Slowly, Lan nodded. “That,” she said, her voice low, “was the Black Tortoise.”
Somehow, she stood. Somehow, she took Shàn’jun’s hand, and pulled him down the last steps. Beyond the Boundary Sealwith its ghostly chorus of warning cries. Out here, the yin was stronger, the shadows darker.
She knelt by the grandmaster. Blood glistened against his robes, oozing across his middle and dripping onto the soil and grass of the forest. His face was pale and his hands were cold as she gathered them in her own. She thought of how formidable he’d looked in the times she had glimpsed him at Skies’ End: frame slight yet powerful outlined against a brilliant, craggy horizon.
“Shi’zu,” she whispered, and then her voice rose with uncontrolled panic. “Shàn’jun!Shàn’jun—help him!”
“I am here.” Shàn’jun knelt by the grandmaster’s side, a vial of clear green liquid already in his hands. He lifted it to the grandmaster’s nose and poured out a single drop.
A hiss, a burst of yáng. For a few moments, nothing happened.
Then Dé’zidrew a shallow breath. His eyes flew open and came to rest on Lan.
“Shi’zu, hold on,” said Shàn’jun. “I will save you. Hold on for me, all right?”
Lan marveled at how soothing his voice could be, how steady his hands as he took out a cloth and pressed it to the grandmaster’s chest.
“Hold it there and put pressure on it,” Shàn’jun instructed Lan.
“Lan,” Dé’ziwheezed. His fingers tightened against hers. “I am glad it is you. Listen carefully, for we have no time left.”
“Please, shi’zu,” she said. “You must conserve your strength—”
“Sòng Lián.”
Her truename, spoken so gently from his lips. Lan stilled, shock icing her blood.
Her truename. He knew her truename.
She had never told him.
“You look so much like Sòng Méi,” Dé’zicontinued. If he’d spoken her name with affection, her mother’s truename was a prayer on his lips. “She was the one who helped me understand things from a different perspective. That good and evil are often two sides of the same coin; it merely depends on how you see it.”
“Shi’zu,” she pleaded. “Save your strength—”
“Listen to me.”Dé’zi’s eyes burned like fire. “You must remember this, Lián’ér. There was no right or wrong to the clan uprisings; the unification of the Middle Kingdom was at once the greatest and most terrible event to have befallen this piece of land. The Nightslayer was not wrong to fight for his clan—yet was it right of him to slay thousands of innocents for the same cause?” Dé’zipaused and gave a violent hack; dark blood bloomed on the front of his shirt. “Yin and yáng. Good and evil. Great and terrible. Two sides of the same coin, Lián’ér, and somewhere in the center of it all liespower.The solution is to find the balance between them. Do you understand?”
She was shivering, shaking with the weight of his words, the vast ancient histories he spoke of, so complex that she could barely begin to understand them, let alone accept them. “Find the balance,” she echoed, her teeth chattering. “Tell me how, shi’zu.”
“The Demon Gods were never meant to be wielded without a check to their power,” the grandmaster sighed. His eyes fluttered. “Let your mother’s song guide you…bring balance to this forsaken land…find the Godslayer.”
The words jolted up her veins like lightning. Lan seized fistfuls of the grandmaster’s páo. “How?” she demanded, herpatience at an end. She had tolerated enough elusive answers. “What is Sealed at the heart of the mountain, shi’zu?”
She was leaning forward, and at that exact moment, wind rose between the trees, nearly snatching away his whisper. Obscuring it so that only she heard.
“Of the four star maps, two are blank,” Dé’zirasped, “for two of the Four were already found by the Order of Ten Thousand Flowers. Sealed in the heart of Skies’ End…is a Demon God.”
The world seemed to stop, the motion of the leaves in wind and the clouds sweeping the sky slowing so that there was only Lan and the dying man before her.
“The Azure Tiger,” Dé’zifinished, “the one that I vowed to keep Sealed until the Order found a way to destroy them all.”
Two found, two missing. The Black Tortoise was now with Zen; the Crimson Phoenix had occupied a part of the night sky far west of them. The Azure Tiger had been here all along.
If so…
“Then where is the Silver Dragon?” she whispered.
The grandmaster’s eyes fluttered.
