The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1)

by Matt Weber

  “No matter my contempt for them in other walks of life,” said Gyaltsen, “I make it a rule to grant my opponents, at minimum, the strategic instinct of a four-year-old. Wherefore I deduce that his sappers are escorted. And, to be assured of his objective, they will be escorted by the Ape’s most potent warriors. I have said, have I not, that the Ape himself reeks of talent?” He wiped the final quill clean on a spare cloth and folded it up with the others in his writing-case. “Well, the Cerulean Sword knows that reek. And it tells me he has just entered the city, between this gate and the Chusrin.”

  Datang looked down on the town and the university. “Where do you surmise Netten will have gone?”

  “He will have hidden the Lady Pema in as unobtrusive a place as he could find,” said Lin Yongten, “unless availed of a reliable escort to Degyen. But that seems unlikely in the circumstances.”

  “He will have begun to look for the princess,” Lin Gyat put in. “Though she will have left as well, if she has any prudence.”

  “We are here,” said Datang. “Let us not disparage others for imprudence.”

  “Disparage?” said Lin Gyat. “I thank and commend her. For, if she has survived, she might prove the very escort Netten wishes for the ex-Queen Regent. And that will be one less impediment between us and the Priestkiller Worm.”

  This brought a swift jerk of the head from both Datang and (less swiftly, with his newly fibrous joints) Lin Yongten. “You pretend we will face the Priestkiller Worm?” said Datang.

  “Why else follow Netten here?” said Lin Gyat with some impatience. “I have not wasted all this sweat and inconvenience, to say nothing of enduring this confounded sartorial restriction, only to spectate from the gorge’s edge and walk away.”

  “You do not wish to walk away?” said Datang.

  Lin Gyat turned his face away; it seemed, for a moment, that he could not bear to meet her gaze. But something had caught his eye. “Ah, see,” he said, “in the courtyard, there, between the shrine and the long hall.”

  The others looked. Out of the long hall filed two lines of bright-armored guards, the dawn glinting from their bayonets. They formed a perimeter in the courtyard, into which several other figures walked out. Many wore the tall hats of mandarins; eight were dressed in diverse but simple vestments, one seizing the gaze with his vibrant garments of dandelion yellow; and one walked with an energy that was irrepressible even from a great distance, with dark-tanned skin and well-made garments of ivory and white. “The King’s retinue,” said Lin Gyat.

  The King and the yellow monk faced each other and bowed. Soon the air was alive with white and yellow light; Datang, remembering the Third Blight, was delighted to find her own test of the Crane’s Migration Step successful. The monk was clearly overwhelmed, though his agility and cunning were such that he was able to defend for some time.

  “He practices the skills he knows,” Datang said with a disapproval she knew for insubordination. “The Four Conflagration Touch will not avail him against the Worm unless the other Rigors are his to command.”

  “Perhaps they are,” said Lin Yongten. “And the other Rigors will not avail him without the offense. No amount of percipience and skill will save Uä if he cannot destroy the Worm’s heart.”

  Datang shrugged irritably. “As you say. Yet the Four Conflagration Touch is what turned the kingdom’s tanks at Goat Ridge. Or had you forgotten?”

  The corners of Lin Yongten’s mouth turned down. I was there, his eyes plainly said when they met Datang’s; and Datang’s replied, just as eloquently, I know.

  “There is one other thing I noticed,” said Lin Gyat, indicating, a few buildings over, a pair of low-slung warehouses. “See the ground?”

  Datang squinted; it was hard to make anything out. “Scorch marks?”

  “Fresh,” Lin Gyat said confidently.

  “It is the University of Heavenly Ordnance,” said Lin Yongten. “We can hardly be shocked that they test their reverse-engineered creations.”

  “But look,” said Lin Gyat. “In the bell tower.”

  Once pointed out, it was impossible to unsee: A brace of great guns, oiled barrels seeming to gleam with foul temper, the scorch marks that Datang had observed falling squarely in their fields of fire. After that, other subtle features of the panorama began to make themselves known: Men in unobtrusive browns crouched on roofs or behind walls, earthworks improvised from the skeletons of old machines, a small pavilion with bloodstains on the flaps, around which Lin Gyat claimed he could see flies buzzing.

