Chapter 3
The plains rolled away to the east, golden-green with the fullness of summer. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sun was high above, white with heat. Somewhere the sound of a bird calling shrieked over the plains, but there were no birds in the air. In the distance, the heat made the grain appear to roll, as though in a breeze, but there was no breeze. There was nothing in the air but dust and the smell of drying seed.
Yao Ye shifted her weight and rested her chin against her knees. Without the gunzosha armor and shockpike, she was a small young woman. Dressed in only her breeches, a loose jerkin, and calf-high boots, she was seated with her knees hugged to her chest. From the top of the small bluff where she sat, she had a commanding view of the plain. There was nothing there to see.
She turned her head sideways to rest on her cheek. With one hand she smoothed back her petals. She could feel sweat damp against her scalp and tickling the small of her back. Her arms felt sticky with dust, and she was still hungry.
Yao Ye stood, picking up her short sword in its scabbard with her left hand. She buckled it to her belt and synched it tight, then struck a pose with her arms folded before her chest and her legs spread wide. “All right. Alone then!” she shouted to the empty plains.
That morning had begun with shouting and the clanging of pots and pans. When Yao Ye first opened her eyes, she saw Selara standing in the bed of the cart with an empty bag in each hand. She was yelling something and trying to wake people up (so inconsiderate!) and the words were generally along the lines of these: “We’ve been robbed!”
Toruna was the first to respond to the call. She was quickly in the wagon, checking the supplies over, starting with the magitech and other equipment for their labor. “What’s missing, Selara?” She asked curtly.
“It’s all gone. All of our food is gone! I just woke up went to see about starting breakfast, and all our bags had been ripped open, as if by some wild animal, and now all the food is gone. Who had the last watch?”
Zhou Wing was standing and stretching now. He pointed at her. “I woke up Yao Ye when I went to sleep. I’m pretty sure everything was fine was fine when I nodded off... I remember getting some wine from a skin in the cart.”
“Yao Ye! And look, she’s sleeping even now. No wonder!”
Yao Ye rolled over and tried to open her eyes. “No’mm not... I’m just... I was lying down so I could...”
Toruna slowly descended from the cart. “Yao Ye, this is serious. Because you failed to keep your watch, we’ve lost all our food and we’re still three days from the next town. What if that had been a scouting party from the barbarian tribes? Did you see anything?”
Ye had finally managed to raise herself to a kneeling position. She yawned, and then sighed. “A lizard with a striped tail... but it wasn’t bandits, Toruna.”
“Then who was it?”
Now even Shu Zhuang was awake; all four of the remaining team members were eyeing her with distrust. Yao Ye shrugged her shoulders pitifully, looking down and to her right. “It was me. I ate it.”
Toruna gave a gasp that sounded like a sharp exhalation, Wing stepped back with a look of disgust, and even old Zhuang seemed surprised. Selara was simply livid. “Are you telling me that you woke up in the middle of the night, ripped open our bags and ate three days worth of rations?”
The girl stood and turned away from them, rubbing her eyes. “Well... well... I told you all that I was still hungry after dinner last night, and then you all laughed at me, like you always do, and ignored me, but I’d been hungry all day, all week! My stomach hurt so bad I couldn’t sleep... I wouldn’t normally fall sleep on watch, really! I am sorry...”
Zhou Wing shook his head. “How could you be so selfish, so immature? Don’t you realize that’s all we had? Of course we had to ration it...”
The snake warrior walked around Yao Ye to face her. “Of course she knew it. She just didn’t care!” She pushed Yao Ye’s shoulders, and the girl stumbled over her sleeping mat.
“Hey, I said I was sorry.” Her ire raised, she grabbed Toruna’s wrists to keep her back. Toruna was shouting something from the cart, but she couldn’t hear it or anything else as she tried to push Selara away from her. From the corner of her eye she could see Zhuang backing away cautiously, Wing shouting something and pointing at her. She gave a solid shove and the warrior let go of her for a moment, one hand reaching back to steady her. Then the hand came back balled into a fist.
In the cool water of a deep pool, almost hidden in a fold between the hills, Yao Ye looked at her reflection in the still water. Her fire-red skin bulged on one side of her face, and she could almost see individual knuckles in the purple-black bruise there. Ye touched it gingerly with one hand, then noticed that her eyes looked puffy and sore as well. She dove back beneath the water.
