by JY Yang
Time and space were just another aspect of the Slack, this fabric of the universe they were woven into. They faded in and out of focus. Sometimes they were like sheets of rice paper upon which everything marched. Sometimes they were embedded into the soup in which everything swam, just another ingredient, no more divisible than salt was from spiced broth. Sometimes they were both.
The way this thing called Sanao Mokoya was connected to the Slack was different from the way the others were connected, sleeping in their tents or stacked within Bataanar’s walls. The time nature of the Slack coiled around them, called to them, separate from what they called the five natures, separate from everything else. Yet all the same. Indivisible. Colors upon colors all melding into one color.
You couldn’t understand it if you looked only for the five natures. But once it came to you, there was no way of unseeing it.
A prophet could control the time-nature of the Slack. Those visions, born from her unconscious mind, were her uncontrolled attempts to rearrange the patterns in the Slack. And once they were laid down, those patterns became locked to the prophet’s destiny. The thing that was Mokoya saw Rider’s death, bound to her against the patterns of the Slack by threads of fortune.
For a prophecy to be undone, the prophet herself had to be undone.
Mokoya opened her eyes. She was lying on hot sand, limbs trembling with the force of enlightenment, heart pumping with the shock of understanding. She sat up, feeling like an entirely new being, resting with her hipbones against the hungry floor of the desert, at once detached from and yet one with the universe around her. The Slack sang to her, songs she had never heard before, its threads ringing like zither strings.
Prophecies could be undone. They had just gone about it the wrong way.
Mokoya got to her feet and was amazed when they held beneath her. They led her back to her tent. She knew what she had to do.
Rider still lay asleep on their cot. Mokoya had no intention of waking them. She crouched on one knee to get a clearer look at their face. Peaceful, unbothered.
“You knew,” she said softly. “You’ve always known. But you didn’t tell me, because you wanted to protect me. You knew what I would do. I understand. I forgive you.”
Rider did not stir. The day’s happenings had truly exhausted them. Mokoya stood, quiet as the breath of trees. She had letters to write.
* * *
Dearest Rider,
I hope you can forgive me.
Do not be alarmed. I have gone to face the naga by myself; that is my choice. I have discovered the truth that you, I think, were trying to save me from. I saw in the Slack how to undo the knots of the prophecy that I created. I saw that it was possible to save you.
Even if it costs my life, I have decided to do it. More than anything, I want you to live.
Do not feel sorry for me. I am not angry, nor am I sad. This has come as a relief to me. In fact, I feel joy.
Since the days of my childhood, when these prophecies started to plague me, I have struggled with helplessness. Oftentimes I felt trapped at the bottom of a frozen pond, watching things happen through the ice, unable to touch them, unable to change anything. I felt nothing but hatred: toward myself, toward my visions, toward the world. It was as if fortune itself were mocking me.
After my daughter died, I decided the only way to avoid more pain was to leave. I knew I was running away when I left the capital, but I cared little. I kept running. If I wasn’t around anyone, if I didn’t care about anything, then there could be no hurt, and no one to hurt.
Living like that, it would have been a matter of time before things came to their logical conclusion. So do not feel regret for my sake. By ending this way, at least something positive will be gained from my death.
I wish we could have met under better circumstances. Perhaps in a time to come, in another world (as you said), we will. To have known you, even for one day, was a gift to me, fortune’s penance. I have only one wish for you:
Live on, dear one. Embrace what fortune has bestowed upon you. Look ahead with no regrets. And carry a memory of me into the future.
Mokoya
Chapter Nineteen
SHE TOOK NOTHING WITH HER, as one does when one does not intend to return. Her cudgel she left in the tent; she would not need it against her foe.
She would serve as a distraction, a focal point for the naga’s slackcraft, to give Wanbeng time to get to safety. She would surprise the creature, break its neck with earth-nature to limit the damage it could do.
If she could, she would kill it. Either way, she did not expect to survive.
She was ready.
Outside her tent, Mokoya closed her eyes against the lightening sky and folded the Slack.
