by Daniel Fox
Soon now. Soon.
All about him and behind, Tunghai Wang’s best men packed close. This was work they knew and could enjoy, in prospect as much as in the doing of it. A simple objective, a target they could see: take the barricade and hold it, burn the watch-house, kill your prisoners slowly. Make a noise. Save the heads of the dead, hang the bodies by the heels.
They were ready for this, oh yes.
Soon.
Lifting his eyes to the sky, a high moon and the broad swath of the silk-stars, the constellation called the Chariot just rising into view, Tunghai Wang saw one more light, piercingly bright and too fast for nature, too fast for anything. It climbed the dark air like a flung stone, trailing sparks; paused for a moment as if to think, as if wondering where, whether, when to fall; and vanished then, before it could decide.
Tunghai Wang wasn’t sure what it meant, except no good to him. It had risen from the height of the ridge, from those surely inadequate defenses, flung surely by the hand of man, which meant the hand of Ping Wen; he thought he might have preferred to see it fall.
Then the sky erupted in a gaudy sheet of flame.
It wasn’t, surely, dangerous. He fought his jittery horse to a standstill, called out to his nervous muttering men: “This is nothing, it is just fireworks,” though it was burning oddly bright and oddly long for a firework. “They seek to frighten us with a display for children, that’s all, flashes in the night …”
Then there was a drone in the air, a brief shadow occluding the stars, a shadow that moved against the wind and fell among them, physical and lethal, a thousand separate shafts.
Archers. Not an arrow touched Tunghai Wang nor yet his horse, he had always been lucky in battle, it was why so many men liked to press so close about him; but many of those men were sorry for it now. He turned his head from their screams and curses, glowered up at the ridge. They knew we were coming …
The firework might have been no more than one alert watchman catching a glint of moonlight on steel, or a boy in the paddy running scared, crying a warning below the barricade. Archers, though, a whole battery of archers, arrows nocked and ready, loosing as soon as the light betrayed their quarry—no. They knew he was coming. He had lost one man too many to Ai Guo’s questioning, or else he had been more deliberately betrayed. This was almost a trap.
Over behind the city, the sky paled and flared. That would be another such firework, betraying General Chou and his force. No doubt there would be one more to the north, to meet General Ha Ten in the valley as he worked his men along the broken river road. Tunghai Wang was not going to sit here astride a fidgety horse and wait to see it. Besides, there went the stars again.
The drone of flight turned to a whistle in its fall, and then a thousand separate impacts on mud or flesh, leather or steel or stone. Ping Wen, you may have mastered me. Done by treachery, perhaps, or else by torture, the thing was still done well.
Nevertheless. Archers are not always swordsmen. Only let his men get in among them, and there could still be a reckoning. Ping Wen’s resources were not great. This might be his only defense on this road, if he’d had to divide his forces three ways tonight. A thousand bowmen along the ridge, a firework to show them when to shoot, and hope to see the enemy run …
The firework had burned out at last. Darkness was some protection but not enough, in the moonlight when the archers had the range. Tunghai Wang could go forward from here, toward an enemy that waited for him, along a narrow road bordered on both sides by the soft mud and still water of the paddy where no man could run; or he could slip away into the night, humiliated in defeat. Really it was no choice at all. He called his men on in a long furious charge to the brow of the ridge.
Led them on, indeed, himself the point of the spear, dragging his army behind him as he hoped to drag his notorious luck like a net full of fish, his soldiers.
Halfway to the ridge, as the road steepened beneath his horse, as he slowed to let his men keep up, he saw another of those rising sparks, a fierce tiny light.
Expecting another flaring light to guide another volley from the archers, he urged horse and men both faster to the top.
And watched the light come tumbling toward him, there and gone and there again—and remembered his own fire-weapon from the trap he had laid along the river, and understood.
“Into the paddy!” he cried. “Quick now, quick …!”
Quick they might be, but of course they were too slow; they always must have been. Everything tonight was slow and late, behindhand. It was his own fault, his own lag. Ping Wen was ahead of him.
Even with his own weapons, Ping Wen had gotten ahead of him.
This wasn’t, was not what Tunghai Wang had left behind, a potful of oil that blazed as it broke. This was worse. It exploded in the air above the heads of his men, above their chaos as they tried to scramble off the road. Immaculately vicious, it was a storm in a pot, thunder and lightning together, like a firework many times too much; and Tunghai Wang couldn’t quite see how, he was too far distant and too slow tonight, too slow, but a number of the men fell dead and more fell screaming.
He felt like a man who had stepped heedlessly off the road and into the cloying clinging seep of the midnight paddy that would suck all strength, all movement, all heart and hope from him while his enemies ran on and on into the light. He was floundering, trying simply to keep his feet in ground that gave no purchase.
He turned to face forward again, to face the ridge, and saw twin sparks descending.
Wanted to curse, to weep, to cry vengeance on all his spies and intelligencers and the gods themselves for letting him lead his best hope into this.
Heard the double eruption at his back as those pots exploded, saw the lights of them hurl his own black shadow far ahead.
