Something wet and cold landed on his cheek. In surprise, he looked up.
It was snowing. Flakes fell from the sky.As fat as goose feathers,his father used to say.
A song came to him then, from a memory that haunted him through the long nights. One that threatened to destroy the fortress he had built around his heart. A bamboo forest, a girl with quick eyes and a mischievous smile, spinning before him in a páo that whirled white as snow.
Tell me your favorite song. Because I’m in such good spirits, I’ll sing it for you.Her laughter rang in his ears like the chimes of a silver bell.
You would not know it,he’d said.
Which means you must teach me.
No. I’m terrible at singing.
I’ll more than make up for it.A smile sweet as spun sugar.
You mock me.
The snow had wet his cheeks. Zen swept his fingers overhis face before turning to the group—his followers—standing beyond the palace gates. “Fellow disciples,” he said, and then inclined his head to Nur and the Nameless Master. “Masters—shi’fù. Welcome to the Palace of Eternal Peace.”
He paused. Most places Zen had been had a name for the building, and then a name for the place itself—the mountains and forests and rivers where it was located. The School of the White Pines had sat in the midst of Where the Rivers Flow and the Skies End.
He had no idea whether his ancestors had given a name to this cold, dark stretch of land, but he needed one now. One that would stitch together past, present, and future. One that belonged to him as much as it paid homage to his ancestors.
Overhead, in the expanse of deep night, a sudden streak of gold light trailed through the ink-black sky. A falling star, here and then gone, brightly burning for the brief moments it crossed the heavens. A near-impossibility, in a night of snow and storm clouds.
The shamans of old from his clan would have read it as a sign.
Zen thumbed the crimson flames woven onto his black silk pouch. The name came to him as naturally as if it were meant to be.
“Welcome to Where the Flame Rises and the Stars Fall.” He summoned a smile. Felt nothing of it.
Xan Temurezen stepped forward into the last moments of golden light and the blaze of fire from the torches.
From here, he would begin to make the world anew.
In the great Emaran Desert, when the sands sing, it is a song of death.
—Unknown spice merchant,Records of the Jade Trail,Warring Clans Era
Elantian Age, Cycle 12
The Jade Trail, Southwest
The sands were singing again.
Sòng Lián paused to listen, adjusting herdou’lìon her head and pulling the bamboo hat’s gauze veil tighter over her face.
The dunes of the Emaran Desert rolled in a glittering ocean of gold beneath the slant of the late afternoon sun. Silence rendered the sand an endless stretch of stillness, yet as night came on, the wind picked up and the desert sang. The Jade Trail merchants traveling in camel caravans and the locals inhabiting the sparse, dun-colored settlements in this part of the kingdom had dubbed the phenomenon sha’míng, or “sandsong.”
Lan would liken it more to the howls of a dying dog.
For the past few weeks, she, Dilaya, and Tai had been following the trail westward toward the border of the Last Kingdom that ended where this desert began; beyond lay a no-man’s-land that led to the kingdoms of Endhira and Masyria, the great Achaemman Empire…and the mythical city of Shaklahira. By now, Lan had come to dread the sandsong andwhat it meant. It was an indication of worsening weather, that a sandstorm was on the horizon. Yet superstition ran amongst the Jade Trail traders and the locals that a sha’míng storm was no ordinary storm, that it was one conjured by spirits and demons of the desert. Though magic and practitioning had long faded from the minds of the common folk, who believed them to be things of myth and legend, superstitions still ran deep in the Last Kingdom, as though its people remembered an echo of its true history in their bones.
Lan and her companions had spent their first night in the desert huddled within the rammed-earth walls of a ruin, listening to the skies shriek and watching the stars turn dark. Yet when she had tuned in to the qì mingled in the storm, she had found nothing supernatural in its midst. Nothing to indicate that yin and yáng, the two components of all energies in this world, were out of balance.
Some superstitions were simply that—superstition.
Still, they needed to get to cover before the sandstorm started and made it difficult to breathe and to see.