  “There has been a battle,” Lin Yongten said. “Now it is at a standoff.”

  “Who stands against the King?” Datang asked. “Who stations guns in the bell tower?”

  “Let us learn,” said Lin Gyat, and trotted his mount down the hill.

  This characteristically abrupt decision of Lin Gyat’s gave rise to a bout of scrabbling, shouting, and general disorder among the three fellow-armsmen, during which Datang wished more than once for the moderating influence of Netten. But Lin Gyat was at last persuaded that the wisest course would be to skirt the university, focusing instead on the town, where Netten and the Lady Pema were more likely to have made camp.

  The town of Pongyo Gorge was crypt-silent, barely larger than the university; in Rassha it would not have been a patch on a neighborhood. There was a post station bereft of horses, a depot not entirely flensed of staples, two smiths, a general store, a number of public houses. But of Netten and Mother-of-Daughters they neither saw nor smelled a sign. When the sun was at its height, the three companions convened at the depot to boil rice, soak dried mushrooms, and confer.

  “We should try the King’s retinue,” said Lin Yongten. “Perhaps Netten has already joined them. It is difficult to imagine a safer place within a day’s walk.”

  “Not if the Worm wakes,” said Datang. “We should go to the engineers. Netten is less a threat to them than to the King.”

  “I vote the Gorge,” said Lin Gyat. “I surmise Netten has gone directly to the fight, or soon will.”

  “The fight is for Netten,” said Datang. “Our best use is to guard the Lady Pema.”

  “It is well for women to speak of nursemaiding gravid courtiers,” said Lin Gyat. “For my part, I will face the Worm or die trying.”

  Lin Yongten’s eyes flickered toward Datang, full of expectation, but she only shrugged. “Your fixation on dying is childish,” she said, words muffled by a mouthful of rice left unswallowed expressly for that purpose. “A deity loves you, deeply enough that he has cursed you in the blind hope of rectifying your behavior,” she continued after swallowing. “Will you disclaim the benefits of that love simply to spite him?”

  “I fear I find your meaning obscure,” said Lin Gyat; but his eyes were haunted by a marked comprehension.

  “Bah,” said Datang. “The monks with whom you shared your brief novitiate know better. You remember the night as clearly as I do. How can you spit on such a gift by dying without accruing a life’s merit? It is both graceless and unwise.”

  “The Python of Degyen resembles such remarks.”

  Lin Yongten leaned toward Lin Gyat, visibly stiff, nearly squinting with the intensity of his examination. “The Red and White, Left Hand, I would not have believed it if I had not seen it myself. You have disinterred something here, and something with no little depth to it. It is like coming to the edge of a mud puddle and looking down on an undersea chasm, with a great city hewn into its walls.”

  The oddly phrased compliment seemed to leave Lin Gyat at a rare loss for words. Perhaps happily, this made room for words from another source—in particular, the words “Ni men hao, the Green Morning!”

  The three companions wasted no time in springing up, Lin Gyat’s rifle at the ready before Datang’s sword; Lin Yongten was still struggling to draw as a face appeared in the depot door to compliment the greeting. “What brings a Green Morning brother, a priest, and a woman to the site of the world’s end?”

  “I am also
a Green Morning brother.” Lin Gyat drew a bead on the speaker’s forehead—he was a Verdant Peak man, pale and tall, with a disordered mane that recalled Netten’s. “And I advise you to take a seat and put your hands palm down on the ground, lest you discover the world’s end sooner than you thought to.”

  “If you are a brother of the Green Morning,” said the Verdant Peak man, making no move to sit or occupy his hands, “you will know that I would not strut into the presence of two armed men without reinforcements.”

  “He is not bluffing, Envied,” said Lin Yongten. “There are gunmen at each window.”

  “A classical death,” said Lin Gyat. “Perforated from all angles.”

  “I am not in a mood to die, I find,” said Datang.

  “Bah,” said Lin Gyat. “That is all one to me. Perhaps you will be more pliable in Heaven than you have been among the Rafters of the World.”

