Master of Devils

by Dave Gross

  Secretly I was grateful for the chore. Not only did it spare me the glares of my fellow students, who reviled me all the more for leading Kwan astray, but it also allowed me to attempt a reconstruction of my lost spellbook.

  Alas, it was a futile endeavor.

  If not for my peculiar handicap, I might have inscribed any spell that lingered in my memory, yet I depended upon riffle scrolls rather than the ability to set spells in my mind, awaiting only a triggering word or gesture. While I comprehended the theories of magic with ease, fixing even the pettiest spell in mind sickened me. Two or three spells of any power wracked me with spasms. Actually triggering a spell caused an immediate and appalling reflex.

  Casting spells made me vomit.

  Of late I had discovered a means by which to inscribe magic directly onto a peculiar form of scroll composed of bound strips of paper. With the proper division of characters from one strip to the next, I could discharge a spell by riffling the pages beneath my thumb. While the method did not permit me to prepare more spells than a normal wizard of my own skill level, using a riffle scroll caused me no ill effect.

  If I could create even one riffle scroll, I could cast a spell to deliver a message that would reach Radovan no matter where he had gone. I was so desperate that I would have stooped to casting a divination simply to learn his location. Yet without my spellbook for reference, I could not recreate so much as a cantrip.

  I bowed to Jade Tiger, acknowledging that the writing was arcane.

  “Then it is as I guessed. You are a wizard.”

  “Of a sort.”

  “Why do you conceal such powers? A wizard would make a formidable escort for the princess.”

  I felt no desire to explain my disability, but his question surprised me. “Does Dragon Temple teach magic as well as fighting?”

  “Well, no, not for many years,” he said. He tilted his head at a sly angle. “But I do.”

  His statement galvanized me. I kowtowed at once. “Master, teach me a spell for the sending of messages.”

  He stepped away, but I kept my forehead pressed against the rice mat. I calculated that only complete obeisance might sway a man himself bound within in a many-tiered bureaucracy. His fan snapped open, and I felt the reflected breeze as he cooled himself. I did not imagine he was weighing his decision so much as testing my composure. Even understanding his likely motive did not lend me the patience commensurate to the task. He said nothing for such an interminable period that at last I peered up.

  With his lower face obscured by the image of frolicking tiger cubs, I saw only his emerald eyes gazing down at me. His lashes were as white as his long hair, although his skin appeared smooth and youthful.

  “You must prove yourself worthy of my patronage.”

  “Yes, honored sir.” I bowed again. It rankled, but if it would achieve my aims, I should endure the debasement.

  “Furthermore, you must not reveal my tutelage to the temple masters.”

  This stricture gave me an instant’s pause as I considered its implications. Just as he offered me something that I desired, so too did Jade Tiger expect some service in return. Before he could reconsider the offer, I bowed again.

  “Very well,” said Jade Tiger. “I shall return tomorrow. Prepare red ink and yellow paper.”

  For an hour each day over the next two weeks, my enthusiasm for Jade Tiger’s arcane teachings ameliorated the fatigue of my kitchen labor and the requisite dodging and defending against Lo Gau’s surprise attacks, followed by another hour devoted to transcribing chronicles of Imperial Lung Wa and its Successor States. Not even the twelve hours all Dragon Temple students dedicated to physical and spiritual perfection could quash my spirits, though I was grateful for the respite of purely intellectual exercise.

  The first task Jade Tiger set me was to demonstrate my proficiency in writing arcane characters. Dubious of my claim of fluency, Jade Tiger demanded I demonstrate a Tian cantrip for which he provided a sample to study.

  “Perhaps I could demonstrate on a scroll,” I suggested. Even before his offer of instruction, I had prepared blank sheaves of paper cut into strips approximately the width of my thumb. Thirty-two or sixty-four pages thick, they were bored through at the end of each strip and bound tight with green cord.

  When Jade Tiger saw the blank riffle scroll, curiosity spread over his face. “Is that some foreign version of a flying scroll?”

  A long lifetime among the scheming nobility of Cheliax allowed me to mask my stupefaction, or so I flattered myself.

  “Please, master, illuminate me.”

  Jade Tiger swept away my blank riffle pages and fetched a sheet of the precious yellow paper I had removed, without permission, from Master Li’s calligraphy cabinet. He flung the sheet above his head and swept his fan from his sash. With five quick strokes, he divided the sheet into six perfect strips. They floated down to land upon my writing desk.

  “Add this to your red ink.” He opened his fan and held it out to me like a salver. Upon it was the shriveled body of a firefly. With the ink pestle, I crushed the insect’s body into one of the reservoirs on the tray before me before adding a few drops of precious red ink—another theft for which I hoped to repay Master Li later. I dipped my brush into the ink.

  “Now,” commanded Jade Tiger. “Fix the spell into the paper.”

  To most wizards, his command would have seemed nonsensical. I grasped it immediately. With Jade Tiger’s scroll of cantrips before me, I arranged the arcane words in my mind. Rather than let the filaments of their power set upon the walls of my subconscious, however, I imbued them into the paper with every stroke of my brush. With every character I wrote from the top to the bottom of the yellow strip, I felt the magic coursing out of my mind, down through my chest and arm, out through my fingers, into the brush and the ink, and onto the page itself.

