by JY Yang
“I worry about you,” he said.
“You don’t have to.”
He cautiously put his arm around her shoulders. She allowed him the action, but didn’t lean into his touch. His hand was warm through the cloak she had pulled tight around her shoulders, a blanket over lizardflesh that concealed the colors bleeding across the skin.
“Four years have gone by,” he said, putting words down like a man walking across a rotting bridge. “You have to stop running at some point. You have to return.”
“To stop running doesn’t mean to return.”
“I don’t mean to me, or to the Grand Monastery, or even to Chengbee. I meant to life, Nao. You have to come back. I see you, I hear about what you’re doing, and I know you’re walking around with this sheet of glass between you and the world. You have to break it sometime.”
She didn’t want to turn this into an argument. She was tired. It was the fourth anniversary, and he had traveled all the way here to see her. He didn’t deserve it.
Great Slack, but she was tired.
He lifted her chin and studied the shadows of her countenance. “Once upon a time, I met someone bold and bright as a leaping river. A silver thread in the Slack, shining against all the reds and the blues. Now I don’t know where she’s gone.”
She died, Mokoya thought. She died in the explosion that took her daughter’s life.
Thennjay grew quiet. “I’m sorry. I won’t push you, Nao. That rarely ends well.”
She felt sorry for him. “Thenn, I’m glad you’re here.” And she meant it, too. “I truly am.”
He hugged her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. A measured, cautious response. “I’m glad to see you too.” When he got up and went into his tent, she didn’t follow.
Chapter Five
MOKOYA COULD NOT SLEEP. She lay on the coarse fabric of her bedroll, the skin of her neck itching, strange prickles running up and down the lizard arm. The opening of the First Sutra rolled over and over in her head—the Slack is all, and all is the Slack—and it formed a barrier between her and sleep. Yet she knew if she stopped, if she gave her mind space to expand like a black sponge, she would see things she did not want to see.
She sat up, shivering. Her capture pearls were arrayed in a glowing line by the bed, colors like lanterns on the Double-Seventh Night. Mokoya knew their contents by sight. If she wanted, she could lose herself in fragments of better times: The riotous joy of Eien’s fifth birthday celebration. Games of eagle-and-chicken with Akeha as a child. Her wedding night, if she wanted to exhaust herself into slumber. She just had to reach out.
Her fingers trembled, and she pulled away.
Mokoya left the tent, stepping into the salmon-tinted sunrise. The second night-cycle was beginning: she’d lost three hours of sleep she wasn’t going to get anyway. The changing air spread a chill through her from the lungs outward. A variety of options lay open to her. She could go to Thennjay’s tent to wake him. She could practice sparring. She could run around the oasis, feet sinking into the unstable sands.
But Mokoya looked in the direction of the canyons and wondered what the naga and its human handler were doing with the new sunrise. Would they follow the patterns imposed by human society and continue to rest? Or would the naga bow to its instincts and hunt again?
Who were they, and what did they want?
Mokoya took several slow steps forward. There was stupidly reckless behavior, and then there was behavior so reckless it bordered on the suicidal. But she had decided. It was better than staying here and doing nothing. Nothing except driving herself into greater madness.
* * *
The cave mouth stood unchanged in the new sunlight. Mokoya stopped Phoenix a dozen yields from the rock face and dismounted with a frown.
A barrier shimmered in the air across the length of the rock, a light fuzz that became apparent only from certain angles. When Mokoya pressed her fingers into its boundary, the air sparked and threads of slackcraft tightened around her hand. She pulled back before it could draw blood.
In her mindeye the barrier stood as an intricate tapestry, fine ropes from each of the five natures braided into astounding, geometric patterns. Tessellations built upon tessellations in a palimpsest of slackcraft. Unpicking it would take time and skill—if it was even possible. Mokoya didn’t know where to start.
So she started with brute force.
She tore into the center of the pattern, where a rosette of connections spread out into a five-pointed star. She hoped to sever the threads of Slack-connections, or simply pull them loose.
