by Matt Weber
The day passed with no comparable excitement. The Copper Rat skirted them sedulously around enormous encampments of the Iron Eunuch’s armies and spoke briefly with a few patrol riders; the conversations took place far from the four friends, but they all ended in prompt, businesslike deference from their detainers. Once, though, Lin Yongten hung back to make an observation to Datang.
“Do you see the columns of smoke? There, and there, and there.”
Datang had noticed them before, of course, but given them little thought; the spring was still fresh, the air chilly, and the Great South Plain was at war. “I could hardly miss them,” she said.
“Look behind us. See those two? We skirted them.”
“We have skirted all concentrations of the Pretender’s troops.”
“It is day, Datang, and the girths of those columns are immense. Besides, I know this way to Rassha from the Khodon Pass, or at least a variant of it. The Pretender is burning farms.”
Datang sketched a quick abasement to the Deity Who Waits. “That is hideous. Eager Edge, I do not think I understood war when I came to Rassha—”
“No one does,” said Lin Yongten, “but it is not the hideousness of the deed that draws my attention. Or not only that.” He glanced almost guiltily at Datang. “The Pretender wishes to be King, does he not?”
“So I am informed,” said Datang. “Therefore I infer that he wishes to starve us into surrender.”
“And I would agree, if he could unburn the farms before the planting season ends,” said Lin Yongten. “As it is, I think he will suffer more in victory than defeat.”
“Is he blinded by the immensity of his goal, then?” asked Datang. “Or is his goal other than what it appears?”
“I do not know,” said Lin Yongten. “But, even in his failed pursuit of the Rigors, he has never struck me as an easily blinded sort of man.”
At this point Lin Gyat had wheeled around to instruct them on the mating dance of spruce grouse that he had discovered in a just-thawed pond off the path, and by some silent agreement, Lin Yongten and Datang spoke no more of farm-burning. She could not vouch for Lin Yongten’s reasoning, but by her own, the fact that Lin Gyat had once misdirected the Copper Rat was no guarantee that such presence of mind would bless him in the future.
The five riders traced an arc over the very foot of the hills, well away from the Pretender’s main mass on the Silver Dragon but far from any elevation that outriders might use for sight, cover, or tactical advantage. The Copper Rat’s path was far from straight, but it was swift; she seemed to find all manner of narrow passes and strangely angled defiles that yielded unusual dividends in crow-miles. They had covered perhaps two-thirds of the distance at the end of the first day, far better than Datang had done, even accounting for the fact that she had traversed much of the plain’s width as well as its length and penetrated well into the western foothills.
They decamped in a serene and unscarred farmstead and were greeted by a freeman named Jangney and his wife Mujhan. They were a fine-looking couple even in middle age; he had an athlete’s build under a pad of flesh just thick enough to comfort a child, and she was one of those women whose frame and face retain a girl’s shape even as they crumble into the soft dignity of queens and matrons. They had a son and a daughter fighting for the Pretender, and a young boy they never named who seemed to come and go as he pleased, making pronouncements about the quality and suitability of things with a duke’s entitlement. All three seemed to know the Copper Rat rather well, and showed no fear of her or any of her companions, though the boy took an instant dislike to Netten and passed myriad judgments on his horse, the cut and color of his garments, the hair on his head and face, and his weaponlessness. This last seemed to be an especially sore point. The boy took it into his mind that Netten could be no use without weapons unless he was a student of the Rigors, and pestered the black-clad rider endlessly to demonstrate his prowess. At last, to everyone’s surprise, Netten leaned over with his hand in front of the boy’s face and produced a fist-sized ball of searing white flame whose heat singed Datang from across the kitchen table. This neither intimidated nor pacified the boy, who began clamoring for a demonstration of the Reflecting Pool Mind until his embarrassed parents banished him from dinner.
