“Lan, we are with you,” Taub said. She held a young disciple in her arms; the child had fallen asleep against her shoulder, curled against the cold. “I’ll have a pot of tofu stew warmed on the stove for you when you return.”
“My blades are yours,” Elanruya declared, stepping forward from the Shaklahiran group, the razor-sharp metal edges of her fans glinting in the moonlight. “It is time to undo what Hóng’yì did to us in that prison of a palace.” Behind her, a murmur of agreement rose from the former Shaklahiran court members.
“Lan’mèi,” Shàn’jun said, and he flung his arms around her in an embrace. “I will forever be the healer behind you. Iapologize in advance for all the caterpillar-fungus soup I will feed you after.”
Lan held on to him tightly. “Thanks, Shàn’jun,” she whispered.
When she drew back, Tai was staring at her, his expression unreadable. His eyes gleamed beneath the wild tangles of his hair.
“Chó Tài,” he said suddenly. “You can call me Chó Tài.”
It might have been a bizarre parting sentence to any outsider watching, but Lan understood the significance. Tai was the monosyllabic Elantian version of Chó Tài’s name, and he’d insisted Lan call him by it after catching her eavesdropping on him and Shàn’jun back at the school bookhouse. Since then, he’d stubbornly refused to let her call him by his truename.
Lan cocked her head and flashed him a grin. “Honored,” she said, and with that, she turned and began to walk away. Behind her, she heard the disciples and Shaklahiran practitioners stirring to action, longswords and broadswords and quivers clanking. She heard Taub’s gentle murmurs as she guided the youngest disciples to the guest quarters within the courtyard manor.
“Sòng Lián!”
Lan glanced over her shoulder. Dilaya was striding toward her, away from the lantern light and the group of disciples. She stopped beneath the shadow of a broken willow, its branches slicing her face into black and white—and there, in the cut of the girl’s stormy eye, crimson lips, and strong jaw, Lan thought she saw the ghost of Dilaya’s mother, Ulara.
For several moments, Dilaya stood with her mouth agape, struggling to find the words to say. And in those moments, Lan wondered if she would witness a miracle: Yeshin Noro Dilaya being nice to her.
The matriarch of the Jorshen Steel clan seemed to readLan’s thoughts. She clamped her lips shut and glared at Lan, then she loosed a breath. Her gaze flickered. “I learned the lesson from my mother that there is no telling what might happen in war,” she said. “But I can tell you we will meet again. If not in this life, then in the next one.” She paused. “And I will still beat you in every art of practitioning, little fox spirit.”
Lan felt the corners of her mouth lift. A smile. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever genuinely smiled at Dilaya.
Still, there had to be a good reason the Hin word for “goodbye” was not a farewell. It was zài’jiàn: “see you again.”
“You too, Horse-face,” Lan said. “See you again.”
She strode through the moon gates where, once upon a life ago, she’d seen her mother enter for the last time. Lan brushed her hands against the instruments on her hips: a small dagger that cut the spaces between stars, and an ocarina that played the songs of ghosts.
She stepped outside the great vermilion front doors, patting the worn bronze lionhead doorknockers as she pushed the doors shut. She looked up at the place where she had known love and loss, the place that was the start of a tale that had now come full-circle. The beginning and the ending.
She summoned her Demon God’s power, creating a portal to a city of bright lights and bustling streets and golden-roofed temples reaching for the heavens.
Sòng Lián stepped through the Gate Seal into the end of the world.
And when Xan Tolürigin fell to madness beneath the weight of yin from his own Demon God, the Last Kingdom was born: a golden era of light and justice. Darkness had been vanquished; turmoil had stabilized to peace.
—Emperor Yán’lóng,Imperial Records of History,Era of the Last Kingdom
The tallow candles and incense sticks had burnt out and been replaced thrice by the time Zen finished drawing the Seals for the Deathriders—one set of Summoning Seals and one set of Binding Seals for every single rider. He leaned back against the wall as he drew breath after labored breath. His qì was an inkwell run dry: he’d traced out the Seals on the stone floor in his own blood, the strongest conductor of his qì and the surest way to inject his will into them. His hair and clothes were sticky with sweat.
The darkness and yin pressed in on him; the chamber seemed to spin. Time flitted by unevenly with each blink; between one and another, it might have been a half bell, or it might have been several. TheClassic of Gods and Demonslay before him, its pages spent; he shut it now, tucking it safely back in his practitioner’s storage pouch.
Still shaking, he reached for the water jug.
It was empty.
The effects of the Seed of Clarity had worn off throughoutthe day as he’d drawn upon more and more of the Black Tortoise’s power. Now he sensed the Demon God’s qì seeping back into his blood and his mind.
The Seals on the floor glimmered, waiting to be activated.
It was time.
Zen stood unsteadily. He knelt by the nearest tomb, the first of the forty-four Deathriders. Her likeness was carved as an effigy in the stone, clad in glistening black lamellar armor. Like all the others, her eyes had been depicted as open, and Zen had the feeling he was the one being watched as he glanced around the chamber.
He looked at the name of the rider, engraved in Mansorian script:Ker Saranejin.The lineage name, followed by the individual’s name—“Moon Flower.” Zen had grown up hearing tales of famous heroes of times past: Rokun the Sun Archer, who had shot down the nine suns that scorched the earth to save humanity; Amun and Renghi, lovers who had partitioned the Eternal Sky and the Great Earth and breathed life into this world. But when those left in his clan had spoken of the Deathriders of Mansoria, it had been in tones of awe and fear. The Black Tortoise had shown him times when they had saved the Mansorian clan, riding against other clans into battle. Yet their names had not been revered in history, their deeds not sung by the bards nor written by the poets—because of who they were and the type of arts they practiced.
