The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1)

by Matt Weber

  “Pacifism is a great luxury, Your Grace. It is no fault of yours that it is denied you.”

  “Is it, though?” Tenshing looked into the middle distance with a small smile. “This Kandro would take my armies from me and face the Priestkiller Worm in my stead. One wonders why I should so strenuously resist such a will to serve.”

  “His talents are part-proven only, like his claim. Men who can fling fire and leap about are everywhere for the asking, as we know; but a monster like the Worm is defeated as much with mind as body. The Pretender’s attainments in the mental Rigors are not reliably attested.”

  “Whereas mine are known to be nearly sufficient.”

  A mortal observer of the scene (of whom, of course, there were none, barring the principals) could be forgiven for detecting a note of bitterness in the King’s reply.

  “That is no small feat,” said the King’s Lama.

  “Your wisdom is exceeded only by your compassion,” said Tenshing. The exchange had left him enervated. He gestured with his eyes to the chamber doors. “I will surely have need of your counsel in due time.”

  “I await your summons,” said the King’s Lama, and withdrew.

  Having followed his general’s visit with a set of mental exercises, Tenshing followed his high priest’s visit with some practice in the physical—though not, as the Thousand Arm Testament suggests but carefully does not assert, in those techniques that would have risked scarring the throne room with force or flame, but rather their precursor forms, lineal ancestors whose power ended at King Tenshing’s feet and fists. The heat of his body had only begun to counterweigh the chill of morning stone when a flash of green plucked at the periphery of the King’s quite focused attention. He continued to play the forms with all the art and subtlety that a practiced musician brings to scales, only adding a few strictly extraneous rotations, the better to expand his field of view. The scrap of green could not long elude him in that bare room, whose very sparsity has earned it the name of “anathema of assassins” in various poetic contexts, but the King allowed himself to pursue it gradually, first glimpsing a sleeve, then a lock of black hair, then a swiftly disappearing silhouette. At just the right moment, he leapt backward like an acrobat, although instead of lengthening his leap with a series of backflips, he simply soared, nearly grazing the ceiling with his scalp, and half-turned to land with his crane-beaked hand close enough to touch the eyelashes of a porcelain-skinned young woman in fur breeks and a green tunic. Her kick arced up toward his ear, but he was already under it and came up with a swift strike well inside her guard; but her head was an inch too far to her left, and she was not struck. They danced for a minute at the arm range, although they were both skilled enough to deliver kicks as well; the King in white played like a water-snake, all fluidity and clean curves, where the woman in green moved with the agility and splendor of a hart. She wove inside his guard and stopped suddenly, her eyes staring straight into his, her lips parted with the light effort of her breath; Tenshing’s eyes alit on the birthmark that they called her mouse, an inch back from the hinge of her jawbone.

  The King stepped smoothly back and made the Abasement to a Respected Sparring Partner, a motion that the woman in green swiftly echoed. “Thank you for coming, Copper,” said Tenshing.

  “I would never refuse your summons, Your Grace,” said the woman styled the Copper Rat, whose name was Lin Tong.

  “I am glad to hear it. What has the Green Morning to say about our defeat at Goat Ridge?”

  “Much goes on in the Green Morning of which I am not apprised,” said Tong. “My testimony is one woman’s, with all attendant limitations.”

  Tenshing inclined his head briefly for a moment—an abasement, it must be emphasized in these unmannered times, that a duke would be honored to receive. “Still, I would hear it.”

  Tong briefly inclined her own head in acknowledgement. “If we have seen his camps, I have not heard of it,” she said. “He has treated his conquered territories fairly in the main, although there have been atrocities. His men are not disciplined. But he has hanged the worst of them.”

  “I am glad he has not harmed my people overmuch,” said Tenshing. “But you know the more pressing question.”

  “Goat Ridge,” said Lin Tong.

  “Ah, you recollect my inquiry.”

  “I would not dare forget. But, Your Grace, it is difficult to speak of.”

  “Please try to find the words.”

  “Finding words is not the problem,” said Tong. “It is avoiding the most perspicuous ones, Your Grace, that vexes me.”