Choosing to travel east, since that was the last order she had received from her master, she had stumbled across the creek and followed it to this pool. It was impossible to pass up the opportunity to bathe, to feel clean for a little while. Though it was only a dozen yards across, she swam around and around the bottom, scrubbing her skin over and over with sand from the banks.
When she was finally worn out, she went to the head of the pool where the water fell in a gentle fall from the stream above, no more than three feet high. She let the water flow through the petals of her hair with her head up-turned. She still felt hungry, but she tried to ignore it, already feeling a little ashamed at herself. “She was right, after all...” she whispered to the waters. “It was a selfish thing to do... maybe they were right about the rest too.”
Yao Ye, caught by surprise, felt herself hit the ground hard. She felt dizzy and sick; the world was spinning around her. Toruna was now yelling, “Selara step away from her. That is an order, by the authority given to me by the master. By your pledge I command you!”
Zhou Wing was talking now. Yao Ye tried to sit up. “She’s right, Selara. It’s no use trying to beat any sense into her. Ever since we left, all she’s done is whatever she wanted. The biggest help she’s ever given us was vomiting in time to stop the riot she helped start.”
Ye stood shakily. “Hey, I know I haven’t been much help, but you need me, really. I mean... um... what if a ghost attacked us? Or... uh...”
Selara shook her head. “It’s more likely that I’m going to be that ghost at the rate you’re going. It’s not as if you’re doing us any favors. You’re just like the rest of us. The power in you is power granted by the magic of the master, and he can give it to someone else just as easily. In twelve hours we can have a new spirit censer, and maybe the next one will have enough sense not to get us killed.”
The dark skinned sorceress took a step forward and opened her mouth, then suddenly closed it. Yao Ye looked to her for a moment, a pleading look in her eyes, then looked back at the warrior. “He... he wouldn’t do that. I know Rivers, and he wouldn’t just replace me.”
She shook her head angrily. “How can you be so weak-willed, so stupid? The sorcery makes you care for him. It doesn’t work the other way around. Why do you think we’re sent out here in the first place? If we die, it doesn’t matter. Hell, if you disappeared, it would just make our jobs that much easier.”
Yao Ye stood with her eyes bulging, facing the older woman with her fists clenched behind her, ready to lunge. She looked at Zhou Wing, with his hands folded in front of his chest, and he would not meet her eyes. She turned to their leader, who stared back at her intently, with an expressionless mask on her face. Shu Zhuang had his back to her as he rolled up his sleeping mat.
She exhaled, and as she did her shoulders sagged and her hands hung at her side, empty. She quietly said, “Okay,” and she picked up her short sword from beside where she slept. She turned back one last time with a sliding glance. “I guess I’ll... okay.” And she walked into the grass.
As night fell, Ye looked at her work. It wasn’t much. A low windbreak surrounded a small mound of grass. Still, it couldn’t be seen from the road, and without wood it was the most ambitious structure she could devise. She sheathed her sword and dove into the grass.
After a few minutes of burrowing, tossing, and turning, she lay still, listening to the sounds of the grain in the wind and the grass settling around her. She tried to go to sleep, but her thoughts kept turning back on themselves, back to the events of the morning, to her empty stomach, to the dozens of nights she had spent like this before.
As the moon rose, the smaller denizens of the plains rose with it. Mice made forays through the wilds, gathering seeds for a midnight repast, ever watchful for owls overhead. A pack of coyotes yipped and barked to one another as they played by a stream bed, sniffing at the new tracks crossing their territory. A passing gopher crept curiously around the mound of grass that had been erected in the field, pricking its ears at the strange, soft sounds that came from within, almost too faint to be heard over the gopher's own breathing.
The team had spent the rest of the day traveling in utter silence, gleaning as they went to make a small repast. They did not look at one another, each lost in their own thoughts, but Selara kept her face set in an angry scowl. Only once did Zhou Wing mention to their leader, some distance away from the others as they rested near noon, “Shouldn’t we, perhaps, go back and see…”
Toruna cut him off before he finished his thought. “You are not my prisoner. Neither was she. She may come and go as she sees fit.”
