The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1)

by Matt Weber

  The three of them hobbled down the hallway. Who are you? Gyaltsen wanted to call after him. But he knew what the answer would be.

  Why, General, nothing but a jumped-up lumberjack and beer-brewer. Who should I be? With a smile full of great, uneven teeth, like broken branches.

  The Ministers of Logistics and Procuration, the Magistrate of Rassha, the Master of the Royal Forge, the Master of Horse, and the Secretaries for Development, Engineering, and Public Health all convened at Gyaltsen’s summons in the Crane’s Eye Chamber. The Undersecretary for Social Harmony in the Precincts of the Great South Plain was nowhere to be found. The mandarins present tried to show no remorse at Gyaltsen’s discovery of their deception, and he let the topic lie. Let them twist themselves up about it; if I do not raise the issue, they cannot defend themselves.

  The picture was one whose lines he would have liked to see weeks ago. The cavalry’s grain reserve was dwindling; it would not be long before they would be forced to choose between feeding the people and the horses. Meanwhile, the refugees from the countryside had inevitably brought disease. The slums were bleeding, but even the city’s richer neighborhoods were beginning to feel the sting. Spies reported that the Pretender’s army was running out of food faster than Rassha—they had lived off the land for too long, and the farmers grew both less inclined and less able to feed them with each passing week—but managing the plagues better, as they could effectively monitor and quarantine their troops. The budget was straitened; the value of currency was falling as prices rose, and with that, every citizen grew poorer by the day.

  Gyaltsen left a long silence after the reckoning was done—giving the appearance of deep contemplation, though in truth it was to let the King’s damnable bean-counters squirm with the guilt of complicity in this wretched state of affairs. At last he said what he had known since well before the ministers had finished reporting. “The siege-break cannot wait.”

  “We cannot provision troops for a protracted engagement,” said the Minister of Logistics, “not while the ground is still frozen. We need the spring crops—the beets, the carrots—and the horses cannot drink from frozen streams—”

  “What about a rout?”

  The Minister of Logistics gave him an annoyed look. “Anyone can prepare for a rout. If a rout had been on the table, I can only assume you would have acted by now—”

  “Careful, Minister,” said Gyaltsen, “about telling me when I should and should not have acted.”

  The Minister of Logistics had no reply to that.

  “Very well.” Gyaltsen turned to his aide. “Have the Diplomatic Corps send a runner to the Pretender’s camp. Tell the Pretender that Rassha wishes to discuss the terms of our surrender.”

  The room was silent.

  “General,” the Minister of Logistics broke in, “surely there are other expedients—”

  “There are,” Gyaltsen said shortly. “We’ll discuss them after I’ve spoken with the Pretender.”

  “What authority have you to offer terms?”

  The Cerulean Sword emitted a giggling yowl.

  The Minister of Logistics blanched, but kept on. “Your feckless blade is no substitute for the duly ratified laws—”

  “Law has nothing to do with it,” said Gyaltsen. “You think I’m going to open our gates to these locusts?”

  “I don’t know what else you could possibly mean by ‘surrender.”‘

  “When I say ‘surrender,’ I mean exactly that,” said Gyaltsen. His speech was already unfolding in his head. The siege-break would barely require four comets; three would do, if the Fourth Blight did not come.

  He turned on his heel. The temptation sang to leave them hanging; it was like the urge to exchange his life for the Undersecretary’s, an alluring suicide. These mandarins were rabbits, but they had too many allies, too much power. If two or three of them were terrified enough to move against him, it would be more than his life was worth.

  “Think on what else I might have meant by ‘terms,”‘ he said, and left the Crane’s Eye Chamber.

  The Bat Mountains

  ho does not know of the Bat Mountains? Yet the knowledge is of a strange form. The Cradle Mountains, which embrace Rassha and the Great South Plain, are ubiquitous in the military epics of Uä—which is no surprise, for men have drenched themselves in valor on both sides of the Khodon Pass since long before Red Tenshing raised the Orchid Palace, and the potency of the small expedition brave enough to navigate its peaks has featured in many a tale of martial and political strategy before this one. In the peaceful reigns of the latter Tenshings, even courtly comedies and dramas were set in their foothills, with witches and wood spirits and ambitious bears lending the spice of fantasy to entertainments otherwise flavored by the musty technicalities of ducal lineages and the overfine discriminations of taste and bearing fostered by a society long separated from its more primal needs.

