Snow in the Year of the Dragon

by H. Leighton Dickson

  “They’re angry, Kerris,” said Kirin. “But more than that, they’re terrified.”

  “And well they should be.” He lifted the bowl to his lips. “They lived for several years under the regime of the Rising Suns. If that’s not treason…”

  “It is treason.” The Shogun-General sat forward, hands wrapped around his bowl. “But I am so weary of bloodshed. Is mercy too much to ask?”

  Kerris grinned and leaned back on the skins.

  “So much silver in you, now,” he said. “Perhaps I shall begin to turn gold.”

  “Dragons and apes and Ancestors and cities that rise from the earth?” Kirin shook his head. “Surely, a grey lion that turns gold will be nothing at all to believe.”

  They sat in the room that had once been their prison, now very high up over the plains of Tevd. The window walls had ceased flickering but were thick and strong and new. They kept the wind out, people in, and changed opacity according to the outside light. To touch them sent warm currents up one’s arm. Ancestral tek without the Ancestors.

  Kirin stared into his sakeh bowl.

  “And the surviving member of the Council? Tomas Jun-Pak?”

  “Watanabe will have him executed.”

  “Publicly?”

  “Tonight at the celebration, most likely.”

  Kirin nodded. It was the best course of action, all things considered. Honour implied it. Treason dictated it. Bushido demanded it.

  “He also wants to talk about resettling Lha’Lhasa.”

  “I agree,” said Kirin. “This is no place for civilians, and Lha’Lhasa is too venerable to leave to the crows.”

  “Kerris-your-name-was?” came a voice from the hole between rooms.

  “Love of my life?”

  “What’s si-ko-kin-ee-sis?”

  “No idea, luv.”

  “Okay.”

  Kerris smiled over his sakeh.

  “She’s translating those Ancestral texts. Her time at the University was very well spent.”

  “What do we do with all of these animals?”

  “We don’t need to do anything with them, Kirin,” said Kerris. “The Xióngmāo will take care of them. That’s what they do.”

  Kirin grunted. The Xióngmāo had been invaluable, providing food for the armies, cleaning up the chaos inside the Nine Peaks Mountain, finding purpose for the myriad of unusual animals that had managed to survive the Great Awakening.

  “With perhaps the exception of those wolf creatures,” Kerris added. “Long-Swift seems to have taken a shine to them.”

  “He’ll make a new Legion out of them, I’m certain.”

  “Speaking of Legions, we’ll need to discuss how we split this army. We have almost ten thousand men and almost twice that number horses. The gardens of the New World won’t keep them for long.”

  “Well, we can send a third of the Dragons to Ulaan Baator,” said Kirin. “Keep a third here to go between Lha’Lhasa and Shin Sekai. I will take the remaining third along with the Emperor’s River of Steel to Pol’Lhasa. We should make it there in a little over a week.”

  “Not bad,” said Kerris. “But no.”

  “No?” Kirin blinked. “What do you mean, no?”

  “Just what I said, Kirin. We are not going to Pol’Lhasa with the River of Steel.”

  “The Empress of the Upper Kingdom must have a seat at this table, Kerris.”

  “Then the Empress of the Upper Kingdom must come to the table, Kirin.”

  “She has never left Pol’Lhasa.”

  “Watanabe has never left Bai’Zhin.”

  Kirin frowned, not sure Kerris knew what he was asking.

  “Kerris-your-name-was?”

  “Love of my life?”

  “What’s sell-yoo-lar re-gen-i-sis?”

  “No idea, luv.”

  “Okay.”

  Kerris leaned back, swirled the sakeh cup in his grey hand.

  “This is where it all started for us as a people, Kirin, here in the Nine Peaks Mountain. The leader of the Lower Kingdom is here, in the Nine Peaks Mountain. The Emperor of the Eastern Kingdom is here, in the Nine Peaks Mountain. Everything we need is right here, in the Nine Peaks Mountain. If the Empress of the Upper Kingdom is unwilling to do what her peers have done, then she doesn’t deserve a seat at this table.”

