The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1)

by Matt Weber

  “Come,” said the fencer, “you would offer amnesty to the man who starved the Meditating City? The man who, even now, plots to destroy the very icon of Uä’s glory?”

  “That plot is defunct,” said Gyaltsen, more confidently than he felt. “Your plans are known to all, and the Green Morning swarms the palace grounds.”

  “Excellent,” said the fencer. “Then you will not be pulled away from the conclusion of this fine contretemps?”

  “Neither wolves nor women could detach me from it.” The Cerulean Sword barked in answer; almost imperceptibly, the fencer flinched. Hope rose in Gyaltsen’s heart. Another passage from On Dispute coalesced in his mind, more obscure than most: A mouse’s best friend is a dog.

  “Will you kindly close the doors, then,” said the fencer, “that our propositions might be insulated from the shouts and fallacies of rabble?”

  Gyaltsen sneered. Twin gusts looped around his back and slammed shut the battered double doors.

  “Capital,” said the fencer, and a tongue of fire lashed out from his empty hand.

  Gyaltsen dodged the flame, which was brindled in strange shades of orange, black, and white, and threw a gale at the fencer, who ducked below it as easily as walking. Gyaltsen spared a glance for the double doors; the flame had melted them together, sealing the aperture.

  “Now do you see there are no sappers?”

  Gyaltsen moistened his lips, not removing his eyes from the tip of the fencer’s worn blade. “I see it,” he said.

  “Now will you acknowledge you have been outmaneuvered?”

  “But I have not been,” said Gyaltsen. “Not until I die.”

  The Cerulean Sword vibrated with a harsh, metallic growl. The fencer gave a small, sad smile, and surged forward to meet it.

  “Iron Eunuch!” said Netten. “The Secretary!” And he pivoted away from Jangmu, around the Eunuch’s back, whispering a swift hint in the Pretender’s ear as he moved to intercept the Judge. But the King was quicker; he moved in front of Netten, and his Eight Weapon Hand struck white sparks against the snake-head glaive. Netten tried to draw a bead on the Judge, but the King moved too unpredictably for him to fire around, and then the lout was on him.

  The slack-jawed hulk barely even looked at Netten; a rope of drool swung, unbreaking, from the corner of his mouth. Netten struck at the lout, aiming to disable rather than kill him—but he swiped Netten’s spirit-blade away with his forearm, striking sparks much as the snake-head glaive had, though they were dull somehow rather than bright. A chill ran up Netten’s arm. The lout looked down at its forearm with mild interest. It was scorched, Netten saw, but the skin was unbroken.

  “Send an unarmed cripple against me, will you, Tenshing?” cried Jangmu. “If you expected me to show forbearance, you have made a grave mistake.”

  The lout gave Netten a curious look, then swiped at him again with snakelike speed. Netten bent back; the huge arm swiped past his face with an icy breeze, a jagged nail scratching his cheek. He laid his hand on the lout’s upper arm and shifted around to his side. The lout pivoted, with all the nonchalance of a horse swatting a fly with his tail, but Netten moved with him, his palm fixed. The Judge was behind him now; Netten’s back itched from the presence of the snake-head glaive. But he kept his hand on the lout. The bemused eyes fixed Netten’s for a moment, gleaming like daggers; the wet lips quirked up. It whirled a half-turn, the arm opposite Netten reaching across its body, nearly tearing the black-clad warrior off his feet. His face was growing numb; so was his hand.

  He could see Jangmu and the Iron Eunuch, she dancing, he staggering. Still, the Eunuch managed to swat one blow away, then another, though the blade drew lines of blood on his arms each time. But the stains on the Eunuch’s tattered sleeves were not red, but utter black.

  “You should have known better, Tenshing,” said Jangmu. “The Fatal Lout would have played with this walking corpse a while. But now you will have to face both him and me.”

  Violent motion caught the corner of Netten’s eye: The King had darted inside the reach of the snake-head glaive. A bright beam erupted from the Judge’s back. The Judge raised the glaive and casually switched his grip, holding it at the base of the blade like a sacrificial knife. He twisted and slashed downward, driving the King to the ground, then disengaged; the King held his head up, agonized, but his right arm hung unnaturally limp, nearly separated from his body at the shoulder.