  The Bat Mountains, though, are higher, their air colder, their very rocks said to be sharper. They are prominent by their absence in the military tradition; they are occasionally named as insurmountable obstacles. The art and literature in which these mountains feature is that of the mystical and psychological; their use is ever symbolic, ever meaning-fraught, but without the meticulousness of imitation with which the military dramatists so charmingly obsess themselves. And, perhaps naturally, on no point is the diversity of conjecture about the nature of the Bat Mountains more fecund than the subject of the bats.

  Tradition holds that the bats of the Bat Mountains are huge and noble, subsisting principally on eagles and other large birds of prey. But this tradition is no more sacrosanct than any other in the sphere of arts and letters; they have been described as great brutes, as intelligent swarms of creatures individually no larger than pigeons, as hedge-wizards with eccentric styles of dress. The southerners of Degyen describe them, with affinity to their own wildlife but in defiance of the montane ecology, as fox-headed frugivores, more like thieves than apex predators. It was on this point that Lin Yongten and Lin Gyat were arguing as they ascended the foothills of the Bat Mountains, following Netten’s lead—whose intentions, though unstated, were nonetheless crystalline: They would cross here, a feat that had brought death to almost every mountaineer who had made the attempt. The fact—or, at any rate, the rumor, for Datang knew better than to put total trust in the provincial ideas that circulated through the Flying Tiger Winery—seemed almost gauche to talk about, coming as it was in the midst of a journey into the very wellspring of terror and apocalypse, where one of their number would fight a possibly unwinnable duel against a creature empowered to extinguish every life in Uä’s borders. But, even in the light of this sobering perspective, the prospect sat ill with her nonetheless.

  “The bats of Degyen subsist on stone fruits,” argued Lin Gyat. “It is only natural that they should learn to forgo the flesh and live on stone alone.”

  “The chickens of Degyen no doubt swallow stones as well,” said Lin Yongten, “but that does not mean they could learn to forgo grain, any more than you could learn to forgo wine.”

  “I forwent wine for a day when I arrived at the monastery,” said Lin Gyat. “My sweat began to smell strange, and the tiny bears who dwell inside the monastery’s walls seemed to speak to me.”

  “Tiny bears?” said Datang, unable at last to keep her silence.

  “Fear not, Ape’s Left Hand,” said Lin Gyat. “I know my mind was addled by wine-lack—for bears do not speak, even tiny ones. Nor, I am sure, do they play musical instruments, as it appeared at the time.”

  “Well, it is good to be reassured of your knowledge of the way of things,” said Datang. “And yet—I do not believe I have ever heard of house-bears.”

  “They are wild creatures,” said Lin Gyat with some indignation, “temporarily dispossessed.”

  “Miniature wild bears,” said Lin Yongten, “are also only thinly attested.”

  Lin Gyat seemed content to contemplate the matter in silence for a while�
�this was a new thing with him, a practice retained from his brief novitiate, that Datang wished only to encourage. She dropped back to ride with Lin Yongten, who had taken up the rear. “You look thoughtful, my friend. More so than usual, that is to say, which is something.”

  “There are two things on my mind,” said Lin Yongten. “One is the matter you know.”

  The wind was high enough that Netten seemed unlikely to hear them. “Our friend’s wormslaying ambition.”

  “The very thing. Which brings me betimes to the second matter, namely the consequences of our choice of path.” Lin Yongten shook his head. “It is all bound up with his ambition. Both the urgency that brings us over the mountains and, I think, his confidence that we will cross them.”

  “What does the Reflecting Pool Mind have to do with crossing the Bat Mountains? I assume that is what you mean by his ambition.”

  “It is not, precisely,” said Lin Yongten. “I mean, rather, his conviction—or at least his strong suspicion—that he has been the rightful heir all along. King Tenshing Astama has a bargaining power that Netten does not.”

  “Bargaining?”

  Lin Yongten looked up at the skies. There were two great sail-winged shapes circling on the thermals. They were too far to make out details, but even at a great distance, some subtlety of vector or proportion rendered them entirely unbirdlike. That strangeness sent a shudder through Datang before she could suppress it. “Well. Let us hope it does not come to that.”

  “On the contrary, Left Hand, we must hope it comes to that.”