Heard the voices of his men in their hurt and terror; worse, heard the boots of his men on the road as they ran.
Away from the ridge, away from him.
It was the first time he had known himself abandoned in the field.
He turned his horse and saw them disappear, lit by the ones they left behind, those men who were burning on the road or in the paddy.
Some of them were still alive, but Tunghai Wang left them too, letting his horse pick a delicate path between the bodies and the flames, letting his luck hang like a shield at his back, letting his voice follow his deserters. Too late now, he ordered them to retreat, to pull back, to regroup out of range. If he could save their face, at least a little, he could save his own a little; he might save some remnant of his army.
He might have something to keep against another, a better day than this.
Dawn was striking in the sky at his back, and even that came too soon, before he was ready for it.
three
ou really should not be here. Really.”
Really, Chung thought he might get tired of hearing that. Especially in that voice, from that man. It was becoming the chorus of his life.
Except that every time he heard it, secretly he agreed with it. Of course he shouldn’t.
He was still a kitchen boy at heart, unless he was the harbor-rat he’d been before. He’d enjoyed being Mei Feng’s runner, but never quite believed it. All else that he’d been, then and since, he didn’t even have a name for. He could name one or two things that he wasn’t, though, and warrior was one of those, and companion of princes was another.
He had been in the company of emperors, of course, one emperor at least; but that was only in Mei Feng’s shadow, not by any virtue of his own. Here he couldn’t even pretend that he stood in Shen’s broad shadow, where almost the opposite was true.
In fact they stood side by side, but it was Chung who was invited. It was Shen who came regardless, as if by right. Also it was Shen who told Chung that he didn’t belong there, in this company, in this place.
Really, he didn’t need the telling.
Even so, it was quite good to be told. It helped, a little. Like standing shoulder to shoulder with
Shen, enough that they were actually leaning just a little into each other, just enough to feel the pressure. That helped.
Like not looking down, not looking at what they’d really come to see. That helped too.
Just a little.
He still had to stand in the stink of it, no evading that; he still had to meet Ping Wen’s gaze, which was no help at all.
Still had to meet his smile …
IT HAD been easier in the dark: working his machines, working his teams, sending his missiles as instructed. Not needing to see where they came down, or what damage they did.
Not expecting to be brought out in the broadest of daylight, to be shown.
To be praised, to be rejoiced over, my pyromancer!
Pyromancer. Was he?
“It, it is not my skill, my lord general,” stammering because what else could you do when you really wanted to scream no, you’re wrong, it isn’t me, no, no …? “It’s my men who deserve your praise, their work that made this happen.”
“But you brought them together, you had the ideas and gave the orders.” Ping Wen was all smiles, among the bodies of his foes.
The dead were crowded around them, and if Chung couldn’t blame the general he would like to blame the men who pulled the ropes, and if he couldn’t do that then by all the gods who watched him he might try to blame Shen at his side, Shen the soldier, who must have infected him with slaughter-lust.
Anything, rather than look down at the corpses and think, yes.
Think, yes, I did this thing, I. Me. Chung the messenger, Chung the kitchen boy, Chung the water-rat, in and out of everybody’s lives. Now I am in and out of everybody’s deaths, making them happen. I am a pyromancer, me.
AFTER A long night standing to the machines, sending up a star-burst every now and then to be sure that Tunghai Wang was not sneaking back toward the barricade, he had thought it might be over: that he and Shen might seek a weary bath and a bed. They stank each of smoke and sweat and powders; careful as they were and watchful of each other, they each had burns and black oil on their hands.
Ping Wen had forestalled any thought of respite, appearing suddenly at his side: “Come, see! See what good work you wrought. It is the same north and east, but come see, this is what you did yourself …”
What we did ourselves, and, at your order, but really I know what I did; and of course he said nothing, none of that.
He trudged in Ping Wen’s wake, and only made sure that Shen was coming too—as if that man would ever stay behind again—and dreaded everything else, every moment of this, until they were stopped in their little procession, just short of the barricade that Ping Wen had set across the road.
Stopped by two that Chung knew, the doctor-woman Tien and the fisherman Old Yen, though he hadn’t seen them together before this.
It was Tien that Ping Wen stopped for, summoning her through the cordon of his guards; it was Old Yen that he listened to, at Tien’s insistence, in the old man’s urgency.
Chung might not have listened, perhaps—as Mei Feng’s messenger he had been hours and days in the presence of great men at their counsels, and even when he was bright and alert he was seldom interested—but Shen always wanted to know everything. Shen pressed close and Chung went with him as a matter of course. It was that or fall over.
“You have a message for me, from the dragon?”
“Yes, my lord general—”
“—Governor—”
“—My lord governor, yes, from the dragon. She sent—”
“And she did this how?” Ping Wen asked mildly, casting his eyes about at his entourage, carefully whimsical and carefully impatient, who let this fool near me?
“There is a boy, who speaks her mind for her. And sometimes prevents her from attacking people. I do not understand the boy.”
