There were no doors to the temple. The entryway yawned open between stone pillars. Zen paused with a foot on the first step, the hairs on his arms rising as a draft emerged from within, as though something there breathed.
Zen’s focus tightened, homing in on the qì inside the temple. He hadn’t given much thought to the stifling yin earlier—attributing it to the horrors of war this place had seen—yet now, as he closed his eyes and parsed the layers, alarm began to grip him.
Therewassomething inside, something roiling beneath the surface of yin energies left behind from death, pain, and slaughter.
Nightfire—one of the few family heirlooms remaining to Zen, a longsword forged by the greatest blacksmith in the north and infused with the essence of fire—hissed as Zen unsheathed it. He brushed his fingers against the small black silk pouch at his waist. Embroidered with crimson flames, the sigil of the Mansorian clan, it was enchanted with a Seal that allowed it to fit much more than its size belied. Practitioners used such storage pouches to carry an assortment of magical weapons, and Zen’s was no different; its belly was full of fú, Seals written on strips of bamboo paper, whose intended functions were activated with a spark of qì at a moment’s notice.
Enough ammunition for whatever it was that awaited within.
Longsword flashing silver in the dim light, Zen stepped forward.
The earliest scholar-sages and practitioning masters had agreed on one defining principle: that qì was meant to be balanced. In a place with an excess of yin, the energies could fester into something unnatural, something monstrous.
Something demonic.
Zen stepped into the ruins of the temple, and the temperature seemed to drop. His breath began to frost as he moved forward, Nightfire in one hand, the other reaching into the pouch at his waist. He withdrew three sticks of incense and a strip of yellow paper with a red symbol on it.
With a flick of his wrist and a jab of qì, Zen activated the flame Seal on the fú.
Light lanced through the cavernous hallway. Out of the corner of his eye, Zen thought he saw things scurrying off into the shadows. With the burning fú, he lit his incense sticks. Their tips flared red, throwing the remains of the temple into sharp relief.
Pillars led down into a corridor swallowed by darkness. There were traces of former finery: a portrait on the wall knocked askew; a jade horse cracked in half; jewels, pieces of silver, and shards of ceramics half buried beneath drifts of snow that had swept in through the entrance. The place bore marks of a fire: walls blackened with soot, charred birch and bark furniture rotting on the floors.
The smoke from Zen’s incense began to drift, following the course of the cold draft pouring in from the open doorway. Zen watched this peculiar sight for a moment.
The common folk used joss sticks to pray to their gods—whichever of the pantheon they chose to worship—but the origin of incense had been lost to time. It was made with aconcoction of herbs that detected strong yin energies: yin repelled the smoke.
Which meant whatever creature lurked in here lay in the direction opposite in which the smoke traveled.
Zen began to walk in the direction of the phantom wind.
What have you to fear, boy?The Black Tortoise’s low chuckle rumbled across the building like thunder.You are the most terrifying creature to stalk these ruins.
The Demon God was right. What Zen feared most was not the demons that lay in wait in the shadows of this temple.
It was the demon that lay in wait inside him.
Silence,he commanded the Black Tortoise through the bridge of thought that connected them. Over the course of the past moon, Zen had learned that the only thoughts the Demon God could hear were those he spoke willingly to it; the rest of the time, so long as he kept that connection between them severed, it must remain a dormant, separate entity from him, unless his life was under threat.
For now.
He snapped down the mental wall between him and the Demon God, reminding himself—as he did more and more frequently—to keep it locked.
The incense smoke was billowing in earnest now, and the cold grew stronger.
A shape appeared in the darkness before him.
Zen raised his sword and his other hand, ready to trace a Seal, but the light from the tips of the incense sticks illuminated a statue. It took him a moment to realize what it was.
Taller than a bear, the obsidian tortoise statue gaped out at them from the end of the hallway. As Zen lifted his incense to it, smoke streamed away from it in a straight line. The red tips of the sticks gleamed in its pit-black eyes, and Zen had the strangest feeling that it was alive.
Watching.
There’s a Seal on it,Zen thought. He touched a hand to the statue, tracing the faint paths of qì denoting the Seal. It had once been inscribed in blood, and while blood faded with the years, qì remained. The strokes, however, were more complicated than anything Zen had ever studied—and the syllabary wasdifferent,he realized. There were loops and curves written in this Seal that would never have appeared in the practitioning Zen had learned.
This wasMansorianSeal writing.
His pulse leapt in his throat, and a tremor of excitement went through him. This was a branch of practitioning that his own people had invented, had specialized in—an art of practitioning that had been wiped from the history books when Mansorian demonic practitioning was outlawed and the Imperial Army slaughtered his clan. The clan’s last practitioners must have used Mansorian Seal writing as a last line of defense, gambling on the fact that Hin imperial practitioners had never studied it. Whatever secrets the Mansorian practitioners had been guarding had remained safe for nearly a hundred cycles—and could very well include Xan Tolürigin’s army of riders.
