Initializing

by E. M. Hardy

  “Tell me, Diplomat Yao Xiu: why do you think her Augustness would care what a lowly historian says?”

  And there it was, the test. Yao Xiu inhaled as deeply as she could, sucking up some of the pain she felt from her abdomen to give her strength.

  “Because the Balancers are her sworn defenders who proved their loyalty when the Three Sages plotted to overthrow her. As such, an honored one such as yourself could convince the Empress to avert a path that has the potential to cause the downfall of the Empire.”

  Cui Dai’s smile widened as she shook her head and chuckled lowly to herself. “Hmm. I think your injury must have done more damage to your brain than I thought.”

  “I heard everything that you said to the cartel agent, about you and your benefactor.” Yao Xiu whispered it softly, almost reverently. “Everything clicked into place when I realized who you were working for. I am just the convenient distraction; the candle that hides the shadow. Martin sees me, Suhaib sees me, the Emir and his family sees me. And in the process, nobody notices the lead historian who’s studying the ancient origins of Martin’s constructs while accompanying her former student into the strange lands of the Bashri.

  “But that’s not what matters right now. Please, honorable Cui Dai… please understand that this is bigger than you, me, this delegation, maybe even the empire itself.” Yao Xiu held her gaze, inhaling deeply and braced herself for the consequences for what she was about to say. “It is in my opinion, as both Diplomat and Historian, that it would be a very, very bad idea to betray Martin a second time—especially considering what happened after the failed attack on his pyramid.”

  Cui Dai continued smiling, but her eyes dulled and glinted dangerously as the muscles around them contracted. Yao Xiu was treading on dangerous waters now, and she chose to power ahead instead of wait for the tide to drown her.

  “Historian Cui Dai, I am immensely grateful that you saved my life, cauterizing the wound and burning out the impurities in the injury before they turned my gut rancid. However, I must insist that working against Martin will do more harm than good. He has been nothing but forthcoming with us, and he has demonstrated immense restraint when it comes to dealing with the betrayal he faced from those he sought to protect.

  “Even now, on the eve of war here in Ma’an, he chose to negotiate rather than outright attack. He downplays his own role, saying that the League representative was the one who kept badgering him for a deal, but I’ve seen how warmongers of all stripes think. I’ve seen drunken fools start a fight over the slightest provocation. I’ve seen hotheaded boys forget the teachings of their parents to rush headlong into a brawl and then claim they’re the victims when they end up with a black eye. I’ve seen soft-spoken but sharp-tongued ladies revel in creating chaos while playing the innocent maiden. I’ve seen crooked merchants swindle my mother, lying and cheating for a few li while squandering away opportunities to earn hundreds more over the long run by being honest with their trade. Martin is not that kind of person. He does his best to be straightforward, even when it means exposing himself to danger.

  “And then there is the threat of the invaders,” grunted Yao Xiu as she leaned back on her cushions, angling herself to lessen the weight she put on her injury. Cui Dai just watched her, her hands folded neatly on her lap. “He has gone to great lengths to connect our people, the Ren, with the people of the Bashri. Yesterday’s demonstrations were a prelude of things to come. Some of the emir’s armsmasters were already able to start sensing the Chi around them with the tutelage of the martial artists. With further instruction, they will know how to manipulate it and draw it into their bodies. On our side, the martial artists have struck up interesting conversations with the jinn. I myself have discussed the matter with Uhi, prince Suhaib’s jinni, and she’ll help me with the rituals to reach out to the Invisible World. I have my eye on bonding with a jinn that can help me better organize my thoughts and memories.”

  She huffed with pain, small beads of sweat forming on her brow, as the effort of talking started to take its toll on her body. “Martin’s not just trying to flood our lands with his dolls, his constructs, in an attempt to wrestle power away from the Empress. He’s doing all he can to make sure that we are better-equipped to deal with the invaders, even if that means giving us power that we could use to endanger him.” She reached out to Cui Dai, slowly and with great effort, and grasped the hem of her dress. “Please… I beg of you, honorable Cui Dai. Balancer or Historian or whatever you are… please do all you can to convince the Empress that Martin is an asset, not a threat, and that we need to make him work with us—not against us.”

