by Dave Gross
Burning Cloud Devil’s exercises looked a lot like the calisthenics I’d caught the boss performing before we’d embark on some footwork, back in the good days. The less-bad days. Whatever. Most of the postures and moves had poetic animal names like Horse Stance, Lazy Serpent, Crane Steps Forth, Monkey Plucks the Peaches.
That last one I’d known all my life. The first thing most street kids do in a fight is throw a punch or a knee at your gem bag. That’s why I took to wearing a spiked leather cup. That was gone with the burned fragments of my clothes and whatever was left of my knives and break-in tools. Maybe some of our traveling gear was scattered among the bones where the boss had died, but I hadn’t had the stomach to search the place. All I had anymore were my two knives, a copper, and a makeshift skirt made out of a banner.
It was that rag around my waist that had the little guy all up in my face.
“You disgrace my father’s banner!”
The newcomer leaped off his dappled horse, which balked rather than approach me. I had yet to meet a draft animal who didn’t get a whiff of me and either head for the hills or try to smash my skull. While the horse shied, its rider preferred the second approach.
He flourished his staff and held it perfectly horizontal behind his back with one hand. “How many of his men did you kill?”
As I opened my mouth to speak, my self-appointed tutor interrupted from his perch on a gnarled tree. I hadn’t even heard him jump up there. He was a nimble old bastard.
“All of them, of course, Fong Jian, just as I slew your master when he dared challenge me.”
“Burning Cloud Devil!”
The old man’s laughter shook the leaves. “Hong Gau was no match for me. What makes you think his student stands a chance?”
Fong stabbed the butt of his staff into the dirt. He made a pretty picture of righteous indignation. “I do not challenge you but your demon.”
“Devil,” I corrected him.
In fact, I didn’t know that for a fact. Most hellspawn where I grew up are descended from the infernal legions, literally from Hell. On the other hand, my mixed blood went way back to when my people lived in Ustalav, where they say my ancestors trucked with both devils from Hell and demons from the Abyss. The roots of my family tree ran deep.
Fong frowned, obviously unschooled in the language of Hell. Burning Cloud Devil translated.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Fong. His staff sprang to life, whirling invisibly until it snapped fast in his double grip. The weapon was dark red with a steel cap on either butt. It looked like the shaft was inlaid with real gold, but that was stupid. Something like that wouldn’t last two good strikes—unless it was magical. I didn’t like that idea. “I will send you back to the underworld and reclaim the banner you have disgraced.”
I was tempted to whip the rag off and throw it at him, but I knew that wouldn’t satisfy his pride. Anyway, no one wanted a look at what was under my skirt. I know I didn’t.
“Hey, I took this from a gang of bandits.” I looked to Burning Cloud Devil for a translation.
“My devil says he wipes his ass with your father’s banner.”
“Hey!”
Fong jutted his chin at the sorcerer. “You will not interfere in our duel?”
“I will not lay a hand upon you.”
“Nor cast spells upon me?”
The old man leaped down from his branch and snarled. This Fong character was testing his patience. “I will cast no spell upon you.” He stepped close behind me and plucked a hair from my neck.
“What the hell?” I rubbed the sting off the back of my neck.
Burning Cloud Devil dismissed my question with a shake of his head. He folded the thick bronze hair into a scrap of yellow paper on which he’d painted red characters. He waved his hand in a “carry-on” gesture as he walked away, murmuring.
Fong Jian thrust the butt of his staff square into my jaw. A hundred green stars exploded before my eyes. My teeth rattled in my head.
I raised my arms to guard my face. The next shot caught me hard in the belly, the third struck down below. That one didn’t hurt nearly as much as I’d expected. The fact that it didn’t reminded me of how inhuman my body had become.
By Fong’s fourth strike I blocked his staff with my forearm. The wood cracked hard against it. The bony ridges running from my wrists to elbows were good for more than just show.
Pleased with myself, I grinned into his face.
