Masaru could barely stand. He slumped against the wall, breath rattling in his lungs, watching the shapes dance in the dark. Michi was a blur, a shadow melting from one spot to the next, tsurugi glinting in the glow of Hideo’s pipe. She lashed out, catching one bushiman across the throat with her blade. The man spun like a top, clutching the red spray at his neck. The girl slid down into a split, kimono riding up around her hips, plunging her weapon into another soldier’s crotch.
Akihito was bleeding from a slash across his shoulder, back to back with Kasumi as she struck out with her bo, sending a bushiman’s blade clattering from nerveless fingers. She broke the man’s leg and pushed his face in with two rapid-fire blows, sending him back into his fellows with a bloody gasp. Another two bushimen launched a savage riposte that she barely deflected, and three fingers from her left hand sailed off into the dark. She cried out, barely able to keep a grip on her staff, leaning back into Akihito. The floor was slick with blood, treacherous beneath their feet. Though the trio was making a brave fight of it, their foes were too many. It would only be moments before they were overrun.
There in the dark, with death a few breaths away, Masaru thought of his daughter. He thought of her arms wrapped around him as she gave him her forgiveness, here in this very cell. He thought of her as a little girl, running in the woods with her brother, pure as new snow, stretching out with the fresh, trembling gift toward the faint sparks of life that lingered in the dying bamboo.
The gift he had urged them to hide.
The gift he had passed to them both.
Yōkai blood.
Hunt Master. Black Fox of Shima. He had hidden it well, ever since he was
a boy, even from his sensei. Even as he eclipsed his master and became the greatest hunter in the Empire. Rikkimaru had often joked that Masaru was gifted. If only the old man had known . . .
Naomi knew. She had loved him for it, thought of the Kenning as a blessing from the Gods. He still treasured the memory of the joy in her eyes when she told him he had passed it to their children. But by then, the “gift” had seemed a curse to him. A blessing he had squandered, used only to make himself a more efficient killer. Forcing the wolves into his pits, the foxes into his snares. The last eagle he had ever seen died on the tip of one of his arrows. At his command, the serpent children of the Naga Queen had turned and devoured each other in front of their own mother, the last of the Black Yōkai blinded by tears of grief as he ended her. The gods had not intended it to be so. Kitsune would have been ashamed of him.
And so when Naomi died, he drowned his grief and the Kenning both, in liquor, in the cloying stink of lotus smoke. To forget what he had become, his abuse of the gift he had turned to butchery. Like a prisoner, he closed it off in a dark room in his mind, hoping it would atrophy and fade, the memories of all the blood he had spilled along with it.
But the long hours of sweating de-tox in this pit had cleared the cobwebs from his skull. He could see the doorway clearly now, the one he had closed and locked so many years before.
He watched the steel dance in front of him, heard Michi cry out. He saw Akihito take a blade to the thigh, opening a gash that was almost bone-deep. A sword sank up to the hilt in Kasumi’s gut, another into her chest, blood spraying from between her teeth. And Masaru walked down the long dusty corridor in his mind, and stood before that rusted iron door. Reaching out with shaking fingers, he turned the handle and opened it.
Off in the dark, the prison rats pricked up their ears, and listened.
The Iron Samurai charged. The bloodlust swelled within Buruu, spilling over into Yukiko, minds instinctively reaching toward each other. Two sets of eyes, six feet planted on the earth, the strength of their wings knotted tight at their shoulder blades, tantō in their hand. They were in the Iishi again, Lady Izanami’s Red Bone Warlord roaring in the rain, the taste of black blood on their tongue. She leaped up onto on his back, slipped into his mind. They bared their teeth and screamed their challenge, a roar drowning out the growling swords, the hiss of armored death charging at them headlong.
Too many to defeat.
But not too many to fight.
Kin removed a brass cylinder from his belt and stabbed one end against his