by F. C. Yee
The handlers must have drawn lots to see which one would face his wrath in person while the rest looked for the shirshu. He spurred his hound toward the unlucky representative. The man’s waving was stiff and forced, like the motion of a waterwheel.
“You can stop,” Jianzhu called out. “I see you—”
A whistle and then a thump. The lone tracker keeled over, two arrows in his back.
Jianzhu cursed and leaped off his mount, more arrows crossing the air above his saddle. He tented slabs of earth around him and hunkered down in his cover, listening to the thunks of projectiles landing around him.
I am getting much too old for this. He never would have fallen for such an obvious trap in his younger days.
There was a pause in the firing. He chambered his fists and punched outward. The slabs that had protected him now splintered and flew outward in all directions like shrapnel from a bombard. He heard screams from the rocks above.
Taking in his surroundings as quickly as possible, he saw a few archers who’d fallen from their perches lying at the base of the crags. But, better safe than sorry. He lowered his stance, shook his waist, and whirled his arms. From base to top, every stone he could see violently sprouted thin spikes the size of jians, like they’d instantly transformed into the same species of Si Wong cactus.
He heard more screams from the archers who remained hidden in their cover behind the rocks. That should have been it for elevated opponents. Fighters who fancied themselves professionals, but weren’t, often made the mistake of taking the high ground without planning a way out.
His eel hound had run off. But two of them were still nearby, tethered by their reins to a heavy weight. The corpse of one of the guardsmen, studded with arrows. The reins had snagged on his wrist.
Good job, whatever your name was, Jianzhu thought.
The other guardsman was busy wiping the blood off his dao with a hank of grass. Three attackers lay at his feet. They’d charged him with melee weapons, and bizarre ones at that. Jianzhu thought he spotted an abacus made of iron on the ground.
He was still impressed. “What do they call you, son?”
The guardsman snapped to attention and stared above Jianzhu’s head with youthful, bright eyes. He had the strong brow of Eastern Peninsula ancestry. “Saiful, sir.”
It was likely Saiful didn’t understand how close of a call this was. Talent would only let you survive so many encounters. After that, the odds tended to catch up with a vengeance. “Excellent work, Saiful. There’s always opportunity for a quick blade on my staff. I’ll remember this.”
The young guardsman kept his thrill contained as best he could. “Thank you, sir.”
Jianzhu nudged a body onto its back. The dead man was clothed in the standard attire of a bandit, in the sense that he wore whatever peasant clothing he’d taken with him from his last legitimate occupation. This one had the trousers of a sailor or a sailmaker, mended repeatedly with fine sewing skill.
But there was an odd detail on his shirt. He’d stuck a flower in his lapel. It was too ruined to see what kind.
Jianzhu checked another body. It had no decoration on its person, but he backtracked along the path the man had charged and found what he was looking for on the ground. A dried moon peach blossom.
A badge, Jianzhu thought with some vehemence.
He straightened up and looked around. The mountains loomed nearby. They were said to be uninhabited. Practically impassable. Yet these men weren’t clothed for an expedition.
With a sudden burst of energy he slammed his palm against the ground. Tremors rang through the earth, spreading wide like ripples in a pond.
“Sir, are you . . . searching for something underground?” Saiful asked.
“Maybe,” Jianzhu said, his attention skimming over the grass. “Though what I’m doing right now is preserving their footprints.”
He continued along the trail left by Saiful’s opponents, watching the indentations they made with their heels and toes in the dirt, examining where they left mud on grass. A long time ago, he’d tracked criminals down in such a way, by listening to the earth and reading its marks.
The prints, in reverse, led to a clearing with a conspicuous gray rock the size of a chair. Jianzhu waved it away with a brush of his hand. Underneath was a wooden trap door.
“A hidden passage?” Saiful asked.
Jianzhu nodded grimly. “Hidden passage. Through the mountains.”
“Sir . . . is this town supposed to be here?” Saiful said.
