“I wonder how history will remember us, Kin-san,” Daichi said, voice frail with pain. “I wonder what they will say.”
Kin’s reply was flat. Dead.
“They’ll probably call me traitor.”
Daichi nodded at the flames. “Probably.”
“They won’t call you anything at all.”
Daichi raised an eyebrow, turned toward the boy, and froze. He took in the unblinking eyes, the blood smeared across fingers and face, the dead-man expression.
“Nobody will remember your name, Daichi,” Kin said.
“What…” Daichi licked his lips, eyes fixed on those bloody hands, “… what have you done, Kin-san?”
“I told you,” Kin said. “I found a way for all of it to end.”
The window exploded at Daichi’s back, a rain of shattered glass and roar of blue-white flame. A Lotusman collided with the old man, knocked him off his feet, the pair crashing to the floor and tumbling across the boards. Another half-dozen suited shapes blasted in through the broken window, the roar of their burners almost deafening, filling the room with choking smoke.
Daichi kicked at the Guildsman tackling him, rolling away and drawing the old katana at his back from its battered scabbard, teeth gritted in agony. A second Lotusman advanced, brass fingers outstretched, and the old man struck with the blade, a dull note ringing out as folded steel connected with case-hardened brass. The hiss of breather bellows, the sound of metallic chuckling as the figures surrounded the old man, his sword raised high, gleaming in the light of bloody eyes.
They lunged and he moved; an ebb tide, flowing back then crashing forward, his katana’s point skewering one Guildsman through the glowing red glass over his eye. The Lotusman screamed, a high-pitched, agonized squeal, thick with reverb as he fell, blood streaming down a blank, motionless face. A quick strike severed the breathing tubes of two more Lotusmen, and the old man staggered back, one hand pressed to his ribs, the other still clutching his blade, knuckles white upon the hilt. Gasping for breath. Blood at his lips.
Swordmaster the old man might have been, but he was one, beaten and sick, and they were six, hard and cold. More still rushing up the stairs now; heavily armed Guild mercenaries with Kobiashi needle-throwers. And they fell on him, just a dull weight of numbers without finesse or craft, bearing him down as he thrashed, stabbing and punching, cursing them with every ragged, gasping breath. Curling up under their blows and finally falling still as they plunged the blacksleep needles into his flesh, his stare locked on the boy who even now sat slumped at the table, bathed in blood, flames reflected in knife-bright eyes.
Kin heard his father’s voice, the knowing rebuke amidst the workshop’s thrum. The words he’d heard so many times, the simple rote that had been as much a part of his life as breathing. And in that moment, he finally understood their truth.
Skin is strong.
Flesh is weak.
“Godsdamn you, Kin,” the old man whispered. “Godsdamn you to the hells.”
The boy watched the light in the old man’s eyes fade as the blacksleep dragged Daichi down into unconsciousness. He felt pale hands on his shoulders, insectoid clicking as eight silver arms encircled him, holding him tight.
“I’m sure they will,” he said.
51
THE QUIET DARK
Michi sheared through the ceiling of Aisha’s chambers and down into a spray of bright red. Her chainkatana parted a head from its shoulders as she tumbled into a crouch, taking a second foe’s legs off at the knees. Metallic screeching. Spattered walls. Rising into a faceful of silver needles.
The air about her sang, whipped into bright, cutting notes, pain behind it. Stepping backward, she lashed out with the chainwakizashi, heard jagged teeth sparking on metal, blinking the blood from her lashes. Gasping, eyes burning, sweat slick on her skin, gown weighing her down like the air in a tomb.
They had the seeming of demons: featureless faces, bodies clad in skintight, gleaming brown, long skirts studded with fat, gleaming buckles, eight impossibly thin arms arrayed about each in a gleaming halo. But Michi saw mechabacii on their chests, recognized them from the palanquin at the sky-docks, and she knew at last the hell they’d been spat from.
“Guildsmen,” she hissed.
The things lunged with those silver limbs, terrifyingly fast, cutting into her right arm and knocking the katana away. Michi’s riposte with the wakizashi opened one along its belly, up into its chest, and the thing shrieked, distorted and metallic, stumbling backward and trying to staunch the glistening sausage-flow of innards bulging from the rend.
The final Guildsman filled the air with silver, Michi shifting onto her back foot as needles whipped and whistled about her. She crouched low, aimed a sweeping kick at its ankles, and hampered by the buckles and skirts, the Guildsman was forced backward. Its heel hit a puddle of blood, and with a squeak across polished pine, it lost balance. Spinning on the spot, Michi hurled the chainwakizashi at the thing’s chest, punching through the mechabacus with the shrieking saw of steel teeth and a rain of brightly colored sparks.
The Guildsman stared at the blade mutely, sinking to its knees. Retrieving her chainkatana from the bloody ground, Michi swung it without ceremony. The thing tumbled forward, headless, silver limbs twitching as if in a fit.
“Michi,” said a voice. “Thank the gods.”
She saw her then, throat seizing tight, and it was all she could do to choke out a reply.
“Aisha…”
She lay on a grand oaken bed, red silk pulled up to her chin, pillows all about her. Tomo, her small black-and-white terrier, sat beside her, growling even as his little tail wagged. Machines were arrayed on either side of her; towering contraptions set with dials and gauges and bellows, transistors and vacuum tubes. Michi dashed across the room, sheathing the blade at her waist, grabbing Aisha’s hand.
“No time to explain, we have to move…”
She tugged hard, trying to drag Aisha from her bed. The Lady flopped forward, hair across her face, a deadweight sack of meat and bones. The silk sheet slipped away from her chin, bunched about her waist, and Michi realized with growing horror that the machines at her bedside, the cables spilling from their outputs … all of them were snaking across the floor, up onto the bed, and from there …
Into Aisha.
Into her arms. Into the bayonet studs puncturing her flesh. Into the device laid upon her chest, thin brass ribs and diodes, the bellows in the machine beside her moving up and down in time with her breath.
“My gods…” Michi whispered, pressing Aisha back into the pillows. “What have they done to you?”
“Saved my life.”
Her voice was hollow, an almost imperceptible reverberation at the end of every word.
“Forcing my heart to beat, my lungs to breathe.” Her eyes gleamed with the beginnings of tears. “Amaterasu, protect me…”
The tears broke, spilling over her lashes and down pallid cheeks.
“I can’t feel anything, Michi.” Aisha’s voice became a whisper, choked and tiny. “My brother, he…” She screwed her eyes shut. “I can’t feel anything below my neck…”
“No,” Michi breathed. “No, that can’t be. I saw you at the sky-docks.”
“Propped up like a corpse in its box. Gagged behind my breather. Plugged into that accursed chair and the contraption beneath. All for show.”