The Hand, the Eye and the Heart

by Zoe Marriott

  It was cold. So cold. And it was always dark. Somehow. Somehow, I never once saw daylight. It was as if I had been stolen out of the real world of sky, clouds, birds, wind, into a hellish, airless black grave that went on, deeper and deeper into the cold, dead earth…

  As the pain in my head subsided a little, I regained the memory of why this was happening to me. This terrible end, in darkness and suffering, had been my choice.

  That was what I told myself, at first.

  The war cabinet had been slaughtered before my eyes, Yang Jie had been murdered before I ever had the chance to… But the emperor would survive. Together she and the Young General would root out the traitor and destroy the Leopard. He would pay. The Land of Dragons would heal.

  Let that be my victory. My vengeance.

  The thought sustained me for two, maybe three days.

  It took me that long to realize my banner-breaking was gone. Maybe it was the drug, or maybe I was just too weak, too disoriented to locate the centre of my qi or manipulate it. It didn’t matter. The thick tangles of my hair were everywhere – the remains of the priceless kingfisher crown and jewelled pins were unsurprisingly gone by the time I thought to feel for them – and my face was covered in swollen bruises and filth. And while the light of the lantern they used when they entered the cage was bright enough to make me flinch away and squeeze my eyes closed, none of them bothered to actually look at me. They thought their prize was firmly in their grasp.

  Sometimes, as the journey stretched on, this knowledge made me laugh – unhinged, high-pitched cackles of laughter that caused the men transporting me to bang hard on the bars of the cage and shout curses at me. If I didn’t stop quickly enough, they came in and gave me a few hard smacks with the handle of the whip they used on the animals. Apparently, despite everything, I unnerved them.

  But my laughter was bitter. No matter how terrible their likely fate at the Leopard’s hands – these fools who dared to bring him some nameless nobody when he had expected an emperor – what awaited me would be far, far worse.

  Thoughts of triumph, honour and courage began to wither. No one knew where I was, no one was coming for me. I might as well be dead already. But I wasn’t. My pain had only just begun.

  If I could have induced my poor, drugged, starved brain to come up with a method, I would have tried to kill myself. To deprive the Leopard of a target for his rage, and the satisfaction of whatever tortures he had devised for the emperor, that would be one last worthy act. And – there was no use in denying it, not now – I was afraid. Terribly afraid.

  But even if there had been anything other than splinters and a bucket of my own waste in the cage, I was too feeble and dazed to plan. Instead, I dreamed of death. Imagined a thousand ways of dying at my own and at the Leopard’s hands. I saw my own blood pooling, heard my own last breaths, choked out my last words so many times and so vividly that it became a surprise, each time, to wake and discover the dark and the misery of my existence still dragged on. An unpleasant surprise.

  I wished it was all over already. I wished I had never left my home. I wished I had given the emperor up and run away when I had the chance. I wished, I wished, I wished…

  Eventually the poisoned cloth always appeared again – for the twentieth, hundredth, or perhaps one thousandth time – muffling all fear and thoughts and senses.

  Then I woke up somewhere different.

  The ground didn’t rock beneath me. There were no animal noises, no breathing near by, no crank and clack of wheels. It was even colder than before, and I was very, very hungry and very, very thirsty. For the first time in … however long it had been, my head felt … clear. A little clearer, at least.

  And there was light. A distant glow, yellow and faint and flickering, but enough for me to make out the pale, spiderweb fragility of my own hands, splayed against the darkness of the floor. Light. I lay still for a while and simply basked in the beauty of it, the relief of light that did not blind. I would have opened my mouth and drunk it like wine if I could.

  That thought made me swallow dryly. How long had it been since I was fed or given liquid? How long had I been alone in this new prison?

  Why … why wasn’t the Leopard here to torment me?

  I focused on my surroundings, trying to keep panic at bay. What could I see? A floor of … stone. Cold, rough stone. Smell? Damp. Hear? There was a dripping noise close by, intermittent rather than regular. Water.

