Where the Veil Is Thin

by Alana Joli Abbott

  “Rhenna here has never known how important she is to me.”

  In her disembodied state, Rhenna froze, straining to perceive Blaise more clearly.

  “And if she dies…”

  Wil straightened, his eyes growing large. “You’ll be unhappy?”

  “Very.”

  The Omen blinked several times. “What can I do?”

  “She needs the breath of the dead.”

  Confusion crossed Wil’s guileless face. Blaise moved with a speed faster than anything Rhenna had seen as he grasped one of the demonstrife daggers at Wil’s belt and stabbed him through the chest.

  Rhenna was shocked. Appalled. She couldn’t even… But the look on Blaise’s face was fierce. If what he said was true and he really cared about her, then if she didn’t take Wil’s breath, Blaise could destroy a large part of the city.

  Her essence wavered, shuddering, hating this choice. She’d never killed. Wouldn’t condone it. Didn’t want to be responsible for something like this. But with Blaise’s emotions foremost in her mind, she reached out towards Wil’s gasping mouth.

  The pouch tied around the neck of her body shook and jittered. Some part of her awareness sensed Blaise untying it, letting the remaining breath free. She’d thought it would be a snack for later, but now she needed all the fuel she could get. The breath of the dying kept her fed and only every hundred times or so did she need to take a new body by consuming its flesh.

  She couldn’t use Wil—he was far too large, and she never liked being a male. But he was an Omen and his dying breath very powerful. Worth about a dozen human breaths. That along with the other one released from her pouch gave her the strength to reconnect with her new body.

  Though it would likely reject her again. All Blaise had done was buy her a few minutes. And at what cost?

  She coughed and sputtered as her essence took hold of muscle and skin and bone again. The breaths flowed through her, sealing her together making her joints and tendons work. She sat up on the couch and blinked her eyes open.

  Blaise peered at her, gaze intense. He took her head in his hands and kissed her. His lips were warm, strong. If she hadn’t been so upset with him she might have enjoyed it. But instead she pushed him away.

  He didn’t appear hurt by her rejection, instead his eyes were bright. He was… happy.

  She had to tread carefully. “Blaise… I….” She glanced at Wil’s body slumped over in the chair.

  Blaise came toward her; she shrank back against the couch. He couldn’t be a monster, could he?

  He firmed his lips and looked at Wil. Then he removed one of the leather bracelets from his arm, the one that made him look like a surfer dude, and blew on it before tying it to Wil’s wrist.

  His gaze moved back to her, warm and pleased. Patient. She held herself as far away as she could.

  The sound of sputtered breaths drew her focus back to Wil. He sat up and looked down in horror at the knife sticking out of his chest.

  “Here, let me,” Blaise said, and before either of them could do anything else, he slid the knife out cleanly, like you would when testing to see if a cake is done.

  There was no blood or gore. The demonstrife weapon was clean.

  Blaise handed it back to Wil, handle first. The young man took it with shaking hands. Then he noticed the bracelet on his wrist.

  “I have to apologize to you, Wil. I’m sorry I had to kill you.”

  Wil looked at him, then at Rhenna staring wide-eyed, then back again. “O-okay.”

  Feeling came back into Rhenna’s body. Her lips still tingled from where Blaise had kissed her, and the signs of rejection she had been feeling in her body went away. The sensation dissolved like dew in the morning sunlight.

  She touched her mouth. “What did you do?”

  “It’s not a fairy’s kiss that provides protection, though some of my ancestors did take full advantage of those who believed that.” His lips quirked. “It’s our breath.”

  Wil held up his bracelet, in awe of the rare talisman he now wore. “If I take this off will I…?”

  “Will you die again? No.” Blaise shook his head. “Your life is your own again. I just had to borrow it for a bit.”

  Wil hunched his shoulders, looking younger than his years. “You could have asked,” he mumbled.

  Blaise either didn’t hear or pretended not to. He turned to Rhenna and reached for her, but paused before grazing her hands, giving her the choice whether to grab onto him.

  It only took a moment for her to decide. She gripped his hands in her own and squeezed. “And did you give me your breath as well?”

  A slow smile lifted Blaise’s lips, curving them up, opening them to reveal perfect, white teeth. She’d never seen him smile before. He was like a light shining through the room. She could understand why he didn’t smile more often; it was blinding. The joy and happiness shooting from him was a magical thing.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did.”

  She pulled him closer and wrapped his arms around her.

  “What about when I have to change bodies?” she asked.

  “Good thing I can see the real you inside there.” He looked into her eyes, and Rhenna knew he was seeing her for real. The true Rhenna, regardless of what skin she wore.

  He leaned toward her and kissed her again. Taking her breath away, but giving her his in return.

  THE LAST HOME

  — OF MASTER TRANQUIL CLOUD —

  by Minsoo Kang

  Ever since I was a child, I was taught by the elders of my family to revere Master Tranquil Cloud as the greatest among all the illustrious ancestors of our noble clan. While he is a well-known historical figure, a high official of the royal court, and a famed scholar who was celebrated for his brilliance and integrity, I found him to be a rather mysterious figure when I came to research his life as an adult. Despite the plethora of information on him in the historical records, I found it difficult to comprehend someone who lived in an utterly different cultural context than my own. I was further beguiled by two central mysteries of his life that have never been solved. The first is the nature of the unusual addendum to his most celebrated writing, and the second, the strange circumstance of his death.

