Space Magic
Page 13
Her boots thumped on the dirt, and then the demon forced her to her knees.
She gasped at the pain, then gasped again at the realization of what it meant. The demon had pulled her material body into the tent!
Yao stood, as did his lieutenants. “I see that Zhang is reduced to having Xian priestesses do his spying for him,” he said. “An excellent sign. Release her, oh my demon.”
The demon pulled her to her feet, then shoved her into the center of the circle. Yao paced around her, examining her as though she were a horse in the market. His nostrils flared. “You stink of magic,” he declared.
Namo Guan Shi Yin Pusa, she thought over and over, willing her knees to stop their trembling. Trying to force herself to meet her end with dignity.
Yao leaned closer, stinking of sweat and blood. This was the man who had decapitated his own uncle to gain the generalship, who had slaughtered entire cities for the insult of opposing his will. So fearful was his reputation that even his most unwilling conscripts obeyed his orders instantly. He sniffed at her hair, her neck, her shoulder, then down her arm. Then he smiled, and pushed back her sleeve, revealing the bronze dragon bracelet.
“What is this pretty bauble?”
Su said nothing, clenching her teeth to prevent them from chattering.
He grabbed her queue and pulled back her head, leaning in close. “Answer me!” he roared, his foul breath hot on her face.
“It is just a souvenir!” she cried, the truth forced out of her by the press of fear. “A small magic to remind me of my home, nothing more!”
“Indeed?” He seized her forearm and pulled the bracelet off her wrist. It came easily. “I think perhaps you do not tell the whole truth.” He examined the bracelet, turning it over so the firelight glinted across the dragon’s scales, then squeezed it over his rough hand and onto his own wrist. “I shall hold this object for further examination.” He turned away from her. “Oh my demon, you may have this spy to do with as you please.”
Su turned and looked up, and up, at the demon’s leering face, then shut her eyes hard.
Then a great commotion erupted from outside the tent, shouting and banging and a fierce inhuman bellow.
A soldier burst in, eyes wide. “They send fire demons against us!”
Yao’s jaw clenched in anger, and he glared accusingly at Su, then turned back to the demon. “Defend the camp!” he shouted. The demon roared and plunged out through the tent flap, but the doorway was too small and the demon brought half the tent down behind itself.
Pandemonium ensued, inside and out, as the tent collapsed on Su, Yao, and his lieutenants. Su found herself struggling under the heavy fabric, blinded by smoke, while all around her men shouted and cursed. A crackling sounded, much too close. The tent had caught fire! Su dropped to the dirt and began to squirm blindly forward.
An eternity later, Su’s hand reached out and found... nothing. The edge of the tent! She dug her fingers into the dirt and pulled herself free, gasping in the smoky air. Fire flickered all around, and men ran shouting in every direction. Over all sounded the roars of the demon and the bellowing of the unseen attackers. Su gathered her feet under her and ran.
She ran only a few steps before colliding with a hard surface... a broad torso covered with small square plates of rhinoceros hide.
Yao Ming.
“I won’t let you go that easily, my little spy,” he panted, and seized the front of her robe.
Su tried and failed to pull Yao’s hand away, but her fingers recognized the dragon bracelet.
She spoke a secret word of power.
Yao screamed, and his hand released its grip... and dropped into the dirt with a sickening thud.
Su ducked away from Yao as he clutched his severed wrist, cursing, blood running down his sleeve. But as she turned to run away, she spotted a glint of bronze in the blood-stained dirt. She spoke the second word of power as she scooped up the bracelet and ran into the night.
The panicked camp was not concerned with stopping one small priestess; in addition to the general’s tent, other fires burned here and there, and the fire demons bellowed and clattered all around. Su kept low and scurried. Her previous flight over the camp, in spirit form, helped her to keep her feet on the right path.