In the physical world, the barrier writhed and crackled. A riot of colors flashed in the air, perfuming it with the tang of burning metal.
The barrier held. The interlocked threads showed no sign of weakness. When Mokoya released her grip in exhaustion, they sprang back whole and unaffected.
Then the Slack puckered, and the woven threads sublimed into nothing. They did not break or unravel: they simply vanished, like ice held over a flame. The barrier slid out of existence, freeing the air on either side of it.
A small pop, a strange deformation in the Slack, and a gray-clad figure stood in front of her.
“Tensor Sanao Mokoya,” they said, their eyes wide and unblinking.
Mokoya’s cudgel sprang to life. “You.” She struck, sending a bolt in their direction.
A green hexagon flashed in front of the stranger. “Wait,” they gasped.
The hexagon hadn’t deflected the bolt: it had absorbed the energy instead. Its pattern in the Slack had the same complexity as the bigger barrier, appearing and vanishing in an instant. Mokoya had never seen anyone call up slackcraft that intricate so quickly. The cudgel stayed ready in her hand. “Who are you?”
“I am called Rider,” they said. Mokoya hadn’t heard wrong, then: they used the archaic, gender-neutral “I” that had died out centuries ago.
“I don’t want your name. Who sent you?”
“No one sent me. I am here of my own accord.”
“You’re lying.”
They stepped back in fear and stumbled as the sandy ground turned traitor. They had long, thin limbs like a Quarterlander and seemed unsteady on their feet. “Please,” they said, “I have no quarrel with you, Tensor Sanao—”
“Did the Protectorate send you?”
Fear overwhelmed their expression. A pop, a deformation in the Slack: they were gone.
“Cheebye!” Mokoya ran forward to the space formerly occupied by Rider. Her lip curled. Perking up, Phoenix fell in behind her, excited for another hunt. “Stay,” Mokoya snapped. “Stay out here. And wait.”
She sprinted into the cave mouth, which drilled through rock in a broad tunnel. Ahead was the promise of light, and running water. The passageway echoed with the sound of an angry naga, and wind gusted over her in waves, increasing in frequency. Wing beats.
Mokoya ran faster.
She burst into the cavern before the naga could take flight. This hollow in the sandstone was huge, a hundred yields wide and half as high. Sunlight punched through on the left where water cascaded in a shimmering curtain, fringed by brilliant splotches of colors: bloodreeds, orange lilies, clumps of cattails.
On the right was the naga, wings spread to the roof of the cavern, bellowing as Rider tried to coax it into flight. Mokoya tensed through earth-nature, the same trick she’d employed earlier, pulling the beast down with gravity. It folded with a groan, joints collapsing under pressure.
“Please stop,” Rider begged. “Don’t hurt her—she has done nothing.”
Mokoya blinked, releasing her hold on earth-nature. The stranger’s plea held a note of something she hadn’t expected: protectiveness. Vulnerability and fear, too—the entreaty of someone afraid of losing something precious. She kept her grip firm on her cudgel, but she let them dismount, dropping to the soft sand of the cavern.
The naga hissed and backed away, putting more space between itself and Mokoya. Rider sang, a keening note, as th
ey slid soothing hands over the creature’s neck and bearded head. The naga calmed, but its luminous eyes—pupils slitted through mint-green—remained fixed on Mokoya.
“Bramble remembers you from before,” Rider said. “It’s not a good memory. You traumatized her.”
“You’re not Protectorate,” Mokoya said.
“No.”
Things were falling into place. The odd style of slackcraft, the unusual physique, the heavy accent: Rider was a Quarterlander. Of course they had a naga. Of course they rode on it. They belonged to people who crossed the Demons’ Ocean in ships of shell and bone that sluiced beneath the untamable waves. Riding such a beast would be easy as crossing a bridge, unremarkable as eating rice. And of course they couldn’t be a Tensor. There’d never been a Quarterlander admitted into the Tensorate Academy. That would cause such a stir that even washerfolk in Katau Kebang would be gossiping about it.
Mokoya let her shoulders drop, but she continued to hold her cudgel like a weapon. “What are you doing here?”