  Master Tranquil Cloud lived during a particularly patriarchal time of the country’s history, one in which women were shut out of positions of power, marginalized in social life, and rendered invisible in its records. For that reason, the final addendum to his great work of judicial philosophy, Treatise on the Moral Training of Righteous Judges, is such a surprising text as it passionately advocates for women’s legal rights. Of particular interest is his detailing of seventeen typical ways in which women are treated unfairly by the courts, with their testimonies ignored, treated with undue skepticism, or even vilified as feminine lies. It ends with an earnest plea to judges, urging them to be aware of their prejudice against women, which could lead to miscarriage of justice. He asks them to consider how they would like their mothers, sisters, and daughters to be treated by the courts, and use that as the basis of their moral guidance. Given the unusual nature of the writing that provides significant insight into the social status of women in the period, the addendum has been published on its own in a number of anthologies of traditional texts under the modern title of “In Defense of Women Before the Law.”

  Some scholars have expressed skepticism about the level of understanding and empathy toward women demonstrated by Tranquil Cloud who was a member of a traditional family of noble lineage. A few have even suggested that the addendum is an early modern forgery, pointing to the fact that no extant manuscript of the text that is older than a century and a half has survived. But other scholars have shown that the style of the writing is consistent with Tranquil Cloud’s other works, and they have unearthed a few contemporary references to the addendum. One feminist historian has speculated that the true author may have been a woman in Tranquil Cloud’s household who successfully replicated his style and surreptitiously i
ncluded it in his collected writings. A recent best-selling novel details such a scenario, featuring a fictional illegitimate daughter of Tranquil Cloud who was secretly educated by him, despite legal prohibition against the teaching of letters to women. After watching her mother, a concubine of commoner status, suffer through a case of egregious injustice, she composes the addendum and places it in among her dying father’s works.

  Despite the universal acclaim Master Tranquil Cloud garnered as an upright statesman, as well as the foremost legal philosopher of his time, his death is also clouded in mystery as it is unknown exactly when and how he passed. While the members of our lineage clan still pay particular respect to him on the days marked for the veneration of ancestors, they can only do so before a monumental tablet, as it is unknown where he was buried. What can be ascertained is that in his sixty-fifth year, when he held the position of state councilor of the left, he was exiled by the king for his vociferous defense of the queen dowager, who was being prosecuted for treason. He was sent to a remote village in the far northern province of Sturdy Hills where he disappeared some years later.

  A fantastic tale that purports to explain his final fate can be found in a number of informal works of anecdotal history and regional folktales written as entertainment for better-educated commoners, though it is known that noblemen also read them as guilty pleasures. It can in no way be regarded as a reliable historical account of Master Tranquil Cloud’s last years, as the story features supernatural elements. The addendum on the legal rights of women is not mentioned in it, but it points to what could be construed as an explanation of how he came to write it—that an uncanny encounter with spirits may have inspired him to do so.

  When Master Tranquil Cloud reached his sixtieth year, he found himself in such a content time of his life that he could not possibly have imagined the calamities that would befall him in the years that followed. After lauded tenures as the minister of punishments, the director of the Office of Forbidden Affairs, and the governor of the province of Resplendent Fields, he was due to ascend to the highest level of officialdom in the State Council. His reputation as a great scholar had already been established with the publication of Treatise on the Moral Training of Righteous Judges, which was universally regarded as the greatest work of judicial philosophy produced in the land. In it, he argued against the old legalist philosophers who advocated the use of stringent laws, strict enforcement, and harsh punishments as tools of social and political stability and control. Tranquil Cloud asserted that no matter how necessary the laws were, they were liable to be perverted and misused if they were practiced by judges lacking proper morals. A country with few laws but with many good judges can be a just place, he reasoned, whereas one with many laws but few good judges will inevitably degenerate into inequity. The bulk of the book details a program of ethical education for the proper moral cultivation of judges, including the practice of benevolence for all those concerned in a legal case.

  Given his high achievements as both a statesman and a scholar, he imagined an easy course through the rest of his life. But then, just as his time as governor was coming to an end, misfortune fell upon him like a series of lightning bolts from a suddenly erupting storm. His beloved son, an official at the Ministry of Military Affairs who was serving as an inspector in the northern border, was killed in a barbarian raid. Not long after, his daughter died in childbirth, her baby son surviving for only a month before joining her in oblivion. His wife then fell ill and suffered terribly as an invalid for years before finally passing.

