by Alec Hutson
Alyanna reached out her hand and stroked the peacock’s head. “Then the concubines of Shan rule the empire?”
Now Wen turned to her again, the slightest of frowns touching his lips when he saw the way the peacock had dipped its neck to her. “The emperor has no concubines in Shan.”
Alyanna allowed the tendril of sorcery she had twisted around the peacock’s mind to dissipate, and the bird jerked itself away from her in confusion. “How can the emperor deny himself the pleasures of the flesh?”
Wen’s eyes glittered as he watched her. “The history of the Shan people is riddled with stories of powerful courtesans who through their influence plunged empires into chaos. The Raveling itself was brought about by a concubine’s poisoned advice to her emperor. So when the long years of the Empire of Wind and Salt ended, and the ships finally arrived on the shores of this new land, the mandarins decided that such a tragedy must never happen again.”
“What did they do?” asked Alyanna, though in truth she knew the answer already.
The black vizier smiled. “Before every new emperor sits the Phoenix Throne he is transformed during the ascension ceremony into a eunuch. Thus he can better dedicate his life to ruling Shan, without distraction.”
“How barbaric,” Alyanna murmured, wrinkling her face in mock disgust.
“Perhaps. But others would say civilized. After all, what is civilization but man’s attempt to separate himself from the animals, which are ruled by base impulses. The Shan emperor is now no longer a slave to this most powerful of passions.”
Alyanna had during her long life known more than a few eunuchs, and she had found them just as petty as any other men – perhaps more so. Competition for women was replaced by competition for glory and riches. The eunuch order that had served the sorcerers of Kalyuni’s Star Towers had been as bad as the women of any harem, expending vast energies in intricate plots to slightly raise their own status relative to their rivals.
Alyanna did not mention this to Wen. Instead she smiled and fluttered her lashes and pretended sweet insipidness.
Men were fools, whole or not.
Wen watched her carefully. Too carefully. She felt a little shiver of – what? Excitement? – under his piercing gaze.
“I will admit that my purpose in coming to the gardens today was not just to see these marvelous birds. I also came to find you.”
“Me, my lord?”
“Yes. And after the history lesson I’ve just given you about the Shan, perhaps you can guess why.”
Of course she could, but Alyanna kept her expression carefully innocent. “No, my lord.”
“Our emperor is obsessed with you,” Wen said flatly, reaching up to pluck a brilliant purple blossom from a low-hanging tree branch. “He speaks of you in our council meetings. He mentions you whenever there is word of new silks from Shan or gems from Xi arriving in the city. His servants tell me that he mutters your name in his sleep.” Wen twirled the flower in his hands, then let it fall. “I hope you will use your influence over the chosen of Ama wisely.”
Alyanna ducked her head, as if embarrassed by the black vizier’s words, though in truth it was to hide her small smile. “I have no power over the emperor, my lord, I promise you. I am just a momentary plaything, a diversion that eases the great burden of ruling.”
The black vizier stared at her for a long moment, his face impassive, but Alyanna sensed the unspoken threat growing between them. Then he turned and glided silently away upon the ceramic path, until he vanished among a tangle of vines hanging down from copper trellises. Alyanna wanted to laugh at the theatrics of it all.
The thought that this puffed up little worm could scare her! She had been underestimated by a thousand powerful men over a thousand years, and this Wen Xenxing would be no different.
A chill breeze shivered the flowers near her, and then one of them was there, peering out from behind the knotted bole of a banyan tree. The peacocks cried out in alarm and half-flew, half-hopped away, beating their clipped wings frantically.
filthy birds.
This one was a boy, Alyanna thought, though like all the Chosen it kept its face hidden behind matted black hair. “I appreciate their beauty,” she said, strolling closer to the crouching demon-child, which flinched away from her.
filthy, evil shan things. and you speak to one, a shan. we wish to eat his heart.
