He had nothing now—no qì to perform a Seal against the tracking spell, to shield Lan from the pain of the metalwork, even to create a Gate Seal back to Skies’ End.
Nothing to fight with. Nothing to defend himself with.
And no power to protect those he loved.
Worse, the Elantians were closing in on the Central Plains, on the school, on the last wisp of hope Zen had held for the Hin to take back their kingdom and regain their freedom.
You were given shit choices,Lan had said, and she was right. The choice to adhere to the path of good, to practice the Way of balance, was a luxury. Zen had devoted the past eleven cycles to following it, and it had led to this day. To this moment. A hundred dead at his hands, and still not enough to quell the terrible power of the Elantians.
The entirety of this kingdom’s history had been written in the same choices.
Kill, or be killed.
Conquer, or be conquered.
His soul was already tainted—had been the moment he’d made the bargain with his demon. There was no further use in trying to be good, in pretending he could ever be a devout disciple of the Way when his history and bloodline had been anything but.
If you forever adhere to the path between two extremes, then you will end up with nothing.
“That’s all right,” Lan said softly, tearing him from his train of thought. “We’ll go back to Skies’ End. Master Nóng was supposed to have returned; he and Master Ulara will extract the metalwork. And we’ll…we’ll tell them about everything.”
Back to Skies’ End.He thought of the first night he’d set foot in the school all those cycles ago, of the masters’ looks of revulsion when they realized what he was and what he held within him. Of how the other disciples had kept their distance from him after the incident in the Chamber of a Hundred Healings. How their stares and whispers had followed him.
His gaze drifted to his smooth, unscarred hands. Whatwould the masters say once they realized what he had done—that he had lost control of the demon bound to him and indiscriminately slaughtered both Elantians and Hin civilians?
“If we tell them, they will forbid us from leaving Skies’ End again,” he said quietly. “They will confiscate your ocarina, and they will subject me to the ferule and isolation.”
Lan’s fingers tightened around the smooth black surface of the ocarina. Zen realized she’d had it hidden inside her sleeves this entire time.
“My mother left me the maps to the Demon Gods for a reason,” she said. “I won’t let anyone take them from me. I need to understand…I need to understand what she wants me to do with them.”
“And now the Elantians have seen the maps, too,” Zen added tonelessly, careful not to give any indication of what he was thinking. It was important, right now, that she reach the conclusion herself.
“Erascius is alive. And what he has been searching for all these cycles…what he killed my mother for…it was all in here,” Lan said, her eyes lifting to his with horror. “He’s been looking for the Demon Gods all along, Zen.”
“He told me that if he had the power of a demon, he would seek to master it, not fetter it. The Elantians wish to command the power of the Four Demon Gods. You saw what my lesser demon alone could do. Now imagine the sheer power four legendary beings might possess.” His voice was low. “The Elantians would be unstoppable.”
“We can’t let them find the Demon Gods,” she whispered.
He looked to the distant mountains, to the waking sky.
“No,” Zen agreed. “Which means we must find them first.”
A practitioner’s duty is to choose to defend rather than attack, to protect rather than harm, and to seek peace rather than war.
—Dào’zi,Book of the Way (Classic of Virtues),3.4
The first time Lan arrived at Skies’ End, it emerged like a dream: curved temple roofs threading between jagged mountains dotted with green pines. Buildings that belonged to the past, that had somehow defied time.
Now time was running out.
It was late afternoon, the sun sinking into the west with red finality. They had spent the day traveling back using the Light Arts, stopping to rest when they grew tired. Zen had been reticent, his face pale and drawn, his eyes darting to his hands every so often.
The Boundary Seal seemed uncharacteristically quiet as they passed through it; even ascending the nine hundred ninety-nine steps felt quick. They came across the Chamber of Waterfall Thoughts first, where the Master of Texts was holding a session with the younger disciples. At the sight of Zen and Lan, the blood drained from Master Nán’s face; he stammered for a disciple to supervise the class and then rushed the two to the Chamber of a Hundred Healings.
Master Nóng had returned; Lan would now be able to undergo the operation to have the Elantian metalwork in her arm properly removed. The Master of Medicine, a serene man with a white beard and long, bushy brows, instructed her to lie down on the kàng bed and handed her a bowl of bitter broth. As the sedative began to take effect, she heard Master Nóng tell Zen that only he and his attendants could remain in the chamber. Lan wanted to reach out, to ask Zen to stay with her, but her tongue had grown heavy and her eyelids were drooping. Zen’s face loomed out of the darkness until he, too, swirled into shadows, her name on his lips fading into smoke.
When she awoke again, it was deep in the night. A soft paper lamp burned on the cabinet by her kàng, casting shadows against the fretwork windows. Someone had draped a blanket over her.
