But Lan was looking at something else.
Over the western horizon, an unnatural darkness had spread, obscuring the embers of sunset. Atop the cresting dunes, shadows had appeared, stretching long and distorted.
A caravan. Lan could make out the shapes of camels, a sight they’d come across not infrequently as they followedthe Jade Trail. Yet something was wrong. The camels were approaching too fast—spread out and charging in their direction. As though fleeing something.
Lan opened her mouth to speak, but that was when they heard it: distant cries shattering the mournful rise of sandsong.
A gust of wind slammed into them, cold and biting to the core and suffused with a stench of energy that choked Lan. She’d encountered this type of qì only a handful of times before.
Demonic qì.
A deep rumbling echoed through the desert, like the roll of a great celestial drum.
And then Tai’s spirit bell began to scream.
Of all the Ninety-Nine Clans, perhaps the most mysterious is the Yuè, who have long perfected the secrets to cultivating immortality and whose roots may, in fact, not derive from mortals in the first place.
—Various scholars,Studies of the Ninety-Nine Clans
Lan was already sliding her ocarina from the pouch on her belt, heart pounding in time to the shrill peals of Tai’s bell. The sand beneath their feet was trembling, little pockmarks forming as though invisible raindrops splattered on the ground.
The sand dunes were rising into the sky, cresting higher and higher like waves. Pushing steadily toward them.
“Mó,” Tai croaked.Demon.
Fear tightened Lan’s throat, and with that, the other being inside her stirred to life. Eyes the blue of ice opening a crack. The shimmer of silver scales in the dark. A voice like a night wind rushed to fill her head.
Mó,the Silver Dragon of the East said softly.I sense the wrath in the soul at its core.
Lan gritted her teeth and broke the connection between them. The sole obligation of the Demon God was to protect her when her life was in danger; at all other times, she had been careful to keep a mental wall up between them, so it had no access to her thoughts.
As it retreated, noise of this world filtered back: the distant shrieks of the scattered caravan merchants, the howl of the sandsong, and the sand spirit that prowled forward, eclipsing half the sky.
Before her, Dilaya drew out Falcon’s Claw. The curved dao was an heirloom of the Jorshen Steel clan and her most prized possession, entrusted to her by her mother in the moments before death. From this angle, Lan could only see Dilaya’s loose left sleeve billowing in the wind, her black eye patch, and the stubborn set of her chin as she glared up at the malevolent spirit.
“Dilaya. No.No,” Tai called from behind. “You cannot defeat it. You cannot. The Elantian magicians. They will find us.”
They had avoided practitioning for the past moon to remain undetected by the Royal Magicians. If they fought now, there was a chance the sand spirit’s qì would mask theirs. Yet there was also a chance they would reveal their location.
Dilaya tilted her head. In the dim yellow light, her mouth was a crimson slash. “And what, Chó Tài? You would run and leave those merchants to the mercy of that mó?”
“Not,” Tai mumbled. “Not what I meant.”
Dilaya slashed the air with Falcon’s Claw, its blade glinting in the last sliver of sunlight filtering through the smothered skies. “Did we survive Skies’ End just so we could watch our people die? Did our masters train us to become practitioners just so we could cower before evil?” Her eye shone as she looked at her companions, and in her gaze, Lan knew, were the ghosts of all they had lost. Their masters. Dilaya’s mother. Lan’s parents. Shàn’jun. Their home. “I am a disciple of the School of the White Pines. I am the matriarch of the Jorshen Steel clan. And I am a practitioner of the Last Kingdom. I will not stand by while my people die.”
With that, she leapt, a powerful jet of qì she’d channeled through the soles of her feet propelling her high into the sky.
Lan’s grip tightened on her ocarina, her thumb brushing over the familiar grooves of the mother-of-pearl lotus inlaid into the sleek black surface. This instrument was how she channeled the Art of Song, a long-lost magic that ran in her clan bloodline. Practitioners of the Art of Song wielded qì through their music, weaving Seals with combinations of notes and melodies that drew upon the infinite threads of energies in this world. Her mother had been the last practitioner to wield this art and had left the ocarina for Lan.
Within the instrument, Lan’s mother had hidden the keys to finding the Demon Gods: four star maps, which only Lan could coax out through the Art of Song. The Black Tortoise was with Zen now and the Silver Dragon with her, leaving the remaining two Demon Gods, the Azure Tiger and the Crimson Phoenix, unaccounted for.
That was why every single Elantian Royal Magician was after her. The magician known as Erascius, who led the war against the Hin practitioners, had a personal vendetta against Lan: he had killed her mother twelve cycles past and was now intent on killing Lan and binding the Silver Dragon to himself, along with the rest of the Demon Gods. Then he would crush whatever remained of the Hin practitioners and any hopes of rebellion they harbored.
Lan looked to Dilaya, now a small red speck in the distance, charging headlong toward the great sand demon. To the caravanners disappearing beneath its roiling, suffocating claws. Her knuckles whitened on her ocarina. Fight, and they risked revealing their location to the Elantian army. Run, and they condemned dozens of innocents to die.
It had always come down to this: choices in a conquered land. And as she stood, frozen in indecision, a memory cameto her: Zen, standing across from her by the black-glass lake, his face contorted in rage and grief.Choices are for those withprivilege,Lan. You said it yourself, that we’re givenshitchoices and we have to make the best of them!
Her throat closed; her vision blurred. There was a sudden ache in her chest, because these words from the boy she’d been regarding as an enemy and a traitor suddenly rang true.