“No,” Jianzhu said, his teeth grinding together.
Though he couldn’t see underground, knowing the tunnel was there allowed Jianzhu to make various educated guesses with earthbending and knowledge of stonework to determine a path. They’d followed the network up the mountain on their eel hounds, forcing aside blocked passages and relying on the agility of their unusual mounts to see them through. Eventually the obstacles parted to reveal a great crater nestled in the heights, and in that bowl, waiting for them, was a village that neither of them had ever heard of before.
An entire settlement not on any map, out of reach of the law. Jianzhu’s rage was almost too great for him to swallow. He was a storekeeper who would never be rid of vermin, a servant who would never be able to polish the silver clean.
The town appeared to be abandoned. They rode through empty streets, between longhouses that made a mockery of the Four Nations with adornments either looted or crudely imitated from their places of origin. One particular scrap-quilted banner had been fastened together so that characters from multiple signs clumsily formed the syllables Hu and Jiang.
Hujiang. So that was the name of this dungheap.
“There’s our shirshu, sir,” Saiful said. He pointed down the street where a dark, foul-smelling mound blocked the way.
The beast lay in relatively dignified repose. Other than the flies buzzing around its face—or lack thereof—it was still whole. Any trophy hunters would have found very quickly that toxins still coursed through its dead body.
Professor Shaw would be upset though. Jianzhu would need to come up with a cover story and a convincing amount of hush money to keep the man’s anger from casting suspicion.
A brief scraping noise came from the house to his right. There was someone inside. Jianzhu dismounted and approached the darkened building.
“Sir?” Saiful whispered. “Going alone is a bad idea.”
Jianzhu waved him off. “Patrol the street.”
He slipped inside, contouring against the door frame rather than standing fully in the entrance, where he would be outlined by sunlight. Judging from the long tables and low backless stools, the building was some kind of inn or tavern. It made him furious again, that these outlaws had enjoyed enough peace in these mountains to build gathering places and sell each other wine.
Jianzhu walked around the tavern’s counter. He found the person who’d made the noise.
It was a man sitting on a pile of pillows. He was muscled and scarred like a fighter, though it would seem he’d fared poorly in his last outing. One of his legs was wrapped in cloth and splinted up to his hip.
The injured man stared at Jianzhu with the empty, wary expression of being caught out. Jianzhu noticed empty bottles within his arms reach, jars of half-eaten food. He pieced it together. The inhabitants of the settlement had evacuated some days ago, probably scared away by the shirshu. The ambush at the base of the mountain had been a rearguard, or a bunch of greedy opportunists who’d lagged behind. This man with the broken leg couldn’t make the journey down at all, so his companions had left him here to recover.
Jianzhu’s eyes went to a small, out-of-place vase. It had a moon peach blossom in it. “I’m looking for a girl,” he said to his recuperating friend. “She was here at some point. A very tall girl, taller than you or me. Pretty face, freckles, doesn’t speak much. Have you seen her?”
The man’s eyebrows twitched. It could have been an attempt to conceal the truth, or it could ha
ve been his memory sparking but failing to light.
“She would have been accompanied by a Firebender. Another girl, black hair, military bearing—”
Jianzhu caught the spear-hand strike aimed at his throat and redirected it into the nearby shelf, smashing the uprights. The man could add a broken wrist to his troubles. Jianzhu watched him seethe with pain.
The injured fighter tucked his bad hand under his good arm. “I am Four Shadows Guan,” he snarled with pride. “And I will tell you nothing. I know a man of the law when I see one.”
Jianzhu believed him. Once these types told you their professional name, there was no more rational conversation to be had. He would try one more tactic, a play on the daofei’s emotions.
He plucked the moon peach blossom from its vase and twirled the stem between his thumb and forefinger. “Times have changed,” he said. “In my younger days I remember tracking this small group around the edges of the desert, from watering hole to watering hole. The Band of the Scorpion, they called themselves. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen members.”
