Rebellion,the governor had called it, the word ringing in this hall of the conquered, amongst the Hin’s tomes and histories and dynasties of practitioning knowledge. Erascius didn’t like that word.
He waved a hand. “Tell the governor to continue his games of politics and economics. I will focus on winning this war for us. And send for Lieutenant Lishabeth. We make for the Emaran Desert by sunset. I want word out to every single base west of here to be on alert for the Hin girl. We find her, we find the star maps, and we find the remaining Demon Gods.”
Erascius turned back to the Hin tome, barely noticing asthe messenger limped out, leaving a trail of blood.Winter Annals,he’d translated, the Elantian language striking left to right before him, straight and true like a sword as opposed to the messy waterfall spill of Hin characters. The book contained a history of the clans, banned across the Last Kingdom’s bookhouses by the Imperial Court. There was a single page Erascius had focused on, and it had given him all the information he needed.
He leaned over, the gold on his fountain pen gleaming as he finished the chapter, then leaned back to survey his work.
The Binding of the Demon Gods.Half the key to this new universe he’d stepped in to conquer.
And the other half…Erascius lifted his gaze west, beyond the silk curtains and a colorless winter sky framed in the rosewood fretwork of the temple hall.
The other half lay with the girl. It was she who held the star maps, the maps that led to the Four Demon Gods. It was she they needed to find in order to conquer this land.
“Run, my little singer,” he whispered, the wind snatching the words from his lips. “Run far and fast, for I am coming….”
I will find you, Sòng Lián.
Power is survival. Power is necessity. Those who seek power must first take it; where it does not exist, they must create it.
—Unknown,Classic of Gods and Demons
Elantian Age, Cycle 12
The Northern Steppes
The ruins rose before him like a graveyard, blackened bones jutting from the ground and gaping at a storm-gray sky.
Xan Temurezen drew to a stop. The steady crunch of his sheepskin boots against snow fell away, and silence swept in, broken only by the distant keening of the wind and his own heartbeat. Around him: a landscape shrouded in white as far as the eye could see. The color of mourning. It was as though the earth itself grieved the day a people and a civilization had died, their last moments now buried beneath the passage of time, the turns of cycles.
Zen held his breath as he knelt by the remains of a charred stone wall. All the ancient tomes and scraps of maps he had studied had pointed to this place, where the great Mansorian clan’s palace had once stood—and where he, Xan Temurezen, its heir, had come to reclaim it.
He brushed away a mound of snow, revealing an engraved stone plaque. He immediately recognized the swirly, linear writing as Mansorian, standing in sharp contrast to the neat,boxlike Hin characters. Some clans, like the Mansorians, had cultures so distinct that they had their own writing systems, different from the standardized Hin language the Imperial Court had forced all to adopt.
Zen’s memory of the Mansorian script had faded, but he could read enough to understand.
Palace of Eternal Peace
His hand gave a tremor; his heart tumbled in his chest. This was it: the lost palace of his ancestors. The place from which Xan Tolürigin, the Nightslayer, had ruled until the end of his civilization. The starting point of Zen’s revolution.
Zen had been born two generations after the fall of the once-mighty Mansorian clan, following the war waged by his great-grandfather Xan Tolürigin against the Imperial Army of the Middle Kingdom. Zen’s grandfather, then a boy, had escaped with a small faction of Mansorians and retreated deep into the unforgiving plains of the Northern Steppes, where they’d built a nomadic life hidden from the iron rule of the Dragon Emperor, Yán’lóng. That was the life Zen had known until, thirteen cycles ago, the Imperial Army had slaughtered what was left of his clan…and then, twelve cycles ago, when the conqueror had been conquered and the Hin had fallen to the rule of the Elantians.
I have returned,he vowed silently to the unquiet souls who slumbered beneath the snow.I will raise an army, and I will bring our clan back.
The snow stirred and the night pressed a little closer. And then came a rattling whisper, like the scrape of a knife against the bone of his spine:Army? You would call thirty or so half-fledged children an army?
It was the voice he had come to dread: the voice of his Demon God, the being that made him powerful beyond all measure, and the creature that embodied his shame. In the world of practitioning, demonic practitioning was dangerous and forbidden; the masters at his school who had raised him had taught him why.
Zen had betrayed everything he knew and loved in order to gain the power of the Black Tortoise.
Pushing those thoughts away, Zen turned to the small caravan of people following him. They, too, had stopped and stood huddled together in the cold, their long, pale robes made for the temperate winters of the south, not for the harsh northern climate. These were disciples of what had once been the School of the White Pines, the last-standing ancient Hin school of practitioning, where Zen had grown up. Less than one moon ago, it had fallen in an all-out battle against the Elantian Army and its powerful Royal Magicians.
The school’s disciples had evacuated first, escaping to safety over hidden mountain trails and through forests that led away from the east, where Elantian occupation held strong. It hadn’t been difficult to track them down. That night, as Zen had been prepared to flee from Where the Rivers Flow and the Skies End once and for all, he’d picked up on their qì. He’d sensed their grief, their absolute terror at having lost their home and their entire way of life.
It had struck a chord, a memory buried deep.
A boy, not eleven cycles old, wading through the burnt feathergrasses of his homeland, weeping and alone.
When Zen had found the disciples, he’d made them an offer: pledge their allegiance and join his rebellion in exchange for his protection.
