The Last Stormdancer (10 page)

“Then you must excuse me, Lord Tatsuya,” Jun said. “But my friend Koh and I have business in the skies above our heads.”

“Will you not stay and do battle alongside us, Stormdancer?” Tatsuya said. “The Guild has ships that sear the skies with fire, blast my men to pieces. You and your thunder tiger could do much to even the scales when the Bear moves against me.”

Jun was already astride my back, my wings spread and crackling.

“I can do better than a single arashitora, great Lord. Give me an hour, and I will give you an army.”

Jun bowed deep to the Lady Ami, palm covering fist. And before the Bull could give his reply, we took to the air, my muscles humming, tearing through the frostbitten skies and circling up the mountainside. The earth fell away beneath our feet, exhilaration filling the boy’s belly, filling my own, his teeth gritted in my skull, my fingers digging into his feathers. That oneness again, adrenaline and hope dragging us together—we two who were so different, and yet so much the same. His grin infectious, making me wish for a brief and gleaming moment I had lips with which to smile.

Do you believe now, friend Koh? Do you see how close we are?

MILES AWAY BY MY RECKONING, MONKEY-CHILD. MY KHAN NOT BE SO EASILY SWAYED AS YOURS.

The gods themselves ride with us this day, friend Koh. Nothing can stop us now.

Up the face of the first sister, black crags and jagged teeth, snow thrashing and curling and twisting beneath my wings. Chill bearing down, pressing him tight to my back, my warmth, his arms about my neck. This little boy, who only a few days ago walked unbidden into my life, and now, had changed it forever. And did I believe, you ask? Believe as he did? In gods and destinies and things undone already sewn in the tapestry of fate?

I confess I did not.

But also, that I wanted to.

A fierce cry spilling from the scouts in the skies above. The eyes of the Skymeet upturned as we pierced mist and cloud, lightning cracking above our heads. I roared, Rahh answered, the Khan bellowing louder still as I skidded in to land, snow swirling about me, young Jun leaping from my back and bowing low, feeling about the Skymeet for any threat. Steam rising from my flanks, shaking head to tail to rid myself of the snow and ice crusted upon fur and feather, dipping my head in respect before my Khan.

“
Grandfather,
” I said.

“
What this?
” The Khan growled in response. “
Where been, young Koh? Why returned now, with boy who should have flown to his death days past?
”

“Have flown far, great Khan. Seeking truth of sickness. Seeking monkey-children who would fight it. Found them. Just below us. Enemies of our enemies. This Guild and their poison machines. They fight alongside—”

A roar, cutting off my words, chilling me to silence, the Khan’s eyes alight with rage.

“Defy our ways, granddaughter. Defy your Khan.”

“I sought only truth—”

“Not female’s place to seek truth. Nor fly free. Such is our way.”

“Then is BROKEN way,”
I snarled.
“Blind way. Old and foolish way. And old and foolish Khan who bids us cleave to it.”

Outrage amongst the elders. Snarls amongst the bucks. But in the eyes of the other females lurking about the Skymeet’s edges, I saw a gleaming. A pride.

“
You DARE,
” my grandfather snarled. “
Too much I gave, when your kin die. Too much love. Too much softness. There, I foolish. THERE, I blind.
”

“This place our home. Monkey-children fight for it. Why not—”

“ENOUGH.”

The great Khan stepped forward, hackles raised, his growl rumbling louder than the thunder above our heads. Lightning flickering in his eyes, along the curling tips of his mighty wings. A snarl spilling from the depths of him, making me quail despite myself.

“Khan spoken. Skymeet ended. We leave Shima this day. It over. Khan’s word is law.”

I felt the words as a blow to my chest, souring my belly, sinking down into my paws. It had been spoken. The Khan’s words could not be rescinded. The Skymeet would not disobey him. And old though he was, afraid of this new world and the terrors therein, still he was respected. Twenty years, our leader. Two decades beneath his wisdom. He was beloved. He was feared. There would be none brave enough to stand against him.

I looked to Jun, standing there in the snow, fear in his eyes. He knew it was not his place to speak. That his words here would only provoke further rage. And yet the need boiled inside him. The belief. Faith in the words of some old monkey-crone, probably moon-touched or speaking to him out of pity. Still, I did not believe. And yet, all she had foreseen was within our reach. With the arashitora onside, the Tiger Lord below could win his war. Purge the Guild. End the sickness. If only one were brave enough to cast the Khan down from his throne.

