The clans of the Tiger, Phoenix, Dragon and Fox had once stood among two dozen extended families, scattered across the Eight Isles, all subjects of the great Shima Imperium. Yet when the first Shōgun of the Tiger clan, great Tora Kazumitsu I, rose in rebellion against the corrupt Tenma emperors, he had rewarded his three loyal captains with vast tracts of land, and stewardship over all the clans within. And thus, two dozen slowly became four, the great zaibatsu conglomerates gradually consuming the clans of the Falcon, the Serpent, the Ox and their fellows, their kami spirits fading from thought and memory, until all that remained were a few scattered tattoos and footnotes in the great, dusty scrolls of history.
Exotic scents and rippling heat drifted up from the distant marketplace, always overshadowed by sputtering motors and lotus exhaust spilling from the engines of the sky-ships, the motor-rickshaws, the rail yards, the vast, smoking chi refinery. Yukiko found herself gagging whenever she was down here; the myriad smells and colors mixed with that oily stench were enough to make her stomach turn.
She pushed through the crowds, keeping one hand on the purse hidden in the obi sash around her waist. Knowing her father, he had already spent his pay on drink and smoke, and the few coins she possessed would be all they had to eat with this month. The gutters of Kigen had birthed a thousand pickpockets with ten thousand sticky, oil-stained fingers, each more hungry and desperate than the last. Here in Downside, the fool who only found himself parted from his money was having a good day.
The crowd was a mix of grimy skin and painted, pristine flesh, dirty rags and luxuriant silk, pressed together in the flyblown throng. There was scarcely a bare face in sight: common folk wore polarized goggles and kerchiefs tied over their mouths, people of wealth and standing had expensive mechanized breathers slung around their faces. It was as if the entire populace had something to hide. Without facial expressions to serve as a guide, social interaction on Kigen streets was mostly measured in flesh; deference gauged in the depth of the other man’s bow, hand gestures serving in place of a smile, an aggressive stance adopted to showcase a frown. A language spoken by the body as well as the mouth.
The buildings of Downside were a multi-storied, ramshackle affair, piled on top of one another without forethought or planning; a constantly swelling blister of cracking clay and bleached wood. The Upside architecture across the river was just as decrepit, but the compositions at least held something close to symmetry. The city’s broad cypress-bark roofs were desiccated and gray, stripped of paint by the merciless sun and polluted black rains that fell in Shima’s winter months. Windows of clouded beach glass or rice-paper stared out with blind, vacant expressions onto the churning crush of flesh on the cobbles below. At each twisted intersection crouched a small stone shrine to Fūjin, the God of Wind and Ways. Temples to the Lady of the Sun, blessed Amaterasu, and her father, Lord Izanagi, the great Maker God, stood shoulder to shoulder with towering brothels, gambling pits and the smoke-filled, tar-stained walls of lotus dens. Each north-facing window was scattered with a small handful of rice; an offering to appease the hunger of the Dark Mother, dread Lady Izanami, the Earth Goddess corrupted by the Yomi underworld after the birth of Shima.
Three rivers clawed sluggish paths through the city’s bowels, their waters as black as tar. Kigen jail sat hunched on the crumbling banks of the Shoujo, glowering at the rusted metal skeleton of the rail yards across the way. Chapterhouse Kigen loomed at the black, foaming collision of the Shiroi and Junsei, a fivesided fist of yellow stone, punching skyward through broken cobbles. It stretched four stories into the reeking air, pentagonal, windowless walls set with five rusted iron gates around the base, throwing a dark shadow over Kigen’s pockmarked face. The vast, charred chimney stacks of the refinery to the south retched their filth into the sky, black fingers of greasy stink and acrid taste worming their way down the throats of the seething masses. The din of metal upon metal, thousands of hungry voices, the squeal of rutting corpse-rats. High, pitched roofs thrust their peaks at the red skies above, lending the smoking city skyline a jagged, saw-toothed shape.
Shouldering her way through a mob of rickshaw runners on a smoke break, Yukiko caught sight of the barometric apparatus of a weatherpriest bobbing through the crowd. The whirling, multi-armed periscope disappeared through the door of a noodle store and her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten today.
“You want some breakfast?” She looked back at Akihito, still wading through the masked mob a good distance behind.
“I thought we were hunting thunder tigers?” he yelled.
“You want to do that on an empty stomach?” Yukiko smiled, stepping into the crowded bar and pulling down her kerchief.