Five Kingdoms

by T. A. Miles

  “I believe that it is your mother’s faith in you that inspired her to allow both you and the Storm Blade to come to Sheng Fan.”

  “Yes,” Shirisae admitted. She added unexpectedly, “And her faith in you.”

  Xu Liang accepted the commend with a slight bow of his head. “We spoke of the roles of individuals against the chaos that rises in my homeland, and which might have already risen in yours.”

  Shirisae watched him, the pride in her golden eyes having gone nowhere, though she held her words for a pause that mirrored the previous hesitation of her touch. At length, she said, “The Phoenix has chosen you.”

  The words drew a frown to Xu Liang’s mouth that he could not withhold. He replied, “It has chosen to return life to me, so that it might take it from me again. I am at its mercy.”

  Shirisae shook her head. “No, Xu Liang. The Phoenix will lead you to glory. When a fire that has gone out is reignited, it burns brighter than it ever did.”

  Ma Shou awoke feeling very much alive. He held onto pain, still, which was the first indication to him that he had not died. The suffering, however, was not significant. Lying upon a pallet, surrounded by the sounds of frogs and the fluttering material of a tent, he felt assured that he was no one’s prisoner. There were no binds inhibiting his movement, only the lingering lethargy of having been wounded and spent, nearly to his end.

  He sat up slowly, discerning the shapes of a minimal amount of equipment or supplies in the darkness. His body was bare to his waist and when he ran his hands over his arms, he felt the rough texture of scarring. A part of him felt immediately reviled and afraid of what he might have looked like, but vanity was not a coveted possession of his. If he must trade it, in order to survive, then so be it. Damage could heal over time, and it was not requirement that one be beautiful in order to advance in Sheng Fan. His reputation would be the greater injury to his ambition now, though perhaps his near death had been a boon for that reason. No one would recognize him with scars and…

  His hand went to his head, where he found some hair yet, but its previous length had been claimed as a casualty of battle. He had intended to cut it off anyway, once he’d completed his work. Undoubtedly, the name Ma Shou would be known as a fugitive. He had once considered taking on a new name and making his own clan, one that spoke more of accomplishment than idleness. He could do so now. Perhaps he might find one of his saviors to be of a worthy family that he might be adopted into. If so, he would strive to keep the name unmarred. He would become a better assassin, and leave no identifying mark upon his future deeds, which included the assassination of Lord Han Quan. If only he could arrive at the Imperial City and set fire to the betrayer at a key moment that would gain him both honor and station. Saving Xu Liang’s life would be quite an unexpected turnabout, though he did not know for certain whether or not the Imperial Tactician had intended to execute him before. Han Quan’s deviously laid enchantment had not provided the opportunity to learn.

  A firefly lit suddenly within the tent, startling him, letting him know that he had a more important task ahead of Han Quan, and that was recovering. He lowered his hand from the uneven remains of his hair, deciding against running his fingers over his face. For the moment, he could convince himself that he was in a position to be strong again. He would avoid any evidence that might contradict that for now.

  Turning onto his side, he laid his hand on a body beside him. Startled once again, he recoiled instantly. The body did not move. He wondered now if his saviors had actually thought him dead and piled him into the tent with the corpse of Zhen Yu or any of the other pirates. But that made no sense, unless they were bone collectors. The practice had been shunned long ago, along with the wild magic that accompanied it, but that didn’t mean that practitioners no longer existed…that he might not be in the presence of them.

  He resolved not to panic. He was alive, yet. He would rely on his own art. His lips stung somewhat when he formed the minor prayer to his ancestors that would properly channel the energies necessary to summon fire. The prayer was whispered, and a small ball of flame hovered in his hand, illuminating scars that were more minor than he anticipated in light of the pain. But, of course, they would be. A pyromancer held some resilience to the fire that he cast. Not enough to come away undamaged after reversal, but enough to survive. He began to recoup his confidence, and guided the firelight over the body next to him.

  It was indeed that of Zhen Yu. The tattoos identified him as if they were scars. They were very dark upon his skin just now, appearing almost as bruises. The scoundrel had gone pallid, taken on the bleached tone of death. “What a fool you were,” Ma Shou whispered, “to try to take glory so recklessly. That was not in the plan. Death is your earning, and you wear it appallingly.”

