Fantastic Schools, Volume 3

by Emily Martha Sorensen

  “A Path is the beginning of true power. It is forged by the one who walks it, and each is unique. The First Step is the ritual by which a student becomes a novice in the Art.”

  “Technically correct. How many of you have witnessed one of the Masters here practice their path?”

  No student answered me. A person’s Path was not some party trick to be casually displayed. Or, that was how the people of this land thought of it. They were the Sine’, people of the steppe, and the tundra. Frivolity was foreign to them. I was from a different place and a different people.

  “Then watch closely. Bear witness to the Path Under the Hill.”

  I dropped the veil of still Qi I maintained around myself to prevent my own drumbeat from deafening or outright killing those with less power than myself. My red hair began to glow with power, and my green eyes would be like twin flames. Every muscle in my body sang with pent-up energy begging to be put to use. I pushed my Qi out of my body, reaching out to that particular energy that my spirit had bonded to. Behind me, reality became thinner, and wild colors, inhuman colors, began pouring out.

  “Come, Gwyn Pukah.” I turned to the hole in the world and pulled through a large creature, an unsettling mix of man and beast that bore a passing resemblance to a rabbit.

  “What manner of monster is that?!” Li cried out.

  “This is Gwyn Pookah. He is a creature from the Land Under the Hill, a world like and unlike our own. My Path allows me to open roads into and out of that land, which has allowed me to make deals with its native creatures. Witness.”

  I pulled three small clay jars from the box I’d brought with me for this lecture. One was honey, one was cream, and one was a very valuable spirit from my homeland, Tua’De. I handed them over to the large bipedal rabbit with three simple instructions, things that could be interpreted in a number of ways, but I had trust in this particular creature to understand and follow my intentions. To be sure my students wouldn’t hear me, I spoke in my native tongue, something far more flowing and lyrical than the sharp consonants and precise vowels of the Sine language. “Humble the proud one, aid the one who hides, and bring danger here.”

  The Pookah didn’t answer me, merely took my bribes and vanished. A few of my less reserved students gasped, startled, as my Fey friend vanished from sight and their fledgling senses.

  “What demon or monster was that?” Li demanded.

  “Neither. Check your registries of demons; his name is not on it. Now, return to your place, Li.”

  The boy’s scowl deepened, but he obeyed. As he was taking his seat, the cushion in his place was suddenly jerked away. The dull thud and pained grunt of the young man drew the eyes of his fellow students. None turned their heads, nor did their expressions change, but their opinion of Li would drop after such a display of clumsy behavior. His long, braided black hair shook as he clenched his jaw, a display of emotion equivalent to shouting and screaming in my homeland.

  “Everyone, stand!” I barked. All of the students obeyed quickly, except for Li who took several moments to comply. “For those of you who believe what happened to be humorous or a good show, watch closely.”

  I picked up a piece of wood and held it to my side. A blade made of sharpened stone drove into and through the wood, burying itself in the wooden beam just behind me. Every eye in the room went wide.

  “I chose to have my friend Gwyn play a small joke on your fellow student to prove a point, but none of you were intelligent enough to understand. A pulled pillow could just as easily be a knife across your throat. Now, I will show you how to guard yourselves against an invisible enemy. As Li reminded everyone, there are demons and monsters who can make themselves unseen.” The student in question looked less angry now, but still glared at me. “Li will be the first to learn this technique.”

  I spent the next several hours walking the young man through the internal movements needed to force Qi out of the body and into a kind of fog. This field of energy would be like a second set of skin, sensitive to change or disturbance. Once every student was able to perform this technique for several seconds, I allowed them to leave for their evening meal. The maidservant snuck out only a moment before my student left.

  “Uncouth dog.” A short, slender man with squinting eyes stood at the entrance to the garden where I prefered to instruct students.

  “Master Feng, join me for a drink?” I offered.

  “The sun has not even reached its peak, degenerate outsider.”

