The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1)

by Matt Weber

  “Now, children,” said the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind, “I’m afraid the demonstration is over. The King thanks you for your polite attention, but he requires privacy for his next lesson.” The children made inarticulate noises of protest, but of course their teachers were implacable. King Tenshing smiled at each student as he left, and graciously accepted the teachers’ swift but deep abasements. Inevitably, of course, the children noticed and loudly observed that the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind had exercised some small disingenuousness, for there would be no more privacy in this lesson than any other; the King’s guards and children were still there, as was Lin Tong. But ultimately the Dawn Courtyard was clear of all but King Tenshing’s close associates. The King looked toward Sonam, who immediately pretended she had not been looking at him for a moment until, begrudgingly, she met his eye. “Since this is new to you, daughter,” he said, “I merely wished to warn you that I will not look so well here as I did with the Eight Weapon Hand.” Sonam’s raised eyebrow said I did not think you looked so well—or meant to say it; but the Eye of Ten Thousand Apprehensions was not blind to the minds of loved ones, and King Tenshing saw a gleam of new respect beneath that eyebrow. “It is the hereditary weakness of the line, at least so far. Even your grandfather, the first to master seven of the rigors, could not master it.”

  “And he was a scholar.” Sonam’s gaze was cool, her insult unspoken.

  “He once told me that was his undoing,” said Tenshing. “A scholar’s mind is always searching. The Reflecting Pool Mind is named for stillness.”

  “Stillness in motion,” said Sonam. “The stillness of the earth’s surface through its orbit and rotation. Not true motionlessness, which is death, but a species of integrity.”

  Tenshing smiled; the elder sons took notice, although the younger had begun to fidget. “Vshatri’s treatise on the warrior’s mind. That is erudition, daughter.” Sonam straightened up an inch, chest out. “Perhaps if you read less ancient martial theory, you might find geometry more tractable.”

  “Martial theory is more important,” said Sonam. “I don’t need geometry.”

  “Read Boshai on fencing strategy before you make that judgment,” said Tenshing. “And do not be too credulous of Vshatri. He writes too beautifully; one can waste nights on him, and only decades later realize that one has not learned a thing.”

  For all her silence, the princess’s skepticism was palpable, and King Tenshing wisely quit the conversation. When he turned to take his place on the pitch, he found the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind. “Good advice, though she is rather young to take it.”

  “Most people are ill-suited to take the advice they most need,” said Tenshing. “Or they would not need it. For one, I am immune to advice on advice-giving.”

  “Your sons would profit from a father’s advice,” said the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind.

  Tenshing looked over at them: tiny Nyatri and sturdy Gyaltsen; too-thoughtful Gephel and Chophel, who still spoke to each other in their invented language; and lonely Yeshe, the only one old enough to realize that, at twelve, he would ultimately have to bow to a brother not yet born. “The one who needs it most has not arrived yet.”

  The Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind snorted. “Him? Every monk and courtier in the Rafters of the World will go to war for the privilege of advising him. What he will need, when you are gone, is brothers who can sort the silver in that trove of advice from the tin—and make him hear which is which.”

  Tenshing gave the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind a searching look. “Brothers do not seek each other’s company in this family. Only sorrow follows from such fraternity.”

  “Sorrow, betimes, but not only sorrow,” said the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind. “‘To act perfectly, see perfectly’—did Rinzen Lama not teach this? Do not chain your children with your own misfortune.”

  “My children are chained to a world in which they never knew the best uncle they could have had,” said the King.

  “Would they know him any better, had you and he ‘fraternized’ less?”

  “No,” said Tenshing, “but he would live, and that would ease my heart.”

  “Today I come to the Dawn Courtyard to teach my King to save his people,” said the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind. “Is it ease of heart that won me that knowledge?”

