—Gautama Siddha, Introduction,Imperial Treatise on Astrology
Red, blue, silver, black: the Demon Gods hovered in the illusory pieces of night sky superimposed over the real one against the slatted ceiling of their temporary abode, the light outlining them shifting like the glow of spirit lights up north in the steppes during the winter moons. Zen’s father had told him those lights were the qì of warrior souls that watched over their people.
The most curious revelation had found him upon closer observation of the star maps, one that he hadn’t spotted back in the Elantian outpost: two of the quadrants appeared blank but for the shapes of the Demon Gods themselves, glittering like fragments of colored stardust. Star maps were pieces of the night sky charted from an exact location at an exact time, and while the other two had the shapes of the Demon Gods superimposed against a sky with stars, the Azure Tiger and the Silver Dragon simply existed on a canvas of black nothingness.
“Maybe Mama never found out where the other twowere,” Lan had suggested when he’d mentioned this to her. “Or maybe they’ve been destroyed.”
There was no destroying a Demon God, as far as Zen knew, but he said nothing. Instead, he had begun with the other two viable star maps.
Even with their work cut in half, mapping out just one took time. Needing the dark, they slept during the day and woke at sunset to the shouts and song of the village children coming home from tilling the fields carved into the mountainsides. There were only a handful of children, yet their winding songs in the sweet southern Hin dialect breathed life into an otherwise barren village. Conquest was strange, Zen thought. There were the realities of Haak’gong and Tian’jing and the other big cities, stamped all over with Elantian markings—and yet there existed Skies’ End and this tiny village, little pockets of refuge that had escaped the heavy hand of invasion.
For now.
The music stopped; the star maps vanished. Lan flopped down on the kàng with a sigh, ocarina in hand. “This is the first and last time I’ll ever wish that the rotten egg Master of Geomancy were here with us.”
It was their third night in the Village of Bright Moon Pond, and their second working on cracking the star maps. Zen had learned some of this back at the school under the tutelage—if it could be called that—of Master Feng. Zen had thought star maps useless back then, an outdated method of mapping, for who needed to map the night sky when he could map the earth and the solid ground beneath his feet?
He regretted that now.
Zen looked up from the parchment he crouched over, where he’d been transcribing what he saw in the illusions Lan conjured. Beyond their open window, the sun had vanished beneath the mountain; the sky breathed brilliant shades oforange and coral. The children would be home soon, singing their songs; candles would be lit, and the village would eventually fall into a slumber steeped in lonely silence.
“You must keep playing,” Zen said, “or I cannot transcribe the star maps.”
“Let me rest a few minutes.” Lan yawned, and then her eyes took on a playful glint. “You want to try playing, and I’ll draw?”
Zen sighed, but he couldn’t help the smile curving his mouth. “You mock me.”
“Never. I daren’t.”
“If I let you transcribe, our search would bring us to the other side of the world.”
Lan poked her tongue out. “And if I let you play, the entire village’s ears would fall off.”
Zen lifted the sheet of parchment to survey his work. They’d had to beg the landlady for writing utensils, and she’d had to scour the entire village before finding a set of old tomes and yellowed parchments a traveling merchant had left behind. There was not much use for writing these days.
He was close to seeing some semblance of a location mapped out by the four shapes in the star maps. Once upon a time, with an entire library at his disposal, this would have been quick work; Hin astronomers had mapped out the changing night skies many dynasties ago, exchanging ideas and collaborating with the scholars of the neighboring Kingdom of Endhira, along the Jade Trail.
Now those records had been turned to ashes, burned by the Elantians when they seized all the great libraries of the Last Kingdom.
The thought of the Elantians closing in drove Zen’s gaze back to his parchment. His head was beginning to swim. Worse than having to transcribe the star maps was the factthat they had been given no key to interpret them. Star maps were meant to have been dated and timed to note the precise hour, moon, and cycle of stars they captured; Hin astronomers had long understood that the night sky shifted with the seasons, some sections disappearing for moons before resurfacing again. This great cycle, however, reset itself every twelve moons: the same stars could be seen in the exact same location and formation at the exact hour every cycle.
Without the date and time of their maps, finding the location of the Demon Gods across a night sky strewn with pearly stars was akin to searching for a shape among the sands of the ocean.
Zen lifted his tired eyes to the window, glancing out at the true night sky, clear as a bowl of ink tonight. That was when he saw it.
Zen took the sheet of parchment he’d been staring at and flipped it. Held it up to the sky framed in the window.
His breath caught.
One of the two viable pieces of the star maps was beginning to match what he saw outside.
The Black Tortoise.
The name twisted in him like a dagger. Of all the Four they might have found first, it had to be this one: the god inextricably intertwined with the name and deeds of the Nightslayer.
He looked at the other quadrants he’d transcribed. The Azure Tiger and the Silver Dragon were still hopelessly blank, no matter how many ways Lan tried to coax stars into them with her songs. The only other readable one, the Crimson Phoenix’s star map, hadn’t yet matched any part of the night sky they’d been observing.
Zen returned to the Black Tortoise, driving every other thought from his mind but for the puzzle at hand. Here and there, the map curved a little, some stars more spread out thanothers, meaning that they saw it from a location slightly off. Slightly southwest.
