by Matt Weber
“Not during my reign,” said Tenshing, “or my father’s or his—”
“Every province has a city in which a factory has been proposed,” said Kalsang. “During your reign. Every such proposal has been crushed, if not at the crown’s behest then unopposed by it, and without fail the church has found a way to acquire the proposed site. Where there might have been work and wealth, Your Grace, there are a few near-empty shrines and a number of impressively unflattering renditions of your hallowed likeness in whatever third-rate stone or metal could be most swiftly requisitioned. It is kind of you not to kill men for their blasphemy, Your Grace, but your inattention kills their visions as surely as your ancestors’ steel once did—if not more surely; for men’s ears are captured by martyrs’ dying words, but the words of failed dreamers strike men deaf.”
“This is insupportable!” said Tenshing. The selectors were pale and rigid, and the Demon Guards flanking Tenshing exchanged inquiring glances, as though to ask one another how many men they would be ordered to bayonet, and how soon. “I have entertained these impious circumlocutions as my office requires, but you have forgotten your purpose, machinist! If you wish me to stand trial for the murder of your friends’ ideas, you may bring your complaint to the courts after the matter of the throne’s endangerment is dealt with. Or, if waiting bores you, you may donate your efforts to the insurgency.”
Kalsang’s gaze was steady and level. “I may not, Your Grace; it would be treason.”
“As accurate and empty as all else you have said.” Kalsang did not reply. “And a man of your subtlety is surely aware of my sensitivity to lies. Well, I will not entrap you, though you deserve no better. The artificer-monks have their purview well in hand, Kalsang freeman, your cavils notwithstanding, and their caution does not deserve your reckless dismissal. Your tractors and threshers are the gifts of the gods, which you seem to acknowledge while having no idea what it implies, and the gods’ silence does not license restless boys to treat their gifts like frogs or flatworms, to be vivisected in satiation of a moment’s curiosity. The church knows how to handle divine matters, and that expertise is as hard-won as yours in your field. There is no question of streamlining the production of holy relics, which you call “parts,” unless the church be for it. There is no question of attempting to recreate the Iron Harvest unless the church be for it. It is bad enough that the gods are silent, Kalsang freeman. It will not be my reign that licenses men like you to draw their wrath.” Tenshing had allowed himself to lean farther and farther forward during this speech, and he drew up all at once, his back birch-trunk-straight. “I begin to think I might exercise one of these retrograde statutes and show you the flagstones of a jail cell for your effrontery.”
“That is your right, Your Grace.” Kalsang looked a moment at Tenshing, gauging his mien. “Only—”
“I thought there might be a proviso, machinist. Your attitudes are so belabored with qualifications they seem almost to disappear. What is it?”
“For myself?” asked Kalsang. “Nothing at all. I am the meanest of men, and whatever fate my King assigns, there can be only justice in it. I merely wish to say that I have told my friends of my petition—both the fact of it, and its substance. They are reasonable men, of course, and do not think so highly of me as to risk their own lives for my freedom—”
“Enough,” said Tenshing; but, perhaps for the first time in their conversation, his mouth quirked with a smile. “That is a pretty game, Kalsang freeman, I grant it. But not even these threats you feign to hide could oblige me to imprison you. Do you understand? I own the respect of your friends, and that of their friends and family, as you own your tongue and teeth. I nurture it, as you do your body, and amplify it, as you do your mind, for diligent care improves our lives and the lives of those around us—and I will not endanger it because one wag from Gyachun managed a moment of ill-advised audacity before the Orchid Throne. You leave a free man, Kalsang machinist. Go back to these reasonable men who so admire you, and see if your words strike them deaf.”
“I will, Your Grace,” said Kalsang.
Tenshing waited for some parting salvo, some knife-twist that would force him to contain yet another immoderate response to this fool who had already wasted too much of his time—but it did not come. Kalsang abased himself and, flanked by Demon Guards, left the throne room.
