by Dave Gross
A few stones down, Burning Cloud Devil offered incense and a bowl of wine at the grave of an old master of his. While he bowed and chanted prayers, it was a cinch to steal the rest of the wine, an empty bowl, and three sticks of incense. I took them back to the pretty girl’s grave.
Lighting them was no problem. I’d figured out weeks earlier that popping my fingers could produce a little flame. There was a time when that would have amused me.
I stuck the smoking incense into the ground beside the headstone. It occurred to me then that I didn’t need to read the headstone to guess the girl’s age. Rain and the seasons had softened the chiseled edges, so I figured it to be fifty or so years old. If the girl hadn’t died, she’d be a crone by now. Back in Ustalav they’d call her “baba.” I wondered what the Tien word for “granny” was.
“Sweet dreams, kid,” I mumbled through the ruin of my mouth. My smashed teeth were growing back in rows, like a shark’s. They were so sharp I could barely speak without slicing my lips. It was worth the risk to offer up a little prayer for the girl whose face had made me forget my troubles for a moment.
I thought for a while before I realized I didn’t have any prayers left in me. I sat there anyway, half-wishing I could trade places with the departed.
The stone relief pushed the hair back from her face and smiled at me.
I blinked, but it was no trick of the gloom. Not only was the image moving, it wasn’t the same girl anymore. It was Spring Snow.
You are leading him down the wrong path.
“I’m not the one leading, sweetheart.” I immediately regretted my tone. Spring Snow didn’t deserve my disrespect.
If it bothered her, she didn’t let on. Give up your revenge. Help him to give up his.
“He’s doing it out of love for you.”
No, she said. He is doing it out of hatred for himself.
That sounded fair enough to me. I thought of the people who’d lost their lives—or their souls—on account of Burning Cloud Devil’s desire for revenge. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Phoenix Warrior, who’d died on account of mine.
You must turn away from the path of vengeance. It leads only to ...
I put my hand over her face to shut her up.
Five notes from a flute drifted away on the breeze. I looked up but saw nothing but the moon leering down through her veils. When I lifted my hand again, there was only smooth stone beneath. I heard the same five notes again, farther away. Spring Snow was gone, and she’d taken the mysterious beauty with her.
“Hell,” I growled. For an instant I wondered whether I was completing Snow’s prediction or stating my philosophy in a nutshell.
There was no point making myself sick with this introspective bullshit. I got up and paced behind Burning Cloud Devil while he finished his prayers. I wondered why Spring Snow didn’t talk to him directly. Why did she bother me instead?
We were somewhere in northeastern Quain. I didn’t know exactly. After we made our departure from the town where we’d left the corpse of the Phoenix Warrior, I stopped paying attention. We fell into the usual routine of training and travel. Burning Cloud Devil was pleased I’d finally learned the Quivering Palm.
He rewarded me by renewing the one he’d hit me with each month since we met. Next, he promised, I would learn his ultimate technique, the Twin White Palms. After a few weeks listening to his mystical mumbo-jumbo about it, I no longer thought the Quivering Palm was all that complicated.
The novelty of the foreign country was wearing off. All I could see anymore was how Tian Xia was no different from Cheliax, or anywhere else in Avistan. Hungry farmers harvested their crops. Greedy bandits swept in to steal them. Indifferent soldiers marched home from their annual patrols. Everyone braced for winter.
An early frost turned the grass brittle, but there was as much green as brown on the nine hills that formed the cemetery above the city of Nanzhu. Burning Cloud Devil insisted on arriving here on the last day of Lamashan, or whatever they called the harvest month in these parts. It was the anniversary of his old master’s death, and he had a promise to keep.
Before the sun set, I’d been curious about the dead guy. Burning Cloud Devil explained that his teacher’s will demanded an annual service from his last pupil. Briefly I wondered how they’d met, what the old fellow had taught Burning Cloud Devil, what kind of food they liked to eat—the sort of thing ordinary people talk about.
The feeling passed.
