by eden Hudson
“When you’re fighting for your life it is,” Lysander said. “You’ve earned your rest, Princess. But first—” He pointed over his shoulder at the brush as he headed for the shade where Hush and Cold Sun sat in resting meditation. “—go find my knife.”
Feeling very pleased with herself, Koida started in the direction she’d tossed the dagger.
Movement at the top of the rocky bank startled her. A small band of heavily robed riders on thick, hairy ponies trotted up to the stream. They wore the same billowing garments Lysander had procured for Koida, Hush, and Cold Sun, but their hoods were up, obscuring everything but sharp gray eyes.
“Lysander...”
The foreigner appeared at her side. “Grassland nomads. Keep your hands at your sides.”
The riders stopped at the edge of the bank, their ponies’ hooves sending pebbles and dirt skittering down. Lysander stepped forward to meet them.
Rather than bowing, Lysander brought a hand to his lips, then extended it to them. The rider at the forefront of their group returned the gesture.
“Apologies for using your stream without permission.” As Lysander spoke, his hands moved in precise, deliberate signs. Koida tried to pick out the meaning of each motion, but she could hardly keep up with their fluttering. “We are passing through to the Great Library of Ten Thousand Nations.”
The rider responded in a lilting language Koida had never heard before, his thick russet hands flitting through a series of accompanying motions. Watching them communicate this way, Koida became very aware of her own hands—one a lavaglass blade, the other a fist—held stiffly by her side. She wondered if she should uncurl the fist, but then stopped herself. Who could say what the movement might mean?
“A traveling scholar and for some time a Lesser Librarian, though I have been away for many years,” Lysander said and gesticulated, as if answering a question.
The rider shifted, causing his saddle to creak, then spoke his lilting language again. Though Koida couldn’t understand what he was saying, his creased brow seemed to convey that the words were troubling.
“He said they haven’t seen traffic coming from the Great Library in more than a year,” Lysander translated. “The few scholars who have passed through their lands toward it have not returned.”
“Are they taking the sea route, as we were going to?” Koida asked.
The rocks behind them crunched, indicating that Cold Sun and Hush had drifted over to join them.
“They wouldn’t all be,” Lysander said. “There are always at least a few who can’t stand the open water, like Hush, and they’re usually the ones coming through the grassland.” Lysander turned back to the rider. “Gratitude. We will remain vigilant on our approach.”
The rider responded, then he and his band turned their mounts and trotted away.
Lysander frowned at their retreating backs. “He said to drink all the water we like. He doubts we’ll live to share his stream again.”
THEY LEFT THE STREAMBED behind as soon as dark fell. The somber mood left behind by the rider’s warning clung to them like a cloak as the last traces of grassland faded away, replaced by endlessly shifting hills of sand. Icy winds howled over the terrain, making an eerie sort of music with the constant hissing of the grit.
Koida shivered, not entirely due to the chill wind, and hunkered closer to Pernicious’s massive neck. After a time, the half-demon activated his Burning Heartcenter ability, radiating heat and lighting his veins, bones, and organs from the inside with his fiery orange Ro. Riding a safe distance away, Cold Sun’s war ram had done the same, though Koida guessed that was for Hush’s benefit, as the big Uktena was steaming in the night air.
Seated behind Koida, Lysander swayed drunkenly and took another noisy swig from his carved ivory flask. His mood had darkened as they crossed into the desert, and he’d been drinking liberally ever since, with no sign of slowing.
Pernicious dug and jumped his way up the steep side of an enormous dune, causing Lysander to spill a bit down Koida’s back. It smelled like a field of clover in bloom.
Koida arched away from him in irritation. “Is that thing not empty yet?”
“Never is, Princess,” he slurred. “Always as full as a young man’s heart and always as bitter as his tears.”
A nearly forgotten bedtime story of ancient magic and heroes surfaced in Koida’s memory.
“You’re making that up,” she said. “There’s no such thing as never-emptying flasks. That’s only in the old legends.”