After a simple, quiet meal of pork, vegetables, and weak wine, the farmers excused themselves to put their son to bed, though they left the companions with a flask of ice-wine whose quality even Datang, the vintner’s daughter, was forced to acknowledge. Lin Gyat retired first, with an invitation to Datang at which even the unflappable Lin Yongten grimaced. Datang returned her customary imprecations, culminating in dark threats of waking one morning to find that the Python of Degyen had swallowed its own tail; Lin Gyat met this inspired but, admittedly, puzzling ultimatum with interrogations as to its particulars, which Datang answered with mounting hostility until, at last, Netten pretended great drunkenness and implored Lin Gyat to escort him to the hayloft. Lin Yongten then made remarks about the great solidity of the farmhouse’s architecture and the cleanliness of both environment and denizens, which Datang found boring and annoying; the Copper Rat seemed to feel the same way, responding with non-sequiturs on various folkloric figures until Lin Yongten, too, pretended exhaustion and joined the other men in the loft. At this, the Copper Rat shook the bottle, pronounced it two-thirds full, and began to pour. As the Rat leaned forward to do so, Datang noticed a patch of dark skin on her neck. “Is that the source of your style?” she said, pointing at it.
“What?”
“That mark on your neck. It looks like a mouse, curled up on itself. Though the skin is not coppery.”
“Ah,” said the Rat. “No, my style has another origin, which I may relate when we know one another better.” She held out a brimming glass. “But let us drink.”
“Thank you.” Datang carefully took the glass. “But what can we drink to? Our objectives are at odds. We can hardly wish each other success at our endeavors.”
“Come,” said the Copper Rat. “Surely we can drink to the gods, or to Uä, if we must resort to such desperate measures. But we are not so opposed as all that. We could drink to the Green Morning, which taught us to be warriors.”
“I am not a brother of the Green Morning,” said Datang, “though it seems a congenial fraternity.”
“It is not the fraternity I toast,” said the Copper Rat, “worthy though it be—but, rather, the era of history from which it takes its name.”
“Ah,” said Datang. “The forge of chivalry, the loom of the martial sciences. Very well, I assent.”
They drank, then sat in a silence that anyone who did not understand the two warriors’ enmity would surely have termed companionable.
“Though,” Datang added at last, “it could be viewed as insubordinate, or at least profane, for the servants of Kings and would-be Kings to toast a kingless time.”
“Oh, of a certainty,” said the Copper Rat. “But who here serves a King?”
“I have a conjecture,” said Datang, “as, no doubt, do you; but since peaceable drinking is more pleasant than profitless debate, let us agree at any rate that one of us does, and the other thinks she does.”
The Copper Rat’s lips quirked. “The assumption is forgivable. And I ought to let it rest. But, in truth, Ape’s Left Hand, I find the company of an enemy excessively liberating; save one, my allies all suffer from a tiresome passion for their cause. What is a King?”
“The rightful ruler of a kingdom,” said Datang.
“Careful,” said the Copper Rat, “for queens and regents alike may rule by right. What bulwarks a King’s right to rule?”
“The succession,” said Datang. “He must be the eighth son of the prior King.”
“Other kingdoms exalt the first son.”
“Other kingdoms do not labor under Uä’s doom.”
“What has that to do with the succession?”
“The Lotus, Copper Rat, even Envied of Snakes knows these things.”
“Knows them, but like you, has not thought about them. The succession is important for one reason: only the eighth son of an eighth son, unto eight generations, may defeat the Priestkiller Worm. And that is why only such a man may be King. And I tell you this, Ape’s Left Hand, so you may prepare for it: Neither your King nor mine will kill the Worm.”
Datang looked at the Copper Rat with a mix of incredulity, anger, and—she could not deny it, even to herself—fear. “You lie.”
“Why would I lie?” The Copper Rat took a long swig of ice-wine. “I do not know what you go to Shrastaka to do, Ape’s Left Hand, nor do I care. Perhaps your King has secreted a division there that will take the Pretender’s army from the rear, with your Eager Edge leading the charge? Then there will be blood in the rear, and worse—but that is not my concern. Perhaps some sorcerer has shrunk the King himself to minuscule proportions and secreted him in a saddlebag for safekeeping? I would be chagrined to miss such an amusing diminution, for I have not seen such a thing in many years—but the King may go where he wishes; it is not my concern. Perhaps you will wheel around in the morning and tell the King, his general, and his lama all I have told you. I doubt you will make it past the Pretender’s army, but you are a resourceful group, and perhaps you will. It is all equal to me. It is not my concern.”
