“There are,” Old Wei replied. Lan raised her eyes heavenward and mouthed the words along with him—words she had heard a hundred times: “There are old gods and new gods, kind gods and fickle gods—and most powerful of them all are the Four Demon Gods.”
Lan preferred not to believe that her fortunes lay in the hands of some invisible old farts in the skies—no matter how powerful they were meant to be. “Whatever you say, Old Wei,” she replied, leaning over the counter and cupping her chin in her hands.
The old shopkeeper wheezed a few times, then asked, “Evemarket again? What, is the Teahouse not feeding you enough?”
They both knew the answer to that: Madam Meng ran the Teahouse like a glass menagerie, and her songgirls were her finest display. She fed them just enough to keep them dewy and ripe for the picking, but never enough so that their bellies grew full—gods forbid they become lazy or fat.
“I like it here,” Lan said, and she did. Out here, hawking alongside other vendors and pocketing the coin she made into herownpockets, was where she felt some semblance of control over her life—a taste of freedom and free will, if only temporary. “Besides,” she added sweetly, “I get to drop by to see you.”
He cast her a shrewd look, thentsked and wagged a finger. “Don’t try your honeyed words on me, ya’tou,” he said, and bent to the cabinets beneath his counter.
Ya’tou. Girl.It was what he’d called her since he’d found her, a scrap of an orphan begging on the streets of Haak’gong. He’d taken her to the only place he’d known that would welcome a girl with no name and no reputation: Madam Meng’s Teahouse. She’d signed a contract whose terms she’d barely been able to decipher, and whose length only seemed to swell and swell the harder she worked.
But at the end of the day, he’d saved her life. Gotten her a job, put a stable roof over her head. It was more kindness than one could ask for in these times.
She grinned at the sour old man. “I would never.”
Old Wei’s grunt turned into a bout of coughing, and Lan’s smile slipped. The winters down in the south had none of the biting cold that she’d grown up with in the northeast. Instead, it encroached with a damp chill that sank into bones and joints and lungs and festered there.
She took in the state of the battered old shop, the shelves that stood fuller than usual. Tonight, on the eve of the big festivities for the Twelfth Cycle of the Elantian Conquest, security had been tightened around Haak’gong, and the first thing people tended to avoid in those circumstances was a shop trading in illicit goods. Lan couldn’t afford to dally either: soon the streets would be crawling with Elantian patrols, and a lone songgirl in their midst was an invitation to trouble.
“Lungs acting up again, Old Wei?” she asked, running a finger over a small stained-glass dragon figurine on the counter—likely a prized trade from one of the Jade Trail nations across the great Emaran Desert. The Hin had not known glass until the era of the Middle Kingdom, under which Emperor Jin—the Golden Emperor—established formal trade routes reaching all the way west to the fabled deserts of Masyria.
“Ah, yeah,” the shopkeeper said with a wince. From the folds of his sleeve, he drew what must once have been a fine silken handkerchief and patted his mouth with it. The cloth was sodden and graying with grime. “Ginseng prices have shot up since the Elantian farts learned of its healing properties. But I’ve lived with these old bones all my life, and they haven’t killed me yet. Nothing to worry about.”
Lan drummed her fingers on the wooden counter, polished with the comings and goings of so many others before her. Here was the trick to surviving in a colonized land: you couldn’t show that you cared. Every Hin you came across would have his share of sob stories: family slaughtered in theConquest, home pillaged and plundered, or worse. To care was to allow a chink in the armor of survival.
So Lan asked the question that had been brewing in her chest all day. “Well, what do you have for me?”
Old Wei gifted her a gap-toothed smile and bent beneath his counter. Lan’s pulse began to race; instinctively she pressed fingers to the inside of her left wrist.
There, imprinted into flesh and sinew and blood, was a scar that only she could see: a perfect circle encompassing a character in the shape of a Hin word that she could not read, sweeping strokes blooming like an elegantly balanced flower—blossom, leaves, and stem.
Eighteen cycles she’d lived, and she had spent twelve of those searching for this character—the only clue to her past that her mother had left her before her death. To this day, she could feel the searing heat of her mother’s fingers on her arms, the hole in Mama’s chest bleeding red even as the world erupted in blinding white. The expensive lacquerwood furniture of their study darkened with blood, the air filled with the bitter scent of burnt metal…and something else. Something ancient; something impossible.
“Now, I think you’ll like this one.”
She blinked, the images dissipating as Old Wei emerged from the dusty shelves and placed a scroll on the counter between them. Lan held her breath as he unfurled it.
It was a worn piece of parchment, but even with one look, she could tell that it was different: the surface was smooth, unlike the cheap papers made of hemp or rags or fishnet common these days. This was true parchment—vellum, perhaps—singed black in the corners and smudged with age. She’d known the feel of it intimately, once a world ago.
Between the wear and tear, Lan could make out fadedtraces of opulence. Her eyes raked over the sketches of the Four Demon Gods in the corners of the page, barely visible but present nevertheless: dragon, phoenix, tiger, and tortoise, all facing the center of the scroll, frozen in time. Swirls of painted clouds adorned the top and bottom margins. And then…there,in the very center, ensconced within a near-perfect circle: a single character, blooming with the delicate balance of a Hin character, yet with nothing recognizable. Her heart jumped into her throat as she leaned over it, barely breathing.
“I thought you’d be excited,” Old Wei said. He watched her carefully, eyes glinting with the prospect of a sale. “Wait till you hear where I got it.”
She barely heard him. Her pulse thundered in her ears as she traced the strokes of the character, following every line and comparing it to the character she’d memorized well enough to know in her dreams.
Her excitement faltered as her finger stuttered over a stroke. No…no.A line cut too short, a dot missing, a diagonal slightly off…Minute differences, but all the same—
Wrong.
She slumped, letting out a sigh. Sloppily, she rotated her wrist, finger tracing a loose circle to finish up the character.
That was when it happened.
The air in the shop shifted, and she felt as though somethinginside herhad snapped into place—an invisible current that rushed from her fingertips into the shop. Like a static shock in winter.
It was gone in half a second, so quickly that she must have imagined it. When she blinked again, Old Wei was still watching her with pursed lips. “Well?” he asked eagerly, leaning forward over the counter.
