A very different thought struck Lan. “Whoever conjured this Seal clearly had a lot to hide,” she said softly. “The area is massive—I’d say at least a fewli.Big enough for palace ruins.”
“You know, you have your moments, little fox spirit,” Dilaya said, which, coming from her, might have passed for fondness.
“Quiet.Qui-et,” Tai said, holding his hand up. It was the first time Lan had seen him exercise authority over Dilaya. The Jorshen Steel matriarch clearly recognized how important this was and kept silent, her crimson lips pursed as she watched him.
From his storage pouch, Tai withdrew a bell: bronze, this time, its surface dotted with spikes. In his other hand, he clasped a wooden mallet. A golden inscription of his clan sigil ran along its length.
Dilaya grunted. “Míng’zhong,” she said gruffly, impressed.
“The ‘clear bell’?” Lan asked.
“Yes. Companion to líng’zhong, Tai’s spirit bell. Míng’zhong sounds only when facing a direction in which there are no Seals.”
Tai stepped forward and struck the míng’zhong with the wooden mallet.
Strangely, it made no sound. The night wind swept through the desert. The sands whispered. Clouds appeared in the sky.
And then, from an empty stretch of desert beyond the net of phantom willow leaves came a low, reverberating note.
“Follow” was all Tai said as he began to walk toward it, and the command brooked no argument. Dilaya was uncharacteristically pliant as she strode ahead of Lan.
By now, the willow branches conjured from the Water of Purity had nearly evanesced. As the three passed through the last of its wispy leaves, the desert around them began to warp, like a glass bending out of shape. The stars scattered. The crescent moon stretched. The dunes before them undulated as though in a heat haze.
They were in the heart of the illusion.
It was dizzying, watching the ground beneath their feet shift with every step they took. They started and stopped in response to each note of the míng’zhong.
Lan wasn’t sure how much time had passed when it happened. Between one step and another, a sand dune split into two, then four, then more, the effect disorienting. As the dunes separated, a flat stretch of land appeared, andthere,between the dunes and the horizon, was an oasis silvered by the moonlight.
Dilaya made a noise in her throat. Tai stopped and tapped his mallet on the míng’zhong again.
This time, the answering note came, clear and pure, in the direction of the oasis.
The moon seemed to grow brighter as they approached. At the center of the oasis was a spring in the shape of a crescent moon—just as the soul of the Yuè immortal had described. The water rippled gently in the breeze and glowed like it had captured the fluorescence spilling from the moon and stars. Duckweed dipped gently into the spring as though in slumber, the quiet rustle of the place filled with whispers of dreams.
They had reached Crescent Spring. But, looking at the sleepy oasis and the vast, empty desert around it, the question arose—
“So where is it?” Dilaya turned to Lan. “I don’t see any palace or ruins.”
“ ‘When the stars burn, you will see the path to the city carved in its waters.’ ” Lan spoke carefully, rolling each word on her tongue like a marble.
“Why must these ancient immortal souls speak inriddles?” Dilaya ground out, hands on hips. “It makes everything unnecessarily complicated. This is why, in the Jorshen Steel clan,we prefer to speak with our swords. I don’t need to tell someone they displease me. I can simply—” She made a stabbing motion.
“Riddles,” Tai mourned. “When the stars burn. When the stars.Burn.”
Lan stroked her ocarina absentmindedly as she stared at the reflection of the stars in the water. They glimmered like jewels, blues and silvers and purples—but they certainly weren’t burning. How did one make stars burn?
The answer came to her.
“ ‘Long ago, the Heavens split,’ ” she whispered, recalling the old ballad. “ ‘Like teardrops, the fragments fell to the ground. A piece of the sun bloomed into the Crimson Phoenix.’ ”
She knew when she had seen the stars burn, recalled it vividly: when she’d sat in a rain-soaked village, the song of her ocarina wending skyward and conjuring four quadrants. The quadrant with the star map of the Phoenix, a constellation outlined in flaming red in the night sky, had been the closest thing to seeing stars burn.
It was a wild guess. Lan’s fingers slid into place over the holes of the ocarina. She looked at the stars and began to play.
The melody unwound, spinning qì into the star maps. Black, silver, blue…and then red—the star maps hovered in the sky, then began to fade. Except for one.
The quadrant of the Crimson Phoenix seemed to grow. It settled like a stream of fire and mirrored exactly the constellations they saw overhead.