At nightfall, as they were preparing a fire to cook the lone grouse that Toruna had managed to spy as they traveled, they were surprised by the arrival of a rider from the west. He approached the camp at a gallop, dismounting as he saw the cart, and as he did so they noticed that, strapped to a thin pole through his backpack, waved the banner of the Plum Blossom Retreat.
The lean young rider approached the fire and stopped a few paces away and kowtowed before them. The amalgams looked at one another in surprise. Toruna spoke first. “Rise rider. You are welcome to join us tonight.”
“Thank you, commander.” He raised himself to a kneeling position before them. “I bring news and letters from the Eye. I am also entailed with the duty of receiving your report, and will carry any letters that you bear.”
“Thank you. Please, make yourself at ease, and tell us your news. We have little food to offer, but we will share what we have.”
Selara snorted, but no one looked at her. The rider kowtowed once more, then shifted into a cross-legged position and began rifling through his pack. “I have food of my own, thank you. Perhaps we can all share together and make a fitting meal?”
As they dined on watery grouse stew, hard tack, and salty cheese, the rider, a tiger warrior by the name of Makaru, began to tell them the news from the Eye of Hiparkes, how God Crossing continued to grow, and how the near crisis with the Mayhiros clan and the armies of Lookshy had been averted. Toruna delivered her report to the rider in a sealed envelope, and he brought out their mail.
“Shu Zhuang, your daughter has written to you, and sends her regards… and this.” He produced from his bag a fairly dignified round hat made of red wool. Shu Zhuang proceeded to don the hat and read his letter. “Selara, your scale commander sent this letter (I’ll never get used to soldiers that can write), and I also have a letter from the Baihu society for Toruna. And from Marta, a letter for Yao Ye… say where is she? Off on her own mission?”
For the first time since that morning, Selara’s frown faded; she lowered her head. Toruna spoke quickly. “She is, yes.”
“Hmm… the twilight wing will be sorely disappointed if I don’t send their greetings, which were of a rather vigorous nature. And what will I tell Marta when she asks how her letter was received?” He shook his head sadly.
Zhou Wing, a little disappointed at having not received a letter himself, said, “This Marta you speak of, she can’t be the sister of our master?”
“Of course. They are great friends. She hadn’t told you this? Yao Ye was much more talkative when she served in my scale, I assure you!” Makaru shook his head with a smile on his face.
The ebon sorceress gave a sly glance at her team, then said, “She is a little secretive with us. Perhaps the amalgamation has made her distrustful. Maybe you could tell us about her, so that we could know her better. How is it that she knows the lady of the manse?”
The rider frowned. “It’s not a pleasant story, I warn you… She was always wild, but when she first came to the Retreat, she was even more so. I’ll tell you because you are her friends, and you might not understand some of her actions unless you understand her past.”
He settled himself into a reclining position before the fire, and removed a pipe from a pouch at his belt and began blowing smoke rings in the fire light. “There were many refugees in the days before the Battle of Breaking Iron, many sad stories of people relocating to avoid the path of the beastman army. Such was Yao Ye’s story. When she arrived she was half starved and half mad… she had serious injuries that had been untreated for days. We never found out what happened to her family, and she never mentioned them either.”
He shook his head before continuing. “Though offered food, she stole more, brawling with any that tried to help her or stop her, refusing medical attention that she desperately needed. Eventually she was overwhelmed by a dozen men and thrown in a military brig. Many at the time thought that the most humane thing to do might be to kill her, for she could no longer speak any language of man.
“Fortunately, there is little that happens in the Plum Blossom Retreat that Marta is not aware of. Against counsel, without regard for her own safety, she entered the cell alone. We don’t know what passed between them, but when next the door opened, Yao Ye would accept treatment. In a week, she was able to speak again, and immediately requested that she be placed in the army’s vanguard. Marta agreed to help her receive a commission, under the condition that she serve under her brother.”
Selara raised a hand for him to pause. “Yao Ye was at Breaking Iron?”
“Yes. She was one of my scale; the scale that rode at the side of Rivers Between Us to harry their massed forces. She was… she is a ferocious fighter, a true berserker. I honestly think she hoped to die that day. When the battle was over, she wept when she could find no more enemies to face.”