Fong didn’t even flinch. He was braver than he looked. Stronger, too. He beat my arms aside the way a swordsman parries a lighter blade before lunging for the kill. The butt of his staff struck me in the throat, in the eye, on the top of my skull.
“All right, all right!” I yelled. “That’s enough.”
Fong hesitated, unable to believe I was surrendering. That was fine, because I wasn’t surrendering. I was asking for help.
I felt a little square of paper in my throat, even though I hadn’t swallowed one. I tried to look back at Burning Cloud Devil, but my neck wouldn’t turn. Instead, I assumed a lower stance. It felt correct, the way it never had when I’d been doing it. My left arm flashed forward and back with a flourish of the wrist.
None of this was my choice. Burning Cloud Devil was controlling me with his little paper pill.
The only part of me still obeying my thoughts was my right arm. That made sense, since Burning Cloud Devil didn’t have one. I made a fist and held it up to protect my face.
“No, you idiot,” said Burning Cloud Devil. “Tip the Leaf, not Scorpion Pincer.”
I corrected my arm, extending it palm-up as if to tap a drop of dew out of a leaf, but I felt ridiculous. This was no way to defend myself, posing with both arms open like some sort of ballet dancer. Back on Eel Street, standing like this would have been a better way to get into a fight than to win one.
“You swore not to interfere!” cried Fong.
“I promised not to cast a spell on you.”
The sorcerer moved me forward, shifting my body to lead with my left, which he controlled. It took me a second to follow what he was doing, and I raised my right hand to assume the trailing position.
He grunted approval of my stance. “Summon your ki!”
“Devils have no ki,” said Fong.
All the same, he retreated, raising his staff high for a powerful counterstrike.
“This minion is no common devil.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m not your damned minion.”
All the same, I tried to do what he told me.
Burning Cloud Devil’s ki business was another lesson I hadn’t really understood. It started with breathing. That part I got. There was more to it, though, some vague summoning of power from my soul or my spirit or—the part that bothered me—my ancestors. The boss had described the concept during our Minkai caper, but the only skill I mastered from his Tian Xia lectures was pretending to listen.
Ki wasn’t really my kind of thing, but there had to be something to it. I took a deep belly breath and held it. For an instant I imagined a stream of energy between the center of my body and the heel of my hand, which I planned to plant in Fong’s chin.
My body trembled. I lunged forward. As Fong’s staff swept down at my skull, I tumbled past its arc and came up beside his knees—not where I’d wanted to be. Before I could growl a curse about the way Burning Cloud Devil was moving me around, my left hand shot up and clutched Fong hard between the thighs.
Monkey Plucks the Peaches.
Fong’s face twisted in a silent scream that made me wince for him even as Burning Cloud Devil tightened my grip.
His knee shot into my throat so hard I felt like my head had come off. He kicked again and knocked me back. He leaped away, howling and clutching his parts with both hands.
As I shook off
the ringing in my skull, I felt a lump in my fist. With some reluctance, I opened my hand to see a hank of fabric. Desna smiled upon Fong, because that was all I’d torn off.
“That’s dirty mean,” I said. “Let go of me. I can take this chump.”
“Good,” said Burning Cloud Devil. “Because I have a better use for my magic.” He coughed, and I felt the little magic pill come up as if it were in my own throat. Burning Cloud Devil spat it on the ground like a cat hacking up a hairball. My body relaxed for a second, and I felt my limbs come back under my control.
Fong snatched up his staff and gripped it with two hands. He glowered at me, eyes glistening from the pain. I thought of a jibe to make him lose his temper, but I knew he wouldn’t understand.
On the other hand, he felt the breeze through the hole in his trousers, and he saw me smirk.
Worked like a charm.
He came on like a windmill in a storm. The steel-capped butts of his staff struck divots on the trail, sparking on flint once or twice. For a second I regretted pissing him off.