  I pushed myself up on to my hands and knees. Hanks of tangled, filthy hair fell over my face as, on shaky limbs, I crawled forward, towards the light and that tantalizing drip. The space I was in was narrow, and I shivered convulsively as my arms – clad only in rags of silk, now – brushed against chilly, damp stone walls. The stone scraped at my palms and bruised my knees. I crawled on.

  The noise of water grew louder. I rounded an awkward, bulging corner of rock – and the light pierced my eyes. I recoiled as if I had been struck, burying my face against my shoulder. It took several long minutes before I could bear it enough to move forward again.

  The narrow walls opened up ahead of me – enough that I could have spread my arms out if I wished. My stinging eyes fixed on a thin trickle of moisture that gleamed on a dark curve of rock and the small puddle on the floor.

  I flung myself forward, cupping my hands in the tiny pool. The water was tooth-achingly cold, clean, fresh – the sweetest thing I had ever tasted in my whole life. I gulped at it greedily, only forcing myself to stop when my stomach let out an uneasy gurgle. I could feel my mind clearing still more, and some of the shakes easing from my muscles.

  Thank you, ancestors, for this gift.

  Another handful of water went to scrub my face. A cleanish rag, torn from the inside of the emperor’s sash, dried it. Crusted blood and dirt came away until the silk was rusty-black. I scraped my hair out of my face laboriously, wincing as my clumsy fingers caught in knots and tangles. A single jewelled pin fell from a thick snarl, pinging on the stone. I tucked it into what was left of the robe’s collar, and then I tied my hair back tightly at the nape of my neck with another scrap of rag.

  A deep, slow breath. I closed my eyes and reached within, seeking the warm, bright comfort of my centre. It was there. Dampened and weakened by my experiences, more of a soft glow than the vibrant fire that I was used to, but it was there, and I could touch it once more. Use it once more.

  I had my banner-breaking back.

  With a sensation of returning home, I slowly, reverently, spun up my mask and drew it into place. I painted dirt and bruises, streaks of dried blood, as lovingly as a watercolour artist captures the feathers on an egret’s back. My face was returned to me. My own imperfect, dirty, battered face. Perhaps it was a foolish use of my already depleted energy, but I didn’t care. The relief was indescribable – almost the same feeling as those first, life-saving sips of fresh water. It was my own sanity that I tasted. I had nearly allowed it to drain away, in the black hell of that cage, but now I held it within my cupped palms once more, cool and clear.

  Made thirsty by the thought, I carefully drank a little more. Then I reached for my pocket – the place where the familiar weight of my bronze mirror normally rested. My fingers froze in midair. There was no practical pocket in these ragged silk trousers. The mirror was not there. Without realizing, I had left it behind in the leggings that I loaned to the emperor.

  I bit my lip. The one thing my mother had given me. The one thing from my old life I might have kept. It would have been good to have it here with me…

  I forced myself to look around again.

  Before me there was a cell door. Wooden, clumsily hewn, fitted into a rounded doorway in the rock, and bound with iron. The top part was open, barred. It was from that opening that the light flowed. Outside I could hear nothing. Using the door handle to support shaky legs, I rose to my feet and peered outside. More stone walls. A single oil-lamp on a hook. Beyond that? Darkness, absolute. How long had it been since I saw the sun?
r />   Will I ever see it again?

  I leaned my face against the iron bars of the door and tried to cudgel my mind to more practical questions. That I had been brought all this way and then dumped in a cell instead of taken directly to Feng Shi Chong was … unexpected. He had ordered the emperor taken alive. He must have plans for her. What were they? And how soon would they discover that their prize was worthless?

  They had a spy in the capital – maybe more than one – and the news that the emperor had survived the attack and was still on her throne would warrant a very urgent message indeed. The intelligence could only be a day or two behind me at the most. Depending on how long it had taken the last of the drug and spirits to work their way out of my body and allow me to wake up here, I might only have hours before they came to check if it was true.

  If I was to survive, I had to escape, and quickly.

  And if I couldn’t escape? Then I needed to discover that quickly, as well.

