The Last Stormdancer (7 page)

“No thanks necessary,” the boy smiled. “I am in no danger.”

“There is a fine line between confidence and arrogance, young master.”

“Not arrogance, Lady. I simply cannot die today.”

He flashed her a winning grin.

“I have not saved the world yet.”

The assassins closed, growling swords raised high in their hands. Were this some pantomime or puppet show on the streets of your scabs, monkey-child, the assailants would have come one at a time, neat and orderly, to be impaled in proper fashion upon the young and dashing hero’s blade to the hymn of the cheering crowd. And it is true that, for some astonishing reason, the first two murderers did approach in a rather conventional array, one slightly behind the other, perhaps lulled into false confidence by the milk-white orbs behind the boy’s lashes.

Jun side-stepped a scything, downward blow, the same hummingbird speed he had used to shame me before my kin serving him now in an arena just as deadly. He leaned in close, below another sweeping strike, and with a bright note of razored steel and the sharp clipped intake of his assailant’s breath, he pushed his blade in and out of the assassin’s chest, one, twice, spinning on the spot and planting his boot square in his foe’s belly.

The bleeding, punctured lump of carrion flew back into his comrades, scattering them long enough for Jun to swipe his blade across the second assassin’s throat. Bright arterial spray painted the boy’s face crimson, the Lady Ami gritting her teeth to stifle her gasp of horror. And then all became chaos, no form or order to it, just six snarling blades filling the air. Jun pushing Lady Ami back, ducking below one strike, leaping up onto the pillar and springing away to dodge the next four. Hurling his scabbard into one assassin’s face, divesting another of his hamstrings. The sting of burning exhaust in his nostrils, choking his lungs. The chainkatana growl utterly stifling his sense of hearing, leaving him secretly thanking the gods for the two cats who even now lingered at the room’s periphery, bubbling with vague concern over the fate of their mistress.

It was through their eyes he saw.

But it was to
my
mind he called.

I had become bored, and more than a little disgruntled, I will confess. Sitting beneath the thin shade of a struggling sugi tree and snarling whenever one of the terrified serving staff looked my way. I had been seriously considering taking to the skies to escape the gut-churning stink when I heard the boy’s cry of alarm in my mind, raising the hackles on my back, the threat he felt somehow spilling over into me and setting my skin to bristling.

Friend Koh! Help us!

I cannot explain the sensation. Your tongue is crude and shapeless, monkey-child, and your words have brittle meaning. I can only say that, though I knew the voice to be his, somehow I felt the threat to be mine. That I stood there, in the room with him, the vague weight of his blade in my hands. Perhaps it was the time he had spent in my eyes? Perhaps the soft kinship we shared, both orphans, both outcasts, both alone? I could not say then, and now, it fills me to sadness to dwell in those thoughts. So instead of the why, I will speak of the what.

The doors of the monkey-nest burst apart like glass beneath my weight, and I pounded down the corridors, shredding the floorboards to splinters as I came. There was no sky over my head, no sun or moon on my back, and the wrongness of this place struck me to my heart. Stone and clay and twigs, vast boxes filled with stink and pretty, pointless trinkets. But on I ran, great loping strides, wings crackling with fresh lightning. Through another set of doors, smashing a wall to dust and ruin, closing in on his thoughts like moth approaches candleflame. Through another wall and at last to him—the little blind boy and the painted monkey-girl, their backs to a pillar of stone, surrounded on all sides by men in thin and gleaming black, slivers of growling steel in their hands.

I roared, bellowed, thundered, pounding the boards with my feet and the air with my wings. A great sonic boom birthed at my feathertips, splitting the floor asunder, blasting three of the assassins to mush and guts as they turned to face me. And herein lies the strangest thing—the sensation in which your words most dismally fail. For as we fought, the boy and I, as I stepped up beside him and cleaved the black-clad men to ribbons, just as he furnished them with a bevy of new and weeping holes, I lost all sense of myself. Not to say I was stricken with some red rage blinding me to the battle’s flow, no. Simply to say I somehow lost track of where
I
concluded and where
we
commenced. I could feel him in my mind. Behind my eyes. Flowing with me and through me. And as we moved, I thought perhaps I knew why the old tales called those who rode the backs of my kin
Stormdancers.
For
that,
it seemed, was the closest word you have to describe what we did in the midst of that song of screams and blades and blood.

