by Fonda Lee
Perhaps he ought to go back and kill these men. He didn’t have time for that, though, and he didn’t want to create a scene that would slow him down right now. There were bigger problems to deal with tonight, and he was supposed to be in his study awaiting Hilo’s call. Lan walked faster. The boardwalk stretched all the way down near where the General’s Ride passed under the KI-1 freeway. There, he could climb back up to street level and hail another taxi to take him home unmolested.
He was nearly there when his chest began to hurt. It was a sudden, constricting pain, as if his diaphragm had been seized in a huge fist. Lan slowed, alarmed, as he put a hand to his sternum. Nothing moved in the near darkness. The streetlight from the road above illuminated only the flat shapes of sampans and the masts of junks bobbing ever so slightly, the water slapping gently against their hulls.
Lan felt abruptly confused, as if he’d stepped from one place into an entirely different one through a door in a dream. He shook his head, trying to get his bearings back. What was going on? What was he doing here? His breaths were growing short and shallow, and he wondered why his heart was pattering irregularly.
He was at the docks. Trying to get home. He’d left the Lilac Divine, gotten into a taxi, been followed … that’s why he’d left the cab and was down here. Why had it all escaped him so completely for a second back there? He took several more steps forward and staggered, unsteady on his feet. Something was wrong. A fog was descending over him, siphoning the clarity from his mind, the strength from his body. He felt warm and flushed, but when he put a hand to his brow he found he was not sweating; his skin was fever hot and dry.
These weren’t jade-related symptoms; they weren’t anything he’d experienced before. It occurred to him that perhaps he was having a stroke or a heart attack. Then the more obvious explanation struck him: the injection of SN1 he’d taken a few minutes ago. How many days had it been since his previous injection? Eight? Nine? After that long an abstention, he should’ve taken a half dose. He must’ve been distracted and rushed and taken a full dose instead.
Lan tried to focus. He had to get to the street and find a phone right away. He’d taken the precaution of keeping SN1 counteractant in the house; he simply needed to get back there. He put one foot in front of the other, misjudging the distance to the ground and stumbling. His fists clenched. He could do this; he willed himself to. The street was not far, and he was a Kaul—his father had once spent three days crawling through the jungle with a bullet in his back. Lan fixed his eyes ahead. He forced steadiness into his breath and took another step, then another. His mind cleared, his gait steadied.
A noise behind him made him turn. Lan was astounded, not just by the fact that the two men—no, teenagers—from the black car had followed him, but that, in his state, they’d been able to sneak up to within fifty meters without him noticing. When he turned, the boys stopped and a second of silent immobility passed. The taller youth on the right fumbled with the bolt of his Fullerton machine gun, but it was the sallow, crooked-faced teen on the left that made Lan stare in incredulity. “You?”
They opened fire.
A detonation of bewilderment and rage burst in Lan’s skull. Enough. Enough with this. He brought his arms up—unleashing Steel and Deflection together in a massive expulsion of jade energy. The teenagers were not very good shots; adrenaline and fear made them worse. Bullets tore up the wooden planks around Lan’s feet, zinged into the air above, chopped into the hulls of boats, and even sent up rows of tiny splashes in the water. The ones that would have hit the Pillar were caught up like flies in a blast of gale wind. Just as he’d taught Anden, Lan gathered them into the sucking wake of his Deflection, whipped them around and hurled them back out like a fistful of thrown marbles.
They did not have the deadly speed and accuracy of bullets fired from a gun, but they were still dangerous. One of his attackers dropped the Fully gun, clutching his arm, the other took lead to the knees and went down with a cry, his weapon clattering to the boardwalk. Lan was already moving, faster than shadow. Blazing with Strength, he struck one gunman in the throat, crushing his windpipe before he hit the ground. He turned to the other youth, the one whose life he’d spared six months ago. The wounded teenager was trying to bring his weapon back up with his left arm. Lan tore the gun away, bent the barrel in his hands, and flung it aside. The boy scrambled backward, his face an openmouthed white oval as fear finally overtook reckless greed.
“You want this, do you?” Lan held up the jade beads around his neck. “You think it’s worth dying for. You think it’ll make you someone you’re not.” He reached to grab the fool by his hair and pull him forward, to break his neck like a duck’s, as Hilo had intended before. “You’re stupid, then. Too stupid to live.”
His hand closed on air as his legs suddenly buckled beneath him. Lan collapsed, his body engulfed in an agony of heat raging under the surface of his skin. The pain in his chest returned, redoubled, emptied his mind of thought.
The teenager backpedaled, staring with wide, confused eyes. Then he turned and ran. His footsteps reverberated like cymbal crashes in Lan’s hollow chamber of a skull. Lan didn’t notice. He couldn’t breathe. His mouth was dry; his throat was burning up. He needed to make it stop. Put out the fire. Fire was like jade, and greed, and war, and unfulfilled expectations—consuming what it touched. Water. Get to the water.