In the cool autumn night, I was more interested in finding out when we were going to move along. It was cold for Lamashan, but it felt even colder among the headstones. There was something unsettled living here—or not living, as the case might be. I felt it in my spurs. We needed to find an inn that served something hot and strong.
Burning Cloud Devil rose from his prayers. He paused and turned his head to the side. I heard nothing.
It must have been something other than a sound that disturbed him. He knelt and placed his palm upon the earth. I did the same. A faint tremor pulsed through my hand, and after a few seconds I was sure it wasn’t my own pulse.
“What is it?”
He didn’t answer. Instead he removed an octagonal mirror from his bag and held it up to the moon. A beam of light shone on its surface for a moment. He flipped the mirror as if catching the moon ray inside.
Then he flipped it back and placed a queer dagger on top. It wasn’t a weapon but a string of coins laid in a cross shape and tied tight together with red cord, a red tassel dangling from its butt. The trapped moonbeams lifted the coin dagger from the mirror’s surface. It turned like the needle of a compass.
Burning Cloud Devil studied the light as it darkened to purple. He glared in the direction the coin-dagger pointed.
“Someone disturbs the dead in my master’s cemetery.”
I followed when he leaped into the trees.
A pair of phantoms passed us in the boughs. One was a grimacing old man with an odd little mortarboard hat tilted on his head. The other was a portly woman whose hands kept wringing an apron not included with her funereal dress. Lotus coffins lay shattered and empty between the churned graves. Brittle limbs scattered in the lanes told me we were getting closer to the cause of the disturbance.
We came to the highest hill on the cemetery, where balding oak trees mourned around a shrine. A yellow nimbus licked at the upturned corners of the building’s three roofs, and shadows slithered on the ground. A halo flickered in and out at the spire on top, uncertain whether it wanted to be party to what was happening below.
Burning Cloud Devil flew toward the base of the hill, and I followed. We made less noise than the wind through the leaves. We crouched on the nearest thick branch and observed the necromancer mustering his troops.
The yellow light gave the man a waxy pallor. His sunken chest and potbelly reminded me of a pear. Around his scrawny neck curled a black torc in the shape of a serpent’s skeleton. Behind him stood a tall scroll stand, a long blank sheet of paper hanging from its crown. Despite the chill, he’d peeled down the chest of his robe to display dozens of red Tien characters on his skin. I saw the bloody knife at his feet and realized he hadn’t used a brush.
His lieutenants were four bald women wearing only iron torcs like their master’s. Between their bare breasts they had painted snake skulls in ash. The women threw back their bald heads and babbled curses at the sky. Shadows of snakes slithered out of their blackened fingers to desecrate the ground.
Above the murmur of his acolytes, the necromancer sang an eerie song in an ancient tongue. With each phrase he jangled a big brass bell. With his other hand he flicked strips of yellow paper into the air. Rather than fall, they squirmed like minnows in a current. Each one sought out a grave.
Two squads of dead stood four by four beside the shrine. In life they’d have made an unlikely mob o
f merchants and porters, ladies and prostitutes, children and crones. Their clothes were all different, the last outfits they’d ever wear. Their only uniform was a strip of yellow paper hanging down their faces from a dark spot on their brows.
A third squad came up a winding lane, clods of earth falling away from their hems. They didn’t shuffle the way you figure the dead would do, or maybe these ones were different. They hopped in unison up the lane, leaping each time the necromancer shook his brass bell.
The parade should have looked ridiculous. Instead, their halting jumps gave me the shudders. I knew the smell of the restless dead, the touch of their putrid fingers on my skin. No matter how they moved, there was nothing funny about them.
“How dare he conjure minions from this sacred place!” I had a feeling Burning Cloud Devil’s outrage had more to do with the presence of his master’s grave than with a sense of civic duty. He made arcane gestures and intoned a spell. The magic glimmered and sank into his body. He cast another on me, another on himself. I got bored of it.
I watched the undead army grow. Considering how many yellow strips the necromancer had thrown, he’d have an army soon.
“There is no time to waste.” Burning Cloud Devil drew the silver sword and flew at the necromancer.
