by Dave Gross
“She fought them a long time ago,” I said. “Long before she met you.”
“How can you know?”
I told him what I’d seen on death’s doorstep. “She said to tell you to give up your revenge and return to, I don’t know, a virtuous path or something.”
Burning Cloud Devil had become as still as one of those stone idols we passed along the road now and then. He thought a long while, then raised a suspicious eyebrow.
“You wish only to be released from our bargain.” His voice sounded like a distant warning of thunder. “You dare to invoke my wife’s name in such a ploy?”
“It’s no picnic tramping the countryside with you,” I said. “But I saw her. She spoke to me.”
“You lie. Only a dishonorable wretch would give up the revenge of his dead master.”
“He was my friend.” My palms itched to encircle his throat.
“A friend! Only a coward would tell such lies. If you care so little for his memory, you must have been no more than his slave.”
I felt the heat of a furnace rising in my chest. “Don’t you talk about the boss. Don’t you call me a slave.”
“You dare to speak of Snow.”
“Yeah, but I—” I tamped down the heat before it hit my brain. “Fine.”
I’d said my piece. I stood up and collected my pack. When he saw me stamping down the road, Burning Cloud Devil followed. If he wanted to walk a path to Hell, I decided, that was fine with me.
I’d hold the door for him.
Weeks later, we were back in the western provinces, a hundred miles south of the Golden River. It was mining territory, with dozens of little towns devoted to cutting stone and scraping copper and gold from the guts of the Wall of Heaven Mountains.
The region was lousy with soldiers. We ran into a security company on a road through a bamboo forest. Before we came within shouting distance, the guards had already braced for an attack. Spearmen stood before swordsmen, and in the rear stood archers with crossbows. One look at the firepots on their hips disturbed an angry snake that had been living in my belly since we ran across the Falcon-Head Sword Gang.
We weren’t traveling in disguise, so they recognized the sorcerer at once. My looks didn’t help matters much, despite my fine new clothes. In the end, Burning Cloud Devil and the chief of security approached each other. They exchanged a little news of the road before we continued on our separate ways.
“Did you hear that?” Burning Cloud Devil slapped his thigh and grinned.
I shrugged. There was this one swordswoman on the security team with dimpled cheeks and a stray lock of hair she kept blowing off the tip of her nose. I wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation.
“The Green Marsh Wrestler is nearby! It is time to put the Quivering Palm to practice.” The sorcerer sounded as happy as a child expecting a puppy. For the first time all summer, I realized what Burning Cloud Devil had done.
He’d appointed himself my manager.
Years ago, when I first left the Goatherds and before I officially joined up with the boss, I had a hard time making ends meet. My old crew spread the word that no one was to let me freelance, and I wasn’t interested in joining another gang. I couldn’t get a tip to save my life, and no one would so much as sit lookout for me on a second-story job. Somebody even tipped off the city guard, and they’d passed my description to the goddamned Hellknights. It got so bad I couldn’t even pick a pocket in the Plaza of Flowers on Judgment Day.
All I had left was my fists and a skull thicker than most. So I did a little fighting.
My first bout was against a stevedore a foot taller than me, champion of the Eel Street Docks, backed by my old gang boss, Zandros the Fair. It took the better part of half an hour, but I got him down on the street and beat his head until his dwarven handler threw in the towel. Nobody cared that I was seconds away from dropping down beside him. Afterward, his manager wanted to be my manager.
That lasted only a few months before something better came along, but I remember how the dwarf hustled to set up fights with every neighborhood champion and kept half my winnings—more than that if I didn’t keep an eye on him.
That’s pretty much what Burning Cloud Devil had been doing for me. The only difference was that he didn’t care about any short-term payoff. He only wanted to get me to that championship bout.
Each morning for the next few days, Burning Cloud Devil spent a couple of hours lecturing me on wrestling technique. What he had in mind was more about throws and evasion than the sort of wrestling I knew, but the end result was the same. One fellow was going to end up on his back with the other one’s hands around his throat.
We had a look at the prisoners working in four different mines and quarries before a stonecutter directed us to a granite quarry a few miles beyond the forest. We walked beneath stalks of bamboo taller than oak trees. Their enormous fronds shaded us from the hot summer sun.
A few miles from the forest’s edge, we stopped at an open-air tea house to eat pork buns while the owner’s teenaged sons slapped at flies with horsehair whips. Between bites, Burning Cloud Devil filled me in on the Green Marsh Wrestler’s story.
“His technique is impeccable, his strength legendary,” said Burning Cloud Devil. “It is said he strangled two of his neighbors’ oxen at the age of sixteen. The village elders sent him to Dragon Temple to save the remaining livestock. After leaving the temple, he bested the royal executioner in a dispute over a courtesan, and just two years ago he defeated the Eight Stone-Faced Brothers of Wailan Mansion simultaneously.”
“Sounds like some mean customer.”
“It is a shame you have learned so few of the rudiments of the Quivering Palm.”
I waved away his criticism. He’d been lecturing me about internal energy, ki flow, and a bunch of other mumbo jumbo. It wasn’t so hard to understand.
“It would be easier to teach a dog,” he continued.