  Ma Shou had no sooner doused the flame spell when the dead pirate bolted to life, sitting up quickly enough that they knocked heads, which summarily knocked Ma Shou back onto the pallet. Fresh pain swelled behind his eye, but he managed to catch himself on his elbow, which enabled him the leverage to hold Zhen Yu back when the dead man lunged at him as if to murder.

  Ma Shou reached for something with which to strike Zhen Yu, but his fingers scarcely made firm contact with anything before he was seized by the back of the neck and dragged toward the tent’s entrance. The grip—familiar in its sureness—transferred from his neck to his shoulder while the individual swiftly hooked him beneath the arm and hauled him out into the night.

  The man dropped him in the grass. Zhen Yu emerged from the tent soon afterward, moonlight revealing his bruised and beaten flesh. It made eerie distortions of his tattoos. His face was a caricature of its former self, twisted with an anger the pirate had never demonstrated in life.

  “No!” someone said briskly.

  Zhen Yu halted, looked beyond Ma Shou, then walked on heavier, more deliberate feet than the River Master would have ever used in the past. He plodded around Ma Shou and toward the speaker as in an instant trance.

  Ma Shou followed his former accomplice visually, confused by the sudden mindlessness about him. He could only stare at him morbidly, until the night spirit came into view once again.

  It sat gracefully beneath the light of the moon, its animal companion yet near. The vulture raised its silvery neck and eyed the oncoming pirate while its master patiently awaited the approach. The spirit—Ma Shou could think of no other way to reference the individual—was even more astonishing now that he was fully awake. He rose to his feet and found himself tempted to follow Zhen Yu’s obeisant path. Surely, this creature was to be revered.

  Ma Shou stayed where he was, however, and watched as Zhen Yu arrived within several paces of the spirit, and dropped to his knees.

  The spirit, wrapped in pale robes and hair the color of the hour, opened its eyes. They appeared red…the burning tone of damnation. This spirit was of the Infernal Regions.

  Ma Shou was again not so certain he remained alive. The presence of the one who had dragged him felt suddenly nearer and he looked in the man’s direction. He was a large man—broad in a similar way that Xiadao Lu had been, but his face was not quite as broad nor was it bearded. The tone of his skin was darkened—perhaps by the sun, making the flaws more apparent. From his upper lip to his left eye, the man had been ravaged by a blade. It had left its mark in the form of a torn lip, a broken gash at his cheek and above his eye, and an eye that was discolored from scarring and quite likely sightless. The stranger compensated with an intense focus of the undamaged eye. From head to toe his appearance was barbaric, the stark opposite of his unnatural companion, whose courtly splendor was such that the effect became suddenly eerie.

  “Who…are you?” Ma Shou finally asked.

  The spirit answered, providing a name that Ma Shou could not decipher, as it came in the dual tones of a softly spoken man and of a song-voiced woman simultaneously. Hearing it, Ma Shou became instantly terrified that he was tru
ly in the presence of a demon. The beauty of the creature was immense and overwhelming. The voice was torment. The eyes were doom.

  “You do not seem to recognize one of your own,” the beast of the Infernal Regions said, isolating the gentle register of the male voice. “I am also a mystic of Sheng Fan. My name is Lei Kui.”

  Ma Shou was both mortified and fascinated by the claim—the claim that was substantiated by Zhen Yu’s state of living from his previous state of death. This cursed stranger was no demon, but a necromancer…a mystic of death.

  Their final day of travel toward the interior of Sheng Fan began with clouds that swept quickly across the green and gold terrain of wide fields and valleys beneath low mountains. There were higher mountains in the distance, their shape sculpted and upright, adorned with bright bands of green and swatches of brown. Alere imagined that they were the cousins to the nearer mounds of rock and lush, articulate growth that gazed down upon the grasses and groves of the kingdom Xu Liang had called Ji. It was the realm of the Blue Dragon, the mystic had said, which Alere took for the bright sky undulating through and arcing over the steep hills. It was like no terrain Alere had ever traveled. His appreciation for it was great enough that he felt moments of better peace over the consistent anxiety he’d felt about being in a land harboring unfriendliness, if not outright hostility toward them.

