by Matt Weber
There was silence for a moment. The Glib Ape met Gyaltsen’s eyes. “Have you done?” said the long-armed man. “If there is more, we would be pleased to listen.”
“I’m done,” said Gyaltsen.
“Then let me convey my response to my men.” The Glib Ape turned out to the massed troops in grey. When he spoke, it was with a general’s voice even better than Gyaltsen’s—a thunderclap that nearly shook the ground. “We accept the General’s offer. Disperse, men, and take an hour’s ease. Division leaders, move to peacetime drill schedule. An extra ration of wine tonight!”
A sound like giants’ footsteps—every man with a pike or spear had rammed the butt into the ground three times. The warhorns blew the Call to Rest. The Undersecretary for Social Harmony in the Precincts of the Great South Plain looked at Gyaltsen and raised an eyebrow, a grin playing at the corners of that huge ugly mouth. A fist of lead closed around Gyaltsen’s heart; but he turned to the Glib Ape with all the fire in his eye that he could summon. “Very well. I will notify my detachment at the Khodon Pass that they may meet the Iron Eunuch’s escort without fear. Our agreement is null and void if they are killed.”
“Of course,” said the Glib Ape. “Only notify your men with all haste. The Iron Eunuch left a day ago; he moves slowly and circuitously, so as to avoid detection. He plans to fight free if he must. We can send a horseman under flag of truce to inform your detachment, if you reveal their location.”
“I will not,” said Gyaltsen. “But I will sign and seal an order. Your man can leave it in their view.”
“Good enough,” said the Glib Ape, and called for a pen and paper. An aide materialized in very nearly no time, holding a hand desk for Gyaltsen. The Ape’s eyes bored into him as he drafted the letter; he miswrote one character, then another, and began the order again on a clean sheet. At last he took chop and ink from his own aide, made his mark, and handed the scroll to the Ape’s man.
“You thought the Eunuch would shrink from his duty,” said the Ape.
Gyaltsen met the Ape’s eyes and could not read what he saw there. “The Eunuch’s view toward his duty is his own affair. It is folly to assume less than the best of the enemy.”
“An understandable folly, in this case,” said the Glib Ape. “The Iron Eunuch is widely known to lack the smallest spark of talent. Every brother of the Green Morning will tell it, from the Precipice to the Banded Tributaries.”
“A good tactician knows intelligence from hearsay,” said Gyaltsen.
“You thought the Eunuch would shrink from his duty,” said the Glib Ape, “and that, when it was pointed out, his men would begin to drift. That is the inference of a good tactician. A quick way to reduce our numbers, erode our organization. How could you have known that he would rise to a challenge everybody knows he cannot meet?”
Gyaltsen was painfully aware of the Undersecretary’s eyes on him, gutting the interaction like a diviner looking for portents in entrails. The camp rustled loudly, now, boots on grass, metal on metal; no one would hear what they said. He tore his mind from his failures; it snapped at him like a dog pulled from food, but this was the Glib Ape who faced him, his counterpart in the struggle for Uä, the man who had survived Gyaltsen’s own snare at the Hill of Faces and, it was rumored, a double-barreled shot from the lightning-handed sniper Envied of Snakes. Who could not win the fight he had come for, any more than the Pretender could win his own—yet acted as though he were ten steps ahead of Gyaltsen, and had nearly convinced the general himself of the same. But the man wanted to converse, and conversation with an opponent was like gold—although, as with gold, it was important to give less than you took. “Not a spark of talent, you say,” said Gyaltsen. “Yet the Eunuch rides to Pongyo Gorge. Or so he says.”
“He rides to Pongyo Gorge,” said the Glib Ape, and Gyaltsen suddenly deciphered the expression on his face—he had seen it on the King, on the rare occasion when one of the children was admitted to play before the Orchid Throne. It had been Kadzati, he remembered, so long ago; she had been a tall child, but had learned late to walk, and the shallow steps from the floor to the Orchid Throne had been difficult for her to navigate. She could have crawled up them easily, but she had wanted to step, as the adults did; but it was not easy for her to raise her leg so high and keep her balance. She had fallen once, then again. And the King had knelt and held out his hand, murmuring some platitude, summoning her, cajoling her to try again: with the same expression that the Glib Ape wore now. The Cerulean Sword snuffed softly at the reminiscence. “He will arrive there,” the Ape continued, “and he will fight the Priestkiller Worm.”
