Raising Fire

by James Bennett

  I have known him all my life. My master. My friend. The understanding pained her. And yet I don’t know him at all …

  He looked ill, Jia decided. Under all his frippery, the stab at sophistication, he looked ill. Glamour or no, he couldn’t hide the sweat that glistened on his brow, the tremble of his lips, the suppressed strain. Nor the stink of magic, emanating no doubt from the artefact he cradled in the crook of one elbow, the fragment of the mnemonic harp. She supposed the fragment was even older than he was, though she had no way of knowing that. The ancient piece, one of three in the care of the Hidden Court, was the pillar of the instrument, forged to resemble the head and forelegs of a horse—or a creature very much like a horse—a marvel of ivory and silver, wrought with a craft unknown to the world today. From a short distance, Jia noticed how the fragment glimmered and gleamed just like its bearer, the yard-long conical spar ending in a point as sharp as her fear.

  “As a representative of the Curia Occultus,” she reminded him, “you were charged to look after your piece of the harp. Not to use it.”

  “As ever, you see the truth of things,” he said. He seemed too weary to argue, whatever invocations she’d disturbed with her arrival taking their toll on him, the insidious grip of magic. “There were three of us, weren’t there? In the beginning? The Guild of the Broken Lance. The Whispering Chapter. And me, the envoy extraordinary. This was all my doing, all of it. My grand scheme.” He sighed, a sound like the wind swirling in the spire above. “Each of us swore to guard a fragment of the harp for as long as the Lore stood. But like the harp, the Hidden Court has come undone, the old order unmade. And I have been the … the …” He paused, searching for the word. “Hausfrau, ja? Looking after old silver and old glass. Discarded, dormant. Or so everybody thought.”

  At the words old glass, an unbidden shiver ran up her spine, her skin prickling with a guilty memory. She guessed that Von Hart knew that, choosing his words well. Centuries ago, he had come to commence her education in Xanadu, teaching her all about the Empire, the Pact, the lands beyond the sea, the wars between men. In the mist-shrouded mountains, he had trained her in the arts of wushu, watching her harden into a warrior, a wandering monk, sworn to uphold the laws of the realm. To uphold the Lore, come what may. Later, their relationship had soured, as all the world had soured, as magic had soured, and she remembered that there had been a price for his wisdom. For his friendship. Always, always a price.

  “I have seen much. Sacrifice, compromise, the matter of the Pact. But justice?” He left the answer unspoken, like a flake of ash hanging in the air. “Jia, the founding of the Lore, the slumber of the Remnants … I made all my oaths in blindness. I stepped down from the Curia Occultus and turned my back on all that I am. I didn’t see that I brought about our undoing, our own slow death. For Remnants and humans alike. You see, to extinguish magic is to extinguish the soul of the world. We sleep as the world dies. In silver, in glass, I have seen the path to our return. And the means of our awakening.”

  Yes, he had shown her in the first place, hadn’t he? His comforting lie. His choice. In that moment, Jia knew with an insight as deep as her Remnant nature that this was all part of the same thread, the same scheme. None of this, his arrival in Xanadu, his lessons on Mount Song, his appearance in Humen and her coming here, was happening by accident. All of it was a game. A gamble. Roulette. A game, she now realised, that he had been playing for centuries.

  “The harp. You speak of the harp.”

  “Twice forged and twice broken. Third time’s the charm, isn’t that what they say?”

  Jia could feel her blood pulsing in her head, an increasing throb of alarm.

  “This is what you meant by your tale of the mirror children, isn’t it?” Curse him. Does he ever talk in a straightforward manner, free of metaphor and half-truths? “We Remnants are trapped in the mirror. The Lore is the glass you would have us break.”

  With a shudder, she conjured up his exact words.

  One day, humans will hear the clatter of weapons deep, deep in the mirror. The Ghost Emperor will stir, monstrous and pale, his mammoth limbs swimming through the darkness towards the tempting light of earth …

  “You would go raising fire,” she said. “You would start a war.”

  Von Hart rolled his eyes. “Such drama, Jia. Must we?”

  She took a step forward, shaking her fists up at him.