  An instant of nausea passed through me, and I knew the yellow strip contained the spell. I reached for the paper, but Jade Tiger snatched it up between two folds of his fan. His precision with the implement was breathtaking.

  Observing my work, he hummed approval before returning it to me. Taking one of the blank strips, he held it between his second and third fingers and flicked it away with a snap of his wrist. The paper shot forth like a dart before fluttering to the floor.

  “Just so,” he explained. He indicated a target with his folded fan.

  I flung the inscribed strip as he had demonstrated, but this time the paper blazed with white light and floated to the top of Master Li’s calligraphy cabinet, where it came to rest on a tiny idol of Abbot Chin-hwa.

  “Perfect,” declared Jade Tiger.

  “This practice is common among Tian wizards?”

  “It is known,” he said. “But no, it is not common. For most wizards, the scrolls are a mere novelty.”

  I understood. Because they were substitutes for, rather than additions to, the spells other wizards prepared, a disabled wizard like me was the only one to whom they were an advantage. For others they were an unnecessary expense. And, I realized, they offered more opportunities to “disarm” me magically. Rain, fire, and even a common pickpocket were threats that could deprive me of my magic. It was even possible that one could use them without my knowledge, as Radovan had once demonstrated with a riffle scroll.

  Jade Tiger produced an ivory scroll case from his sleeve. He thumbed open a catch and pulled out a long string of spells he had copied from his own cache.

  “Choose one.”

  Recognition of the Tian versions of spells I knew quickened my pulse. I called upon my lessons to control my breathing.

  On the pages were eight spells, one from each school of magic. The first was an effective if distasteful necromantic spell for drawing the life out of an opponent. The next two were warding spells I had once longed to master for the purposes of
proofing my library against uninvited browsers. So was the fourth, although its explosive effects threatened to bloody the very books it might safeguard. The fifth would produce a noisome miasma, effective in combat if distasteful to employ. The sixth was one of my favored spells, but a fireball was a clumsy weapon for my present circumstances.

  Only two spells remained, and I disdained both of those schools of magic.

  Most spells dealing with prophecy and information-gathering are miraculously useful, even to one who has made study his life’s principal passion. Yet employing them has always seemed a dangerous shortcut to knowledge, which is far surer when earned than when stolen. The true danger is in those spells that violate the sanctity of the sentient mind. In Cheliax, the revelation of private thoughts often leads down a short path to the gallows, if one can afford to purchase leniency, or the tines, if one cannot. In any event, I foresaw no immediate need for this particular spell, meant to detect the presence of the undead.

  Yet even more than these voyeuristic spells, I dislike those charms capable of usurping one’s will. From insidious love spells to direct and brutal manipulations, they are the most terrible of magics—assassins of the soul.

  And yet the spell Jade Tiger offered me from the last school was the only one I could imagine useful in my present circumstance. It would not harm an opponent directly, yet it could prove effective in both offensive and defensive situations.

  My hesitation brought a faint smile to Jade Tiger’s lips. I suspected that his offering was a test. Did he mean to discover my preferences and specialties? Did some enmity among the ancient schools of arcane magic exist in Tian culture?

  I discarded that notion. Jade Tiger carried all of these spells himself, suggesting that he was, like me, a student of all schools. In that case, was this a test of character? If I chose the necromantic spell, would he be pleased or horrified?

  I indicated the final spell.

  Jade Tiger nodded, but his expression remained neutral. “You may copy it on—”

  At the sound of a footfall outside the scriptorium, the eunuch dispelled my light cantrip with a quick utterance. One look at it would be all the evidence Master Wu required to prove that I had spent my time in the scriptorium doing something other than my assigned task.

  One of the elderly temple servants appeared in the open doorway. I leaned over the transcription I had set aside, pretending I had been at work all along. The eunuch craned his neck to peer over my shoulder, as he had done on previous days. The old man bowed to the eunuch and gathered the scrolls I had completed for delivery to Master Li.

  When he had departed, Jade Tiger favored me with a conspirator’s smile. Together we had narrowly avoided discovery of my disobedience and of his interference with the authority of the temple masters. From that moment forth our conspiracy bound us as inexorably as fate.

  Chapter Ten

  The Goblin Who Swallowed the Wind

  While perched on my shoulders, Judge Fang scratched out a spark in his firepot. I set my paws firm on the ground and stopped. The cricket-headed man flew off my back and tumbled to the ground. His pipe and tobacco case rolled away.

  “Impudent dog! We will never catch her in time.”

  Judge Fang knew I did not like him to smoke on my back. I told him so many times, and he was wise enough to remember that the strong smell made it hard to follow the trail. One time he tapped the ash onto my shoulder. That stung so much I almost bit him before stopping myself. Worse, it made a bad smell for days, and I couldn’t get away from it.

  Judge Fang gathered his things and flew back onto my shoulders. His transparent wings were strong enough to lift his little body a short distance, but he could not keep up when I ran.

  “Go!” he said. “Hurry!”

  I ran. It felt good to run, because I was on a job.

