by Dave Gross
At last, the duel was decided. Its tail drooping low, the tiger ran back to the remains of its feast of brigands and slaves.
Mon Choi and I lolled in the dust, our strength exhausted. The palanquin and its guards had long since vanished behind the walls of the inner compound. Thinking ourselves alone, we clutched our injuries and groaned.
“What are you doing?”
The speaker was an ancient man whose skin had shrunk and darkened to the complexion of stained walnut. He wore the white robes and prayer beads I had come to associate with various sects of Tian monks. On his shoulder rested a light bamboo fishing pole.
Mon Choi rolled over and slapped my arm with the back of his fingers. “Kowtow, brother,” he whispered. “Kowtow three times!”
I am not averse to the courtesies of bowing, but I am not accustomed to prostrating myself before any presence less august than that of a prince. Considering my circumstances, however, I deemed it best to comply with Mon Choi’s advice. Careful not to aggravate my injured ankle, I placed my hands on the ground, fingertips touching. I bowed three times, my head upon my knuckles.
The old man frowned, no doubt dissatisfied with my obeisance. I felt his eyes lingering on me, no doubt considering my appearance. While my straight black hair and almond-shaped eyes were not unusual in this part of the world, my height and long, tapered ears no doubt marked me as a foreigner even before I spoke.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mon Choi peering across at me. He kept his head down, so I did the same. A rivulet of perspiration formed on his neck and spattered in the dirt. We waited an interminable period before the old man sighed and spoke again.
“Very well, you may stand.” He looked with longing toward a pond between the first and second gates. “You do not look like much, but I accept you both as applicants to Dragon Temple. You are late, so your first trials begin at once.”
Chapter Three
King of Heroes
Desna weeps.”
Burning Cloud Devil tilted his head. “I do not understand.”
“Desna is what we call Lady Luck.”
“I am familiar with the Resplendent Goddess of Fortune. But why is she melancholy?”
Desna weeps.
On our way back to find the boss, I explained to Burning Cloud Devil that we’d been ambushed by bandits. That was all the prompting he needed to expound on the difference between luck, fortune, and fate, and which of those powers had brought me to his attention.
It was fate, he said. He had bargained with many devils in the past, but none had been able to master the techniques he taught. He needed someone both infernally strong but full of mortal life. Back in Cheliax, they call my kind hellspawn. He called me a semi-devil.
I called him a few things back to see which ones translated through to Tien. Burning Cloud Devil smiled, but I saw he was remembering every insult for later.
He kept shoving a sheet of yellow paper at me, demanding I sign a compact with him. In exchange for becoming his disciple and slaying his enemy in a year, he’d unlock me from my infernal form.
I said I wouldn’t even consider his crazy demand until we’d returned to the spot where he’d found me. He surprised me by agreeing, since it was fate that he had found me where he did. Sometimes crazy works in your favor.
At first I thought he wanted me to kill some fellow called Dragon. After all, he called himself Burning Cloud Devil, and he was no more devil than ...well, he was no more devil than most any other fellow you might meet. The more he talked about his enemy, however, the more I started to realize he meant for me to kill an actual giant-flying-wyrm dragon.
With my bare hands.
The man was beyond optimistic. The boss would talk some sense into him, pay him off, or stupefy him with some of his big words and convoluted sentences. Or, if that didn’t work, magic.
The one thing I learned from Burning Cloud Devil’s yakking was that I was never going to get used to Tian Xia. The only reason I was here was to look after the boss, who’d been sent by his bosses in the Pathfinder Society to fetch some magic pearl, or the shell of one, or something like that. The whole thing was shady, if you ask me. Someone in his little explorers’ club was jerking him around, and I didn’t like it. Neither did he.
He might not have liked the reason for visiting, but the boss loved Tian Xia. All the way cross-country from the eastern shore, he pointed out every curious landmark and told me what he’d read about it in one of his thousands of books. When we ate, he explained what was in the hundred different shapes of dumplings. When we drank—not too much, and for that so far so good—he gave me a lecture on how the local wine was really more like beer because of the way it was fermented. If he weren’t here on business, it’d all be research for a book of his own. He couldn’t be happier.