  Tenshing met the rebuke decorously, with averted eyes and silence. The Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind took the stance of concentration: Feet shoulder-width apart, shoulders square and eyes forward, fingers knotted at the navel. Tenshing took two paces back and admired the master’s stance before mirroring it himself. The King never felt comfortable in the stance of concentration; it seemed calibrated finely to the minor details of the master’s physique—or rather, specifically, those details most different from his own.

  We have done the reader a disservice by holding these details in abeyance, although King Tenshing has done us the favor of suggesting one of them: the Master’s shocking youth. He was perhaps twenty-five, with a boyish face whose fine grooves could only be detected at close range, although when observed at such a distance, they seemed less like signs of age and more like marginalia, explicating the text of his features much as the master himself often explicated kōan: that is to say, in spidery verses that suggested great insight but failed to edify any but the most sedulous readers. The other masters, even those whose specialties were mental arts such as the Diamond Word or the Eye of Ten Thousand Apprehensions, were all fit and strong men, no matter that most were old enough to be grandfathers. But this master was not strong. Nor yet was he withered, nor wiry, nor corpulent, as masters of the rigors have sometimes been; his figure was clerkish, not fat but soft, a common enough type among mandarins. King Tenshing could beat him badly without summoning any of the Rigors, and had done so in his youth, when the Master was not yet Master, the King was not yet King, and the frustrations of the Reflecting Pool Mind were still fresh and bitter. But those bruises had long healed, and the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind had never seemed to begrudge them in any case. And King Tenshing Astama was still pricked by jealousy as he admired how well the Master’s stance sat on that weak and frankly doughy body, even as his own restlessness put such ease beyond his reach. They locked eyes, the familiar feeling of instability unfolded from that critical point halfway between the King’s navel and his pubic bone, and the contest began.

  It was a peculiar discipline they struggled with as the Dawn Courtyard’s beauty began to fade with the sun’s ascent, a discipline of no evident application in combat—but Tenshing had once thought the same of other exercises in the progression, only to find them refining his strategy in subtle ways that defied easy summary. Here the conceit of reflection was taken as literally as it could be; for each man’s goal was to project back what he saw in the other’s eyes, adding no complication, simplification, or distortion. Small errors multiplied quickly in this exercise, and more than once Tenshing had found himself staring, or so it had felt for that searing fraction of a moment before his concentration broke, into his own face. This was at least easy to understand; it was when the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind’s face transmuted in its awful combination of slowly and all-at-once into Mother-of-Daughters’ face, or his father’s, that the King was truly shaken. Only once or twice had the master’s face transformed into the face of someone he knew but had not met, such as his great-grandfather Tenshing Panchama or his unconceived eighth son. At that point, the day’s exercise invariably became unsalvageable. The King wished he had dismissed his daughter and Lin Tong, and ripples of those regrets undulated through time on the master’s face. It was a bad error, but not unrecoverable, and the King made his eyes a mirror and let it fade away. The game settled slowly toward that fragile, brilliant state that was its goal, and King Tenshing carefully neither exulted nor resisted exultation.

  At last, a labyrinthine pattern of knotted right angles overlaid his vision; and Chief-Marshal Kandro stood
before him in the King’s court garb, his face lit sepulchrally from below by the twin globes of white fire that sheathed his hands. Rlung flowed reflexively to Tenshing’s own hands, but before he could release it, the aperture of the vision widened: The Pretender stood by the shore of a dark lake, staring upward with ill-concealed fear. Far above him Tenshing saw the tip of a whisker as thick as a man’s finger; a nostril the size of a man’s head; a great tongue in a cavern of a mouth, adorned floor and ceiling with teeth like gleaming bone sabers. From that huge mouth, a rumbling noise rolled forward—but the Pretender would not move—

  And then the enemy was gone, and only the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind stood there, crouched into submission, hands held over his face against the twin globes of fire that King Tenshing Astama found around his own hands, outstretched to his sides, brighter than they had been during the duel with the Master of the Eight Weapon Hand, brighter than he had ever thought or tried to make them. Fatigue weighed him down like an iron vest, and the King sank on shaking legs to support himself on no-longer-burning fingers.

