Yukiko peered over the Thunder Child’s railing, down through the filthy skies to the lotus farms stretched out below. The fields were an endless interlocking series of rectangular paddies, shrouded by choking scarlet pollen. A vast orange serpent stretched away into the distance; a hulking pipeline of corroded metal connecting the Kigen city refineries to a central collection hub in the midlands known as “First House.” Though the refineries in each capital city kept a measure of the chi they pro cessed on hand, the vast majority of it was flushed via rusted arteries to the seat of Guild power in Shima; a tithe to the masters of the fuel and technology that pumped the iron Shōgunate’s heart.
Alongside the pipeline ran lengths of rusting metal and sleepers of bleached wood; tracks for Shima’s combustion-driven railway. The snub-nosed hulk of a goods train was thundering away beneath them, retching a black, smoking trail from its snout as it wound its way back toward Kigen city. Before the advent of the sky-ships, rail had been the highway on which Shima’s most vital commerce sped. Foodstuffs, trade goods and common folk still rolled back and forth along the corroded lines every day, but for cargo as important as blood lotus or gaijin slaves, the sky was now the only way to travel.
The chi pipeline and railway lines were weeping scabs, crusted across the sweeping vista of lotus fields. But in some places, the landscape of swaying red and green was also pockmarked by dark stains; broad tracts of smoking, ashen soil, utterly devoid of life. Yukiko had been nine years old when she’d first seen the blackened scars from the air, the great swathes of land they covered. She had asked her mother where they came from.
Her mother had explained that lotus roots gave off a toxic discharge that rendered the soil around it barren in just a few short years. Like cancer in a blacklung victim, the blood lotus flower crept across Shima’s plains and valleys, dead earth in its wake, choking everything before it. Wildlife fled to the forests, only to have their sanctuaries cleared by the buzzing blades of the shreddermen, sent forth from the Guild’s assembly lines in their screaming, smoking saw-machines. The plant grew on Shima’s face like red mold across a rotting fruit.
“The deadlands were a problem in the past.” Yamagata conceded the point with a shrug. “But the Guild gives the farmers inochi by the barrelful. The fertilizer is more than enough to stave off the soil death. The paddymen just need to use the bloody stuff.”
“Gives?” Akihito scoffed. “You means sells them inochi, don’t you? How in the hells can they use it if they can’t afford to buy it?”
“I didn’t expect you to be an idealist, Hunter,” the captain smiled. “Don’t you kill things for a living?”
“Have you been into the countryside lately, Yamagata-san? What the hells is left to kill? The only animals thriving are corpse-eaters: lotusflies and rats. Ask the average farmer’s son if he knows what a deer looks like, if he’s ever seen a bamboo bear that wasn’t painted on a drinking house wall. There are only three tigers left on this entire island, all sickly curs, prowling the Shōgun’s gardens and refusing to breed. And this is an animal with a godsdamned zaibatsu named after it. I can’t remember the last time I saw a real fox. And as for dragons or phoenix?” The big man’s laughter was short and bitter. “My father was a hunter, Yamagata-san. And his father before him. But my sons?” Akihito spat onto his whetstone. “They’ll be factory workers.”
“They can still hunt yōkai.” Yamagata waved at the choking red sky. “Isn’t that why you’re here? To capture a spirit-beast?”
Akihito snorted. “The last official sighting of a sea dragon was a century ago. The last arashitora died during Shōgun Tatsuya’s reign. The great yōkai beasts are legends now; bedtime stories to tell your children between coughing fits.” Akihito aimed a polarized stare at Kasumi. “And we’re supposed to be out here catching one.”
Yukiko stabbed her tantō into the deck and sighed. Everything Akihito said was true. Her father was right; the Shōgun should just release them from his service and be done with it. A few starving wolves were hardly worth the expense of their upkeep. There was no need for a Master of Hunters any more.
“Ah, well, you know what they say.” Yamagata shrugged—the feigned helplessness of a man who profits from the status quo. He adjusted the breather on his face, stuffed his hands into his obi and wandered off in the direction of his cabin. “The lotus must bloom.”
As if on cue, Yukiko heard the heavy tread of iron-shod feet. She looked up and saw the Child’s Guildsman emerging from below decks to peer at the balloon above.