  Furious, Datang sheathed her sword in one smooth motion, walked in front of Lin Gyat, and wrenched the nose of his rifle toward the ground. “I owe you no promises, lout, and make none, save this: Send me to the Road of Stars before I wish to walk it, and no woman in Heaven will come near enough to spit in your eye, such are the tales I will tell—nor in any Hell either; the succubi themselves will flinch to look at you, and the very goats of the abyss will cringe and pucker up their shit-holes as you pass.”

  Lin Gyat stared at Datang for a moment, dumbstruck with frank awe. “The Python of Degyen stretches taut with admiration.”

  A pause hung uneasy in the air.

  “Will you lay down your arms, then?” asked the Verdant Peak man with the disordered hair.

  Datang turned on him with steel in her eyes. “We will put them up. We are fencers of the Cerulean Guard, not some rabble with no face worth saving.”

  The Verdant Peak man was looking at Lin Yongten. “The Cerulean Guard.” He mulled over the claim. “You handle a sword well enough, to untutored eyes, and you have changed both your garb and your… coloration. Yet, forgive my forgetfulness—but I seem to remember you in scholar’s robes, when last I darkened the door of the Orchid Palace.”

  Lin Yongten nodded slowly; Datang could hear his skin creak. “I wore them, for a while, when my mind found better-paying work than my sword could do. But the King has had less patience for petitioners than did the Gracious Regent, and more for fighting-men. You were the Regent’s last, I think. Kalsang, free machinist of Gyachun, far from home.”

  Kalsang made the Abasement from a Commoner to a Functionary, though with a fillip that vitiated its sincerity. “The penultimate, brother, but I thank you for remembering. A woman was selected after me—one of no small beauty, if I recall, though presumptuously attired.”

  “She dressed according to her station,” said Lin Yongten. “Well, as a former Selector of Petitioners to the Gracious Regent of Rassha, currently fencer of the Cerulean Guard to the King of Rassha, will you accept my word that these are my comrades-in-arms, and that we will not harm you or your companions without first declaring our intentions?”

  “I will,” said Kalsang the machinist, “provided that you credit and fully understand the following: we are engaged in a standoff with the King’s retinue at the University of Heavenly Ordnance. I cannot promise that you will not be witness to actions that might risk the King’s life, and I cannot promise that your lives will be spared if you attempt to interrupt those actions; in fact, I can nearly promise the opposite. How sits this with you?”

  “Whyever would you kill the King?” said Datang.

  “You evade the question, ma’m’selle,” said Kalsang.

  “If you’re for the Priestkiller Worm, I’d as soon know right now.”

  “Far from it.”

  “Then you and the King share an enemy.”

  “All Uä shares an enemy, ma’m’selle, but the King is impotent against him. The University of Heavenly Ordnance is for the Iron Eunuch, the only man who can slay the Priestkiller Worm; and the King is against the Iron Eunuch, therefore against Uä, therefore against us.”

  “The Iron Eunuch’s claim is baseless,” said Lin Yongten. “He is a top-flight fencer, but devoid of talent. He cannot face the Worm and win.”

  “I know that for a lie,” Kalsang’s face darkened, “for I saw him take the field at the Vale of Jade with my own eyes, and slay the Swollen Hog and the Summer of a Thousand Snows with a white sword of shining rlung that burned their wounds closed even as it rent them. If my testimony does not settle the matter, I invite you to face the man yourself and verify it.”

  “Verify it?” said Lin Gyat. “The Eunuch haunts your camp?”

  “Have I not said as much and more?”

  The three confrères looked at one another for a long moment.

  “Having met two would-be Kings,” said Datang, “‘twould be a shame to decline audience with the third.”

  “And should we choose to fight,” said Lin Gyat, “we would in that instance be surrounded, the more gloriously to perish.”

  Lin Yongten shrugged and turned to Kalsang. “Very well, then. Take us to your leader.”