  “Lin Tong!” shouted Netten; and when Jangmu met his eyes, he cried Drop your sword.

  Jangmu froze. So did the Judge.

  The Iron Eunuch charged.

  Jangmu smiled thinly and, sidestepping, impaled him neatly on the Inkwell Sword, letting him carry it with him as his charge ended in collapse.

  “No!” Netten screamed, as convincingly as he could.

  The Judge raised the glaive over his right shoulder. The King smiled as it whistled toward his neck, then through it.

  When his head came to rest, the Inkwell Sword was buried a foot into the Judge’s shoulder.

  The Judge whirled angrily on the Iron Eunuch, who slumped to the ground, the last of his strength spent. Netten released the Fatal Lout with a spray of fire to its face, then leapt as high as he could into the air.

  He hung at the apex of his leap for an eternal second. His face was numb, and likewise his hand, and his mind reeled from the Judge’s fatal aura and the smell of blood; but, in that eternal second, he looked at the Judge and saw as deeply as he was able. He saw the lines of light that formed the skeleton of his nature, the cords of will that moved him, the knots where those diverse components joined and moved.

  It was beautiful. As elegant and complex as an insect, a war machine, a code of laws.

  In that eternal second, suspended in the poison air of a cavern abattoir, Netten stilled his mind, rendering it as calm and impenetrable as a reflecting pool. Arrayed on that still water, somehow, were the faces of those he loved—not too many to count, for neither a King nor a Regent loves easily, but too many to name, and none brighter or sharper than Mother-of-Daughters. His mind’s eye fixed, in that eternal second, on the swell of her belly, and his hands and cheeks shouted the memory of questing caresses and stern blows from the little daughter who there grew. The calm of his mind rippled just slightly, as if in echo.

  Netten chose his target. His spirit-weapon lanced forth, white-hot, from his hand, and he descended.

  The weapon penetrated the base of the Judge’s neck; the force of Netten’s fall brought them both to the ground. He heard the squeal of metal and felt twin gouges in his ribs.

  Hands that felt like frozen iron took him by the shoulders. A soft, cold blackness narrowed his field of view. He felt himself lifted, like a kitten, into the air. Then he flew, and then, with no tension in his limbs, he landed, and he broke.

  There was a wet cough, then a growl. Netten tried to turn his head toward it, but could not.

  “Help me stand, Lout,” rasped the Judge. “There is justice to be served.”

  The Orchid Throne stood, rooted to the mountain; around it, fire and wind contended, and alien steel struck blue sparks from a rusty blade.

  Gyaltsen’s advantage in a fight was the meeting of incompatible strengths: His smith’s shoulders and barrel chest gave him the strength to cleave through flesh and steel alike, and his armor protected him from all but the strongest or best-targeted attacks, but the Cerulean Sword’s riding-gales gave him speed and balance. The wind would take him anywhere at any speed; the wind would support his balance when he needed to bend back to dodge, would compensate instantly for the most fatal wrong-footing. And the wind would scatter enemies like dandelion seeds. The only limits on Gyaltsen’s potency were the speed and sureness of his mind.

  But the slim fencer threw fire as fluently as Gyaltsen threw the wind; and the slim fencer’s one-handed thrusts came with all the power of a lancer’s charge, challenging even Gyaltsen’s two-handed parries; and Gyaltsen had not slept.

  The brindled fl
ame came in billows, balls, lashes, sheets. The Cerulean Sword dispersed it all with jubilant yips and burbles, but every such preoccupation distracted it from Gyaltsen’s control, normally as seamless as breathing. Perhaps in compensation, the Sword began to take its own initiative in assailing the slim fencer who had been the Glib Ape: Gusts came when Gyaltsen had not willed them, more powerful than any he would dare to use in such a small space. They interfered with Gyaltsen’s tactics—moving the slim fencer left when Gyaltsen wanted him to be right, wrong-footing Gyaltsen with blowback from the walls and floor—but they saved his life once, then again, blunting the force of an unforeseen thrust or turning it aside completely.