Me, not so much.
The food was all different, and you had to ask for a spoon or else they expected you to eat with a pair of sticks—although I was getting better with those. Darned near everyone wore robes, not just the priests, and being polite was a lot more complicated than it was back in Cheliax. Plus, the rules on manners changed from province to province, as I’d learned the hard way a few times. The worst part was that in most places the women were too shy to talk to strangers, especially foreigners. Especially foreigners with devilish good looks. I was lucky to practice “hello, sweetheart” before they scurried away.
Don’t even talk to me about the language, not that I could speak it at the moment. Tien was ten times harder than the Varisian I’d learned. They didn’t write with proper letters but these complicated symbols that meant whole words—and different words for the same character, which you had to figure out from the context. I couldn’t read more than a few words, and even then it was a throw of the dice whether I got it right.
Now Burning Cloud Devil explained that they change the names of the gods. “Resplendent Goddess of Fortune,” my spurs. He needed some educating.
“Desna smiles, see?” I said, shooting him the big smile. He didn’t even blink at the armory in my mouth. Good for him, tough guy. “She smiles, you have good luck—fortune, fate, whatever. She weeps, you have a bad day. A real bad day.”
Burning Cloud Devil grunted agreement. “Desna wept over me thirty-five years ago. But now I think she is beginning to smile again.”
“You’ve got to be careful,” I said. “Sometimes Desna laughs.”
He frowned at that. “Why would she laugh?”
“Because sometimes you only think she’s smiling,” I said. “That’s because you don’t understand women.”
Another joke that didn’t translate, I figured. Burning Cloud Devil stopped walking and turned toward the sunset. I was impatient to get back, but I let him ruminate a minute.
Whatever Burning Cloud Devil had done to make me a stone instead of a wave—or to forge an alloy out of me, or whatever—I could feel that I wasn’t coming down out of the big and spiky anytime soon. I had a bad headache and an anxious feeling that squirmed like a winter eel in my stomach.
Still, I’d calmed down enough that I realized my blunder. I had to get back to the boss, and fast. Those bearers could not be trusted, and there was every chance the bandits had found their balls and returned to finish the job.
Just as I was about to nudge Burning Cloud Devil, he started walking again. He also started talking, and how.
“Long ago, my name was Black Mountain. I was the greatest hero of Quain. None could stand before me, neither the greatest swordsman nor the most enlightened monk. By fist or by sword, all fell. The defeated begged to become my disciples, but I refused. None were worthy of learning my Twin White Palms technique, against which even the Mighty Abbot of the Red Desert Monastery perished.
“One morning the Golden Swordswoman of Qiulin came to challenge me. She fought with bravery and skill, e
luding my Flowing Strikes and keeping me at bay for hours. As the sun set, so chivalrous and beautiful was she that I was tempted to feign defeat to please her. Yet so heroic was her demeanor that I would not dare to tender such an insult. If I had pretended to lose, even out of admiration, she would have rightfully scorned me.
“Rather, when I exhausted her stamina and showed her that death lay in my palm, she renounced her name and begged to be my disciple. I accepted her pledge, dubbing her Spring Snow, for I knew that her once-cool heart had sought out my warmth that it might thaw.
“Together we reigned over the heroes of Quain, but only for one month. By then I knew I wanted her not as a disciple but as my wife. As a wedding gift, I promised her the wish granted once every twelve years by the Celestial Dragon.”
“You don’t say.”
He puzzled over that. “I do say.”
I hadn’t told Burning Cloud Devil what the boss was looking for, so I couldn’t figure how this could be a trick. After things went sour in Minkai, we’d been on our way to ask permission of the king of Quain to acquire a magic pearl for the Pathfinder Society. What were the chances this could be the same one?