  Still, in spite of the serenity of the current environment, Alere’s guard could not be completely lowered. The land and the people were two different elements. If his reasons for following Xu Liang to his homeland were not already solid and validated, he would have turned around. He remained ready to do so at any time. Aerkiren might have had siblings, but it remained the sword of Morgen Shaederin, and his inheritance. He would not surrender it to anyone, for any reason, save the gods.

  That considered, the gods’ involvement in all of this was clear to him, particularly since the arrival of Tristus, whose relationship to the god of fury spared Alere the permanent revocation of Aerkiren. He had not seen Ilnon since that evening in Yvaria, when Xu Liang had confronted it with his own spirit—godlike, at the time. He retained his belief that Xu Liang was of both the mortal and the spirit planes. His soul burned brighter than his body, even after his near death had retracted his energy back inside of his physical form. It was that instinct—the reflex to preserve the physical part of him—that bound him to the mortal world. Perhaps it was the Phoenix Elves’ deity that had something to do with the renewed brilliance of the mystic’s spirit, and if that were so, it continued to prove that the gods were involved in this.

  While the thought reverberated at the back of Alere’s mind, the land eventually slung itself low beneath hills that were virtually pillars of brown earth adorned with delicate trees. A lake, or the illusion of one, caught daylight and appeared as a golden mirror, reflecting shades of life and glory upon the cache of uniquely formed structures cradled in the valley.

  As their caravan began a gentle descent toward what could only be the imperial city of Xu Liang’s people, no one stopped to gaze upon its beauty. It was with an almost somber air, and perhaps with some relief, that each of them guided their mounts over a shallow ledge of rock and brush and carried on toward their destination.

  Ma Shou felt held in a limbo. While he sat within the tent he had previously awakened in, the sound of the Tunghui pervaded his thoughts, reminding him constantly that he had gone nowhere since awakening after what was nearly his death. It seemed possible that the necromancer and his—or her—companion had been allowing him time to heal. It may also have been that raising the dead meant waiting a period for the dead to recognize themselves. He wondered if Zhen Yu would.

  He wondered also if he were their captive. He had not been banned from leaving, but at the same time he did not feel invited to leave. The necromancer had said very little. The necromancer’s scarred ally had said less. Ma Shou knew only that the man’s name was Guo Sen. He wondered if Guo Sen had also at one time been dead, and if he served the one who had syphoned death from him and returned it to him as life. Ma Shou was not at all versed in the ways of a necromancer. The element of death was forbidden to practice with. The Seven Mystics had condemned those who were called by their ancestors in such a manner, believing that the calling manifested of bitterness, dangerous ambition, and abhorrent souls. Those who prayed to the spirit of the dead were empowered by the hells, it was said. Their prayers were claimed to be as the breath of doom, carrying the tortured cries of the damned in order to enact their vengeance. They inspired disorder and illness.

  Whether or not any of it was true, it was easy to believe with the impression made by Lei Kui. The necromancer was a creature of ill beauty. Ma Shou was still undecided whether or not he was in actuality a demon. His very appearance was one of ambiguity and guile, trickery that would lure the living to disaster. Why Ma Shou had been pulled from the river and why Zhen Yu had been given back his breath was unknown to him.

  Footsteps pressed against the soft earth outside of the tent. Ma Shou tensed, and listened. He had slept through much of the day. He’d been too exhausted and in pain to do much else. He had required food at one point and had also found need to relieve himself, and so took that to mean that he had not actually died. Whether or not that logic was sound, he also determined that the nature of his thoughts and his ability to think had not changed. He imagined that Zhen Yu’s mind could not have been what it once had been.

  Ma Shou had seen the red horse kick its hooves upon his skull and bones. Summoning death from his body could not have undone the damage. He might have tried to speak to Zhen Yu, to see just how intact his mind was, but the pirate was not currently in the tent with him.

