by eden Hudson
He didn’t stop to ask himself why a physician and student of the Darkening Skies would have fled upstairs to the library when the fighting began. He couldn’t.
As he ran through the upper corridor, he saw bodies through open doors into the students’ rooms. Many were tangled in blankets. A few lay on their mats as if they had never woken at all. Who had killed these?
Raijin rounded the corner. Shadows moved in the light cast through the library door.
He sprinted toward it, but a wall of velvety smooth skin flew in front of him. He tried to dart past Zhuan, but she corralled him, herding him backward.
“No,” the ray hissed, her voice low enough that Raijin could barely hear. “You are still the weakest creature in the forest, legged one. If you swim in on these, they will kill you.”
The shuffling of parchment and scrolls filtered out into the corridor from the library. Hearing it, Raijin stopped struggling and strained his ears to listen.
“The sheer amount of knowledge here...” The voice was one Raijin had never heard before. A man. “If we could keep just a few scrolls—”
“No,” a feminine voice snapped, thin and nasally. “It all burns. Bodies, monastery, everything.”
The clinking of scroll cases bumping against one another filled the air.
“I’m just saying, the price these things would fetch from the right buyer... And these cases? We should be able to keep a few of these for our trouble. Call it reimbursement for losing Do-Nang and Olil.”
“Those morons killed themselves when they deviated from their orders so they could go after that guai. They got what they deserved. You will, too, if you don’t follow your orders exactly.”
“Probably Olil’s idea. Stubborn mule,” the man said. Wood scraped against wood as if whoever was in the library were pushing a table across the floor. “Imagine, though, the kind of amazing things we might learn by reading even a fraction of this pile.”
“Read as many texts you like,” the nasally woman’s voice said. “But if you do, you burn with them. You heard Grandmaster Youn Wha—no trace of this path or its practices can remain. Or did you think we risked our lives so we could let some knowledge of it survive to be rediscovered later?” More scraping, then an exasperated sigh. “Are you going to help me with this or not?”
“Oh, quit your posturing. I was only talking.”
“As if you ever do anything else.”
Liquid glugged and splattered as if poured from a jar. A moment later, firelight flared up, casting shadows through the library’s doorway.
From his place in the corridor against the top of Zhuan’s flat body, Raijin’s mind reeled. These strangers were casually setting fire to hundreds and thousands of books and scrolls, the combined written knowledge of the Path of Darkening Skies, everything the school had gathered.
All the stories Master Chugi had loved so dearly.
Fury boiled in Raijin’s bones, finally emerging from wherever it had been hiding. His fists balled at his sides until it felt as if their tendons would snap. In that moment, the wrongness of what these strangers had done—the evil of it—all seemed to be exemplified by the simple act of burning the library full of books Raijin had read to the old man as his sight dimmed and then disappeared altogether.
He wanted blood.
Once a practitioner caused violence in the name of revenge, they could never step back onto the Path of Darkening Skies. Their Ro would be tainted forever.
But these strangers were murderers. They hadn’t just killed the masters and students, but tore them from their Path, denying them an honorable death in protection of the weak and shaming them in their last moments. Now they were destroying Master Chugi’s favorite books. How could they do such evil to such a kind old man? What righteousness was there in allowing offenders like that to go free?
“They killed my master,” Raijin whispered to Zhuan, his voice shaking with rage. “They killed my best friend and everyone on my Path.”
Fire crackled in the library, obviously finding good tinder in the many shelves of books and parchment. Glass shattered, and the light burned brighter.
“You aided me in ending the legged creatures who killed my mate,” Zhuan said, her low rumble just barely audible over the flapping smack of parchment tossed into the flames. “Let me destroy these creatures for you. I am their equal in strength. Together two of them will provide just enough challenge that I will gain some honor by their deaths.”
Raijin swallowed hard and shook his head. Only a lazy man or a coward would lay his responsibility on the shoulders of another.
