by F. C. Yee
Lao Ge kicked a pebble at a shuttered window. There was no response to the noise. “Tell me, has Jianzhu ever failed his people in this manner?”
Kyoshi was forced to admit that Yokoya had only grown and prospered since Jianzhu planted his flag there. The townsfolk she’d seen in Zigan had the sinking, harried look of men and women running out of time. They weren’t starving yet, but they would be soon. She recognized the weight of hunger on their shoulders, the same one she felt on hers as she went from door to door in Yokoya after being dumped there, rejected in turn by every family, her options dwindling.
She knew intimately what would happen next to the villagers. How their humanity would break down as starvation and helplessness took over. How it felt to watch death encroach a little closer every week. It had taken an intervention by Kelsang to save her from that fate.
Now Lao Ge was claiming to be that mercy for Zigan, for hundreds of people instead of just one girl. She had no reason to call him wrong.
It was a long, serpentine hike up the hillside to their encampment. She noticed the Flying Opera Company preferred elevated positions—maybe her mother’s influence seeping through. It made perfect sense in this context. The rocky terrain hid them from view, and from this high up they could see the layout of Te’s palace as clearly as a well-drawn map.
The governor is tactically incompetent not to have scouts monitoring these passes, Kyoshi thought, before noticing the strange mix of Rangi and Lao Ge that had rubbed off on her.
Lek looked up from stoking the campfire. “Did you get the rice?”
“We got sweet potato.” She tossed the burlap sack to the ground. “Rice is . . . an issue.”
“I’m sick of sweet potato,” he groused.
Kyoshi ignored him and climbed higher to the flat outcropping where Kirima and Rangi lay on their stomachs, surveying the palace. They’d come to a temporary truce over their mutual appreciation for intelligence gathering. Casing a joint was pretty much the same thing as planning an assault.
She sat down behind them, unnoticed.
“We’re looking at a traditional siheyuan design dating back to the Hao line of Earth Kings,” Rangi said to Kirima, fixated on the complex below. It was ancient compared to the mansion back in Yokoya. There were four courtyards instead of two. And instead of being walled by rooms in continuous, smooth construction, it appeared as if more than a dozen houses of varying sizes and heights had been placed end to end along square patterns drawn in the ground. The ancient owners must have grown in wealth over time, adding more and more extensions haphazardly, a far cry from the singular vision Jianzhu had in constructing his own home.
It was still obscenely extravagant, especially when compared to the declining village of Zigan. One of the courtyards held a gaudy turtle-duck pond that was too large for its surroundings. Kyoshi knew that was a new trend in imitation of the Fire Nation royal palace.
“There’s overlapping fields of view for the guards in each of the high points,” Rangi said. She pointed at three lumps of roof on the closest edge. “We have to assume they’ll be fully manned. So, coming at the best angle, that’s three sentries we’ll have to deal with on the approach.”
“Lek can drop two of them from a distance, but the third would have time to sound the alarm,” Kirima said. “How do you know so much about old Earth Kingdom architecture?”
“In the academy we studied how to attack any kind of fortification,” Rangi said. “Walled Fire temples, Earth Kingdom stockades . . .”
Kirima looked at her carefully. “Polar ice walls?”
“Yes,” Rangi said without hesitation. “Preparedness carries the day. There was even a plan for Ba Sing Se, though I’d pity the troops who carried it out.”
The Waterbender set aside the comments made toward the other nations. “Mok will want to attack the south gate directly,” Kirima said. “If we time our approach with his, we could assume the sentries posted on the other walls will divert toward him.”
Rangi frowned. “That’s a killing field.” The ground south of the complex was hard-packed dirt strewn with fieldstones the size of a man’s head. “A few Earthbenders in Te’s guard could cause massive casualties.”
“I don’t think Mok cares,” Kirima said. “I don’t know what poison Wai’s been pouring in the ears of his men, but they’ve turned into fanatics. He’s going to breach the walls with sheer numbers.”
