by Matt Weber
The hatchet to the door had been joined by another now, landing in irregularly paired strokes.
“Are all Kings prone to such gassy self-examination?” said the queen-grandmother. “Kandro was the same way after Bhasdra died, convinced his every little villainy bore some divine freight. You would have reeled at the heights of his rationalizations when he had the hetman executed to pave the way for his first little uprising. He said the deities would not have let him strike the poor fool down with white light had his claim not been just, but everyone knows the deities’ sciences can be set against the deities’ purposes. Shivered a beautiful dining table into pulp when I pointed that out, the dear. Luckily, the House of Ogyal has always dined on iron, otherwise we’d still be plucking plate-sherds from the ceiling.” She hawked again, then drew a long croaking breath that left her coughing. “The Red and White, what an impatient curse! The letter is in the hilt of a letter opener, there, in a plain oak box in my desk.”
“I can see the hatchet blades through the wood of the door,” said Datang—and so she could, with flashes of hot-eyed men in bear pelts behind them.
Netten was wrestling with the desk, which had a roll-out top that was locked. “The window, Left Hand,” he said.
“The Crescent, Netten, I will attend to the window, but you had best quit coddling that desk.” Datang vaulted the queen-grandmother’s bed and put a foot through the window frame, then began kicking out the remaining shards of glass one by one.
“My daughter-in-law will have you skinned alive!” the queen-grandmother chirped happily.
The desk exploded. The hatchets on the door ceased for a moment. Netten was a black streak, following Datang across the bed and then out the window, describing a graceful arc that ended just short of the forest. Datang and the queen-grandmother were alone in silence and settling ash.
“You never knew he was the Regent, did you, girl?” said the queen-grandmother. “Secrecy seems to run in the royal blood. Little Kandro barely talked to me at all after the revelation.”
“You should call him Tenshing,” Datang said, still not entirely recovered from Netten’s destruction of the desk. The hatchets resumed their horse-gait impact on the door. “And I suspect he had other reasons.”
“Nonsense, child, I am a virtuoso of conversation. It’s why the queen mother dislikes me so. Anyway, best be off, before you’re chopped into kindling.”
“I could kill those men,” Datang murmured, “but I think it would be crueler to let them live.”
“Oh, quite,” said the queen-grandmother cheerily, “as long as I draw breath. Away with you, then.”
The speck that was Netten was rushing off into the woods of Naga-gyo. The door splintered and gave way. Datang gathered her strength and followed Netten in an arc across the sky, filling her lungs with the clean spring air.
Netten availed himself of the Crane’s Migration Step for two more great leaps, which Datang matched, but only barely; indeed, Netten was coiling for the third before he noticed the strain in Datang’s breathing. “Forgive me,” he said. “You understand that it is best to put great distance between fencers such as you and pursuers such as those retained by the House of Ogyal. For, if we fail to do so, our pursuers might lose their lives, and that would be a waste when there are alternatives.”
“I grant you the stipulation.” Datang punctuated the phrase with ragged inhalations. “Though I am not so sure I agree. But, then, your moral education exceeds mine as a priest’s a pig’s.”
Netten quirked a smile at the observation. “That is no fault of yours, Left Hand. But, do you know, my own education is imperfect after all—for I find myself yearning to hear the style of my old office, though I know I would be obliged to correct you if you used it.”
“Ah,” said Datang. “I think I understand such yearning.”
“But you do not truckle to it,” said Netten. “That is well. It is no virtue to style a false King true.”
Datang’s eyes flickered to the letter opener, still clutched in Netten’s hand. “To be sure; and yet, I think we possess evidence relevant to the matter of truth and falsity of Kings. Do I misguess?”
“I…” Netten blinked, as though he had forgotten the prize with which they had fled the House of Ogyal. “Well, I was informed by—let us say an august personage—that my father had traveled here when I was young. If he has done, and left this letter, I will know it by his chop and his mandala. But as to whether the information in it pertains to the truth and falsity of Kings? I cannot presume to know.”