  The Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind slowly straightened. It took longer for Tenshing to find the strength to do so, his sore legs and lower back slowing him down. But even his exhausted eye could not fail to notice the skin of the master’s palms and face—rage-red and tender, with blisters forming at the heels of his hands. The King looked in alarm at the gathered crowd, but they had been far enough away to avoid an injury. Sonam and Yeshe had joined forces to distract the littlest boys; Gephel and Chophel whispered in their twintalk. The Master of the Eight Weapon Hand watched Tenshing’s every move with entomological interest. And Lin Tong simply watched, so impassive that the King could only assume the display had disturbed her for reasons he did not understand.

  “Today’s lesson is abbreviated,” said the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind with great aplomb. “You spectators may disperse. The King will need a bit of rest.” The remark was well-timed, inasmuch as it caused Sonam and Yeshe to herd the other children out, which interrupted the ingress of the King’s physician for several seconds, during which the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind approached him.

  “I am sorry,” Tenshing said.

  “You have punished me more gravely,” said the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind, “and I bear no scars from it. I only wish to ask you what you saw.” The King’s face hardened, although he did not wish it to, and the master held out an abeying hand. “Very well. A force of genuine terror, then. That leaves only two possibilities. I suppose it does not matter which.”

  Tenshing ran a hand over his scalp. “No, Master, it matters.”

  “How so?” asked the master. “Pretender to your throne or Priestkiller Worm, I cannot imagine your attitude much differs.”

  “You are not a fighting man,” said Tenshing. “It is one of the things I like most about you.”

  The Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind nodded. “And what would a fighting man have seen that I did not?”

  “He would have seen the position of my hands,” said Tenshing. “Stretched out to my sides. Full of fire, I grant you, but held away from my body, neither attacking nor defending. A posture of submission.”

  “It did not look like submission to me,” said the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind.

  “You put too much stock in the fire,” said Tenshing. “Shame can drive a man to powerful displays, but the truth is always down to stance. Which lines he guards, and which he leaves open; what he positions himself to do.”

  “Very well,” said the Master of the Reflecting Pool Mind. “I allow that, in light of your interpretation, it matters whom you saw.”

  “Just so.”

  The Master waited a moment. “Will you not tell me?”

  Tenshing shook his head. “I need a different sort of counsel, Master. But I fear it will be some hours before I may seek it.”

  The Resting Place Between Heaven and Earth Pavilion

  in Yongten seemed to have pinpointed Lin Gyat’s attitude toward Netten: The huge fighter had passed out, slobbering and murmuring, not long after Lin Yongten and Datang had brought the meat, and Netten had considerately deposited his insensate form in the alley where he would not befoul the house. Lin Gyat, naturally, persisted in believing he had outdrunk Netten and regularly consoled the odoriferous boxer on that nonexistent defeat in terms he clearly thought were magnanimous and kind. This misprision irritated Netten not at all, and he gladly accepted Lin Gyat’s advice on the correct breathing exercises and dietary regime to maximize one’s imbibing potential, while gracefully acknowledging that one’s innate physical endowment naturally imposed its own insurmountable restrictions.

  Life in the Cerulean Guard was as uneventful as Lin Yongten had promised. After Datang’s harrowing journey to Rassha, this came at first as a relief and then, gradually, a great disappointment. The only excitement was the occasional mob at the foot of the Resting Place Between Heaven and Earth Pavilion, which generally crystallized around one of the few knots of regular protesters who shouted their causes at various points on the perimeter. But when these congregations threatened any real danger, King Tenshing could generally be summoned to disperse them with a brief display of the Four Conflagration Touch.

