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.
What had he promised them? What had Riku sold of himself to buy this bloody victory?
“Godsdamn you for a fool, brother,” Tatsuya murmured.
And kicking at his stallion’s flanks, the Bull turned and fled.
Clouds dipped in sunset, sky the color of a belly wound, just as difficult to look at. The stains of the sickness seeping into the very air around us, turning all to red. Below us, farmlands. Fields for miles. From the blur of one horizon to the next, pressed up against that wounded sky. Between the wheat and corn and rice, I saw long rippling swathes of lotus blossoms. Snaking through the weeping land like rivers of blood. Deeper and wider by the year.
Jun and Ami sat astride my shoulders, the Lady pressed against the boy’s back. Her hands about his waist sent a thrill humming in his veins, adrenaline souring his tongue, and through the sliver of himself the boy had lodged behind my eyes, spilling now into me. I felt as he felt, though perhaps only a shade of it; conscious of the curves of her body snug against his spine, her soft breath on the back of his neck sending frissions of current along his skin.
Youthful memories filled his mind; palace grounds and bright laughter and long ribbons of midnight hair. He was near drunk on her closeness, and yet, the knowledge that the Lady was another man’s wife—a man who would probably be Shōgun by week’s end, no less—lingered first and foremost in his mind. That though she seemed to relish the reactions her proximity caused him, she was a woman, another’s woman, and he himself still only a boy. Unused to courtly games, the weapons used therein. He felt oafish. Clumsy. Foolish.
“Your friend flies swift, Stormdancer Jun,” said Lady Ami.
Though it was more monkey-jabber spilling from her lips, I realized when she spoke, I could perceive something of the Lady’s words through Jun’s ears. Disconcerting. Fascinating also, to feel your clumsy speech take form and shape in my head. And so, while I admit I was still afraid of this boy skulking behind my eyes, the changes his presence wrought in me, I let him linger, listening to her words and his heart and the static charge growing between them.
Crackling.
“Swifter than I imagined,” Jun said. “If we fly through the night, we will reach your Lord and husband’s armies before dawn.”
“They will be impossible to see in the dark. Unless they have already engaged Lord Riku’s forces. They will light no fires by which to be spotted.”
“Koh has excellent eyes.”
She shifted her arms about his waist. Sighed deep. Jun shivered as her breath tickled his earlobe, his blood rushing south, licking at bone-dry lips.
“I fear I may fall asleep,” Ami said. “Perhaps you should sit behind me, Stormdancer. Your arms about me. Better to catch me if I should fall?”
Jun glanced down at the growing problem below his waistline, horrified at the thought of the potential First Lady of Shima inadvertently pressing up against it. I could feel his face flushing a deeper scarlet than the sky, amusement rippling in my mind despite myself.
SHE NOT TIRED. SHE HUNGRY.
Gods above, what is wrong with her?
GRATEFUL YOU SAVE LIFE.
She’s a married woman!
VERY GRATEFUL, THEN.
“Perhaps it would be best if we landed and took some rest, Lady Ami,” Jun said. “It has been a long day, and tomorrow I fear will be longer still.”
“You wish me to bed down in some farmer’s squat?”