by Matt Weber
“The Red and White,” whispered Kalsang. Netten, Datang said in silent farewell. She imagined that she could hear a cry echo from the base of the mountains, scratching the very sky with pain.
The cloud-veil descended just far enough to reveal the worm’s face in the firelight. It opened its mouth, and although no sound shook the air, nonetheless a terrible voice boomed in Datang’s mind:
THE TRIAL IS CONCLUDED. THE SENTENCE IS PASSED. NOW COMES THE HEADSMAN.
GIVE UP YOUR PRIESTS, UÄ, AND YOU SHALL BE SPARED.
Something gave the Worm pause; Datang shook her head when the words ceased, as though waking from a dream. When it spoke again, the words were mere sound, if puissant enough to loose knuckle-sized chunks of mortar from between the tower’s bricks. It looked down at something on the rim of the Gorge.
“ONE OFFERS HIMSELF TO BEGIN THE PROCEEDINGS.”
“Lin Gyat,” said Datang. And, indeed, the giant capered at the firelight’s edge, his bellow a whisper echoing from the mountains and the Gorge:
“Come, vermin! But beware—we clerics of Uä are tougher bits of gristle than once we were!”
“He is mad,” Kalsang said in awe.
“Of a certainty,” said Datang. “Shoot the Worm before it proves him wrong.”
“You are mad.” Kalsang looked at her with incredulous eyes. “Shoot it? All it wants are clerics. Let it feast!”
“A GOD-MARKED MONK,” said the Priestkiller Worm. “I KNOW THE LAW, FLEA; I KNOW THE MARKS OF A DEITY’S PROTECTION. THOSE ARE NOT THEY. YOU ARE MERELY—”
“Cursed,” Lin Gyat’s reply came back in that same echoed murmur. “And a spicy curse it is, pest! You think yourself a lengthy snake? Behold a lengthy snake!”
“No,” murmured Datang—but, of course, there could be no intervening. Lin Gyat flung his robe wide; his breechclout fell in the dust around his ankles.
Twin silences hung heavy in the unnatural night that veiled Pongyo Gorge.
The Worm leaned its head down to peer more closely at Lin Gyat. There was a wet gleam, Datang saw, at the base of its skull, and for the third time she uttered the name “Netten,” this time aloud. She seized Kalsang by the tricep, digging her hand into the gap between muscle and bone; he yelped like a tail-trod dog. “Shoot the wound,” she said between her teeth. “Where its head joins its neck.”
“Marvel at the Python of Degyen, beast!” Lin Gyat cried. “Thick enough to choke the Hinge-Gullet Goat of Tanggang, and cursed from tip to tail! Recede into your lair, or it will batter down the diseased gates of your jaws and fill your brain-pan with its pearly venom!”
“I have spent my life hounded and harried by priests,” said Kalsang. “That Worm is my ally. I would no sooner shoot it than Gyaltsen himself.”
“Then move aside.”
THIS I SHALL ENJOY, the Worm purred, cracking its gullet in a razorous smile.
“No.” Kalsang set his jaw.
Later, Datang would try to sort out what had been in her head at that instant—when the Priestkiller Worm had no less than granted a reprieve to almost everyone in Uä, when it had exposed the lamas’ account of what White Tenshing had fought for as the lie that his so-many-greats-grandson, Netten’s father, had suspected. How can you believe this Worm? she might have said—but she believed the Worm. How can you let Netten die unavenged? she might have said—but Netten, if he had died, had died a hero’s death, and all knew a hero’s death was salve for vengeful urges. How can you countenance mass murder? she might have said, and a poignant rejoinder it was—but Kalsang would have said that mass murder loomed in either case, the only difference being the magnitude of mass, and he would sooner fewer die.
And by then, Lin Gyat would have been swallowed and Datang’s gleaming target would have reared, unreachable, into the air; and so, she yanked on Kalsang’s tricep to jerk him upward and vacated the gun’s controls the only way she could.
The machinist screamed as he fell. Datang heaved the gun to bear, held it for the space of one breath to aim, and pulled the lever.