  I could now remember several effective, if not pleasant, methods by which I might deprive the Leopard and his men of a target for their depravity. But now that I was myself again I did not want to use any of them. I needed to be sure that I had exhausted all other options first.

  The lock on the cell door was heavy and the planks thick. Even if I were at full strength I couldn’t have forced it open. But… I felt for the hairpin in the neck of the robe. They wouldn’t expect the emperor to be able to pick locks. Or use banner-breaking.

  If I could get out of this cell, I might see the sun once more.

  Twenty-six

  expected the lock to confound me. This was a dungeon in the Leopard’s lair, and I had been brought here by men who believed me to be the most powerful and valuable person in the world. A priceless hostage whom they had risked their lives to secure. Surely the prison they had chosen would be impenetrable to my feeble efforts.

  No. The lock was simple and crude, the kind any random store cupboard or barn door might possess. The greatest difficulty was in holding the heavy tumblers down with the pin, which was gold, and inclined to bend under pressure. Even with a fierce headache and hands that still trembled a little, my count of seconds had only reached two hundred before I heard the telltale click that signalled the lock’s surrender.

  I pushed the handle down and the door swung outwards. I hesitated on the threshold, expecting … something. Some further measures to keep the prisoner contained. But the glow of the lantern revealed no squadron of guards beyond and no pit lined with spikes. The Leopard was not a very good jailer.

  Then again, he hadn’t had much practice in taking prisoners, had he?

  I moved to take the guttering lantern from its hook on the wall, but hesitated again. To carry a light with me would be to give away my presence, since the light must travel in advance of me wherever I went. I could whisk a cloak of shadow around myself if I heard someone approach, but the light would remain.

  I swallowed hard as I realized I must bear still more darkness.

  The ceiling of the corridor – tunnel? – was low enough for me to touch with my fingertips without standing on tiptoe. Two men travelling in opposite directions would each need to turn sideways to pass one another. The smell and feeling of damp was pervasive, prickling my skin with gooseflesh, and my fingers trailed through more tracks of water as I went. But the rock, though uneven, was smooth under my hands. This place, whatever it was, was old. Older than the rebellion, or the Leopard.

  I turned a corner and left the diminishing glow of the lantern behind. The dark closed in on me, suffocating. I continued walking blindly forward, but my body began to quake and tremble with suppressed terror. How could any place under the sky contain such depthless, terrifying night? This was no castle keep, no mere dungeon.

  It was no place on the surface of the world at all.

  And then I knew. I was underground. A long way underground.

  The realization made my shaking worse, but not with fear any more. My mind raced as I put the pieces together. We must have been travelling through tunnels like this one since the start of my captivity. It was the only explanation: the reason why I had never seen any light but lantern-light, and why my jailers made no efforts to be silent, didn’t even bother to gag me. I had wondered if my endless journey into blackness had been a drug-induced hallucination, it seemed so impossible. But it wasn’t impossible. Not if the Leopard had access to a network of tunnels, some kind of secret subterranean maze.

  It must be massive. Miles of hidden caves and tunnels, some of them large enough to be used as roads, like the one I had travelled to get here.

  And … there had to be an opening within the city. Maybe even within the grounds of the Imperial Palace itself. Close enough to the Forbidden Park that the men who caught me had been able to escape through it with me on the same day that they took me.

  Great Dragon and Phoenix! I kept stumbling forward, the fear of darkness lessening its grip on me as I worked through the implications. This was vital information. The sort of fatal weakness in the empire’s defences which was nothing less than disastrous. I thought back to what Wu Jiang had told me of the Leopard’s abortive attempt to lay siege to the city walls. Feng Shi Chong might be evil and depraved – but he was also a genius. Who would believe that someone with a direct route inside the city’s ramparts would bother wasting time, men and resources on assailing its walls? It was the perfect way to conceal his greatest advantage until he was ready to use it.