When Master Chugi had told Raijin that his time with them was over, he had assumed the old man meant his time with the school. But no, Master Chugi had meant the Path of Darkening Skies itself.
Raijin pushed past the huge guai-ray.
The time had come for him to step off the Path for good.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
PRESENT
“I don’t understand.” Koida realized she was whimpering, but couldn’t stop herself. “What happened? I don’t understand.”
She and the yellow-haired foreigner stood in the shadows of the palace garden beneath her bedroom balcony. Hush had left them behind and climbed up to Koida’s room.
“Nothing happened,” the foreigner said, showing her a casual smile. It was terrifying in its authenticity. He gave her a wink and lifted his ivory flask to her. “We’re just three wealthy folk out for an evening’s ride. Nippy out this time of night so close to winter, but we’ve got a sip or two in us keeping the Ro burning hot.”
He tossed back the drink.
Koida stared. This foreigner was out of his mind, spewing drunken nonsense about cold weather. Maybe the shock of the mass slaughter they had just escaped had pushed him over the edge.
A shadow moved in the corner of her vision. Koida flinched, adrenaline flaring to her already overloaded heartcenter. She drew in a lungful of breath to scream, hysteria painting the night around her in garish, oily colors, but a hand closed over her mouth.
“It’s only Hush,” the yellow-haired man said, tucking his flask away. “Breathe. Calm. If you’ll keep quiet, she’ll let you go. Nod your head if you understand.”
Koida obeyed his instructions. Breathed. Nodded. The hand came off her mouth, then Hush stepped in front of her, holding out her black silk riding clothes.
“How did you find these?” Koida asked, her voice flat and emotionless. “I keep them hidden in a loose stone on my balcony that no one but I know of.”
Hush pressed the clothes into Koida’s hands.
“Get changed,” the foreigner said, turning away and leaning his forehead against the wall as if the drink had already gotten to him. “Every second you waste brings the executioner’s axe a little closer.”
“Lysander,” Koida remembered. “That’s your name.”
He chuckled humorlessly. “Glad I made such an impression. Now get dressed before we’re all arrested and put to death for your supposed crimes.”
Koida tried to comply, but she couldn’t figure out how to loosen and take off the many layers of her dress robes and sashes. Hush’s hands picked and pulled at them, unwinding here and untying there, but this wasn’t fast enough for Lysander.
With sigh of frustration, the drunken foreigner turned around.
“She’s not going to need those where she’s going.” He produced a burled steel dagger from his sleeve with one dangerously unsteady hand.
Koida’s eyes widened, and she backed away only to bump into the stone wall of the palace. Before she could bolt, however, the knife sliced down the front of her robes and undershift, the cold metal caressing her stomach as it parted the layered fabrics with barely more than a whisper.
She grabbed her falling robes, instinctively trying to preserve some semblance of modesty, but the drunk had already spun around and turned his attention to the lights spilling from the windows farther down the wall.
Koida’s stare fixed on the weapon as it dis
appeared into Lysander’s robes.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered again.
Hush shook her head and helped Koida out of her ruined dress robes, then into the black riding clothes. When that was finished, she began pulling bell cascades out of Koida’s hair and wadding them in the remains of the second princess’s wedding robes.
The only princess now, Koida realized. The thought seemed to come from far out past the moon and stars. So far away, it couldn’t be felt at all.
Koida didn’t remember climbing over the palace walls or getting Pernicious out of his stall and mounting up. All she could remember, when she thought back later, was Lysander’s weaving feet and drunken slurring about Stones and Tiles, demanding the attention of everyone in the stable, while Hush slipped away. Then everything went black, and confused shouting filled the air.
Sometime later, Koida blinked and the sun was coming up. On the horizon, the sky transitioned from a rim of pale yellow to a soft peach, then a cold blue. She was sitting on Pernicious’s back, trotting through a forest next to one of the palace’s best destriers, a roan named Linebreaker. Lysander swayed along in the roan’s saddle.
