by Matt Weber
Gyaltsen braced for the Glib Ape to strike again, but the strategist only smiled. His breath smelt of weasel-musk or some kin scent, rich and rotted. “You saw through me.”
“I’ll see through you when I hack you in two,” said Gyaltsen. “Which I’ll do unless you tell me where the sappers are.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about those if I were you. I’m sure your clever Green Morning brothers caught them all. Shouldn’t you be more worried about your people starving?”
“We have mandarins to worry about that,” said Gyaltsen. “No more. Where are the sappers?”
The Ape gave Gyaltsen a penetrating look. “This will be easier than I thought.”
Gyaltsen rolled his eyes, told the Cerulean Sword to make itself light for its rise into the air, then heaved it to.
The Ape could not quite escape Gyaltsen’s grip, but he jerked the General off his stance with a well-angled sidestep, then wrenched himself loose with another. Gyaltsen stumbled for a moment, but the Sword’s gale caught him and impelled him forward.
The Ape was quicker still, though, at the palace doors before Gyaltsen knew it. A straight kick staved them in; a whirling kick flung them open, the split bar screeching audibly on the palace’s granite tiles.
The Glib Ape darted inside. Gyaltsen mounted the gale and followed.
It was stranger than Datang had expected, to be alone.
She was not unaccompanied, of course; she walked in a rank of fighters, behind the moil of sweating priests and machinists pushing the Iron Eunuch’s great earth-moving engines through the salvage tunnels. She had asked to labor with them, but Kalsang the machinist had rebuffed her—and, she reflected, justly; for, rather than slight her woman’s strength, he had simply noted that the brawn of priests and machinists was in less short supply than the skill of fencers, which were far more valuable fresh than exhausted. The other fighters were less convinced of this than was Kalsang, but Datang practiced a few repetitions of the advanced Cat forms in their view, and the murmurs receded.
Still, it was strange to be alone. Not since the Road of Bulls had Datang spent any time distant from a fellow-armsman; even the erratic behaviors and slantwise cognitions of Lin Gyat lent a certain centering that this crowd of not-quite-hostile men could not provide. But Netten was nowhere to be seen, Lin Yongten was a prisoner of war, and Lin Gyat’s riflery was needed elsewhere.
The moil of laborers stopped. Datang craned her neck to see over the engine. In the dimness, a ramp sloped up, and beyond, the outline of an enormous door.
She leapt lightly over the men resting from their labors on the rearmost engine (the clawed one that would move the stone), then over the crowd of similar size that had been pushing the frontmost (the one with the piston and the huge chisel that would crack it), to the rank of Iron Army soldiers and Green Morning brothers in the vanguard. She found the slight, balding man, shorter and less muscular than she, that the brothers called Thunderous Lin. Of the fighters, he and she had been judged the best suited for reconnaissance, she principally because she would not be viewed as a threat if discovered. He moved like the arthritic old man he appeared to be; but his thefts and subterfuges were legend among the brothers present, and they would countenance no replacement for this part of the mission.
Thunderous nodded at Datang, and the two padded toward the door, along with a pair of priests. The provost-abbot of the University had fled, as had much of the faculty; the ranking lamas present were a pair of visiting lecturers, whose contributions to theo-technological theory had been viewed (per Datang’s eavesdropping) as insufficient to warrant permanent posts. It was to those lecturers Datang and Thunderous Lin proceeded. The lamas had assumed the Sustained Abasement Before a Deity Not Present and begun chanting a mantra into the floor of the cave.
“This is a test of their holiness, you know,” said Thunderous. “The university would never have taken them on if they could not open the salvage tunnel doors.”
“The deities still listen?” asked Datang.
Thunderous chuckled. “I think not. These two are drunks as crooked as high-mountain trees, and they told me that the provost-abbot himself sometimes failed to open the doors. And they themselves could not do it the first time. But listen to the mantra.”