  “You are far too free with your compliments.” I took a gourd of water from my bag and started drinking from it. The gourd exploded into steam, lightly-scalding my skin. I dropped what was left and gave Feng a bored look.

  “And you are a stain that I will burn from this world.” He threw something at my face. I didn’t bother to move or catch the object. A bundle of cloth hit me and draped over my head. My muscles tensed as I realized what this was. “Three days from now, on the night of the Gate Rituals. We will meet in the Arena of the Sixth Gate. If you flee, I will hunt you down. Your promised decade of hiding behind the Grand Elder’s robe is over.”

  When I heard Feng leave, I pulled the fabric from my head and looked at it to confirm what I already knew. That son of a donkey had torn my banner from the Master’s Hall as an insult and a formal challenge. I was honor-bound to meet it, and when I did, Feng would do his best to kill me.

  Shui Lan

  There were wonders unimaginable to behold in the vaunted halls of the Sublime Moon Sect. People who could shape the elements into weapons, heal with a touch, make drawings take on a life of their own. There were sacred weapons, unearthly icons, miraculous medicines, and trees that glowed with the light of the heavens. My first task today was cleaning the bathrooms. There was nothing wonderful or miraculous about them, except for the self-warming seats. Crap is still crap.

  I scrubbed the floors and seats with herb water to clean the marble and purge the smell. Rosemary smelled strong enough to linger for a few days so I wouldn’t have to do it again for a little while. I got off my aching knees and breathed deeply. Some smell of filth still lingered from the rags and soiled water, but the room was clean once again. I breathed deeply, this time to move the Qi from my belly into my limbs, refreshing them for the tasks that lay ahead. I pictured the lines of energy woven through my body and guided the pure life energy through them, bringing relief to my aching muscles and beginning to heal the scrapes and light bruises that came from working on one’s hands and knees for hours.

  “Shui Lan!” The voice cracked like a whip. I spun around, eyes carefully kept low, and head slightly bowed.

  “The maidservant greets the honored Master,” I said, pressing my hands together one atop the other in front of me then bowing more deeply. I didn’t have to look to know who had spoken to me. Master Feng of the Path of Wandering Flame, one of the instructors in the Sublime Moon Sect. His large green eyes would be narrowed to chips of emerald color, his irritable nature and need of glasses giving him an almost eternal glaring expression. His black beard hung elegantly down to his waist, accented by the robe of sparkling stones he wore.

  “The Grand Elder has called for all to attend his demonstration. That includes you. Hurry up, girl. It would not do for the greatest of us to wait upon the needs of a mere maidservant.”

  My Qi burned cold for a moment.

  “As the honored Master wishes.” I bowed more deeply and listened to his steps tapping their way toward the entrance of the massive pagoda that housed the Sect. I took a brief moment to breathe and try one more thing. I sped up the circulation of Qi in my body, forcing it outward and into my skin. Sweat poured out of me, pushing ingrained filth with it. I continued to force my Qi outward and after a full minute of effort, the stench was eliminated from my body and clothes. A quick sniff told me I would still smell like sweat, but it was a definite improvement.

  Master Feng gave me a slight glare when I arrived outside, my simple bamboo sandals making far too much noise for m
e to join the crowd unnoticed. But I didn’t care. Sage of the Sublime Moon, Khan Yue, stood in a simple white robe facing an oncoming thunderstorm. Atop a platform of raised earth nearly a thousand paces removed from us, he stood alone before a force of nature. The students and instructors were murmuring to each other about the nature of the demonstration. Apparently, the Grand Elder hadn’t told anyone much of anything other than where to stand.

  A peal of thunder shook the ground we stood on, and an animalistic cry shook the souls of the crowd. Something not quite a tiger and not quite a bird burst through the clouds trailing lightning. It was large enough to swallow a man whole with a long snake-headed tail with eyes that burned like embers.

  “A Yao Nue.” Master Feng gasped.