Rider was about to answer when the naga growled. Behind them, Phoenix had edged into the cavern, feathers alert and erect, mouth open to show teeth.
“I told you to stay outside,” Mokoya scolded.
Phoenix hooted mournfully.
“Is this her?” Rider asked. When Mokoya frowned they clarified: “Your daughter.”
Mokoya exhaled very slowly, her organs curdling into tallow.
Rider said, to her silence, “There are rumors of the accident that killed your daughter. They say that when she died, you grafted her pattern in the Slack onto a young raptor. Is this her? She’s very large. And the pattern she makes is interesting.”
Their tone was untainted by judgment or condescension. If anything, they sounded curious.
She swallowed. And then she said, “Yes.”
The memory shivered through her: the smell of blood, burnt flesh, oily smoke; an impression of pain that was happening to some other body in some other world; the Slack shining wide and lucid around her; the glow of knots and threads that was Eien beginning to disintegrate; the movement she made pulling it to the nearest incandescence, tying it in place, tying it firm, so it wouldn’t be lost—
Focus. Focus. Look at the falling water. Look at the light refracted, dancing over the ground. Breathe.
A delicate expression—not quite a smile, not quite a look of curiosity—had come over Rider. They appeared to have forgotten Mokoya was there. One pop through the Slack, and they appeared before Phoenix, who reared back in terror.
“Hush,” Mokoya said, hurrying forward, but Rider remained perfectly still, their palms held out to Phoenix. The raptor hesitated, then lowered her snout and sniffed their hands, then their arms, their face, their neck.
Rider’s face lit up with wonder. “She is lovely.” They stroked the soft, pebbled skin of her nose, the boundary where flesh ceded to feather.
Mokoya started to breathe normally again. When Rider turned once more to look at her, she said, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“A question that cannot be answered simply. Come sit by me, Sanao Mokoya. We should talk.”
They smiled at her, and there was something oddly alluring in that. Something transient and precious, like the sun glowing across paving stones during the minute that it fell. Damned if Mokoya could put it into words that made more sense. Against her better judgment, she nodded.
* * *
“I was born in Katau Kebang, in Banturong, on the border of the Demons’ Ocean. My parents were merchants. But the doctors diagnosed an illness, a disease of the bones and joints. So my parents sold me to Quarterlanders, in hopes that my path to adulthood would be easier in the half gravity.”
The two of them sat cross-legged in the cavern, knee-to-knee, close enough that Mokoya could follow the easy rise and fall of Rider’s chest. They had a soft oval face of Kuanjin extraction, and the skin on their hands was translucent enough Mokoya could count the veins. But despite how sallow their face was, their eyes burned with a passion and intensity that snared the attention and refused to let it go.
“When I was twenty,” Rider said, “I took Bramble across the Demons’ Ocean. I wanted to find my family, the ones who had given me away. But I was told they had relocated from Banturong, and moved back to the capital city. So it was to the capital city that I traveled. Do you follow, Tensor Sanao?”
“Just call me Mokoya. Please.”
“Mokoya.” Rider sounded it in their mouth, as though testing out its fit. They smiled like it pleased them. “Mokoya.”
“So,” Mokoya said, “you went to Chengbee.”
“Yes. And in the capital I met a woman. Tan Khimyan.”
She frowned. “I know that name.”
“You should. She moved to Bataanar recently, as an advisor to Raja Choonghey. It was at his invitation. Mokoya.”
Yes—Akeha had mentioned her—that was why the name was familiar. “They’re friends?”
“Perhaps too shallow a description for their relationship, Mokoya. The two became close around Raja Ponchak’s death. When she was very ill, Ponchak went to the capital to seek treatment. That is how Khimyan and Choonghey met.”
A suspicious coincidence—or perhaps not a coincidence. She remembered Akeha referring to Tan Khimyan as an adversary. The adversary, even.
“Keep talking.”
As they had been speaking, Phoenix had started making curious overtures to the other beast in the cavern: creeping up, bumping her snout against Bramble’s shoulder, then scuttling away. The naga rumbled, equally curious and equally cautious.