“Name one thing outside your precious palace that you were told about that was real. I’ll wait. Father dear probably told you the world dropped off at the edge of the empire.”
Koida clenched her teeth, anger kindling to life in her heartcenter. The few moments’ good humor they had shared earlier seemed impossibly long ago, washed away by an ocean of liquor. The lavaglass in her arm tried to respond to the combination of anger and unease.
Taking a deep breath, she retreated into her Stone Soul. She wished Hush wasn’t so cautious of Pernicious so the silent physician and the drunk could switch places.
“How far is it to the oasis?” Koida asked. If they didn’t reach it soon, one of them was likely to kill the other.
“We’re almost there,” Lysander said, tipping back his flask for another drink.
His idea of almost there, however, turned out to be another three nights’ ride.
The water they had gathered ran dry the second morning in the desert, and that night the last bit of nuts and dried fruit in Lysander’s oiled leather bag ran out. Hush called off all training until they made it to the oasis, indicating that it was too dangerous to sweat out what little water they had left in their bodies.
Koida began spending much of their daily stops in resting meditation. She waited until she was certain the others were either asleep or passed out drunk, then turned to the jade and amethyst Ros circling one another in her heartcenter.
For the past several days, she had seen nothing but blackness when she reached for Raijin’s Ro. She might have been worried that something terrible had happened to him, but each time, a cold determination to do whatever had to be done came over her. Her betrothed was alive. He was strong. Whatever had happened to him, he was persisting on willpower alone.
That determination helped her through the sorest and most frustrating stretches of desert, urging her forward. Whatever had happened to Raijin, whatever he was going through just then, he was determined to do what had to be done. She faced no more than a little hunger and thirst and a riding partner who was growing increasingly sullen and mean. If Raijin could push on in circumstances far worse, then she could as well.
Finally, as they crested a rise on the third night, the gauzy scrim of clouds pulled away from the moon, lighting a brilliant white tower amid the dunes in the distance.
“There she is,” Lysander said, his voice taking on a strangely soft note. “The Great Library of Ten Thousand Nations, heart of every scholar, historian, poet, and philosopher who ever put charcoal to paper.”
A contrary part of Koida wanted to find anything Lysander spoke highly of unimpressive and disappointing, but even over such a long distance, she had to admit the Great Library was a marvel, sticking up like a beacon in the middle of an endless sea of sand.
An almost inaudible sniff made her turn to Cold Sun. A tear trickled down his stony features.
“It is beautiful,” the Uktena warrior whispered reverently.
Koida felt the building tension and hard-edged determination from the last three days melt away, her heartcenter warming. She smiled, wishing she were close enough to hug Cold Sun. On the war ram behind him, Hush gently patted his huge shoulder. Even Lysander’s face softened at the Uktena’s awe.
Without another word, they rode onward, toward the greatest repository of written knowledge in the known world.
Chapter Thirty-one
MORTAL LANDS
After her son’s departure, Youn Wha had t
aken to spending all of her time in the alchemy tower, listening to the drip of water and watching the handsome young face inside through the wet planes of melting ice.
Time passed. Days. Or was it weeks? It didn’t matter. The dripping slowly increased. She waited like a spring-snare spider in her trap, patiently anticipating her prey.
Her original plan had been to absorb and hold the powerful Ro until Yoichi returned to the palace, then feed it to him like a mother bird regurgitating a half-digested worm for her chick.
But Yoichi was old enough now to face the consequences of defying her. As much as it would have pleased her to retire to the shadows, the longer she waited for the Ro to fall within her grasp, the more she thought of it as hers. The power it would provide. She would become ageless, a sparkling beauty only a few years past her prime with advancement to Eternal Blossom of Youth. Or something even greater. The Ji Yu’s Ro might even be powerful enough to advance her twice. No Water Lily grandmaster in recorded history had advanced beyond the final stage. Even the ancients had never told of such a thing. There was no knowing what lay on the other side.