The two fighters drew closer and Datang listened. The priests’ words had the pace and cadence of a mantra, slow and low and rhythmic, and Datang could see they were reciting into small holes in the floor: The priests are beasts the monks are drunks the nuns have sons the prayers are airs the books are cooked the gods are frauds the priests are beasts…
As Datang and Thunderous watched, the salvage tunnel filled with the grinding of stones, and a sliver of starry sky sprang through a vertical crack.
“It is a matter of pressure and resonance, you see,” Thunderous said, not without smugness. “The abasement triggers certain pressure plates; the rhythm and pitch of the voices likewise trip some hidden mechanism. They must continue chanting while we leave, then sprint through themselves before the doors grind closed. But the choice of words does not matter.”
“Some boxers resent being reminded of what they already know,” said Datang, who had formulated the maneuver and rehearsed it a hundred times before she had seen hide or hair of Thunderous Lin, “but, for one, I am comforted when my elders demonstrate powers of memory and apprehension so nearly adequate to their endeavors. Tell me, though, Thunderous: Do you truly think the deities so stodgy as not to appreciate good-natured ribbing?”
“I think the deities sufficiently preoccupied as to lack patience for trifles.”
“And when is it that you most appreciate trifles: When they impinge on a period of peace and content, or when they puncture a situation of excessive gravity?”
Thunderous snorted. “They name you Left Hand, but you are as agile as the right. Still, what I appreciate, the gods may abhor; else the Deity Who Waits would have little to wait for.”
“You also think the right hand agile; but in Shrastaka, where we love music, we know that the right hand is strong for strumming, and the left is the hand nimble enough to shape the chords.”
“Shrastaka has changed with the decades. I grew up there when it was Wukuai, and the Garden ruled, and only courtiers and whores played the strings.”
“Have you not been back since Keen Tenshing won it?” said Datang in wonder.
“Never,” said Thunderous. The shaft of sunlight was now man-wide; Datang walked toward it, and Thunderous followed. “After I quit the Garden, I stayed well west of it. I would sooner die under the hooves of a Grasslander horse, or transfixed by an arrow from the blue bows of the Rivermen, than face one more suit of red-enameled mail. Whence do you hail in the province?”
“The Flying Tiger Winery, in the barony of Khavang. Not far from Tanggang City.”
“Southeast, then. That is well. I grew up in the east, in the provincial capital.”
“Lhatso, we call it now.”
“The Gardeners laughed at the legend of the Priestkiller Worm,” said Thunderous quietly. “Their boys used to invent rituals to summon it sooner, so all the Uä’ns would die. My parents told me that the Worm would come in its own time, and no Gardener boy could summon or stop it. When I was small, I always wondered how they could be sure. Now I am old, and I still wonder.”
Datang and Thunderous had reached the door, whose aperture was just wide enough for two. They crossed the threshold, then cleared it for the priests, who scrabbled out like cat-chased rabbits.
The four of them stood acclimating to the darkness as the doors rumbled closed. The doors were cut deeply into a hillside; a great packed-earth path ran past them, connecting the town to the north with the gorge itself, to the south. There was no cover other than the deep doorsill in which they now crouched, getting the lay of the land. This was the salvage road for the Northern Battlefield, where Tenshing had met the infidels with tanks; the Southern Battlefield had entered the conflict much later, for it was where Tenshing’s h
oly mortars had lined up across the gorge, invulnerable to anything but arrows or the occasional student of the Crane’s Migration Step—until a detachment of the Worm’s army built a rope bridge under fire. The tanks could not cross the bridge, and so the heavy salvage had lain on the north side, which had been allocated to the University of Heavenly Ordnance for just this reason. But seven generations had cleared the Northern Battlefield of any relic larger than a thumbnail—though craters remained, great gouges and trenches in the earth where the prayer-engines had come to rest.
Datang and Thunderous looked at each other, nodded once, and broke in opposite directions. Their goal was to find a high point in secret: first, to report the start of the diversion, and second, the approach of the King’s army on their position should the diversion fail.