Datang took the bottle from the Copper Rat and matched her swig for swig. Her head swam almost immediately. “Well,” she said with more swagger than she felt, “such a comprehensive disavowal can accommodate only one inquiry.”
“Very good,” the Copper Rat said with a small smile. “My concern is this, Left Hand: Why has the Glib Ape taken you under his wing?”
“I killed him once,” Datang said, forgetting in the moment who had fired the shot. “It seems to have inflamed his passions.”
“The Ape I know would have returned the favor and forgotten it in the same breath,” said the Copper Rat, “and, when asked about the promising young woman he had killed, spoken of her as of a distant but pleasant acquaintance lost to some regrettable plague, or perhaps a rosebush that never quite took to the soil.”
“You have an ear for metaphor,” said Datang.
“And little opportunity to exercise it in recent years,” said the Copper Rat. “The Pretender’s zealots are excessively literal-minded. What is it about you that attracts the Ape?”
“Principally, it is my retiring disposition,” said Datang. “Secondarily, my exalted ancestry; and tertiarily, the brimming coffers of my family fortune. Shall I conjecture as to the quaternary factor?”
“Never mind,” said the Copper Rat. “I know it is somewhere between neck and knees, and that is more than I wish to know.”
“Have a care,” said Datang. “I do not entertain apes in the precincts of my femininity, any more than the Demon Guard entertains their presence in the Orchid Palace.”
The Copper Rat smirked. “And yet—you last met our mutual friend in the Resting Place of Heaven and Earth Pavilion, did you not?”
“Not by choice, Rat,” said Datang, “and, I warn you, abandon this conjecture if you wish us both to ride out of this farm tomorrow. I am no ape’s apess, nor have I ever been. Not by shared sport or marriage, not by consent or force. If you cannot say the same, you have my sympathies, but it is not my concern.”
“Oh, I can say it,” the Copper Rat said. “I say it now. And not, if I may flatter myself, for lack of opportunity. I did not understand what it was we did in those years. I did not realize it was a long dance, two separate but converging arcs. But here we are, and you have cut in, and so has this stinking tangle-haired commoner—” She stopped herself. “I truly am losing myself. I would blame the wine, but it is not the wine. I had my sport, Left Hand, but I did not send the man back to the Ape for nursemaiding!”
The Copper Rat barked that last word, and when she did, the entire farmhouse kitchen trembled—the tremor, not of an earthquake, but of an aspic. She saw Datang start in alarm. “The wine is strong, is it not?” she said; but there was a fevered light behind her eyes.
“I have never drunk stronger,” Datang agreed with forced insouciance. “I should join my companions in the barn. No doubt Envied of Snakes is asleep by now, and I imagine we leave early tomorrow.”
“Your imagination ceases to interest me,” said the Copper Rat. An odorless vapor rose from every surface, as if from hot stones brought out into the winter cold, and a chill begun to penetrate the kitchen, though the now-steaming fire was as bright as ever. “What preoccupies me more and more, what veritably seizes my mind now that I have conceived it, is the gall of that damnable grimalkin you call an Ape—to know me, to have walked with me for as long as he has, and to send me his little lover,” and here she slitted her eyes and stared with pure hate at Datang, “and expect me to protect her.” The air was thick with vapor now, the cold sharper. “As though I were some housewife who would serve tea and noodles to the very instrument of her cuckoldry.”
A scraping noise interrupted her tirade, followed by a thump and a sort of strangled, formless grunting. The farmer and his wife had rolled, entangled, down the stairs, his face blackening above her hands white-knuckled on his neck. They scuffled on the floor, leaving a vapor trail as thick as smoke from wet wood. Datang leapt over and tried to separate them, but no matter what she did, she could not seem to lock her fingers around the farmer’s wife’s hands.