Selara nodded. “She always was rash. I still don’t understand why the master would choose such a young girl for such an important position. Every chance she gets, she rushes into combat with no concern for her own safety or her mission.”
“I admit, I was surprised when she was chosen. She was ecstatic of course… she stayed up all night when she found out about the selection, drinking and telling us all about how she would repay the wizard for the opportunity. But she is very impulsive… like many a girl her age.”
Shu Zhuang looked up from his letter. “You all are forgetting who you are speaking of. The master is himself only seventeen, by all accounts. If you have heard his story, it’s not hard to understand. Two years ago he himself was exalted. We forget that he too was a boy when he was separated from his fellows and chosen to serve all.”
Selara snorted. The rider looked at her, then tossed a twist of grass into the fire. “Well, she was always fond of the Lord of the Plum Blossom Retreat, so, who knows, maybe he did it because he knew it would keep her away for a while.” He chuckled to himself, then stood and walked away from the fire to tend to his horse.
The next morning, he rode west, back to the Eye with letters from Zhuang, Selara, and Toruna. They packed their equipment in a thick gray fog. Wing looked after the rider for a long time, then looked back at the sullen team. He sighed, and began walking.
In the soft gray light that precedes dawn, Yao Ye woke up in a heap of grass, every inch of her body itching and aching at the same time. She stood, bits of straw falling from her hair and clothes. Her didn’t feel like eating anything; she knew she was back in that place that was past hunger, where food didn’t matter.
She raised one red fist before herself. She spoke to the grasslands that stretched in every direction for miles. “Yao Ye, it’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself and wandering in the wilderness. Let’s go find the road, and not stop to eat or sleep until we’ve Done Good!”
With that she began marching once more. By the time the sun had risen, illuminating a landscape shrouded in fog, she had found the dirt track that the cart had been following and began walking down it. “If I meet them, I’ll just walk on by,” she said with as she lifted her chin proudly. “Maybe if they call out to me, I’ll nod my head and then keep going.” She nodded her head to demonstrate exactly what it would like, then tried again to try to make it appear more lofty.
Towards noon she was walking in this fashion, her shortsword slapping against her thigh, when she saw something in the road ahead. The mist was still thick; the sun hadn’t yet pierced the cloud layer above. Yao Ye reflexively drew her sword and held it in a loose grip at her side, though whatever it was was not moving. As she approached it resolved itself into a long, low shape, and there seemed to be a kind of shimmering above it.
Then Yao Ye recognized a familiar sight from the battle and before the battle, so she steeled herself and held her breath. It was, in fact, a dead horse, and parts of the rider. She skirted them at a distance, noting that the make of the saddle marked it as one of her own, but she could tell nothing about the man from what was left. Something large had attacked them, recently too. The blood hadn’t hardened yet in places. She could tell it was fast; the blood covered the entire road in great arcs. She looked at the pack, then saw the mail bag beside it, empty.
She noticed that the tip of her sword was shaking, waving in the mist. She tossed it aside and knelt down beside the body. “Think Yao Ye, what would do this? What could be that big? Oh, by the Sun...” She looked at the tracks on the road; the horse had been coming from the east at a rapid pace, but there was no sign of the attacker’s steps.
“Something caught him, killed him, and... and took the letters...” She looked at the bloody print of a paw as big as her head on the side of the mailbag. “If he was coming from the east, he had to have talked to the rest of the Day... well, the other amalgams.”
She stood and looked to the east, through the fog. She could see the ruts left by their wagon in the dirt. She could also see the monster clearly in her mind, see how easily it would cut down the rest of her team in a matter of moments.
She picked up her sword and began running.
After noon, the fog worsened. A misting rain began to settle over the plains, soaking the heads of grain until they began to bow with the weight. It soaked into the team’s robes until they clung about their bodies, turning their journey in a slow and heavy trudge through ankle deep mud.
After an hour of trying to travel through the rain and fog, they saw a small foot trail leading to the north. Zhou Wing scouted out the path, hoping to find a horse ranch or outpost that might take them in. He noticed a stag’s tracks crossing the path, but no recent human footprints. He returned a quarter of an hour later.
“We’ll have to leave the cart here, but there is a place a little ways off that we can get out of the rain.”
Toruna started to pull together some equipment and a shockpike from the cart bed. “What is it?”