  Datang had surmised that the University of Heavenly Ordnance might have constructed ways to move about unseen; the business of hauling weapons of war was ticklish, to be sure, and doubtless it would have been better for the University’s priests to limit their exposure to parties who might seek to pillage their expeditions. But she had not expected to go underground so close to the depot. The tunnels were nothing like sewers, though occasionally they crossed the paths of sewer lines—they were capacious, square, and dry, the walls decorated with carvings whose paint had long worn off, and the floor tiles inscribed with runes of protection long since defaced by scratches from the great machines that had been dragged across them these last decades and centuries. She did her best to memorize their route, but quickly lost confidence in her recollection—they were at Kalsang’s mercy in the maze.

  Kalsang, for his part, expressed intense interest in how a giant in priest’s robes should come to be a member of the Green Morning, or vice versa. Lin Gyat avoided any mention of the Deity Who Waits, saying merely that he had been afflicted by a curse under circumstances he preferred not to reexperience. The omission of the Deity’s name may have been wise, for the curse moved Kalsang to inveigh against the Deity—not by name, but by virtue of his distaste for deities in general:

  “They gave these weapons to the commonalty, did they not? I do not know their reasons, but I know it was not only priests who drove the tanks when Palden rode against Tenshing, nor yet was it only priests who died when the Green Morning overran the gun emplacements at the Khodon Pass. Oh, the devices were of Heaven, I do not deny it—but they ran on physics, not prayer!”

  This was clearly a mere prolegomenon to what would surely develop into a far more detailed harangue, but that harangue was preempted by a comment from Lin Yongten: “Not at first.”

  Kalsang looked at him in some disbelief. “How, not at first? Has physics not always governed the world?”

  “It never has, as you well know—not completely. But we are speaking of the machines with which the gods gifted us during the White War, are we not?”

  “Of course.”

  “The very earliest of those machines were operable only by skill and prayer in concert. Only later did the priesthood divine the physical principles by which they operated, whereupon they were able to create and deploy the engines that shed so much blood here in White Tenshing’s day. Do you know what I find most interesting about this fact?”

  “What would you say if I said yes?” asked Kalsang.

  Lin Yongten chuckled. “I would shower you with all my praise for your talents, and petition the crown for your promotion to mandarin. Then I would note to my comrades-in-arms, whose command of the Eye of Ten Thousand Apprehensions is less well developed than your own, that it was the priesthood who unshackled the war machines from prayer. There are not many reports from that time—the most famous is the Song of Chojor the
Voluble, a boxer afflicted with mutism from a crushed larynx. He singlehandedly held the Exquisite Bridge equipped with a machine consisting principally of a pair of apish metal arms, twice as long as he was tall, with which he successfully barred entry to the foe… until the arrival of the Longshoreman of Heaven, a fighting monk similarly equipped, but with the addition of two swords, commensurately sized.” Lin Yongten shuddered for effect—an odd motion in his newly fibrous form, which amplified the shudder to a full-on gyration. “The ruins of Voluble’s armor can still be seen in the Archive of Relics in Rassha, where the would-be anatomist may amuse himself in attempting to identify the shards of skull and long bones yet embedded therein. But perhaps I wander from the point—which is that, despite its name, the Priestkiller Worm’s semi-mechanized heroes are, to the last, described as pious men. Is that not curious?”

  Kalsang shrugged. “Trust in gods is a peacetime luxury.”

  “Yet the armies of the Worm held it, and it served them.”

  “They lost, blue man.”

  “Not until the Worm’s subdual, since which everyone knows the gods have been silent. Perhaps it was only then that prayer failed.”

  “Perhaps I have missed some subtlety of rhetoric here, brother, but if your argument is meant to suggest that the gods are other than inconstant, you will have to explicate it more clearly.”

  Lin Yongten shrugged. “In truth, it was merely to point out that prayer was once at parity with physics as a principle that governed the workings of these war machines. A point doubtless redundant to you, as you have surely studied devices inoperable by purely natural means.”

  “By this I take you to mean devices whose natural operations we do not yet understand.”

  “Whatever you like.”

  Datang had been studying the glyphs and pictures on the walls with half an eye as the party moved. There was much writing from the language of mathematics, with which her father and tutors had familiarized her to the point of recognition but not fluency; so, too, were there diagrams, some as abstract as the Gardener art pieces that adorned houses and bodies in Shrastaka, some as concrete as the blueprints to the Flying Tiger winery. “The University seems to have been at pains to educate its salvage-men.”