They walked on, past the pentagonal walls of the Guild chapterhouse, passing in silence over wide stone archways bridging the slime-smeared banks of the Shoujo and Shiroi. Yukiko glanced over the railing at the black river water below, saw a dead fish floating in the choking muck, two beggars wading out through the filth toward it. A street minstrel was bent over his instrument in the shade on the other side of the bridge, singing an out-of-tune song about the spring wind, the threadbare rug before him scattered with a few meager copper bits. The crowd grew thicker, street volume rising, hundreds of voices joined together to form a constant, rolling hum.
Yukiko and Akihito squeezed through the mob and out into the broad, bustling expanse of the Market Square. The plaza stretched one city block on each side; a vast, crowded space lined with store facades of every variation under the sun. Spice merchants hocked their wares alongside flesh pedlars and textilemen. Food stalls and clothiers and herbalists, holy men from various temples selling blessings for copper bits next to street courtesans and thugs for hire. Dozens of performers amazing the crowds while cutpurses weaved among the flesh with sharp, smiling faces. Goggle vendors everywhere, selling massproduced lenses from wooden boxes slung around their necks. Beggars in the gutters, swaying before their alms bowls, the flint-eyed stares of grubby children with growling bellies and shanks of sharpened iron hidden in their rags. The scarlet jin-haori tabards of the city soldiers were everywhere amidst the mob; red sharks cruising for wounded meat.
In the center of the market lay a large mall of gray brick, sunk one or two feet below street level. Four columns of scorched stone rose out of the ground, one at each cardinal point, towering above the milling crowds. Each one stood ten feet high, studded with pairs of charred iron manacles. The official name for the mall was the “Altar of Purity.” Locals called them the “Burning Stones.”
Four Lotus Guildsmen were stacking bundles of dry tinder around the northern pillar, eyes glowing the color of blood, red light gleaming on the sleek surfaces of their mechanized atmos-suits. Segmented pipes connected the blackened fixtures at their wrists to large tanks mounted on their backs. Yukiko stared at the white jin-haori tabards they wore over their metal shells, the kanji symbols that denoted their sect within the Guild.
“Purifiers,” she spat.
She caught a glimpse of color on the steps leading down to the Burning Stones; a small freestanding slab of polished flint, no more than four inches high. It was an ihai—a spirit tablet laid to mark the passing of a loved one. Real flowers were impossible to find in the streets of Kigen, so the mourner had arranged a delicate circle of rice-paper blooms at its base. Yukiko couldn’t make out the name carved into the stone. As she craned her neck to get a better look, one of the Purifiers clomped up the stairs, stamped on the tablet and scattered the flowers with its boot.
Yukiko stared at the ashes beneath the blackened columns, at the crushed paper petals blowing in the wind, gnawing at her lip. Her heart was pounding in her chest.
Akihito kept his voice low, shook his head.
“The Guild must have caught another one.”
A crowd was gathering around the edges of the mall; a mix of the morbidly curious and the genuinely fanatical, young and old, men and women and children. Their heads turned as a wail rang out across the market, an anguished cry, threadbare with fear. Yukiko saw a small figure being dragged through the square by two more Purifiers, a girl only a few years younger than her. Kicking and thrashing as she came, dressed in black, hair tangled about her face. Her eyes were wide with terror as she struggled against that cold, mechanized grip; a child’s fist against a mountainside. She stumbled, knees dragged bloody across the cobbles as the Purifiers hauled her to her feet again.
“Impure!” A cry went up from a few of the zealots among the mob, echoed across the square. “Impure!”
The girl was dragged down the steps, screaming and sobbing all the way. The Guildsmen hauled her onto the tinder, pressed her back against the northern Burning Stone. As two Purifiers closed a pair of manacles about the girl’s wrists, a third stepped forward and spoke in a mechanical rasp, a voice that sounded like the song of a hundred angry lotusflies. The words flowed as if known by rote; a snatch of scripture from the Book of Ten Thousand Days.
“Soiled by Yomi’s filth,
The taint of the Underworld, Izanagi wept.
Seeking Purity,
The Way of the Cleansing Rite, The Maker God bathed.
And from these waters,
Were begat Sun, Moon and Storm. Walk Purity’s Way.”
Another Purifier stepped forward, lit twin pilot flames at the blackened fixtures on its wrists and held them aloft to the crowd.
“Walk Purity’s Way!” it bellowed.
Approving cries rang out across the Burning Stones, the voices of fanatics among the mob drowning out the uneasy murmurs of the remainder. Akihito clenched his teeth and turned his back on the grim spectacle.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Yukiko tried to tell herself it was rage that turned her stomach to water, made her legs shake and stole the spit from her mouth.
She tried to tell herself that, but she knew better.
She looked up at Akihito, her face a mask, drawn and bloodless. Her voice trembled as she spoke.
“And you ask why I get in their way.”
5 Blackening