  We were tracking a kami Judge Fang had sensed while meditating on a lily pad in a holy pond. He decided he needed to do that after we searched for two full moons and most of a third. In all that time, he had failed to persuade any of the beasts we met to join us. Some promised they would join us later, but now it was time for raising their offspring.

  Judge Fang said we would have better luck among the kami, but we had not seen any yet. Having never seen one, I asked what they look like.

  “There are nine thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine sorts of spirits,” he said, “all of them different. Some of them are oni, wicked spirits that have no natural bodies, but form new ones from pure magic in order to carry out their evil. Kami are guardian spirits, bound by the Celestial Bureaucracy to protect the natural order of things.”

  “So you are one sort of kami?”

  Judge Fang grunted and fiddled with his divining tools. “According to these star charts and the motion of my lodestone, a powerful spirit is nearby.”

  “Is it a kami or an oni?”

  “It is hard to know, but it is powerful.”

  We followed the direction of his lodestone for two more days and nights. When Judge Fang saw a rustling in the trees on a still day, he leaped up and told me to follow the wind.

  “It is Gust!” he cried. “What good fortune! She was born when the Monkey King caused the Empress Dowager to laugh while eating her prosperity rice ball on her one hundredth birthday. The old woman choked, thus ending the Mu Dynasty and provoking the War of Four Brothers. This was long ago, mind you, three thousand years before Rovagug stirred in his prison and moved the Golden River to its present course.”

  He continued his story. What he said did not sound important to my job, and he hated to be interrupted, so I kept my nose to the ground and learned more about our quarry.

  Gust was made of wind and clouds. I still had not seen the kami, but her path smelled like the breeze just before a storm. Sometimes she left a path of clear ground where she had blown the leaves away. Sometimes she left piles of blossoms or leaves under the trees she had shaken as she passed. Always she left a trail of sweet air.

  For two days we followed Gust’s path through wheat fields and farm yards, but we could not catch up. Her trail was fresh enough that I could follow it even without Judge Fang’s magic, so while I ran he clutched my coat and told me more stories of demigods and heroes.

  When I felt too hungry to keep running, I caught a chicken near a house and carried it off before a woman ran out to shout at me. Judge Fang chuckled at her red face. The woman turned her anger toward the rooster who had failed to protect the hens. Judge Fang did not call me a good boy, but he also did not call me a naughty dog. It didn’t matter, because he wasn’t the one who decided whether I was good or bad.

  I missed my master.

  On the morning of the third day, I smelled a new scent following Gust’s trail. It reminded me of a trail I had smelled a few times when I was a pup. It belonged to a creature my parents’ master called a goblin.

  I had never seen one, but Judge Fang told me that this goblin was different.

  “One morning the Goblin made a great yawn,” he said. “A great wind kami—like Gust, but even more powerful—flew right into its mouth and became lost inside the labyrinth of its belly. It nearly escaped by pushing out in all directions, but it could not match the strength of the Goblin’s stomach. All it managed to do was to blow long spines out of the Goblin’s back, forming a cloak of quills.

  “From that day, the Goblin was no longer a normal goblin, but rather something else entirely. It caused nothing but trouble for its fellows. Every time it caught a cold, its sneezes blew out cooking fires and scattered the tribe’s treasure. The kami in its belly swelled up to protest whenever it ate meat, releasing poisonous farts on the Goblin’s tribe. When it knocked the goblin leader off his mound of pelts with a giant belch, the chief exiled this Goblin Who Swallowed the Wind.

  “The Goblin soon learned it had to eat more wind to survive and
keep its captive kami happy,” said Judge Fang. “If it catches Gust before we do, it will devour her. We need her help, so we must stop him.”

  I liked Judge Fang’s stories. They were easier to understand than the ones I overheard my master telling Radovan. All of Judge Fang’s words made sense the first time he said them, but not because he was smarter than my master. His cricket head just knew how to talk with beasts and kami.

  Gust’s trail led up out of the farmlands and onto a rocky ridge. At the top was a grassy plateau with a few waving trees on top. Pebbles rattled out of the dirt as I ran up the incline. I jumped over tangles of roots and weeds sticking out of the ground. Judge Fang clutched my fur and screeched until we reached the top.

  “There!” He pointed along the ridge, but I had already spotted the Goblin.

  He was shaped like a man, only half as a big and with moss-colored skin. His chest was wide but thin, and his arms were long enough that he could scratch his knees without bending. A thick layer of porcupine quills covered his back.

  The Goblin ran up the ridge toward a giant gray statue of a robed man looking out over the farmland. Behind the statue was a line of trees standing in pairs, like the soldiers we had seen in the big city. The smell of fresh air made me feel strong, even after running all day. At last I saw Gust.

  She was a white cloud the size of a lamb, but she moved as fast as steam from a kettle. Wherever she touched the trees and bushes, they shook and dropped their leaves. She left a glistening trail on the ground behind her. The Goblin lunged toward her but slipped on the wet grass and cursed.

  Gust laughed with the sound of a dozen little drums. Veins of lightning flashed inside her body.

  “I’ll suck you down and fart you out!” the Goblin squealed.