Please?
He whined.
shouldn’t be baddog
Red …
going now i am gooddog
The hound turned to leave. Yukiko thought of Buruu again, bleeding and starving out in the storm. Her best friend in the world. Her brother. More to her than life itself. And though the guilt made her wince, the breath catch in her lungs, she reached inside the Kenning, and found herself making it hard. Iron. Not the soft voice of suggestion, or even the subtle press of manipulation. It was crude and heavy-handed; a subtraction of will, the strings of a puppeteer upon a flinching marionette. Head pounding as if it might burst, warmth trickling over her lips.
Red. Do as I say.
Not asking. Commanding.
And with another soft whine, the dog tucked his tail and obeyed.
He stole across the generator room, several gaijin shouting at him, trying to shoo him away. Yukiko noticed none of the workers had insignia on their collars or animal skins on their shoulders. They looked messier than Danyk and his fellows, more unkempt. Several sported what looked to be burn scars on their exposed skin.
The hound nosed his way up onto a gantry of steel mesh, into a thicket of pipes and bright red valve handles. A large picture hung on the wall, covered in gaijin writing. It resembled a spider’s web; a central hub connected to smaller nodes by thin, fluorescent wires. Each node was set with a small globe and scribed with a symbol. One bulb in the topmost corner was glowing faint blue-white, a trail of fluorescence leading back to the web’s center, light slowly fading as the static electricity in the room died. Yukiko noticed a stylized sea dragon curled around what looked like a compass in the bottom corner and realized what she was seeing.
A map.
A map of the lightning farm and the surrounding pylons.
Gaijin men were gathered around a cluster of controls nearby, and one of them soon spotted Red standing before the glowing diagram. A hulking uniform-clad shape Yukiko recognized as Danyk appeared, bellowing at the top of his voice. Red cowered low, belly to the floor. Blue-white light glinted across the flattened samurai helms on the big man’s shoulders.
told you baddog now …
I’m sorry, Red. I really am.
Danyk picked up a wrench and made to throw it at the dog, roaring again. Ilyitch appeared from behind a cluster of pipes, a dripping mop in his hands, faint hand-shaped bruise on his cheek. The big man cuffed the boy across the back of his head, sending his goggles flying. Scooping them back up off the grille, Ilyitch grabbed Red by his collar and dragged him down the stairs, berating the hound in his strange language. She sensed Red’s shame, vague resentment mixed with confusion about why he’d done something so thoroughly baddog. She felt awful guilt; a pity-sick disquiet that she’d turned the Kenning into something so overt. So cruel.
She eased away from the contact with the hound, blinking hard, licking at the blood drying on her upper lip. And tentatively, she projected herself through Red’s eyes, reaching out to touch the boy’s thoughts. The migraine grew awful; like a metal vise grinding the base of her skull. She had to fight to maintain her grip, to stay inside the noise and light of a human mind, so utterly different from the beasts she’d swam in for most of her life.
The boy dragged Red across the catchment room floor, through the double doors and up the spiral stairwell. Yukiko tried to speak into his head, to frame words Ilyitch might understand, but they slipped away from her, all a-tumble, white and empty noise, like hollow pipes falling upon a sodden floor.
The boy stopped, looked around him with a frown. Red whined, hackles rising. She could feel the dog’s trepidation, his instinctive sense that something was very wrong.
She tried again, to form a greeting and project it through the dog, but it collapsed like a castle of sand between her fingers; just a muddled jumble of consonants and vowels and hissing static. Ilyitch tilted his head to one side, eyes screwed shut, holding his nose and trying to pop his eardrums. Yukiko backed off, lingering on the edge of his warmth, and he grabbed Red’s collar again, hauled him up the stairs.
This isn’t working. I can’t form the words.
It was as if the constructs in the boy’s head were too different from her own: square pegs into round holes. Language was never an issue with animals, but perhaps that was because animals didn’t really speak? Perhaps the Kenning was never meant for this?
What could she do? How could she leap the barrier between them? She needed a way of communicating that they both understood …
She recalled Danyk looming over her, the katana blade slipping down over her tattoo. His eyes fixed upon the picture inked into her skin, the symbol he understood without her needing to speak a word.
“Keetsoonay. Sahmoorayee.”
… That was it.
The answer.
Not words. Pictures.
Yukiko formed an image and pushed it into Ilyitch’s mind; herself, sinking beneath the waves as he dove into the thrashing waters to save her. The boy reeled back against the railing, hand to his brow. She gave him another image; of her and Buruu flying through clear skies, her arms around his neck. She tried to inject emotional content into the picture, the simple warmth of friendship and trust.
Ilyitch steadied himself, blinking as if he’d been struck in the face. Sure enough, the boy loosed his grip on Red’s collar and looked to the stairwell above. He ascended at a scuffing, cautious pace, Red on his heels, heavy footfalls ringing on metal as he reached the landing and started down the corridor toward her room.
The sensation was disorientating, almost nauseating; watching the boy walking down the hallway, Red beside him, hearing their footfalls through Ilyitch’s ears, the same footsteps coming closer in her own. So she broke full contact and opened her eyes, wiped her nose as best she could on her shoulder and leaned back against the wall. As she did so, she pushed one last picture out to the gaijin boy; an image of herself, helpless, frightened and wretched. Bound wrists and pleading eyes, desperate and alone, looking to him, her only hope.
When Ilyitch opened the door a few moments later, that was exactly what he saw.
26
FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW
The Gentleman knelt on a satin cushion at the head of a long oaken table. The reflections of the overheads on its surface were tiny stars on lacquered midnight, twinkling with more vibrancy than the real stars overhead could ever dream. A pretty duet of koto and shamisen music drifted through the drinking house walls, competing with the growl of the generator downstairs.
The table was dressed for eight, each place set with fine porcelain, a saké cup, a thousand-thread linen napkin; all as white as Iishi snow. Jimen the accountant sat at the Gentleman’s right hand. Each other cushion was occupied by a yakuza lieutenant; a collection of muscle and scars, narrowed eyes and gleaming, tattooed flesh. Five men and one woman, each stripped to the waist, every inch of flesh below their necks and above their wrists sporting beautiful, intricate ink work. Canvases of flesh, painted by the greatest artisans in Kigen.
Seimi knelt with fists upon knees, Hida beside him, pawing at one cauliflower ear. The room was cool as autumn’s kiss, the heady scent of liquor veiling the stink of sweat and exhaust from nearby sky-docks. Seimi could see the horizon through the bay windows, the shades of night studded with the silhouettes of docked sky-ships, forlorn as abandoned lovers.