So, from her hermitage in the deserted alchemy tower, she sipped from the Pool of Life and waited. No doubt animals, plants, and humans were wasting away for miles around the Sun Palace. The ignorant fools populating this empire would think it a plague.
Sudden movement in the ice drew her closer. The Ji Yu chieftain’s eyes. At first she thought his long black lashes were struggling open.
Then sunlight filtered through the window, and she realized what she had seen as black was actually red.
Blood.
A smile creased Youn Wha’s face. She draped herself in her Mortal Aura, a mantle of grasping lethal tentacles that filled the air around her.
She wouldn’t be waiting long now.
Chapter Thirty-two
MORTAL LANDS
Throughout the night, the pale light cast by the moon and the ever-shifting dunes distorted Koida’s perception of the distance left to the Great Library. At times it seemed as if the tower were looming over them, at others it seemed years away. She tried to keep track of how long they had been riding since spotting the tower, but the moon hardly seemed to be moving toward its western bed.
As always, Koida and Cold Sun kept their demon beasts a safe distance from one another during their ride, letting them run parallel to one another but keeping the length of the Sun Palace stables between them. Since spotting the tower, she had noticed the war ram far to her left pulling ahead, either due to the Uktena urging the demon on toward the Great Library or the demon scenting the water in the oasis.
An insistent clap rang across the dunes, drawing Koida’s attention. The war ram had come to a stop at the bottom of a dune. Hush was standing in the sand, waving them over.
Koida gave Pernicious his head, then reined him in when they came within charging distance of the ram. The silent woman held a large white stone in her hands.
“What have you got there?” Lysander muttered. He swung down from behind Koida, sinking into the sand up to the ankle.
Hush held up the stone. It had eye holes, a nose hole, and teeth.
Koida grimaced. “Is that a human?”
“Used to be,” Lysander said, wading through the moonlit sand to join Hush. He gestured toward the silent woman’s feet. “There’s the rest of him.”
Though she didn’t want to look, Koida’s eyes were drawn to the jumble of bones bleached by the relentless desert sun. They rested atop an oiled leather satchel. A tattered reed hat lay half-buried nearby.
“Traveling scholar. Obviously not much experience taking the land route.” Lysander crouched beside the remains and switched to a familiar, friendly tone. “But you almost made it.”
The foreigner looked up at Hush as if she’d asked a question.
“No, I didn’t know him. I left the Library almost two decades ago; he’s less than a year dead. Any traveling scholars from my time will have retired or transitioned to working in the stacks.” He pointed at the skull in Hush’s hands. “Are you going to crack that open and study it, astute physician?”
Koida shuddered at the thought. Thankfully, Hush shook her head, black horsetail slipping over her shoulders with a whisper.
“If there’s nothing you can learn from it, then he’ll want it back.” Lysander motioned for her to hand the skull over.
Hush gave it to him, and he set it gently inside the hat.
Koida glanced from the skull to Hush to Cold Sun. “Should we...should we build him a pyre?”
“Not the sort of thing a scholar cares about,” Lysander said, brushing aside the bones as if they were no more than dust. “This, however...” He picked up the satchel, untied it, and peeked inside. Then he nodded down at the skull. “Rest easy, friend. I’ll make sure they get there.”
Lysander tested the strap. Satisfied, he hooked the satchel over his shoulder with his own bag. Without a glance back, he returned to Pernicious and, in spite of the half-demon’s petulant wheeling, leapt up behind Koida easily.
As they rode away, Koida said quietly, “You were a traveling scholar.”
“Believe me now, do you?” Lysander said.
Having just stared into the eyes of a dead man picked clean by the desert, the drunk’s usually annoying tone could hardly touch Koida’s solemn mood.
“How often did you take this route to the Great Library?”
“When I felt like it. The sea’s a beauty, but even she gets old.”
Koida glanced back over her shoulder, catching a last glimpse of the skull in the hat before they rode down the opposite side of the dune. Surprisingly, Lysander was doing the same.
