With a guttural growl, He With Eyes of Blood surged forward in a swirl of black smoke. A flash of metal, and a copper light had risen to meet the darkness. Zen had watched, with a familiar feeling of horror, as the smoke of his demon was quelled by a shield bright as the sun. He felt faint spikes of pain wherever the demon’s qì touched the metal magic.
Erascius’s laugh rang out in the dark. “You taught me much twelve cycles ago, including how to subdue demonic power. Had I recognized you earlier, those soldiers in the chamber behind you might not have died—nor those poor innocent Hin in the cells next to you.”
Zen’s anger flared scorching white inside him. His demon snarled. It had condensed into a thicker mass of shadows, something four-legged and as large as a camel—the form it had taken that day in the snow when Zen had first bound it. It paced before Erascius’s golden shield, eyes flashing crimson.
“You cannot control it, can you?” Erascius’s voice was soft, delighted. “You are so terrified of losing control that you have let it lie dormant within you your entire life.” His teeth gleamed as he smiled, leaning forward so that the shadows and light split his face in half. “If I had that much power, I wouldn’t waste my time attempting to repress it. If I were you, I wouldmasterit. But that is where you Hin fail, is it not? My colleagues would believe it is the inferior nature of your race, but I think otherwise. I think that what destroyed the Hin civilization was the principle ofbalancethat you so cherish.Zhong Yong ZhiDào—Doctrine of the Mean.I have read your classics and learned your philosophies, and I can tell you this: if you forever adhere to the path between two extremes, then you will end up with nothing.”
And then the magician had slipped into the shadows, and the shadows had found Zen’s mind as his demon took over again.
“He’s alive.” The words were sharp, jumbled, cutting Zen’s throat as he spoke now. “Erascius is alive.”
Lan looked pale. “How?” she whispered.
“When the Elantians captured me and…studied me, he was there. He learned then how to fight and restrain a demon.” Zen touched a finger to his chest, where the knife wound had been healed by his demon. “Even so, he wasn’t aware of the Seal Dé’zihad put on the—my—demon. That its powers would remain dormant unless my life was under threat. Erascius didn’t realize that trying to kill me would, instead, save my life.”
But at what cost?whispered a voice in his mind. Zen thought of the Hin prisoners lying in the dungeons, their blood coloring Nightfire, their souls feeding his demon.
A new question burned into existence. If he’d had complete command over his demon, would he then have been able to destroy the Elantian outpost and save the Hin?
He could still hear the magician’s wicked laugh in the dark.If I were you, I wouldmasterit.
Abruptly, he stood, aware of how much his bones ached and his qì flickered, ashes of the fire that had gone out when his bargain with his demon ended. No matter how much he wished to deny it, the qì of the demon’s core had embellished Zen’s own and given him strength over the cycles of their coexistence. It had been no coincidence that he’d risen quickly in the ranks of disciples at the school. The power of a demon, even one fettered by a Seal, inevitably strengthened a practitioner.
He examined their surroundings. He recognized the great river winding past them: the Coiled Dragon, or the Endless Blue, as his people had called it, beginning from the ice mountains of the Northern Steppes and winding through the ShuBasinlands all the way to the Central Plains. Its waters ran paleaquamarine from the minerals trapped in the melted ice. He followed its path until it became a wisp of blue that threaded into the mountain ranges in the distance.
He had brought Lan here with a Gate Seal. After He With Eyes of Blood had ravaged the outpost, it had relinquished its grip on Zen’s mind and begun to fade, the bargain tethering its core to his dissolved. With the last of its power, Zen had conjured a Gate Seal to a place his instincts deemed safe. This river lay a few hours’ travel from the Yuèlù Mountains, in which Skies’ End hid. In the first cycles of his arrival at Skies’ End, he remembered running down all nine hundred ninety-nine steps, and through the night, to this river—the one that connected him to his homeland in the north. A homeland that no longer existed.
If I were you, I wouldmasterit.
If his father had learned to master demonic practitioning instead of turning away from it, would his people have survived? He still remembered the army, flying banners of the Luminous Dragon Emperor, setting his home on fire. How far away they’d looked at first, a gleam of scales winding through the flat, frozen plateaus of the Northern Steppes. There had been a terrible beauty to the uniformity of this army wrought in red and gold.
Gold, for the fire and destruction they’d wrought.
Red, for the blood they’d shed.
And then, one cycle later: Tian’jing, the Heavenly Capital, burning. Flames devouring the pointed, gray-tiled roofs. Shot directly from the hands of pale-skinned monsters who wore metal bands around their arms and the colors silver and blue.
Silver, for the metal they wielded.
Blue, for the skies they ruled.
Zen closed his eyes, but the images remained seared into his mind. All this destruction, all this death—because hehadn’thad power. Because he’d been trained to be afraid of it instead of to command it.
“Zen.” He heard Lan’s voice as though from very far away. When he opened his eyes, she stood before him, outlined against a breaking dawn. “We should move. If Erascius is still alive, doesn’t that mean his tracking spell is still in my arm? He could still find us.”
His focus sharpened. “May I?”
She held her arm out for him. The metal had somehow spread up to her elbow, bubbling up from her veins to the surface of her skin.
Gently, he pressed his fingers to the metalwork. She winced. His mind was already forming the Seal to cover it, yet when he reached for the strands of qì around them, he found that he could barely summon any. It swirled at his fingertips and dissipated.
He tried again, but something inside him had cracked with the slaughter and the demon’s departure.
“Forgiveness.” Nausea swirled in his stomach as he set her arm down. “I seem to have pushed myself too far today.”
Standing amidst the rushing river and the silent, mist-filled forests, a new feeling found him. It took him a few moments to realize what it was: helplessness. It was something he hadn’t tasted in twelve cycles, for even in the most life-threatening of situations, he’d known that there was a backup, a way out. That if his hand was forced, he had one last card to play.
As much as he’d tried to fight it, he’d come to rely on the power of the demon coiled inside him.