Kyoshi shuddered to think of the slaughter that would follow if the daofei succeeded. She’d never heard of a siege where the attackers didn’t repay the cost of victory in blood.
“We have one last option,” Kirima said. “We still don’t know which building the prison cells are in, or under. Capturing the entire palace might be the only way we get enough time to search for the person we’re trying to free. So instead of trying to penetrate the compound, we simply take out the watchmen on the south wall, open the gate from the inside, and let Mok stroll right through.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Kyoshi said.
“Gah!” Kirima launched herself to her knees and nearly fell off the outcrop. “How are you so stealthy on those giant hooves of yours?”
“Servants have to be quiet.” Kyoshi appraised the pair of benders, who were probably more alike than either cared to admit. She needed some wisdom in a hurry. The conventional sort, not the turned-around mind games of Lao Ge. Right now, these two women were her best sources.
“We have to talk,” she said to them.
The last hours of daylight were devoted to more training. The training never ended. The training would invade her dreams. She was certain the next Fire Avatar would be born with her muscle memory imprinted in their little fire-baby limbs.
“Let’s go already!” Wong shouted. “You’re the one who wanted to learn dust-stepping.”
“Are you sure about this?” Kyoshi said, justifiably nervous. “When I saw the rest of you do it, you started on solid ground and worked your way higher. That seems a lot safer.”
She perched on a rock column, one of many that studded a ravine. The distance between each pillar was at least twelve feet. On the far side of the gully, Wong waited for her.
“Practice should be more difficult than the real thing,” he said. “The goal is to reach me without slowing down. If you stumble you have to go back to where you started and try again. You’re doing it three times.”
Kyoshi peered down at the ground below. There was nothing that would break her fall on the hard stone floor. “Can I at least use my fans?”
“I don’t know,” Wong said. “Can you?”
She pulled her weapons from her belt. The heft in her hands was comforting as she spread them open. She had the thought that maybe if she flapped hard enough, she could take to the air like a bird.
“Either shoot or go hungry,” Lek called out.
She should have just went for it without hesitating. Now she’d drawn an audience. The entire group, including Lao Ge, watched from various seats around the camp.
Precision, she thought to herself. Timing. Precision. Timing.
She leaped into thin air. In the same instant, pebbles and dust rose from the bottom of the ravine, stacking on each other, solidifying into a rigid structure that only needed to support her weight long enough for her to take her next step. She felt the ball of her foot land gracefully on the miniature, temporary stalagmite, the fragile tower of earth.
Then she crashed right through it. She dropped like . . . well, a stone.
In her panic Kyoshi let go of her fans and reached for the column with her hands, a drowning victim ready to pull the entire lifeboat under the surface with her. She struck the side and bounced off, scrabbling for the top of the column with her fingers but unable to find any purchase. Her back collided with the formation behind her, sending her pinwheeling face-first into the bottom of the ravine.
She lay there, a smear along the ground. Two thuds sounded, her fans landing after her. She had a distinct feeling, mostly becaus
e she was still alive, that someone had earthbent the ground under her to be softer, covered the rock with a layer of sand. Her guess was Lao Ge.
“Zero,” she heard Wong call out. “Start over.”
Every attempt at dust-stepping failed. Painfully. It was so bad that Rangi relented and let Kirima try teaching her to use water as a support instead of earth. That meant Kyoshi still ended up sprawled on the ground, only wetter.
“Maybe you should sit the mission out,” Lek said after a particularly brutal fall. For once he was speaking out of genuine concern instead of taunting her.
“I don’t think she can,” Kirima said. “The only decent plans we came up with require all of us working together.”
“I think there’s ways we can make use of Kyoshi’s raw power,” Lao Ge said. He hadn’t offered any opinions on the matter until now. “She may be a hammer on a team of scalpels, but sometimes a brute-force approach is necessary. I’ll babysit her on the raid.”