This Celestial Dragon was supposed to produce its pearl about a year from now. The boss was hoping he could finesse the king into letting him have the shell left after the pearl’s magic was used up. He had all but told me the Decemvirate expected him to fail. If it were up to me, I’d tell the whole pointy-headed gang to climb their thumbs, but the boss saw it differently. A matter of honor or something. So here we were, on the other side of Golarion.
“Go on.”
Burning Cloud Devil continued his story. “Together, Spring Snow and I overcame the trials of Iron Mountain, defeating all of its guardians and reaching the Gates of Heaven and Hell before the royal envoys. We barred the way behind us and summoned the dragon down from Heaven. We would use the pearl’s wish to ensure that we would remain together forever—the strongest vow I could offer.
“The Dragon refused to surrender the pearl to Snow, declaring her no virgin. That was true, since we had already consummated our marriage. But we would not be denied. If it would not give us the pearl, we would take it by force.
“Snow was magnificent. She leaped upon the dragon before I could prepare my mightiest strike. It was too soon, and the dragon was ready.” Once more, Burning Cloud Devil stared off into the distance. His eyes misted, but he kept walking, so I didn’t complain. I couldn’t leave him behind, since during my mad pursuit I’d completely lost my bearings.
“I get the picture,” I said. “The dragon killed your wife.”
Burning Cloud Devil turned to me, an anguished look on his face. He gave me a curt nod, paused, and nodded again. The second one looked like thanks for not making him say it.
“I get why you want revenge,” I said, and I meant it. There were a couple of people whose deaths I’d avenge. Hard.
“I meant to have it the moment Snow perished. Before, we had sought only to defeat the dragon, not to destroy it. As an immortal, the dragon was invincible to all but my ultimate technique, the Twin White Palms.”
He grasped his stump with his remaining hand.
“The dragon bit off your arm.”
“I fought through the guardians of Iron Mountain and wandered Tian Xia for thirty-five years. Everywhere I found an oracle or a conjurer, I offered myself as his disciple. I learned to summon devils to do my bidding. I recited ten thousand sutras. Yet no combination of minions and spells was sufficient to slay an immortal dragon. The only skill I possessed that was capable of slaying my nemesis was useless to a one-armed warrior.”
“There must have been some other fighter who could learn your technique,” I interjected.
“There were many! But none would agree to act as my hand, fearful of the judgment of Heaven. I tested the devils I had learned to summon, yet none of them had the ki necessary to perform the Twin White Palms. That is what makes you the perfect disciple. You are a human man suffused with the power of Hell. Your mortal ki combined with your infernal might will overcome the dragon’s defenses.”
“That remains to be seen,” I said. “I told you, I’ve got to make sure the boss is all right first.”
“If you refuse me ...” He clenched his fist, and I felt his fingers in my heart.
“Yeah, yeah,” I bluffed, but it came out a hoarse rasp. Maybe the boss had a spell that would cut Burning Cloud Devil’s hold on me.
We reached the site of the attack as the last rays of light drowned beneath the western mountains. Burning Cloud Devil conjured a bright yellow flame in his cupped palm and threw it at my head. I flinched, but I didn’t feel the slightest heat. The light danced atop my head like a torch flame.
“Knock it off.”
“Why would I do that?” said Burning Cloud Devil. “Do you not need the light?”
The fact was, I didn’t so much need the light. Even before I go all spiky, I can make out everything but the detail in darkness. So all right, the light was helpful. But that was beside the point. I didn’t like his putting crowns of fire on my head. People see something like that on a guy who looks like me, they get the wrong idea. I was having a bad enough time before the transformation. I didn’t need his making it worse.
I squinted at the tracks in the gloom. Among them lay the blackened remains of the tools I’d kept in my now-disintegrated jacket. They were useless even if I’d had a place to put them. I found my lucky coin in the ashes of my clothes. It was a little worse for the fire, but I could still feel the profile of an ancient prince on its face. It reminded me of a couple of women I had left back in Ustalav. I tucked away the thought with the coin.