“Where’s Hush?” The sound of her own voice in the silence of the forest startled Koida.
Apparently it surprised Lysander, too, because his head snapped around as if she’d shouted.
“Can you keep it down?” He squinted and held up a hand to shield his eyes from the weak rays of the sun. “Some of us haven’t had the opportunity to sleep off last night yet.”
“Was she killed, too?” Koida asked. Perhaps she’d only imagined Hush coming with them. Or perhaps the silent woman had died in the dark confusion at the stables.
“Hush is fine. She’s off making a false trail to confuse any unwanted trackers.”
Koida turned this over for a moment. “Are there any trackers we do want?”
“For crying out loud.” Lysander pinched the bridge of his nose between his eyes. “I’m saving your royal highness hungover, half-starved, and sleep-deprived. This isn’t the ideal climate for me to put up with sarcasm, Princess.”
Koida blinked. She wasn’t being sarcastic. She wasn’t anything. With a nothing shrug, she let her mind return to the safe blackness.
Chapter Forty
6 YEARS AGO
Raijin stepped into the library, his hands raised to Inviting Attack. Though the fire had been burning for a few minutes at most, already ashes and scraps of smoldering paper flitted through the air.
On the far side of the room, a heavyset man in black with a stringy mustache leaned over a flaming pile of parchment, board books, and scrolls, dumping lantern oil in a line from the fire to the nearest shelves. Much closer to the door Raijin had just entered, a thin woman with a pointed, birdlike nose stood frozen in the act of flipping a low table end over end toward the flames.
She blinked.
In the space of that blink, Raijin took in the sweat wetting the hair at her temples, the sleeves rolled up to expose her freckled forearms to the air, even a faint scarring on her inner wrist.
And then she attacked.
She shot toward him at a speed faster than Straight Line Winds, so fast he could hardly see her. Then he couldn’t see her. She disappeared into the shadows thrown by the dancing fire as if she were made of nothing more than a wisp of smoke.
Frantic, Raijin manifested a Shield of the Crescent Moon in each hand and covered his back and front. A rain of needles pattered against the shield behind him.
He dropped and spun, lashing out with his leg and sending a Landslide of Ro in the direction the needles had come from, but the woman was gone.
The heavy footfalls of running feet caught his attention. Raijin turned just in time to catch an oil lantern on his forward-facing shield. The lantern’s glass shattered, and oil dripped down his uniform jacket and pants.
Flames raced along the trail of oil on the floor, up Raijin’s pants and his shield.
Panicked, he dismissed the needle-studded and oil-covered crescent shields. The fire hung in the air before his face for a moment, seeming to burn the very oxygen from his lungs. He whipped his arms around, directing a gout of Torrential Downpour at himself and drowning the flames.
“Beware, legged one!” Zhuan shouted. “The female attacks from behind you!”
Raijin threw himself into a roll. The poisoned needles flew across the room and thudded into burning shelves.
A net of glowing black strings of Ro slapped down over Raijin’s right side, tangling around the back of his neck and shoulder. In less than a second, the strings had melted through his jacket and into his skin. Everywhere they touched, his flesh bubbled and burned as if he were being stung by a curtain of jellyfish tentacles. He screamed and ripped at the Ro net with both hands, trying to tear it off.
It wouldn’t move. More needles whistled through the air.
Throwing himself to his feet, Raijin shoved both palms forward in a Flash Flood Wall. A wall of jade water flung the acidic net off him. Some of the needles flying toward him should have pierced his watery Ro, but immediately behind the jade floodwaters flowed another wall, this one of glimmering white jade. The few needles that made it through the first were taken down by the second.
On the opposite side of the double Flash Flood Walls, Raijin saw Zhuan dart like an enormous round hornet at the thin woman from behind. The woman danced and spasmed as the guai-ray’s stinger pierced her heartcenter and sent lightning singing through her body.