“It looks like some ruins, maybe once a temple. About half the roof is still horizontal. What do you think?”
She motioned for the other four to follow, and they set off down the path. It wandered through a gully until it came after a slight rise to a level space, perhaps a hundred paces across, where the grass competed with thick, sturdy moss for purchase on ancient pavers. In the center were white columns of marble, half of them broken and lying in various states of dishabille. The broken segments were as wide as the length of a man’s forearm, and showed signs of nearly effaced fluting, marred by black patches of lichen. Those that still stood supported an immense slab of stone formed from a single block, three times as high as Toruna and twice as wide as tall.
They took their bags and piled them under the roof. They couldn’t see clearly farther than their outstretched arms, so they sat in a close circle to wait out the weather. While the rest tried to light a fire from some of the grass that had escaped the wet, Shu Zhuang went back to the cart to get his scriptures and writing supplies and make sure they didn’t suffer water damage.
Toruna tried for a half hour to start a blaze, but the tinder wouldn’t catch a spark. Her hands raw from striking flint, she gave up and sat back on her haunches. The stone floor was cold; it seemed to drain the heat from them as they sat on it. Selara kept pacing back and forth between the columns, rubbing her shoulders with both hands. Wing looked through the packs, checking to make sure that his medicinal herbs were sealed tightly in their jars. After a few minutes of this, he turned around to the path.
“Shouldn’t old Zhuang be back?”
Selara and Toruna looked at each other for a moment. The warrior called out, “Zhuang!”
The only sound that they could hear was the gentle patter of water on fields. Selara drew back her hands to her side, sticking out her chest with her legs spread wide, then exhaled in a sharp hiss while striking outward, two fingers extended from each hand. She followed the adoption of the snake form with essence fangs and scales, filling her lungs with breath and sealing her chakras against hostile essence. Toruna picked up the shockpike and backed against the baggage.
Selara whispered, “All right, leader, what do you think?”
“Something’s not right here.”
“Yes, I know this.”
“Selara, this is probably not the best time for us to begin discussing your issues with teamwork.”
“Right.” She turned to face Toruna, keeping her hands in the rigid fangs of the snake, but her face relaxing somewhat. “But I am willing to admit... perhaps...”
“Selara!”
The rain and the fog were now so thick that the three team members were standing in a thick gloom that obscured their features. As the martial artist had turned to speak to the sorceress, a dim, dark shape began to resolve itself from the fog behind her. It towered nearly twice as tall as herself. It moved in a smooth sweeping gesture, as lithe and graceful as a dance, and she fell to the stone like a sack of rice.
Toruna began firing.
Yao Ye found the cart, but none of her teammates were present. She leaped onto the bed and noticed about half the baggage and one of the shockpikes were missing. She stood there for a moment, scratching her head and trying to come up with an idea, when she heard a sound coming from under one of the sacks by her foot.
She kicked it aside and saw old Zhuang huddled under a sheaf of scriptures that were sprayed across the bottom of cart, the ink bleeding in the rain. She knelt beside him and called his name.
“Hmph, snoring again...” She then saw the thick blood dripping down from his scalp line. She gently pushed aside his hair, and saw three deep gashes that stretched across the crown of his skull, the blood still wet.
“Oh no... where’s Wing when I really need him?”
As if in reply she heard a shout from the north in his familiar tenor, inarticulate but with a ring of desperation. She leaped from the cart into the grass and was surprised to find a meandering trail there. As she ran the world around her became a hazy blur. In her mind she heard her own voice barking orders at her, telling her to go back for the magitech, to slow down and assess the situation, but Yao Ye ignored them and instead listened to the blood still fresh on her fingers from Zhuang’s scalp.
She came upon the ruined temple in the rain and did her best for a moment to clear her eyes; in an instant she took in Toruna lying by a pillar with one arm twisting in too many places, Selara face down with her back laid open in four vertical slashes, Zhou Wing backed against a pillar seated with his arms over his head, and the twelve foot tall thing before him. It stood on two legs, but they bent back too far, like the legs of a horse or a dog, on pads as big around as her face. A ringed tail whipped back and forth behind it, and she heard Wing’s voice softly drifting through the mist to her.
