The Book of Swords

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “How did you know?” I ask. The bricks at my feet have not flipped open to reveal a yawning pit and no soldiers have rushed from behind the screens. But my hands grip the cord tightly and my knees are ready to snap. I can still complete my mission if he truly is defenseless.

  “Children have sharper ears than their parents,” he says. “And I have long made shadow puppets for my own amusement while reading late at night. I know how much the lights in this hall usually flicker without the draft from a new opening in the ceiling.”

  I nod. It’s a good lesson for the next time. My right hand moves to grasp the handle of the dagger in the sheath at the small of my back.

  “Jiedushi Lu of Chenxu is ambitious,” he says. “He has coveted my territory for a long time, thinking of pressing the young men in its rich fields into his army. If you strike me down, there will be no one to stand between him and the throne in Chang’an. Millions will die as his rebellion sweeps across the empire. Hundreds of thousands of children will become orphans. Ghostly multitudes will wander the land, their souls unable to rest as beasts pick through their corpses.”

  The numbers he speaks of are vast, like the countless grains of sand suspended in the turbid waters of the Yellow River. I can’t make any sense of them. “He saved my teacher’s life once,” I say.

  “And so you will do as she asks, blind to all other concerns?”

  “The world is rotten through,” I say. “I have my duty.”

  “I cannot say that my hands are free of blood. Perhaps this is what comes of making compromises.” He sighs. “Will you at least allow me two days to put my affairs in order? My wife departed this world when my son was born, and I have to arrange for his care.”

  I stare at him. I can’t treat the boy’s laughter as an illusion.

  I picture the governor surrounding his house with thousands of soldiers; I picture him hiding in the cellar, trembling like a leaf in autumn; I picture him on the road away from this city, whipping his horse again and again, grimacing like a desperate marionette.

  As if reading my mind, he says, “I will be here, alone, in two nights. I give you my word.”

  “What is the word of a man about to die worth?” I counter.

  “As much as the word of an assassin,” he says.

  I nod and leap up. Scrambling up the dangling rope as swiftly as I ascend one of the vines on the cliff at home, I disappear through the hole in the roof.

  —

  I’m not worried about the jiedushi’s escaping. I’ve been trained well, and I will catch him no matter where he runs. I’d rather give him the chance to spend some time saying good-bye to his little boy; it seems right.

  I wander the markets of the city, soaking up the smell of fried dough and caramelized sugar. My stomach growls at the memory of foods I have not had in six years. Eating peaches and drinking dew may have purified my spirit, but the flesh still yearns for earthly sweetness.

  I speak to the vendors in the language of the court, and at least some of them have a passing mastery of it.

  “That is very skillfully made,” I say, looking at a sugar-dough general on a stick. The figurine is wearing a bright red war cape glazed with jujube juice. My mouth waters.

  “Would you like to have it?” the vendor asks. “It’s very fresh, young mistress. I made it only this morning. The filling is lotus paste.”

  “I don’t have any money,” I say regretfully. Teacher gave me only enough money for lodging, and a dried peach for food.

  The vendor considers me and seems to make up his mind. “By your accent I take it you’re not a local?”

  I nod.

  “Away from home to find a pool of tranquility in this chaotic world?”

  “Something like that,” I say.

  He nods, as if this explains everything. He hands the stick of the sugar-dough general to me. “From one wanderer to another, then. This is a good place to settle.”

  I accept the gift and thank him. “Where are you from?”

  “Chenxu. I abandoned my fields and ran away when the Jiedushi Lu’s men came to my village to draft boys and men for the army. I had already lost my father, and I wasn’t interested in dying to add color to his war cape. That figurine is modeled after Jiedushi Lu. It gives me pleasure to watch patrons bite his head off.”

  I laugh and oblige him. The sugar dough melts on the tongue, and the succulent lotus paste that oozes out is delightful.