Alyanna chuckled. “You may yet have your chance. But it won’t be so you can exact some revenge for your imprisonment. And anyways, he serves Menekar, not the Phoenix Throne.”
all shan are cunning. do not trust him.
Alyanna waved away their echoing words. “If the Shan were so formidable I would not have been able to steal you away from right under their very noses.”
underestimate the warlocks of shan at your peril. their ways are as deep and as fathomless as your own.
“If you feared them so much, why did you leave such an obvious trail across the Kingdoms? There are Shan hunters out there, searching for you.”
they will not find us. we will not go back. we will rend and scatter their limbs to the four corners of the world.
“They will not find you,” Alyanna agreed, reaching out to brush aside the Chosen’s tangled hair. The thing’s face was smudged with grime, like a street urchin. It had no eyes, just gaping black holes, but she felt it watching her. She let the hair fall back. “You are not my only servants. I have set upon the trail of your hunters an old and powerful pet.”
the false man. the so-chin-jeng
Alyanna let her surprise show. “It is familiar to you?”
they existed in the ancestral lands of shan, as well, before they were hunted to oblivion
Interesting. “They were also hunted here. My servant may be the last of its kind, then. When we found them living amongst us, feeding on us, we named them genthyaki – ‘the hidden ones’. An ancient immortal race, slowly dwindling, having lost the ability to breed but still deadly strong, and wielders of great magics. The wizards of the north and the south united to root them out. I led a band of hunters at that time, and we took many of their heads. I wore a necklace of their teeth, and armored myself in scales I flayed from their still-living bodies. It was a wild age. The last we tracked was the strongest I had ever encountered; it slew my fellow hunters, and came close to besting me. But in the end it cowered before me, and begged for mercy, and I slaved it to my will.” Alyanna remembered that moment vividly. She had stood over it in the lashing rain, in that remote northern forest among soaring pines, her face streaked with mud and her body laced with red claw-marks, her hair coiling like a nest of snakes as the air crackled with spent sorcery. A cat-of-nine tails drawn from the living darkness had squirmed in her hand, and with ancient words she had bound its soul to hers.
It would dispose of these Shan hunters. She was sure they had brought some sorcery to recapture the Chosen, but they could not possibly be prepared for the genthyaki.
“Leave me,” she said, and the demon-child faded into the gathering shadows.
yes, mistress, it whispered in its chorus of lost voices, and was gone.
Such strange, artless creatures, so full of passion and power. Imbued with great festering sorcery, yet at the same time riven by weaknesses that left them in thrall to her. She could not restrain her fascination.
Alyanna shrugged out of her silken shift, letting it puddle at her feet as she stepped from the ceramic path. Fireflies were appearing as evening fell in the garden, sketching patterns around her and swarming the stirring nightblossoms. She breathed deep of the garden’s smells. Cool grass tickled her feet, and a warm breeze caressed her body. Above her the emerging stars glittered like diamonds strewn across velvet.
A dark shape slithered through the grass away from her. Alyanna sunk a tendril of sorcery deep within the snake’s cold brain, compelling it to approach. She closed her eyes a
s its smooth, dry scales wrapped her ankle and began to climb her leg. So alive. The garden, this world, herself. She should have died a thousand years ago, but she had refused to go meekly into the dark. Instead she had traded their world for her eternity – a bright, flowering world, to be sure, but she held no regrets. All that mattered was that she now lived, when the rest of them were dust and shadows. The snake’s darting tongue touched her thigh. She shuddered with pleasure.
“The tiger and the lion are oft . . . often compared with each other, as they are the largest spe . . . spe . . .”
“Specimens.”
“Specimens of cats in our world. But they could not be more different. While the tiger is a soli . . . solitary flame burning in the dark forests of the north, the lion lives in close . . . close . . .”
“Knit.”
“Close-knit families on the arid eastern plains.”
Keilan leaned back on his stool in the scholar’s wagon, unable to keep from smiling broadly. Xin buried his ashen face in his hands and groaned.