  He must have been preparing, all this time, for a definitive final assault, gathering men and arms in anticipation. It would be an attack from a direction that the emperor would never see coming, and could not hope to defend against. And this would also explain how the traitor managed to correspond with the rebels in secret without his communications ever being discovered by the empire’s agents. Through the hidden tunnel entrance.

  The only surprise was that Feng Shi Chong and his men hadn’t already laid waste to the city. Why this elaborate ambush on the war cabinet? Why bother to take the emperor alive? Why, indeed, this long, inconclusive campaign against the Imperial Army? A force of a few hundred could probably overwhelm the Centre of the Universe if they were able to gain access to the grounds in secret. There had to be a reason.

  I could not guess at what it was.

  But if I was right, capturing the emperor – as they thought they had – must bring that plan to its close. The rebel army would be preparing for their attack at this moment. I had to get out of this place. Get back to the city. Warn Wu Jiang and the emperor before the devastating invasion of the city began – before it was too late.

  In the dank stillness of the tunnel, I made out a faint sound. Footsteps ahead. A faint, wavering glow of light, growing brighter. Someone was coming.

  They weren’t likely to be friendly.

  A few breaths of frantic effort drew out my familiar cloak of don’t-notice-me, tinged with the dark, damp gleam of rock. I squashed myself flat against the icy wall, hoping that the tunnel – which had gradually been broadening as I moved along it – was now wide enough to allow someone to pass me without touching.

  The light rounded the faint curve in the tunnel ahead. I squeezed my eyes shut against it, then slitted them to observe. It was a young man. A boy, really. Not dressed in armour but in rags. He had a wooden yoke over his shoulders, a bucket swinging weightily on each end, and carried his lantern on a long pole ahead of him. The boy’s face, in the flickering light, was dirty, hollow-cheeked and marked with lines far too deep for a youth of his age.

  Around his neck … a dark shape. A collar of iron.

  A slave.

  He was clearly not a threat to me, even in my weakened state. That didn’t mean, however, that he would automatically be my ally. The collar could mark him as a lawful citizen of the empire, taken hostage by the Leopard. On the other hand, it could mean that he was a foreigner imported from the Land of Clouds, or the Joseon Peninsula. The Leopard had dealings with both nations. In that c
ase the boy would certainly hate the Leopard – but he would probably loathe the entire Red Empire equally. I couldn’t risk him giving me away.

  What I could do was follow him. If I was right about the scale of this cave network, I could walk for days and never escape. The boy clearly knew his way through this labyrinth of caves and tunnels – maybe he also knew the way out.

  I reinforced my illusion until it was as dense and impenetrable as I could make it, and stealthily dogged the slave’s steps back the way I had come, placing my feet with the utmost caution. The tiniest sound might reveal me.

  Almost immediately he diverged from what I had thought of as the main tunnel, manoeuvring awkwardly through an opening that branched off to the left. It proved to be far wider than the path I had explored. Within a minute of walking at the slave boy’s heels, the tunnel brightened as lanterns, some guttering, others dark, began to show up on hooks hammered into the walls. The boy refilled the dark lanterns from one of the buckets on his yoke, and relit the wicks from his own light.

  There were noises ahead, indistinct but growing. The echo of many voices, and a confusion of other sounds, including a low, regular creaking-and-grinding – perhaps a machine of some kind?

  Suddenly enough to make me jolt, a group of seven or eight men burst from a side entrance into the tunnel before us. They were dressed in the loathsome black-and-gold painted armour, talking and laughing loudly and breathing clouds of ale fumes. They shoved the slave boy carelessly aside with a few cursory imprecations. I ducked back as quickly as I could, but one of them caught me with his elbow, hitting a heavy bruise on my ribs. A tiny whimper of pain forced itself from behind my lips.

  The man ignored the sound and the contact completely. The slave himself seemed unsurprised, if somewhat ruffled, by the brutal encounter. He waited for the men to disappear out of sight before he straightened and picked up the long lantern pole he had dropped. One of his buckets had tipped, spilling a pool of oil. He stepped around the spill and moved on. Clearly, he was well used to such treatment.