You do not presume to know, but you presume to hope. Datang thought this thought, and Netten looked at her with an eye brimming with apprehensions and knew it, and quirked another rueful smile, and nodded. Without ceremony, he turned the opener’s point to the ground and began testing its joins with sensitive fingers. The weather was cold enough to make mist of their breath, and to set Datang’s muscles into gelid lumps of clay; but it was not long before Netten succeeded in his goal. He detached the cylindrical hilt from its uneven, undistinguished blade, and like a conjurer, drew out a scroll no longer than a finger and no thicker than a cigarillo. He unrolled it carefully, as Datang moved to his side, and together they read the cramped characters, written in fine black strokes sometimes no thicker than a single hair.
To my eighth son:
I am dead as you read this, of course, and if all has happened as I planned, you have departed the Orchid Throne in peace. I pray that the wives and grandchildren I have not met are safe and well cared for, be it by you, the new-recognized King, or other agencies. The boy who will be King seems good, strong of heart and loyal, and I have made provisions for his upbringing, and for the presentation of the claim he will by now have brought to you. If there is still some doubt as to whether you should cede the throne, I pray this message quells it. He will not rule long, but not badly either, or so I pray. I pray, and I pray, and still I feel I must pray.
It would have been best for me to begin more directly. We are not Kings, you and I. If you confront the Priestkiller Worm, you will fail to slay him, and you will die. The attack with which this Kandro will have assailed your claim is true: My grandfather sired his eighth son on a logger’s wife in Therku. Whether Kandro’s own claim is good, I do not know.
What is more, I do not care. The Worm may do his worst. Uä will survive his depredations; you will survive them. I will not have you die to save the priesthood that made tools of us.
I think that, in your heart, you understand what I mean when I write those words. The history is too deep for me to recount here. Suffice it to say that the Worm is not what the priesthood says he is. Oh, he is mad for blood, make no mistake; and our august ancestor stopped that thirst and buried it in Pongyo Gorge. But that ancestor was not a hero fighting for the people of Uä; he was a shield between the priesthood and the fate they chose to court, a built thing as surely as any tank or rocket. As are we.
We are not Kings, you and I. You cannot kill the Worm. For myself, I am content to let him win. But I will not have you be these lamas’ final sacrifice.
I have summoned you out to Therku so that you may know the truth of things, that you may make what investigations you care to into your usurper’s ancestry. More, though, I have done it to take you from Rassha and the Orchid Throne. I beg you, stay away. Wherever you are known, there will be those who wish to press you into service against the Worm; you are puissant, and they are terrified, and they will purchase a night’s sleep with your life and count the bill cheap. But Uä does not need a hero to die in vain for it. Uä needs men who, on the day that all the priests are dead and the divinity of their Kings proven fraud, can face the sun and put mortar to bricks.
That is not what you were raised for, my beloved boy, but it is a better office than burnt offering.
If I could have spared you and our land the ravages of usurpation, I would have done so. Be good in this new world, and do not lightly heed the word of lamas.
With love,
your father
“How could he know?” asked Datang.
Netten looked at her blankly, as though she had emitted the call of a grouse, or perhaps as though fine motes of light had poured from her mouth instead of words.
“Netten, how could your father know that your grandfather—” She shook her head. “Your great-grandfather fathered a bastard in Therku?”
“The mandala…” Netten trailed off, staring at the letter as if to find some hidden passage that would lay the matter bare. “No. He brought the mandala himself. He thought the tryst real, yet he forged a proof of it. So that I would be taken in.” He looked back at Datang. An electric chill passed over her: The man seated inches away from her, in the snow in this desolate forest province, had sat the Orchid Throne. “I do not know.”
For a moment stillness reigned, purified by the snow. A pair of riders broke it—two of them, green against the white snow; but four horses, approaching at a full gallop.
“What do you imagine they have done?” Netten asked.
“I surmise that Envied of Snakes has made some lurid proposition to what here passes for a woman of quality,” replied Datang.
“Ah, now,” said Netten, “I would not so readily exculpate the Eager Edge.”
“What?” said Datang, distracted, for it seemed to her that Lin Gyat and Lin Yongten were producing a clamor of hoofbeats inordinate to their number and distance, even accounting for the two extra mounts whose reins were wrapped around Lin Gyat’s enormous left arm. “The Eager Edge is the soul of chivalry to women.”
