by Sarah Zettel
Under Mae Shan’s direction, Kyun lit a small fire. She chose not to notice how his hands shook as he started the small blaze. Her own were not as steady as they should have been for this most mundane of tasks. Chen cooked a measure of rice porridge in the pot he had had the foresight to bring. They ate in silence with Mae Shan spooning some of the porridge into Tsan Nu. The child swallowed, but did not wake.
Darkness settled close around them, allowing them to see other small campfires like distant candles dotting the hillsides. The sound of motion, voices, creaking axles, and feet on hard dirt drifted continuously up from the road, but the world still seemed too quiet, and the scent of burning still tainted the wind.
Mae Shan set the watches, and took the first one herself. The night passed slowly, divided into times of waking and times of sleeping with one arm draped across Tsan Nu, but the sounds of motion and the scent of burning remained constant.
In the morning they ate the remaining porridge cold and drank sparingly of their water. Tsan Nu still did not wake, but her breathing had slowed and deepened, and her color was better. Mae Shan shared out her burdens, except for her bow and arrows, to the trainees and slung Tsan Nu into her arms.
Then they walked on.
The hills around Tien were heavily terraced for the growing of rice and fruit. Mae Shan tried to make sure their passage disturbed as little as possible and forbid Chen and Kyun from raiding the orchards they passed, even when it was clear that the house had been thrown open and the occupants fled. It was also clear from the scuffs and the gouges in the paddies and the dirt, and the cores and seeds on the ground, that others had not been so scrupulous. Chen’s face went hard, but he obeyed. Quiet warning stirred in the back of Mae Shan’s mind, and as she led them on that day, she often glanced back, and more often than not she saw the two trainees whispering to each other. The warning grew stronger.
They spent their second night in such an abandoned house, because the woods were growing more crowded with people on the move and Mae Shan did not wish to risk another night with nothing at their backs. Tsan Nu was able to sit up then and take a little water and some dried fish with her rice porridge, although she nodded off again with her bowl halfway to her mouth.
On the third day Tsan Nu was able to walk a short distance on her own. They settled in another farmhouse, this one a little less ransacked than the first. Chen found a full cellar with salt fish and bread still good. By now their own supplies were all but gone, so she permitted him to take enough for another three days. In the empty bedroom, she opened her private purse and tucked one of her few coins under the mattress where hopefully the owners of the house would find it upon their return. Not to do so would be theft and a direct breaking of her oaths as a soldier of the Heart. It was by small derelictions that the greater came into being, said her trainer, and she believed it. She had to. It was all she had at the moment.
But it did raise the question of what to do with the trainees. Mae Shan stared at the faint coals they’d carefully banked in the cottage hearth. They were growing discontent with her insistence on maintaining discipline. The last thing she needed at this time was a confrontation with the boys, a confrontation she was sure to lose, because they were realizing they had few reasons left to obey her.
She picked herself up and stood in the scarred and splintered threshold of the farmhouse door. In the red dawn, she took in the lay of the land. Then she sat down and counted four of the six remaining coins out of her purse.
Coins in hand, she stepped around Tsan Nu, and shook the trainees awake where they slept in the workroom by the back door. As they blinked their eyes open, she gestured to them to keep silent. Their faces were sullen and sleepy as she led them outside. The wind was freshening, but there was scarcely any ash in it this morning, and Mae Shan felt the relief of just being able to breathe.
She pointed between two terraced hills to the northwest. The mountains rose blue and misty in the distance behind them.
“Over those hills is the town of Nhi Tao. It’s no more than half a day’s good march. The captain of the city guard there is named Kein. Give him my name and tell him I sent you to shore up his garrison.” Kein would understand she truly sent the boys to him for safekeeping. He had always understood what she truly meant. For a moment, Mae Shan imagined collapsing into his arms and being cradled like a child while she wept for all she had seen. Perhaps one day.
She held out two coins each to Chen and Kyun. “This is all I have to give you, apart from my thanks for your aid to my mistress.”
