by JY Yang
“Send someone up with water,” Akeha said. “Two pails.”
Ang nodded.
Yongcheow barely made it up two flights of stairs and down the wooden corridor to Akeha’s room. Akeha released him onto the bed, where he remained seated, breathing very slowly. His clothes were heavy and stiff with drying blood. “Get undressed,” Akeha said. He sought out his medicine cabinet.
“Wait,” Yongcheow said. Akeha turned back, frowning. The other man pushed his hands against the hard surface of the bed to stay upright. “There’s something . . . you need to know.”
“What?”
“My confirmation, I didn’t . . . I didn’t get confirmed.” As Akeha’s frown deepened, he said, “I mean, I got confirmed, but I didn’t go to the doctors. Some—”
“I don’t care,” Akeha said.
He turned away: there was work to do. Cloths for bandages, herbs and powders for salves, bowls to mix them with. Akeha’s skill with forest-nature was self-taught and lacked the finesse to reknit a gash this deep. Needle and thread would help.
Broad-shouldered Amah was the one who brought the pails up. She glanced over at Yongcheow, his tunic off, compression bandages off, exposing a blood-thickened knife wound across the rib cage, and clucked. “Getting in trouble again?”
Akeha thanked her for the water.
“There’s still soup left over from dinner,” she said. “Do you want?”
He nodded. “Bring us two bowls later.”
The wound had to be cleaned, disinfected, pulled shut. Yongcheow leaned back, breath whistling through his teeth, as Akeha worked.
“So what is it you do?” he asked. “When you’re not rescuing people in need.”
Akeha threaded needle through flesh. “I’m a deliveryman.”
“You’re very good at killing people, for a deliveryman.”
Akeha said nothing. The work before him required focus.
“So what do you deliver? And for whom?”
“Anything. Anyone. I don’t ask. I don’t look. I do the job. It makes everything simpler.”
“Anyone?”
“No Protectorate. That’s my only rule.”
Yongcheow laughed, and Akeha halted as the man’s side shook, the torn edges of the wound shifting. “You’re a smuggler.”
Akeha waited for him to still before returning to work. Black thread drew flesh to flesh, forest-nature set it on the path to healing.
Closing the wound was the easy part. The blood loss—that was harder to fix. A skilled doctor would have had ways to replenish the lost iron; Akeha was no such thing. He pressed the thick paste he had made over the gash, equal parts nourishment and antiseptic. Then he bound it with clean cloth.
“No compression until it heals,” he said. The other man nodded.
The injuries clouding his head and legs were superficial, easier to deal with. Basic doctoring was simple; the rest was up to the fortunes.
Yongcheow’s fingers grazed his chin. Akeha froze. “Thank you,” the man whispered.
Akeha escaped the contact to prepare the strong, bitter healing brew.
His patient accepted the cup of dark liquid with a small expression of wonder. “Why did you save me?”
“We’ve discussed this.”
“You didn’t answer.”
In irritation, Akeha turned away to clean the room. “Rest now. This place is safe. Soldiers won’t find you tonight.” And it was the best they could do for now. Tomorrow was tomorrow’s affair.
* * *
Yongcheow slept easily; Akeha didn’t. In a square of moonlight by the bed, soft as winter frost, he combed through the cloth bundle that had almost cost his companion his life.
The Machinist scrolls drew his attention first. They were lightning scrolls, new technology that had filtered south only in the last few months: thin sheets shaped out of lodestone paste, Slack-imprinted with information that required a decoder to extract. Their presence told stories—Tensor involvement, money, deep organization. In Akeha’s line of work, he listened to a lot of talk. The talk about the growing Machinist rebellion in the capital said it was driven less by downtrodden farmers than by disaffected Tensors. Here was the proof, solid in his hands.
His companion, then: also one of those disaffected? The bundle told little of the man. The small wooden boxes held medicines, soaps, tools to mend broken things, money. There was a thin prayer mat, folded and rolled up. The third scroll was a copy of the Instructions, the holy edicts revered by the Obedient. An old copy, but well kept. Well loved. He looked for evidence of family, lovers, friends. Nothing.