“I am sure you meant to say that he will kill it.”
“No man is given certainty in any endeavor. White Tenshing himself could not do it.”
“And if the Worm is killed,” said Gyaltsen, knowing he should have kept the insight to himself, not caring, “how will we know who dealt the killing stroke?”
“Come, General,” said the Glib Ape. “Any man strong enough to kill the Priestkiller Worm is strong enough to kill a pretender.”
“If you believed that, you would not have come to the Great South Plain—for any army strong enough to repulse one pretender is strong enough to repulse two.”
“The Therku insurrection never came to pitched battle,” said the Glib Ape, with that same look of smirking encouragement. “Still less was it repulsed. The Gracious Regent capitulated, if you recall.”
“But the Priestkiller Worm will not. Your man means to set upon the King and steal his victory.”
“I assure you, he will fight the Worm.”
“You admitted he has no scrap of talent!” Gyaltsen nearly roared.
“I did. But if you asked him, you would get a different answer.”
Gyaltsen narrowed his eyes and studied the Glib Ape; the Ape frankly returned the gaze. “And you have come all the way here, hemmed in the King and killed your men and mine—good Uä’ns all—in nurturance of this pretender’s delusion?”
The Glib Ape shrugged. “What can I say? I am a romantic.”
“I will shiver your flesh from your bones,” said Gyaltsen, “if I must rip the sky in two to do it. You mock my life and paint your japings on the land in blood.”
“That is well put,” said the Glib Ape.
The Undersecretary for Social Harmony in the Precincts of the Great South Plain chortled aloud. Gyaltsen turned his back on the Glib Ape without farewell or abasement, mounted up, and proceeded back over the ridge, toward Rassha and disgrace.
The Earthen Sky
t was a somber party that descended into the western foothills of the Bat Mountains—though they did reach them quickly, Lin Gyat’s ankle splinted and nearly healed. Every so often they would query one another on aspects of the encounter with the mountain bats, as though unsure which parts they had experienced and which they might have dreamed. “Do I remember it correctly, that the bat who healed me had a blaze on its chest that looked like a wheel?” Lin Gyat asked once, to which Lin Yongten replied, “It had more a lotus shape in my recollection.” And when Datang reminisced on their flight on bat-back, from the entrance of the great city under the mountain over the black underground lake that formed its center, the other three nodded with brows furrowed, as though straining for a long-forgotten memory. They spent some time after that, reconstructing the image with words, trying to fix it in one another’s minds: The huge graceful dens that hung like stalactites from the ceiling of that hollow mountain, the terrible spaciousness through which they had flown, all of it just barely illuminated by sparse, tiny lanterns that gave no more light than the stars. Inside their temples and dens, though, there had been stronger lights, for the inaudible sounds the bats used to navigate between peaks and through passes oppressed conversation indoors, and the constant echoes would dull the ears. Or so one of the bats had said. It might have been the bat with the wheel or lotus blaze, small (if a bat the size of a child can be called “small”) and golden-furred, with whom they
had spoken for hours in the temple, while they ate delicate honey-candies and thin raw slices of the flesh of mountain raptors, blood-warming for all that they were lean and foul-tasting; but then, it might have been one of the huge white war-bats who had hulked outside their cave, with whom Netten had dickered for their lives in the midnight cold.
They none of them were certain of the terms—save possibly Netten, who disavowed all memory but looked at nothingness with hooded eyes when the question arose. Datang sensed that she would know when the bill came due. She tried to trust the woman she had been before Red Tenshing’s pass, the men that Netten and Lin Yongten and even Lin Gyat had been; but how could she trust a woman whom the cold had hounded like a hart, whose mind had been a hart’s, darting and desperate? What price would she have stinted to pay for the minutes that now she lived? Her best answers were tinged with conjecture.
Four horses awaited them at an eagle-beaked rock, a circumstance both unexpected and unsurprising. Netten began to strip their saddlebags, leaving them on the rock. “Envied of Snakes has enough bags for all of us, and we would do just as well not to retain tack decorated with Imja’s blackbird.”
