A roar, tail lashing, hackles bristling down his spine. All thought fleeing at my challenge, his pride and his rage swelling past his love for me, his last remaining kin. And as he tensed to charge, a buck stepped from the crowd of onlookers and roared at the top of his lungs.
“I challenge.”
My friend. My brother, not my brother.
Rahh.
He glanced at me. All that lay between us. That might lie before us. And he turned to the Khan and spoke again.
“I challenge.”
Two white shapes. Falling like meteors in the skies above our heads. Blood like rain amidst the thunderclaps. Lightning at the edges of their wings. Crackling across hulking clouds as they collided, screaming and roaring and tearing.
Heart in my throat. Pulse running quicker. Fear for him, my friend, my brother not my brother. A feeling for him, running deeper than I had known. Where did it come from? The monkey-child now inside my mind? His softness spilling into me? Had I always known this, and only now acknowledged it, when he might be taken away? The flood of it, the confusion of it, all a-tumble in my mind. Jun beside me, hand upon my shoulder, bringing more comfort than I could have believed but a day or two ago.
A strange thing, monkey-child. Your clumsy words failing me again. I felt I had awakened from a dream. I felt the proximity of gods. The hands of fate. So many intersections here, on the ground below, in the skies above. So many possibilities stretched before us. Only one outcome certain.
Death.
Rahh roared, kicking loose of my grandfather’s embrace, a spray of blood trailing from the old Khan’s claws. Rahh was quicker, stronger, younger. Yet the old Khan had wisdom on his side. Patience and cunning. Rahh’s was the charge, the strike, the bellow. But the Khan’s was the feint, the riposte, the deathly silence. Gravity and momentum, muscle and bone, majestic gleaming arcs of trajectory across the roiling black, collision and escape, and blood, blood, blood.
I prayed. Yes, we pray, monkey-child. To the father, Raijin. The God of Lightning and Thunder. To bring Rahh back to me. To show us a sign. That we were meant to remain, to fight for this place, once our home, now taken away by the sickly hands of metal and greed. I did not know if he heard. Or if he did, if he listened. If the outcome of this battle, as all battles, was preordained. If there was such a thing as fate. A part of me wished to believe so—in destiny and such. For if such existed, Rahh would not fail. Could not fall.
And yet, the part of me that had awakened in those last few days, roaming free, flying with the boy on my back—that part of me hoped beyond hoping that there was no hand at play here. That we were all free to do as we wished. That, if Rahh won, he won because he willed it more, not because some god upon some cloud intended it so.
The pair collided again, roars and shrieks, orphaned feathers falling from the sky. I squinted as the lightning flashed, Jun’s fingers clutching my feathers. The old Khan had his talons dug into Rahh’s chest, kicking with his back legs, claws like sabers. The pair plummeting from the sky. And yet, locked tight in that embrace, the Khan had left himself exposed. Rahh proved himself the stronger, arresting their fall with thunderous beats of his mighty wings, flipping the Kahn over onto his back. Rahh caught the Khan’s hind legs with his own, struck once, twice with his beak, tearing the tendons at the join of wing and shoulder, the Khan roaring in agony. And as they fell closer and closer to the jagged rocks below, Rahh clawed loose of the Khan’s grip, bloody spray and tattered fur, leaving the old beast to fall.
I watched my grandfather’s end. Many turned away, but I forced myself to see. The end of an era. The death of an age. Trying to flap with broken wings, deny gravity’s grim embrace, refusing to cry out, admit defeat, shriek his fear. Crashing into the rocks, jagged and unforgiving, crushing and tearing and pulping to nothing, the grand old beast reduced to blood and feathers and fur. Thunder split the skies, echoing the roars of triumph below, the answer above. Rahh circling above us, bloodied but unbroken, bellowing his victory for the Thunder God to hear. Jun beside me, fist raised high, grinning and cheering, hugging me, telling me he told me so. That all this had been said and done. That all this was as it should be.
Rahh came in to land, the Skymeet gathered about him, singing his name.
The first new Khan of Shima in twenty years.
What would his first command be?
Tatsuya cursed beneath his breath, retreating to the caves, his soldiers and his bride beside him. Riku’s forces were marching up the hill, row by orderly row. No heedless charge for the Bear’s men, no. Not with those Guild vessels overhead. They tromped over the broken ground, up the steep incline in the shadow of the sky-ships, knowing full well if Tatsuya charged out to meet him, the Guild’s bombardment would blow them to bloody pulp. A grim advance, hemming the Bull’s forces in against walls of stone. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
“Form up on me!” Tatsuya bellowed.
“Form up!” The cry echoing down the line. “To the Bull! For the Imperium!”
Tatsuya turned to Ami, drawing his katana.
“Go back to the caves, Ami-chan. You will be safe there. If Riku breaks through, throw yourself upon his mercy. You are his sister-in-law. He will not harm you.”
“No kiss farewell, husband-mine?” Ami said. “No last tearful embrace?”
Tatsuya glanced at the soldiers gathering about him. The blades drawn. The flags unfurled.
“It would be unseemly. Go wait in the cave, Ami-chan. I will return presently.”
Ami licked her lips. Bit her tongue. Bowed.
“As my Lord commands.”
Riku’s forces closing in. Tatsuya’s gaze fixed on his brother, spotted now amidst the swell of bright steel and black iron and rolling, rippling red. The same banner at his back. The same armor on his skin. So much alike, they were. To think it had come to this …
“Make your peace with the Maker, my brothers!” Tatsuya called, raising his sword high. “And take these bastards with you to the hells!”
“Banzai!” his men roared. “Banzai!”
“Charge!”
A great shout rolling down the line, the thousandfold trample of running feet. A thunder, tumultuous, the katana raised high in Tatsuya’s hand as he stormed down the incline, the crush and press of bodies all about him, cold dread in his belly as the Guild vessels accelerated and Riku’s army came to a full halt. The shadows of the advancing sky-ships fell over the Bull, his muscles tensing as he waited for the bombardment to begin.
A blast fell amongst his men, then another, blinding, deafening, tearing through his soldiers as if they were paper dolls. Men blown to cinders and pieces, the blast as loud as thunder, rattling the teeth in his skull. But as quickly as it began, the explosions stilled, the ringing silence in the aftermath setting Tatsuya’s teeth on edge. What was happening? Those ships should be ripping them to shreds …
More thunder overhead, rolling across the skies above the drone of propellers, the cries of terror. And Tatsuya looked up at the screams above, the cries of wonder from the men about him, and saw the sky was filled with thunder tigers.
Awe and amazement. Openmouthed shock. Dozens of the beasts filling the air above him, falling on the Guild ships with claws sharp as swords, hard as steel. The flank-mounted cannons opening fire, not with black powder, but with a burst of silvered death, shuriken shredding the skies and the arashitora unlucky enough to be in their sights. Beasts fell tumbling and torn, blood pattering on his helm and spaulders as four bodies crashed among his lines in quick succession, roars of pain and bellows of despair. But by then, Tatsuya’s charge had cleared the shadow of the sky-ships, thundering down into Riku’s lines, smashing through the rows of spearmen with momentum and gravity behind them. The screams of the wounded, the cries uncurling behind vicious deathblows, the ring of steel on steel.