Akeha unwrapped one of the last bundles. As he laid the cloth flat, its damning contents spilled into the light. Pearl-sized silver pellets. Blasting powder in packets, smelling of fireworks. And the main event, heavy and metallic, sitting in the middle of it all.
A gun.
Akeha had seen guns before. They were Tensors’ playthings, put together by masters of earth- and water-nature for fun. The ones he’d seen used coiled springs and slackcraft and produced just enough force to punch holes in paper cutouts. This one was no plaything. It had heft. It had scars, black on the nozzle and stark across the body. It had a slot for blasting powder.
It was a weapon.
A weapon that didn’t rely on slackcraft.
A weapon that didn’t require a Tensor to charge it.
A weapon that anybody could use.
Akeha lifted it, felt its stonelike weight, put it back down. A slip of paper caught his attention. Unfolded, it revealed a scrawl of diagrams and instructions. Akeha recognized the signature appended to it. Midou. A friend from later childhood, a relative close enough to bear some prestige, a cousin distant enough to be dispensable. The paper was speckled with red that could be inkspill or bloodstain.
He rolled up the bundle, blood racing in his veins. If this was the Machinist endgame—arming the peasant masses with deadly weapons—then his understanding of the situation was broken and hollow.
Akeha looked over his shoulder. In the dark, on his bed, Yongcheow slumbered, pallid and inscrutable. A small man, caught up in a web of things beyond his ken. Akeha had to extricate himself before he, too, got caught in it.
Chapter Fourteen
YONGCHEOW WOKE AT FIRST sunrise to pray. Akeha, who’d slept on the floor, watched his slippered feet pad across the ground, pause to retrieve the prayer mat, then vanish behind a cabinet’s bulk. He drifted back to sleep with Yongcheow’s fluid supplications nestling in his ears.
Later, he woke again to a stirring in the Slack: Yongcheow pulling on fire-nature to dry freshly washed clothes. He sat up. The bed had been made, the cloth bundle reassembled. Yongcheow was half dressed, heating his tunic as it hung on a piece of string.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh. You’re awake.”
“Planning to leave before I woke?”
“No, I—” Yongcheow obscured his reaction in the flurry of putting on the tunic. “I need to get to Waiyi as fast as possible.”
Akeha knew Waiyi. A foot-of-the-mountain hamlet in the wilds, several hundred yields off the river. It was surrounded by hills and good places to hide. He did a lot of business there. “I don’t advise traveling. Your wounds need more time.”
The stiff, cautious way Yongcheow fastened his tunic was proof he also knew this. “It’s time I don’t have. I would stay longer, if I could.”
Akeha watched the man’s face and movements intently as he posed the next question: “What are you carrying that can’t wait one more day?”
“Information.” He met Akeha’s gaze head-on. “I know you looked through the bundle.” When Akeha didn’t deny this, he continued, “The information concealed on the scrolls is a matter of life and death.”
“Information the Protectorate would kill for. What is it?”
Yongcheow’s lips tightened. “Maybe . . . it might be better for you not to ask.”
Akeha folded his arms and leaned against a wooden beam.
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“It involves your sister.”
Within him, Akeha’s stomach lurched into movement. “Tell me.”
A seismic sigh. “Your sister had a vision. She saw an attack on the Great High Palace by a small group of Tensors. These Tensors had connections to the Machinist movement. It’s . . . complicated, and their motives were their own. But in short, the attack failed, and now your mother is purging suspected Machinists throughout the Protectorate.”
“Purging . . .” Dread shivered through him. “Do you mean—”
“What do you think it means?”
Akeha looked to the ceiling, to where the rafters held firm. “How many dead?”
Yongcheow’s shoulders tilted. “We can’t save those in the capital. They got out, or they died. We’re trying to warn everyone else. What I’m carrying are lists. A list of known members outside the capital, and a list of Protectorate targets. Not all the people on our list are Protectorate targets. And not all the people on the Protectorate’s list are our people.” He licked his lips. “We could save innocents by warning them.”