  “You were my master. My friend.” But this didn’t quite cover it, and her heart threatened to burst, forcing her words into a plea. “Why? Why have you done this?”

  But he had already told her.

  A worm gnaws at the heart of things … I believed the Pact could save us …

  “You lied to me.” She pressed her deepest of wounds upon him. “For years, you lied.”

  “Well, you said you came here for the truth. And the truth you shall have.” He broke her gaze to stare into the shadows, perhaps counting the cost of the past. “I made a mistake, long ago. I forged something that I shouldn’t have forged. And I chained something that I shouldn’t have chained. How was I to know how the ages would turn? How the circles of protection would weaken, magic turning sour? But I am not without my wits, Jia. Am I not Fay, despite my failings?” He coughed behind his hand, a theatrical gesture, and corrected himself. “Few as they are, anyway.”

  “You have broken the Lore,” she told him. “The Pact we all signed.”

  “Ja.”

  “And what else? What else, traitor?” She spat the word out. “What else did your precious wits have you do?”

  Von Hart smiled, moonlight on a winter lake.

  “Why, she is standing here before me, Daughter of Empires. Let’s call her my get-out clause.”

  Cold flooded her veins, her inner wounds stinging in the knowledge that he hadn’t just betrayed her, breaking the Lore under which they both lived; he had also shaped her. Like molten ore, he had scooped her up in the gardens of Xanadu, a child seething with loss. On Mount Song, he had tempered her into a sword and then left her to rust in the mist, returning years later in the Opium Wars merely to test her mettle. And here he stood, in this nameless temple, poised to challenge her to the hilt …

  Just like the harp, he had forged her. Made her.

  “Blast you, fairy,” she told him. “You won’t use me like some blunt blade.”

  “Oh no, liebling,” he replied. “With you I have fashioned a key.”

  With this, Von Hart lifted the fragment of the harp above his head, the silvery light illuminating the shadows.

  It was then that Jia noticed the bulky object resting further back on the dais. The large angular shape lurked there, watchful somehow, and the hairs tingled up on her neck, a sensation that had as much to do with dread as it did with longing.

  The Eight Hand Mirror!

  As she drew closer to the dais, the mirror became clearer, the gloom in the temple swimming in and out. Breathless, her heart leaping in her breast, she came to a halt at the bottom of the steps, looking up at the dark and achingly familiar surface, Von Hart a pale flame flickering at the edges of her vision, forgotten for now. To all intents and purposes the ancient artefact was simply a large octagonal mirror on a stand, both the frame and the glass covered in dust. Even from several feet away, a coldness was pressing on her cheeks, numbing her flesh. She’d felt this kind of coldness before, this dead weight, this nothingness … and she had risked the sensation time and again just in order to see …

  She was at the top of the steps before she realised she was climbing them. Von Hart drew back, letting her proceed past him, as though the shadows on the dais were reeling her in, drawing her towards the glass. Two, three steps away from it, she drew to a halt, the chunky octagonal frame stretching over her head, a giant guardian. The glass, as usual, was black, jet black. The darkness in the frame appeared to lack texture of any kind, resembling a … a space. An empty space. And, as usual, the glass was reflecting nothing—nothing living, anyway—absorbing the vague o
utline of shapes behind her, the ruined guts of the temple. Not Von Hart. Not her. The mirror had erased her, rejecting or ignoring her physical presence.

  Finally, Jia drew in a breath, dust swirling into her lungs. How long had it been since she’d looked in the mirror? Six hundred, seven hundred years … ?

  Like a swimmer testing the water, her fingertips stretched out, hesitant, hungry, to touch the glass …

  Thud.

  Something large and pale smacked against the other side of the glass. Startled, Jia leapt back, her fingers snapping into a fist. Eyes wide, she took in the coiling, vaporous appendage as it withdrew from the glass, sinking back into shadow. But she had seen the vast tentacle, the many slick and questing suckers. It belonged to some gargantuan creature, some half-glimpsed behemoth that she recognised from nightmares, even as her guts clenched in shock. She had caught the hint of a bulbous eye, the colour of old piano keys, and tendrils that might have been follicles or antennae, weaving, insectile in the dark. The intimation of some shining maw, a gruesomely elegant visor of bone, receded into the depths that held it, which, although she had never seen the void before, she knew well enough as the gulf of the nether. Lightless. Endless. It was as though Von Hart had trapped a giant squid in a tank, except she knew that the Eight Hand Mirror, for all its mystery, was just that—a mirror. The frame was barely a foot thick. And she knew that the back of it was flat.