The world was dulling. He was crashing out rapidly now, as if his jade was being ripped away from him all at once. He felt frantically for the beads around his neck, the cuffs around his arms—he still had every stone. Get up, he urged himself. Keep going. He heaved himself back up and took a few more steps. Lan had once run lightly on thin beams across the Academy’s training grounds, but now he lost his balance and put a foot down too close to the edge of the pier. He pitched over, and when he hit the water, it was such an instant cold and silent relief that he didn’t struggle when the silence closed over his head.
SECOND INTERLUDE
The One Who Returned
The most well-known scripture of the Deitist religion, the Pact of the Return, is the story of a pious man named Jenshu, who, a very long time ago, spoke out against the evils of a despotic king and was forced to leave his land. He packed his large family, including his younger brothers and sisters and their families, on a great ship and went in search of the fabled ruins of the original jade palace on earth.
After forty years of sailing the earth, stopping but never settling, aided by some gods and hampered by others, surviving adventures that would form the basis for many myths in Kekonese culture, Jenshu and his clan arrived on a lush and unspoiled island. Impressed by his dedication and piousness, Yatto, the Father of All, spoke to Jenshu, who was by now an old man, and led him into the mountains where he found stones of jade: the remains of the divine home once meant for humankind. A gift from the gods.
While his family constructed a village by the shore, Jenshu retired to a hermit’s life of meditation in the mountains. Surrounded by jade, Jenshu developed and mastered godlike wisdom and abilities, growing ever closer to a state of divine virtue. His grandchildren and great-grandchildren would seek him out to ask for his help, and he would emerge briefly from his isolation to settle disputes, quell earthquakes, beat back storms, and repel barbarian invaders. When he was three hundred years old, the gods agreed that Jenshu alone, of all their human descendants, deserved to be brought home to Heaven.
Devout Kekonese Deitists consider themselves the descendants of Jenshu and closest in favor to the gods. Green Bones who practice the religion today trace their way of life to Jenshu’s favorite nephew, Baijen, who went into the mountains to learn from his uncle and, after Jenshu’s departure from the earth, became the protector of the island’s people, the first and fiercest jade warrior in island legend. While all Kekonese revere Jenshu as the One Who Returned, only Green Bones consider themselves close enough to his legacy to refer to him simply as “Old Uncle.”
Upon Jenshu’s ascendanc
e, the gods further proclaimed that when the rest of humankind followed Jenshu’s example and achieved the four Divine Virtues of humility, compassion, courage, and goodness, then they, too, would be welcomed back to godliness. All Deitists believe in this final promised occurrence, which they call the Return.
CHAPTER
32
The Other One Who Returned
The phone call came before dawn, waking Shae on the morning of the day she’d expected to go to the family house for dinner with her grandfather and brothers. When she picked up the phone, she was astounded to hear Hilo’s voice.
“Stay where you are,” he said. “I’m sending a car to pick you up.”
“Hilo?” For a second, she was not sure it was him.
“You have to come to the house, Shae.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” The grogginess of sleep fled at once. She’d never heard Hilo sound near panic. “Is it Grandda?” There was silence on the other end, so deep she might have heard her own voice echoing down a well. She squeezed the phone receiver. “Hilo? If you won’t talk to me, hand the phone to Lan.”
Something in the pause that followed filled her with the truth a split second before she heard the words. “Lan’s dead.”
Shae sat down. The phone cord pulled taut and Hilo’s words stretched thin as thread, barely reaching her from the other side of a vast gulf.
“They got him last night at the Docks. Workers found his body in the water. Drowned.”
She was staggered by the depth of her grief, the suddenness with which it arrived. “Send the car. I’ll be ready,” she said. She hung up and waited. When Hilo’s large white Duchesse Priza pulled up in front of the apartment building, she walked out without locking the door or turning out the light. She got into the back seat.
Maik Kehn turned over his shoulder, sliding her a look of compassion so sincere she would have wept, if it had not been too early for that yet.
“I need to stop by the bank,” she said.
Maik said, “I’m supposed to take you straight home.”
“It’s important. Hilo will understand.”
Maik nodded and pulled the car away from the curb. She gave him directions to the bank, and when they arrived, he parked and got out of the car with her. He was loaded with weaponry—moon blade, talon knife, two handguns. “You can’t come into the bank like that,” she said.
“I’ll wait outside the door.”
The bank had just opened. Shae went in and requested access to her safe deposit box. The manager said, “Of course, Miss Kaul, come with me,” and showed Shae into the back room with its wall of small steel doors, then left her alone.
Shae had not unlocked her safe in two and a half years. When she turned the key and opened the box, irrational fear gripped her for an instant. What if it was not there? But it was—her jade. All of it. Even before she reached inside, she felt the tug of its power setting off a tide in her blood like the moon’s gravity pulling on the ocean. She counted every stone as she put on the earrings, the bracelets up both her forearms, anklets, choker. Then she closed the safe deposit box door and sat down on the ground, her back to the wall, and hugged her knees to her chest.