“I’ve heard that before.”
Burning Cloud Devil said so many things that reminded me of the boss that they didn’t make me angry anymore. They just highlighted the differences between the men, and Burning Cloud Devil came up short. He made me appreciate how good I’d had it before. That trail of thought led down a dark hollow, so I changed the subject.
“How did the wrestler end up on a chain gang?”
“He killed a magistrate’s son in Lanming. The judge sentenced him to ten years of hard labor.”
“I’d like to have seen the fight at that hearing.”
“There was no fight. Like all disciples of Dragon Temple, the Green Marsh Wrestler respects authority. Once judged, he obeyed the sentence.”
I pressed for more details, but that’s all he had. Burning Cloud Devil had never seen the guy fight, so I could only imagine what he had in store for me. Probably he’d have a hard time getting a good grip on me, with all my spikes. The trick was to find a way to use more than my elbow spurs, which I’d put to good use in scraps since I was a tyke.
After our rest, we walked a few miles through the forest to the base of the mountains. There we found the quarry. Beside the road leading down into the rock pit, a severed head was stuck on a bamboo shaft. Below it someone had fixed a board with a name written in dried blood. Burning Cloud Devil translated it, and I knew we’d found our guy, or what was left of him. Flies formed a black halo around his rotting brow. My stomach is cast iron, but I had to cover my face at the stench.
Burning Cloud Devil went livid. Without waiting for me, he flew to the headman’s office, his smoking fireball setting fire to the nearby tents. He dispatched the guards with a few casual slaps and pulled the man from his shack.
By the time I reached them, Burning Cloud Devil had his hand raised as if to strike a mortal blow to the official, who kowtowed over and over fast enough to start a breeze
.
“I swear, dread sorcerer,” he blubbered. “We did not execute him. It was the Moon Blade Killer.”
The name cooled Burning Cloud Devil’s fury. He lowered his fist and stroked his chin until he seemed to pull the amazement off of his face. He lifted his beard on his wrist, considering what he had heard.
“How long ago did this happen?”
The official raised his head only long enough to reply. “Four days.”
The wrestler’s head looked pretty ripe for being only four days old, but on the other hand, it was hot.
Burning Cloud Devil turned to me. “Go, bury the remains. Such a great hero deserves better.”
“But—” The overseer swallowed his words when Burning Cloud Devil raised his hand.
It had become clear that “hero” meant something different to Burning Cloud Devil than it did back home. Still, four days with your head on a stick seemed plenty to me. I climbed back up to the edge of the quarry and grabbed a shovel from the nearest prisoner. He scuttled away, forcing his nearest companions on the chain to do the same. They cast sidelong glances at me as I dug a little grave. When I pulled the bamboo pole from the ground and tipped the stinking head into the hole, they cried out prayers to Pharasma and ran away as fast as their shackles allowed.
By the time I tamped down the last of the grave, Burning Cloud Devil rejoined me, an annoying little smirk on his face.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and assume this Moon Blade guy is my next opponent.”
He nodded, but his smile still mocked me with a secret.
“How’re we going to track him down?”
“There is no need,” he said. “He will surely find you.”
The wind picked up as we returned to the tea house. On its breath came the warmth of late summer and a scent of lightning.
The owner had lit green and blue lamps around the outdoor tables. They bobbed like buoys in the evening tide. The rising moon set the clouds to glowing silver through the black stalks of bamboo, which bent their heads toward each other to gossip. In better company, it would have made one hell of a romantic setting.
The shop owner promised us roast duck and carp before retreating into his covered kitchen. Meanwhile two of his boys brought us out little bowls of rice and dishes of steamed vegetables, most of which looked almost but not quite like the ones back home. The carrots tasted more or less like carrots, only they were purple.
There were also these thin white slices of something one of the boys kept telling me were shoots from bamboo, but not the nearby kind, which were apparently poisonous. Not that I’d felt any compulsion to start gnawing on the trees, but that was good to know. It was also good to know my grasp of Tien was improving even though I couldn’t practice speaking it myself.
With his chopsticks, Burning Cloud Devil pinched a green stalk of something like leafy broccoli and gestured for emphasis. “No one remembers the Moon Blade Killer’s true name, but forty years ago, he too was a disciple of Dragon Temple.”
“Forty years?” I whistled low. “Guy must be decrepit.”
I covered my smile by concentrating on using my own chopsticks. After months of practice, it was getting easier, but I still had to focus on getting the food from the plate and into my mouth without any sudden detours across the table.
Burning Cloud Devil snarled at my jibe. He wouldn’t tell me his age, but my guesses were getting closer. His thick dark hair threw me off. I bet he used a spell to keep it black.
“He was peerless among the students and soon became First Brother in each of the Eighteen Weapons of Irori. Yet the masters of the temple deemed him too cruel. They cast him out of the temple.
“Ever since then he has wandered across Tian Xia, seeking out former disciples of Dragon Temple to prove that he alone remains worthy of the title First Brother. With his moon blade, he beheads every foe.”
Even at only a few fights a year, over forty years, I reckoned that was a big pile of heads. I liked mine where it was, even though it wasn’t its usual pretty self.