  “That is curious; I have always viewed perspicuity as the highest goal of speech.”

  “A meal in a Green Morning mess hall would be ample tonic for that sentiment, Your Grace. In any case, I do not wish to conceal anything from you. But to speak plainly would be…”

  “Disrespectful?” said Tenshing. “I am not so fragile.”

  “It would be that, Your Grace,” said Tong. “But I think the word is ‘blasphemous.”‘

  “How so?”

  “Your Grace has mastered the Four Conflagration Touch,” said Tong, “and the Eight Weapon Hand. In fact, you are accounted the only living master of both Rigors.”

  “Well,” said Tenshing, “my father and grandfather live on in my heart, and in the hearts of my wives and children.”

  “Doubtless,” said Tong. “Yet—”

  “I understand, Copper,” Tenshing said gently. “To acknowledge another dual master—there are those who would count it blasphemy.”

  “I am one,” said Tong. “As should you be. It is you, not the Rough-Hewn Torch, who has mastered seven of the Rigors; it is you, not he, who has practiced them through sickness, through betrayal, on your very wedding days—”

  “Let us not speak of weddings,” said Tenshing, and the throne room seemed to warm half a degree.

  “As you wish, Your Grace,” said Tong, and the chamber’s air cooled again. “The Green Morning has much to do these nights. They are taking your measure and your kingdom’s measure. They do not wish to be surprised by the outcome of this contretemps.” She smiled at him, a close-lipped sort of smile, hinting at mysteries and forces too potent or complex for verbal summary. “No doubt our duties will be lighter when you have doused this rebellion.”

  “All the more reason to do it quickly,” said Tenshing.

  Lin Tong smiled, as one cannot help but smile at egregious flattery. “Some masks do not fit the head,” she said. “It is an accident of birth or circumstance. I do not take offense.”

  “Take a token instead.”

  “I will do no such thing,” said Tong. “Your kisses enrage me. They are perfect in every detail of force and angle, neither too wet nor too dry, and when they end, it is like waking alone on a cold morning. I suffer that enough as it is.”

  “As you wish.” Tenshing again inclined his head in one of those abasements that were rare as rubies to anyone not Lin Tong. They looked at each other and, in so doing, economically shared a wealth of information, for she wished he would press her to accept the kiss, and he knew it from her eyes, and she knew that he knew, and so on, like facing mirrors.

  “My regards to the Queens,” Tong said at last, and with a swift abasement, left by a circular window that seemed too small to admit her hips. Tenshing looked through it and onto the mountains until a scratching at the chamber door told him that the court was ready to begin its day.

  The Western Foothills

  atang woke at dawn, when the proprietor of the Typical Moniker tipped her chair over so that he could wipe her table free of spilled wine and noodle-scraps. Her sword was untouched, but her purse had been relieved of copper. However, when she confessed her penury to the proprietor, he said the meat and drink had been settled—and when she braved the sun’s lance to see to her horse, she found it brushed, fed, and watered, with a small string of silver coins tucked in the left-hand saddlebag. The wine sat heavily on her but not long, and she was abl
e to eat a small breakfast and set forth before the sun had burned the night’s fog from the earth.

  The undistinguished Road of Bulls served Datang well enough, for it had never been paved. This claim may seem strange to anyone who has spent any time on a road, and we certainly do not wish to suggest that it made her travels more pleasant or efficient than the Road of the Chusrin, which her brother Kunsang would have taken on the trip he never made, would have done. But, as we have already mentioned, Kunsang’s pleasant, efficient journey would likely have ended in his summary demise; whereas Datang’s slog through the slushy mud of the spring thaw, and the caution she exercised on seeing the sheer vastness of the Pretender’s army written in that mud, kept her out of the Great South Plain until the infamous Engagement at the Hill of Faces, where General Gyaltsen brilliantly crushed a tenth of the Pretender’s army in the only successful recorded execution of what was then called the Gardener’s Ring Maneuver and is now called the Cerulean Snare. After the Hill of Faces, the Pretender’s strategist exercised much stricter control over the movements of his divisions, ensuring their concentration at well-defended points. Thus, a cautious approach and a chastened enemy conspired to enable Datang to pick her way through the Khodon Pass uncontested, and to cross the Silver Dragon with only minimal harassment by the dzo-herd dogs who viewed the ford as territory.

