Four Barbarian Generals: Dryth Chronicles Epic Fantasy (Celestial Empire Book 3)

by T. A. Miles

  Che Wen Tai had assisted now, merely with his presence, as did the potent energies of the school’s environment, particularly those of the Wisdom Pavilion. The accomplishment in the moment was not a feat of any specific prowess or mastery, and he would not hear the master’s praise. Unfortunately, he could not help but to feel that it, like Xiang Wu’s, came with ulterior motive.

  Naturally, Che Wen Tai was percipient to the thought. “There are many who would place the fate of the Empire within your hands, Xu Liang. There are many who believe your hands have been blessed by the Jade Emperor, via his daughter…that you are the mortal offspring of Mei Qiao and Cheng Yu.”

  “There are many who blaspheme in ignorance,” Xu Liang replied.

  The comment was not intended to cite his elder for any such failing; he did not believe Che Wen Tai was entirely convinced of the scenario he suggested, rather that he was being constructively argumentative. The astralmancer was not ignorant of the affairs of court, or the rumors spread by those both within and without of it. Such rumors often began as deliberate lies to bring about a desired end. In this instance, unwanted supporters who were, in fact, enemies for their betrayal of the Song hoped to gain advance approval from the people in order to usher forth change.

  There had been malcontent since the death of Song Bao—Xu Liang knew. He also knew that he had been too quick to act on behalf of a very young empress, and that he had established a relationship with her that might have credited himself more than was intended with her accomplishments. He had heard of the Silent Emperor. He understood that there were some who believed that he governed from beside the throne…but he did not. He would not, and he would also not attempt to take the throne directly, not by usurping or by marriage, or by any other means.

  And it was that topic which had brought him to the school in the middle of the Empress’ campaign against Xun; betrayal.

  “Han Quan,” Che Wen Tai began, “has departed from ethics. He came to the school a man of brilliance and vision. He felt a connection to Oodeng Ten, a calling from the Spirit of Earth to become a geomancer. His goals then were to assist in fortifying the new dynasty.”

  “But he wasn’t assisting,” Xu Liang surmised, based upon the tone of the elder’s memory. “In truth, Han Quan has been sapping strength from the foundation of the Song. He began with Song Dai’s reign.”

  “It would seem so now,” Che Wen Tai confirmed. “Perhaps we should have anticipated such a change. In his youth, the tone of his ambition—though worded honorably—was volatile…overly courageous. It led him to erratic behavior; a summer spent in meditation here would be answered with several seasons of absence.

  “He studied simultaneously to become an official, as you did. But, unlike you, he seemed to consistently favor one path over another. His teacher retained faith in his ability to master both ways, and so we let him be. One spring, his sights were drawn to the position his master had vacated through extreme old age. He desired to succeed his master so strongly that he was denied by the rest of us, twice. For a time, he appeared to abandon the school in his resentment; he had returned his focus to the path of an official—and he was well on his way.

  “It was not until many years later that he returned to us, accomplished and appearing somewhat humbled by the vast undertaking of a rank within the Emperor’s court. His changed perception had improved his skill as a geomancer and, we believed, tempered him as a child of Sheng Fan. We invited him to join us as a master of the mystic arts, and to carry the teachings of Oodeng Ten throughout the mortal plane.

  “In the past two decades, Han Quan has refused to give his blessing to more than two aspiring geomancers. He has all but refused to teach them at the school and of his two pupils, one has abandoned the path. The other has come to reside in the mountains and studies beneath an absent teacher.”

  Xu Liang absorbed all that had been said, applying it to what he knew and had witnessed of Han Quan in the sixteen years he had been acquainted with him. He, too, had been persuaded by the former chancellor’s colorful nature. It was presented in such a way that it seemed more passionate than duplicitous. Han Quan was careful to never be too accommodating in matters of policy and never too flattering in personal assessments. His praise was consistently balanced with criticism. It made him appear both cautious and constructive in the eyes of Xu Liang. Perhaps some of that opinion had been formed in the impressionability of his youth. He had met Han Quan at the age of sixteen. The man who was, at the time, Song Bao’s Imperial Tutor, had been in his sixties.