Much like the previous night, there was a restless and complicated silence in which King Tenshing Astama examined his three selectors, and in which the selectors submitted to his examination with considerable discomfort and not a little terror; and much like the previous night, Tenshing broke it. “Last night I was uncertain whether you had erred in summoning humble Thogmey vassal to the throne. I have not thought on it, and at a night’s distance, I do not care. But this Kalsang is nothing but poison.” Tenshing’s eye wandered to the windows that flanked the Orchid Throne. The sky was beginning to grow light. He turned back to the selectors. “I cannot hold the morning’s practice in further abeyance,” he said. “Though it mortifies me, I must ask the third select-petitioner to delay until the evening. Hope for your own sakes that you chose better than you did with this machinist from Gyachun.” With this, King Tenshing Astama left the throne room, to spend a moment’s solitude in his own chambers and to don the loose whites he wore to train; and the selectors were left alone with two Demon Guards, whose eyes held no certainty that their bayonets would not soon find some regrettable but necessary application, and with the Orchid Throne, which smoked faintly at the arms’ ends where the King’s hands had been.
The courtyard behind the Orchid Palace has been praised as far abroad as, not only the River and the Garden, but even in the dissipated city-states of the lush southwest, whose visitors to our land have returned with any number of travelogues portraying the Uä’n as an enigmatic mystic constructed equally of barbarism and exotic refinement; and in the wave-battered isles of the northwest, whose more inept navigators have sometimes blundered into Uä and returned with tales of our subtle magics and just-concealed depravities. The palace’s architect (his name, Kesar, has been lost to time) had had a free hand with the enormous blocks of mulberry granite that formed the walls, for that had been the Green Morning, when wizards could be hired and slaves taken; and the palace’s history has never been entirely free of the taint of blood and magic, though each King on the Orchid Throne has developed his own method of forgetting it. But as undeniable as the palace’s stained origins was its grace—a word not readily applied to a structure built of such immense and unlovely constituents, and yet none other will serve. In the architect’s hands—or rather, those of his slaves and the sorcerous manipulations of his wizard-foremen, directed by his incomparable mind—the rough surfaces and edges of the blocks revealed a mountainous, unhuman elegance forever out of reach of the baby-smooth lines of steel and glass so fashionable now (to say nothing of the recent scourge of neon, loved by the Thousand Arm Deity and found unholy by most other thinking beings). But the architect’s particular genius lay in the four interior courtyards around which the rest of the palace coiled like clinging ivy around a copse of pines. Each was placed and shaped with a time of day in mind, and accounting for the beautiful distortions of light that, in certain weather, the peaks on the horizon often created. Perhaps there will come a time to describe the others. But for now we turn to the Dawn Courtyard (the others were Noon, Afternoon, and Twilight), that most often frequented by King Tenshing Astama—and, indeed, all seven of his namesakes, for even White Tenshing who never sat the Orchid Throne had sometimes been summoned to train there by his friend, General Zigsa, before they were forced to set aside that friendship for war.
Along those lines, perhaps it is no coincidence that the Dawn Courtyard’s architecture centered on the mountain called the Brow of the Sky, where the doom of priests was written in the Iron Harvest. The crenellations of the palace walls seemed almost to bow before that mountain, and the trained eye could detect a subtle mirroring effect, where small
er details of the architecture actually echoed the snowline. The granite of the walls was polished, not to a high sheen, but just enough to reflect the dawn’s light, and the coldest morning felt warmer in the pink and orange highlights that eddied there, captured and finely distributed by clever placement of walls and windows. It was not the Dawn Courtyard that hosted the cherry tree where Tenshing’s would-be assassin came to so abrupt a stop, for the boldness and crisp line of wood was thought to be too harsh for dawn, and the delicate pink of cherry blossoms redundant with the light; instead it was planted with flowers of blue and violet, bred for particular hues that did not curdle in the dawn light, which served as gentle reminders of the night that has not long been absent. In the winter, these flowers would fade and die, revealing the small sculptures of celestial animals in similar hues. But, on the morning of which we speak, the blooms had not yet succumbed to the autumn—and were thus available to provide another perspective on the inappropriateness of a cherry tree for the Dawn Courtyard. For it is evident to the most cursory reasoning that a tree is more difficult to plant than a flower, and a tree’s loss more grievous; a tree does not achieve maturity for centuries or at least years, while a flower rises to its task in weeks if not days. And so it can be plainly seen that, when a man’s body is sent at great velocity to crush a bed of flowers, however beautiful they be, it is a far smaller loss than had he done similar damage to a tree.
