“We may not make it to the city tonight.”
Lan’s thoughts snapped back to the present. Dilaya had parted her veil: her remaining eye was the gray of sword metal, her mouth a slash of red across a long and angular face that bore a unique beauty in its fierceness. With her one hand, she shook out a parchment map.
“Ruins. More abandoned ruins,” Tai moaned from the ground. “Sleeping on cold rocks. Once, I slept on silk sheets in a palace.”
Lan scooted close to Dilaya, searching the map. According to their calculations, they would have arrived at Nakkar justpast nightfall—but with dusk looming on the horizon and the sands beginning to sing, the prospect of a full meal and soft bed looked like a distant dream.
She traced a finger down the Jade Trail map, searching closer to their current location. They’d bartered the map from a Jade Trail merchant, who’d taught them the key: a camel represented a caravanserai stop (where one could fillup waterskins and buy a day or two’s worth of dried foods), a house meant a town with shelter, and a crown with wings represented an Elantian trade checkpoint, a bustling town with plentiful supplies and resources specifically designed to welcome Jade Trail travelers.
“No trading posts in the periphery,” Dilaya said. “I checked already.” She looked up and sighed. The thought of another night sleeping on cold, hard ground weighed on them all.
Dilaya dug into her storage pouch, which, like each practitioner’s, bore a stitching unique to her identity. Dilaya’s was sheepskin with two crossed sabers clutched in a falcon’s claw, whereas Tai’s was gray silk stitched through with a white bell. Both bore the sigils of once-powerful clans that had been wiped out under the Dragon Emperor’s brutal reign in the era of the Last Kingdom.
Dilaya withdrew her hand. Between her fingers winked a contraption that resembled two concentric rosewood boards, painted with obscurefeng’shuisymbols and rimmed in gold. A silver needle in the center spun gently with the motion. The luó’pán, or lodestone compass, was a geomancy tool and an utter mystery to Lan. Apparently, the oldest scholars of geomancy had designed it to track the stars in the sky and the movement of the ground in order to derive the precise direction of a place or object.
Lan thought it all a heap of useless turd if one couldn’t evenread the thing. “What do you need that for? We already have the map.”
Dilaya placed the luó’pán flat on her palm and squinted down at it. The dial settled, shifting slightly as though to an invisible wind before growing still. “The luó’pán works on a combination of astrology and qì and can detect things that aren’t on a map. I’m going to look for waves in the qì that suggest wooden or dirt structures. I just need to understand this symbol…. Chó Tài, do you remember what it means when the first trigram on the earthly plate crosses with the seventh trigram on the heavenly plate and the dial points to a flute and a horse?”
Lan could no longer resist. “A musical pile of horseshit?” she suggested.
Dilaya looked daggers at her, and Lan could practically see all of the Kontencian Analects working their way up the girl’s throat. Their relationship had progressed from mutual dislike to a form of alliance and even respect, stemming from their common goal. Still, Lan couldn’t resist needling Dilaya once in a while for fun, and the latter was only too glad to bite back.
“Hilarious,” Dilaya snapped. “Perhaps you’d actually be able tohelpif you’d paid more attention in Master Feng’s classes—”
She stopped suddenly and drew a sharp breath. Lan’s grin slipped from her face, and Tai sat up slowly, his gold-rimmed eyes reflecting the setting sun between his black curls. As the sandsong filled the silence with its mournful wails, Lan knew with certainty that they all shared a memory: Skies’ End falling, the masters staying to protect the Azure Tiger, the Demon God they had kept hidden within the mountain for so long. The home they had lost to the Elantians in a night of rain and fire and blood. And, for Dilaya, the loss of her mother, YeshinNoro Ulara, the school’s Master of Swords and the matriarch of the Jorshen Steel clan, a role that now fell to Dilaya.
The three of them bore an unspoken sentiment of guilt, the possibilities ofwhat if.What if they had stayed behind with the masters to fight? What if they had been able to lure the Elantian army away from Skies’ End?
What if Lan had been able to command the power of the Silver Dragon of the East, the Demon God her mother had bound inside Lan?
She could feel it within her now as her thoughts turned to it with a mixture of fear and disgust. Over the past few weeks, Lan had come to find that she could communicate with the Demon God when she willed it; when she didn’t, it remained dormant within her, a silver core of unimaginable power she carried. Demonic practitioning bargains differed, yet the only bargain Lan had known of had been Zen’s: a contract promising that with each use of the Black Tortoise’s power, he gave more of his body, mind, then soul over to the god.
It was Lan’s mother who had Sealed the Demon God within herself and, in her dying moments, in Lan in a desperate attempt to hide it from the Elantians twelve cycles ago. The price her mother had paid for the bargain was her soul.
It was a bargain Lan had replaced with her own: at the end of her contract with the Demon God, it would release Sòng Méi’s soul—and take Lan’s instead, for all eternity.
Lan touched the Seal imprinted on her wrist by the Silver Dragon. It contained the terms of their bargain. The sands had begun wailing louder now, an eerie phantom chorus that swept across a rapidly darkening sky.
“We should use the Light Arts,” she said to Dilaya.
“And risk being discovered? I haven’t walked in these gods-damned sands fordaysjust to blow our cover—”
“There are no checkpoints nearby,” Lan pointed out. “And at this point, with the sandstorm so close, any Elantian Royal Magiciansandpatrols would have returned to their checkpoint towns.” Truthfully, anyone with some common sense would have found shelter somewhere indoors by now.
Dilaya hesitated. Lan could see the girl wavering as another gust of sand howled against them.
“Agree.A-gree,” Tai chimed in, sitting up, revived, with sand pouring from his tousled hair. His hand went to his spirit bell, which remained quiet as he carefully dusted it off. “Either we go or we die here in this sandstorm.”
“Or get our souls sucked out by sand demons,” Lan added. She mimicked the sound of slurping noodles and smacked herlips.
Dilaya looked as though she were considering murdering Lan.“Fine,”the Jorshen Steel matriarch growled. “But if we happen to run into any magicians, Sòng Lián and Chó Tài, I swear on your ancestors’ graves I’ll fish you both out from the River of Forgotten Death just so I can kill you again.” She reached for her luó’pán.
And froze.
On the lodestone compass, which glinted gold beneath the sinking sun, the silver needle had begun to move. It jerked left, then right, then left again, and then began to spin. Faster and faster, until it became a blur.
Dilaya’s lips parted. “What—”