“Too bad I never went to this Dragon Temple. This Moon Blade Killer’s got no reason to fight me.”
Burning Cloud Devil chortled. “Ah, but you have given him one. He also slays those who disturb the remains of his victims.”
Terrific, I thought. This chopper guy was probably looking for me already, ready to turn me into one of these headless stalks of the local broccoli. The thought chased off my appetite. I looked around to see whether the next dish was on its way.
In the kitchen doorway stood one of the serving boys, his mouth open in a perfect O. I followed the line of his gaze to the fallen body of his brother.
The headless body of his brother.
Before anyone could react, the surprised boy’s head flew off his body. I looked in the direction it moved, but all I could see was a brief flash of silver.
I rolled away from the table and hunched my head down as close as I could to my shoulders. “I can’t see a damned thing.”
Burning Cloud Devil didn’t reply. He’d vanished again.
The tea house owner came outside, calling his sons’ names.
“Get down!”
He didn’t understand a word I said, but as he looked toward me he saw the corpses of his sons on the ground. As his mouth contorted in anguish, a moon-white ring of metal encircled his neck. His blood left a black trail in the moonlight as his head vanished into the sky.
There was no sense in that. Those boys and their father hadn’t gone anywhere near the Moon Blade Killer’s prize. I bellowed what I thought of that, not caring whether the killer understood me.
All of a sudden my neck itched. I shrugged on my wicker pack. It rose up behind my head, making a target wider than the beheading ring.
At least, that was my working theory, as the boss might have said.
The bamboo whispered above me. I looked up to see the silhouette of a man standing on one of the high fronds. He was thin as a switch, with a smoky halo of hair and beard whipping about his head. He held a staff, its head an irregular circle within a circle. An eclipsed moon.
His eyes were lost in shadow, but I knew he was staring an accusation into my face. I shot it right back at him, along with the tines. He shook his staff toward me, and I heard the skirling passage of his moon blade.
I dropped to the ground. A metallic chime sounded beside my ear, and I felt an impact just behind my neck. The staff I’d taken from the drunken boxer saved my neck, but the top twelve inches of my wicker pack were gone, despite being twice as wide as the loop of the man’s blade. The outer edge of that moon blade was as sharp as the inner.
Looking back up, I saw the Moon Blade Killer catch the razor circle on the top of his staff. For the first time I glimpsed the slender chain that drew it back into place. It was finer than rope, barely visible in the moonlight.
The branch on which he’d stood swayed back up. I didn’t see him move, but he was gone.
“After him,” hissed Burning Cloud Devil. He was nearby but still invisible.
I dropped my pack and ran toward the base of one of the giant bamboo trees.
“No, you fool. Have you learned nothing? Use what you won from the sisters. Leap!”
A terrific report cracked beside me. Before it flew away, I glimpsed the moon blade cutting through the edge of a giant bamboo, returning on a sharp arc to slice through the other half. The enormous trunk slid down toward me.
I tumbled forward and kept rolling to avoid the massive weight, but it didn’t fall the way I’d expected. The giant bamboo slid down and plunged into the soil beside its own base. It stood there without so much as a quiver, as if it had just decided to step a little closer to its neighbor.
I heard the metallic song of the moon blade as it flew out again. Without waiting to see it, I kicked o
ff from the ground and flew up into the fronds. It was terrifying but strangely easy, not much different from bounding around the rafters at the House of a Thousand Silks.
About three-quarters of the way up the giant bamboo, the fronds and sprouts formed a dense cover. There was much more moonlight, but it spilled across such a tangle of green that I had no idea where the Moon Blade Killer had gone.
That was until I heard the blade flying through the trees. Leaves fell in its wake as it closed.
I leaped to the next bough. It bent under my weight, just as the first had done. As it began to lift me back up, I bent my knees and pushed off in another direction. I heard the path of the moon blade a few feet below me, farther away than the earlier throws.
I was getting the hang of this flying business.
Within a few jumps, I sensed the general location of the Moon Blade Killer. He reacted to each of my moves with a brief pause and a leap of his own. I snapped a few darts after him to raise the stakes, but he was quicker. A couple of seconds after he reached the next branch, the blade came whirring toward me.
Thinking of Burning Cloud Devil’s sword-capture technique, I lifted my hands to clap them shut on the moon blade, but at the last moment I thought better of it. The disc wasn’t even a blur. It moved so fast it was invisible.
The next time the disc zipped out toward me, I pretended to leap but hung on to the upper fronds of the bamboo. My weight slowed its return motion just enough for the trunk to catch a glancing blow from the moon blade. The blade cut the wood but kept flying, slightly off course. When the chain pulled taut, it snapped back around the shaft of the next bamboo.
I jumped over to pin the chain between the bamboo and my chest. When the disc came near, I leaned back to avoid its razor edge and stabbed my knife through its hole.
It held fast, but only for a second before the inner ring cut through the steel. The handle of my favorite knife fell away, leaving the blade in the bamboo.
“Son of a bitch!”
The moon blade snapped back into place on the Moon Blade Killer’s staff. A second later it sang out again. I dropped to the ground and ran back to where I’d dropped the pack.