“Please... we’re not here to start a war or threaten anyone... we’re here to help and heal. I’m a doctor! That’s all I do...”
A rumbling voice, as low and deep as the purr of tearing silk, cut through the young man’s babbling speech. “Then tell me, construct, who will heal... you?”
When the beast that was a man began speaking, Yao Ye saw its great muscled shoulder rippling beneath thick, bristling fur with stripes of deepest black. She leaned forward and silently drew her sword from its sheath, her soft boots whispering over the moss and between the blades of grass. When one clawed hand reached back, she twisted and slid backward beneath the arm, lifting her sword before her and howling an animal call of rage as she parried the avalanche of its strike.
She knew it for what it was. The lunar exalted are known to the people of the threshold as a whispered nightmare, and the briefings at the Plum Blossom Retreat had taken nothing from the edge of fear that they wielded. She knew that their strength was easily double her own, that they could change to become terrific monsters whose battle prowess could match the most powerful of the reborn solars. She had always wanted to fight one.
In that instant though, when she swept between Wing and the claw, she knew that something was wrong about how big, how strong this thing was. The slash passed her in a flash that she couldn’t follow with her eyes. Her head twisted with the stroke, and she saw half of her blade flying in a flat spin toward one of the columns and lodging halfway into the marble, but the hilt was also following it though her hand still clutched it. She saw her own hand moving away with her forearm and a crimson thread drifting behind through the drops suspended like threaded beads in a diaphanous curtain.
But then the rain began falling again. She heard an abrupt snort of surprise and found herself standing and bleeding alone, with Wing’s form lying on the ground. He seemed uninjured; perhaps he had fainted dead away. He was safe for the moment... she sank to her knees, scanning the fog.
Tearing away the lower half of her shirt with a savage twist of her left hand, she quickly tied a knot around her upper right arm using her teeth to tighten it. She did not look at it while she worked, watching through the shades of gray for a sign of motion and listening for the pad of mammoth tiger paws.
“Who are you!” She shouted as loudly as she could, but winced at the shaking in her voice. She felt no pain, numb in fact, but she didn’t want to drop her guard for a second, afraid of letting the realization of her injury catch up with her.
She could see nothing, but the voice was a presence so real and intimate, it felt as though the thing was an inch from her face. “Impressive... this wizard’s plaything has an ounce of steel in her spine...”
“I’m not his plaything!”
It was moving, perhaps circling, but she couldn’t tell... she could almost feel it’s breath in her ear. “You’re a spell with a flesh component, a blasphemy against nature. I’ve met wizards... you mean nothing to him, and you can be replaced by any soft fool.”
“There is only one Yao Ye!”
“Hmm... there was.”
Yao Ye reached with her left hand for the shockpike that lay by Toruna’s still form. “You know, I had a personal message for your goat-king... maybe you’ll deliver it for me...”
“Hard to wield that piece of trash now... aren’t you missing something?”
Yao Ye backed under the roof of the ruined temple, then rested against a pillar with her pike set against the heel of her right foot. She cringed as she caught sight of half her arm lying across the floor from her. “It must have been holding me back.”
“You’re wrong... I answer to no king. You’ll collapse soon, so I’ll end this while you can still scream. I still need to pile you freaks back in your wagon to send you back west...”
“We’re not freaks!” Her face had paled to a more yellow-red flame, but she set her teeth in a fierce grin. “We are the Daybringers, and we’re her to Do Good, Be Awesome, and Annihilate...”
And then he was on her. Her essence rose in her throat, revealing the attack as it unfolded, so she set her spear to face the charge. She felt it knocked aside from her hand by an irresistible force, and then a half ton of weight slammed into her, cracking the pillar behind her. She felt the claws tightening around her throat, blood trickling down her throat.
The face before her was neither tiger nor man. She saw black stripes radiating from a squashed nose, cat’s eyes and thick, dark lips. They peeled back in a smile, revealing a mix of flat incisors and tusklike canines.
“Little bitch, though there is little honor in killing you now, there will be much pleasure.”
Yao Ye focused on trying to stay conscious, to keep the blood in her head long enough to make one last effort. She thought back to Breaking Iron, and the horrors before the battle, to the promise of destiny that the spell had wrapped into her bones and the four team members that might not have wanted her, but needed her now. She looked at the grinning mask before her, and chose to stay awake a few moments longer to show the beast that she too was a tiger warrior.