“
Then I challenge it,
” I growled. “
I challenge Khan’s law. And I challenge Khan.
”

My grandfather snorted, amusement bubbling among the Skymeet.

“Foolish child. Only males challenge. Female not be Khan.”

“Kill me then, Grandfather. Throw my scraps down with the remains of my kin. Your daughter. Your grandson. Leave behind when you flee, tail tucked between your legs.”

A roar, tail lashing, hackles bristling down his spine. All thought fleeing at my challenge, his pride and his rage swelling past his love for me, his last remaining kin. And as he tensed to charge, a buck stepped from the crowd of onlookers and roared at the top of his lungs.

“I challenge.”

My friend. My brother, not my brother.

Rahh.

He glanced at me. All that lay between us. That might lie before us. And he turned to the Khan and spoke again.

“I challenge.”

*   *   *

Two white shapes. Falling like meteors in the skies above our heads. Blood like rain amidst the thunderclaps. Lightning at the edges of their wings. Crackling across hulking clouds as they collided, screaming and roaring and tearing.

Heart in my throat. Pulse running quicker. Fear for him, my friend, my brother not my brother. A feeling for him, running deeper than I had known. Where did it come from? The monkey-child now inside my mind? His softness spilling into me? Had I always known this, and only now acknowledged it, when he might be taken away? The flood of it, the confusion of it, all a-tumble in my mind. Jun beside me, hand upon my shoulder, bringing more comfort than I could have believed but a day or two ago.

A strange thing, monkey-child. Your clumsy words failing me again. I felt I had awakened from a dream. I felt the proximity of gods. The hands of fate. So many intersections here, on the ground below, in the skies above. So many possibilities stretched before us. Only one outcome certain.

Death.

Rahh roared, kicking loose of my grandfather’s embrace, a spray of blood trailing from the old Khan’s claws. Rahh was quicker, stronger, younger. Yet the old Khan had wisdom on his side. Patience and cunning. Rahh’s was the charge, the strike, the bellow. But the Khan’s was the feint, the riposte, the deathly silence. Gravity and momentum, muscle and bone, majestic gleaming arcs of trajectory across the roiling black, collision and escape, and blood, blood, blood.

I prayed. Yes, we pray, monkey-child. To the father, Raijin. The God of Lightning and Thunder. To bring Rahh back to me. To show us a sign. That we were meant to remain, to fight for this place, once our home, now taken away by the sickly hands of metal and greed. I did not know if he heard. Or if he did, if he listened. If the outcome of this battle, as all battles, was preordained. If there was such a thing as fate. A part of me wished to believe so—in destiny and such. For if such existed, Rahh would not fail. Could not fall.

And yet, the part of me that had awakened in those last few days, roaming free, flying with the boy on my back—that part of me hoped beyond hoping that there was no hand at play here. That we were all free to do as we wished. That, if Rahh won, he won because he willed it more, not because some god upon some cloud intended it so.

The pair collided again, roars and shrieks, orphaned feathers falling from the sky. I squinted as the lightning flashed, Jun’s fingers clutching my feathers. The old Khan had his talons dug into Rahh’s chest, kicking with his back legs, claws like sabers. The pair plummeting from the sky. And yet, locked tight in that embrace, the Khan had left himself exposed. Rahh proved himself the stronger, arresting their fall with thunderous beats of his mighty wings, flipping the Kahn over onto his back. Rahh caught the Khan’s hind legs with his own, struck once, twice with his beak, tearing the tendons at the join of wing and shoulder, the Khan roaring in agony. And as they fell closer and closer to the jagged rocks below, Rahh clawed loose of the Khan’s grip, bloody spray and tattered fur, leaving the old beast to fall.

I watched my grandfather’s end. Many turned away, but I forced myself to see. The end of an era. The death of an age. Trying to flap with broken wings, deny gravity’s grim embrace, refusing to cry out, admit defeat, shriek his fear. Crashing into the rocks, jagged and unforgiving, crushing and tearing and pulping to nothing, the grand old beast reduced to blood and feathers and fur. Thunder split the skies, echoing the roars of triumph below, the answer above. Rahh circling above us, bloodied but unbroken, bellowing his victory for the Thunder God to hear. Jun beside me, fist raised high, grinning and cheering, hugging me, telling me he told me so. That all this had been said and done. That all this was as it should be.

Rahh came in to land, the Skymeet gathered about him, singing his name.

The first new Khan of Shima in twenty years.

What would his first command be?