It had been so long since she’d worn jade that she felt the rush coming like the wave of a tsunami looming before it engulfs the beach. She did not tense or cringe from it. She raced alongside and let it sweep her up in its inexorable path. She rode it high, let it carry her simultaneously above her own body and more deeply inside it. She was inside the storm; she was the storm. Her mind spun in elated disorientation—the kind that comes from returning to an old house and opening the drawers, touching the walls, sitting in the furniture—remembering what was once forgotten. Guilt and doubt rose in opposition, then fell, carried swiftly away by the flood.
Shae got up. She walked out of the bank and back to the Duchesse with Maik Kehn. She got into the passenger side front seat, and Maik asked, “You want me to take you to the house now, Kaul-jen?” Shae nodded.
They did not speak during the drive. Shae’s mind was being torn asunder so that her face and body did not know how to react. Someone observing her, such as Maik Kehn, who occasionally slid a glance in her direction, would think that she was frozen, that she felt nothing at all.
Lan being dead opened a chasm of desolation in Shae so vast she could not see the other side. Her eldest brother was the rock in the family, the one she felt she could always count on no matter what. He had never been unkind or judging toward her, had always given his attention to her and respected her even though she was much younger than he was. She wanted to be alone with the pain of her loss but also could not help reveling in the rediscovery of her jade senses. The sense of euphoria in her own reclaimed power was inescapable—and it suffused her with terrible remorse. And all the while, another part of her was thinking clearly, if feverishly, toward vengeance.
When they arrived at the house, she walked past the sentries and found Hilo standing in the kitchen, his hands leaning heavily on the table so his shoulder blades jutted up and his head seemed to hang between them. Like Maik, he dripped with weaponry. He appeared in control of himself, almost thoughtful, but his jade aura heaved and roiled with the fiery consistency of explosive lava. Fists flanked him left and right, so the family kitchen was crowded with ferocious, waiting men, the collective aura clamor of their jade-adorned bodies assaulting Shae’s reawakened sense of Perception so much so that she paused to brace herself before entering.
Elsewhere in the house, she heard Kyanla quietly sobbing.
Hilo raised his head to look at her but didn’t move.
“I’m going with you,” she said. “I know where we should go.”
Hilo straightened and came around the table toward her. She tried to see into his eyes, but they were as black and distant as she felt. The Horn placed his hands on her shoulders, and pulled her close, and laid his cheek against hers. “Heaven help me, Shae,” he whispered into her ear. “I’m going to kill them all.”
CHAPTER
33
Down from the Forest
Gont Asch spent most Sixthdays at the Silver Spur Cockfight Pit & Bar, which was owned by his cousin, a Lantern Man in the Mountain clan. A longtime aficionado of the sport, Gont owned and played a dozen prize gamecocks that his nephew bred and trained for him. Right now one of them was finishing off his opponent in a feathery melee of flapping, pecking, and flashing steel spurs. Excited shouts and disappointed groans rose from the bettors ringing the arena. Money exchanged hands as the referee lifted both birds, depositing the twitching loser in a blue plastic bucket and handing the victor back to his smiling trainer.
The arena and seating took up the main level of the Silver Spur. The open second floor contained the restaurant and bar where half the tables overlooked the action on the floor below and those without a direct view could see the fights on the hanging closed-circuit televisions. In between watching the matches, Gont was having a late lunch and talking business with three of his Fists when a messenger barged through the door and ran straight up the stairs to his table with the news: Kaul Lan was dead, and Kaul Hilo was coming here now to kill Gont himself.
The Horn was taken aback, but it didn’t show on his face. Gont was an expert at keeping his thoughts and emotions to himself. Only his First Fist, Waun Balu, noticed the small shift in his expression—a flaring of the nostrils, the tightening of his mouth into a skeptical scowl. Gont looked around himself. He was in a building in the south Wallows, deep inside Mountain territory, in broad daylight, surrounded by several of his Green Bone warriors. Was Kaul really so insane as to try to attack him here?
Gont decided he was.
“Call every Finger you have nearby,” he demanded of his Fists. “Clear the people out of here. Send lookouts to either end of the street and guard the doors.” His men scrambled to obey. Gont found his nephew and told him to take their valuable birds out the back door and far away. The owner of the Silver Spur refused to flee with the cus
tomers, so Gont made him and his staff lock themselves in the kitchen with a pair of shotguns pointed at the door.
The battle to come would be bloody. The second Kaul son was a heavily jaded and ferocious fighter, and for all the Mountain’s internal assertions that No Peak was in decline, Gont knew that it was still a formidable clan with committed young warriors. After the failed assassination attempt and the duel at the Factory, Ayt-jen had instructed everyone to be more careful, more focused on the Mountain’s eventual goal. So Gont had not expected a violent showdown so soon. As much as he looked forward to separating Kaul Hilo’s head from his body, he wondered what had gone wrong, why their plans had failed. No time for speculation now.
Green Bones filled the Silver Spur and its surrounding streets. In a few minutes, Gont had a total of fourteen men in and around the building—three Fists and eleven Fingers. They took up positions near the door and in the upstairs windows. Half a dozen more jade warriors were gathering down the street in the Mountain-owned Brass Arms Hotel, where they would close in behind the No Peak fighters and attack from the rear. Gont expected No Peak would outnumber them, but this was Mountain turf and he held the advantage of ground.