  I walk about the alleyways and streets of the city, savoring every bite of the sugar-dough figurine as I listen to snatches of conversation wafting from the doors of teahouses and passing carriages.

  “…why should we send her across the city to learn dance?…”

  “The magistrate isn’t going to look kindly on such deception…”

  “…the best fish I’ve ever had! It was still flapping…”

  “…how can you tell? What did he say? Tell me, sister, tell…”

  The rhythm of life flows around me, buoying me up like the sea of clouds on the mountain when I swing from vine to vine. I think about the words of the man I’m supposed to kill:

  Millions will die as his rebellion sweeps across the empire. Hundreds of thousands of children will become orphans. Ghostly multitudes will wander the land.

  I think about his son, and the shadows flitting across the walls of the vast, empty hall. Something in my heart throbs to the music of this world, at once mundane and holy. The grains of sand swirling in the water resolve into individual faces, laughing, crying, yearning, dreaming.

  —

  On the third night the crescent moon is a bit wider, the wind a bit chillier, and the hooting of the owls in the distance a shade more ominous.

  I scale the wall of the governor’s compound as before. The patrolling patterns of the soldiers have not changed. This time, I crouch even lower and move even more silently across the branch-thin top of the wall and the uneven surface of roofing tiles. I’m back at the familiar spot; I pry up a roof tile that I had put back two nights earlier and press my eye against the slit to block the draft, anticipating at any moment masked guards leaping out of the darkness, to spring their trap.

  Not to worry—I’m ready.

  But there are no shouts of alarm and no clanging of the gong. I gaze down into the well-lit hall. He is sitting in the same spot, a stack of papers on the desk by him.

  I listen hard for the footsteps of a child. Nothing. The boy has been sent away.

  I examine the floor of the hall beneath where the man sits. It’s strewn with straw. The sight confuses me for a moment before I realize that it’s an act of kindness. He wants to keep his blood from staining the bricks so that whoever has to clean up the mess will have an easier time.

  The man sits in the lotus position, eyes closed, a beatific smile on his face like a statue of the Buddha.

  Gently, I place the tile back in place and disappear into the night like a breeze.

  —

  “Why have you not completed your task?” Teacher asks. My sisters stand behind her, two arhats guarding their mistress.

  “He was playing with his child,” I say. I hold on to the explanation like a vine swaying over an abyss.

  She sighs. “Next time this happens, you should kill the boy first, so that you’re no longer distracted.”

  I shake my head.

  “It is a trick. He is playing upon your sympathies. The powerful are all actors upon a stage, their hearts as unfathomable as shadows.”

  “That may be,” I say. “Still, he kept his word and was willing to die at my hand. I believe other things he’s told me may be true as well.”

  “How do you know he is not as ambitious as the man he maligns? How do you know he is not only being kind in service of a greater cruelty in the future?”

  “No one knows the future,” I say. “The house may be rotten through, but I’m unwilling to be the hand that brings it tumbling down upon the ants seeking a pool of tranquility.”

  She stares at me.
“What of loyalty? What of obedience to your teacher? What of carrying out that which you promised to do?”

  “I’m not meant to be a thief of lives,” I say.

  “So much talent,” she says; then, after a pause, “Wasted.”

  Something about her tone makes me shiver. Then I look behind her and see that Jinger and Konger are gone.

  “If you leave,” she says, “you’re no longer my student.”

  I look at her unlined face and not unkind eyes. I think about the times she bandaged my legs after I fell from the vines in the early days. I think about the time she fought off the bamboo-grove bear when it proved too much for me. I think about the nights she held me and taught me to see through the world’s illusions to the truth beneath.

  She had taken me away from my family, but she has also been the closest thing to a mother I know.

  “Good-bye, Teacher.”

  I crouch and leap like a bounding tiger, like a soaring wild ape, like a hawk taking flight. I smash through the window of the room in the inn and dive into the ocean that is night.

  —

  “I’m not here to kill you,” I say.