The naga had nested in open air on the far side of the oasis, where water cascaded down massive boulders to a reflecting pool below. A raised plateau about two hundred yields across stood between the oasis and the sunken pool. That was where Mokoya came out of the fold, tumbling over her own feet and into a roll, dry dust filling her mouth. Her head struck something lumpy, and sand-noise dizziness flared as she stood. She was right in front of the naga’s massive bulk, radiating animal stink.
The creature struggled to its feet, nostrils flaring, a growl building in its throat.
So much for surprising it.
“Who goes there?” demanded a voice.
Wanbeng was alive, imperious as ever, standing between the creature’s winged front limbs.
“Wanbeng! It’s me.”
“Tensor Sanao?” The girl’s eyes widened.
The naga bared its teeth and lunged its head forward. “No!” the girl commanded.
Her hand snapped up as she tensed through forest-nature. The naga froze, then backed down.
The creature’s breathing was labored. Blood oozed from its sides and marked wide smears on the ground. The Machinists’ fire cannon had struck deep. The naga was dying, its wounds slowly draining its blood, the great rot setting in.
Mokoya said to the girl: “It’s me, Wanbeng. I’ve come to help.”
“You’re not dead.”
“Not yet.”
“Then I’m not a criminal.” Her voice shook with relief.
Unreasonable hope seized Mokoya: What if this ordeal was survivable? “Wanbeng, we must end this creature’s misery,” she said. “Look at its wounds.”
“Those murderers did this.”
“You saw what it did to the city. You know it’s dangerous.”
The girl couldn’t answer the accusations. She didn’t argue with Mokoya, did not insist on the naga’s humanity. The delusion had been wrung from her in the hours since. In a way, Mokoya almost envied her. Wanbeng’s eyes shone with bright frustration, the lines around them evidence of her exhaustion. “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be my father’s little puppet.”
“You don’t have to be. Wanbeng, I promise I will do all I can to help you. But there’s nothing out here. I know, because I’ve spent the last two years of my life hiding in the wilderness. It won’t help.”
The girl bit her lip. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m—” Mokoya exhaled. “I’m going to undo what has been done,” she said. “I’m going to untangle the soul-graft.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Keep it still while I work the slackcraft. Can you do that?”
Wanbeng’s shoulders moved. “I’ll try.”
Mokoya calmed her mindeye and read the creature in front of her. She could see what had been done to the essence of the wild naga. Raja Ponchak’s soul pattern had been grafted on, precisely and artificially, a profusion of Slack-connections fastened to the naga at five points, like a pentagonal tumor. The naga’s body had grown to enormous proportions in response to the injury that had been done to its soul, accumulating matter and complexity to balance this unasked-for addition.
The deed had been done with calculated artlessness. She despised the ones responsible.
/>
She had to work fast: she didn’t know how long Wanbeng could keep the naga still once she started. She began to unravel the first knot, dissolving the connections that held it together.
The Slack resisted. The prophecy tangled around her pulled back against her efforts, choking her slackcraft. Refusing to let her unfix what had been fixed.
Mokoya, existing half outside her own head, saw a path through the snarl. She twisted the Slack. Bright connections sprang free. The first knot disintegrated.
The naga screeched and tried to rear up on its hind legs. “No! Don’t!” Wanbeng pulled through forest-nature, holding the naga back. The creature’s anger and pain disrupted slackcraft, rippling in waves, making everything more difficult.
Mokoya reached for the second knot and twisted the fabric of the world. The knot came undone to another cry of pain, another seismic spasm through the Slack. The third slipped from her as the naga bucked, trying to break from Wanbeng’s control—
“Tensor, hurry!” The girl’s voice was strained. “I can’t hold on—”
Mokoya undid the third knot. The naga bellowed and swept one wing forward. Wanbeng shrieked as she was knocked backward.
“No!” Mokoya made a mad tense for the fourth knot and missed. The naga swung one wing at her, and she tensed a layer of solid air between them, the naga bouncing off it with a sound of rage.