  “You see him, don’t you?” Von Hart spoke across the ice of her alarm. “The Ghost Emperor shows his teeth.”

  She tore her gaze from the mirror, turning to face him, her eyes narrow chips of jade.

  “Ghosts?”

  “They gather here at the door to Creation,” he told her. “Converging. Joining. Becoming one.” Gently he lowered the fragment in his hand, the shadows settling around them. “A king among phantoms, drawn by the souring of magic and the strumming of the harp.”

  “Lurkers.” Her throat was dry and she could barely muster a rebuke at the horror he’d shown her, the depth of his Lore-breaking. “You rouse a dragon and now you’re stirring up this … abomination? You’ll bring about the death of us all.”

  “Death comes regardless,” he said.

  In her mind, Jia could feel the roulette ball, spinning and dancing around his wheel, ready to fall into one of the pockets, each number spelling disaster. And he was playing her too, she knew. Guiding her. Summoning her here …

  But he was wrong. As ever, she was a servant of justice. A servant of the truth. He had only proved himself a servant of deceit.

  Thinking this, she drew herself to her full height.

  “I am Jia Jing, the appointed judge of the court of Kublai Khan, Guardian of the East, Keeper of the Lore. And you are no longer my master.”

  It was hard to go on. Grief threatened to choke her.

  Von Hart, however, was not shaken.

  “No one is your master, Jia. The Age of Empires is over. Now who will you serve?”

  With a whisper of steel, her butterfly swords were in her hands. The sharply edged blades seemed to reflect the eight hundred years of their acquaintance, everything that he had taught her, spiralling off into the past. A bond she stood poised to sever.

  “Who if not yourself?”

  “I serve the Lore. The Lore protects us.”

  “Oh Jia,” he breathed as she raised the swords, striding towards him. “Who if not your own kind?”

  Von Hart drew back as she came near, every bit the maestro revealing a trick at the end of his show. She meant to subdue him, if she could—silence him if necessary. Anything to shut out his voice, the wheeling hints and references that were now consolidating into a whole like the teeth of a key fitting into a lock. A swirl of shadow at the corner of her eye arrested her and she slowed, her head turning, taking in the Eight Hand Mirror.

  With her proximity, the glass was clearing. Each receding shadow stole a sliver of her rage, replacing it with longing. She came to a halt, tracing arcs in the dust as she spun towards the mirror, a compass magnetised by need.

  How long has it been?

  The octagonal frame yawned around her, no longer a window onto a void, but an underground cave, a darkened shore beside a sunless sea, miles under the northern plains.

  Jia’s breath frosted the glass as she drew close, her nose all but touching the mirror. Like a woman in a dream, she sheathed her swords, her hands rising to press against the surface before her, the heat of her yearning meeting ice. The sea wind howled through the temple, the triumph of ghosts. Upon sight of the vision in the mirror, a storm was gathering in her breast, hurling leaves of memory around her mind.

  Since the end of the Opium Wars, Jia had been wandering, out in the wilds. As Von Hart had said, the Age of Empires was over, the Qing Dynasty crumbling under the weight of the modern world. As the twentieth century dawned, she had stood in a circle of grass on the plains and lamented the bones of Xanadu, the palace long since eroded into lumps in the ground, grassy and unremarkable. There she had paid her respects to her parents, Ziyou and Ye, sleeping somewhere under her feet. She’d wondered if the herd still galloped in dreams, but she didn’t linger long. The faded scar of the Silk Road, whence a dusty Italian merchant had come with tales of progress and glory and sleep, had carried her west into the desert. From the ruined cities in the Taklamakan, their crumbling walls shored up by dunes, their watchtowers home to buzzards and the wind, she had walked, galloped and trudged south to Tiger Leaping Gorge, the Jinsha River snaking far below through one of the deepest canyons in the world. Fifty-odd years had passed, vanishing in the dust of her trail. In Yunnan, she scaled mountains and ran through forests, counting the dwindling numbers of elephant, tiger and monkey, sharing meat and fruit with each—and their sense of impending doom. If even the beasts indigenous to earth stood no chance of survival, what hope was there for her? With these thoughts heavy on her mind, she passed over many bridges and prayed in many temples, beseeching gods of justice and mercy as she made her way across the land. Down the long road of history Jia walked, through the Great Leap, the red harvest of dust and death, and through the rise of the Republic. And on and on into the new century, into the modern age.