In this particular instance, the man was King Tenshing Astama, whose practice whites were white no longer, although it must be said that the King’s wrong-footing was in no way representative of the usual course of these sparring matches, for he inflicted like indignities on his trainers with some regularity. This habit was a bane to the King’s gardeners but a boon to King and masters alike, all of whom recovered more swiftly from impact on a flowerbed than on the Dawn Courtyard’s softly gleaming flagstones. The gardeners would have derived no comfort from what followed the King into that flowerbed, a crackling mass of light as sun-yellow as the same weapon in King Tenshing’s hand was moon-white. This weapon’s effects on soil and flowers were so predictable that they require no description here, and indeed so gratuitously destructive that it is perhaps best not to dismay the reader by dwelling on them.
At this point we may no longer put off describing Tenshing’s assailant, who was none other than the Master of the Eight Weapon Hand, the foremost among those monks who had devoted their entire existence to achieving virtuosity in that esoteric skill. He was not a young man, though younger than Tenshing’s lucent father would have been had he been living, nor was he old; it could not be said with justice that he was thin, yet to say that he was fat could not be farther from the truth; and as to his height, well, he was short, for men have grown taller in the hundred years since Tenshing Astama sat the Orchid Throne—but, for a man of his era, he was far from short, and surely the reader can guess whether, in addition to this absence of shortness, he would have been called tall. He maintained a cropped beard that sometimes seemed more like stubble, and his hair was moderately long, though when it was plastered back with sweat, as it was by now, it seemed rather short, unless one focused on its wildly curling ends, in which case it gained (or so it seemed) a modicum of length. If it seems needless to enter into this litany of negation when one could simply describe him as average in all things, well, there are at least two relevant considerations. First, the nearer truth was that the Master of the Eight Weapon Hand had less the aspect of an average man than of one who violently avoided any given extreme, recoiling farther from it than would seem possible without drawing perilously near the other; and second, that it would be impossible to describe a fighter of such consummate skill as “average” in any respect at all. In any case, in addition to his talent, which knew no moderation, he always dressed in immaculate dandelion yellow and maintained the hygiene of his hands meticulously.
The percipient reader will infer that, in emphasizing the precipitous effects on the soil wrought by the Master of the Eight Weapon Hand, we have implied that his intended target had avoided those effects, for had he not, we surely would not fail to say so. This is precisely the case; King Tenshing Astama, abiding by the lesson’s prohibition against the use of the other Rigors Martial, had rolled out of the way rather than (for example) using the Crane’s Migration Step to leap above the master’s stroke. He returned fire on the master, creating a grid of barbs that would have torn a thousand trenches in any lesser enemy’s skin; but the Master of the Eight Weapon Hand deflected those barbs, a technique available only to the most advanced students of his discipline, and conjured a sword of light from the air in ample time to meet the sword of Tenshing, who had decided (as he frequently did in these particular lessons) that his older foe would be worn down at a more satisfying rate by the rigors of hand-to-hand combat. This, of course, was far from certain, for the master was in peak physical condition, much like the King he fought; but it was rare that staying at range especially benefited Tenshing either, as his skill in deflection was feebler than the master’s and he could not sustain that hard monk’s punishing rate of fire. Here we have the pleasure of pointing out another rare deviation from normality on the part of the Master of the Eight Weapon Hand, for his grace and speed in fencing were entirely preternatural, and even the sullen Sonam could not deny the beauty of the duel: the luminous blades of white and yellow like rents in the dawn through which full daylight briefly burned, the perfect forms of the two men and their utter silence, with not so much as a hastily drawn breath audible to the spectators.