  “He is…nearly useless,” came the dual voice of the necromancer. The chord of registers seemed to fall heaviest on the male, but the female crept along its edges. Even when it seemed to have dissipated in sound, it’s influence pulled at the inflections of its sibling tone.

  Ma Shou could not move his thoughts from the notion that this mystic was also a demon, or that it was a demon using the label of mystic as a guise. He became so enrapt in considering that a denizen of the Infernal Regions had surfaced at the bank of the Tunghui that the words of the necromancer’s companion startled him.

  “Shall I be rid of him?”

  Ma Shou felt a flare of panic within him. Was he the useless one the necromancer spoke of? His mind scrambled over quick thoughts on how he might present himself of more service or benefit. But how could he? He had no knowledge of what it was Lei Kui wanted, or had potentially traveled from the hells to accomplish.

  “How is the other?” Lei Kui inquired.

  To which Guo Sen said, “He is recovering from his damage. The burns are largely superficial, though they will likely leave scars.”

  Ma Shou’s fingers raised to his face, gliding over unevenness and in some places, tenderness. He felt fully that his hair also did not weigh nor did it sit as it once did. The majority of the tail was gone, the ends coarse and brittle. The length was erratic around his face, and he was only able to locate soft growth very close to his scalp. He’d known he was going to have to cut it in order to disguise himself since Xu Liang and others had witnessed him. They’d witnessed him and he had not accomplished what he set out to do, which meant that he was now a fugitive as well as a rogue. He had a fleeting hope of escaping and finding a rebel liege in one of the kingdoms actively opposing the Song. It would require much effort to find new clothes and remake himself enough to be valued by anyone of station.

  “I will make my determinations later,” Lei Kui concluded, while Ma Shou was in the process of examining the singed and tattered outer layers of his clothing. “I am in no hurry, Guo Sen.”

  The companion to the necromancer made no vocal response. The sound of footsteps carried both individuals off. As well, the peculiar, yet oddly human gait of the vulture’s shadow traveled across the cloth partition. It was an
odd creature to be kept, and Ma Shou still wondered if he would wind up dismembered by its beak yet.

  Through the Gate of Heavenly Protection

  The Imperial City of Sheng Fan—also called Jianfeng, they were told—seemed as if it were the biggest city in all the world. Tristus had always believed that Rhinan, the capital of Andaria was large, but this was astounding. It was a city within a city, within a city. The palace itself and the palace grounds—the places, according to Xu Liang, where everything politically important went on—was heavily fortified, guarded by men and stone as well as a moat, while the city around it was contained by a series of walls and gates of its own. Beyond the outermost walls was a smaller community of what were almost squatters, traveling merchants and peasants living in simple shacks, working to cultivate the land outside of the Imperial City. Some of the residents were fisherman, riding daily to a river not far away with the hopes of filling their carts with fresh fish to sell by the basket to merchants within the city. Though, the gate they were approaching—Tristus had been told—was not the gate through which food and wares were delivered. There was a gate especially designated for that, just as the one they would enter through had its own assignment. Apparently, it was to receive returning troops and envoys. Tristus had maneuvered to the front of their caravan strictly for the sake of hearing what Xu Liang would tell them of his home as they entered it. When it seemed to him that the mystic’s attention was divided between their curiosity and the anticipation of his return after such a prolonged absence, he decided to leave the mystic to his thoughts and once again dropped back.

  There were so many people...and all of them had black hair and dark eyes, except for the elderly with gray or white hair. Of course, the Phoenix Elves had all been flame-haired with golden eyes, but their population wasn’t nearly so large and one tended to expect such things among the elvish people—they were so reclusive and otherworldly. To find a group of humans, who all looked so alike and yet so vastly different was utterly amazing to Tristus. As with many societies, one could distinguish the poor from the well-to-do by their dress. Those of a more affluent role appeared to wear heavily decorated silk. It seemed that the majority were adorned in coarser, though still uniquely cut fabrics. Tristus could only imagine what they thought of his white-gold plate armor, or of Shirisae’s black. Perhaps it was best that the Phoenix Warrior removed her helm before they arrived at the Imperial City. Or perhaps not. Her redder than red hair and yellow-pale complexion was drawing a great deal of attention.