“Yes,” said Netten; and then the front rank of Gardener cavalry crested the ridge.
The Thousand Arm Testament has treated the Gardener incursion into Uä with the Deity’s customary precision, lavishing gleaming couplets on each of the invading generals like gold coins pouring from a great urn, and carving verses capturing the majesty of the army’s movements with the thousand-faceted compactness of a perfect ruby. But Datang, Netten, Lin Gyat, and Lin Yongten had no time to absorb the fearsome decorations of the other side’s heroes, nor the complexities of the Double Star maneuver that had overwhelmed the border garrisons at Dzemet and New Dhaka—though, in fairness, it must be admitted that neither was in evidence, as the forces pursuing the two Green Morning brothers were a detachment led by an undistinguished captain named Shi Xiaodao, and Dzemet and New Dhaka had fallen days before. But, distinguished or not, that detachment outnumbered the four friends dozens to one, and their surge over the ridge looked like nothing so much as a torrent of blood rushing around the black birches and through the snow to drown Lin Gyat and Lin Yongten.
“You can escape this,” said Netten.
“If one of us escapes, Your Grace, it should be you,” said Datang.
Netten scowled. “The Red and White, how long will you hold my ancestry against me?”
“As long as you shoo me from glory like some puling civilian.”
“There is no glory for you here, Left Hand.”
“Dying on the swords of a thousand Gardeners is as glorious for me as you, Your Grace.”
“If not more so,” said Netten; and at that moment Lin Gyat and Lin Yongten drew up by them. Datang mounted her horse eagerly, drawing her sword almost before her hand touched the reins, but Netten took his time.
“I am sorry we brought this horde to your heels,” said Lin Yongten, “but glad to have rejoined you nonetheless. It would be a shame to die far from you.”
“It would,” said Netten, “but I think that death will not come as quickly as you think.”
Lin Yongten looked at Datang, then back at Netten. “To be sure, we shall make a good accounting before the hammer falls—” He was cut off by a report from the direction of Lin Gyat, who had put a bullet through the eye of the Gardeners’ bannerman. “But the odds, to be sure—”
“Are better than you surmise, thanks to an article of ignorance on the part of Envied of Snakes.”
“Ah,” said Lin Gyat, “I have been told that it would take a century to itemize my ignorance. I am glad it has come in useful.” He picked off a cavalier in the front line, a large and savage-looking fighter with a ten-foot lance. “Though I would like to know,” he said as he reloaded, “what particular article of ignorance is so handy in this instance, lest by some mischance I remedy it before its utility has expired.”
“Well, it is just this: You are not familiar with the Gardener badges of rank, and thus have failed to kill their captain.”
A muscle under Lin Gyat’s eye twitched at this. “I admit, Netten, the utility of this failure eludes me.”
“Not for long,” said Netten; and, without further ceremony, he locked the eyes of a rider—on the collar of whose breastplate Datang immediately detected a thin rim of plated gold—and said, Call a halt.
The gold-collared cavalier immediately shouted something in the Gardener tongue, and the rider to his right picked up a horn and blew it in a complex sequence. Datang watched, wide-eyed, as the torrent halted as though up against an invisible dam.
For a moment, the forest hung in a strange, electric silence.
“You had better kill him now,” Netten said to Lin Gyat.
“The Crescent, Netten, you have the right of that,” muttered the huge fighter, and his rifle coughed again. The gold-collared cavalier promptly fell from his saddle.
Netten wheeled his horse and made for the river. “Come!” he called. “Let us not squander the time that we have gained!”
They careened through the bare-limbed forest, Netten’s blacks as stark against the snow as the limbs of the birches. Datang felt herself flagging, her strength still not recovered after following Netten’s leaps, the clumsiness of her legs sapping her horse’s confidence. She heard the reports of Lin Gyat’s rifle from behind her, heard the impact of flesh and metal hitting the frozen earth at galloping speeds. Quarrels fletched in red and yellow began raining from the air, their shafts as black as the birches, as Netten’s garb. Datang drew close enough to the river to look into its bed. “Netten,” she cried, “the river is frozen!”