  Datang entered the mouth of the Great South Plain on a midmorning, and used gleaming Rassha as spur to her flagging resolve as she traveled apprehensively toward the Silver Dragon, made the difficult crossing, and headed for the pine forests of the western foothills, by which time it was dark enough that a bear’s nose or a hedge-wizard’s spells would have a powerful advantage over her sight. The densely packed trees soon diminished visibility yet further, and Datang was reduced to walking her horse. Whether this choice can truly be blamed for what happened next is debatable (and we deities have debated it)—for on the one hand, a mounted warrior is taller and more easily spotted than either warrior or mount; but on the other, a mounted warrior might detect and interpret the rolls of her horse’s eyes and the nervous rotation of its ears, whereas a warrior leading her mount might fail, as Datang did, to do so. In any case, the die was cast; and when Datang drew up on the ranger wearing the Pretender’s orchid and ingot, each was as surprised as the other.

  Datang, in particular, was too surprised to draw her bow, which she carried in one hand by the nocked string. The ranger, for his part, was too surprised to draw his sword, which would have been no use anyway had Datang drawn her bow; but he was not too surprised to let slip an inarticulate syllable and immediately, as though inspired by his voice’s reflex, to follow it with a stentorian call for reinforcement. At that point Datang regained the presence of mind to draw and fire, but the arrow only grazed the ranger’s bearded cheek. She dropped the bow, then scrabbled up onto the horse and lashed the reins.

  They fairly soared through the tree-maze on that dark night, guided only by a half-moon’s light. A group of indistinct silhouettes materialized before her. Arrows tunneled the air to either side, hissing—and the use of arrows rather than muskets did not escape that corner of Datang’s mind which seemed to come alive only when blood was on the air; the Pretender’s troops preferred silence to lethality, that night. She felt as though she could see each needle on each tree. She scattered the Pretender’s soldiers like any folk hero, and those who were too brave to scatter she rode down.

  And, like many folk heroes, she was undone by her horse. She felt the impact against his flank like cannon fire, choked on the stench of seared horseflesh, mourned over his final scream—but that was merely in the front of her mind. The corner that controlled her combat reflexes had already sent her far into the air, farther than any careening horse could do, farther than any rabbit, cat, or squirrel could leap. She seized a pine branch and imagined, swiftly and in precise detail, the flaking of the bark under her hands, the snapping of wood fibers one by one under her weight—but the branch was smooth and green; it bent, but held. By the time she realized this, she had grasped it with her other hand and clambered up into the crook.

  “The Ape’s Left Hand!” a familiar voice called from below.

  Datang’s eyes widened, but she allowed her voice to betray no surprise. “You may call me Whirlwind of Tigers, Ape. The Pretender’s lackeys have incinerated my horse. Help me fight free, I beseech you.”

  “You ate my meat, drank my wine, took my silver, and now you wish more aid?” There was no indignation in the Glib Ape’s voice, only a dispassionate accounting. “Well, Left Hand, I would give it even so, but I am prevented by professional obligations.”

  “Will they not keep? I am treed.”

  “No student of the Crane’s Migration Step is ever ‘treed,’ Left Hand, at least not in a forest.”

  “The Lotus, Ape, that is a searing insight, and I will put it into effect forthwith. Though if you persist in referring to me as your appendage, I may opt to untree myself in your general direction, with some prejudice.”

  “That is how the gallant fraternity knows you, Left Hand. Golden Bat and his cronies seem to have realized that your story would spread from the Typical Moniker, and they contrived to fix your style before a more complimentary one could take hold.”

  Datang would have let out a stream of curses, had she known enough curses to string together into a stream, but her frankly petit-bourgeois upbringing at the Vineyard of the Flying Tiger had left her poorly educated in invective. “Call me Datang, then.”