Jianzhu caught what he was looking for, the man snorting in derision at a brotherhood that small. Which meant his group was much larger.
“The funny thing was, when I caught up with them, I found out why they were moving so slowly,” he went on. “Two of their members had caught foot rot and couldn’t walk. The others fashioned litters and carried them through the desert, the whole time. The group would have escaped me if they had left their sick behind, but they chose to stay together. They chose brotherhood.”
He crushed the flower. “That’s what Followers of the Code used to be like. When I look at you, abandoned by your sworn brothers, I don’t see that tradition. I don’t see honor.”
Jianzhu let a flying gob of spit hit him in the face. “The brothers of the Autumn Bloom are willing to die for each other,” the man said, wiping his lips. “You would never understand. Our cause makes us—”
He paused, realizing that Jianzhu was manipulating him. Four Shadows Guan was smarter than he looked. He clenched his jaw and slammed back against his makeshift bedrest.
Jianzhu grimaced and rolled up his sleeves. So much for doing this the easy way.
He stepped into the sunlight and wiped his hands on a nearby saddle blanket that had been hung up to dry and forgotten.
The Autumn Bloom, he thought to himself. The Autumn Bloom.
Who in the name of Oma’s bastard children were the Autumn Bloom?
Jianzhu really was getting too old. He’d never heard of this gang before. He, the man who’d once single-handedly kept half the continent from falling into lawlessness, had let a new criminal outfit large enough to populate a good-sized village operate within shouting distance of the capital. The Autumn Bloom, whoever they were and whatever their goals, had a level of organization high enough to evacuate the settlement the moment they suspected an intrusion.
And more importantly, most importantly, the only thing that was important, was that they now held the Avatar in their clutches. The girl had been here at some point, that was certain. She must have planned to hide in the remote mountains and fallen into an ambush, like he nearly did. She’d been captured and taken to this headquarters. Shirshu followed living scents, and the animal would not have come here if she were dead.
Jianzhu cursed the spirits and mankind alike, cursed the threads of fate that had formed this knot. The Avatar had been kidnapped by daofei.
He threw his head back and stared at the sky for answers. Out of the corner of his eye he watched a bird fly away, its long tail plumage trailing behind it like a streamer. Some obscure cultures read the future through the patterns of winged creatures. Jianzhu wondered if that would have worked, if birds could have found the girl at birth and saved them this trouble. He heaved a great sigh.
Saiful rounded the corner and came back into the street, trotting back over to his boss. “Did you find anything inside, sir?”
“Just a corpse.” He looked at the young swordsman. Saiful, along with a handful of other men, had answered Jianzhu’s call for more fighters after the encounter with Tagaka left the ranks of his guard depleted. Perhaps a little too quickly and conveniently, now that he thought about it.
“Saiful, I didn’t tell you to send a message with one of our hawks,” Jianzhu said.
The young man looked surprised. “I was, uh, relaying ahead for supplies,” he said. His hand drifted toward his weapon. He was a capable warrior, unafraid to kill for pay. A mercenary who swore loyalty as long as the wages were good. When you got right down to it, there was really no difference between him and a daofei.
But lying was something he needed more practice at. “You’re from the Eastern Peninsula, aren’t you?” Jianzhu said. He clasped his hands behind his back. “I have a good friend who does a lot of business in the Eastern Peninsula. His name is Hui. Have you met him before, by chance? Perhaps he was the one you relayed for supplies just now?”
It had only been a twinge of suspicion on Jianzhu’s part, a bluff really, but mentioning Hui’s name let loose a flood of tells from Saiful’s face and body language.
“Let me guess,” Jianzhu said, digging deeper along this productive seam of ore. “Hui sent you to infiltrate my household, didn’t he? With orders to find out what happened to the Avatar.”
The slight step backward Saiful took let Jianzhu know that he’d struck upon the truth. “And being the smart young man you are, you realized the implication of the shirshu trail ending here. The Avatar—and, let’s be clear, we have been following the Avatar—has been lost to outlaws. That was the message you sent to Hui just now.”
