by Henry Lien
I look at the little empty bowl like a letter orb before me.
I think of the Zendoshi koan hidden in it.
I think of the architecture students whispering everything we want to know just out of earshot. Their entire final year at Pearl Famous has been turned upside down. They weren’t expecting to be conscripted into this plot to magnetize the sea and skate on it and wrangle coiling water dragons. This all started after Yinmei arrived, and the Thousand Flowers Campaign was launched, and we all started being used as weapons for Pearl’s defense. The three architecture students are probably overwhelmed with their new duties and talk of little else.
If I could just hear a few moments of their conversation, I would learn so much.
I think of another Zendoshi koan from leadership class: If you wish to hear a whisper from halfway across the world, make the world into an ear.
“I know how to learn what they’re talking about,” I say, picking up the bowl. “We get the Shinian servant girls to substitute letter orbs for the bowls that they serve to the architecture students. The orbs will record whatever they’re whispering. Then when the servant girls clear the bowls, they will clamp the lids on the orbs to capture the words and give them to us.”
I stop speaking as the Shinian servant girls come to take away the bowls for this course. I smile at one girl and say to her in Shinian, “Thank you, sister. What is your name?”
She doesn’t even look at me, just turns away without answering. I don’t blame her. I’ve never talked to any of them. She probably thinks I’m only talking to her now because I want something from her. And she’s right.
“Let me try,” says Yinmei. She taps on the drums of her drumchair and follows the Shinian serving girls out of the hall.
The next course resembles an experimental opera production more than a meal. We get three tiny, flavorless courses in a row. The first comes with a placard reading, THINGS THAT ARE NOT VERY RED. The next comes with a placard reading, THINGS THAT ARE LESS RED. When the third course arrives, bearing a placard that says, THINGS THAT ARE EVEN LESS RED and looking like a melted candle in turnip broth, Yinmei returns.
“What happened?” I ask.
She smiles and nods her head in the direction of the three third-year architecture students at the far end of Eastern Heaven Dining Hall. They’re speaking to one another with intensity. On the table between them lie three empty letter orb halves.
“How under heaven did you convince the servant girls to do this?” I ask.
“Soon after my arrival here, I went to the kitchen to meet them.”
“Why?”
“Because we are Shinians.”
Their princess went to visit them in the kitchen. No wonder they would risk getting in trouble for her.
“I knew you could do it,” says Doi, radiating pride and adoration as she places her hand over Yinmei’s.
Yinmei’s expression doesn’t reveal much. However, I can imagine what she’s feeling under that mask. I knew you could do it. I know what it’s like to have someone say those words to you. Doi said them to me last year at the far end of the Arch of the Sixteenth Whisper, when I still thought she was Hisashi.
Then the Shinian servant girls swoop in and we watch as they carry off the three precious orbs from the architecture students. I hope they screwed the lids tightly.
Yinmei drums away on her chair again. When she returns, she sweeps her sleeve across the table.
Three letter orbs roll out, sealed tight and intact.
We quickly excuse ourselves from the banquet, and the five of us gather in the Garden of Whispering Arches to open the orbs. We crouch together under an arch that amplifies sound. We’ll have only one chance to hear what the orbs say, so we decide to open them all at once. The recordings will be of poor quality. Playing all three at once will allow them to supplement gaps in one another.
Doi, Hisashi, and I each hold a letter orb. Cricket and Yinmei each hold a brush and a scroll to take notes. We lean in close enough to touch foreheads, then twist open the orbs and hold their halves upward. Thin scraps of whispered conversation rise from them.
“… need to magnetize the sea earlier to regularize the … told you the salt soldiers would … actually do have to stir the water faster then, or the coiling water dragon refuses to birth … when we unstick the Repellers and slap down together, we might not get enough lift for it to clear the wall of the nest…”
The orbs abruptly fall silent. They’ve reached the end of their recording capacity.
“Cricket, Yinmei, did you get all that?”
The two of them compare what they wrote. “Our two transcriptions are identical.”
We look over the words Cricket and Yinmei each wrote. What can it all mean?
Magnetizing the sea.
Salt soldiers.
Stirring the water faster.
Repellers.
Slapping down together.
The nest.
“Is this starting to mean anything to anyone?” I ask.
Hisashi juggles the six orb halves and replies, “I’m sure it’ll all make utter sense … after we’ve already stumbled across what they’re talking about.”
“The only thing,” I say, “that I have some idea about is the salt soldiers. I don’t believe they were actually people turned to salt after looking at the coiling water dragon.”
“Why not?” asks Doi.
“Because I accidentally looked at the dragon during the attack.”
Cricket gasps. “What did you see?”
“Whipping tails and tentacles that looked like they were made out of black water.”
“That’s what I saw, too,” says Doi. “Tails and tentacles spinning in the sky.”
“You looked, too, Wing Girl!” laughs Hisashi. “And I thought I was the only one!”
“What did you see?” I ask him.
“Same thing. Tails and tentacles. Black fluid squirting everywhere. Like an octopus spinning on a potter’s wheel in a storm.”