I stepped quickly to the side and threw a knuckle shot at his throat. He was too mad to anticipate the move, but he was still quick enough to lean back out of the way. He kicked at my crotch, but I caught the blow with a knee. He shouted as the spike on my kneecap pierced his foot.
My new bone structure had that going for it. Who needed a cup?
He battered me with either side of the staff, but the strikes came from the obvious four quarters. I caught them all with my bony elbows and knees. Just before I saw the flicker of sanity return to his face, I caught the staff with both hands and did what I hate most.
I bit.
Even before my “episodes,” as the boss called them, my smile would send the barber running from a block away. After the fire, my jaws were more like a rusty bear trap.
Luckily for Fong, I didn’t go for his face. Instead, I clamped my teeth on the staff. It split with a satisfying crunch. A yellow flash dazed me for a second, but it sent Fong flying back a good four yards. Spitting out the splinters, I tasted enamel and fragments of gold.
Fong gaped in disbelief, but it was Burning Cloud Devil who cried out, “Impossible!”
“What?” I said, dusting myself off an arm at a time. “I told you I could take him.”
“The Eight-Figured Staff,” wailed Fong. “Monster, you have destroyed the sacred weapon of my house!”
“If you liked it so much, you shouldn’t have stuck it in my face.” He still didn’t understand a word, but that didn’t matter. He rushed me.
His anger dulled his vision, not to mention his good sense. I stepped left as he came into range, and I caught him in the gut with the heel of my palm.
The blow threw Fong up and back, much farther than I’d expected. If the strike didn’t kill him, the fall might.
But I was worried more about myself.
The instant my hand struck his torso, my blood turned to fire. I felt it surging through my veins before bursting out through the skin of my hands. Behind me, Burning Cloud Devil intoned arcane words. He was casting another spell on me.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Burning Cloud Devil spoke a few more syllables and sighed like a porter setting down a heavy load. “I have sealed the lesson into your body.”
Looking down at my fists, I saw they glowed with tiny Tien characters. They ran across my wrists and halfway up my forearms, flared bright, and vanished.
Burning Cloud Devil knelt, exhausted. He picked up a fragment of the shattered staff and squinted at it. “Only another great magic should have the power to destroy such a weapon.”
“You wanted his ass beat,” I said. “I beat his ass.”
Twenty feet away, Fong moaned.
“You have not just defeated him,” said Burning Cloud Devil. “You have broken his honor.” He shook his head as if I were too stupid to understand his point. He pointed the staff fragment at Fong. “Finish him off.”
“Why bother?”
“Because I am your master, and you are sworn to do my bidding.”
“Our deal is I kill this dragon. Anything else is just to get me ready for that.”
Burning Cloud Devil looked ready to argue, but he opened and shut his mouth twice before rummaging in his bag. He selected a yellow scroll from a bundle of dozens and glowered down at it. Beneath the Tien characters, I recognized my signature and wished I’d had someone to translate the terms before I’d signed. I knew better than that, but I’d been distracted at the time.
The boss could have done it. But if he were still alive, I wouldn’t have had to make the bargain.
Burning Cloud Devil grunted. “I should have worded our compact more carefully. Very well, devil. Do as you will.”
I stood up and shooed Fong away, but he just lay there staring at the sky. A sliver of guilt nibbled at me. I whipped off his house banner, tied it around the broken pieces of his staff, and threw the bundle at him. “Go on. Get out of here.”
Fong barely grimaced when he saw the worst parts of my inhuman anatomy. His face was a caricature of mourning as he gazed down at the ruins of his family banner and weapon. He clutched them to his chest and limped back to his waiting horse. I watched him ride away until I felt Burning Cloud Devil watching me with an expression of disbelief.
“And you think me cruel.”
Chapter Seven
Enchanting Lyre
On the twenty-seventh day of my captivity, I resolved to escape Dragon Temple.
I had remained so long as I had not for fear of Master Wu’s vivid descriptions of the punishment for leaving but rather because I had discovered the singular purpose of the order intersected perfectly with my original goal in traveling to Tian Xia.