“Wanbeng, run!” Mokoya gasped, a moment before the naga struck her with a ball of raw force, water-nature. She flew backward. Her arm made an ugly sound as she landed, and instinct drove her into a roll. Jaws descended, and Mokoya narrowly escaped their massive snap.
She tensed through earth-nature, pulling the naga’s head to the ground and keeping it there.
In her mindeye she saw probabilities converging upon her, driven by her manipulation of the Slack. She knew what was coming. She welcomed it.
“Tensor!” Wanbeng was still alive, thank the fortunes. She felt the girl’s effort in the Slack, trying to wrest back control of the situation, and felt a spark of admiration.
Mokoya pulled at the fourth knot as the naga clawed at the Slack, but its soul was so ragged the motion came out glancing and crooked. A spasm through water-energy, meant to bury her in a wave of lifted sand, only flung her backward. Something in her hip tore as she landed, and she cried out.
The fourth knot, frayed by the naga’s frantic attempts to tense, had come undone. The soul-graft was loose in the Slack, anchored only on one point. It was unraveling and flailing in all directions, pulling at the soul essence of the naga, tearing it. The Slack warped with the unnatural energy, and the naga arched over her in both physical and metaphysical pain.
The naga knew who was causing it all that pain.
Mokoya braced herself as the naga snatched her up with one clawed hand. She felt gravity lurch as she shot skyward, her lower body crushed under massive pressure. Pain consumed her, and black spots burst through her vision.
There was only one thing on her mind. Mokoya pulled at the last knot as hard as she could. There was no time for focus or delicacy: just a pure surge of energy into the fabric of the Slack.
The fifth knot broke. The graft tore away, unraveling into nothingness.
The naga screamed. There was motion, an impression of being flung into the air, gravity calling, speed, a blur of dark and light. Something that looked like the sky whirled over Mokoya, and then her body struck ground, broken and crunching, a sack with a ripped seam spilling its warm contents onto sand.
The sun was rising, and she wasn’t really in her body anymore. The thing that was Sanao Mokoya dwindled to a string of thoughts as her consciousness faded.
There. I did it. I changed what couldn’t be changed. I’ve cut the red threads of fortune.
Now I am free.
Chapter Twenty
SUNLIGHT AND BREEZE GREETED the cemetery like old friends, daubing the koi pond with light and the hillside with the pattern of leaves. The gentle fingers of willow trees swayed in the wind, brushing their tips against the gravestones in the Sanao family quarter. The ground exhaled the scent of yesterday’s rain as Rider knelt before the newest stone in the quarter, the red paint on the granite still vivid. From a distance came the faint hubbub of life, the chatter of voices from inns and the old songs of cowherds.
Rider tensed a small flame and lit a stick of incense. Smoke unraveled from its tip, redolent with sandalwood and ash.
As Rider stood, Mokoya took their hand. “Thank you for coming with me today.” She swept a glance over her daughter’s grave, bright and blissful, and felt her belly grow warm. “I wish you could have met her somehow.”
Rider squeezed her fingers. “Your memories of her are enough.”
Screams and laughter intruded upon their peace: the twins, playing a game of catch-the-thief. Rider colored. “Children! This is a graveyard, not a playground. Show some respect.” The twins looked at her, stifled their giggles, and vanished behind a willow tree. Rider sighed.
“Let them be,” Mokoya said. “They’re only children.”
They watched light dancing over her daughter’s headstone. “Could you have imagined this,” Rider said, “all those years ago, in the dust, when we first met?”
Mokoya laughed. “In those days, I tended not to imagine happy endings.”
Rider squeezed her hand, where a symphony of reds was spreading upward. She returned the gentle pressure. But even as she did so, there was a sense of something not being right, like a dislocation between vision and reality.
Someone was tapping on her forehead.
Mokoya wrinkled her brows. There was warmth around her, and softness: a bed, padded with cotton, heated to the right temperature, the air sharp with cleansing herbs.
“Don’t you think you’ve slept for long enough?”