He moved so fast that I expected him to impale the man, but the sword was just a prop for his grand entrance. He floated to a stop ten feet from the shrine.
“Who dares—?” The necromancer held the bell and another handful of papers above his head, like a housewife who’d spied a mouse. Half a dozen emotions wrestled for control of his face until an awed smile won out. “Burning Cloud Devil! You honor me with your presence.”
The necromancer dropped the yellow paper to press an open hand against the fist gripping the bell. It rang again as he bowed. The approaching dead leaped another step closer.
Burning Cloud Devil tilted his head. Maybe he was surprised by the compliment. He lowered his blade and waited to hear more.
“Have you come to join your infernal legions to my undying army? Tonight I shall have enough to conquer Nanzhu. If you will open the gates of Hell to muster an army of devils, we can rule Quain by spring.”
Burning Cloud Devil sheathed his sword. He brushed an errant leaf from his shoulder.
I considered leaping down to join him, but I was tired of straight-up fights against sorcerers and priests, not to mention paladins and magic seamstresses. Instead I shrugged off my pack and crept around toward the back of the shrine, careful to stay in the shadows that didn’t look like snakes. The priestesses kept chanting, oblivious as I moved past them.
The long silence finally prompted the necromancer to speak.
“Forgive me, King of Heroes. I am rude. Of course you do not remember me from our brief encounter in Fuchuan, but I could never forget the sight of your battle against the Six Peerless Sons of Wo Han at the Gate of the Alabaster Unicorn, nor the spectacular duel against the eunuch sorcerer who sought to avenge their deaths. I am Bingwen of the White Branch School, formerly Court Conjuror and now Summoner of the Undead. In the south I am known as Foul-Eye Bingwen, and the oni of the Salt Desert call me Master of Agonies.”
I slipped into the shrine while Foul-Eye listed all his names. I crouched behind one of eight thick pillars carved in the shape of entwined constrictors. They looked new compared to the rest of the monuments in the cemetery, and felt warm under my hand. I pulled it away.
Burning Cloud Devil lifted his beard on his wrist as he considered the introduction. “You disturb these honored ancestors for revenge?”
“To overthrow a despot who has no appreciation for the true power of sorcery!”
“Ah,” said Burning Cloud Devil. He shook his head, disappointed at the answer. He turned in the direction where he thought I still was. “You may kill him now.”
“What treach—?”
I shoved the big knife through Foul-Eye’s spine. It was a neat cut, right between two of his vertebrae, maybe the best I’d ever done. Not that I’d made so many like it. Not as many as people thought back home.
The bald women screamed, feeling their master’s pain. Foul-Eye slumped forward, but he kept standing. Unbelievable for anyone but a necromancer.
I shoved the knife to the left, twisted, and shoved it back in the other direction. The women screamed again, their arms flailing as the shadowy snakes fled their fingers. Bingwen’s heavy torso leaned farther, but still he refused to fall.
He didn’t bleed so much as he oozed. The orange-colored blood—or ichor, or goo, or whatever it was—had the thickness and stench of hot tar. Thick, snotty ropes of the stuff stuck to the big knife.
Foul-Eye turned to face me. He twisted at the waist, detaching the rest of his torso from his legs, which flopped to the ground as the remainder of his body hovered above. His eyes blazed and darkened. He leaned forward, grasped my shoulder in his fat, sweaty hand, and sprayed my face with steaming whispers.
Blasts of fire erupted all around the shrine as Burning Cloud Devil began incinerating Foul-Eye’s troops, but I couldn’t look away from the necromancer’s sunken eyes. They had been dead for decades, disguised by an illusion of life. All the weight came off my body. I fell forward, into those black pits.
“Resist.” Burning Cloud Devil’s magic whisper breathed in my ear. “Do not let him dominate your mind.”
Easier said than done, but the encouragement snapped me out of my daze. I shoved Foul-Eye and shook the confusion from my head.