Datang knelt down and looked at one of the discarded bags; the arms of Imja were small but distinct, branded in the lower right corner of the flap, a blackbird rampant with spread wings and an open beak. “They killed Imja’s men for our horses?”
“It is not so uncommon for rangers in the foothills to go missing,” Netten said. “The Dukes of Imja have led parties of extermination into the mountains for generations. Traditionally, one is sent back alive, though rarely with all the blood he started with, nor all the parts either. But disappearance entire is not unheard of. I assure you, Datang, we have deprived no men of their lives, only a few bats of a horsemeat dinner.”
“Those hungry bats must then eat something, must they not?”
“Hives and honey,” said Netten. “Mountain grouse and grackle. A bit of goat.” But Datang could tell he was not easy with the answer.
It was a clear day, and the air was almost warm as they descended—warm and thick, almost stifling, like a blanket. Had she so quickly acclimated to the mountains’ airless chill? The counter-acclimation was slower, in any case—perhaps, Datang thought, because there was so little else to think about. Every step in the mountains had been a struggle against cold, dread, gravity, and the flagging of the lungs, and later against the bulk of a handicapped Lin Gyat, which eclipsed all other trials. Descending from the foothills, there was little to do but converse idly, lose oneself in thought, and stare every so often with renewed appreciation at the Earthen Sky.
The great plain that formed the north of the province of Imja was a huge expanse of lush, tough bamboo, its stalks and leaves both a startling cerulean, and on a clear day like this, it looked like nothing so much as a mirror of the sky, punctuated by towns and villages that, white-roofed by ducal fiat, served only to reinforce the impression. (By night they imitated constellations rather than clouds.) Cut and dried, the bamboo of Imja was storm-cloud grey and as tough as any wood south of Therku. It was only as they approached the dense expanse of towering grass that Datang wondered aloud about the dangers cloaked therein.
“There are roads,” said Lin Gyat. “Wherefore I infer that there are bandits in plenty who wait beside them. But I will eat a bandit any hour of the day, Left Hand, and if his friends wish to dispute my course of action, I will eat them too, and pick my teeth with the splinters of their bones. Meanwhile, I should imagine that they serve to thin out the wildlife and sate the lusts of any rapacious spirits, such that we need worry on nothing.”
“The Lotus,” murmured Lin Yongten, “he becomes more monkish by the day.”
“If by eating a man I save him from staining his soul with another half-lifetime of corruption,” said Lin Gyat, “how then am I not godly? This Deity Who Waits would have an easier time of it if he simply truncated unpromising lives before more damage could be done. The current policy only makes more work for him in the long term.”
“Then the world would be a few dozen saintly parents with vast broods of demonic children,” said Lin Yongten, “falling over dead and being reborn at the first sign of turpitude.”
“Especially on the poor mothers,” said Datang, “who must suffer nine months of bloating and a day of labor for every spawn. If I were a woman in such a world, I would pray that my children who were saints would be murdered by those that were not, so that the saints might more quickly leave the wheel of life, and thus my table, and the murderers would be reborn to some animal that loves nothing better than brooding damaged souls.”
“Have no fear,” said Lin Gyat. “Our children will be legion, and every one a saint. I shall see to it.”
“Our children will never be more than wisps of your febrile imagination,” said Datang, “wherefore I grant that you may stipulate their moral qualities.”
“Though I cherish nothing more than the great fellow-feeling that leads Envied of Snakes to pursue his gallant project of anthropophagy,” said Netten, “I do not imagine we will see much in the way of bandits. We are a party large enough to cause difficulties but small enough, and evidently poor enough, to carry little of value. Only the truly desperate might molest us, and I think we are a match for any number of those.”
“Then you have no concerns?” said Datang. “The roads will take us safely from the Bat Mountains to whatever awaits at Pongyo Gorge?” The thought was exhilarating and terrifying both. She realized that she had rather expected to die before coming into the proximity of the Priestkiller Worm; and, facing the prospect of coming near it, that living through what the next few days and weeks might hold seemed unmanageably complex and peril-fraught. It seemed inconceivable that the Worm would deal a death more merciful than the Bat Mountains would have, or the bats themselves.