  “If his devotion to the school was in question for twenty years, why was he not dismissed from his station?” Xu Liang asked. It was not intended to disapprove or to criticize; the question simply required asking.

  His elder believed that the answer was not for him, and he was denied through silence.

  Xu Liang begged apology with a bow of his head.

  Eventually, Che Wen Tai said,” I have violated our ethics as well, by visiting in spirit upon one who is not my student. Because you are here as an official of the Empire, within which all are housed and protected, I will tell you what I discovered within the dreams of Han Quan. I will tell you also of the boy that we condemned.”

  Xu Liang looked to the elder, who turned his gaze toward him for the first time since leaving the Iron Pavilion.

  Che Wen Tai said, “I will tell you about the Eighth Mystic.”

  THE SCHOOL DID not appear to have many people present. Shirisae considered that it may have been the time of day for meditation or for studies, and that those who lived on the mountaintop were currently shut away to achieve either or both. Alone on the balcony which surrounded the temple, she took up her own study of the environment, paying attention to the amount of wilderness that surrounded the school. She had no difficulty comprehending the reasoning behind such a remote location for the type of training that went on within these few walls. She could even grasp the deliberate difficulty of the route. It was not a school for everyone. Vilciel was similarly secluded and difficult to get to, though the defensive strategy behind establishing one’s home at the level of the sky was perhaps not among the considerations of a group of scholarly mages.

  Her gaze settled upon the pavilion below the level of the temple. It was predominantly red in color. Rather than lattice railing, the floor was encircled by the body of a serpentine dragon. The head and tail met at the entrance with a sphere to each end in gold. At the head, the ornament could have been intended to simulate a fireball and she guessed that the structure was for the element of fire. The neighboring pavilion, situated higher upon its pillar of natural earth, was primarily blue and green. It also had a serpent wrapping the base in place of lattice, but this beast was a wyrm, possessing no depiction of arms, legs, or wings. It was clearly a beast of the water, which thusly identified the pavilion in Shirisae’s mind. The creature possessed only one sphere, which appeared carved of pale stone or pearl. It was impossible to descry any true detail from her distance.

  So, she had glimpsed the buildings dedicated to the elements of iron, stone, fire, and water. Xu Liang was a mystic of the air. Perhaps he had gone with the elder to that particular pavilion, else they might still have been inside the temple itself. Of course, she had no real way of knowing and there was no purpose to debating except to wonder.

  It was then that Xu Liang appeared, not from the temple entrance he had gone through earlier, but at the opposite corner of the balcony from the one she had come to be standing at. He must have come from behind the temple. She watched him standing there for a moment, facing the west pavilions, wondering if he’d even noticed her yet. Except, she felt assured that he was always aware. Whether or not that was true, and whether or not he was waiting for her, she abandoned her own corner to traverse the balcony toward his.

  He did not look in her direction until she arrived. And then he said, “There is a task I must complete before I leave here.”

  The contemplative tone of his voice was usual an
d so did not alarm her. There was, however, a certain graveness about the topic. “What sort of task?” she asked him.

  “It involves a spirit,” he answered. Finally looking at her, he added, “And a dream I had last night.”

  Shirisae studied him, sifting through the layers of consideration and logic that he carefully wrapped around every topic that had earned his attention. She was searching for signs of distress, which she had been discovering were often lying just beneath the surface of his well-displayed intellect…easily within reach, yet as impossible to see as a fish with scales that reflected the water around it. It was as difficult to touch, even after trust had been established. Shirisae was determined to make herself expert at drawing that aspect of him to her, that she might help him when he felt so burdened.

  “A dream about what?” she finally asked him.

  His reply was simply and softly spoken. “Death.”