The trainees stared at one another, and then slowly accepted the coins.
“Are you certain, Lieutenant?” said Chen, tucking his meager pay into his sleeve. “We are ready to accompany you the rest of your way.”
Mae Shan would have found that statement more convincing if he had not taken the coins first, but still, it was a show of courage.
“My mistress’s way takes us to the barbarian lands, and I do not know how long we may be gone. Hung-Tse will need all her sons, and most especially her soldiers in the coming days. I cannot take you away from her.” She gave them a brief smile that she did not feel. “Get your gear and go. Remember, the man you want is Kein.”
Chen looked at Kyun, who nodded. The boys snapped to attention, folded their hands in front of them in formal salute, and bowed crisply to her. She bowed in return and they went back inside to collect their things. Mae Shan made a circuit of the house, assuring herself that no one still on the road was coming too close to “their” house, and that no one was watching what was happening here.
She went back in the front door and sat beside sleeping Tsan Nu with her back toward the hearth and her face toward the door. She twisted her sigil ring on her finger and tried hard not to feel she had just cut her last tie to the Heart of the World.
I will return. I will, and I will find my family and I will help rebuild, and Wei Lin will have a spirit tablet in the temple of the Goddess of Mercy and a monk to say all the proper prayers.
She repeated that thought to herself until she found the strength to believe it.
When Tsan Nu woke, she was well enough to be unhappy. She hunched in front of the fire, staring hungrily at the porridge Mae Shan cooked with some of the salt fish from the cellar.
“How much farther, Mae Shan?”
Mae Shan considered. “A day’s walk, maybe two.” They had to bypass Nhi Tao and head downhill to the river.
“Couldn’t someone give us a ride in a cart?”
“Not over these hills, mistress.”
“We need my father. He’d find a way to take us there in a heartbeat.”
“I have no doubt, mistress. Unfortunately, we cannot bring him by wishing …” But before Mae Shan finished the sentence, she straightened up, remembering who she was talking to. “Can you, mistress?”
“He gave me a spell,” said Tsan Nu. “He said that I was to use it if things went badly for me in the Heart of the World.”
And they were not going badly enough before this? Mae Shan wondered incredulously at the logic of the child. She would not think to call her father while she was escaping from a burning city, but would to escape a pair of sore feet?
Tsan Nu’s father was a powerful sorcerer. How quickly could he cross the Silent Lands to come to her? To take her safe away to the northlands and let Mae Shan look after herself? She would be released from her oath then, having fulfilled her assigned duty. She could make her way across country, find her parents and her siblings and help them through what was to come.
“Are you sure you can do this, mistress?” she asked warily. “You are still weak from your last working.”
In answer, Tsan Nu pulled off her slipper, one of the pair she had risked the fire to retrieve. Now Mae Shan could see a small tear in the lining. Tsan Nu stuck two fingers into the tear and pulled out a circle of braided cloth, black, green, blue, and red.
Tsan Nu held up the amulet for her guard’s inspection. “This is different
than before,” she assured Mae Shan. “My father did the working already, I just have to set it into motion. It will take very little magic from me.”
Mae Shan swallowed, unlooked-for hope forming inside her. “Then work your spell, mistress, I will keep watch.”
“I will need a bowl of water.”
Mae Shan wiped the cooking pot clean, filled it from one of the water bottles, and set it before Tsan Nu. The child held up the braided circle, and started to work at the knot that held its complex weaving closed. As she did, she began to speak, but the words sounded strange. They were not the singsong of the spell tongue she had used before. These words were harsh and clipped. They had the rhythm of the drum rather than the zither. Mae Shan realized she must be speaking one of the northern tongues to work this northern spell.
Mae Shan turned her attention to the house door. Come for your daughter, Master Kalami, I pray you, she entreated silently. Let me give over the care of your family so I may go aid in the care of mine.
