by Alec Hutson
Prince Ma rubbed unconsciously at his neck. “Last night was the first time for me. It’s the child from the cave.”
“I know.”
“It asked . . . it asked that I let it out. It said it is cold. And that there are other children in there. But nothing else. No monster. No demon. Just the spirits of small children, suffering in the darkness.”
Jhenna could barely breathe. “What will you do, my prince?”
“I must do something!” he cried, his voice cracking. “What kind of emperor would allow this to happen to those he has sworn under Heaven to protect?” He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “Today I went to the red tower. I have known the Autumn Warlock for my entire life. He pulled me from my mother. He has tutored me on how to be a just ruler, teaching me of the Seven Virtues, the Path, the Precepts of the Enlightened. I asked him how the Shan can allow such evil.”
“What did he say?” Jhenna whispered.
“He said that this was one of the oldest traditions in our people’s history. The sacrifices have occurred for a thousand years. But then he admitted something else.” Anger twisted the prince’s face. “He admitted that before, it was not children who were killed. He said that once it was the Winter Warlock whose lifeblood was drained upon that rock. That had always been the way. But Lo Jin changed that when he donned the white robes seventy years ago. He was a young man – the other three warlocks had died during the wars when the hordes boiled out of the Burning Lands. He did not want to be slain when next the earth shook or the sky wept blood, so he convinced the three new warlocks to accept a change to the ancient tradition. Now a child of great sorcerous ability would be murdered and placed beyond the door as an offering.”
“So it should have been him,” she said softly. The evil of it all – to change places with an innocent child – chilled her. “Will you ask your father to reinstate the old way?”
Prince Ma nodded. “Yes. But first I must make good on a promise I made last night.”
“What was that?” Jhenna asked, though she knew already.
“I am going to open the door.”
Her horse tossed its head and whickered, its breath pluming in the early morning chill. Jhenna leaned forward and patted Windrunner’s side, murmuring nonsense words to try and soothe her stallion. Usually when she slipped from the stables before the sun had fully risen, it meant a fierce ride on the fields reserved for the imperial family, as if she and Windrunner were back on the steppes racing her cousins in the long grass.
But today was different. They had leaped the low fence that fringed the paddock and made their way to the great arrow-straight northern road. She’d brought a simple gray cloak to hide her rich vestments, and had pulled up the cowl so that none of the farmers driving their animals toward the city would notice that she was not Shan. Now she waited on a knoll overlooking the road, Windrunner stamping his hooves impatiently, no doubt feeling cheated of his morning run.
She recognized the prince from a distance, galloping along the road as if a pack of bloodwolves were nipping at his heels. He turned his horse from the road as he came closer and reined up beside her.
“You should return to the palace.”
Jhenna stuck her chin out and met his eyes brazenly. Mounted on her horse, she felt like the old Jhenna, the girl who had challenged the boys to archery contests and snuck away to hunt the white antelope during the Whelming Time. Not the meek imperial consort who bowed and scraped and tried her best to avoid being noticed. “I saw the ghost as well. I want to help him.”
He tried to match her gaze, but finally looked away, sighing. “Very well. Just know that even my life may be forfeit for doing this.”
“If you think that, we’ll keep on riding after we open the door. We’ll ride to the shore of the bitter sea, or to the great white waste, or to the Burning Lands. Shan is the greatest empire in the world, but it is not endless.”
The prince reached out and gently touched her hand. “Exile would not be so terrible if you were by my side.”
Jhenna wanted to tug down her cowl to hide her blush. “How will you open the door?”
Prince Ma pulled his saddlebag up into his lap and untied the drawstring. “There are two doors, remember? I visited the red tower this morning and took this” – he gestured at something lashed to the side of his horse, the same twisted black staff the Winter Warlock had used to open the first stone door – “and this.” He withdrew from the bag a key of heavy black iron. “This is for the inner sanctum. I saw it hanging in the tower before in a place of honor, and never knew what it was until the sorcerers used it in the cave.”
“The staff will work for you?”
The prince nodded. “Bae Fan told me when I spoke with him yesterday that the door will open for anyone, so long as they strike the stone with the staff of the Winter Warlock. I suppose that harkens back to the days when the warlocks themselves were sacrificed.” He cast a quick glance over his shoulder, at the distant peaked roofs of Lianjing and the red towers of the Shan sorcerers rising behind them. “Come, Consort Jhenna. We should hurry.”
They rode north along the imperial road, keeping a good pace, though not one that would exhaust their horses. The last time, this journey had taken more than half a day, but since they were mounted and without those trundling wagons, Jhenna expected to reach Sleeping Dragon Valley soon after noon. They traded stories as they rode, tales of growing up on the steppes and in the court: Jhenna told the prince of the trials of strength that the tribes conducted every summer solstice, and how she had disguised herself as a boy one year and won a tiger claw necklace in the archery competition. In return, he spoke of his proudest moments as a child, most of which involved reciting poetry and the wisdom of ancient sages flawlessly.
When the sun had climbed high overhead, Prince Ma paused as they crested a hill and surveyed the road they had taken. His face tightened, and with a sinking feeling in her stomach, Jhenna followed his gaze. A thread of horsemen could just be glimpsed in the distance, and her suspicions were confirmed when something they were wearing glinted.