  Datang’s look of incomprehension was eloquent.

  “Because, my friend,” said Lin Yongten, “if they do not come to us, it means the mountains have will have killed us without their aid.”

  It was not yet dusk when the path grew too narrow for the horses. The four took what provisions they could carry—Lin Gyat carried two full saddlebags without complaint, so they did not have to leave much—and released the beasts, who could only turn back, toward the village, where they would serve as donations from the King’s post. By the time night fell, there was no longer a path, and the friends had to pick a route through a mix of conjecture, trigonometry of sun and shadows, and the occasional heap of bones denoting a place that a human traveler could reach, even if reaching it had served that traveler ill. Datang inspected the bones for any clue as to the means of their owners’ demise, but all she could see was that some had been gnawed. She was not sure what sort of predator could survive here—but doubtless there were rabbits and voles and other such things that kept out of her sight lines, and where there was meat, there would be meat eaters. Or perhaps the bats themselves butchered their victims. They were not interrupted in the night, though Datang could never escape the impression that she might just have heard the soft beats of huge, fine-furred wings.

  They were barely out of camp, though, when Lin Gyat was injured. He had been using his monk’s spade to steady himself on icy patches and support his weight, now considerably increased with the packs; despite his burdens, it was no trouble for him to outstrip the rest of the party, and Netten had no great wish to bound after him for supervision. But he and Datang wasted no time swallowing the distance from themselves to him with the Crane’s Migration Step when his bellow came from some distance upslope. The injury was not great—he had planted his spade in a snowy patch, but the snow had disguised a pile of bones covered by a shield, off of which the spade had skipped, sending the huge warrior toppling. (It was Lin Yongten who noticed that the skull was missing. They found it on a ledge at about head height, watching the space over the now-disordered snowpatch.) Lin Gyat could pull himself up easily enough, using the surrounding rocks, but the leg would not support his weight.

  “I had thought the Python of Degyen would serve as spare leg, Envied of Snakes,” Lin Yongten said when they had assessed the giant’s incapacity.

  “Oh, it lacks nothing in strength,” Lin Gyat said blithely, “but it is not well to have one leg longer than the other.”

  “Perhaps we could fashion a stirrup for the Python,” Lin Yongten said, with an appraising look.

  “That would only aggravate matters,” said Lin Gyat. “A thicker-heeled boot is what’s required.”

  The injury would not last long, but the day was cold and food was short; they could not afford to let the leg rest long enough to heal. Netten and Lin Yongten could carry more than could Datang; they reapportioned the provisions between the two uncrippled men and put Datang, willingly but not happily, into the role of crutch. Before she consented to have his arm over her shoulders, she drew a knife and showed it to him. “Snakes are not the only creatures with fangs, nor the only ones who bite when intruders invade their territory. Have a care that your hands do not stray.”

  “I ache for the moon to drop its hold on you,” he sighed, “but I obey.”

  He did—but Datang had no chance to be grateful for it, for even the fraction of Lin Gyat’s weight that she had to bear was crushing. On level ground, the task would not have been so arduous, but the painted monk was no more immune than he had been to the whims of ice and stone, and the path grew no more level as they approached the pass. More than once, all four of them had to stop for minutes to hoist Lin Gyat up a chest-high shelf that, whole, he would have vaulted as lightly as a sparrow. They and the sun approached one another, then crossed paths; the cold ceased pinching and began to bite with razored fangs. Datang found herself pressing up against Lin Gyat more closely than strictly necessary, grateful for his warmth. She vowed that she would stop as soon as the Python reared its head in conversation; but it lay dormant, the horse-chasing giant too exhausted to unlimber what passed in his mind for wit.

  They made the pass by dark, leaving the wind howling for blood behind them. Netten found a shallow cave full of bones and pronounced it a fit stopping place, and Lin Yongten laid a tiny fire, which consented to burn only with regular rejuvenation by Four Conflagration Touch.

  “I nearly itch in my vestments at the sight of these unconsecrated dead,” said Lin Gyat. “But this weapon will not dig through rock.”