  The man nods, as if this is entirely expected.

  “My sisters—Jinger, also known as the Heart of Lightning, and Konger, the Empty-Handed—have been dispatched to complete what I cannot.”

  “I will summon my guards,” he says, standing up.

  “That won’t do any good,” I tell him. “Jinger can steal your soul even if you were hiding inside a bell at the bottom of the ocean, and Konger is even more skillful.”

  He smiled. “Then I will face them alone. Thank you for the warning so that my men do not die needlessly.”

  A faint shrieking noise, like a distant troop of howling monkeys, can be heard in the night. “There’s no time to explain,” I tell him. “Give me your red scarf.”

  He does, and I tie the scarf about my waist. “You will see things that seem beyond comprehension. Whatever happens, keep your eye on this scarf and stay away from it.”

  The howling grows louder. It seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. Jinger is here.

  Before he has time to question me further, I rip open a seam in space and crawl in to vanish from his sight, leaving only the tip of the bright red scarf dangling behind.

  —

  “Imagine that space is a sheet of paper,” Teacher said. “An ant crawling on this sheet of paper is aware of breadth and depth, but has no awareness of height.”

  I looked at the ant she had sketched on the paper, expectant.

  “The ant is terrified of danger, and builds a wall around him, thinking that such an impregnable barrier will keep him safe.”

  Teacher sketches a ring around the ant.

  “But unbeknownst to the ant, a knife is poised above him. It is not part of the ant’s world, invisible to him. The wall he has built will do nothing to protect him against a strike from a hidden direction—”

  She throws her dagger at the paper, pinning the painted ant to the ground.

  “You may think width, depth, and height are the only dimensions of the world, Hidden Girl, but you’d be wrong. You have lived your life as an ant on a sheet of paper, and the truth is far more wondrous.”

  —

  I emerge into the space above space, the space within space, the hidden space.

  Everything gains a new dimension—the walls, the floor tiles, the flickering torches, the astonished face of the governor. It is as if the governor’s skin has been pulled away to reveal everything underneath: I see his beating heart, his pulsating intestines, the blood streaming through his transparent vessels, his gleaming white bones as well as the velvety marrow stuffed inside like jujube-stained lotus paste. I see each grain of shiny mica inside each brick; I see ten thousand immortals dancing inside each flame.

  No, that’s not quite accurate. I have not the words to describe what I see. I see a million billion layers to everything at once, like an ant who has always seen a line before him suddenly lifted off the page to realize the perfection of a circle. This is the perspective of the Buddha, who comprehends the incomprehensibility of Indra’s net, which connects the smallest mote at the tip of a flea’s foot to the grandest river of innumerable stars that spans the sky at night.

  This was how, years ago, Teacher had penetrated the walls of my father’s compound, evaded my father’s soldiers, and seized me from within the tightly sealed cabinet.

  I see the approaching white robe of Jinger, bobbing like a glowing jellyfish in the vast deep. She ululates as she approaches, a single voice making a cacophony of howling that sends terror into the hearts of her victims.

  “Little Sister, what are you doing here?”

  I lift my dagger. “Please, Jinger, go back.”

  “You’ve always been a bit too stubborn,” she says.

  “We have eaten from the same peach and bathed in the same cold mountain spring,” I say. “You taught me how to climb the vines and how to pick the ice lilies for my hair. I love you like a sister of the blood. Please, don’t do this.”

  She looks sad. “I can’t. Teacher has promised.”

  “There’s a greater promise we all must live by: to do what our heart tells us is right.”

  She lifts her sword. “Because I love you like a sister, I will let you strike at me without hitting back. If you can hit me before I kill the governor, I will leave.”

  I nod. “Thank you. And I’m sorry it’s come to this.”

  The hidden space has its own structure, made from dangling thin strands that glow faintly with an inner light. To move in this space, Jinger and I leap from vine to vine and swing from filament to filament, climbing, tumbling, pivoting, lurching, dancing on a lattice woven from starlight and lambent ice.