“This one feels like he’s just run ten leagues. Then fought in a battle. And then been chased by a pack of hungry wolves. Up a mountain.”
“That was excellent reading.”
“This one’s head hurts.”
Keilan laughed and bent again over Seeker Garmond’s copy of The Tinker’s Bestiary. It was a beautiful edition, far nicer than the one he had kept in his mother’s chest back in his village, the flowing script precise and perfectly proportioned, each page decorated with colorful illustrations of the beasts it described. Even the borders and blank spaces were inked with twisting vines and blooming flowers and small, bright birds.
“Come. Let’s finish.”
Xin waved his hands in surrender. “Enough. Enough for now. This one needs a rest.”
Keilan grinned and twisted to face Seeker Garmond, who was seated behind a small desk littered with scraps of parchment and several strange objects – the jeweled skull of some large rodent, an hourglass filled with blue sand, and a tiered pyramid carved from red crystal. There was also a bottle of clouded green glass and a trio of matched tumblers in front of him.
“What do you think, Master Garmond? Has Xin done enough for the evening?”
In response the scholar uncorked the bottle and poured a dollop of honey-slow amber liquid into each of the waiting glasses.
The Fist warrior let out a long sigh of relief and pushed himself away from the table he hunched over.
“His progress has been remarkable,” Garmond said, stoppering the bottle. “Barely a week has passed, and our Fist friend seems ready to enroll in the Reliquary. His teacher should be proud.”
“I am,” Keilan said, joining them at the seeker’s desk. And it was true. Watching Xin progress from forming basic letter sounds – some of which, admittedly, he had already known – to stumbling through simple sentences, to reading entire pages in a book as difficult as the Bestiary had been incredibly fulfilling. He felt like he had revealed a whole new world of wonders to the Fist warrior.
“Then it is time for a toast,” Garmond said, passing a tumbler to each of them. “We call this scholar’s milk. It helps sharpen the mind.”
Keilan sniffed the viscous liquid. It smelled like the dead whale that had once washed ashore near his village.
“This one doesn’t want to know what teat this milk was squeezed from,” Xin said, eyeing his drink warily.
Seeker Garmond tossed back his glass, smacking his lips loudly. “By the Pen, it’s good. Now hurry up and drink yours, fearless warrior, before I make you read aloud to me from my seminal work on the arboreal mushroom of the northern Blightwood. I have it right here, two hundred pages describing that fascinating fungus in exhaustive detail.”
“This one takes back what he said earlier about this master being kinder than the others,” Xin muttered, and then drained his tumbler.
Before he could even set down his glass Xin was doubled over coughing. “Gods. Gods. What is that poison?”
“Scholar’s milk. I already said that.”
“Don’t, lad . . .” Xin gasped, his face reddening, “It’s a trap . . .”
Keilan swallowed and carefully set down his glass.
“My boy, you are wasted as a warrior,” the seeker sighed. “You should have been a mummer.”
“Master Garmond,” Keilan said, trying to distract the scholar from his untouched drink, “I’ve been wondering what that is.” He pointed at a large mirrored box pushed into a corner. Aside from a small cot, the desk, the table and its chairs, and a few large chests it was the only other furniture in the scholar’s wagon.
“Ah,” Garmond said, pulling a stubby bone pipe from the folds of his robes. He tapped out the ashes, then tamped a fresh pinch of dreamweed into the bowl. “That was what I came up with to transport our basilisk back to the Reliquary. A shame we’ll never get to know whether it would have sufficed. But that’s the life of the scholar, I suppose – endless hours spent researching and traveling and exploring, with no guarantee that anything will come of all your hard work. I’ve often wondered – ”
Xin suddenly stood, knocking his stool over, his face twisted into a look of intense concentration.
“My boy, what’s the matter?” Garmond said, frowning.
The Fist warrior blinked, seeming to notice Keilan and the scholar for the first time. “Something’s wrong. My brothers . . .”