  CHE WEN TAI stood in the south entrance of the Temple of the Encompassing Sphere, observing the gradual change of the weather from mild clouds rolling gently through the mountains, to a darkening and cooling of the air that suggested rain or storm before evening. The shallow descent to the Wisdom Pavilion channeled his perception toward the structure’s present occupants. Xu Liang sat in meditation, facing south, preparing for another departure from his body—one more taxing than his earlier demonstration of deference toward a teacher. The woman who had accompanied—from the outer realms or from the Heavens—stood near to him, waiting diligently to join him in what was to come.

  A match had been made. It had not been made by the Empress, though Xu Liang would dutifully seek her blessing, as he would continue to support her and the Song family loyally. He tied himself to the mortal plane with a rope constructed of humility, but it would not hold him indefinitely. Already, his feet floated above the earth. He would complete this task where even Che Wen Tai did not feel the strength necessary. The silence would end.

  The Eighth Mystic

  SHIRISAE STOOD WITHIN the Wisdom Pavilion and watched the clouds gathering darkly around the mountains. The sky was turning faintly green above trees that now appeared several shades darker while the light sapped slowly away. The statues of large cats guarded the entrance on the temple side of the shelter, each with a sphere to protect. On the opposite side of the open building stood a portal to what had at one time been a bridge, but it was broken now. The stone path went only a few steps before ending abruptly with the posts that had once held the ends of a bridge of chains and wooden planks. The planks were on the other side, tapping against a narrow cliff with its own pavilion upon it. This particular shelter was dilapidated and overgrown. A tall, thin tree had cropped up on one side of it, but its growth was sparse and appeared to have died. The limp red leaves fluttered in the mountain breeze, somehow failing to break free from overlong and thin branches that were the color of bone.

  There were in actuality eight elements to the mystics of Sheng Fan, it had turned out, and the eighth element was death. Shirisae had not been given all of the story behind the desolate peak that stood set apart from all the others of the school, just that the isolation had been intentional and that the eighth mystic had been shunned from the order, considered a bringer of curses.

  Xu Liang had gone to investigate, but in spirit, not in body. Shirisae felt somewhat impotent in being left to wait, but he had asked her to do so. Beyond waiting, her task was to bring him back if he gave signs of struggling to do so himself. She did not feel entirely confident in knowing what that might look like, but he assured her that she would be strongly compelled to wake him, if she were to witness it. She decided that she would compare against the struggle she had observed at Vilciel, after resurrection. She had felt compelled to wake him then, but she had been unable to do so. At the time, it required someone the mystic knew and trusted—Shirisae had chosen Tristus. She determined that she would be all that he needed this time, beyond the fact that she was all that he had present.

  ANSWERS WAITED at the would-be tomb of the Eighth Mystic, within the shunned pavilion, which no student of the mystic arts had been invited to speak of before now.

  Xu Liang recalled that, as a very young man, he had only ever seen glimpses of the shunned pavilion through the frequent cloud wall that tended to separate the school from the southernmost cliff. Even those glimpses had filled him with a sense of dread. Years later, he had arrived at the school, having dreamed of something that provided him with a similar dread, only to have the partition of cloud lifted and to have the school’s eldest master request that he go across to the natural divide to visit the cliff that had for years been forbidden.

  Xu Liang began to feel anchored after some few hours of meditation. In the process, he received flashing visions of his spirit as it stepped away from him. He typically saw himself in diminished color and at times lacking substance, if he saw himself at all. Now he appeared pale as he had been after resurrection and in black-toned robes to match his hair. The atmosphere around him was cast in the jade of the fire the Phoenix had been setting upon his dreams since the resurrection.

  “Resurrection is a blessing of the gods,” Che Wen Tai reminded him, his voice accompanying Xu Liang, though there was no visual expression of the elder nearby this time. “A necromancer does not resurrect, but supplants life with death.”

  Xu Liang was reminded of the keirveshen and of the dark affliction. Alere considered them a plague.

  “The denizens of the Infernal Regions will rise to free Chaos from its prison,” Che Wen Tai continued. “They will find allegiance with mortals, just as the Heavens will choose champions.”

