—Mansorian funerary rite, First Verse
Zen found himself on a stairway that spiraled downward. He suppressed his desire to pull out a fú and light a flame. Fear of darkness was too human a flaw; Zen would embrace the shadows, the unknown. He could function well enough by reading the movement of qì in the place.
And movement there was…far down below.
He conjured up a barrier Seal at the obsidian tortoise’s belly, one that would alert him if any qì passed through it. Then he began his descent.
The yin grew stronger with every step, and it wasn’t long before something else joined the mix: the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh.
It was a while before his feet hit the ground, and he sensed stone yielding to wood before him. Beyond that…the press of yin, like floodwaters beyond a great dam.
Zen drew a fú from his pouch. With a sound like the strike of a match, it activated, light flaring golden and illuminating a set of red doors before him. Where the door handles orknockers should have been was the engraving of a Seal. It was dead—there was no qì flowing through it—and brown stains ran through the strokes in the wood. Zen could no more read it than he could the other Mansorian Seals, yet the realization of what he had to do hit him.
He lifted Nightfire and pressed the tips of his fingers to its blade. A sharp bite, and blood began to flow.
Zen pressed his hand to the engraving of the Seal. Qì flowed from him in the form of his blood. The Mansorian Seal began to glow—and there, on the surface of the paint, characters began to form.Mansoriancharacters, ones that had been wiped from existence by the Dragon Emperor and his Imperial Court. Ones that Zen had barely come to know before they’d been outlawed.
Anger wrought a sharp ache in his chest as he stared at the words he should have known like the lines in his own palm. It was anger that made him careless, anger that drove him to open his mind and summon that voice with the dry rattle of fallen leaves and dead things.
“Welcome, child of Mansoria,”his Demon God read to him.Your instincts are correct. This Seal is one that opens only with the blood of a Mansorian clan descendant.
With a greatcrack,the doors before him scraped open.
The living corpses came all at once: a flurry of limbs and hair and peeling flesh, mouths open in broken shrieks from rotten vocal cords. Zen barely had time to raise Nightfire before he was slashing through tendon and bone. He flung a handful of fú, feeling their sparks of qì as they activated and exploded. Gut and sinew splattered the walls and his clothes. The cloying smell of decayed flesh was overwhelming, and his head was beginning to spin…he needed help, he needed—
He didn’t feel the Demon God take over, only knew when it relinquished its hold. When Zen opened his eyes again, thechamber was still. Empty. A Seal burned before him, wreathed in fire and shadow, lending its red light to the scorched ashes that fell around him like snow. He could sense the lick of qì all around and knew that it had somehow come from him, from the other consciousness inside him.
“I did not ask for your help,” he said to the silence.
And the silence answered:No, but you needed it.
Anger scorched his throat, but he redirected his thoughts. Layers of powerful Mansorian Seals locking this place away. Countless living corpses standing guard. This place had secrets.
That was when Zen noticed the graves.
There were about forty of them, caskets half entombed in the earth and lining the length of the rectangular chamber. They were made of stone and tightly sealed, which was unusual, as Zen’s people believed that the Eternal Sky and the Great Earth accepted their souls and bodies after death. Drawing closer, he saw that each casket was engraved with an effigy of a person in classic Mansorian garb. Strangely, their eyes were portrayed as open instead of closed. Zen had the feeling he was being watched.
At the center of each effigy’s abdomen was another Mansorian Seal.
Frustration burned inside him. There was something here, something so tightly protected by his ancestors that it had survived an entire century and a foreign invasion. And he, Xan Temurezen, descendant of Xan Tolürigin, could not reach it because he couldn’treadthe language.
He swallowed the heat of his anger and made a decision. “Perform the Counterseal,” he said, and his Demon God did his bidding.
A low rumbling sounded across the chamber as the stone lid of the first casket grated off. Zen leaned over the edge of the casket and felt his body go ice-cold.
Within was a corpse—undoubtedly Mansorian, its owner once a high-ranking general, Zen surmised from the gold hilt of the saber clutched between its fingers, the finely woven silk tunic, and the samite sash looped over its waist. It was so perfectly preserved, Zen might have believed it to be a man asleep had it not been for the vortex of yin surrounding it. The weave of its energies was far more complex than the cruder Seals that had driven the living corpses: mindless, weak things already falling apart from rot. No…this corpse was different.
Ah.His Demon God’s voice came with a new, peculiar lilt. Of recognition.The Forty-Four.
“What is that?” Zen demanded, hating that the creature knew more of his ancestors’ secrets than he.
A pause. And then:I could show you.
Zen gritted his teeth. “Show me.”
The burial chamber flickered, and he had the sensation of plunging backward, watching as the walls stretched with time flowing in reverse. The frozen ground beneath his boots became grass, as green as emerald beneath a sapphire sky. An army numbering several dozen were mounted on long-haired Mansorian horses, and Zen’s attention was instantly drawn to the man sitting astride a black stallion.
His great-grandfather wore his hair long and proud. His earthen skin was encased in armor glimmering black and red, spear in one hand and reins in the other.