Kyoshi almost had to admire the way the old man spun events into the patterns he desired, a weaver looking at raw flax and seeing the cloth it would become. “Maybe that would be for the best,” she said. “We can keep each other out of trouble.”
Each night, Kyoshi looked at the moon growing fuller, as if it were gorging on her dread. The date of the raid drew nearer and nearer, and the mood around camp turned grim. Roles had been determined, rehearsals walked through using props of nut shells and loose coins laid on diagrams traced in the ground. The gnawing in Kyoshi’s stomach had little to do with hunger, and cold sweat kept her awake no matter her distance from the campfire or how close Rangi slept near her.
On the bright side, the two most useless members of the group being paired up gave Kyoshi and Lao Ge plenty of time to talk in private.
“Haven’t you wondered why Mok’s goal isn’t to kill Governor Te?” Lao Ge asked, moments after he ordered her to sit and meditate with him.
The thought had crossed Kyoshi’s mind. “He knows you’re going to do it?”
Lao Ge laughed. “And I used to believe you didn’t have a sense of humor. No, the reason is that he has the same piece of information I do. Palaces built in the Hao period often had an iron saferoom hidden in their depths. In case of an attack, the lord of the manor would flee there and lock himself behind impenetrable metal doors. The vaults had supplies to last a month, which was more than enough time for reinforcements to arrive. Mok knows trying to kill the governor would be a waste of effort.”
The more Kyoshi heard about this Te person, the more she despised him. She opened her eyes. “He’s going to abandon his household to an army of daofei?”
“What did you expect from a wealthy official?” Lao Ge said. “You sound disappointed. Perhaps you assumed Te would stride onto the field of battle at great risk to himself and fight off Mok’s forces single-handedly with an incredible display of earthbending, protecting scores of innocent lives? I don’t know where you got that image from.”
Her hackles rose. It seemed like the old man never let an opportunity to sing Jianzhu’s praises go by. She tried to calm herself by returning to her meditation.
Kyoshi had been denied access to this kind of training in Yokoya, but Rangi had found moments to teach her the basics on their journey. With their bloody task looming over her head, she found the practice calming, centering. She was like cool stone deep below the—
“So you’re telling me you’ve never wondered about my age?”
Now he was trying to goad her on purpose. It was astounding how easily he flipped from the hypnotic, terrifying vision she knew he could be into an oafish child with wrinkles and white hair. She was wrong to have thought that calling him sifu a few times would have given her consistent, uninterrupted access to a guru of death.
“I can’t say that I have,” Kyoshi muttered through her teeth.
He sounded slightly wounded by her lack of interest in his secrets. “It’s just . . . the people who’ve openly confronted me in the past with the name ‘Tieguai the Immortal’ . . . to a man, they all begged me for the secrets of longevity. The only ones who didn’t were you and your mother.”
First, she didn’t believe he was anywhere near as old as he claimed. And second, desperately grasping for more power and control over life was what people like Jianzhu did. Te too, probably.
“Sifu,” she drawled. “Oh, please, impart upon me the mysteries of immortality, for I wish to watch eras pass before my eyes like the grains of an hourglass.”
“Of course!” Lao Ge said brightly. “Anything for my dear student. You see, it all comes down to maintaining order. Keeping things neat, clean, and tidy.”
“Excuse me?” This was genuinely offensive to Kyoshi, as a former housekeeping servant. She’d let go of her standards for cleanliness the first morning outside of Yokoya, after waking up covered in Pengpeng’s shed fur. But with his drinking and aversion to changing clothes, Lao Ge toed the line of rancidity. What did he know about tidying up?
“Aging is really just your body falling apart, on the smallest, most invisible levels, and neglecting to put itself back together,” he said. “With the right mental focus, you could take an inventory of your own body and place each little piece that’s not where it should be back into the correct order.”