Mokoya opened her eyes. Akeha’s face hovered over hers, his expression arranged into one of fond disgust. She found her voice in a throat cracked and dry with disuse. “Akeha? What—what happened?”
“You’re alive, even though you shouldn’t be.”
Mokoya blinked. Akeha spoke to someone off to the side. “Go and fetch the Head Abbot at once.” A patter of running feet.
As the calm of the graveyard receded from her—Vision? Dream?—the reality of the present flowed into place. She lay on a bed in a high-roofed room, royally appointed, the sheets brocaded and the bed drapes fine and rich. Silk screens, not paper, stood in window frames. Somewhere a bird sang.
“Don’t try to sit up,” he said.
She tried anyway, and something in her lower back twanged. She dropped onto the bed with a grunt. Memories filtered back to her, of the last fight with the naga, of her mortal wounding. She tried to move her feet, heavy under a blanket. One foot twitched awkwardly, then the other.
“You didn’t lose any organs this time, if you’re wondering.”
“I thought I was dead.”
“You were. Good as, anyway. Heart stopped, everything broken . . .”
“But, yet, somehow I survived.”
“It’s a good thing you made a new friend. I don’t know what kind of Quarterlandish black magic they practice, but they managed to . . . stop you somehow. Stop? I don’t know what that means. They tried to explain it, but it sounded like nonsense.” He shrugged. “Anyway, they kept your spirit with us until we brought you back here.”
“They’re alive?”
Akeha receded to the post at the foot of the bed. “You’ll be happy to hear that no one died in your little heroic scheme. Well, except for the naga. Couldn’t have saved it anyway—it was too badly hurt.”
“And the city?” she asked.
“Rebuilding. It’ll take a while.” He snorted. “Even with the help of Protectorate troops.”
Mokoya tried sitting up again, and this time got as far as her elbows, where she stayed. “So Mother’s troops are in the city?”
Akeha shrugged; he looked tired. Mokoya sighed.
A billow of ocher robes her
alded Thennjay’s arrival in the doorway. “Nao.” He crossed the room rapidly as Mokoya pushed herself up to sitting, ignoring the protests made by her slowly healing body. Her left wrist hurt. Thennjay pulled her into a half embrace, his arm around her shoulders, pressing her head into the cloth of his belly. She inhaled, smelling incense and sweat as he sighed, a deep rumble through his bones.
“Why was I surprised to find that you’d run off to martyr yourself?” he said, when they broke from the embrace. He put a gentle hand on her cheek.
She leaned into his touch. “Where is everyone?”
“Everyone?” Akeha said. “Hmph. Phoenix is busy frolicking with her new best friend. Adi and her crew are helping with reconstruction and annoying the wits out of my people. Or she’s annoying me, at least. The raja and his daughter have been enjoying some quality family time.”
“But that’s not the question you’re asking, is it?” Thennjay said.
She wet her lips and swallowed. “I want to see them,” Mokoya said.
“Come.” Thennjay held out an arm.
Akeha narrowed his eyes. “The doctor said her spine will take time to heal. Should she be walking around?”
Mokoya made a dismissive noise. She braced her weight with her arms and pushed her legs off the bed. They moved sluggishly and unevenly. Distinct lines of pain flared across her back and the muscles of her thighs. She was aware of bandages wrapped tight around her left leg, and her right ankle was encased in a solid, molded cast. She closed her eyes and examined her injuries through forest-nature. Healing bones, torn flesh slowly knitting whole. There were metal implants in her right ankle. Walking would be difficult.
She planted her feet on the cool stone floor, pressed her weight onto Thennjay’s arm, and stood.
Thennjay looped one arm around her waist as pain threatened to fell her again. Mokoya pushed her own body upright through water-nature. Thennjay dissipated earth-nature from around them, lessening the weight of her body. “Lean on me,” he said. “Don’t put pressure on that ankle.”
Akeha tutted as Thennjay led her into the first staggering step. Her legs were disobedient, unwilling to bend. “You suffered some nerve damage,” Thennjay said. “Training your body to move properly again will take time.”