  “That’s blasphemy, Kerris, and you know it. The Empress has never left the walls of Pol’Lhasa. It’s not allowed.”

  “Not allowed? Not allowed? Did you really just say that?”

  And Kerris lifted the sakeh to his lips, drank without looking away. A challenge. Not one Kirin could accept after the Khargan’s words this morning.

  “I’m sorry, Kirin,” said Kerris. “But the Way of Things must change, or the Upper Kingdom will be left in the sand.”

  “I will ask,” Kirin said quietly.

  “Take a Legion or two,” said his brother. “Take dogs and cats and horses and monkeys and Xióngmāo and dragons and whatever else you need, but you must convince her to come. She will need to break her own chains before she can ever hope to break those of her people.”

  “This isn’t about breaking chains, Kerris.”

  “Isn’t it?” Kerris snatched the entire bottle now, lifted it to his lips, but paused. “Because I have no desire to be slaves to the Ancestors, and that’s where this road leads.”

  And he downed it all in three gulps.

  “Kerris-your-name-was?”

  He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Love of my life?”

  “What’s py-ro-gen-e-sis?”

  “No idea, luv.”

  “Okay.”

  Kerris stared at him now, blue eyes glittering and sharp.

  “So? What’s it to be? Shall Kaidan of the Mountain go to Pol’Lhasa to fetch the Dragon Empress, or shall it be her Shogun-General? I’m fine either way.”

  “No, Kerris. I’ll go. But I will take a third of the Dragons. If the Ancestors attack, we will need a sizeable army for defense.”

  “Fair enough.” And he sat back, toyed with the bottle in his hand. “Look at us. The brothers Wynegarde-Grey deciding the fate of Empires.”

  “Father would have been proud.”

  “Father wouldn’t have approved. You know that.”

  Kirin sighed.

  “I will leave at first light tomorrow. And I will do everything in my power to bring her back with me.”

  “Even take on Chancellor Ho and the War Council?”

  “Even so.”

  “Right then. This calls for a celebration.” He reached in to one of his many pockets, pulled out a second bottle identical to the first. “To Diplomacy.”

  And Kirin reached for his bowl.

  ***

  Someone was tapping him on the cheek.

  Slowly, he opened his eyes to see the nose of the ugdan, mere inches from his.

  She shrank back, flailed her arms in the air before swinging closely back in.

  She tapped her throat. She opened her mouth. She poked him in the chest and tapped her throat again.

  Nevye sighed and sat up, taking in the room at a glance.

  It was the temple room, the one with the pillars and the fire, Chiing and the bears. Balmataar sat in a far corner, arms wrapped around his head, a knot of spindly limbs. The children sat around the fire, tearing strips from roasted tsaa buga and watching him with wary eyes. He frowned, wondering why.

  The udgan poked him again.

  He reached out and laid a finger on her forehead, drew it slowly down her face. Nose, lips, chin, jaw, finally stopping at her throat. He flicked it with a finger and she yelped.

  “I can talk?” she gasped. “I can talk!”

  The woman staggered back, laughing and spinning around in a wide circle, but suddenly, she swung back to point a finger at him.

  “I wish you’d stayed dead,” she growled. She left him then, dancing over to snatch a haunch from the fire.

  He looked back over at the children. Eleven of them
left. Only eleven. It seemed like years ago that Sev and Zorig had died.

  He had died.

  He looked down at his hands. They were white, like his hair, like his eyes. The spots and rosettes on his wrists were still black but he knew that it was only a matter of time. Four deaths, five lives. It was all only a matter of time.

  No wonder the children were afraid of him.

  Whispers and lies

  The faint, acrid scent of smoke.

  He raised his head, looked around.

  Setse was not in the temple.

  The end of all things

  He bolted to his feet and raced down the steep, dark, winding stair to the Court of Teeth and Claws. The cavern was thick with smoke, the stony walls flickering with light. In the middle stood Setse, torch in one hand, oil lamp in the other. All around her, the bones were on fire. The skulls, the femurs, the ribs, the feet – all the work that he had done in separating them, now nothing more than cracking, crumbling piles of ash.

  He stepped down into the court that had once been filled with rats.