Yinmei says, “The senseis lied to us about the salt soldiers because they did not want us to look at the dragons.”
“Just like they lied to us about the contract and the supposed nest behind the Conservatory of Architecture,” I say. “This is part of some plan the senseis came up with to keep us from being meddling little monkeys.”
We all take a moment to let our minds absorb this.
All the warnings they gave us, perhaps even the attack on Eastern Heaven Dining Hall itself. All of it staged for the purpose of keeping us away from the information that is out there across the sea, the truth that the senseis wanted intensely to hide. Except for maybe Sensei Madame Liao.
But I also remember what she said to me as the coiling water dragon was flying toward Eastern Heaven Dining Hall: “This is real.”
“So,” says Hisashi, clapping his hands together and stacking the orb halves he was juggling into a perfect tower. “Who’s ready to be a meddling little monkey?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
Coiling water dragons.
Shinian ships.
Pearlian police.
Peasprout, what are you doing out here on the water again?
But I can’t think about those things now. I need to focus as Doi, Hisashi, and I row on the skiff toward the back side of the Conservatory of Architecture.
“Do you think we should be looking for a nest built of kelp?” I ask.
Hisashi replies, “Maybe kelp trunks, given the size of coiling water dragons?”
“I wonder if it’ll be floating on the water or below its surface,” Doi says. She turns to me and asks, “So you’ve prepared what you’re going to say or do if the coiling water dragon appears?”
I say, “Yes. Well, I mean … sure.”
Even though the academy is sleeping, I’m anxious that we could easily be spotted from the Principal Island because this night is not dark. The sea is filled with luminous octopuses and unlike last year, they aren’t all
amber-colored. There are streams of pink and sea-foam green and sky-blue octopuses as well. Perhaps the fact that they aren’t being fished out has allowed different strains to emerge. It looks like we’re rowing through an aquatic garden of blooms of light.
Their radiance shimmers against the wall of the Conservatory of Architecture as we approach. The structure appears like a flat, smooth wall from the Principal Island. However, it isn’t flat; it’s a curved wall that encircles the conservatory within. It appears flat only because it’s enormous, far wider than the rest of Pearl Famous put together. And what we didn’t appreciate when we first encountered it blindfolded is the riot of carved forms covering its surface in the shape of dragon faces, tail fins, blossoms, scales, fronds, prows, halberds, trumpets, and paws.
After perhaps half an hour, we reach what must be the back side of the conservatory since the entire academy is now blocked from our view.
A sole, slender pier protrudes out of the back. We perform pear blossom single-footed spins to leap softly as petals from the skiff onto the pier. It connects with the wall of the conservatory at a vast arch in the form of a scallop shell, but the door leading in is sealed closed.
We skate toward the end of the pier. I squint at several objects sticking up where the pier ends. A strange thing begins to occur. The closer we skate to the objects, the harder it is to push onward.
We reach the end of the pier. There are lucky instruments made of metal sticking up. The top of each instrument is a sort of ring, like a handle. The bottom is slotted into the pier itself, but the part that is visible is flattened into a bowl, like a spoon.
Chingu’s oracle comes flooding back to me. Formula: Look for four spoon-keys to reveal a one-walled palace.
These must be the spoon-keys. If these are keys, how big are the doors?
Big enough to hold in a coiling water dragon.
The strange resistance is even stronger now that our skates are so close to the objects. It feels as if they’re repelling our skates. Like reverse magnets.
These must be the Repellers that the architecture students mentioned in the letter orbs. The Repellers are the spoon-keys in Chingu’s oracle.
I grasp one by the handle and lift it out of its slot. It goes shooting out of my hand toward the water.
It hits the surface of the sea with a crackle like streaks of lightning and embeds itself there, vibrating lightly.
There is a metallic hum in the air and the quality of the atmosphere changes. Doi, Hisashi, and I look at one another and nod.
So this is how they magnetize the sea. These Repellers are reverse magnets of tremendous power.
Something in the seawater can be magnetized. Instead of attracting the metal in our blades, it repels.
The Repeller stands in the water like a spoon stabbed into a bowl of rice, buzzing quietly, little licks and coils of blue sparks crawling up its length intermittently.
We grab the remaining three Repellers and leap onto the water.
When we hit, our skates dip down but then bob back up. We’re floating above the water at about the span of a hand, but we’re rising and falling with the rhythms of the sea.
We brace and listen for any indication that we have disturbed the coiling water dragon. However, we hear only the lap of tide against the pier and the crackle and buzz of the Repeller in the water.
So Yinmei was right. As long as we don’t break the surface of the water, the coiling water dragon doesn’t attack.
Skating on water is the strangest thing I’ve experienced. It’s like skating on the belly of some giant creature as it snores beneath us, shifting in its sleep. I feel every rumble of its stomach as it digests its meal, shuddering under our skates.
We haven’t touched the other three Repellers to the water yet. It seems that as long as one of these Repellers is in contact with the water, we can skate on the sea, so it’s not clear what purpose the other three hold. Perhaps as keys to open a one-walled palace, whatever that means.