Kalami ran through the Shifting Lands for a long time, for a short time, for no time at all. He held tight to the name he sought as he ran through the thick forest of evergreen trees, his footsteps rustling and crackling on the carpet of needles underfoot. The trees whispered and creaked as their branches lifted to move themselves from his passage. Eyes watched him, he knew that, but he was permitted to pass, so they were not the Vixen’s eyes and that was all that mattered.
He caught sight of a birch tree, stark, white, and incongruous among the pines. Then there was another, then a grove of them, and hope leapt in him and sped his feet and tightened his thoughts. He was near.
A small stream trickled across his path. He vaulted over it. An ancient birch, craggy from the weight of its years, raised its branches, whipping them back and forth, into his eyes, against his back. But Kalami had known far worse pain and greater fear than this, and although he slowed his pace, he did not stop.
Beyond the birch waited a fence. Human bones tied with leather and sinews had been used to shore up the wooden staves. Kalami had thought now that he was dead such a sight could have no terror for him, but as he approached the fence, he found he had been wrong, and he trembled. And the fence was nothing compared to what walked in the dirt yard beyond it. The house Ishbushka turned slowly on great, taloned legs. He had stood here before, but now he heard the grating as its claws scraped the ground, the screech as they scraped against stone, its muscle creaking like timber. The obscene dwelling measured its restless pace by its fearful mistress’s will, allowing her to see all the worlds from its windows if she so wished.
A sagging gate hung between two fence posts. It was shut tight, and Kalami reached out tentatively to push it open. But before he could touch it, a black blur leapt up onto the right-hand gatepost. He started backward, and then realized it was nothing more or less than a black cat with a white blaze on its chest. The creature regarded him steadily and with intelligent recognition in its eyes. Kalami was not surprised. He had met this cat before. What did surprise him was the wave of cold he felt wash over him. It came from the animal’s bright gaze, from the bones of the fence, from Ishbushka itself. How could cold touch him as he was? But it did, that cold turned his mind thick and heavy.
Drawing his composure together, he reverenced politely in the courtly Isavaltan style.
“And what brings the great sorcerer of Tuukos to this house?” the cat inquired.
“I am come to seek an audience with your mistress,” Kalami said as he straightened.
The cat tucked all four of its legs up under itself, settling comfortably onto the post. “Why should she grant such an audience?”
“I have power I would place in her service.”
“You are dead,” said the cat flatly, twitching its tail. Cold emanated from its voice, from the whole of its being. “You are nothing beyond the boundaries of this place. If you had power she wanted, she would have taken it by now.”
The cold and the paralysis it brought threatened to overwhelm Kalami. He had one last cast.
“The Vixen claims me for her own. Perhaps that fact would be of interest.”
“Ah!” The cat’s yellow eyes gleamed and the cold subsided just a little. Kalami felt his mind clear again. “Now you have said it. Now you understand your place.” The cat stretched out its hind leg and began washing it lazily. “If you step through the gate, she will grant you audience.” The cat stopped washing and regarded him again, this time with hunger in its eyes. “And perhaps more than that.”
The gate opened with a long shriek. Beyond it waited two huge, black mastiffs, their eyes as awake and intelligent as the cat’s. Cold and weak, Kalami went through. As he crossed the line of the bone fence, the voices that were the constant background of his journey fell silent. Kalami felt light, alone, and small, as if he were a moth or a feather and that any wind might blow him away. Ahead of him waited Baba Yaga’s fearful dwelling. The dogs stalked beside him, their ears alert, but for what he did not know. One scratched at the dirt. In response, Ishbushka knelt, and its door hissed as it fell open. Still escorted by the mastiffs, Kalami mounted the steps that creaked and groaned underneath him, although he could not feel the touch of the boards.
Inside Ishbushka’s single room, built of bone and hung with bone, Baba Yaga worked at her loom. A bright fire burned in her hearth of skulls. The flicker of the flame drew his gaze and for a moment he saw in there a palace with a golden tower at its center. Saffron walls protected its lovely gardens and wide stone court. Voices rose whispering from the flames, and Kalami drew back. The Heart of the World gleamed in Baba Yaga’s hearth, and in a moment it was gone.