“The roads will take us safely from the Bat Mountains to Dzangbo, where they all cross,” said Netten. “However, in that case, we will be diverted near Dzangbo to the Duke’s estate, where we may be detained indefinitely. Thus, we will not take the roads. Or rather, not the main roads.”
“Detained?” said Datang. “Has this Duke no notion that an apocalypse looms?”
“This Duke has endorsed the King, as all the Dukes did,” said Netten. “He does not recognize me as a fit foe for the Worm.”
“The Crescent,” said Lin Gyat, “are you?”
That silenced everyone. Datang’s eyes were on Netten; Lin Yongten watched him from the corner of his eye. Lin Gyat appeared to have no notion that he was making anything other than idle conversation.
Netten laughed at last, and Datang’s heart sank at his bitterness—sank and recoiled, for that bitterness so ill befit the King’s voice that Netten yet retained. “That question has been on more than one mind of late,” he said. Datang could not help but screw her face up in regret; Lin Yongten shrugged. “I do not know, Envied of Snakes. I do not know whether to believe my father’s letter. My love for him says I should, but his love for me says I should not.” Netten sank a hand into his tangled black mane and tugged. “More than love, though, all I know of heaven’s laws and lawmakers says that he is wrong. But all that I know of Heaven, I have been taught by priests, and books written by priests. And my father’s letter strikes at the heart of that.”
Lin Gyat made a contented noise.
“What exercises your mind, Envied of Snakes?” asked Netten.
“What? Oh. I fear I failed to attend to some of your speech. I was meditating on the great beauty and insatiable lusts rumored to afflict the fox-spirits who live in forests, and I wondered if such dwelt in the bamboo as well.”
“I can think of no topic more diverting,” said Netten.
“And yet, since you ask, the deployment of a speech seems odd in the moment, for the only question that nags me is, are you the master of the Reflecting Pool Mind?”
“No,” said Netten. “The technique’s higher refinements still elude me. But White Tenshing
was not either.”
“White Tenshing did not kill the Worm,” said Lin Gyat.
“And thus we assume he could not have done.”
“White Tenshing fought the Worm to a draw with a trick,” said Lin Yongten. “He used the Diamond Word to subvert its retainer. This is attested by eight dozen witnesses and eight dozen more. The Ratter held the Worm back long enough for Tenshing to aim his heart-strike true. And even with that advantage, he could not slay the Worm, and was killed.”
“White Tenshing’s aim was not ‘true,”‘ said Netten, “or we should be talking about finer things in this moment. Say, rather, true enough. Perhaps I, too, could make my heart-stroke true enough.”
Datang understood what he meant by this, and her heart sank; and then she thought on it for a moment, and it flared. “What good another ‘true enough’ strike, Netten?” she cried. “Seven more generations of waiting to produce a warrior whose line will inevitably be corrupted, just as yours was?”
“We do not know it was corrupted,” Netten said with a mildness that held some reproof. “Perhaps the King’s claim is good, or the Iron Eunuch’s. Even mine. And these last seven generations bought seven generations of lives that ended in peace, as they began. Seven chances for souls to slip the chains of earth.”
“Or slide back into hell,” Lin Gyat said with great good cheer.
“Seven generations would be a fine ransom for a life,” said Netten. “What might we learn in seven generations? Perhaps the gods will speak to us again—they have begun to do already, as we all four know. Perhaps we will fill Pongyo Gorge with molten steel, let it cool, and dam the Worm in forever. Perhaps someone will learn to make peace with it.”
“And what if your father is right,” said Datang, “and all you save by dying is a few generations of lamas who will use the time to further exploit and deceive us?”
“What,” said Netten, “you think there will be no lamas after the Worm? The clerisy is not a breed, Left Hand, nor yet a bloodline; it is a profession and a calling, as old as words. A new priesthood will fill the monasteries before the blood of the old has dried on the ground. And what will their lodestar be? Their predecessors toiled for peace and plenty, so it is said, and were killed for it. What will they infer? And—Left Hand, you may not grieve for the lamas, but the people will; they will grieve and search for meaning. These new priests will proffer it. ‘Peace invites war,’ will be the litany, and then the anthem. Tell me what you think will happen, with a war-cult taking root just as the Gardeners breach our borders.”