Dancing.

And when we were done, standing with burning lungs and trembling fists, him behind my eyes as I looked him over, pale and bloodied and breathless, that oneness faded. That sensation of being lost in another, of being
more
 … it evaporated like early morning mist with the rising of the sun. And it surprised me, how much I longed to feel it again.

Thank you, friend Koh.

YOU BLEED. YOU HURT?

A scratch or two. No matter.

MONKEY-KHAN’S MATE?

“You are well, Lady?” the boy asked.

“I…” Lady Ami looked herself over, eyes wide. “I believe so…”

“Who are these men?” The boy gestured to the assassins.

“I know not.” The Lady stooped, picking up one of their growling swords. “I have never seen a blade such as this. But my husband must be informed immediately…”

“I can take a message to him when I—”

“And have me wait here patiently to be attacked again? I think not, master Jun.” She glanced at the locked door the serving girl had left by, the iron bolt trapping them inside. “It seems those closest to me have been bought and sold, and Lord Riku is not content to fight this battle on the field alone.” Here she looked at the slaughtered men about her, dead in puddles of cooling blood. “If my own bodyguard can be slaughtered to a man by these assailants, who will protect me when next they strike?”

“What do you suggest, Lady Ami?” Jun frowned. “I cannot remain here to protect you.”

The woman looked me over, from the tuft of my tail to the tip of my beak. Her hands were shaking from the fright, face paling at the stink of blood and excrement daubed in the air. And yet there was iron in her voice. Steel in her gaze.

“As I said, my father raised me on tales of the Stormdancers, young master Jun.”

Her smile, the curve of a newly sharpened blade.

“And there looks to be room on your friend’s back for two…”

*   *   *

The sun was a burning eye in the heavens, and the Bull’s armies were arrayed for the kill. Orderly rows of bushimen in iron breastplates, long naginata spears clutched in gauntleted hands. A legion of horse-borne archers on the flanks, short hankyū bows upon their backs, quivers of arrows at their waists. And in the vanguard, the warriors to lead the charge. Fully one hundred samurai, long tabards and tassels of bloody Tiger red. Guild-crafted suits of hissing, clanking, whirring iron, spitting chi fumes into the air. Growling chainkatana and wakizashi in their fists, the hum of a hundred motors murdering the prebattle hush. Their eyes narrowed—against the fumes or the glare or the rush of the oncoming slaughter, who could say?

Lord Tatsuya sat astride a white stallion at the rear of his forces, blue-black air rattling about the poor beast’s lungs. A tall banner pole rose from his back, set with the sigil of the Tiger clan and the scrolling kanji of the Kazumitsu line. He had declined the Guildsmen’s offer of a suit of chi-powered armor, preferring instead to wear the traditional
ō
-yoroi his father had commissioned for him. It seemed fitting; to claim the rule of the Sh
ō
gunate in gear that had been gifted him by the former Sh
ō
gun himself. Lips curling with contempt, he glanced up at the sky-ships hovering overhead, their propellers a muted drone, great bladders creaking with the press of the hydrogen inside. The Guild loitered above the battlefield like carrion birds, poised to swoop down and feast on his brother’s fresh-killed corpse.

The Bull turned his gaze from the Guild vessels, took one deep, rasping breath in the suffocating air. And raising his hand, as a puppeteer on the marionette’s strings, he gave the order for the slaughter to begin.

A cry rang down his lines, the samurai vanguard surging up the hill with great, leaping strides. Already, the sight of Tatsuya’s fiercest would have been enough to make an ordinary soldier quail. He could not imagine what the men on Riku’s front lines thought as they saw those metal-clad engines of death charging up the hill toward them. Iron masks shaped in the likeness of oni demons. Arrows falling among them like spring showers, turned aside by the Guild suits or simply shattered on the embossed iron. A roar building amongst the charging samurai, underscored by the growling snarl of their chainblades raised high. Farther up the hill beneath the wooden rain they charged, close enough now to see the terror on their enemies’ faces.