By the time I was ready for another go at him, yellow-green vapor poured out of the necromancer’s mouth. His skin blistered as the fumes rolled down his naked chest and spread in all directions.
I fell back to roll out of the shrine before the stuff touched me. The priestesses clutched at me despite their sightless eyes. I kicked one back into the green cloud. The poisonous fog stifled her screams.
Shaking off the other three took a moment. Their hands were weirdly strong, but a good crack on the noggin laid each of them out. For a second I considered cutting their throats, but I had a feeling they weren’t volunteers. Foul-Eye’s dead gaze had almost done a number on me, a street-raised hellspawn. These girls wouldn’t have stood a chance against his magic charms.
A strong gust blew away the noxious fog. Burning Cloud Devil hovered above a pile of smoldering corpses, a triumphant smile creasing his face. The smile vanished when he saw what the wind revealed.
In his own blood, Foul-Eye had drawn a symbol on the giant scroll. When Burning Cloud Devil saw it, he choked and writhed in the air. The necromancer turned it toward me. I closed my eyes and threw myself to the ground, but it didn’t matter.
Pain screamed into my body, twisting my limbs and shriveling my guts. Pain had come before, so often it didn’t even knock anymore. I opened my eyes and screamed back at it with all the hell I’d been saving for the dragon. I stared the bastard down. And you know what?
Pain blinked.
Whatever magic Foul-Eye set off got one taste of me and had enough.
While the necromancer worked his next spell, I rushed him, dropping the useless knife. Instead, I moved in for Burning Cloud Devil’s favorite strike.
Even with my eyes closed, it was a perfect shot. My hand struck the necromancer dead between the nipples. My fingers spidered out to touch the Seven Margins of the Soul, then back to bind them all to my command.
It was perfect. After I’d killed the Phoenix Warrior, I felt exactly how it was done. The strings of Foul-Eye’s soul should have been tied to my will. But I felt nothing.
“The Quivering Palm!” Foul-Eye’s raspy voice was full of admiration. With his yellow nails he slit open his chest and pulled open his ribcage. Where a heart should be lay a gore-slicked stone. “Your skill is impressive, but it is useless against one who has entered the Ninety-Ninth Chamber of Undying—”
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I crushed his larynx to spare myself the boredom of hearing his story.
Apparently he’d skipped the chamber that puts a stone in your throat. His limp hands slapped uselessly against his neck.
“Twin White Palms!” shouted Burning Cloud Devil.
What the hell? I gave it my all. Knuckle shot to either side of the stone heart, cupped palms to receive the Immortal Essence ...and there was nothing. I hit the necromancer anyway. The force of my open hands upon his chest knocked him back a few feet, but that was it.
No instant death. No fireworks. Not even a good yelp. I was disappointed.
A fireball exploded inside the shrine. Fire washed over me. The blast sucked the breath out of my lungs, but otherwise it barely mussed my hair. I glared at Burning Cloud Devil.
He nodded with satisfaction at the sizzling corpse of Bingwen Foul-Eye and the flaming remains of the scroll stand.
“A little warning next time.” Still, there was no harm done. Not even a thread of my magic robes got singed. In fact, I felt pretty good after the bath of flame. Even my teeth stopped hurting. I realized they’d grown back completely the instant the fire caressed me.
The cheer lasted only until I saw the smoking remains of the priestesses I thought I’d spared. It would have been nice to end the night with a little bit of a rescue to take the edge off.
I sank to the ground, too exhausted to work up a good mad. It wasn’t my fault those girls were dead. It wasn’t Burning Cloud Devil’s, either. It was the necromancer who’d made them come here to call up the dead, which they had no business doing. Or else they were as twisted as he was and chose to come along of their own free will. I hadn’t seen a thing to tell me different.
That’s what I kept telling myself as I followed Burning Cloud Devil out of the cemetery and down into the city of Nanzhu.
Chapter Nineteen
Shadowless Sword
Even after mastering the spell Jade Tiger gave me, I remained unable to reach Radovan through his dreams. Night after night I made the attempt, only to wake exhausted and with nothing to show for my efforts.