Crushing down the fear that had begun to grow in her belly, Lan focused on the qì.
She frowned. Something was wrong. Whereas she had sensed the overwhelming, suffocating stench of metal earlier, the air was now clearer, the energies of mountains and trees and water brighter. The Elantian army’s presence had diminished; they seemed to be growing farther away.
Northeast,the little boy had said of the army’s direction.
On impulse, she lifted the ocarina to her lips and played.
The four pieces of star maps sprang into view, the constellations of the Demon Gods glinting brightly against the true night sky beyond. Lan looked to the northeast quadrant of the star map, and her heart almost stopped.
The quadrant of the map was a near-exact match to the true night sky. And on it, marked by an absence of light, was the shape of the Black Tortoise.
The seed of doubt in her chest bloomed, squeezing so hard that she could not breathe. It made sense, if she thought back to Zen’s words:A small, downtrodden village in the midst of the Central Plains has nothing to offer them.
Of course. She had been so singly focused on the village, on protecting the lives here. Why would the Elantians make for a poor, broken village with a scattering of children and elders? No, Erascius had made their goal clear to them: seek out the Demon Gods, and then hunt out the School of the White Pines, where the last Hin practitioners resided. Withthe last of Hin magic destroyed and the might of the Demon Gods in their hands, they would raze the Central Plains and all the remainder of the Last Kingdom unobstructed, sealing their power over this land once and for all.
Zen had realized this—and he had gone for the Black Tortoise…without her.
We are but two practitioners against the might of the Elantian army. And I no longer have my demon bound to me.
Cold spread through her. The clues had been there all along—she simply hadn’t picked up on them. She’d trusted him.
He had lied to her.
If she went after him now, she might be able to reach him before it was too late. A Gate Seal wouldn’t work—she had no known destination to conjure, no idea what lay several hours northeast of here.
Lan filled herself with qì until she could feel it glowing within her. Then she sent it to the soles of her feet and leapt into the night. Jagged mountains blurred around her as she picked up speed, more surefooted than she had ever been before, each leap carrying her farther than she had ever gone. Still…she thought of the swirl of qì left by a Seal back in their room. If Zen had gone with a Gate Seal, he would be hours ahead of her.
It was not enough. Still not enough.
Time slipped, her world comprising the rhythmic push of qì through her feet, the search for the next cliff or tree or rock to kick from. Only the stars lingered overhead, blinking as tendrils of clouds began to blot them out.Hurry,they seemed to whisper as she drew closer to the Elantian army, their scent of metal beginning to overpower all other threads of qì.Hurry.
She might have been several bells into her journey when it happened.
A whorl of energies cleaved the air. Lan stumbled, therhythm to her steps lost as the energies—filled with torrents of yin, fury, and grief—crested over her. She slammed into the edge of a cliff, her nails scraping against dirt and leaves and roots as she fought for purchase. Her feet skidded against rocks, then there came a horrible lurch as she stepped onto nothingness. Her fingers wrapped around something—the root of a plant—but she was too heavy, and the plant was starting to snap. Beneath was the hungry rush of a river, and up ahead, she could just see the disappearing moon limn the rim of a great circle of mountains.
“Zen,”she screamed, then the stalk snapped and she fell.
Pressure on her wrist; a searing pain in her shoulder as her plunge was jerked to an abrupt stop. Lan hung, suspended in the air over the cliff’s edge, as her rescuer’s face appeared over the edge.
“Sly little fox spirit,” snarled Yeshin Noro Dilaya as the last slivers of moonlight were swallowed by clouds. “I really should have let you die.”
—
“Dilaya,” Lan panted as she lay on the ground far from the edge of the cliff, trying not to sound too grateful that the girl had just saved her life. “Is your nose so big that you can’t help poking it into everyone else’s business?”
“Say one more thing that rubs me the wrong way and I will fling you back off the cliff,” came the response, along with the glimmer of a blade to remind Lan who was in charge. “My neck’s still sore from whatever trick you used earlier.”
“How did you find me?” Lan asked. The last she’d seen of Dilaya had been the girl knocked out cold on the floor of the Chamber of a Hundred Healings.
“Your friends Herb Eater and Ghost Boy told me everything,” came the reply. “I tracked your qì to this place.”
In the distance, the pulse of energies had stabilized, but she could still feel it washing over them like currents of a dark, suffocating river.Yin,she thought, her stomach clenching against the tides of rage, grief, and suffering that pounded against her own heart.Mó: a spirit born of wrath, ruin, rage, and an unfinished will.
A face came to her: skin desiccated and blue-gray, clinging to a skeleton like dried vellum; yellow, unseeing eyes and a sagging mouth, patches of loose black hair falling like weeds. The worst part—how closely the thing had come to looking human, how the long sleeves and skirts of its páo had trailed it like a ghostly memory of who it had once been, the grandmaster’s soul having been bartered over to the monster.
She recalled how Zen had stared at it in horror, and it was only now that she understood why. The mó had been a reflection of one of the fates that could befall him.
A fate he might evade if she could reach him in time.