“Who are they?” she asked the prince.
He frowned. “Dragonhelms, almost certainly. My father wouldn’t entrust this task to regular soldiers.”
“Do you think the warlocks are with them?”
“Yes.”
“What should we do?”
The prince wheeled his horse around and kicked it into a canter. “We ride!”
By the time they reached the edge of the valley the horsemen had closed the gap, but were not yet within arrow range. Jhenna could see them more clearly – her mother had always said she had eyes like a hawk – and the prince’s guess had been correct: their pursuers wore scale armor that rippled in the light, and their plumed helms were wrought into the shape of roaring dragons, their faces recessed within the open jaws.
Prince Ma and Jhenna slid from their horses and led them carefully down the steep descent into the forest. Her heart seized in her chest several times when a hoof skittered on the loose scree, but the Great Sky had blessed them this day, and they reached the bottom safely. The forest’s ground was equally treacherous, with the thick moss hiding deep divots that could easily break a horse’s leg, but Prince Ma insisted that they push on quickly, so Jhenna clung to her stallion’s back as they hurtled through the woods, praying that their luck would continue.
“How do you know which way to go?”
The prince paused their headlong flight, searching the ground for something. “Look!” he said, pointing at what seemed to her to be just more moss. “I’ve been on enough hunts to know how to track a fawn in the forest. Forty city-Shan bumbling about is easy enough.”
Yet despite this claim, it took the prince several long moments to decide which way they should go. He leaned forward in his saddle, his brow furrowed and his hands clutching at the reins. “There’s almost too many
of them,” he said softly. “And they don’t move as one. It’s like trying to follow a herd of cats.”
Distant noises drifted through the woods. “We have to hurry,” she said, glancing behind her and peering through the endless rows of white trunks for their pursuers.
“This way,” the prince said with what sounded like forced confidence, and he kicked his horse ahead. She plunged after him, branches clawing at her face.
A slab of gray appeared through the bracken. It swelled larger, becoming the huge stone door set into the side of the hill. Jhenna hadn’t noticed it before, but the trees seemed to be shying away from the cave; several serpentine roots extended towards the clearing and then veered abruptly away, as if afraid to creep too close. That thought made her skin prickle.
They dismounted and approached the great door. Prince Ma brandished the warlock’s staff as if it were a sword, holding it by its end. He and Jhenna shared a long look, and then he reached out tentatively and touched it against the stone.
From the look of surprise on the prince’s face, he at least partly hadn’t expected anything to happen. But just as when the Winter Warlock had struck the door, a grinding began deep within the hill, and it swung open. Fetid, stale air washed over Jhenna, and she struggled to keep from coughing.
Shouting and the sounds of horses blundering through the forest came from behind them. Prince Ma grabbed her arm and pulled her inside the cave just as a warhorse caparisoned in gleaming armor burst from among the trees and charged into the clearing. It reared back, hooves churning, as the warrior in the black-enameled plate of the empire’s elite dragonhelms drew his sword and cried out in triumph.
“I have them!”
Prince Ma hauled her across the cave, towards the smaller door set in the far wall. He fumbled with the iron key, and it fell clattering to the floor, skittering until it came to a rest beside the white stone where the child had died. Growling a Shan curse Jhenna did not know, the prince lunged forward and scooped it from the ground, then turned back to her.
“Wait, my prince!” implored the soldier, who had swung down from his horse and now stood silhouetted in the light of the entrance. “Speak with the warlock before you do anything, I beg you!”
Prince Ma pressed the heavy iron key into her hand, his fingers lingering where they brushed hers. His face was shadowed in the cave’s darkness, but she could feel the intensity with which he was staring at her.
“Jhenna,” he said, “open the door. I will keep them back. Let us bring peace to these poor children.”
Then he turned away from her, steel rasping as he drew his sword.
Pushing aside her rising panic, Jhenna shoved the key as far as it would go inside the rusted iron lock, and then using all her strength, she tried to twist it.
Nothing happened.
Swords clashed behind her. Jhenna spared a glance over her shoulder, even as she strained to turn the key. Prince Ma was warding away three dragonhelms, sweeping his blade in broad arcs as more of the soldiers streamed into the cave. Jhenna had watched enough duels out on the steppes that she knew he was no great warrior – the dragonhelms seemed hesitant to attack their prince, and metal only rang when they deflected his awkward swings away.
“Stop this foolishness!”
The soldiers stepped back and sheathed their swords as those words echoed in the cave. The voice was cracked by great age. Jhenna knew who it must be.
The stooped Winter Warlock shuffled inside the cave, followed a step behind by the Autumn Warlock. They seemed not to be of the same mind: anger twisted the older sorcerer’s lined face, but the taller sorcerer in his red robes looked fearful, staring at the imperial heir.
“Prince Ma, put down your sword and come away from the door,” the Winter Warlock commanded. “This is madness.”
“The only madness here is the killing of Shan children!” shouted the prince, pointing his blade at the wizened sorcerer.