Rider said, “It is necessary you know this, Mokoya. Khimyan and I were intimately involved. An arrangement that, in hindsight, was ill-advised on my part. But it allowed me to become privy to some of the things she did in secret.”
Mokoya raised an eyebrow, and Rider laughed, a sound like chimes on the wind. “Not of the sort you are imagining, Mokoya.”
“I’m sorry. Please continue.” She liked the way her name sounded in their mouth, the vowels round and gentle. She kept her hands pressed to her thighs, lest they betray her.
“Khimyan kept company with a group of Tensors who were conducting experiments on a clutch of captive young naga. They were inspired by what you achieved with Phoenix. They wanted to replicate it, surpass it even.”
A shiver passed through Mokoya, starting from the deep of her chest and spreading to her fingers and toes. “I’m glad my personal tragedy was so inspirational,” she said through her teeth.
Rider’s lips curved. Vindictiveness looked foreign on the soft lines of their face, yet the expression was also corrosively genuine. “I reported them to the Tensorate. It was the first thing I did when I escaped.”
“Escaped?”
They hesitated. “Khimyan . . . has ways of trapping people by her side. I left when she brought home another girl, another child who was unwell and would be entirely reliant upon her. I had realized that she would never change. She saw those around her as curiosities, not people.” They shifted their weight slightly, bumping their knees against Mokoya’s. “And I feared she might take Bramble for experiments. Mokoya.”
“That sounds like a terrible thing to be put through. My sympathies.”
They shrugged, a fluid motion of the shoulders. “Because of what I did, Khimyan was expelled from the Tensorate and had to leave the city. So there was some justice, after all.”
“So they were successful, these Tensors? With their experiment?”
Rider nodded.
Mokoya’s mind chugged through this information, trawling for the dregs of logic that had to be contained within. So the rumors the Machinists heard had been right. But again, not wholly. If this was the work of bored, arrogant Tensors, and not instructions from the Protector—
Phoenix barked: a child sound, short and high. When Mokoya looked, she was darting away from a swipe of Bramble’s clawed wings, head bobbing playfully. The naga grumbled, and its tail flick
ed, scales and spikes iridescent in the dimness.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Mokoya said.
“Which one, Mokoya?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Have I not given you enough clues to answer it yourself?”
“I want to hear you say it.”
Rider folded their hands in the loose gray of their lap, the shape of their wrist bones pulling at Mokoya’s attention. “You and I seek the same thing, Mokoya. The naga that these Tensors created. It has come to Bataanar and nests nearby, somewhere in the desert.”
Mokoya looked briefly at Bramble, then back at Rider. “There is a second naga?”
“Yes.”
“Who summons it?”
Rider tilted their head, frowning. Mokoya got more direct: “Is this part of a Protectorate plan to destroy Bataanar?”
“Ah.” Understanding brightened Rider’s expression. “You are a Machinist. Of course—that would be your primary interest. Yes.” Their gaze briefly flicked toward the light puncturing the cavern. “This is no Protectorate plot, Mokoya. Whatever the naga’s purpose here, it has nothing to do with crushing the Machinist movement.”
Rider spoke with a conviction that would have been suspicious, if what they were saying didn’t make so much sense. In Mokoya’s head, the abnormalities of this saga were rearranging themselves into a new shape, like a tangram. A vast, unwieldy political conspiracy folded into a petty, personal drama: not a plot to destroy a city, but the journey of an abandoned creature seeking its creator. “Is the city in danger?”
“I do not suspect so, Mokoya. There is little benefit to be gained from harming it.”
A capsule of relief burst over Mokoya, and she relaxed into its cooling embrace. Out of everything, she could at least set aside her worry about the immediate fate of Bataanar, that citadel of stone and white clay protecting her brother.
“Come back with me to camp,” she said. “You need to meet my crew leader.” And my husband. “We have a lot to discuss.”
“Do the rest of your crew also not sleep?”
Mokoya chuckled: she had forgotten the time. “Come tomorrow morning, then, at first sunrise.”