The explosion woke Netten from the slumber that he had not realized had claimed him. There should have been light, great plumes of feathered, varicolored light; but all that reached him from the spiral entrance to the underground lake was a wave of hot, dry air, a breath of sweet relief for the frozen marks on his cheek, hand, and shoulders. There was an odd thickness in his ears. It took him a moment to realize what it was: The Gong of Night had ceased its keening.
He opened his eyes. Jangmu was sitting by him, knees up, the bloodied Inkwell Sword laid naked and flat across them. A few feet behind her, the lout whittled a bit of wood. The very instant his eyes opened, the lout’s gaze met his, and the wet lips quirked up once more. Jangmu looked at Netten, then the lout. “Leave him. He’ll have his fate in due time, you made sure enough of that.”
Jangmu turned her gaze back to Netten. “Would it help at all if I said I hoped it would be different?”
Netten opened his mouth and tried to speak, but only a thin croak emerged.
“You were a good King,” she said. “I sometimes thought—if you could see how the lamate had wasted the deities’ gifts, if you could know that there was no eighth son of an eighth son unto eight generations to defeat the Judge, you might have come around. You could have been the true King—led Rassha into a new age, free from the White Way’s yoke. I think he might have spared you, had you let him.” She watched his mouth work for a bit, then stared a moment at the Inkwell Sword. “But you never would, would you? Because even the lowest, most self-serving scum of Uä were your subjects. And you were a good King. Though you were never King.”
Netten smiled.
The smell of burnt hair and roasting flesh wafted toward Netten; Jangmu and the lout leapt to their feet. The lout hung back, but Jangmu ran, and Netten at last found the strength to roll over.
At the entrance to the underground lake was the Judge, scorched bald and all over blood, eyeless. But upright—the skeleton of light still joined to the cords of will, if by a thread.
Only when that horrible head turned its sightless sockets toward him did Netten hear the moan leaking from his own throat.
The cavern was vast, the lake seemingly endless, but suddenly its huge dark was crowded with light, its space strained to bursting with presences. Eight, Netten’s failing mind announced with perfect clarity; seven strange, one stately and familiar.
Perfect Judge Dorje, said the White Umbrella Deity. We must discuss what happens next.
Datang had wasted no time descending from the tower; the Crane’s Migration Step had taken her most of the way to Lin Yongten in one leap. The blue fencer’s gaze was inquisition. “The machinist would not be persuaded to fire,” Datang said, “save by immoderate rhetoric. I do not think such argumentation will be taken kindly by our hosts.”
“That is mildly stated.”
“I am a mild soul.”
“See what comes,” said the blue-skinned fencer, pointing awkwardly toward Pongyo Gorge. Against the lightening horizon, a silhouette drew closer—loping, it swiftly became evident, at an astounding speed.
“The Lotus,” said Datang. “I pray his vestments have stayed as whole as his flesh. I do not know if I can endure the sight of the Python at this time.”
“Let us signal to him,” said Lin Yongten. “Surely there is some flare, or even a bow—”
Datang shook her head. “He can chase down horses. Let him do it.” And she strode off, full of purpose, toward the pavilion that formed the makeshift stables.
The men guarding it saw her and crossed their glaives. “Lady Datang—”, the one began.
Datang looked to their brassards. “I am no lady, but I beg the Cerulean Guard to help me serve one. We require horses. Four.”
“We brought no spare horses,” said the guard.
“You have lost at least two men I know of,” said Datang. “It would not take long to raise the toll to four.”
“The King may yet live,�
�� said one of the guards stiffly, bringing his glaive to bear, “and I will not be threatened—” But before Datang’s straightsword was more than an inch out of her scabbard, the other guard, whose eyes had never left her face, pushed his companion’s glaive aside.
The two exchanged a long look; at last, the angered guard put up his weapon. The other looked to Datang again. “Four horses, you said. There are two of you.”
“Two Green Morning brothers, a courtier, and myself.”
“A courtier? Is there one in Pongyo Gorge?”
“Her location is my concern,” Datang said with palpable coolness.
“As you say.” Worry shifted his stoic physiognomy. “What, then, of the Priestkiller Worm?”
“Blasted from the sky.”
“The world saw it fall. But what after?”