  The word ran through the crowd like a line of fireworks. One student, no more than twelve summers old, tripped on his own feet trying to run and bowled into his friends. Master Yi of the Path of Shimmering Stone quickly disciplined the boy, cuffing him on the ear once he was on his feet. The slim Master could have taken the boy’s head off with such a blow, but his self-control let him strike with a merely human amount of strength.

  The Yao beast roared again, and lightning crashed to the earth in a dazzling flash. Dirt was churned and stone shattered by the awesome natural energy the creature had called from the storm. Not a bit of it harmed Khan Yue. Not a speck of debris touched his white robes. The Yao beast, a creature born of either evil sorcery or corrupted natural energy, was surrounded by storm clouds that looked more like an artist’s portrait of clouds than the real thing. That was where the power of the creature was leaking into reality, seeping out to disrupt the natural weather and create that massive thunderstorm.

  The Grand Elder stood on the raised plateau as a serene counterpoint to the chaos around him. The students were terrified, and I was right there with them. Wind buffeted my clothes and had blown my hair-wrap to the other end of the Kingdom by now. Rain washed over us in a sheet. I could see the Masters of the Sect pushing the rain away from themselves with a minor outpouring of Qi. A few of the more-enterprising students tried, but even those talented enough to replicate the technique quickly exhausted themselves. I thought about trying it myself, but the rain was washing away the sweat, so I shrugged and let the rain wash me clean.

  The Yao Nue must have seen the Sage’s defiance because it roared and ran through the air toward him, rain and lighting following in its wake. The ancient man stood tall in the face of a living natural disaster. Then, so fast it was difficult for my eyes to follow, he set his feet in a martial artist’s stance. His arms, still thick and strong, were thrust out at the invading monster, and I saw the air around him stir. He moved in a fluid motion turning his body clockwise with his arms moving in wide sweeping arcs. His right arm swept up toward the sky, and the clouds parted as if cut with a god’s sword. Moonlight, bright and beautiful, spilled onto the rain-drenched ground.

  The Nue screeched in inhuman rage as the rain and lighting were stripped away from it, but still it charged at the Sage. Again, the old man seemed to dance in a circle. This time, his right hand swept down at the ground. The world around the beast distorted, and it fell impossibly fast. All of us felt the impact of the monster when it slammed into the stone of the mountain, and all of us heard the sound of shattering rock. The monstrous creature had been pulled out of the sky and broken on the mountainside by a single technique of the Sage of the Sublime Moon. The entire gathering was dead silent, awed and terrified by the power of the wise old man.

  “Three cheers for the Sage’s great victory!” one impertinent student shouted.

  Many began to clap or cheer once the silence was broken, but none of the Masters even breathed as far as I could see. Master Feng, a proud and self-satisfied man if there ever was one, looked far paler than his ruddy complexion should have allowed. I wasn’t as well-learned as any Master, not even as much as most of the students, but I thought I understood. That hadn’t been a fight, it had been butchery. The Sage had crushed a beast of mythical proportions with less effort than it would have taken one of the Masters to beat down an unruly student.

  “Immortal,” Master Feng breathed.

  Had I been a few feet further away I wouldn’t have heard him. I was preoccupied with something else. The Sage’s dance had felt wrong. The arrogance of that thought struck me like a rock to the back of the head. He had just decimated a Yao Nue, a herald of destruction for cities, and I was thinking I knew Qi techniques better than he did. But still…

  No, it wasn’t something I could afford to spend time on. I’d lost half an hour of time, and I still had so much work to do. I rushed back inside ahead of the students and instructors and began wiping down the floors in the auditorium with a rag wetted in cinnamon-infused water. Rosemary was more common and far less expensive, but Master Cu MacDann said rosemary reminded him too much of his lost home.

  “Well, that was quite a sight, was it not?” Master Cu, a large man with pale skin and green eyes said, turned me around to face him. “You don’t see a Nue killed in single combat every day.”