Behind him, the floorboards creaked beneath a heavy tread. Raijin used Cyclone Speed to spin around. The man hurled his stringy black Ro net. With a burst of Straight Line Winds, Raijin shot to the side. He sliced his arms through the air in Yong Lei’s favored Driving Sleet technique, sending a barrage of hair-thin ice projectiles at the man in black’s face.
The man manifested a defensive shield from that foul-looking black Ro. The Driving Sleet shattered against it, but already Raijin was twisting into a devastating back kick. Battering Volley of Hail struck the man’s shield with overwhelming force and threw him backward into a burning shelf.
Before the man could recover, Raijin struck again with a Shattering Crescent Wind kick. The man’s black shield flickered but held. Raijin lashed out with a straight kick that so far as he knew had no name, his heel just missing the man’s high shield and slamming into his heartcenter.
Thunder boomed, deafening in such a small space. The man slammed into the floor, his black shield disappearing. He clutched at his heartcenter, coughing in big, wet whoops. Flecks of blood dotted his face.
Raijin crept closer, fists raised and legs ready to spring.
The man reached toward his hip with both hands as if to grab something from the air, then whipped them forward. Clearly the move was meant to manifest a weapon of some sort, but his Ro didn’t respond. Whatever Raijin’s unnamed technique was, it had disabled this man’s Ro.
As if realizing that at the same moment, in one swift motion, the man slipped a bamboo blowgun from his sleeve and lifted it toward his mouth.
Raijin drove himself to one knee beside the man, throwing every ounce of his weight and momentum behind a vertical punch to the heartcenter. He’d seen the technique practiced by the masters and some of the highest-ranked students during moving meditation, but it was always executed with an open palm.
Raijin struck with a closed fist.
On impact, the air around them crackled with frost. The man’s heartcenter froze solid, then shattered into a hundred pieces under Raijin’s knuckles.
The man’s hands dropped limp at his sides. The needle blowgun rolled across the floor. He stared up at the burning ceiling. Dead.
A cloud of foul-looking black Ro filtered up from the man’s splintered heartcenter and floated toward Raijin. Raijin fell onto his backside trying to avoid it, but the black cloud of Ro oozed into his chest.
Immediately, the glimmering white Ro attacked the black, encircling it and tightening down like a c
lenched fist. His jade Ro closed over both, snapping shut on them like the jaws of a hungry beast.
Raijin could feel the toxic black Ro trying to burn its way out of the dual jades. With every move the black made, the white and green clamped down harder. A tentacle of black Ro burned through the white. Raijin panicked and grabbed at it with his jade Ro, but rather than tightening around the whole structure again, the jade sunk through the white like green sand through a sieve and enclosed the black.
The movement made Raijin’s head spin, and he had to stick out his arms to catch himself. In desperation, he turned his focus outward. It was overwhelming enough to feel the jade and white switch places and repair itself whenever the black burned through one. If he kept watching, he would pass out.
All at once, the injuries of the fight caught up with him. His temples throbbed, and the snaking lines of acid-blistered skin twisting around his neck, shoulder, and upper arm screamed with pain. That momentary blast of frost from the deadly heartcenter strike had soothed them, but now they were cooking in the heat from the library-consuming fire.
Some small, rational part of Raijin’s brain was still functioning, however. He stumbled up to his hands and knees and leaned over the man. He had to know who these strangers were. Quickly, he searched the man’s robes for something identifying. Finding nothing in the pockets, he pulled back the man’s sleeves, searching the compartment that had hidden the blowgun. Nothing. He was about to drop the man’s arm when he noticed a series of white marks on his wrist almost too pale to see.
Hadn’t he glimpsed something similar on the woman’s wrist? He turned around, looking for the second corpse.
The woman was still impaled on Zhuan’s stinger, but her clothes, hair, and flesh had been cooked to ashes. No answers would be found there.
Zhuan, for her part, was no longer swimming through the air above the floor. The huge guai-ray lay folded over on top of her right wing, the left rippling slowly.
“Go, legged one,” she said. “Your kind cannot survive a fire.”