I joined the Pathfinder Society in my youth, and in recent decades I served as one of the organization’s many venture-captains. It fell to me and my peers to communicate with a number of field agents, guiding and supporting their efforts to uncover lost civilizations, to unravel ancient mysteries and—yes, from time to time—to retrieve buried treasure.
It was the Decemvirate who charted the course of the organization as a whole, and to them I submitted the summation of my own agents’ reports. Those the Decemvirate deemed worthy became part of the Pathfinder Chronicles, an ever-expanding archive of investigations across Golarion. My own accounts had occasionally been deemed worthy enough to join the storied annals of our society.
When dispatched to collect the husk of a Celestial Pearl, its magic expended, it was only natural that I felt curious as to the reason. Thus I inquired of the masked member of the Decemvirate who had given me my orders.
To my eternal vexation, my anonymous superior explained nothing more before dispatching me to the other side of Golarion. When my initial efforts to fetch the husk failed, I took the initiative in traveling to the mainland in hopes of acquiring one of the hundreds of identical shells residing in the capital of Quain, largest of the sixteen Successor States of Imperial Lung Wa.
Yet those husks were delivered to the royal vaults by the monks of Dragon Temple.
Once every twelve years, the disciples of Dragon Temple enjoyed the honor of escorting an embassy past the fabled Flying Mountains to the base of Iron Mountain and thence to the Court of Heaven and Hell and its fabled gates. There a representative of the royal family summoned the Celestial Dragon and offered the immortal creature a mortal heart in exchange for its own, a great magic pearl whose contents bestowed upon the supplicant both longevity and a powerful wish. Afterward, the husk of the dragon’s heart, its wish expended, was conveyed to the royal vaults within the capital city of Lanming.
If ever there was an opportunity to negotiate for the husk of the dragon’s pearl, I had found it. Armed with the favor of the Pathfinder Society, a certain amount of diploma
tic experience, and—if it came to that—a considerable personal fortune, I would appeal to the king to let me return with the object.
Had I simply traveled to the capital and acquired King Wen’s permission, I should have joined the monks some months from now at this very site—albeit without the arduous and demeaning trials I had endured. Yet how much more persuasive would his majesty find my voice upon learning that I had personally accompanied his embassy to the Gates of Heaven and Hell?
The irony troubled my imagination. Not for the first time, I pondered the question of fate as a power greater than mortal will and chance.
More troubling was the weeks-long absence of Radovan and Arnisant. The temple’s barrier against spirits and beasts might have prevented the hound from entering, but even with his Hell-tainted blood, Radovan remained essentially a mortal man. That is, I had no conclusive evidence to believe otherwise, despite his reticence to allow me to perform a few simple, if uncomfortable, experiments to determine the nature of his atypical transformations. He should have been able to enter the temple grounds or at least approach close enough to hail someone inside the first gate.
On the other hand, even one of the enormous tigers was capable of slaying one or both of my lost companions.
I banished the thought. In the past I had allowed cloudy circumstances to persuade me of Radovan’s death without conclusive evidence. Never again would I presume my bodyguard dead without proof, yet I remained at a loss to explain why he had not yet found me. Even without the benefit of the hound’s keen nose, Radovan was resourceful enough to discover my trail and follow it to Dragon Temple.
If not, then I knew he must await me at our rendezvous, the Inn of Forty-Four Delights in Lanming, which—despite its fanciful name and Radovan’s great disappointment—was not a brothel but a famed restaurant. Bereft of my spellbook, I had no means of contacting Radovan from afar, and Master Li had flatly refused my request to send a message to Lanming. When I protested, the old man closed his rheumy eyes and counseled me to set aside my worldly concerns. Upon entering the temple as an aspirant, he said, I had pledged obedience and loyalty to the temple masters, forsaking any previous bonds of fidelity. Before I could argue that I had made no such vow, at least not explicitly, he took up his fishing pole and strolled out the inner gate.