By the trampled ground, I could see that the brigands had returned. Judging from the tracks, so had the boss and Arnisant, although the hound had run south. Everyone else had headed northwest.
“All right, enough with the halo,” I said. “Get this thing off my head.”
Burning Cloud Devil dismissed the light with a flick of his little finger, the nail of which he left long. “I weary of this,” he said. “If we do not find this boss of yours soon, I insist you answer my demand. Become my disciple, or—”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time.” I pointed to the tracks. “A bunch of bandits got him.”
“The Falcon-Head Sword Gang roams this region in the spring,” said Burning Cloud Devil. He lifted his beard with his wrist. The gesture reminded me of the way the boss pinches the bridge of his nose when he’s thinking.
“‘Sword Gang’ sounds like these guys. They went that way. I figure we creep up on them, nice and quiet like. Kill the sentries, slit as many throats as we can before they know we’re there. Bust up the rest if they don’t have sense enough to run.”
“They must be miles away by now,” said Burning Cloud Devil. “You were fortunate I found you when I did. They are notorious cannibals.”
“Then we’d better get marching,” I said. “Unless you can conjure up a couple of horses.” That’s what the boss would have done. It was one of my favorite of his tricks. The steed he conjured for me always looked like it came from Hell, complete with brimstone smoke for a mane.
“Horses?” Burning Cloud Devil scoffed. “I have something much faster.” He drew big circles in the air, each leaving a faint orange trace behind. He spun on his heel, forming a globe of fiery threads.
“I see why they call you Burning Cloud Devil.”
When the last thread of fire fell into place, I felt the earth tilt as we rose off the ground. I fell into the bottom of a flaming sphere as we flew across the countryside. I could see through the walls about as well as looking through a bonfire. Flames crackled all around us, along with the muted sound of barking.
“Wait,” I said. “That sounds like the boss’s dog.”
Burning Cloud Devil either
didn’t hear or didn’t care. “The trail leads this way.” Standing above me, the wizard pressed the back of his first two fingers against his left eye, then the right. Magic glimmered over his irises, and I could tell he was following the tracks I could no longer perceive.
We flew for maybe half an hour before landing. I saw by the light of the fading sphere that we stood amid a field of bloody bones. Scraps of armor, arrows, and bows were strewn in all directions. Lots of swords with those beak-shaped tips, which I finally connected to Burning Cloud Devil’s “Falcon-Head” remark.
“We are too late,” he said. “The dragon was here.”
My belly felt tight as a drum. I couldn’t breathe. I banged against the warm inner shell of the flaming ball and shouted, “Boss!”
The fireball vanished. I could make out the shapes of mutilated corpses and other detritus, but no details.
“Give me some light,” I said.
“But you said—”
“Give me some goddamn light, you son of a bitch!”
His lips whitened. If he’d attacked me, I wouldn’t have minded. A fight was what I felt like at that moment. Instead, he flicked a scrap of magic light at the big knife. I held it up and searched the ground for any sign of the boss.
All too soon, I found it.
There wasn’t enough of him left to fit into a coin purse, but there was no mistaking his embroidered Chelish coat and one of his riding boots. He would have wept to see the state of them, after all the hours he’d spent keeping them at a high polish.
I knelt there a while. At first I tried to straighten the bloody clothes and lay the lone boot, foot still inside, in the appropriate place. I tried to find the other one, but I gave up after an hour’s search.
Burning Cloud Devil sensed the meaning of what I’d discovered, and he gave me my space. I heard him messing about with the other remains, probably looting them. I didn’t give a damn about those ones.
It felt wrong to leave the boss’s body alone, even if it was almost entirely gone. Any moment, I figured I’d embarrass myself in front of the Tian wizard by crying my guts out, but it didn’t come. My face was hot, but everything inside felt ice cold. I didn’t know what else to do, so I used a dropped sword to cut a line in the earth beside him, outlining a grave.