Soon she escaped into the darkness between the camp and the town. After that she met no one until she came to the moat, gasping and holding her sides. “Yüen Su!” cried the lieutenant at the drawbridge. “Thank the ancestors you are alive!”
Immediately she was conducted to Zhang, where she reported what had occurred. When she described how the demon had captured her, Zhang nodded grimly. “So I surmised, from what you said just before you vanished.”
“But how did you summon fire demons?” she asked. “You have no other priests or magicians.”
“Fire demons?” Zhang snorted. “Yao’s foul habits are too well known to his conscript troops, they see demons behind every bush. No, we did nothing more than to tie burning lanterns to the tails of several bulls. But they do make an impressive noise, and do a most satisfactory amount of damage. Now go and rest. I will require your services again in the morning.”
“Yes, my lord.” But she did not leave. “My lord... thank you for rescuing me.”
Zhang gave her a curt nod in reply. “I would not abandon my only remaining priestess.” Then his face softened. “I am glad you were not harmed.”
She thanked him again, and bowed, then retired to her borrowed pallet. But though she was bone-weary and the hour was late, she barely slept. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw the demon’s leering eyes and fearsome teeth.
The next day, after a wholly inadequate breakfast of thin rice gruel, Su was again commanded to survey the enemy’s camp. It took her half the morning to calm herself sufficiently to release her spirit from her body, and she hesitated for a long time beneath the hall’s tile roof before pushing through it.
When she arrived at the camp she found Yao at the top of a small hill, with his demon beside him and all his thousands of men gathered around him. Though his missing right hand was bound up by a blood-soaked bandage, his face burned with energy and determination. Su ducked behind a rocky outcropping before the demon could spot her.
Yao stood beside a large pile of clay pots. As she peered out from behind the rock, he took a mattock from one of his lieutenants and methodically smashed them all. Then, breathing hard and holding the mattock high, he stood on the pile of shards and began to speak.
Puzzled by this display, Su shifted closer, trying to hear what Yao had to say. But as she approached, Yao’s nostrils twitched and he paused, sniffing the air. Then the demon cried out and pointed straight at her. Rigid with anger, Yao ran to his war-chest and drew out a black spear that shimmered with power.
Su did not wait to find out how well the demon could throw. She flew back to the magistrate’s hall with desperate haste.
“Ah!” she gasped, drawing in a breath as her spirit rejoined her physical body. Zhang’s lieutenants immediately bombarded her with questions, but she had to close her eyes and concentrate on her breathing for a long moment before she could even speak coherently.
Once she had made her report, Zhang took a deep breath and turned away, hands gripping each other behind his back. His lieutenants were silent. “What does this mean, my lord?” she asked him.
“Yao has created a ‘death ground,’” Zhang replied without turning around. “Without cooking pots, his men now have only the food they have already prepared—perhaps three days’ worth.” He turned back then, and his face was as grim as she had ever seen it. “They know they must conquer or starve, and so they will fight without pause and without mercy.”
Zhang thanked Su for her report, then began discussing with his lieutenants the defense of the town. But as Su bowed and prepared to leave, he gestured for her to stay.
Zhang clearly expected an attack in overwhelming force within the day. Though his words about troop emplacements, fallback pos
itions, and supply lines were meaningless to Su, she could see the desperation of the situation in the empty faces of his lieutenants. One by one they bowed and departed, to make what preparations they could.
After the last lieutenant had left, Zhang gestured Su close to him. He looked old, so old. “Su,” he said, “you are a priestess of Xian. You understand compassion, and peace. I am a man of war.” He took a deep breath. “Am I a bad man, Yüen Su?”
She considered the question carefully before replying. “It is true that many have died, on both sides of this conflict, because of your orders. But you have also saved many others who might have died. I believe you have been as good a man as you can be.”
Zhang sighed, and looked at his folded hands. “I have an opportunity to save many lives this day. But I fear that I will not have the courage to do so.”
Su waited for the words to come.