  “Setse,” he moaned. “What have you done?”

  She turned.

  “I love you, Shar,” she said. “And I love what we have been called to do. But we will not do it this way. We will not trade in bones and eyes and death.”

  One skull split in the heat, sending sparks raining across the floor.

  “You don’t understand. We just need to harness it. It doesn’t have to control us.”

  “But it does, Shar. It always does. I will not see us become Needle and Storm. We cannot lose our way like they did. We have far too much to lose.”

  The femurs now, sliding over each other as the flames charred them like kindling.

  “Your people are not cats,” he said. “They do not learn like cats. I don’t know what I can teach them.”

  She tried to smile.

  “We’ll teach them. We’ll train them. It’s all that we can do.”

  He waited for her to turn back to the pile of feet and ribs, long bones and short, brittle and round. And his hand slipped into the folds of his robe, to the sash at his hip, where the skull of a raven whispered sweet things.

  ***

  They sat in a makeshift tent under the central hub, Ezekiel Wheels droning as they spun slowly overhead. Black linen draped all around them, shielding them from the sand and the wind, but nothing could shield them from the blistering heat. Solomon was beginning to regret his decision to hold this meeting outside the conditioned comfort of the Wheels, but Ward had refused to let them in. There was nothing he could say to make her sit, lay down her heliad, or anything that might remotely resemble cooperation or peace.

  “I remember you,” said the Kuri called Angela Garcia Castillo. “We’d been briefed on the other teams. Jeffery Solomon, physician.”

  “Wish I could say the same,” said Solomon. “You look, ahhh little different…”

  She grimaced.

  “We are the original six.” She swept her arm across the motley crew. “Josias Park, Ellie Bakshi, Shazad Tariq, Georg Hamill, Lin Tran and me.”

  “Reedy made seven,” said the man named Tariq through the wire.

  “There are more than six Kuri, though, right? Reedy mentioned offspring…”

  “Children, yes,” said the woman named Ellie Bakshi. “It has been decades now. We have a community of fifty-three.”

  “Even with our changed appearance,” said Castillo. “We can still fall in love…”

  Solomon grinned sadly.

  “So, the mutations,” he began. “They are obviously passed on to subsequent generations.”

  “With incredible rapidity,” said Park.

  “And flexibility,” added Tran. “You’re familiar with the theories of Metagenesis and Macromutation?”

  “Old news, but yeah.”

  “Because of the Chimera virus, it’s not so old.”

  “Hopeful monsters,” said Castillo. “That’s all we are now.”

  Ward grunted. The first sound she’d made since the meeting. Solomon was grateful. If he knew anything at all about Damaris Ward, it was her staunch belief in genetic purity. Best for her to say nothing, and hopefully learn.

  “So Reedy was telling the truth,” he sighed. “The Hypsibius cryosphoridae in the cryo process has rendered us all susceptible to the Chimera virus.”

  “The gene transfer is facilitated by the process, yes,” said Hamill. “I’m sure the IAR had no idea that this might be a result.”

  “So,” said Solomon. “We could all end up like you?”

  There was silence for a very long moment.

  “I told you,” growled Ward. “Sengupta told you.

  “I…” He bit his tongue. “Yah, you did.”

  “You don’t listen,” she said softly. “You never listen.”

  He let her words roll over him like a wave. She was right and he was arrogant. Always had been. He looked up at the six, now calling themselves Kuri.

  “I’ve been living on the surface for almost two years now, and one of them almost exclusively in the company of IAR cats.” He held out his hands. “I think I look pretty normal for a human, don’t you?”

  They glanced at each other, but said nothing.

  “So, what do we do?”

  Castillo shrugged.

  “It depends on what you want. I’m not sure this process is reversible. Even if it were, I’m not sure I’d go back.”

  “Me neither,” said Hamill. “This form is incredibly well adapted to the environment.”

  “I think we’re sexy-fierce,” said Bakshi. “In a vaguely cano-arachnophilic way…”

  Latif laughed.

  Castillo leaned forward.

  “Whatever you and these sleepers decide, you can’t stay here. You can’t build a life or community around the Ezekiel Wheels.”