  Even as he had to face such personal tragedies, his position in the government became precarious. After he returned to the capital from the province of Resplendent Fields and took up his new position as the state councilor of the left, a major crisis erupted in the royal court. The king discovered the scandalous and unseemly circumstances under which his mother had been deprived of her position as queen and eventually executed when he was still a little boy, which sent him on a path of frenzied vengeance. He arrested all the old officials who had been in the government during the time of his mother’s downfall and executed or exiled those he held responsible for her demise. He ordered the death of all three surviving former concubines of his father as well. Then he went after the queen dowager who had replaced his mother as the royal consort. Many of those who were persecuted had indeed been involved in the execution of the king’s mother for various political and personal reasons, but it was generally known that the queen dowager was innocent. She came from a minor lineage clan that had only a few junior-level officials in the government at the time of her marriage, and she had been chosen rather hurriedly to become the new queen so that the whole sordid affair could be forgotten. Yet the king meant to get rid of the woman who had taken his mother’s place beside his father.

  Because of his preoccupation with avenging his mother, the monarch was neglecting his duties of the state so that all the important works in the kingdom was at a standstill. Many officials, consequently, thought that sacrificing the life of the guiltless dowager queen was an acceptable price to pay to finally allay the king’s wrath. But there were others, including Tranquil Cloud, who felt that the bloodletting had gone on long enough and claimed too many innocent lives already. In the crucial moment before the king was set to announce the prosecution of the queen dowager, Tranquil Cloud led the formal remonstrance against the course.

  For ten days, he and many other officials sat before the throne room, begging the king to spare the life of the queen dowager. It ended with their mass arrest, which was followed by a trial for disloyalty to the monarch. Before Tranquil Cloud was deprived of his position and sent away in exile, he learned in prison that his long-suffering wife had passed away.

  The journey to the remote corner of the Province of Sturdy Hills was long and arduous, but Tranquil Cloud’s fortune brightened a little when he finally arrived. The local magistrate was a great admirer of Treatise on the Moral Training of Righteous Judges and also sympathetic to the circumstances under which Tranquil Cloud ended up in exile. So the magistrate provided Tranquil Cloud with a modest but comfortable home on the outskirts of the village and even assigned his head servant, a large jolly fellow who was called Bull Dung, to see to his needs. And so Tranquil Cloud settled down to lead a quiet life of mourning for his family and meditating on the unfathomable vicissitudes of life.

  One mystery that puzzled and distressed him was the disappearance of a girl named Butterfly who was one of three servants he had been allowed to take with him in exile. She was young, not yet twenty, and had been an orphan street beggar until his wife had taken pity on her and brought her into their household. A diligent and modest girl, she had always appeared content to be in Tranquil Cloud’s service, so he could not understand why she had run away. When he told Bull Dung that she was missing, the man offered to look for her but returned a few days later without having found any trace of her. It was yet another loss for Tranquil Cloud, who had been fond of her, but his sadness was soon eclipsed by the great grief that overwhelmed him when he was visited by the admiring magistrate, who informed him that the queen dowager had been executed by the order of the king.

  About a year into Tranquil Cloud’s exile, the magistrate came for his regular visit to pay his respects. He was accompanied by Bull Dung, who carried the magistrate’s gifts of food and liquor on a wood-framed carrier. In the course of the leisurely afternoon conversation between Tranquil Cloud and the magistrate, the latter revealed that he was investigating an utterly confounding case of bloody murder. Five days before, the entire family of the richest merchant in town had been found dead in their sleeping chambers with their bodies mutilated. The merchant, his mother, his wife, and two sons had their bodies ripped open and their vital organs cut out in the middle of the night. The strange thing was, there had been no less than twelve household servants, but none of them had heard anything. They were arrested and interrogated for three days, and their rooms were thoroughly searched, but there was no
thing that implicated them in the horrific crime. To add to the mystery, the magistrate’s soldiers discovered a grave in an obscure corner of the backyard, which they dug up and found the body of a young girl. From the clothing on the corpse, the servants identified her as one of their own who had gone missing a few months before. As she had been deeply unhappy at the household, they had all assumed that she had run away. The body was too decomposed to yield any clue as to how she had died.

  At the end of the day, as Tranquil Cloud walked the magistrate out the house gate, he noticed Bull Dung leaning against a nearby tree, apparently deep asleep. After they bade farewell, the magistrate walked over to his servant and woke him up.

  “What is the matter with you?” the magistrate asked. “You seem tired all the time these days. Every time I turn around, you fall asleep somewhere. Are you ill?”

  “No, my lord,” Bull Dung said in a listless voice as he slowly got to his feet.

  Tranquil Cloud watched them leave, feeling anxious with the presentiment that something terrible was about to occur. He mulled over the horrific story of the murder of the merchant and his family, the dead servant girl, and his own servant girl Butterfly who had gone missing. He shook off his unsettling thoughts, but that night he dreamt of an elderly servant woman who had taken care of him in his early childhood. The servant’s mother had been a shaman, so she knew many stories of ghosts, goblins, and monsters. Despite the fact that most of them were scary tales, he was thrilled to hear them and always asked for more. Now, all the terrifying creatures returned to him in his dream and tormented him until the morning.

  A few months later, Bull Dung returned with more food and other gifts from the magistrate. When Tranquil Cloud saw him, he was shocked to see that the once hefty servant was reduced to an emaciated state, with his eyes sunken and his skin pale. As he was panting desperately from the effort of carrying the gifts, Tranquil Cloud had him sit down at the edge of the veranda and had some water brought to him.