  Tours in the Orchid Palace had even less possibility of combat, but were far more interesting. Datang, Lin Gyat, and Lin Yongten were required to memorize the names and faces of not only the King, his wives, and their children—but also the staff, who had nearly been infiltrated during the events that had so horrified the clerk at the Logistics Bureau, as well as a slew of senior bureaucrats from outlying provinces who had yet to learn their way around the corridors. They were not asked to memorize the names and faces of the Demon Guard who flanked King Tenshing’s person at all times—a lucky thing, as it was hard to identify them through enameled helms that barely showed their eyes and the bridges of their noses; nor of the Versicolor Guard patrols who alternated shifts with the Cerulean Guard, although of course they did so anyway. General Gyaltsen himself supervised the Cerulean Guard’s relief of the Versicolor, leading his soldiers to their posts group by group, the Cerulean Sword mumbling and barking from its sheath and occasionally weeping drops of bluish ectoplasm in a trail behind the General. The King’s Lama was too old and slow to do the same, so he sent a senior subordinate to do it. This made shift-relief the great redemption of patrolling with Lin Gyat. The huge boxer was as distractible as a puppy and constantly complained about the deteriorating leather wraps on the grip of Sawed-Off’s sword, which he variously called the Limb of No Tree and the Earthsbone Truncheon, but his smiles invariably left the lama on duty visibly knock-kneed. The honor of shift-relief was soon propagated lower and lower in the lamate’s ranks, until eventually it was reserved for smooth-faced acolytes and transgressors of monastic discipline.

  It was near a shift change that one such acolyte conveyed a note from General Gyaltsen to Datang and Lin Gyat. “The senior Queen requires an escort to the fabric market,” Datang read. “The Lotus, what a chore. Where are the Wives’ Chambers? Forgive me; my routes have not yet taken me through the residences.”

  The Versicolor Guards relieving Datang and Lin Gyat shared a glance. “On the Great Plain side of the Wind Horse Wing,” said one.

  “Oh,” said Lin Gyat, “but Mother-of-Daughters lives in the Chusrin Wing, on the Twilight Courtyard, as Eager tells me she has done since the Regency’s end.”

  Datang looked between Lin Gyat and the Versicolors. “Is Envied of Snakes correct?” she said at last.

  “Well,” said the Versicolor who had spoken, a gangling man with a mustache Datang suddenly found offensive, “he is; but you asked where the Wives’ Chambers were.”

  “Ah,” said Datang. “I perceive the confusion. Your ears were momentarily stopped, so you failed to hear the context of the request, which was so articulately supplied by this worthy acolyte.”

  “Something of the kind may have occurred,” said the Versicolor guard.
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  “I thought so; for it is well known that imbecility causes the brain to swell, which can block the ear canals.”

  “Ah,” said the Versicolor guard. “That explains why you did not react when I told my comrade here that, whatever the provocation, I value my reputation far too much to fight a woman.”

  “Ha!” said Lin Gyat. “He has bested you, I think.”

  Datang turned a hooded gaze on Lin Gyat. “Would you care to expand on that, Envied of Snakes?”

  “Oh, indubitably. Had he fought you, you would have played with him as a cat does, peeling off digits and bits of skin at your leisure—a mortifying and agonizing end. Whereas, when he finds himself facing me, I suspect he will expire immediately of sheer terror. A painless end.” Lin Gyat treated the Versicolor to a smile of the sort he usually reserved for the lamas on shift-relief; and, indeed, the Versicolor guard turned as green as any cleric.

  “Wu liao,” said Datang, who had been studying useful phrases (principally of greeting, admiration, and scorn) in the Gardener tongue. “I hardly require your oafish assistance to deal with baggage such as this. He toddles like a drunken infant.”

  “But he will not accept your challenge.”

  “If my steel challenges his throat, he will accept one way or another.”

  “Left Hand,” Lin Gyat said in reproach. “The dueling code mandates respect for the decisions of one’s enemies. I know you womenfolk brim with mercy, but it is hardly fair for you to rescue this craven from the hell of cowardice he has created, when so many others writhe in theirs. Why, it would take mass murder to set things right after that.”