“Is it frightening to think that could have been you?” she asked, facing forward once more.
Lysander huffed a soft laugh. “That could never be me, Princess.” The stopper squeaked as it came out of his flask. “I won’t get that lucky.”
They rode on through the night. The moon sank toward the horizon, silhouetting the Great Library like scenery from a shadow play as they reached the outskirts of the oasis. Keeping tight rein on their demon beasts, Koida and Cold Sun rode down opposite sides of a wide, sandy street.
Apart from the Great Library, the buildings of the oasis were square, made of some mud mixture the same bleached color as the sand in the last vestiges of the moonlight. No wall lined the city, likely because enemies willing to travel days through the scorching desert to attack were in short supply, Koida reasoned.
Stranger, however, was the fact that no lights burned in the windows. She had been out many times up to and after the sunrise, and in Boking Iri, there had always been light in some of the houses. Families with ailing members or new babies and a few people who worked into the night left lamps or fires burning until all hours.
“Is it always this quiet here?” Koida asked Lysander. Though she had pitched her voice low, it seemed obtrusive and loud in the silent dark of the street.
“Never,” came his quiet reply. “I’m going to dismount. Keep riding straight toward the tower unless you feel me or Hush urging you to change course.”
Lysander gestured at Hush. The two of them slipped down from the backs of the demon beasts, dark forms dropping to the ground silently.
A glowing magenta woman appeared in the street ahead. She wore the simple robes of a scholar and a set of spectacles with multiple lenses that could be raised or lowered over her eyes with the flick of a lever. Her hair had been bunched into a haphazard pile of ringlets atop her head almost as if it were an afterthought.
Pernicious reared and screamed out a Petrifying Shriek of Legions. Koida’s heart thundered in her ears as she fought to keep her seat. Garish, oily fear washed over her at the sight. The moon broadsword surged to the surface, glinting in the magenta light. Wasn’t it hellfiends that could take on the shape of humans to draw in unwary souls and devour them?
She looked over to see that Cold Sun’s machete was out as well, and Hush had manife
sted a pair of bladed ruby sais.
Lysander stood motionless in the street. No weapon. No fear. The magenta glow cast his scowling face in hard lines and deep shadows, as if he’d aged a hundred years in only a few moments.
The hellfiend’s brows drew low, and she shook her head. Her mouth moved, but no sound escaped. It looked almost as if the hellfiend was talking to Lysander.
“I...” Lysander’s voice was a dry rasp. He swallowed and the sound echoed through the street like the snap of a dry twig. “I can’t hear you.”
In the midst of Koida’s terror, a detached part of her mind wondered at how strange it was to hear the rough, drunken foreigner’s voice take on the intimate speech tone of a lover. Was he being bewitched by this creature?
Hush crept on silent feet to Lysander’s side, her sais poised to strike.
“It’s a hellfiend,” Koida said, holding Pernicious back. “Stay away. No matter what it says.”
“Can you all see her?” Lysander asked.
At his side, Hush nodded.
The hellfiend’s feminine features twisted with resolve. She pointed a glowing magenta finger behind her at the Great Library, then turned back to Lysander, huge dark eyes pleading.
“Can any of you hear her?” Lysander asked.
“No,” Koida and Cold Sun both answered, and Hush shook her head.
Acting as if it were frustrated, the hellfiend took a sharp step forward.
“Take care!” Koida shouted.
Rather than tear Hush and Lysander to shreds, the fiend disappeared in a burst of magenta sparks.
Lysander let out an audible breath, and his shoulders slumped. He raised a shaking hand and scrubbed it down his face. Hush’s eyes glowed with Ro, and the silent physician turned in a slow circle, searching the darkness for danger.
Koida hunched over, throwing her arms around Pernicious’s overly muscled neck. He was too huge for her to reach farther than halfway around, but clinging to the warhorse slowly dispelled her shivering.