The southern edge of the city had never, it appeared, been well off; there were windows that had been broken long enough for dust to gather on the shards, and the market alleys were cramped, shabby, and picked clean, as though the awnings and counters that had once adorned them had been precious enough not to surrender to the Worm’s depredations. Datang imagined a trail of discarded awnings—wending north, perhaps, into the Earthen Sky, or around the Gorge, south to Degyen, and thence perhaps the River, as their owners realized they could not be eaten or sold. Then again, she supposed, they could be used as blankets, or to fashion poor shoes. In that case, the trail would be sparser, and longer.
The first building of any height was a stone temple with a cupola, bleakly grey in the style of the barbarians beyond the Grass and speckled with the dull iconography of the deity they called the Unctuous; she considered it, then rejected it, for its height would gain her barely anything in light of the slope toward the Gorge. The next likely-looking vantage was a line of three-story rowhouses, set along the grade of the slope, with each successive rooftop a few inches higher than the last. She leapt up to the nearest roof and continued along them like stairs.
Just as she reached the row’s end, the first flame soared up from across the town, arcing high like a comet before it crashed into the university campus. It seemed puny in the night, smaller than a star.
Four hoots of an owl across the southern edge—Thunderous had seen the signal too, and was returning to the priests with the message. Datang sat down on the roof and waited.
No sooner had she sat than a woman appeared beside her, tall and ageless, dignified in a faintly unfashionable qipao.
Datang, though she was no less than consumed with surprise at this occurrence, nonetheless maintained her composure. “Of all the roofs in all the rowhouses in Uä, what brings you to this one, xiao jie?”
“You may call me Jangmu,” the tall woman said. “As to your question—it is amusing to watch the contortions of men who think themselves Kings. Like a mêlée in a snake pit—the principals are competent enough, but they soon become tangled in one another’s tails.”
“Yet here you sit, with a lone fencer, removed from action.”
“You have switched sides, it appears. That interests me.”
Datang’s back stiffened. “If the company of traitors is your interest, you may find it elsewhere. I seek only to deliver my countrymen from a Worm’s talons.”
“Which countrymen?” asked the woman.
“All of them.”
“Some may wish death.”
“They may seek it at their own expense; they need not trouble innocents about it.”
“Some may deserve it.”
“We have courts for that, structured on the Celestial model. We do not arrogate our verdicts to the hungers of beasts, however great.”
Jangmu laughed, not without kindness. “Perhaps a headsman is a beast, but what of it? Do we scorn the hound for love of fetching?”
“You name the Worm headsman?” Datang gaped. “Zao gao, Jangmu, we accept the headsman for our preservation—or, if we fall afoul of him ourselves, that of our friends and families. Genocide is hardly in his ambit.”
“Genocide,” said Jangmu, and the laugh that came with the word was unkind, this time. “That old blood libel? Here is a parable for you: A vintner’s daughter walks into a town and comes upon a great pit; in it, the provincial headsman, beaten senseless, and his glaive with its haft splintered. She finds a public house where she may slake her thirst, and there inquires as to the headsman’s offense. ‘He was going to murder the entire village,’ says the innkeep.
“‘On what charge?’ asks our vintner’s daughter.
“‘No charge,’ the innkeep says.
“‘What did he do?’
“‘Went into the Mayor’s office and attacked him.’
“‘And what did your Mayor do?’
“‘He says he didn’t do anything at all.’
“‘So all you know,’ says our vintner’s daughter—warming to the pursuit of truth, as vintners’ daughters are known to do—‘is that the provincial headsman, whose job it is to keep the peace, went into your Mayor’s office, and the next thing you knew, he was beaten to a pulp and thrown in the jail pit? And from this, he stands accused of attempting to murder the entire village?’
“‘That’s about the size of it,’ says the innkeep.
“And the vintner’s daughter walks to the edge of the pit, spits on the headsman, and calls him genocide, because no one had ever taught her to think for herself. The end.”
Datang thought of a tiny letter in crabbed, spidery characters, and looked at Jangmu one more time. “You were human once, is it not so?”
“And you were once a vintner’s daughter.”
“I am a vintner’s daughter still, and our lamas are ours to deal with.”
“They are not,” said Jangmu, angry. “They deceived you into embracing them. Had you known the terms of the decision, you would have cast them out and left them for the Court’s lawfully appointed agent to punish.”