Then the trail of vapor disappeared, but so had the farmer and his wife; in their place was an immense, malformed rat, which wasted no time in snapping at Datang’s face. She danced away, reached for a sword that was not there, and tried to recall her instructor’s hasty summary of the Series for Defense Against Animals; but it did not come. She parried the rat’s next lunge with her forearm, which cost her a bad gash and, nearly, her footing—but months of fighting among men had taught Datang not to rely too much on brute power; she dodged, stumbled, and recovered. The rat retreated half a step and considered its next move. Datang raised her hand above her head and stood with one foot pointing at the ground, her stiffened fingers pointing toward the rat’s eye in Watching the River.
At this point, several things happened at once—although Datang, afflicted as she was with the linearity of perception endemic to humankind, noticed them in series. The first thing to reach her attention was the condition of the rat, which first stood stone-still and then, gradually, began to emit the same sort of vapor as the farmhouse kitchen and the farmer and his wife had done. This led inexorably to her next discovery, namely the disappearance of the farmhouse; the barn had likewise vanished, and the horses were fast receding, tethered as they had been to posts in the now-absent stables. The Copper Rat, too, had disappeared, as Datang next noticed; but a clue to her location might have been provided by the event she noticed yet next, the soft but commanding utterance of the Gardener syllable tong from behind her. This, naturally, gave her cause to roll away and whip around, where she saw (in addition to the still-paralyzed rat, which she had been careful to keep in her field of view) the Copper Rat, with a dagger in her hand and her arm drawn back as though to sink it at about the height of Datang’s liver. Netten held that arm in one hand, face dark. Lin Yongten was rushing toward the three of them, broadsword drawn; Lin Gyat was running for the horses.
Netten turned to Datang. “Are you well, Left Hand?”
“I have had too much to drink,” said Datang. “And it seems we will have to kill the Copper Rat, which pains me no little bit, for I had enjoyed her company. How fared you in the barn?”
“The boy ran in, smoking, then tried to cut my head off with an axe,” said Netten. “I did my best to reason with him until he and the barn disappeared. Then I saw you engaged with this rat, and the other rat sneaking up behind you.” He jerked on the Copper Rat’s arm as if to wheel her around, but her stance remained rooted. Instead, he walked around her to look her in the eye, never letting go of her arm—which left him in an odd posture, his own arm twisted half around so the heel of the
hand was facing up. He met the Copper Rat’s eyes with a mix of revulsion and confusion in his own. “What are you?” he asked, but not as he would ask a stranger.
The Copper Rat barked a brittle laugh. “Where would I begin?”
“Why did you try to kill the Ape’s Left Hand?”
“She is the ambassador of bitter truths. It was nothing personal.”
“I have never read you easily,” said Netten, “but I know that for a lie. Soon I shall require plain answers.”
The Copper Rat barked again and smiled harshly, jutting out her chin. “I would like to see you require a thing of me.”
“The last assassin I snared will not walk for a while yet.”
“Cripple me, too, then.”
Netten hesitated. The Copper Rat flashed into motion, and he was on his back, though his hand still seized her arm. She twisted it cruelly, and he cried out. Datang and Lin Yongten started toward them, but the Copper Rat shouted “Stop!”, and they heeded her.
“All the world’s spider-silk will not prevent me from tearing that arm from his socket,” she said. “I wonder if it will still cling to me when it is detached from his body?”
This gory hypothetical brought Datang’s gaze to Netten’s hand like a fly to spoiled pork, and so it was that the instant in which he opened that hand to release the Copper Rat was graven on her vision. Then both of them were in motion too fast to follow. Eventually Netten stumbled and the Copper Rat was free of him, streaking to pick up a satchel that had fallen to the ground when the kitchen table (and, for that matter, floor) had vanished into mist. Then she was airborne, a green arc rapidly blending into the clear night sky.