“Yao wants me. Only me. He knows that, while I live, the people of Li will never surrender, no matter how badly defeated. But if he can parade my head on a spear to all the cities of Li, they will accept his victory and allow themselves to be quietly absorbed into the state of Wu.” Zhang took Su’s hands. “I mean to surrender myself to Yao. If I do this thing, Yao may spare the lives of some of my men today, and thousands more will live instead of dying in a hopeless struggle against the Wu.” His eyes pleaded. “Help me to be strong. Help me to carry through with this plan.”
Su’s heart resonated with Zhang’s pain, as one gong will vibrate when another nearby is struck. But she damped it down. “No,” she said firmly. “I will not help you.”
Zhang dropped his eyes from hers. “Then all is lost.”
“No!” she said again. Then, more gently: “As long as you live, not all is lost.”
Zhang looked up again.
“I have seen the evil of Yao, and the black demons that Tang worships. I know that any lives you save today by surrendering yourself will be lives lost in misery and despair tomorrow. Even if you die here, the people of Li will know that you died fighting, and they will do the same in your honor.”
Zhang shook his head with a rueful smile. “Priestess, you understand too well how to motivate an old soldier.”
“I have learned from one of the best.”
Zhang bowed Su from his presence.
Outside the hall Zhang’s chief armorer, an aged craftsman with some knowledge of practical magic, awaited her with many pointed questions about the demon’s exact appearance and behavior. Finally he thanked her, though his expression was grim. “From what you have said, I believe it is a taloned demon of the Fifteenth Hell. These are vulnerable to certain charms, but they must be written on silk, and we lost our scribe at Yu-min.”
Su’s heart leapt with hope. “I can write!”
“Thank the ancestors!”
With the armorer’s help, Su wrote out the charms on dozens of strips of silk, which they tied to the shafts of arrows. She then blessed each one with a prayer to Guan Shi Yin. “I will accept the assistance of any god who is willing to give it,” the armorer said with a shrug.
After that Su set to work making bandages, blessing amulets, and praying with any soldiers and citizens who desired her assistance. As she was blessing a jade disk for a trembling young soldier, she heard horns and a distant roar like wind and surf.
The sound of an army at the charge.
Su’s station was at Zhang’s headquarters, and she hurried to him.
“I need you to be my kite,” Zhang said when she arrived. “Fly high over the town and give me the strategic view.”
“Yes, my lord.” As she bowed, their eyes met briefly. He did not say that will keep your spirit safe from Yao’s spear, and she did not thank him for it. But they both understood.
Exhausted and shaken as she was, it took Su a long time to send her spirit out. By the time she rose above the magistrate’s hall, Yao’s forces had already begun crossing the moat, the roaring demon in the lead. But as soon as it came within range, Zhang’s best bowmen let loose with Su’s charmed arrows. At their touch the demon screamed and burst into flame, and then it was no more.
But the demon was only one part of the attack; even as it burned, massive wooden fork-carts, catapults, and scaling ladders rolled across temporary bamboo bridges. Zhang’s men pelted them with flaming arrows from the tops of the walls, but Yao had prepared for this: the fork-carts were protected by wooden roofs covered with fresh oxhide, which trapped the arrows and refused to catch fire.
Su reported this development to Zhang, and a moment later her spirit eyes saw men with heavy crossbows charging to the defense. But they were too late. Under the protection of the hide-covered roofs, the first of the fork-carts had reached the walls. Thick braids of twisted rope sent wooden levers—each twice as long as a man and tipped with a three-tined iron fork—snapping down onto the town’s earthen walls like the striking claw of a great tiger. Two or three such blows were sufficient to bring down a large chunk of wall. Though Zhang’s bowmen fired rapidly into the gap, killing many of the invaders, more and more of Yao’s conscript soldiers were pouring over the moat. They soon began swarming over their comrades’ bodies, through the gaps in the wall, and into the town.