A scream from outside, high and piercing. “What’s happening?” Garmond said, also rising to his feet.
“We’re under attack,” Xin said, whirling towards the door. “You both stay here.” He reached for the sword at his waist and found nothing. “God’s blood. Master, do you have any weapons in your wagon?”
Garmond blinked. “Perhaps . . . a cheeseknife?”
Another scream, cut off abruptly just after it began. “This one doesn’t think cheese is out there.”
The door was flung open, and Garmond let out a strangled cry, but it was only Delon, Xin’s Fist brother. He had already donned the wine-colored cuirass of the slave-soldiers. The lanky warrior tossed a sword towards Xin, who plucked it out of the air with ease.
“What’s going on?” Keilan asked, trying to keep the panic from his voice.
Delon looked behind him. “Wraiths. Swarmed into the camp moments ago. They are slaughtering the merchants.”
“Wraiths?” exclaimed Garmond, “That’s impossible. There’s never been a documented case of wraiths attacking a caravan as large as this.”
Delon shrugged. “First time for everything, I suppose.”
Xin hesitated, glancing from the scholar to the open doorway and the darkness beyond.
“Well, go fight,” Garmond said, making a shooing motion with his hands.
“But we are supposed to protect you . . .” Xin said, letting his words trail off.
Garmond harrumphed. “Killing those monsters would be an excellent way to do just that. Off with you.”
Xin grinned wolfishly and dashed for the door.
Wraiths. Keilan knew little of them. He had asked Vhelan what they were after the rangers had mentioned they’d found their marks on nearby trees. The wizard had said that the creatures roamed the Frostlands in packs, and like the gibbons of the woods near his home they were man-shaped, though larger and thinner than the forest apes. He’d also said that they were scavengers, lurkers, and avoided all contact with men.
Outside, something thumped hard against one of the wagon’s walls. Garmond and Keilan glanced at each other.
“Well, boy,” the scholar said, “how is your weapon training coming?”
“If there’s one thing my teachers have taught me,” Keilan replied softly, “it’s that running is often the best course of action.”
The seeker glanced around his small cluttered wagon. “I suppose we don’t want to to b
e trapped in . . .” Garmond cocked his head, as if listening hard.
Keilan heard it then, and cold fear washed through him. There was a sound from outside, like knives scraping against wood. And it was moving, though not quickly, along the length of the wagon and toward the front. Keilan couldn’t tear his eyes from the wedge of blackness beyond the partially opened door.
“Should we douse the light?” Garmond hissed, reaching for the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling.
Keilan’s mouth was bone-dry, but fear forced him to reply. “Do you want to be in the dark right now?”
The seeker withdrew his hand and instead rummaged quickly through the piles of papers on his desk, eventually pulling forth a tiny blunt knife, specks of white still crusting the blade.
Keilan didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The scraping had stopped. Keilan edged closer to the scholar, keeping his eyes fixed on the doorway’s thin strip of black, and picked up the seeker’s red-crystal pyramid.
“It’s gone?” murmured the seeker, desperate hope edging his voice.
With agonizing slowness something emerged from the night. A long, blue talon, curved like a raptor’s claw, curled against the doorframe. Another followed, and then another, as if the creature outside was deliberately stoking the fear of those within.
Then the door was flung fully open, ripping from its hinges with a shriek of torn metal, and the wraith loomed in the entrance, stooping to peer inside the wagon. Its long, dangling arms were roped with muscle, and its skin was gray-green and scabrous, bubbling as if it was covered in huge warts. Slitted red eyes peered from behind a ragged tumble of greasy black hair, and its mouth hung open as it panted, revealing yellowing fangs jutting at odd angles.
Keilan screamed and hurled the pyramid at the monster.
With surprising grace the wraith caught it between two of its blue-tinged nails and brought it close to its face, sniffing. A long, thin tongue flickered out and licked the pyramid. The creature’s sunken features wrinkled in disgust, and the pyramid disappeared in a shower of glittering crimson dust.