Saiful was astonished that Jianzhu had performed the supernatural feat of reading his mind. Really, all Jianzhu had done was follow lines of information as they unfolded, like any good Pai Sho player.
The swordsman decided to follow a gambit of his own. He’d been found out, but they were in the isolated mountains, and he had his weapon and his youthful reflexes on his side. He warily drew his dao again.
Jianzhu rolled his neck, his joints creakier than in years past. The thing about Pai Sho was that most games didn’t need to be played to completion. Masters usually recognized when they were beaten and resigned while the action was still technically in progress. If this dance between him and Hui had taken place on the grid, then right here would be where Jianzhu was supposed to bow and pick up his tiles in defeat.
There was no stopping the message from reaching Hui now that the bird was in the air. The chamberlain would realize how big a mess he was hiding and assemble a case against him to the rest of the sages of the Earth Kingdom. If the girl was found alive and her identity proven, she’d be delivered straight into the hands of Hui, who in the end wouldn’t care which version of the Avatar he got, so long as he was taking it from Jianzhu.
By all logical reasoning, he was ruined. He’d lost.
But what only his close Pai Sho partners knew about him was that Jianzhu had never surrendered a game early in his life. On the rare occasions when an opponent got the best of him, he forced them to play out the lines to the bitter end. He made them jump hurdles for every piece of his they captured, and ran the late-night candles down to their last inches of wick out of sheer spite.
Jianzhu smiled grimly as he closed in on the young swordsman. Beating him always required a price in blood. He wasn’t about to drop the habit now.
QUESTIONS AND MEDITATIONS
Kyoshi kept pace behind Lao Ge through the streets of the market. The two of them were alone, a girl and her elderly uncle taking a relaxing stroll. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Except Lao Ge, when not in the presence of the rest of the Flying Opera Company, walked with the bearing of a dragon wrapped in the clothes of a beggar. And Kyoshi was . . . Kyoshi. Vendors in their stalls craned their necks to gawk at her as she passed.
“Aren’t we here to buy rice?” she muttered, feeling the pressure of so many gazes. “We passed two different pedd
lers already.”
“Any one of us could have done that alone,” Lao Ge said. He winked at a matron sweeping her stoop. She frowned and pushed a pile of dust at him. “You’re here to observe.”
Zigan Village was the main town that supplied food and manpower to Governor Te’s palace. Kyoshi had been impressed by its size as they walked in from the outskirts, but quickly noticed that the solidly built houses and traditional Earth Kingdom trappings were somewhat of a front. They hadn’t encountered an actual person until they were well into the heart of the village. Kyoshi found it hard to believe that the outer districts were completely vacant, but she’d seen nothing to the contrary.
Her ears perked toward the sound of an argument. A peddler and the farmer supplying him were nearly at blows.
“You can’t fool me!” shouted the peddler. “I know the harvest was good this year! What you’re charging me is an outrage!”
The farmer gestured wildly with the straw hat in his hand. “And I’m telling you, most of it gets confiscated for the governor’s silos! I have to set the price based on the grain I have leftover!”
“How can you keep raising prices when there’s an ocean of rice sitting behind his walls?” The peddler was beside himself. “For Yangchen’s sake, I can see the roof of the storehouse from here!”
“Te hasn’t opened the silos for over five years! You might as well consider that food eaten by the spirits!”
Lao Ge pushed Kyoshi along. Apparently, they were not here to offer solutions to people who needed them.
She knew what he was trying to prove, that Te’s impending death was justified. “Reserving food for an emergency isn’t foolish or corrupt,” she said.
“No, but secretly selling your reserves for off-the-books profit is. To enrich himself, Te has traded away the grain he’s collected every year since he was appointed governor. He’s persisted during bad harvests, when his citizens have gone hungry enough to abandon their homes. Most famines are man-made, and he is on the verge of making one.”