Another pause, and that new uncertainty he’d sensed.I cannot.
He growled. “Why not?”
This Seal bears the flames of one of the Four. That which is aligned with the sun, with the crimson of fire and blood and destruction. Attempting a Counterseal triggers the illusions of fire and pain you just experienced.
“The Crimson Phoenix.” The bird with brilliant red plumage he’d seen. The Demon God known to have been in the possession of the imperial family for dynasties, unbeknownst to the world; the fourth and final Demon God, which Lan’s ocarina and star maps had traced to an unfamiliar patch of sky and stars.
Yes. The other half of this book was locked and stolen by its binder.
Zen stared at the open tome, at the blank pages that came after the Seal. “You’re saying that this Seal,” he said slowly, “was conjured by the qì of theCrimson Phoenixat the command of the imperial family…and that the murderers of my clan hold the other half of this book?”
The shadows shifted as the Black Tortoise watched him. The answer was apparent in its silence.
Zen slammed his fists into the ground. With a resounding crack, it split. He sensed tremors rumbling into the earth deep below, into the stone walls all around, as the waves of his anger—manifesting in his qì—roiled through like a tide. For several moments, he couldn’t see, couldn’tthink,from the fury that threatened to tear him apart.
The imperial family had stolen half of an ancient tome that belonged to his ancestors; the very tome that would allow him to call upon his great-grandfather’s army of Deathriders.
Through the waves of his anger, he recalled something.
The Crimson Phoenix. It had been one of the two missing Demon Gods he and Lan had been able to locate through the star maps she’d conjured with her ocarina.
Star maps he’dtranscribedweeks ago.
He fumbled in his storage pouch and found the pieces of parchment by touch, so often had he brushed his fingers against them to assure himself of their continued existence. Even without unfurling them and looking at the black dots representing stars in the night sky, he could see the scene as clearly as though it had happened yesterday. A girl playing the ocarina, four quadrants of the sky glittering above their heads. Red, blue, silver, black.
He unfurled the parchment and held it to the candlelight. The smattering of dots meant nothing to him here in this underground burial chamber, but he remembered distinctly that it hadn’t matched any part of the night sky where they’d been in the Central Plains.
If he wanted to access the missing half of theClassic of Gods and Demons,he would need to find the Crimson Phoenix and have its Seal unlocked from his book.
But there was no telling whether the Crimson Phoenix had moved since they’d transcribed its location. And what could he offer a Demon God to persuade it to release the Seal?
It was another complication to his plan, another step between him and his goal.
Zen stood and made his way to the stairs that led up from the burial chamber. His head was pounding, whether from fatigue or suppressed fury he couldn’t tell. The candlelight, the still air, the silence of the dead had all become asphyxiating. He needed air. He needed to see the stars.
The barrier Seal he’d placed on the obsidian tortoise’s belly whispered to him as he passed through. A feeling of wrongness twisted in him as he looked around.
The open-air hallway of the ancient palace was pitch-black and cold. He could sense the winter breeze wafting in fromthe entrance—which should have remained open to the snowcapped mountains slumbering beneath an ink-black sky—but Zen felt as though a blindfold had slipped over his eyes.
He took two steps forward, then felt a shift in the air.
A voice behind him rasped his name:“Temurezen…”
Zen spun. That face again, in the darkness: flesh pale and dead, eye sockets empty, tongue lolling out, wisps of hair clinging to it. And in its hands—nails rotted and skin blue—it held a jar.
The monster he had glimpsed yesterday.
Zen drew Nightfire and slashed.
“Temurezen,”the creature shrieked, lunging sideways. The jar exploded against the wall, and then the darkness was absolute. Only the echo of the creature’s voice remained, with the faintly bitter stench of whatever it had carried in that jar. “…murezen…rezen…Zen…Zen!”
Zen blinked. His surroundings came into view as moonlight filtered into his vision, dusting the cracks in the palace walls and the rubble scattered on the ground. Before him stood a familiar figure, long hair tied in a simple ponytail, lips parted in shock as he beheld the shattered bowl of medicinal broth slicking the ground beneath his boots.
“Sh-Shàn’jun?” Zen felt as though he’d just woken from a dream. A nightmare.
Shàn’jun wrapped his arms around himself. “I…I couldn’t sleep when I thought of you alone down there. I got up to deliver some hot broth to you, to replenish your yáng qì,” he said, and Zen heard a tremor in his voice. “Forgiveness, Zen.”
Zen sheathed his jiàn, trying to steady his breathing. He wanted to kneel at Shàn’jun’s feet and beghimfor forgiveness, the one person left of his old life to stay with him and understand him. To return to the days when their biggest worrieswere whether the Master of Texts would punish them for failing to memorize ancient Hin verses.
