“She can’t take this!” cried Yamagata.
Masaru’s thoughts were quiet. The faint trace of lotus smoke left in his system brought a strange calm, even when all hells were breaking loose around him. He narrowed his eyes, watching the beast as it flailed: the cruel beak, the proud glare in its eye. It beat its wings against the cage, tiny arcs of lightning racing along its blood quills and out into the span of its flight feathers.
Don’t think of it as a living legend. Think of it as a beast, like every other you have hunted. It wants to fly. To be free. Like any other bird of prey.
The thunder tiger roared, as if it knew his heart.
How do you train a wild bird? Reel in that desire and make it see you as the master?
Masaru swallowed.
“Akihito, did Kasumi bring the nagamaki blades that Shōgun Kaneda gave us?”
The big man blinked away the storm. “Of course.”
Masaru’s face was a mask, hard as stone, rain washing over him as if he were granite. He clenched his fists, eyes never leaving the arashitora, drawing the back of his knuckles across his lips.
“Fetch me the sharpest.”
12 Tears in Rain
Yukiko crouched in the bow, the pale boy beside her, watching the beast rail against its prison. She reached out with the Kenning again, feeling only an unassailable rage tinged with a faint ozone scent. She gave it her regret, her pity, flooding its mind with helpless overtures. She tried to make it feel safe, warm. Her every plea was rebuffed; the buzzing of a troublesome insect.
Kin crouched low whenever a cloudwalker approached the bow. Yukiko gradually became aware that he was terrified of the men, skulking low, fear plain in his eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
“They can’t see me like this,” he hissed.
“Like what? What are you talking about?”
“Like this!” he cried.
Yukiko frowned.
“Who are you, Kin?”
A dizzying arc of lightning cracked the sky a handful of feet away from the
Thunder Child , blazing a trail through the thousand-span darkness to the waiting earth below. Yukiko flinched, pressed herself against the chi barrels. She cast a fearful glance at the balloon swaying above their heads, straining against its moorings in the grip of the monsoon.
“What happens if lightning hits us?” she whispered.
“That depends. If it ignites the fuel, we’ll burn up. If it strikes the inflatable . . .” The sentence trailed off into a brief pantomime, pale, slender hands indicating a wobbling descent into the deck and an explosion on impact.
Yukiko squinted through the rain. Her father approached the arashitora’s cage, halting a few feet away and taking the needle-thrower from Kasumi’s arms. The beast roared and cracked its wings again, sending several cloudwalkers sprawling across the deck. Her father took careful aim and emptied an entire magazine of blacksleep into the creature’s flank.
She felt a stab of sympathetic pain, overshadowed by near-mindless outrage. She could feel the beast’s hatred, burning a picture of her father into its brain and vowing to tear him limb from limb, to bathe in him as if he were a fresh mountain stream. But the poison rose up on wings of tar; a smothering, reeking blanket that dragged him back down into oblivion.
Akihito appeared from below deck, carrying the long haft of one of the Shōgun’s nagamaki. He removed the leather sheath from the blade, steel glittering like a mirror as lightning flashed dangerously close to the starboard side. Fear clutched Yukiko’s gut and she stood, Kin forgotten, running down the deck toward the cage as her father unbolted the door.
“You’re going to kill it?” she cried. “You can’t!”
Masaru glanced over his shoulder, eyebrow raised.
“Where did you come from? Get below deck!”
“It hasn’t done anything!”
“We’re not killing it.” Kasumi shook her head. “But it’s going to crash the ship if it keeps up with the Raijin song.”
One of the lookouts shouted a warning, and Yamagata tore the wheel sharply to starboard. A towering spire of jagged mountainside loomed out of the darkness in front of them, the ship’s keel barely clearing a spur of sharp rock. The crew hung on for dear life, the hunters ducking low as the captain flooded more chi into the struggling engine. The Child rose a few precarious feet above the stone fangs.
The hunters stood slowly, uncertain, the deck rolling beneath their feet. Yukiko looked deep into her father’s eyes, unable to banish the dread despite Kasumi’s assurances.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked, fearing the answer.
Masaru hefted the nagamaki.
“Clip its wings.”
Yukiko’s jaw dropped, eyes wide and bright with outrage.
“What? But why?”