Kyoshi had to assume he was tailoring his lessons to her background and that the real process was much more complicated. “The way you describe it, you’d have to decide what version of yourself you’d be stuck as, forever.”
“Exactly! Those who grow, live and die. The stagnant pool is immortal, while the clear flowing river dies an uncountable number of deaths.”
“Is that another proverb of Shoken’s? Because it doesn’t sound like any spiritual lesson I’ve heard.”
“It’s my proverb,” Lao Ge whined, his feelings hurt again. “All this fretting about spirits. I’m trying to teach you about the mind. An infinite world that’s been neglected by far too many explorers.”
The mind. Kyoshi’s mind drifted to another existence, one where she was sitting happily across from Kelsang in a green field as he told her about the wonders of the Spirit World. His warm and gentle voice guiding her consciousness until they crossed the boundary, hand in hand, to a land where human concerns couldn’t weigh them down.
She’d lost that. She’d lost him, and the sickness that followed would never fully heal. Kelsang’s absence had put her in stasis. If Lao Ge wanted her to be stagnant and forever trapped, she’d already mastered the lesson.
Kyoshi looked at this substitute who sat before her, the strange joke she got instead of her true teacher. It was an exchange poor enough to make her weep. “Spirit creatures are more interesting than mental riddles,” she said.
“My dear,” Lao Ge said softly. “As you’ll discover one day, the mind has specters of its own.”
THE FACE OF TRADITION
The time had come. The moon was full to bursting. It spilled its light over the fields surrounding Te’s palace, sharpening corners and altering colors in ghostly detail. Mok knew enough to schedule his raid when his men could see what they were doing.
The Flying Opera Company picked its way down the rocky hillside. “Does everyone know the plan?” Rangi said.
She was asking as a formality. Rangi had drilled each step into their skulls. It had been satisfying to see the others get a measure of Fire Nation discipline as revenge for what they’d put Kyoshi through.
Going to see Mok before the assault was part of the operation. If he let them move as they pleased, and did not let his temperament and vanity reign, then with luck on their side they would deliver him exactly what he wanted. One prisoner, unharmed.
Te’s foolishness was on full display as they approached Mok’s encampment south of the palace. Kyoshi counted at least five hundred daofei preparing for battle, sharpening their swords and honing their spear thrusts. Had none of Te’s household guard noticed this many armed men converging on his location? Jianzhu would have smothered t
his miniature uprising before it—
She shook her head. For one night, and one night only, Jianzhu was immaterial.
They tiptoed by a large group of bare-chested men arranged in neat rows, deep in Horse stance, chanting gibberish in unison. Their captain walked among them holding a bundle of lit incense sticks in his hand. He ritualistically swept the smoking ends over their torsos, leaving trails of ash on their skin. Kyoshi looked closer and saw that each man had the characters for “impervious” inked on their forehead.
“Who are they?” she whispered to her companions.
“Those are members of the Kang Shen sect,” Kirima said. “They’re nonbenders who believe that performing secret purification ceremonies will make them immune to the elements. Mok must have recruited a bunch to serve as his front line.”
“That’s madness!” Kyoshi said. “If they charge straight into a formation of Earthbenders, they’re going to be slaughtered!” The men she saw had no armor, no shields. Many of them seemed to be empty-handed fighters, lacking a weapon entirely.
“It’s amazing what the mind can be led to believe,” Lao Ge said.
“Especially if you’re desperate,” Lek muttered. “They say that people turn to the Kang Shen sect after seeing a friend or loved one killed by a bender. Be made to feel powerless that way, and you’ll do anything that gives you courage.”
They approached the center of camp. Mok was easy to spot. He’d set up a fancy wooden desk in the middle of the outdoors that served no purpose other than to show he could. He sat behind it with his fingers tented, as if he were the governor of these parts and not Te. Wai stood next to him, a nightmarish imitation of a secretary.
“My beloved associates,” Mok said after they bowed. “Come closer.”
They glanced at each other nervously and shuffled toward the desk.