Demonic practitioning, the Wayward path.
If I must see darkness for our people to find light,he had once told Lan,then I will make that same choice, over and over and over again.
Zen reached into his storage pouch and withdrew four sticks of incense. He swiped a fú, and the tips of the incense flared, casting the burial chamber in a flash of blood-red.
Zen lifted the incense sticks to his forehead and bowedone, two, three times. “May the Eternal Sky take my soul. May the Great Earth take my body.”
It was one of the few phrases he remembered from Mansorian funerary rites. He recalled the great bonfires that stood taller than him, the flames licking up into the sky and the embers blending into the stars. For a Mansorian to be properly honored in death, they had to be burned: to release their soul from their fleshly prison into the Eternal Sky, and then for the ashes of their mortal body to fall into the embrace of the Great Earth.
To be encased in a stone tomb was to have one’s body and soul trapped in a deathless death.
Zen straightened. “March with me into battle once more,” he said to the chamber of the undead, “and I vow to honor you in true death, releasing you to the Eternal Sky and the Great Earth as it was meant to be.”
He took out theClassic of Gods and Demonsfrom his storage pouch and flipped it open. Zen drew a steadying breath, then yielded his mind and body to the Demon God that waited in the shadows.
As his qì flowed from his fingertips, buoyed by the power of the Black Tortoise, an unearthly gleam passed over the Seals he had painted on the stone floor.
The smoke from his incense was palpitating violently. The temperature in the chamber plunged fast, frost cracking across the walls and stealing into Zen’s lungs. Black flames roared to life, ringing each stone casket. The Seals written on the carved effigy across the lid of each tomb had begun to glow: a deep red, spreading across like blood and fire. With hisses, they ate away at the stone until there was nothing left of the lid at all.
Yin blasted across the chamber, a chorus of screams that nearly drove Zen to his knees. He stood by the strength of his Demon God, watching as, one by one, the preserved corpsesof the Mansorian demonic practitioners rose. Behind them, outlined by the red light of their Seals, were shadows that did not belong to them. A wolf with elongated legs and jutting ribs; a hawk with wing feathers as sharp as knives; a horse with teeth like fangs; a fox with nine tails. Their once-human binders turned to him, eyes glowing, weapons at their hips, cores screaming with yin. He could feel their souls connected to his in the same way he was connected to the Black Tortoise, ripples of their qì reaching him in a manner that was utterly intoxicating. Each Deathrider had the strength of an army of fully trained practitioners, if not more.
The Forty-Four stilled, as though waiting for his command.
Zen unfolded his left palm. At its center, puckered like scarred flesh, glowed a Mansorian Seal: the miniature version of the one he had drawn from theClassic of Gods and Demons.This was the Seal that bound the Forty-Four’s wills to his and linked their demonic qì irrevocably to his core.
Together, they held the keys to liberating this kingdom—and to destroying it.
As the enormity of his task lifted from his shoulders, relief and exhaustion began to set in. Zen went to his hands and knees, shaking as sweat dripped down the side of his face. His energy was spent.
And something was wrong.
The floor was going in and out of focus. A strange buzzing had filled his ears, and his head pounded as though with a rush of blood. He could no longer feel the cold in his hands nor the stone ground beneath his feet. Zen sucked in deep breaths, blinking to clear his vision.
Zen,came that rumbling whisper in his mind, and the Black Tortoise’s qì began to close over him, as massive as a mountain and as overwhelming as the night itself.Oh, Zen. We are so close. So close to the end.
No. Not now.
He gritted his teeth and pulled, replenishing the yin energies flooding his veins with yáng and the strength of his own will. He would get through this. He would take down the Elantian army. And he would see Lan again, just one last time.
His story wouldnotend like that of his great-grandfather.
Those thoughts pierced through the veil of yin, light through dark waters. And Zen surfaced, gasping as the Black Tortoise’s presence retreated from his mind. Sight and sound rushed back: the musty air of the dungeons, the cold stone beneath his palms and knees, the sweat drenching his hair and páo, the demonic practitioners he had summoned watching him with faces like stone. Their demons—the shadows on the walls—shifted, perhaps sensing the presence of a powerful Demon God amongst them.
Zen remained where he was a few moments more, waiting for his breath to steady and the world to settle again. When he felt strong enough, he pushed himself to his feet.
He managed to stagger up the dungeon steps. He gulped down lungfuls of fresh winter air when he emerged, the piercing wind that whistled into the hallway through the broken doors of these ruins a sharp relief to the suffocating stillness of the dungeons.
The sun was setting. It hung barely over the mountains inthe west, staining their peaks orange and whipping fire into the snow clouds. Below, the rest of the world was steeped in shadow.
Zen watched the last of the sun sink beneath the horizon. Lan, and all the remaining practitioners of the Last Kingdom, would have moved out; their plan hinged on his being able to wipe out most of the Elantian army and their Royal Magicians in the capital. Without that, he was letting them walk into a trap in the city with the heaviest Elantian presence.
He closed his eyes and drew in a deep, steadying breath. Ran a thumb over his left palm, where the Seal pulsed, carrying his will and command to the Forty-Four demonic practitioners that waited at the other end.
“Deathriders of Mansoria,” Xan Temurezen said, his voice carrying through the halls of his ancestors. “Heed my call.”
Sound east, strike west.
—General Yeshin Noro Dorgun of the Jorshen Steel Clan, Sixth of the Thirty-Six Stratagems,Classic of War
