When there was only gray again, they turned and walked away.
The edges of the storm had come on them days ago, like thieves in the smothered light of dusk. Fingers of lightning stretched down into the sunset silhouettes of the nearby mountains. The wind buffeted the Child as if it truly were an infant, tossed about in the grip of a cruel, thoughtless giant. Days and nights were spent in fruitless search, the mood of the cloudwalkers growing ever darker as they sailed further and further into the Iishi ranges. The mountains loomed all around them, towering spires of dark stone and pale snow, the echoes of the thunder rolling down their flanks and rumbling among the black valleys at their feet.
How many days are we going to spend up here, hunting ghosts? Rigging lashed against the balloon above Yukiko’s head with the sound of bullwhips. After half a day of the deafening barrage, she had been forced to abandon her haven among the chi barrels and seek shelter inside. Black rain sluiced on the deck, rushing over the rails into the nothingness beyond, reeking of lotus toxin. Cloudwalkers shrugged on protective oilskins and perched trembling in their lookout posts, peering ahead into the darkness. Lightning arced down in blinding, brilliant strokes, hurled from the hands of the Thunder God.
Below decks in the tropical heat, the sky folk burned offerings to Susano-ō, praying for mercy day after day. Though the Storm God was considered a benevolent force, his firstborn son, Raijin, God of Thunder and Lightning, was renowned for his cruelty, his delight in the terror of men. Prayer and offerings seldom held interest for him, nor did the lives of those who sailed in his skies. It was chaos he loved above all, above the mewling of monkey-children in their fragile little boats, the wooden coins they burned in his father’s name. And so the cloudwalkers knelt, prayer beads rubbed between calloused fingers, begging Susano-ō to stay his son’s hand. Begging for their lives.
And still, Yamagata urged them onward.
Yukiko could see the tips of the Iishi Mountains beneath them, peering out through the porthole as the lightning turned night to day. She wondered whether the helmsman could even see in the dark, whether he would drive them into the black crags and end all of them in a bright blossom of super-heated hydrogen. Fear uncoiled inside her gut, and she thought of the boy in her dreams, the boy with the sea-green eyes. She did not want to die.
For three days the motors whined with the strain, Yamagata tacking back and forth across the face of the wind. The stench of burning chi was overpowering. The hunters’ meals boiled inside their bellies and threatened to pay the air a second visit after every sitting. Masaru and Yamagata spent long hours in his cabin, poring over charts and plotting their course through the treacherous currents of wind howling between the saw-toothed peaks. They had the sense to keep the door closed when their arguments grew fiercest, but the volume was still enough to travel through the walls. The cloudwalkers muttered among themselves, wondering if this would be the last hunt of the great Black Fox. Whether Shōgun Yoritomo’s command was leading all of them to their doom.
Yukiko lay as she had done for the past three nights: curled up tight, trying to hold in her dinner as her hammock swayed back and forth. Her father hung above her, swathed in a lotus stupor, empty pipe still clutched in one stained hand. She envied him for a moment, envied the peace he could find in that awful little weed. The voices of memory and loss smothered beneath a veil of sticky, blue-black smoke; the howl of the tempest around him nothing but a distant breeze.
Her stomach churned again, dinner surging against her ribs. Admitting defeat, she lurched up and stumbled for the door as the floor undulated beneath her.
Snatching up an oilskin, she burst out onto the deck, almost falling as the wood pitched away from her feet. She staggered to the railing and vomited, a rancid stream of yellow and brown splashing out into the blackness. The rain pelted down, plastering her hair to her skin. Tangles clung about her face in thick black fingers, as if they wished to cover her eyes. She gasped for breath, shrugging on the poncho and blinking around the deck.
She saw him on the prow, a white silhouette against the black, hands outstretched. Clawing her way along the railing, not daring to look down, she swore she could hear him laughing over the sound of the roaring wind. He moved with the pitch and roll of the ship, head thrown back, howling like a sea dragon.
“Kin-san?” she yelled over the din.
He turned, surprised, and his face lit up in a wide grin. His clothing clung to him like a second skin, and she could see how thin he was, how frail. And yet he stood like a rock, legs planted among the tightly lashed chi barrels, turning back and screaming at the storm. He wasn’t wearing an oilskin.
“What the hells are you doing out here?” Yukiko yelled.