  I didn’t know him, but I knew of him. He was the only Master at the sect from outside the kingdom, possibly the only Master to have come from across the Tempest Sea. He was infamous in the Sect for ignoring anything resembling rules of decorum or social strata. I was a maidservant. Conversing with someone like me as a friend or acquaintance was an act that would cause most to lose face. I wasn’t sure he understood the concept of social honor. If he did, then he chose to ignore it entirely.

  “This lowly maidservant has never witnessed such a sight, Master of Fey Roads.”

  Master Cu let out a deep sigh.

  “You Sine’, so formal. My former countrymen sometimes said that your people know neither how to laugh or smile. They are not far wrong based on my time with the Sect.”

  My Qi twisted in my core. What did I have to laugh about? I stilled my mind by regulating my breathing. Calm. I needed calm.

  “It is not my place to correct the Honored Master.”

  “Song and drink, girl! Can’t you even get mad and insult me openly?”

  “It is not the place of one as lowly as myself.” I bowed deeply and held that pose until the temperamental Master got sick of me.

  “Very well. Go back to your cleaning, maid. But don’t assume I am as blinded by my own genius as the others. I see you.”

  My reaction to those words was too strong to hide entirely. He’d noticed something. Either my own increasing mastery of Qi, or my eavesdropping on the lectures and demonstrations of the Masters of the Sect. No one ever paid attention to the cleaning servants! I swallowed down the lump in my throat. No one, except a foreigner with no concept of social hierarchy. Curse his ancestors to the eighth generation!

  I made the mistake of meeting Master Cu’s eyes. He was grinning at me, at whatever expression of fear had crept into my face.

  “And I don’t mind.”

  “Will the honored Master keep this lowly one’s confidence?” I dared to ask.

  “I will, if you do one thing for me.” He waited until I was forced to ask the question he’d left hanging in the air.

  “What does the Master require of this one?”

  “The Ritual of the First Step is happening in three days. The students require attendants as they are put to the test. I would like you to be one of those attendants.” My heart and my Qi stopped for a moment. The Ritual was one of the closely-guarded secrets of the Sect. Most students were sent back to their families before the Ritual. A basic mastery of Qi was enough to strengthen the body and provide the student with a lifetime of good health and a youth almost certain to span half a century. But to pass the first Gate meant beginning a Path. A Path leads to power and status. There was only one answer to give.

  “I humbly accept the Master’s request.” Despite the trembling in my hands, I dared a further question. “Does the Master have any words of wisdom for this humble maidservant?”

  “Now
that is almost a smile,” Master Cu said, grinning like some fool child who won a footrace. “Seek the will of Heaven” he intoned.

  I stopped and pondered that simple statement, but he was not done.

  “All that resides on Earth reflects the heavens. Man stands above the Earth but below Heaven. Think on this as you practice.”

  I did not understand, but I was not willing to make another request of this strangely generous man. The secrets of Qi and Paths were closely guarded. The entrance fee for the Sect was equal to the wages of a farmer over a fifty-year period. Only the sons of wealthy merchants or high government officials could afford it, assuming they could manipulate Qi at all. Even then, if you did not show talent or catch the eye of a Master, basic mastery of Qi was all you could ever hope for.

  “The maidservant thanks the Master for his generosity.” I bowed deeply.

  For the first time, my bow was honest. It felt better than I thought, being genuinely thankful. Or maybe that was the hope. Hope that I could reach beyond the life my parents had sacrificed me to. I hadn’t even fetched a year’s wages. Old bile crept up my throat, but I forced it back down.

  “One more thing.” Master Cu’s words caught me halfway out of his lecture hall. I stopped and turned back, hoping for more information. “All the power in the world doesn’t amount to much if the person holding it doesn’t know how to smile.”

  My disappointment must have shown on my face because he began to laugh at me.

  “Truth can be a bitter pill, but it is still medicine.”

  I didn’t bother with the bow this time and left as quickly as was polite. I had work to finish and I wanted, no, I needed to finish early tonight. I was so focused on working fast I began circulating my Qi without realizing. I only noticed when the water on my hands began steaming away from the excess energy.

  “Careful, dear,” Head Maidservant Mei Liang warned me.