  I lunge after her, she easily dodges out of the way. She has always been the best at vine fighting and cloud dancing. She glides and swings as gracefully as an immortal of the heavenly court. Compared to her, my moves are lumbering, heavy, lacking all finesse.

  As she dances away from my strikes, she counts them off: “One, two, three-four-five…very nice, Hidden Girl, you’ve been practicing. Six-seven-eight, nine, ten…” Once in a while, when I get too close, she parries my dagger with her sword as effortlessly as a dozing man swats away a fly.

  Almost pityingly, she swivels out of my way and swings toward the governor. Like a knife poised above the page, she’s completely invisible to him, falling upon him from another dimension.

  I lurch after her, hoping that I’m close enough to her for my plan to work.

  The governor, seeing the red scarf I dangle into his world approach, drops to the ground and rolls out of the way. Jinger’s sword pierces through the veil between dimensions and, in that world, a sword emerges from the air and smashes the desk the governor was sitting behind into smithereens before disappearing.

  “Eh? How can he see me coming?”

  Without giving her a chance to figure out my trick, I launch a fusillade of dagger strikes. “Thirty-one, thirty-two-three-four-five-six…you’re really getting better at this…”

  We dance around in the space “above” the hall—there’s no word for this direction—and each time, as Jinger goes after the governor, I try to stay right next to her to warn the governor of the hidden danger. Try as I might, I can’t touch her at all. I can feel myself getting tired, slowing down.

  I flex my legs and swing after her again, but this time, I’m careless and come too close to the wall of the hall. My dangling scarf catches on the sconce for a torch and I fall to my feet.

  Jinger looks at me and laughs. “So that’s how you’ve been doing it! Clever, Hidden Girl. But now the game is over, and I’m about to claim my prize.”

  If she strikes at the governor now, he won’t have any warning at all. I’m stuck here.

  The scarf catches fire, and the flame erupts into the hidden space. I scream with terror as the flame engulfs my robe.

  With three quick leaps, Jin
ger is back on the same strand I’m on; she whips off her white robe and wraps it around me, helping me smother the flames.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  The fire has singed my hair and charred my skin in a few places, but I’ll be fine. “Thank you,” I say. Then before she can react, I whip my dagger across the hem of her robe and cut off a strip of cloth. The tip of my dagger continues to slice open the veil between dimensions, and the strip drifts into the ordinary world, like flotsam bobbing to the surface. We both see the governor’s shocked face as he scrambles away from the white-silk patch on the floor.

  “A hit,” I say.

  “Ah,” she says. “That’s not really fair, is it?”

  “Nonetheless, it’s a strike,” I say.

  “So that fall…it was all planned?”

  “This was the only way I could think of,” I admit. “You’re a far superior sword fighter.”

  She shakes her head. “How can you care for a stranger more than your sister? But I gave you my word.”

  She climbs up and glides away like a departing water spirit. Just before she fades into the night, she turns to look at me one last time. “Farewell, Little Sister. Our bond has been severed as surely as you’ve cut through my dress. May you find your purpose.”

  “Farewell.”

  She leaves, ululating all the while.

  —

  I crawl back into ordinary space, and the governor rushes up to me. “I was so frightened! What kind of magic is this? I heard the clanging of swords but could see nothing. Your scarf danced in the air like a ghost, and then, finally, that white cloth materialized out of nowhere! Wait, are you hurt?”

  I grimace and sit up. “It’s nothing. Jinger is gone. But the next assassin will be my other sister, Konger, who is far more deadly. I do not know if I can protect you.”

  “I’m not afraid to die,” he says.

  “If you die, the Jiedushi of Chenxu will slaughter many more,” I say. “You must listen to me.”

  I open my pouch and take out my teacher’s gift to me on my fifteenth birthday. I hand it to him.