  Cui Dai glanced at the shaking hand holding her dress, then at the freely-sweating face that was scrunched up with pain and despair. Cui Dai gently took Yao Xiu’s hand, holding it with as much tenderness as she could while she sat down beside Yao Xiu on her bed. She kept holding that hand with almost loving reverence as she pulled out a knife from one of the folds in her dress and held its edge tight to Yao Xiu’s neck. Stunned, the young woman could only gulp as she peered down with her eyes, not daring to move a muscle.

  “You speak of dangerous things, historian. The kind that would make most people disappear in the night.” She whispered the words as she brought the blade flush to Yao Xiu’s skin, drawing a thread of blood in the process. Yao Xiu could only keep herself still, though she stopped trying to look at the blade and instead fixed her gaze to match Cui Dai’s. They held each other’s eyes for a moment more before Cui Dai chuckled. “But no, not this time. You make a few interesting points for me to consider. Besides, the cartel’s spy was a little too quick to bloodshed for my tastes. That’s not a good sign in our line of work.”

  Yao Xiu’s brows shot to her forehead as Cui Dai lifted the dagger from her neck, flicked off the few droplets of blood that stuck to it, and sheathed it back into its hidden compartment within her sleeve. Yao Xiu released the breath she didn’t know she had been holding, and sagged back down on her beddings.

  “Speak to no one of what you overheard,” Cui Dai said, her uncharacteristic bout of levity forgotten as she smothered it with a stony expression. “If anyone asks what happened, say that things went too fast and you don’t know what happened. Avoid the specifics, and blame the shock of your injury. Do this, and you get to keep your life. Do you understand me?”

  Yao Xiu hesitated for a moment, but nodded all the same. Cui Dai nodded, stood up from the bed, aiming to make her way out of the room.

  “And my recommendations?” Yao Xiu did not know what possessed her to call out after the woman who moments earlier held a knife to her throat. “Will you pass them to the Empress?”

  Cui Dai frowned, then grimaced. “You push your luck. But yes, I will pass them on—along with everything that happened.”

  Yao Xiu gulped and was sorely tempted to take back everything she had said. However, her convictions ran stronger than her fears, and she nodded in the affirmative. There would be no turning back from that point on.

  “Can I ask one more question?” Yao Xiu called out with trepidation. “A personal question, please, before you go.”

  Cui Dai stopped at the threshold, her back still turned to her as she held the wall with one hand. She sighed, then stood still—an action which Yao Xiu took as assent.

  “Does Shen Feng know?”

  Cui Dai stilled for a few more moments, then turned around to face Yao Xiu once more. Her face was as blank and expressionless as before. “He followed his orders like a good soldier should. That is all I will say on the matter.”

  Cui Dai did not answer Yao Xiu’s question, not directly, but it was enough. Whatever power plays the Empress was making, the General of the White Tiger was not a willing participant in them. As such, Yao Xiu simply nodded and then bowed deeper in gratitude, pushing back the pain of her freshly-healed abdomen to show her respect to the woman who had both saved and spared her life.

  Epilogue

  An eyeball peerin
g into Yao Xiu’s room from a hundred yards away had seen the whole scene, while another eyeball floating just above the window had heard every word exchanged.

  All he wanted to do was keep an eye out for Yao Xiu, help her out if someone decided to finish what they had started. Instead, he had found out the Empress had shafted him from the very beginning.

  He had expected such a betrayal from the cartels, from the Sages who had attacked him, but not from the Empress who had vowed to protect those who had pledged themselves to her. He had been nothing but forthright with her, and she had repaid him with nothing but betrayal. He had even forgiven Shen Feng, going so far as to protect his men and women instead of slaughtering them and extracting their souls when he had unlocked the secrets of draining Chi from the air. And yet here they were again.