  After one fraught pass, they flew apart in a welter of air and flame. The slim fencer’s face was bruised and bloodied, courtesy of the Gauntlet of the North Wind; Gyaltsen’s right shoulder throbbed with heat beneath the Pauldron of the Ecliptic. “Good,” the fencer said, his voice thickened by the swelling of his jaw. “You’re finally learning to use that thing.”

  The Cerulean Sword yowled in response. “It’s learning to use me,” Gyaltsen said. “But we are both happy to let you banter a bit before you die, if it eases your fears.”

  The slim fencer sighed theatrically. “You military men are so damnably incurious. Does no fire of inquiry burn behind that sweaty beard, General? Don’t you want to know why this is happening to you?”

  Gyaltsen thought to press the attack, but his lungs and limbs rebelled; he needed the reprieve more than the slim fencer, who spoke with no labor in his breathing. “The urge to destroy greatness needs no explication,” he said. “It is a defect of the mind. As well ask why a fat man loves noodles.”

  “It frustrates me that such dim mentalities are so difficult to extinguish,” said the fencer. “So I will not be too long about it. Rassha is the symbol of human presumption, General. Divinity is the work of lifetimes and lifetimes. To spread the Deities’ secrets like corn among chickens—that is not only illegal, it is cheap, and upstart. Dogs, apes, and mandarins know the fate of upstarts, and the rest of you will taste it soon enough.”

  Gyaltsen opened his mouth as though to respond, then sent a gale screaming from the Cerulean Sword.

  The slim fencer tried to spring away, sending a plume of brindled fire out as he did so, but the gale was too huge—no corner of the throne room was free of howling wind. The fire scattered in the swarming air, and the gale picked the fencer up like a ragdoll and slammed him into the far wall, then kept him there. The blowback curled around to Gyaltsen, but he was ready for it; wind whirled around him, but the air just by his body was still. Gradually he narrowed the focus of the Cerulean Sword’s blast, keeping it trained on the slim fencer, making sure to keep his arms and legs flat against the wall of the throne room. The blowback lessened, though a gentle breeze still ran over Gyaltsen’s face under the Sun Helm. Keeping the gale trained on the fencer was an exercise in mental control; the Cerulean Sword was straining to flay the man, but Gyaltsen knew the danger in allowing any latitude for motion to any of the slim fencer’s limbs.

  “I painted a room with blood once,” said Gyaltsen, “when another would-be killer made a bid for the man we thought was King. Did you ever hear the fate of that aspirant, Glib Ape?”

  The fencer tensed up as though to pull an arm from the wall, but he was powerless against the wind.

  “The servants still resent me for that day,” said Gyaltsen. The Cerulean Sword squirmed and whined. “The blood has not yet come out of the wood. But that room was sheathed in goatcherry, a thirsty tree by nature. This room is granite, and granite does not thirst. I think I may write your eulogy on it in your own blood, Ape. The staff will swab all traces of it from the granite in the morning.”

  He let the Sword do what it wished for a moment; the slim fencer made three revolutions around the perimeter of the throne room, battering the wall with crushing blows. Gyaltsen reined the gale in, pinning the fencer again, and looked at the path he had taken. A faint dark band could be seen at about eye level in the throne room. Gyaltsen looked at the fencer’s face, which was no longer beautiful. “I may take my time in the composition.”

  He let it begin again, the Cerulean Sword cackling and yapping.

  There was a point at which the fencer began to scream, and a point at which he stopped. Gyaltsen let the Sword take him for one more revolution, then slowed him down just enough to position the sword—blade parallel to the floor, just below eye level, directly in the fencer’s path. It would be a showy killing. No bloodier than the famine that awaits Rassha, but with a grimmer end, praise the Crescent.

  The fencer’s limp form rolled along the wall toward him. Gyaltsen braced the Cerulean Sword.

  Then the fencer was no longer there—only a scraggly bit of brindled fur that flew above the plane of the Sword, hurtling on beaten but uncut.

  A moment later, Gyaltsen would think: Maintain the gale, let the wind take him whatever his shape. But that was a moment later. In the moment, Gyaltsen whirled with the Cerulean Sword to catch the furred shape before it flew out of reach.

