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 Shōgunate in gear that had been gifted him by the former Shōgun 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—