Akeha closed his eyes and counted the stiff breaths that passed. When he opened his eyes, the world was still there. “What about the gun?”
Yongcheow remained mute for several heartbeats. Finally, he said thickly, “It was a gift. Bequeathed to me.”
“I saw Midou’s signature. He was a childhood friend.”
Yongcheow’s eyes were fixed on the air, on nothing. “He was a good man. Too good.”
Silence bloomed. Yongcheow, regaining his composure, said, “In any case, now you understand my urgency.”
Akeha said nothing. He had not been in the capital in a long time. Mother’s purges were stern, quiet things: doors pushed in at night, muffled bodies dragged from beds. Vanished. Mokoya once asked Sonami where they put all the graves. Sonami said, “Mother doesn’t leave that kind of mess.”
Yongcheow carefully tied the cloth bundle around himself, avoiding the wound. “Will you come with me?”
Akeha tightened his arms across his chest. “No Protectorate. That’s the rule.”
A medley of emotions ghosted through Yongcheow’s face: disappointment, sadness, resignation, fear. “I see. Well . . . thank you for everything, then. His peace be with you.” He stepped over the room’s threshold.
“Wait,” Akeha said.
Yongcheow swiveled as Akeha dove into a medicine cabinet. “Take these. You need to replenish your iron.”
His fingers closed loosely around Akeha’s as he accepted the elixirs. “Thank you.” His hand lingered a moment longer than necessary, skin electric against skin. Then he stepped away, out of the room.
Akeha folded onto the unyielding surface of the bed, breathing very slowly. His thoughts turned briefly to Midou. Scrub-haired, knock-kneed Midou, who took everything with the gravity of a funeral director; Midou the gunmaker, Midou the unlikely rebel, Midou who was almost certainly dead. Strange to think of those familiar bones reduced to atoms, scattered across a hillside in Chengbee.
He shut his eyes, pressed cold fingertips to the bridge of his nose.
What would Mokoya do?
* * *
The fierce, shining ribbon of the river Tiegui broadened into sluggish green flats by the time it reached Jixiang, heavy with silt and soft at the banks. Diluted clumps of merchant ships bobbed listlessly in its eddies. When Akeha caught up with him, Yongcheow was walking the gray-skied docks, trying to find a willing oar among the merchants sailing upriver with the last of the harvest.
“Don’t take the river route,” he said. “It’s too open.”
Yongcheow had showed almost no surprise at Akeha’s reappearance. “What’s the alternative?”
“There’s a path through the forest, along the buttress of the mountain range. It’s longer, and shouldn’t be traveled alone, but it’ll be harder for soldiers to find you.”
Yongcheow folded his hands behind him. “It sounds risky.”
Akeha drew and released a full breath before speaking, knowing that there would be no turning back after this. “I’ll take you.”
A small smile spread from one corner of Yongcheow’s lips to the other. “You changed your mind.”
“Come,” Akeha said irritably, “before I change it again.”
Chapter Fifteen
THE ROUTE WOULD TAKE two days on foot. Yongcheow’s injuries meant more precautions, fewer treacherous shortcuts. Over both day- and night-cycles they would travel during the sunup hours and rest during the sundown ones, taking turns to keep watch.
“You’ve done this many times before,” Yongcheow observed.
“And you haven’t. Not even once,” Akeha replied.
He did not deny this.
In the monotony of light forest cover, routine settled upon them like a fisherman’s net. They walked, they caught snatches of sleep, they walked again. This far south, at the periphery of summer and autumn, sunup and sundown hours matched each other in length. Light, dark, light, dark. Akeha trapped rabbits to skin and boil. Yongcheow sank into a fog of strange, serious contemplation, breaking it only to pray at every rest stop, and to answer questions.
Their first stop Akeha asked, “What has my sister said about the purge?”
“Who knows? She doesn’t leave the monastery. You probably have a better idea of what she thinks than I do.”
Their second stop Akeha asked, “Does she really not leave the monastery? Ever?”