Those spectators were a more or less conventional mix. The King’s eldest daughter had accepted her invitation and stood beside his five sons. At the King’s insistence, neither the approaching army nor the night’s bloodshed had turned away the little class of schoolchildren scheduled to witness the day’s work. Lay visitors had been invited to the King’s training since Tenshing Dvitiya had sat the Orchid Throne, a custom suspended only during the grimmer parts of the reign of his great-grandson (and Tenshing’s great-grandfather), Tenshing Panchama. The exact composition of those visitors was a matter of the sitting King’s taste. Red Tenshing Dvitiya had invited his friends and his father’s friends in the loose confederation of boxers who would become the Green Morning, the better to cement those alliances and learn new training methods; his grandson, Tenshing Caturtha or Silverhand, had invited the most accomplished of the nation’s monks, the better to impress on them his power—and to encourage them to bend their efforts toward reverse-engineering the principles of the gods’ then-ancient prayer-engines. Keen Tenshing Sastha, Tenshing’s grandfather, had invited soldiers and generals, the better to understand how to integrate his talents on the battlefields of the provinces; and Tenshing’s father, to his own father’s unstated but palpable chagrin, had invited scholars and historians in hopes of situating the family art in the context of its antecedents. Tenshing Astama, as we have suggested, was in the habit of inviting students, from the littlest of boys to university men who would soon become scholars in their own right—which is not to say that boxers, monks, soldiers, and historians had not all observed his lessons at some point. Indeed, in the audience that morning were a boxer, a monk, and several soldiers. Granted, the soldiers were the King’s Demon Guards, who had attended morning practices since even before Tenshing Dvitiya had thought to invite the populace, and the monk was the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind, who was perhaps more properly construed as a participant in the spectacle rather than a spectator, as his own lesson would follow the other master’s. The boxer was Lin Tong, and all the world’s concentration could not conceal from Tenshing how his daughter looked at her.
Tenshing tried a surprise move, splitting the weapon between his hands, so that his right had just enough to parry with and his left was free to launch a burning sphere at the Master of the Eight Weapon Hand. The master deflected the sphere, of course, but it had not been meant to harm, only to wrong-foot him, and indeed Tenshing saw a flaw in the Master’s
weighting. He hooked a heel around the Master’s ankle and swept; the Master was too quick for this as well, but now he was twice wrong-footed and entirely on the defensive. Tenshing pressed the advantage close, sheathing his forearms in the weapon’s white radiance and reverting wholly to plain boxing strategy. The Master of the Eight Weapon Hand would not echo Tenshing’s tactic, although it cost him the initiative for strike after strike, for he could not block Tenshing’s effulgent blows without risking grievous harm and had to resort to dodging and retreat. Gone were the shining fencers of just a moment ago; the strategy of close work was taxing and brutal, the timing closer and the blows faster, and both King and monk were breathing hard and sweating freely. For all that, the stakes were clear enough to the spectators. King Tenshing’s goal was to get a hand on the master and force him to a grapple, where the Eight Weapon Hand became awkward and the King’s strength and skill would take the day. The master knew this, hence his reluctance to engage the King in boxing, where quick hands could convert a blocked blow into a hold at nearly the speed of thought. The Master of the Eight Weapon Hand, for his part, was looking for an angle where he could pour all his force directly into the King’s body—but the King, no stranger to his tactics, remained fluid and oblique, always positioned to turn or dodge the master’s stroke.
Both duelists and audience were caught by surprise when it was over. A finger on the master’s shoulder, a blast of yellow at a strange angle—and when eyes could see again, King Tenshing Astama had his knee in the master’s back, the monk’s chest to the ground and his right arm pointed straight in the air at a shoulder-cracking angle. King Tenshing blinked a moment at the resolution, then released the master before permanent damage could occur. The schoolchildren clapped. King and monk exchanged the Abasement to a Respected Adversary, then made that same abasement to the children, who chirped with laughter at the honor.
