Dilaya gave him an assessing look and wrinkled her nose. “And draw him a bath.”
—
Zen let the guards lead him through the palace, down to the dungeons, where they plonked a wooden bucket of water and bath powders on the ground.
The water was ice-cold, yet it felt good to bathe. In the darkness, his mind was clear—his strength was returning, and as it did, the Black Tortoise’s presence in his mind began to fade.
He banished it back to its dormant state in its core.
When he finished bathing, he leaned back against the rough-hewn stone walls, reached into his storage pouch, andretrieved theClassic of Gods and Demons.In the faint light seeping into the dungeon, he cracked the tome open to the last page ofhishalf—the first page of the portion Hóng’yì had stolen.
It was all there: the Seal to summon the Deathriders.
Zen traced a finger down the page, following the rich strokes of ink that made up the Mansorian Seal. As he did, he recalled the Seal he had watched Hóng’yì begin to perform on Lan on the shore of Crescent Spring.
Anger burned white-hot inside him. The crown prince had been performing the exact Seal that had bound the preserved bodies and souls of the Deathriders to their commander, only Hóng’yì had intended to bind a living, breathing person tohim.
Lan.
Zen drew a long, ragged breath. He exhaled through his teeth, willing the fury pounding through his skull to cease so he could think.
Gradually, the throbbing calmed.
In the days since the Ghost Gates, he’d had plenty of time to reconsider the path of his life: one that had ostensibly been written in the stars he’d been born under, in the legacy he had inherited. Zen had simply misread it all along.
Or perhaps there had always been two sides to the story.
His great-grandfather had bound the Black Tortoise, wholeheartedly embraced its strength and given himself over to it. In the end, he had succumbed to a power that had become a trail of blood and destruction and tragedy. The Mansorian clanhad become a stain upon history; the name of Xan Tolürigin had been spoken with fear even among the clan members Zen hadgrown up with. The surviving Mansorian fugitives, including Zen’s own parents, had disdained the thought of demonic practitioning and had been left to flounder in the ashesof their fallen clan until the last of them had been swallowed whole by the imperial court.
Power,Zen reflected, leaning his head against the cool stone walls. He turned back to the tome, to the inscription on the first page.
Power is survival. Power is necessity,the classic began. This, Zen understood. Power was necessary; without it, peoples and clans and kingdoms were swallowed up by those with more power.
But the next line had stumped him.
Those who seek power must first take it; where it does not exist, they must create it.
This principle was in direct contrast with the first principle of the Way; Zen had spent the better part of his childhood reciting it at the School of the White Pines. “ ‘Power is always borrowed, never created,’ ” he muttered to himself.
Dào’zihad been right, in some sense. The power of the imperial family, including Hóng’yì, had been siphoned from the common people—they had literally taken the souls of their people, using it to fuel their cores of qì and control the Crimson Phoenix.
Power borrowed.
Yet now, Zen realized, staring at the page in the dim light, there was a new, third line of ink. It was darker and fresher than the rest of the book, as though written at a much later time. It must have been in the half of the book the imperial family had stolen, and had reappeared now that the two halves were made whole.
Zen’s fingers trembled as he swept them over the new words.
Once power is created, one must know when to destroy it.
—Xan Tolürigin, Ruler of the Eternal Sky and the Great Earth
It was as though, with these words, the world clicked into place for Zen. All this time, he had searched for a truth but found only half. He had known his great-grandfather’s story, of the necessity and dangers of power. But it had been a story unfinished.
The most basic principle of Seals, of practitioning, of the Way, was that everything had a yin and a yáng, a beginning and an end, in a cycle of creation and destruction and rebirth.
The imperial family and Xan Tolürigin alike had realized the necessity of power. They had attained power in the form of the Demon Gods. But Xan Tolürigin alone had realized the need to destroy his power.
It had been too late; the power he’d taken had consumed him, leaving the cycle open. Creation without destruction. An endless, sorrowful spiral of four Demon Gods and the humans who fought to possess them—the “Ballad of the Last Kingdom.”