  One of the walkers posted on the desert, far away where no living person would see or hear it, repeatedly and furiously slammed the butt of its spear on the rocky ground as it screamed into the empty air. Another walker in the Qleb Sierra pyramid punched the granite wall in frustration, cracking its fist in the process. Another walker patrolling the road leading to the Leizhu Swamp groaned out loud as it clutched its head with its hands. Idle dolls milled restlessly about, while the working ones rushed about in agitation. The cow-boxes kicked out with their powerful hind legs even when they had nothing to kick at, while some of them ended up butting the ‘heads’ of their bodies against one another. Non-essential eyeballs shuddered in the air as they rushed along, deviating from their usually sedate pace. Even the obelisks grew slightly warmer with the added rush of power flowing through the network.

  Yao Xiu’s words, however, deflated his anger.

  She had kept her trust in him despite being knifed in the gut, despite facing murder from the woman masquerading as Cui Dai. She understood what he was trying to do, who he was doing it for, and she did her best to make the Empress’ spy see things her way. Her words convinced Martin to play dumb, to pretend that he knew nothing about what went down. He would continue to honor his pledge to the Empress not because he expected his pledge to be honored with good will, but because one injured woman had believed that he truly wanted to help repulse the coming threat.

  Three raging walkers out of nineteen thousand, seven hundred and thirty four walkers; that was enough for the locked soul controlling them all to vent his remaining anger. After all, he had better things to do than throw tantrums all day long—such as digging out the collapsed tunnels of the Bashri Desert Ruins. He may not know how to build new pyramids from scratch, at least not yet, but his dolls knew on an instinctual level how to repair them. And boy did they have a lot of work cut out for them.

  ***

  In the Red Court, more than two thousand miles away from al-Taheri, the target of Martin’s ire had just received two reports from her Balancers. One of them detailed the reformation of the Taiyo Shogunate, led by the traitor Ye Heng who was now calling himself Inagaki Nobumoto. This rebellion off to the far east was expected, and both the General of the White Tiger in the capital and the General of the Azure Dragon to the east were taking steps to contain and eventually put it down. It was what she anticipated.

  The second report, however, came as a total surprise to her.

  It was a brief from Balancer agents stationed on the southern borders. They had learned that their agents within the Saahasi Dominion, a vassal state to the south of the Imperial Capital, had been compromised. All reports they had been receiving as far back as three years ago had been falsified, and the agents only picked up on their trail after the Order of Rats attacked the Empress. They learned that the new Maharaja, Venkati, had been quietly building an army while the Empire was focused on the restive lands of Taiyo to the east.

  The worst part, however, was that the reports had come too late. Maharaja Venkati’s forces had already attacked the garrisons manned by General of the Vermillion Bird Qiu Ja, pinning them down in their fortress. She and her troops held out briefly, but the Maharaja had had a lot of time to prepare for his insurrection. The gates of the fortress were sabotaged from the inside and were easily broken down with nothing but a few battering rams. As a result, the Maharaja’s forces overwhelmed the Imperials in a matter of days. They now held Qiu Ja and a large number of her forces captive, and were now marching north towards the capital with their hostages in tow.

  Empress Zi Li cursed. She vaguely remembered Feng Jiahao, one of her former advisors, mentioning something about the Maharaja wanting to renegotiate the terms of his vassalage. Was this what he had meant by that? She cursed the dead man once more, spitting on his memory, as she considered her options. General Shen Feng’s forces could march south to meet the Maharaja’s forces while General of the Azure Dragon Bai Yu contained the Taiyo insurrection. She could also call on her Khanate vassals from the north to supply soldiers and horses to help defend the Empire, along with a contingent from the General of the Black Turtle Guo Zhenya who oversaw the Northern provinces. It would take months for them to organize and arrive, though, as the Khans were spread out over their steppes.

  The problem, however, was Martin’s constructs.