  And when at last she headed north and returned to Beijing, she found a city rising in neon and smog, a miasma obscuring the stars. A new world had risen and it cared nothing for the spirit of the Ancient Country or the children of the Xian. For a century and more she had gone in search of old Zhongguo. She had found only ghosts.

  Then, yesterday, the Zhoukoudian hills had started to shake, shattering her reverie.

  And she had remembered.

  Not far from here … there stands an old temple …

  Grim-faced, she had turned her eyes to the south.

  Now she stood, the cold glass burning her palms, before the Eight Hand Mirror.

  Jia blinked away tears, the cavern in the mirror blurring. In a heartbeat, all her memories came galloping across time as though through the summer dust on the northern plains. The haze parted and she could see them, gazing into the space under that distant and longed-for earth, the cavern carved out for her parents, her herd, by an alien song. The two equine figures lay on the shore beside the underground lake, a soft mound of green hide and golden hooves glimmering in the darkness, locked together in perpetual sleep. Her father, Ziyou, rested his noble horned head against her mother’s neck. Ye reclined against his body, her horn bowed to the cavern floor, yielding to dreams, enchanted. Everything was as it had been seven hundred years ago—and yet everything was different.

  “No,” she said. “It cannot be.”

  Jia choked, stumbling towards the glass. Her thoughts spun in a whirlpool, sucking her down into all those yesterdays, into the eye of the storm. For a moment, she was a girl again, sitting on the palace steps in the Great Khan’s garden, longing for her parents, for the comfort of her slumbering herd. And wasn’t this the seed of her sorrow, the restless embryo growing inside her, ripening over the years and bi
rthing doubt? As she looked into the mirror, uncertainty clawed at her heart. That all the things she believed in, her oaths to empire after empire, the Pact and the Lore, should crumble under such a childish need, such a juvenile grievance. It didn’t seem right to her. It didn’t seem fair. And yet …

  “Now,” Von Hart said, from somewhere behind her. “At last, you open your eyes. You look through the glass and see the bitterest truth.”

  In the glass, Jia could see Ziyou and Ye, the patchy state of their pelts, silk faded to a stagnant green. With the keen eyes of pain, she could make out the sheen of her parents’ hooves, dull, dusty and cracked. The way their tongues lolled from their mouths, dry and sickly-looking. Worst of all, she could see their ribs, stark through their wasted skin, their bellies rising and falling in weak undulations. The two sin-you were struggling for breath.

  And here was another ghost, whispering to her from a distant childhood. The ghost of her heart’s desire.

  You can look again, if you wish. Or you can walk away, believing whatever you want to believe. Believing that you have seen an old mirror, a fairy’s fancy. Nothing more.

  Across the years, he had told her just what she had chosen.

  You can look into a mirror and see what you want to see. Yet you ignore what’s sitting right under your nose.

  There was no mistaking it. Jia could see the truth before her, stripped of illusion and sharpened by despair.

  Her parents, Ziyou and Ye, were dying.

  Echoes snapped across the dais, cantillating into the temple. The ground shuddered and groaned under her feet, strengthening tremors sending dust and debris rattling from the crumbled spire above. Like ice in the last days of winter, the mirror was cracking under her hands. Fault lines popped and buckled across the surface, zigzagging from her spread palms out to the edges of the frame. In no time at all, a cobweb of fissures covered the mirror, the reflection distorting, the cavern, her parents, gone. Only darkness lay beyond, the black flood of the nether held back by a splintering dam of glass.