Datang shrugged. “For my part, I am done with the debate. You may await the Worm’s rebuttal if you like.”
The two guards shared another look. The glaives uncrossed. Datang entered the tent; when she emerged with four horses, the Cerulean Guard was gone, their post claimed by Lin Yongten, who had come across a halberd and held it with a faint disdain, as a chef might a dull knife. He and Datang each took double reins, and they sped through the camp until they met up with Lin Gyat, clad only in charred tatters, at its edge. He swung up on the spare mount as though the rendezvous had been planned all along. At a comfortable distance from the camp, they brought the horses down to a trot at Lin Gyat’s insistence—they had asked enough of cold horses, in the giant’s view, and no one was inclined to gainsay it.
“Where do we go?” asked Lin Gyat.
“To a high place,” said Datang, “and not too far. We look for a column of smoke. But we will not see it until sunrise—whenever that is.”
“Smoke?” said Lin Gyat.
“The Lady Pema and her protectors will have made a bonfire of green wood. We must go to them.”
“And thence?”
“Perhaps the Lady Pema has further orders from Netten.”
“Netten,” said Lin Gyat, as though he had just remembered something. “A false and inconstant King, a mediocre boxer, and wholly unserious in his drinking—yet in his absence, I discover an affection for him out of all proportion to his merit.”
In silence, they walked the horses to a low hill west of the royal camp, where the rising sun would not make targets of their silhouettes. When the hill was between them and the camp, they stopped by mutual agreement. Lin Gyat threw himself on the ground and slept immediately. Datang prepared to do the same; but Lin Yongten touched her arm. “A moment.”
“I have nothing but moments; take all you need.”
“You are a true friend. There is something I would have you know, in case something should befall me.”
“What could befall you that has not already done so?”
“Fire,” said Lin Yongten. “Drought. A horde of Gardener pandas.”
“Truly, your life hangs in a balance more precarious than I ever imagined.”
“As you say,” said the blue fencer with a thin smile. “The Lady Sonam—”
“Netten’s eldest daughter?” said Datang.
“The same.”
“We will see her shortly,” Datang said.
“We will?” said Lin Yongten.
“Yes, I have deduced it.”
“And one day I shall ask the details of that deduction. Yet this is not what I wished to say about her. You described her as Netten’s eldest daughter?”
“Have I erred?”
“In no way, yet there is a subtlety you may not know. She is Netten’s eldest daughter, true, but—”
“The Lady Pema’s second.”
Lin Yongten blinked slowly and effortfully, as his stiff eyelids required. “Another deduction?”
“The opposite. Netten informed me of it—before his summit with the Pretender and the King. He asked me to tell you, in fact, but the detail had slipped my mind.”
“Well, tossing machinists out of towers and shooting demigods will tax the memory.”
“You understand the import of the matter?”
“Well enough, I think.”
“How did you learn of it?”
Lin Yongten looked at the stiff, fibrous skin covering his hands and grimaced. “The spirits of the grass and rivers now betimes apprise me of intelligence they deem germane to my movements.”
“The Red and White, man,” said Datang, “to hear you speak, it sounds as though they have apprised you of the death of your dog.”
“They speak of the Queen’s blood-curse as a blessing,” said Lin Yongten. “They speak of the child…” He searched a moment for the words. “Much as your machinist did of that cannon in the clock tower.”
“The Blue and Black,” said Datang. “I value the intelligence, but I do not envy you whatever whispers bring it.”
Lin Yongten shrugged. “I cannot say I would not ask for this spirit-yoked existence, knowing the alternative was blood-drained oblivion. The world yet harbors a pleasure or two for me, even in this semi-vegetal aspect. But I do not like it.”
“Perhaps a bit of sleep will brighten your outlook,” said Datang, preparing for her own hard-earned nap on the damp and irregular ground.
“I need not sleep.” Lin Yongten shrugged—but where the blue fencer’s shrugs usually indicated a genuine nonchalance, an ease, this one seemed a parody of those, brittle and unnatural, exaggerated by his stiffness. Perhaps it was that sense of defective sanguinity that made his next words seem to catch and crack inside his throat. “I cannot sleep.”