“Wait. He prevents her …?” No whimsy now; Ping Wen was interested. “Did she allow you across the strait again?”
“Yes, excellence.”
“Without one of those mute children aboard?”
“Yes, excellence.”
“Hmm. I had thought, perhaps you were bringing me another of the children. That would have been a gift worth having. If you can speak to the dragon, though …”
“Excellence, she would want to speak to you. Directly.”
“How so?”
“That is my message. She sends me to fetch you to the Forge, or if you will not come”—added quickly, in the face of his abrupt shake of the head—“then she asks that you fly a flag of her color, a banner in an open space outside the city, and she will come to you.”
“She will come? And how am I to trust this accommodating dragon?”
“Excellence, she wants to parley,” the old man said simply. “I have negotiated with her already, to allow the fleet at Taishu to fish with her consent. The boy said she will make the same arrangement with you.”
“In exchange for what?”
“You would have to ask the dragon. All she wants from us on Taishu is that we fly her color at the mast, and not cross the strait. I do not suppose that she would want more of you.”
Ping Wen grunted and stood still for a moment, gazing up at the empty sky. Then he walked again, more quiet than he had been; the fisherman and the doctor both were left behind.
It was a pity. Chung would have welcomed their company, any company: anyone else who really shouldn’t be here, who really didn’t want to be doing this.
Shen the soldier was looking forward to it, he thought, as much as any man might want to see the results of his handiwork. Chung the pyromancer, who might deny it as much as he liked but still knew himself to be responsible, knew that none of this would have happened without him—he didn’t actually want to be anywhere near, did not want to be confronted with what he had done.
Only that he thought he ought to be, and so did Ping Wen, so here he was.
MEN CLEARED aside the barricade to give them an easy walk along the road.
There was an open stretch of ground, littered with spikes and pits and obstacles to frustrate an assault.
The assault had never reached so far. The bodies made another line of litter, farther off.
Ping Wen wanted to examine the bodies, to see the results of his new weapons in the flesh. Deep in the torn scorched flesh.
Chung didn’t want to look at them.
He kept his chin up and his eyes on the horizon, except when Ping Wen spoke to him, words of considered praise like coins counted out by generous, careful fingers.
So it was that—despite the entourage, despite the guards who ought to have been watching but were all too readily distracted by the dead—Chung was first to see movement on the road westerly.
Banners and flags, designed to be seen at a distance: this wasn’t another assault. A tentative party, rather, coming slowly, making themselves plain.
Chung said nothing, waited for others to notice. Hid his smile when it was Shen who saw, Shen who pointed, Shen who called an alert.
Ping Wen straightened, turned, assessed. Said no, they would not fall back behind the barricade. This was an embassage of some sort, riders flying the flag of Tunghai Wang with bannermen running before. Ping Wen would receive them on the road here, in person, right now …
· · ·
IT COULDN’T have been what they were expecting. Functionaries speak to functionaries, by and large. If they had thought to be brought before Ping Wen at all, it would have been in the governor’s palace, in the audience hall with perhaps a word in private after, before they were sent back to their master.
Not this, to find the man himself with such a small party, outside his defenses, surveying the night’s carnage. They weren’t quite ready for it, these runners and riders. Perhaps some distracted aspect of their minds was wishing they had laid a little ambush, live men among the fallen …
Still, they recovered. They saluted Ping Wen with respect; they conveyed the greetings of their own lord Tunghai Wang, who asked for a meeting between th
em, the two powers on this side of the strait.
Two equal powers was not said. Neither was anything said about victory or defeat, surrender, submission on either side. It was all most courteous and diplomatic.
Ping Wen took a little time to consider, but not too much. He stepped aside for a minute, and stood untroubled among the corpses; then he came back and said, “I will fly a banner on the ridge, north of the city. Do you tell Tunghai Wang to come to me there, and we will speak.”
“When will that be, may we tell him, excellence?”
“When I fly the banner. Do you watch. A green banner; you will not miss it. It will be soon.”
The green banner was the dragon’s signal. Chung wondered what it was that Ping Wen might have to say to Tunghai Wang and the dragon together, or to either one of them that he might like the other to overhear.
Then Ping Wen dismissed the embassage, and watched them ride away with their bannermen running before them; and then he summoned Chung with a brisk wave of the hand, and then Chung didn’t have to wonder anymore.
four
iao thought probably she should have gone with Ping Wen to see the bodies beyond the walls. She had seen bodies enough in her time, but these might have been interesting, handiwork of those curious boys with their curious machines. Besides, it would be good practice to establish herself at the governor’s side, let her seem to be there by nature. If she really did want to act as his second voice, his shadow. It was one of her options. She was considering it.
But she would have had to take the tiger, her own second voice, her shadow. She was nothing yet without the tiger; and she thought perhaps he had seen enough of blood and death for a while. He was young yet, just a cub. She didn’t want him thinking that human beings were always to be found beneath his feet. Dead by nature.
There might be no faster way to make a tiger-skin of him, and she was hoping to avoid that for as long as possible.