We skate holding our Repellers by the ring handles and dragging the spoon ends in the water behind us, because they soon get too heavy to hold aloft. The instruments trail a train of leaping sparks in the water. The pushing force of the Repeller behind me feels like it’s urging me forward or that it has thought and will. After a luckieth of an hour thus, we must have skated ten, fifteen li out to sea. We’re so far out that there are no more octopuses, and the water below is a sea of ink.
Obviously, there’s something special in the seawater here in Pearl that the Repeller is interacting with, but where does that something end? It can’t extend all the way to Shin. Does the magnetization of the Repellers run out and have to be recharged?
It’s an unnerving thought as I look down at the black water below our skates, slapping little waves with each of our steps. Are there Pearlian sharks? Could we swim all the way back if the magnetization gave out? I had practice swimming in skates last year after Doi demolished the Temple of Heroes of Superlative Character with me in it, but what about Doi and Hisashi?
Ahead of us, clouds like bouquets of smoke peonies part to reveal the brilliance of the moon against the dark sky. I am glad for the light, because otherwise, we could skate right onto or over the nest of the coiling water dragon and not realize it.
Before us, the ocean stretches to the horizon with fluffs of cloud cover tumbling above them. Then, my Chi chills as I see that there’s something wrong with the sky ahead of us. The clouds in the top half of the sky don’t match the clouds near the horizon. As if someone had sliced a painting of a sky and slid apart the halves.
“Do you see that?” I say to Doi and Hisashi.
“Yes,” they answer.
We skate faster toward the anomaly in the sky. The cleanness of the seam is deeply wrong. Nothing in the natural world exhibits so perfect a line.
This sky is unnatural. This sky was made.
“Look!” cries Doi. “There are people on the water!”
I squint out and see the forms skating toward us.
“Defensive positions!” I command to Doi and Hisashi.
We begin skating forward in tight half crouches, readying for combat, and we see the people ahead of us do the same.
“They’re readying to fight us!” I say.
We’re not prepared for this. I never thought to train Doi and Hisashi for combat on the sea, and I wouldn’t know where to start. Skating on water is so different that it must change everything in wu liu. All balances are off, all resistances reconfigured.
Then I see that the people skating toward us are holding something in their hands. They’re attempting to drag them behind their backs to conceal them, but I can make out that they’re long and metal.
Weapons.
I’ve brought us into danger. Again. Then something leaps behind the figures.
A light.
Sparks.
They’re not carrying weapons but Repellers.
“Stop!” I command.
The three of us stop.
Just like the three of them.
“It’s our reflection!” I cry.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
We skate toward our reflection.
Rising out of the sea is a great mirrored wall three stories high.
The seam that we saw in the sky was the top edge of a mirror. The mirror reflected the water and sky in front of it, but where the mirror ended, there was a clean edge, and we saw the real water and sky. Of course.
This must be some special form of the pearl, polished to a reflective finish.
We follow the wall to see where it ends.
“It’s curved, too, like the Conservatory of Architecture,” says Doi, running her hand along it as we skate.
“And it’s probably mirrored to hide it from view,” I say. “Look how hard it was for us to understand what we were seeing until we came right up to it.”
“It looks like some kind of silo or storehouse,” Hisashi says.
“Maybe they keep
the pearl in there?” I say. “Anyway, let’s keep skating. We’re supposed to be looking for a nest.”
“Or a one-sided palace,” says Doi, her hand still running along the curved wall.
“I’m sure that’s a metaphor,” I say. “How can any structure be built with only one—”
I look at her hand running along the curved surface of the round structure. Then I figure it out. I must have drunk sand to death, because my head is as thick as mud.
A structure can be built with only one wall if the wall is circular.
“Takes you a while,” says Doi, “but you get there eventually.”
“Oh!” says Hisashi, rapping his knuckles on his skull a moment after me. “I’m so dense. I’m lucky that I’m good-looking. Crick would’ve figured that out before we even set skate on the water.”
“But if this is the palace in Chingu’s oracle, how do we get inside?” I ask.
We continue skating around the curved mirror wall. Ahead of us, something breaks the smoothness of its surface. We skate closer and see several pedestals rising from the sea lining the wall.
On each pedestal, at our chest level, stands a figure of white.
A salt soldier. It’s wearing a metal breastplate.
When I skate closer to it, the breastplate begins to rattle.
“It’s your Repeller,” says Hisashi.
I hand my Repeller to Doi and skate closer. I put my hand on the boot of the soldier. It’s coarse and grainy. I touch my finger to my mouth.
“Peasprout!” shouts Doi. “What did you learn last year about putting weird things in your mouth?”
“It’s definitely salt,” I say.
I run my hand over it and notice a raised line on the ankle. It goes all the way up the side of the figure and down the other.
It’s a seam.
Seams don’t occur in nature.
They occur in made things.
“This came from a mold!” I say to Doi and Hisashi. “That’s why all their faces looked the same!”