  Lin Yongten, for his part, was not so troubled by the dead’s unconsecrated state that he was afraid to dig through the bones. Most had been pillaged of what had not decayed—there were no coins, certainly, no intact weapons, no clothes or books, no tinderboxes—but the odd artifact remained; a broken belt buckle, a bladeless dagger hilt, a little ornament that might once have dangled on a thong. These latter items seemed to interest him most; when Datang turned her eyes to him, after a cold supper of dried beef and snow-thinned wine, he had collected a handful of them, no bigger than knucklebones. “What have you learned?” she asked.

  “The men here were girt for war.”

  Datang looked at Lin Yongten’s findings. “I see broken knives and hilts, but no armor. No gongs, no horns, no banners. How made you the determination?”

  “A thousand little clues,” said Lin Yongten. “These clips and buckles are for fastening greaves and breastplates. These fetishes were worn by warriors before the White, and some years after; some brothers of the Green Morning wear them still. Blade nicks and shrapnel in the bones—of which the hips are all men’s hips, nearly, and the arm- and shoulder-bones show the thick tendon roots of those who lived by fighting.”

  Datang made her way over to him, crouching to keep her head from scraping the cave ceiling, and squatted for a closer look, making sure not to block the guttering firelight. The fetishes were diverse, but there were themes: a crude rounded sketch of a woman sitting on her heels, a disk etched with a crude mandala on either side, a crescent. The crescents were by far the most common; flakes of green paint lingered on a few.

  “The relevance of the green crescent is clear enough,” said Lin Yongten, “for warriors. The kneeling women would be painted black or blue, for the corresponding aspects of the Many-Colored Deity. And the disks—look at this one.” He held it up to the weak light. Scrapings of paint were caught in the etching,
obscuring the crude pattern: one side was painted red, the other white. “This dates the expedition. The mandala is in imitation of the King’s, although of course it is no King’s. White Tenshing was not styled until after his death; Red Tenshing, not until the Battle at Scarlet Crag, where he defeated the combined forces of Gyachun and what was then the Duchy of Palden, which we now call the Great South Plain and the City of Rassha.”

  Datang strained to recall her history. Netten watched them, silent but attentive. “After the Crag, Red Tenshing’s next great battle was at Crossriver Ford,” she said. “Not far from Dhaka, which we passed. And his next in Imja, rushing down from the foothills into the Earthen Sky. My father always said they must have had spells of marvelous travel to skirt the mountains with such speed.”

  Lin Yongten smiled his thin smile. “Your father’s theory is no worse than those advanced by the best military historians of Uä. What everyone thinks, but no one can support, is that they must have crossed the mountains, rather than skirted them. But no one knows how it could have been done. That is why there is no complete epic of Red Tenshing’s campaign—all content themselves with portraying his escape from the Duke of Imja, his rise to power, and the victory at the Crag; or else they begin with his defeat of Imja at the Earthen Sky and continue to the founding of Rassha.” He looked over to Netten. “Have I missed aught of importance?” He turned his attention to the massed crescents, moving them into a pattern of some kind.

  Netten graced him with a weary grin. “What you have missed, Eager Edge, could fill a thimble. The royal histories contain Tenshing Dvitiya’s account of this very crossing, as well as those of several soldiers who survived it and the battles that followed. There is good agreement on the elements and some predictable divergence in emphasis. Duke Rabten of Imja, whom we now call Estranged of Heaven, was waiting at the hinge of the mountains,” he said to Datang, “on the high ground, as the Eager Edge and his colleagues well know, and my ancestor knew it too. He faced the choice between certain defeat at Rabten’s hands if he skirted the mountains, and likely death at the mountains’ hands if he skirted Rabten. But if the mountains spared him, he could threaten the ducal estate and draw Rabten’s army to lower ground in defense. Rabten knew this as well as my ancestor, and took his own gamble when he heard of the crossing’s success. He gambled that my ancestor had lost enough men on the crossing that they could be defeated even from a disadvantageous position, even on home ground where Rabten’s men could easily desert if the opening engagement went badly.” Netten shrugged. “Tenshing won his gamble. Rabten lost his. The duke was slain, and his heir, Tashi the Atoner, did not leave Tenshing’s side until his middle age. They were best friends, in fact, while he was captive. Both young men, brilliant and ambitious. Tashi of Imja was the architect of much of Uä’n law, even the elements that limited the power of the dukes, and he oversaw the erection of the Orchid Palace. But the friendship did not survive Tashi’s return to his duchy, and he poisoned his own son’s mind against the crown.”