“So,” said the Old Witch, looking up from her work with black eyes that glittered in the firelight. “You would come to me?”
Kalami tried to pull his wits together. He had faced Baba Yaga in life. He knew her ways. He was still a sorcerer. He still had his powers and his learning.
“I do, mistress. I am …”
“Would I have admitted you, little spirit, if I did not know you?” Her bone-thin finger traced the pattern of her macabre weaving. “You are Valin Kalami. You were trapped by the Vixen while you were yet living, and now you come to me.”
“Because it is only you who are great enough to shelter me from her.” Kalami reverenced deeply. “You are the only one she cannot deceive.”
“You seek to flatter me,” said Baba Yaga. “You will not do so by speaking such simple truths.”
“I seek shelter,” said Kalami. “In return I offer my service.”
“You are dead,” said the Old Witch bluntly. “You have no service to offer, only self.”
Kalami thought of the lokai, of the horror of the hunt, and of knowing that he would be caught, and wrenched in two, set to run and caught again. “Then I offer myself.”
Baba Yaga’s cold eyes gleamed and she clacked her iron teeth. “I am not as your other mistress, and this is not as your life. You seek to barter, and think you may yet escape any bargain that you make. You are a fool, little ghost, without blessing or true understanding.”
Kalami felt how small he was, how light and fragile, as if he were only a dream, or a memory, which, in truth, he was. He could drift away and be caught on a thorn like a cobweb.
But Baba Yaga laid her finger again on her cloth of sinews and hair and bared her teeth at what she saw there.
“Your daughter calls you.”
Kalami started. He thought to say the child’s name, and but held his peace.
Baba Yaga’s gaze warmed slightly with something like approval. “She calls her father for succor, for the Heart of the World has burned down.”
She was using the amulet he left her. He should feel it, tugging at his mind, opening his inward senses. But he felt nothing at all. He was beyond all such bindings.
Baba Yaga considered for a moment. Kalami sensed the currents of the room shift and slip, as if the world around him was being woven. He glanced at the fire and again saw t
he Heart of the World in its depths. A seer had once told him that all fallen things belong to the Old Witch. He had not known until now what that truly meant.
“You will answer your daughter,” Baba Yaga said. “I will permit it.”
“Thank you, mistress.” Anna, Tsan Nu, the daughter of his blood, his sorcerous child. There were ties between the two of them that might save him yet. It was strange that he had not thought of her before. Truly he was not what he had been. Not yet.
Again the witch clacked her iron teeth. “You should give thanks to Bridget Lederle for this. Without her intervention, even the call of blood could not have reached you.
“Return to the river, speak with your child. Do this and you will find the shelter you seek, but do not forget the words you have spoken here.”
Kalami wanted to say “I never could,” but he found he feared the response, so instead he reverenced and moved toward the door. The dogs stood aside to let him pass. He traveled down Ishbushka’s rickety steps, across the yard and to the bone fence. He passed through the gate under the watchful eyes of the cat, and became at once immersed in the ocean of noise. The birch drew back its branches for him, revealing the brown river that had been so far away before he entered Ishbushka.
Kalami stared out at the surface of the rushing water, hearing in its chatter and song all the noise of life and wondering when it was he had died. Anger ran through him as strong as the current of the river before him. He did not know what to do, what he was or what he would become, and his ignorance infuriated him.
He also did not know what would happen next.
Then, the water roiled, the murmur of the water and the roar of the voices around him faded, and he heard one clear word.
“Father.”
Tsan Nu stared into the pot of water. It was so hard and so long. She had never felt her magics reach so far. She had told Mae Shan this working would take little effort from her, but that was not the entire truth. This particular amulet’s spell would use her own magic, drawing it out until it touched her father, as easily as if she reached out her hand to him.