Tatsuya noted Riku had pulled back his own samurai from the front lines, meeting the charge with a legion of peasant soldiers; a bristling thicket of long spears outthrust against the oncoming tide. It was a sensible enough stratagem—to see what havoc these new technological terrors could wreak among his chaff before he committed his best forces to the fray. Their commander’s wisdom, however, proved little solace for Riku’s spearmen. Tatsuya’s samurai began the grisly task of hacking them to pieces, leather and thin iron plates melting like snow under those awful, growling swords, the spears no more use against the Guild suits than toothpicks against an iron cliff.

Tatsuya raised his hand to his signalman, preparing to send in his infantry as soon as Riku’s archers were neutralized. It would only be moments before his vanguard smashed the lines—then his bushimen could proceed uphill without being riddled with arrow fire. He could hear screams and agonized wails now rising above the rumble of gunning motors and snarling swords. The Guild engines wreaking slaughter among the—

Wait …

A hush falling over the carnage up the hill, the bass and bottom end falling away from the bloody symphony. Tatsuya frowned, squinting in the burning glare, clawing goggles of polarized glass down over his eyes to dim the burning light. He could see figures falling—armored figures—chainblades tumbling from nerveless fingers amidst cries of rage and despair.

General Ukyo stood tall in his stirrups, hand up against the sun.

“What the hells is happening?”

“Listen,” Tatsuya said.

Ukyo titled his head to the song of murder on the wind. His face paled as he looked to the Bull.

“The armor,” Tatsuya whispered, glancing at the Guild ships floating overhead. “The motors have fallen still…”

Black shapes fell from the silhouettes overhead, pushed over the railings by brass-clad hands—barrels lit with burning fuses. The first landed amidst his archers, a second landing a split-second afterward, Tatsuya’s voice rising up in a roar as a deafening blast ripped through his men. A burst of scalding air hit the Bull’s face, momentarily dazzling, the thunderous whump of a dozen more explosions tearing through his lines like summer fires through waves of dead grass. Dread realization seized him by the throat, cold fear unfurling in his belly.

“We are betrayed!” he cried.

Another explosion, another, the bombardment ripping up his lines and leaving wailing, bleeding pulps of meat and bone in its wake. Soldiers, warriors, brave men all, reduced to blubbering children. Clutching their missing pieces with bloody hands or rolling about in warm, wet puddles of themselves. Screaming horses. Thundering, flaming hooves. Fires blazing, burning, choking smoke, yet more terror tumbling from the sky-ships overhead and bursting upon his shell-shocked troops.

“Great Lord, beware!” Ukyo cried.

The old general lunged forward and slapped Tatsuya’s horse, just as a bone-shattering explosion erupted behind the pair. Ukyo was blasted to pieces, the shockwave hurling Tatsuya to the ground, the bannerpole at his back almost snapping, his colors dragged through the dirt. Another explosion nearby, shrapnel flying, the Bull crying out as blood-soaked clods of earth rained down around him. The sounds of slaughter on the hill, the wails of samurai in lifeless iron suits being chopped to pieces by Riku’s own elite. Tatsuya felt his gorge rising, staggering to his feet, watching his few remaining archers incinerated by another blinding burst of flame.

“Retreat!” he roared at the top of his lungs, the word bitter and black upon his tongue. “Maker’s breath, we are betrayed! Retreat! Retreat!”

The Bull ran to his horse, wide-eyed and bloodied. Though terrified, the stallion was war-trained, holding its nerve long enough for its master to scramble atop its back, kick hard in the stirrups. But where could they go? Somewhere to shelter from the bombardment. High ground, more easily defended. Roofs of stone above their head.

He looked west. West toward those four snow-clad peaks rising from tumbledown hills.

“Ride!” Tatsuya roared. “Make for the Sisters! Ride, damn you!”

Men all about him, scrabbling for horses or simply breaking on foot. Weapons thrown aside, breastplates hurled to the ground—anything and everything they could do to move swifter, escape the barrage from those accursed ships overhead. The bombardment had paused; thick, billowing plumes of smoke shrouding the field in choking black. But Riku’s forces would quickly be finished with the slaughter on the hill, soon to be set like hounds upon his trail. So swiftly, the hunter had become the hunted.

Tatsuya squinted up the rise, fancied he caught a glimpse of a tall man wading amidst the slaughter, a banner bearing the Kazumitsu sigil on his back. The same armor Tatsuya wore, black embossed iron, now slick with blood—a gift from their father on the day they became men. And now Riku had whored himself to the chi-mongers.