Lead and Steel: Jin
by
Silvrethorn
The crows led him there. Ever the outriders of death, their wheeling, crying numbers warned the samurai what he would find. The number of bodies piled in the ravine did not surprise him--the empty village meant just one thing, and the only question, answered by the crows, was where to find the bodies. Nor did the variety of the dead dismay him; old men and young children, grandmothers and maidens heaped together, and on the top the torn bodies of men. All the people of the village were here, save the men who fought best, and those were taken by the pirates who had built this mountain of corpses.
No. What sketched the frown on the samurai's still face was the smallest of things, the tiny black holes in the foreheads of the dead at his feet. Bullet holes. Dozens, scores of bullet holes. With one simple movement of a single finger these people had fallen like trees before a tidal wave, not by steel--the old way, the honorable way--but by lead and gunpowder, the clockwork reaver of a new age.
The samurai lifted his hand and touched the hilt of his sword. A sea breeze rippled his clothes and swept the hair across his face, a breeze tinged with the first, faint odor of decay. For a long time he stood on the brink of the ravine and stared down into the darkness of the bullet holes, the darkness of a future where the steel under his hand was no defense against the softest of metals, and he and his kind were nothing but shadows and memories.
"I am not a ghost," he said softly.
The crows circled and cried, their caws like mocking laughter.
