won’t move him a foot, or sway him an inch. But still she tries. She tries every time.
Yoshi raises his fists.
He won’t win. His father is bigger. Seven shades meaner. But the boy is getting stronger every day. Faster. And his father is getting fatter and slower and drunker. Every day.
Yoshi won’t win. Not this time.
But soon.
*
Brisk footfalls broke the predawn hush, echoing down the suffocated gloom of Kigen’s streets. A pair of long shadows preceded their owners across shattered cobbles, through palls of sweat-stale lotus exhaust; dark slivers wearing the shapes of men. The men themselves wore black kerchiefs, broad hats, shoulders cloaked in dark gray against autumn’s chill. They walked empty lanes and broken roads, listening to the Guild criers calling in the Hour of the Phoenix and paying the Daimyo’s curfew less notice than Lady Sun pays to Father Moon.
Hida clomped along in front; short, ox-wide, a broad, flat face set with piggy eyes, his ears so deformed from years of fistfighting they resembled an extra set of knuckles on the sides of his head. Seimi followed close behind, taller, leaner, crumbling yellow rubble for teeth, sharp lines of his cheeks and chin betraying a feral, gutter-born cunning. Each man carried a clinking satchel and a wooden tetsubo studded with fat iron rivets. Both clubs were stained at the business end; dark smudges that only a simpleton would confuse with varnish.