“And they are dead!” Lo Jin said. “Nothing can bring them back!”
“Please, my prince,” entreated the Autumn Warlock, “you know not what you do. You endanger us all—”
“I saw that child again!” interrupted the prince, his tone softening as he addressed his old tutor. “The one he killed. Its ghost came to me and begged me to let its soul free.”
The two sorcerers glanced at each other. “Impossible,” said the Winter Warlock. “A dream or a touch of madness—”
“I am not mad!”
The key screeched as it finally turned in the lock, and Jhenna nearly fell over.
“No!” cried the Winter Warlock. The sunlight pouring through the open portal seemed to shimmer and twist, hardening into glowing tendrils that gathered around the sorcerer’s hands.
Jhenna pulled on the stone door, though she knew it would be too heavy for her to open by herself.
But it moved, almost as if something was pushing from the other side.
The Winter Warlock snarled and raised his hand, and the gleaming snakes twining around his arms erupted outward, slithering toward her and the prince. Prince Ma was struck first, the sorcery plunging into his chest and passing through him like his flesh was paper held over a candle flame.
Jhenna screamed.
The golden serpents squirmed towards her next, and she raised her arms even though she knew it was futile.
Yet she did not die. The sorcery had halted a few handspans from her, writhing, sparks falling away to glitter in the darkness.
Why had he spared her? But when she looked past the shimmering ropes, she saw surprise in the old warlock’s face.
A sound made her glance to her side, at the thin slice of darkness where the door had cracked open.
Tiny fingers curled around the door’s edge. Then it slid open wider.
Jhenna stumbled back a step as a shape emerged from the black beyond the door. It was the child, but it did not look like the ghost she had seen in her room. Something had changed. It was pale, but not the pure white she remembered from her chamber; rather, it was sickly and mottled, and black veins were etched beneath its almost translucent skin. Its hair was a tangled mess that hid its features, but Jhenna could see the line the dagger had made across its throat. The child lifted its face toward her.
midwife to us, we thank you. Its voice was terrible, many hoarse whisperings spoken as one.
“No!” cried the Winter Warlock, gesturing at the ghost like he could banish it back behind the door. “You are dead!”
we are, the thing said, stepping forward. It raised its hand and brushed its fingers against the sorcery that still hovered, crackling, in the chamber. Like ink dropped in water, a darkness unspooled within the golden serpent, and where it bled the warlock’s magic melted into shadow.
“Go back, demon!” screamed the Winter Warlock, a bubble of shimmering power flaring around him.
but father, the ghost said, walking calmly toward the sorcerers, we’ve wanted to meet you for so long.
More children were emerging from behind the door. Their clothes were rotted and torn, their white flesh webbed with black lines. All their faces were hidden behind long, ragged black hair.
The ground buckled, and Jhenna fell to one knee. Stones and dust rained down from the ceiling. The dragonhelms glanced above, then at the approaching children. Some unspoken agreement passed between the soldiers, and they turned and ran.
Jhenna rushed over to Prince Ma and crouched beside him. His eyes were open. A black hole had been burned into his chest, and beyond the charred fringes of his robes she could see his blistered flesh. She cradled him, the horror of it all threatening to overwhelm her.
Again the ground shook, and a great chunk of the ceiling tore loose and plummeted toward the sorcerers. The rock struck the shimmering bubble they had summoned and bounced away with a ringing clang.
The first of the children reache
d the edge of the ward and stepped through it unhindered.
Another quake. Jhenna climbed unsteadily to her feet and ran toward the smear of green she could see through the shuddering doorway.
A rending crash and an old man’s screams followed her as she fled the cavern.
Her hands cracked and bleeding, Jhenna pulled herself up onto the ledge where she had first beheld the valley.
She lay on her side, panting, her ribs aching and her legs numb. Waves of pain were coming from her right knee; she had smashed it against a rock one of the countless times the ground had spasmed and sent her sprawling.
The earthquakes had worsened as she’d fled through the forest and scrambled up the stony hillside. She had feared that she would be swept back down in an avalanche of gravel and rock, but somehow that had not occurred, and now from this higher vantage she could see what was happening in the valley below.
But she couldn’t understand what she was seeing.
The forest was rippling. Swells like waves on the ocean seemed to be passing beneath the valley, sending great swathes of trees crashing down. Pillars of stone were exploding through the canopy, as if something were thrashing deep below the surface.
What was this?
Far away from her, a great patch of forest many li wide shuddered and lifted toward the sky. Earth and forest debris fell away from whatever it was that was pressing upward; Jhenna couldn’t see it clearly, but what was emerging from the ground reminded her of a newborn serpent pushing through the shell of its egg. Scales flashed in the sunlight as a living river emerged from beneath the valley.
Jhenna watched in horror as the world began to unravel.
Cho Lin drew in a shuddering breath as she returned to herself. The shard of the Sword of Cho slipped from her numb fingers and clattered to the stone floor. Around her, the chamber was as she remembered, painted with moonlight. It seemed like it had only been moments since she’d gazed into the rippling steel . . . but it felt like the soul inhabiting the blade had shared with her a lifetime’s worth of memories.