  They were a knife pointed at the Red City, the very heart of the Ren Empire, and she refused to leave the throne undefended against such a blatant threat. If she locked down Shen Feng’s forces within the capital, the Maharaja’s own force could march all over the Ren countryside, looting and pillaging at will. If he was cooperating with Ye Heng, he could even use his forces to break the siege on Taiyo and link up with the eastern rebels. If that happened, the Ren Empire would be weakened—and weakness was an invitation for invasion. She put herself in Martin’s place, and she could not imagine herself passing up such a golden opportunity to expand her control.

  No, she was sure that Martin would send his constructs the moment he sniffed out her weakness. He had already tasted blood with Shen Feng’s failed attack, and any further weakness would invite disaster. Her mother and father had shown weakness and compassion when they should have shown strength and cunning. They had turned a blind eye toward the machinations of the Three Sages, doting on the welfare of their people as well as their vassals. She had no desire to share their fate.

  If only Shen Feng had done his job and eliminated Martin and his puppets in the first place, he would now be free to march south and punish the Maharaja for betraying the Empire.

  And then another curious thought struck her as she thought about her latest vassal. She grinned to herself, tossing the reports into the fiery brazier beside her, and summoned a scribe. If she couldn’t get rid of the dagger aimed at her heart, she could at least point it somewhere it would be useful.

  ***

  Somewhere far away from all the machinations of man, deep in the jungles where ferocious creatures of bone and spine fought each other for dominance, a huge boulder rolled slowly to the side. Its deep, chest-rumbling grind roared throughout the ridge that shielded it. A large, furry creature napping nearby startled, clacking its jaws shut. It contracted its muscles, ready to pounce upon whatever predator or prey had woken it up. It jerked its long, heavily-muscled neck from side to side, settling its eyes upon the boulder. Slinking back into the shadows, it set up an ambush as it shifted its fur brown and green to better match the mossy rocks around it.

  The boulder finished its grinding, revealing a large entrance that belched stale air thousands of years old. A large mass of thunking sounds erupted from the opening itself, a regular cadence of beats that echoed within the stony confines of the ridge. The sounds grew in intensity, a steady step-step-step that showed no signs of abating. The marching stopped, and a small ceramic figure toddled out of the entrance. The doll looked around, inspecting its surroundings for threats. Seeing none, dozens of other dolls stepped out and began moving to further explore the area.

  The creature crouched low in the shadows, eyeing the strange little bipeds with equal parts fear and anger. In the end, it settled on anger, for these insignificant
little things dared to invade its nest and disturb its daytime repose.

  It slinked closer and closer, then lunged at the nearest doll. Its massive jaws and powerful paws made short work of the ceramic figurine, ripping it apart to shards in mere moments. The other dolls threw themselves at the creature, to no effect. The creature simply batted them away, powdering one of the dolls with a powerful swing of its clawed forepaws.

  And then something bit down hard on the creature’s neck. Tough hide saved its life, however, preventing the sharp protrusions from piercing deeply into its flesh. It flung around, eager to throw off its attacker. However, another set of jaws bit down on its paws while another set bit down on its belly. More sets of jaws began biting all over the creature’s body, and it thrashed about to try and dislodge its attackers.

  Its strength allowed it to fling off its attackers, and it was able to leap up on the rocks and away from its tormentors. It turned around, panting with effort, and surveyed the scene.

  Dozens of four-legged constructs clomped around on lithe ceramic legs, their tails swishing this way and that. Their sharp beaks were shut tight, bits of flesh and fur dangling from them as every one of them focused their attention on the bleeding creature—despite none of them possessing any eyes whatsoever.

  The creature settled on a ledge, still panting in exhaustion. It considered its attackers, which were content to sit on all fours. They kept their eyes on the creature for a few moments more, staring it with their eyeless faces. Behind them strode a much larger construct, craning its neck down so as to fit through the entrance. It was a scaled-up version of the other four-legged constructs, but its head was different. It did not possess the sharp beaks of its smaller brethren. No, its featureless head was rounded and erect, a strange shape. It looked a lot like the heads of the upright apes that sometimes stalked the jungle, but wrong somehow. No eyes, snout, jaw, or ears.