*   *   *

Tatsuya cursed beneath his breath, retreating to the caves, his soldiers and his bride beside him. Riku’s forces were marching up the hill, row by orderly row. No heedless charge for the Bear’s men, no. Not with those Guild vessels overhead. They tromped over the broken ground, up the steep incline in the shadow of the sky-ships, knowing full well if Tatsuya charged out to meet him, the Guild’s bombardment would blow them to bloody pulp. A grim advance, hemming the Bull’s forces in against walls of stone. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

“Form up on me!” Tatsuya bellowed.

“Form up!” The cry echoing down the line. “To the Bull! For the Imperium!”

Tatsuya turned to Ami, drawing his katana.

“Go back to the caves, Ami-chan. You will be safe there. If Riku breaks through, throw yourself upon his mercy. You are his sister-in-law. He will not harm you.”

“No kiss farewell, husband-mine?” Ami said. “No last tearful embrace?”

Tatsuya glanced at the soldiers gathering about him. The blades drawn. The flags unfurled.

“It would be unseemly. Go wait in the cave, Ami-chan. I will return presently.”

Ami licked her lips. Bit her tongue. Bowed.

“As my Lord commands.”

Riku’s forces closing in. Tatsuya’s gaze fixed on his brother, spotted now amidst the swell of bright steel and black iron and rolling, rippling red. The same banner at his back. The same armor on his skin. So much alike, they were. To think it had come to this …

“Make your peace with the Maker, my brothers!” Tatsuya called, raising his sword high. “And take these bastards with you to the hells!”

“Banzai!” his men roared. “Banzai!”

“Charge!”

A great shout rolling down the line, the thousandfold trample of running feet. A thunder, tumultuous, the katana raised high in Tatsuya’s hand as he stormed down the incline, the crush and press of bodies all about him, cold dread in his belly as the Guild vessels accelerated and Riku’s army came to a full halt. The shadows of the advancing sky-ships fell over the Bull, his muscles tensing as he waited for the bombardment to begin.

A blast fell amongst his men, then another, blinding, deafening, tearing through his soldiers as if they were paper dolls. Men blown to cinders and pieces, the blast as loud as thunder, rattling the teeth in his skull. But as quickly as it began, the explosions stilled, the ringing silence in the aftermath setting Tatsuya’s teeth on edge. What was happening? Those ships should be ripping them to shreds …

More thunder overhead, rolling across the skies above the drone of propellers, the cries of terror. And Tatsuya looked up at the screams above, the cries of wonder from the men about him, and saw the sky was filled with thunder tigers.

Awe and amazement. Openmouthed shock. Dozens of the beasts filling the air above him, falling on the Guild ships with claws sharp as swords, hard as steel. The flank-mounted cannons opening fire, not with black powder, but with a burst of silvered death, shuriken shredding the skies and the arashitora unlucky enough to be in their sights. Beasts fell tumbling and torn, blood pattering on his helm and spaulders as four bodies crashed among his lines in quick succession, roars of pain and bellows of despair. But by then, Tatsuya’s charge had cleared the shadow of the sky-ships, thundering down into Riku’s lines, smashing through the rows of spearmen with momentum and gravity behind them. The screams of the wounded, the cries uncurling behind vicious deathblows, the ring of steel on steel.

Tatsuya cut some poor spearman from neck to privates, took another’s throat out, ear to ear. Cleaving and hacking through the chaos, intent only on his brother, on that banner waving above the mob, on the voice shouting above the discord. Smashing a blow aside, divesting his attacker of his hands, then his life. Knocked down to his knees by the press and crush around him, helped up by some loyal soul who died for his trouble, cut to bubbling pieces by an enemy’s growling chainkatana. Riku’s elite were amongst them now—the samurai who had cut his own to shreds, wearing the very armor of the men they’d slaughtered. No fuel shortage for Riku’s troops though, no. No failing of the growling steel in their hands. And fury took Tatsuya—fury at his betrayal, at his own stupidity for trusting those serpents, at his brother for taking their hand. He became a dervish, death itself, roaring, breath burning in his lungs, spittle flying from his teeth, gore caked thick upon his blade, his hands, his face. Chaos all about him, the copper perfume of blood entwined with the sharp stink of shit, screams and roars layered upon the off-key notes of armor and katana and tetsubo and naginata. Thunder tigers amidst the samurai now, bellowing, shrieking, falling on the only soldiers they knew were foes—the ones clad in the Guild’s hissing suits, carrying the Guild’s growling steel. Tearing them limb from limb, all the power of the chi-mongers laid to ruin in the face of Raijin’s children, their fury terrifying to behold.