“My friend, I’m half Kebangilan. My father is a provincial magistrate. Our village is so small people can’t point to it on a map. I am—I was—no one in the Tensorate. Certainly not of the tier to hear the whispers that surround the Protector’s family.”
“I see.”
Their third stop, Akeha said, “The gun. A Machinist initiative?”
This one drew a laugh, bitter as the frost. “If only! It was Midou’s prototype for the Tensorate. In the end, he didn’t want it in your mother’s hands.”
Steam rose in sheets from the pot of boiling rabbits. Clarity seeped into Akeha’s mind. “The guns were for Protectorate soldiers.”
“And Tensors. You must have noticed, most of us are useless at fighting. Get us a little nervous, and . . . that’s the end of it.”
“It just takes practice. Focus can be taught. Adrenaline can be a tool.”
“Yes, Monastery-style training. That will go down well with the pampered brats stuffing the halls of the Tensorate academy.”
“So, weapons, then. She must be preparing for something.”
“Not necessarily. If she could arm Tensors, then she wouldn’t need pugilists for close combat. You know she doesn’t get along with the Grand Monastery these days.”
“I know,” he said. Pride swelled quietly at Thennjay’s resistance to her rule.
“More than anything,” Yongcheow admitted, hands tense around the cloth bundle he carried, “I’m afraid of Protectorate troops with these weapons.”
“It’s only a matter of time. If not Midou, someone else will perfect them.”
“I know.” The tendons in his hands stood out as he clenched them. Akeha resisted the urge to reach out and massage the stiffness out of them.
At their next stop Akeha said, “So, about you and Midou . . .”
Yongcheow’s lowered lids occluded reams of history. “Many years ago, if that’s what you’re asking.” At Akeha’s patient silence, he sighed. “We were both in the academy at that time. He had recently converted to Obedience, and that’s how we met. He was always a radical, agitating for change. I was afraid of what would happen to my family. So, we fell out.”
“But you’re here now.”
Yongcheow pushed in the dirt with a broken branch. “The Protectorate put his name on the list. I was added by association. They came for him first. He left me a warning, and—” He hefted the cloth bundle.
“Then you’re not a Machinist.”
“I wasn’t. But I am now.” He shifted his weight. “Don’t misunde
rstand me, I’m not opposed to the philosophy. In fact, I agree completely. People should have access to technologies without relying on Tensors. I just didn’t think I had it in me. Joining the movement, I mean.”
“You underestimate yourself,” Akeha said softly.
It was Yongcheow’s turn to rest as the sun fell. In the soft shelter of willow crowns, Akeha watched shadows march across the warm canvas of the other man’s face. As the patterns shifted and changed, he felt something in his chest come loose.
He spent the time between the third and fourth stops snarled in thoughts of possible futures. When they laid down their packs again, he ventured, “You didn’t go to the confirmation doctors. Was that because of your religion?”
Yongcheow blinked. “That’s . . . a very personal question.”
“I apologize. I shouldn’t have asked.” He turned away to kindle damp leaves into flame. Under the ministrations of fire-nature, the detritus dried and crackled to life, the sound filling the damning silence. He watched the flames gyrate until his heart rate slowed, then he turned back. “I’m sorry.”
Yongcheow met his gaze coolly. “It wasn’t because of religion. Some Obedient don’t alter their bodies because they believe we shouldn’t touch what the Almighty bequeaths us. To me, confirmation doesn’t fall into that. I just didn’t do it because it didn’t feel right for me.”
Akeha nodded. “Thank you. I’m so—”
“Don’t apologize again.”
He nodded.
It was Akeha’s turn to rest. He found a stone to sleep on and let dreams claim him with their wild trajectories. When three hours had passed, he woke to Yongcheow studying him with the same intensity he’d afforded the other man.
“You’re the first son the Protector’s had,” he said.
“I am.”
“It must have been a surprise for her.”
Akeha laughed, a sound like pebbles rolling. He stood, brushing dirt away. “Everything about me was a surprise for her. My existence was a mistake.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I know, I know. The will of the Almighty.”