“So we run?” She released him and stepped back, incredulity twisting her face. “I won’t—”
“We draw them away if they get too close.” There was one single solution to both save the village and prevent the Elantians from finding the Demon Gods, and if Zen had harbored any hesitation at all in the days before, the Elantian army had given him a swift answer. He was out of choices and out of time. “They were heading north; they may yet pass by here without discovering the village. We must find out exactly where they are going.”
Relief melted the tightness on Lan’s face. Perhaps she was thinking he was not the monster others had made him out to be; that she had been mistaken in thinking he would run and leave people to die in his wake.
Lan nodded. “Let’s go.”
“No.” He caught her wrist and turned her to him. This time, he could only pray that the surface of his composure did not crack. His heart was breaking, and he could not let her know. Zen swallowed and took in her face, those bright eyes and that quick mouth, the red cord of the necklace he’d gifted her. “You go round up the villagers, prepare them to flee if needed,” he said. “I will scout the army’s path. Do not act without my signal. If all goes well, they may yet pass by. A small, downtrodden village in the midst of the Central Plains has nothing to offer them.”
She must have seen something in his expression, for she searched his face for a moment before she nodded. The trust in her eyes now felt like a curse.
Lan wrapped her fingers around his and brought their intertwined hands to her heart. A brief touch, but the gesture nearly broke his resolve. “Don’t make me wait too long,” she said, and then she was gone, slipped through his fingers like wind.
He had the impulse to call after her, to catch just another glimpse of her, to kneel at her feet and beg for forgiveness. Instead, Zen remained silent, trapped in his own body as he listened to her footsteps cross the yard, scattering cooing chickens. He heard the sound of doors sliding open as she entered the main room.
Then he turned to the kàng where he had left the parchment of the star maps. He folded it and tucked it into his storage pouch.
Zen faced the open window and began to pull on qì, gathering it and holding it in his core. He could already sense the overwhelming taint of metal in the natural energies, the balance of the world disturbed.
It would all be over soon.
Instead of channeling the qì to the soles of his feet in preparation for the Light Arts, Zen brought it all to his fingertips, where he began to trace a Seal. Earth and earth, on opposite ends of the circle, separated by lines of distance. Swirl, dot; departure, destination.Northeast.What lay northeast of here? He needed a landmark, somewhere he’d been before. Anywhere within the vicinity was fine.
The answer came to him in a twist of irony. The Coiled Dragon River ran northeast before curving into a straight line toward the Northern Steppes. Near the intersection of the Central Plains and the ShuBasinlands, though, was a lake. Cartographers had likened it to a pearl held by a dragon. And Zen, desperate for some reminder of his homeland in his early days at Skies’ End, had gone there.
Black Pearl Lake,he thought, closing his eyes and thinking of the expanse of water that looked dark even in the daytime and served as the perfect reflection of the sky at night.
He kept the image in his mind, then traced the last strokes of his Seal.
A straight line to bridge departure and destination.
Then a circle to close.
The village, the open window, the kàng and the little room he’d shared with Lan—it all disappeared as the image in his mind swallowed him whole.
—
In the moments it took his eyes to adjust, he heard the crash of waves against a shore, felt the softness of sand beneath his boots. Gradually, he saw the outline of undulating mountains encircling him. The stretch of darkness before him began to take shape: the light from the stars seemed to seep into it, as though it stole from the sky itself.
He straightened, breathing in the scent of water and wind.The mountains that rimmed the lake gave the illusion that he was in a small world of his own, the sky and sea both strewn with stars.
He swiped a fú for light, then unfolded the parchment with the star maps and held it to the glow. And there it was: the dots he had painstakingly transcribed onto the sheet nearly perfectly matched the pattern of stars overhead.
He was close.
Zen closed his eyes and combed the qì around him, searching for that tangle of anger, and hatred, and fear—the one he’d stumbled upon thirteen cycles ago at the place where his clan had been slaughtered. He found nothing but the gentle weave of wind and water, mountain and earth, all the natural elements in the qì flowing in harmony.
And yet…He frowned, pushing further. Beneath it all: an undercurrent of dread, of a vicious flux beneath the surface. A feeling of something older, somethingoffabout the place itself, something like terror that had seeped into the bones of the mountains, the roots of the trees, and the bottom of the lake.
The bottom of the lake.
Zen thought back to that winter day thirteen cycles ago, to the words He With Eyes of Blood had whispered to him.Did you not call for me?Did you not cast an unspoken wish for power? For revenge? For the chance to do to them what they did to your family?
He had. He had asked for all those things, and had achieved none. Instead, Zen had run in a perfect circle, coming right back to where he’d started. Except he was no longer a naive child yearning for the affection of his master, for acceptance in the world, for redemption of his soul. No, it was too late for that, and if he could achieve something with the path less taken, Zen would choose it.
He dug through his memories, calling on all that he had learned to suppress. Everything that held emotions he had tried not to feel over the past thirteen cycles: helplessness andagonizing pain at the hands of the Elantian interrogation team, terror at the sight of Yeshin Noro Dilaya’s bleeding form, bitterness at the masters’ cold indifference, anger at the nonsensical injustice of their decisions…fury at the Elantian army for what they had done to Lan, what they were about to do to the village should he fail.
Further, further back…to the day thirteen cycles ago when he’d smelled smoke on the high plateaus and run back to see fire tearing through the plains that had been his home, mixing with the red and gold livery and banners of the Imperial Army.