“Frozen and bridged,” he replied, and the rest of his words were lost on the wind of their passage.
A quarrel hit her horse’s flank; it screamed and stumbled. Datang was airborne before it fell. Another horse left to die, she thought with a sort of calm melancholy as the wind whipped her hair and leathers, stung her eyes. She expected a quarrel to pierce her own flesh, as one had done when she first crossed the walls of Rassha, but none even came close. She twisted in the air to face the onrushing enemy, saw the horse she had abandoned fall (how had it remained upright so long? But she had left it not a second ago; her thoughts were coming slowly, as they always seemed to do during the Crane’s Migration Step) and skid on the snow, plowing up a little palisade that burst into fragments as the fallen horse careened over the river’s edge. Netten had crossed the bridge already, Lin Gyat and Lin Yongten were more than halfway over, and a few over-eager Gardener cavaliers, perhaps emboldened by their captain’s death, rode neck and neck with them. Datang landed as she had done on the parapet above the Bat Gate, knees bent and the fingers of her left hand taking some of the weight; she skidded in the snow, but kept her feet. Netten had drawn his horse up and wheeled around; Lin Yongten broke right around him and Lin Gyat left, even as he swung his rifle by the barrel to bat a red-armored cavalier from the saddle. Something near Netten glowed with the fire of a white sun. Three melon-sized balls of flame leapt from his hands, searing the supports of the bridge; two more flew into the river, boring holes in the spring-rotten ice.
The bridge collapsed with six Gardener cavaliers on it. They and their horses shattered the weakened ice; cracks ran up and down the river as far as Datang could see. Then something hit her in the chest and stomach, as though an ogre had struck her in the chest with a tree trunk; something hoisted her from the ground. Full of sudden fury, she bit the arm that held her as hard as she could with the pommel of her sword.
; “Ah! The Red and White, woman! Were the moon not on you, I would leave you for the Gardeners’ crossbows!” cried Lin Gyat as he swung her into the saddle in front of him.
With a curse that petered out into a sigh, she hit the back of her head hard against Lin Gyat’s ribs. “Why did you not warn me, you thoroughgoing ape?”
“Warn you? I did nothing else, once I saw your horse was down. You were too taken with these pyrotechnics of Netten’s. Ah,” said Lin Gyat. “The Python of Degyen stirs.”
“If I hear anything more about the Python of Degyen,” said Datang, “I will detach it from your twitching corpse.”
“So you say,” said Lin Gyat, “but when the time came, I do not think you would have the heart to do it. It would be like slaughtering a thoroughbred show goat for soup meat—the waste of a fine specimen.”
“I still have a knife,” said Datang.
They rode in silence through the chill spring air, the thump of crossbow quarrels in ice-crusted mud murmuring behind them like rain on glass.
The last petitioner
he evacuation of the Orchid Chamber was an awkward affair. Though all present were convinced they had witnessed one of the pivots of Uä’n history, and that for the first time in that history a claimant to the throne would gain it with the assent of the deposed, the fact was that until the claim was verified, nothing could change. Cessations of hostilities were brokered, of course, and plans for a regency sketched in the event that significant time elapsed between the verification of Kandro’s claim and the fulfillment of the celestial-numeric conditions on a legal coronation (which did, in fact, occur, leading to a tense nine-day interval in which the duties of the throne were held in joint custody of General Gyaltsen and Kandro’s top strategist, Pech the Stevedore of Mortuaries, in whose presence the Cerulean Sword continually emitted a purring noise that the Thousand Arm Testament accurately terms “pregnant with baleful attention”), all of which passed the hours as efficaciously as one could ask—but when it was done, the man who was and the man who would be King each had to leave by the same door through which they had entered. Tenshing made the abasement suited to Kandro’s present, not future, station; Kandro did not quite dare make the King’s Abasement, but contented himself with the Militiaman’s Abasement Among Equals, incrementally less egregious. Tenshing’s pair of bodyguards followed him less closely than otherwise they might, as though his concession had tainted him. For the first time, he became aware of the danger of those rifles with bullets enchanted for range and precision; of those wicked, gleaming bayonets.