  “I shall do so.”

  “But, Ape, a question yet vexes me.”

  “Ask it.”

  “What are the ‘professional obligations’ that bar you from assisting me against these satirists of patriotism who menace my person?”

  “Ah. You refer to the stalwart soldiers who, even now, form up in nested ranks around me and level arrows in your direction?”

  “I will resist the temptation to bicker over the terms ‘stalwart’ and ‘soldiers.’”

  “That is kind. I perceive, then, that you understand our relationship?”

  “Well, I comprehend it.”

  “What a fascinating distinction!”

  “I will anatomize it for you.”

  “Do so.”

  “I comprehend that you are the commander of the men gathered round the bottom of this tree, and that your collective aim is to kill or capture me. What I do not understand is why, if you wished to kill or capture me, you pursued that aim by luring me to this desert of bears and hedge-wizards and slaughtering my horse, rather than simply letting the deed be done at the Inn of the Typical Moniker.”

  “I had no intent to lure,” said the Glib Ape. “But our enlightening conversation led me to realize that General Gyaltsen could not possibly expect the army to mass in these barren hills. Accordingly, I thought it well to survey the region for a possible surprise attack, or as a fallback in case Gyaltsen ousts us from our current site.”

  “And is that site indeed in the eastern foothills?”

  The moon gleamed off the Glib Ape’s smile. “If you have switched allegiances, you might have said so earlier. If not, well, I can hardly satisfy your curiosity.”

  “I am still for the King,” said Datang.

  “I as well,” said the Glib Ape, “though I do not think we mean the same thing.”

  “Wherefore,” said Datang, “I take my leave.” She tensed her legs, summoning her reserves of rlung to apply the Crane’s Migration Step; the Glib Ape’s archers adjusted their aim. “If we meet again, I pray that you do no more gratuitous killing of animals.”

  “But this meeting has not ended. You still owe me a bowl of wine.”

  “The debt will keep.” And Datang leapt.

  The crook where she had crouched became immediately arrow-studded. She landed yet higher, regained her balance, and then leapt again. This time there was no hiss of arrows. Datang was breathing hard by this point—she had never used the Crane’s Migration Step so many times in c
lose succession, nor for leaps requiring such strength and precision—but she forced herself to leap again. She fell short of her target branch, and for a sickening moment, she hung like a pendulum from a single hand; but, for all her exhaustion, she was young, strong, and light, and she swiftly achieved a stable perch. She allowed herself a moment’s rest, staring up through the branches above; she would gain height before she leapt again, improving her odds, should she miss her target, of finding purchase before she hit the ground.

  In that moment’s rest, the Glib Ape landed catlike on the branch.

  “This is insufferable,” was all Datang could say.

  “Accompany me peaceably to the ground, and you need not suffer,” said the Glib Ape. “Several valuable officers were kidnapped at the Hill of Faces. I rather think a styled fencer with the elements of the Crane’s Migration Step could be traded for one.”

  “Two, if you conceal my sex,” said Datang as she rose and drew.

  “Come,” the Glib Ape spread his hands, “I am unarmed.”

  “Come,” said Datang, “do not invite jokes in poor taste.”

  The Glib Ape looked at his hands and grinned. “I am blessed with a surfeit of arms, ‘tis true. And I had not intended to conceal your sex. Even Gyaltsen is afflicted by the chivalric impulse; he will see a woman fencer as in need of rescue.” He looked into Datang’s eyes. “Which your excellent technique, of course, reveals for the error it is. But I will allow you to teach them that lesson after the trade is made.”

  “I will teach the lesson.” Datang assumed the best guard position she could in light of the terrain. A sudden vertigo washed over her; she nearly reeled. “But there will be no trade.”

  “We shall see,” said the Glib Ape; and from his right hand thrust a bar of amber light.

  Datang’s heart began to crawl in her chest, as if moving toward her throat to escape her body entirely. She bounced straight up and swung onto a strong branch, then darted away from the trunk, planning her escape to the next tree. She felt the impact of the Glib Ape’s landing and leapt.