  “Not a sustainable one, at any rate,” said Park.

  Ward shifted her heliad.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Take back the base.”

  “From Reedy?” she snapped. “And the First Line?”

  “You bet,” said Castillo and she turned her strange scorpion/dog face on the jian. “And it will be harder than you think. Reedy doesn’t just control the Qore—”

  “He is the Qore,” finished Solomon.

  “He was the last of us to go under,” said Latif. “Things had begun to shift here in Kalgoorlie pretty soon after we were commissioned. Reedy volunteered to watch over the base for a few months to make sure things were running before he went under.”

  “When we woke, the Ezekiel Wheels had already been turned into sleeper pods,” said Tran. “And the SandPit had been pretty much evacuated.”

  “Dillies?”

  “Yah, dillies. Big, nasty buggers.”

  He glanced at Ward. Question answered. No running to the SandPit.

  “We believe he used the wire to integrate with the Qore on a quantum level,” said Hamill. “It was efficient, brilliant even—”

  “He’s a brilliant SOB,” said Park.

  “He is, indeed,” Hamill grunted. “But for all we know, they’re inseparable now.”

  “The entire base responds to his thoughts.”

  “Does he still have a body?” asked Solomon, and he looked from face to inhuman face. “I mean, is his physical form still in cryo somewhere or is he doing all this from Dreamtime?”

  “Don’t talk about Dreamtime,” growled Latif. “Completely his invention.”

  “He had a body,” said Castillo. “He was already awake when we got the signal, but he was just…”

  “Off,” said Tran.

  “Yes, off.”

  They all nodded.

  “We began doing exploratory missions,” said Bakshi. “To see if there was anything left of civilization. Reedy didn’t go. He stayed to oversee the base.”

  “We knew something was up, but cryo affects everyone differently.”

  “Did he even go under?” asked
Solomon. “He’d told me he’d been awake for a very long time.”

  Castillo shook her head.

  “It’s entirely possible,” she said. “He may be in a permanently altered state.”

  “Not awake. Not asleep,” said Tran. “But conscious because of the way he is linked to the Qore.”

  Solomon shook his head.

  “That’s long enough to drive anyone mad.”

  “He sure as hell fits the bill,” grunted Ward.

  “He’s mad, alright,” said Castillo. “The last time, the six of us took a Tig—”

  “Tig?” asked Solomon.

  “Terragryph,” said Ward. “Like the Griffen, only bigger.”

  “Yeah,” said Latif. “We did a 2 week sortie of the Southwestern Coastline, from Adelaide to Perth up to Exmouth. When we got back, he’d locked us out.”

  “Literally,” said Castillo. “All our access codes were blocked and he had the suits programmed to target the Tig. We crashed into the scrub near Mt. Burges, decided to make that our base until we could figure out what to do next.”

  “When did you start to change?” asked Ward and Solomon cursed her unflinching honesty.

  “About a year later,” said Hamill. “Tran was the first.”

  “I thought I was dying,” he said. “It was worse than all the prep leading up to cryo.”

  Solomon remembered.

  “So how do you know if you’re going to change?”

  “We didn’t,” said Castillo. “But then, we were living out of a crashed Tig at the base of a mountain. We had no tek.”

  “The Wheels have tek,” said Ward.

  “The Pit has more.”

  “You can’t live out of the Wheels,” Park repeated. “All the resources are in the Pit.”

  “Gardens?” asked Ward. “Water?”

  “All of that and more,” said Bakshi.

  “So,” said Ward. “We take back the base.”

  The Kuri nodded.

  “We take back the base.”

  Solomon sighed, wondering if this was just the beginning of something that should have ended a long time ago.

  ***

  It was late and there was no one else in the teak corridor save a woman dressed in yellow silk, standing beside an ebony pillar. Ursa recognized her as one of the Bushona Geisha. She was a lynx and the tips of her silver ears peeked out of the piled sweep of her hair. She should nod as a sign of respect, her husband would say. But she didn’t respect them at all so she didn’t. In a bold move, the yellow blocked her way.