“The Court did not see fit to apprise us of its terms,” said Datang, “and, for all you say they lied, the lamas did not leave us. What parent fosters his child with the enemy, then expects her allegiance when she is grown?”
“Love is not the issue,” said Jangmu. “The issue is the law.”
“The Crescent,” said Datang. “I do not think I ever understood Netten’s impulse until now. I do not love the lamas, nor have I much use for the White Way, but this toad-souled bloodthirst is more repugnant than any sermon I could imagine, or any penance either.”
“If you bridle at the law’s dispassion,” said Jangmu, “at least consider the opportunities it gives you. What awaits you if Netten wins? The rule of Kings and mandarins, and you in the vanguard to reinstate it. The Duke of Imja is in the field now, and he will not shrink merely because a King has won a duel. Netten will pit you against him, or else against the Garden—”
“It will be an honor—”
“—and you will have no choice, or a choice that is no choice: Fight for blood-rule and concubinage, for the birthing and discarding of too-early sons, for governance by machines bred to kill the gods you claim to miss so dearly—”
“I never claimed—”
“—or leave,” Jangmu said. “Leave your friend because he makes a King’s demands, your country because he has a King’s reach. While away your time stoking rebellions in vassal territories to the Garden—or become mercenary to the Garden and suppress them, if you like.”
Datang quelled the desire to pelt Jangmu with oaths, contenting herself instead with a penetrating examination of the ageless woman’s eyes. “What think you to gain from my defection? The Worm’s death or life is not down to me, and I do not even know where Netten is. I cannot hurt your cause or help it.”
Jangmu’s face was enigmatic, simulating polite puzzlement at the query; but she could not stop her eyes from flickering behind Datang, up the hillside.
Datang’s head whipped around. The darkness was unpunctuated—where were the stars, the moon? Where were the Iron Eunuch’s promised bombardments? She realized she had neither he
ard their impacts nor seen the light of their flames in her periphery. A tiny light winked and then went out, followed by another—but they were not the arcing comets she had seen before, merely a pair of static flashes. In truth, however, she barely perceived these events, for her mind was more greatly exercised by a subtler, nearer motion: men running through dark streets.
“The Perfect Judge has no patience for earth-moving engines,” Jangmu said, her voice rich with self-satisfaction.
“Deceiver!” cried Datang, and smoothly executed the low-line lunge of Capuchin Reaches from the Vine.
Jangmu’s weapon snaked out to meet hers—an odd blade, she noted in the back of her mind, white at the base fading to black at the forked tips. Steel scraped steel—but the ageless woman’s parry had come too late; Datang’s blade was buried in her abdomen.
Jangmu smiled and sank down. “The inkwell snake is inconstant. I look forward to seeing which King you choose, in the end.” And she issued one wet cough, and spread her arms, and fell.
Datang looked over the roof’s edge to see where she had fallen. A Demon Guard looked back at her.
She did not wait for the volley of arrows that followed; she was already in the air, leaping as far as she could down to the edge of the town and the Northern Battlefield. She worried for a moment that she might lead them to the operation, but discarded the concern. These men were not scouts. They had a foe in mind already.
As she drew closer to the Northern Battlefield, she saw the activity from which the Eunuch’s bombardments had been intended to divert the King’s attention: A series of block and tackles, lit as covertly as possible by hooded lamps, through which the remaining priests and machinists were just beginning to feed ropes.
The maneuver had been a calculated gamble. The Eunuch’s scouts had spoken of a path carved into the gorge wall, but its grade was too gentle, hitting the top far to the west. It would have required too long a trek on open ground—open and uneven, unlike the stone-tiled salvage tunnels, which were slow enough. A shorter push would gain them the edge much faster, but at that point the path had descended several men’s heights below the summit. The Iron Eunuch did not have enough trained fighters to protect a train of earth-moving engines moving slowly in plein air. But he did have enough skilled engineers, perhaps, to lower those engines to the gorge-wall path—if the King’s men could be distracted long enough for the scaffolds to be built, used, and disassembled.