  The words followed Xu Liang across the distance between pavilions. As in his dream along the path to the school, he walked over what had previously been cloud, though there was no stone pathway revealed this time. It made no difference. His spirit required no footing outside of his will. He stepped upon the accursed ground of the Death Pavilion—the prison and ultimately the tomb of the necromancer. The structure loomed before him, dark and bent beneath the boughs of what Che Wen Tai had called the Bone Tree. It was a legend within the mountain region, but not one that Xu Liang knew of in any depth or detail.

  “The tree began to grow one month after the bridge lines were cut,” Che Wen Tai informed him. “It has never borne a green leaf and its bark has always been ashen.”

  Xu Liang studied it, noticing the manner in which the roots tumbled over and randomly pierced the edges of the cliff, splayed like the arms of corpses over the side of the rock.

  “The Spirit of Death lingers within the pavilion,” Che Wen Tai said. “Perhaps you recall as a young man, having witnessed his shadow.”

  Xu Liang hadn’t, until the words provided an image of a fleeting form loitering just out of view at the edge of the mist that had seemed to constantly enshroud the island cliff during his training days. Whether or not he had actually seen it when younger, he saw it now, moving without a true commitment to destination from one pillar to the next. The bulk of its form seemed in some way anchored to one column while aspects of it reached for others experimentally. It bled in and out of focus, offering only the shade of a person. There was no face.

  “Zhai Liao is a malevolent spirit,” Che Wen Tai said. “His element is an aspect of the Infernal Regions, just as the element of wisdom is of the Heavens, and the remaining elements are of the mortal world. Six elements were freely granted to men, and are governed by the spirits. One element is a rare blessing, and one is a curse.”

  “It is all a balance,” Xu Liang said, anticipating the elder’s words.

  Xu Liang felt that he could see the elder’s grave nod ahead of the words that followed. “We took it upon ourselves to banish the curse from this realm, by forbidding the study of necromancy. We felt that we could not allow one among us to freely manipulate an element that exists so potently within all life…an element which is as a natural and slow-acting poison to men. The Jade Emperor has granted it to all mortals. It is the
means by which life fades, ensuring that an individual live only for the time allotted them. We felt that only the gods should be allowed to intercede, whether it be in the abbreviation or the extension of life.”

  Xu Liang understood the logic. Still, he wondered, “Does one who murders or even one who kills accidentally act on behalf of the Jade Emperor’s greater plan?”

  “Yes,” Che Wen Tai answered. “But the impulse of such action is as natural as lightning, and the agent of the action does not reap the unspent energies, nor recast them to new bodies.”

  Xu Liang drew a breath spiritually and assumed that he had done so physically as well, because he detected Shirisae look over at him. He envisioned a flash of her golden eyes, which made him once again aware of the fact that the elves could see him in his present state.

  Keeping that in mind, he moved forward in spirit, focused on the inconsistent form of Zhai Liao. Within the pavilion there was the statue of a vulture, wings spread while it perched upon a sphere. The reflection of clouds moved over the sphere’s surface. Their movement had no natural pattern.

  Xu Liang walked beneath the entrance of the pavilion. The spirit drifted to the opposite side, drawing itself to a nearly coherent form…one which was, in its essential form, a reflection of Xu Liang. He observed it for several moments before reaching toward the sphere that sat upon the floor between them and beneath the talons of the vulture.

  The spirit mirrored his action. One lit hand and one hand of shadow loomed over the orb for an immeasurable span. And then Xu Liang made contact.

  So did the spirit.

  Xu Liang’s fingertips dipped into the confused portrayal of clouds, as if into water. The surface shot black with streams of the spirit’s dark energy, tangling around Xu Liang’s fingers as if he had stuck them through the ends of his own hair while it floated on the surface of a pond. He did not withdraw, though he felt a cold course through him as pronouncedly as the cold that had visited upon him in his dying moments upon the Flatlands. He would not die here, for he had already died once and been restored by a different being. If he knew anything, it was that he had been in the clutches of the Phoenix ever since. It would not release him here, not even to the Spirit of Death. Not yet, at any rate.