“Fall back!” Zhang ordered his lieutenants when Su told him the walls had been breached. Then he turned back to Su. “We too must retreat.” She found herself leaning heavily on his arm as they hurried out of the magistrate’s hall.
Zhang and Su moved in the midst of a flood of screaming, panicked townspeople, heading for the garrison where the town’s west wall met the mountains. The sturdy little building was not a castle, barely even a fort, but it was the most defensible structure in the town and it was large enough to hold all of Zhang’s troops.
But when they arrived, they found fewer than two hundred soldiers. “We have been taking very heavy casualties,” reported a lieutenant whose head was bandaged up with a blood-soaked rag. “The Wu men fight like trapped rats.”
“Let in five hundred civilians,” said Zhang, “then bar the door.”
While Zhang and the three lieutenants who had made it to the garrison prepared to make a last stand, Su sagged exhausted and worthless in a corner. She was too drained to send her spirit out again, and she would be no use whatsoever in a fight. All she could do was prepare her spirit for the afterlife.
But when she had finished her prayers, the final attack had still not come. “What is he waiting for?” she asked Zhang.
“I do not know,” he said. They pressed through crowds of terrified civilians and wounded soldiers to the outer room, where splintered furniture blocked the garrison’s only door, and peered out an arrow slit.
Outside, mobs of Yao’s troops crowded the street, but they had left an open space in front of the garrison. Yao himself stood in that space, his rhinoceros-hide surcoat stained with soot and blood. “Does Zhang yet live?” he called out.
“I live,” Zhang called back, though he stood to the side of the arrow slit in case one of Yao’s sharpshooters should make an attempt to change that. Su moved to another slit nearby, unable to take her eyes off of Yao.
“I would like to make you an offer,” Yao replied. “You have a Xian priestess with you. Do not deny it, I can smell her. Give the bitch to me, and I will allow you and your men to live.”
Zhang looked at Su, his expression unreadable, but he called back, “We would prefer to die, rather than live under Wu rule.”
Yao gave a swift curt nod that indicated he had expected no other response. “I will give you until dawn to reconsider your decision.” He raised his voice. “My offer applies to anyone in the building. Send out the Xian priestess, and all your lives will be spared.”
Su’s knees gave way. She slid down the wall, collapsing like a horse that has been ridden too far. But Zhang stood tall, and spoke in a general’s voice. “You will not be surrendered,” he said to Su, and stared around at the soldiers and civilians who crowded the room. “This I promise.”
The children gasped and cooed in pleasure, pressing their faces into the breeze, and the young widow smiled at their happiness. But then the youngest reached out for the shiny bauble, and thrust her tiny hand through the shimmering loop all the way up to the elbow. Su gasped at the memory of Yao’s severed hand, but the panic lasted only a moment; she had dabbled her own fingers through the bracelet into the cool air beyond many times. It was only at the moment the charm was invoked that it was so dangerous. Still, magic was always unpredictable, and she gently grasped the child’s arm and drew it back out of the bracelet.
The infant’s face bunched up as though to cry, but then relaxed into an expression of curiosity and wonder as she stared at her own hand, tightly clenched in a fist. Then the tiny fingers opened.
Su too looked on in wonder.
Sparkling in the child’s palm was a tiny handful of... snow.
“General Zhang!” Su called as she hurried to his quarters. “General Zhang! I must speak with the armorer immediately!”
Luck was with her: the armorer was among the survivors. But after he had inspected the bracelet, he shook his head and handed it back to her. “I am sorry, priestess,” he said. “If it were iron, I might be able to enlarge it as you request. But bronze is not so malleable.”
Su’s spirits, so recently raised, fell hard.
“Still...” said the armorer, tugging on his beard, “though the bracelet cannot be hammered out, perhaps the spell can be. What do you know of its construction?”
“It partakes of the Circle of Heaven, of course, and the power of the Dragon of the West, but my own memories are the focus of the charm. It will not work unless I am touching the bracelet.”