  His concentration shattered. The gale ceased. The Cerulean Sword swung true; but then the fencer was there again, lips curled back in a cat’s hiss, and the blue blade met pitted steel. The fencer slammed back into the granite wall, but his heels met it straight on, and then his legs shot out like pistons, sending Gyaltsen sprawling, then skidding across the floor until he stopped at the foot of the Orchid Throne.

  A spike of cold pain slipped under the Pauldron of the Barycenter, then down, tearing as it went.

  The fencer withdrew the sword from Gyaltsen’s shoulder and tucked the hilt under his arm, the bloody blade thrusting straight and proud behind him as he strutted three quick steps. Then he turned, spreading his arms out in that same dancer’s T, the sword a bloody fan. Gyaltsen’s own blood spattered his face under the helm. A soft mosquito-whine entered Gyaltsen’s ears, plaintive and confused. Something hard and heavy hit his knees. He held out a hand to stop it from hitting his chest, but his elbow slowly bent until his entire length was pressed against cold stone.

  The fencer leaned over Gyaltsen. His face barely deserved the name; his grin was missing teeth. “The slow calligrapher has power,” he said wetly, “but the swifter stroke is surer.”

  The whine rose in Gyaltsen’s ears. The chamber rumbled with wind.

  “Well,” said the fencer, “I take my leave. I would rather not be in the vicinity when your death strikes the shackles of propriety from your irritable weapon. Should you encounter the Deity Who Waits on your travels, please convey the kindest regards from Perfect Judge Dorje and his retainers, and reassure him that we do not take legal disputes personally, whatever the outcome.”

  The fencer disappeared.

  Gyaltsen rolled his eyes up at the Orchid Throne. The whine had become a full-fledged scream.

  “Hush,” he whispered, and with great effort he brushed his fingers on the hilt of the Cerulean Sword. “We have a little while.”

  The keening softened but did not cease. Gyaltsen perceived a catch in it, as of a sob—but perhaps it was his own imagination.

  “You will do what you must when I am gone,” said Gyaltsen, “though, I hope, no more. But, before then, let us collaborate on a kindness if we can.”

  Gyaltsen closed his hand around the weapon’s haft, then bent his wrist, bringing the alien blade in contact with the Orchid Throne. Now the keening did cease, the blade intent on their joint project. Gyaltsen instructed the Cerulean Sword as best he could, and it began to vibrate, sending those vibrations into the Orchid Throne and thence the palace, setting air and stone thrumming with a sound that coalesced gradually, as his ebbing mind executed its last maneuver, into words:

  TAKE SHELTER. LEAVE THE ORCHID PALACE. THIS IS GYALTSEN’S LAST COMMAND.

  The message repeated as his field of view drew in, blackness gnawing at its edges. The Sword’s keening began again, drowning out the words.

  Under the kee
ning began a dull roar. Soon it was all Gyaltsen could hear. The sword was vibrating now, but coarsely, irregularly, the blade clattering on the flagstones. The roar rose. Gyaltsen stared up as the mortar joining the stone slabs of the ceiling crumbled, then parted, then tore open entirely, the vault of dawn shining down upon his now unseeing face, until fingers of night dug into the soft morning light and pulled it aside, like the gale had the stone, to lay bare the dark behind it.

  The earth shook beneath the bell tower. Netten, Datang whispered to herself, despairing; but what came from her throat was, “Envied of Snakes! The fires!”

  Lin Gyat took off fleetly for the edge of the gorge. Before long, light leapt up. Kalsang took his position at the levers of the gun. “I had thought it would take longer.”

  “We do not know what it means,” said Datang. “Perhaps it is merely the echo of a mighty blow, not the end of the battle.”

  “If the Kings had won,” said Kalsang, “the false night would have lifted, would it not?”

  “So we surmise,” said Datang shortly. “But who can know what binds the sorcery of the Gong of Night to the Priestkiller Worm?”

  Lin Gyat’s silhouette against the firelight was obscured, then buried, by a dark cloud boiling up behind it. Within its vapors, there soon appeared the coils of a great snakelike shape, white-scaled with dense, intricate patterns of black, rising into the sky like pyre-smoke. Its face was half-human, half-dragon, its limbs short but muscular and sharp-clawed; the tail that at last licked above the rim of Pongyo Gorge was tipped with a gleaming blade, sampling the night air like a hound.