Free Samurai by Jason Hightman

body. You couldn’t quite tell where she came from or how old she was. She had used her looks to earn a small fortune on the catwalk, some years back, before an ugly argument with an American model had caused her to lose her temper—and she had torched the Manhattan girl in a New York minute.
    Several more of these arguments, usually over boys, resulted in more deaths—and dodging the police had made the whole thing hardly worthwhile.
    She decided to move into manufacturing, using sweatshop labor. Little girls and boys, and incredibly poor men and women were chained to sewing machines for long hours so she could make millions selling high fashion at shocking prices.
    She had a formula. In the factories there was an ivory sculpture with a giant tiger’s eye painted on it on every floor. The eyes hypnotized the workers. The workers never complained.
    Each tiger’s-eye sculpture had a pupil, like a giant pearl, which moved back and forth with a very slow, eerie clicking. At the same time, the sculptures gave off a low hum, like a growl, that would grow louder whenever the workers showed the slightest rebellion. Then the laborers would grow weak, uncertain, and decide not to challenge their masters.
    The Tiger Dragon could not decide which was better, the pain and suffering of her sweatshops (which gave her so very much joy), or the thought that millions of girls had seen her in magazines and starved themselves to look like her. She probably preferred her factories; so much agony to feed on, all in one place.
    The sweatshops lay beneath her magnificent, modern palace in Bombay.
    Her palace was itself a factory, home to the darkest suffering of all. The workers’ pain floated up to her and gave her strength to begin each day.
    The Tiger Dragon, whose name was Issindra, came from a family that had ruled over the ancient jungle lands of India, watching as Bombay grew around their domain over the centuries. Through all the squabbles—and she had of course killed the rest of herfamily by now—Issindra had kept their palace complex intact. In fact, her bedchamber remained a part of the prehistoric wild, with great trees and plants of the forest shooting out of the ground and wrapping around the indoor support columns, as well as her furniture, the bed, the desk, everything. It was like sleeping in an overgrown greenhouse.
    She tended this dense garden with sorcery, lovingly protecting its legendary secrets, which were special and fearsome even to the Serpentine world. The power of the palace, hidden in its heart, was kept safe under her watch.
    Issindra was now feeling that a nation with a billion people was far too small a place for someone so great as she.
    She licked her tiger-striped skin, reflecting.
    It would be too much to say that she wanted to be Queen of Serpents herself. She would be content with simply expanding her empire—an empire that encompassed every form of smuggling known to man. This included a very good trade in exotic animals: stolen elephants, rhino, giraffe, zebra, birds, lions, and, of course, tigers, all for private owners, who usually cooked them up and ate them, no matter how rare, as well as a fairly good business in tea exports (her tea was rotten; it made a person feel spiteful and jealous and mean).
    The tigers she kept close to her, roaming about her lazy, opulent palace. They could often be found beside her in a giant canopy bed—until she sold them off, and once in a while she would allow the animals to eat one of her workers alive, just for fun.
    That is, if she didn’t eat the workers herself. She’d been picking at a piece of human meat that had been stuck in one of her teeth since yesterday, and was reconsidering whether the flesh was really worth the bother. She worked at the fat, greasy tidbit with her tongue, squeezing juice from it, and decided it was.
    Her entire palace was built to accommodate the tigers, which moved through hollow passages, so that at any time, a worker might