The stars faded, the dawn painted the sky, and before long, a column of smoke boiled up from a low peak to the east. The royal camp lay between the comrades and the bonfire, which produced in Datang no small moiety of worry, for a sortie from the camp might reach the Lady Pema before she and the Green Morning brothers could. But, as they skirted the camp, Lin Gyat’s keen senses reported only disarray and confusion. The painted giant guessed that a trail of smoke from a far-off peak could be the last thing weighing on the minds of the dead King’s retinue; and Datang was inclined to agree, if not to slacken the pace of the horses.
The source of the smoke was not nearly as high up as the pass through the Bat Mountains, but they had to walk the horses for all that. Not long after they were forced to dismount, Lin Gyat called attention to a figure shadowing them at some elevation. He offered to make short work of the shadow with his rifle, but Lin Yongten and Datang shook their heads, and Datang called out: “Zao, the lady! Zao, the Versicolor Guard! The Ape’s Left Hand rides with the Green Morning to escort you four to safety.”
“The Ape’s Left Hand I recognize,” called a woman’s voice, “but I was told to expect my father’s comrades-in-arms, not a monk and a blue man.”
“I am no monk,” bellowed Lin Gyat, “and my friend here is no man, for I know his manly anatomy to have been replaced by fibrous excrescences most fearsome to behold.” He looked skyward for a moment in thought. “Or perhaps I dreamed this vision. But, if so, it was a dream of the sort that speaks hidden truths.”
“This can be none other than Envied of Snakes,” the voice said drily.
“If my skin has changed, my lady, I flatter myself that my voice has not,” said Lin Yongten.
A face finally emerged from the rocks above—the woman who had introduced herself as Hariti in the noodle shop those weeks ago. “Yongten,” she said with a warm smile. “It is good to see you.”
“And my own heart soars to see you, my lady,” said Lin Yongten. “But the news of your lord father is not good.”
Sonam dropped down to the path; Datang, Lin Yongten, and Lin Gyat all made the abasements apposite to her rank, which caused her to wrinkle her nose. “Leave off,” she said. “I should abase myself to you, for I have earned no style and no merit; and doubly to the Ape’s Left Hand, whom I deceived when first we met, thinking not to see her again.”
Datang waved off the apology. “Caution
with your identity is a habit that will serve you well in the years to come.”
“I hope you are wrong, but I cannot believe it.” Sonam turned to Lin Yongten, her face growing somber. “Speak no more of my lord father until my husband and my mother are there to hear it.”
“Thank you,” said Lin Yongten, “for I would as soon give the news but once.”
The air soon grew close with the smoke of green wood, and Sonam led the way to a narrow, hidden path off the main trail. The three comrades tethered the horses and followed her to a broad ledge, purple-carpeted with snow lotus, where the former guardsman Thoto and Mother-of-Daughters sat, coughing and weeping from the smoke. No words were exchanged for some time, as the confrères assisted Thoto and Sonam in extinguishing the fire by the tricky but effective expedient of pushing the wood off the ledge. The task accomplished, introductions and reacquaintances ensued; and, although Mother-of-Daughters’ decorum was perfect, Datang could see the sorrow rising behind her eyes. At last Lin Yongten spoke.
“My lady Pema, your lord husband gave his life in combat against the Priestkiller Worm.”
Mother-of-Daughters closed her eyes; they opened gleaming with bright water. “My heart keens,” she said, “but I will not mourn until my child is safe. Did Tenshing slay the worm?”
“He, the King, and the Iron Eunuch collaborated to wound it badly,” said Lin Yongten. “The Ape’s Left Hand had the honor of completing their work.”
“With help from the University of Heavenly Ordnance,” said Datang. “And, my lady, I have done you no favors, for in the process I killed one of the Iron Eunuch’s righthand men. I fear the retinue and the rebellion are poisoned against us now. I am sorry.”
Mother-of-Daughters transfixed Datang with a haughty stare. “The killer of my husband’s killer cannot transgress against me. Not if she kills a hundred thousand righthand men, each servant of a god more powerful than the last.”
“I rejoice to hear it,” said Datang, “but, Lady—life is long, and all things come to pass in time.”