Lifting her legs so that she dangled in his grasp, she braced her feet against his crooked knees and pushed. The lunar warrior fought back, silver essence beginning to flicker about his limbs, pushing back against her. She strained with all her might, with her back flat against the pillar, until she heard the crack as marble, weathered for centuries and fractured by the first rush, shattered behind her. She fell against it, the jagged edges ripping through her jerkin and tearing her skin, and then she hit the stone and rolled while above her the already damaged roof gave way. It twisted and fell, but not before striking the bestial warrior and slamming him to the ground on top of her.
And Yao Ye was finished fighting that day.
For a minute, both of the warriors lay still under a ton of broken marble, the rain running in rivulets through the stripes of the tiger’s fur down onto the tattered ruin of Yao Ye.
Then the lunar warrior leaped to his feet, hurling slabs of marble dozens of feet through the air in all directions. Standing over the fallen amalgam, his chest heaving, he raised both taloned claws wide, spreading them as though to encompass the whole world. He howled and prepared to crush.
“That is enough, Blood Like Sparks!”
The tiger turned and snarled. He was no longer the only creature standing on the field of battle. A dozen feet away a great silver stag had left the grass, its chin lowered so that its mighty rack of flowing moonsilver menaced the tiger-man. A knee-tall raven landed on the rubble to his right, and a suspicious looking gopher maundered into the clearing from his left.
“She’s nain-ya, and she hurt me!”
The stag spoke once more, in a clear voice that rang like a bell across the weeping sky. “You have fought bravely today. You showed cunning and mettle in waiting for the wizard’s emissaries to divide, and using their division as your cloak, but today this girl has shown that valor is not ours alone to claim. Do not shame your hunt now.”
The tiger snarled out, “The boy wizard of the horse people thinks he can civilize this land! He must be stopped! I can make him stop too.”
“Let MaHaSuchi stop him, for he has claimed the honor of facing this growing force. The solars are not yet our enemy, though you have slain one of their messengers already... this hunt was a test of your patience, remember.”
The gopher spoke up, raising a paw. “Let us leave these travelers with the lesson unfinished,” she said in smooth tones, softening the tiger’s bristling brow. “And perhaps in the future they’ll learn respect for us... and for each other. The dead cannot be taught the Way.”
The tiger bowed his head mutely and nodded it. “Thank you, elders.” But before he left, he leaned close to the still form of the maimed girl. “But I still hope you die, you cunning little lackey,” he whispered over her.
Between rain drops, they were gone, and the only conscious witness was Zhou Wing, who had the presence of mind to feign a faint when the situation called for it.
The Plum Blossom Retreat was an hour and a half away from their cart by use of sorcery. In the week that followed, thanks to first age artifacts and solar charms, Selara was able to recover from the slash that had torn through the muscles of her back, Toruna from the shattered collar bone and wrist where she had struck a broken column, and Zhuang from his concussion. These were among the smaller miracles that happened regularly in the manse. Yao Ye, on the other hand would take longer to recover.
Thus it was after a week that the team was able to once again gather as a whole at the bedside of Yao Ye in the hospital of the Retreat. Her right arm was wrapped in dozens of layers of herbs from her shoulder down, and though no one wanted to draw attention to what might be happening in those bandages, at the same time their eyes were constantly drawn to it. She did her best to keep it covered, but she was feeling so much better that she frequently seemed to forget about such concerns as she vigorously gestured, describing over and over again how she had stepped into the clearing, fought the lunar for an hour and a half until they both cleaved off each other’s arms, saluted, and agreed to withdraw till another day.
Selara made a point of saying, quite sternly, in the middle of the story, “I am glad that you’re not dead.”
Silence followed in the room, while everyone tried to think of a reasonable comment to follow this. Toruna gestured with her slinged arm, “Well, yes, I think we can all say that.”
Shu Zhuang nodded his head sagaciously. Zhou Wing opened his mouth to make a snide comment, but then noticed that everyone in the ward was facing the door. A warrior in gunzosha armor had entered the room, scanning the beds for a moment, before a young man entered, striding through in light gray civil robes over a gleaming breastplate of orichalcum. Wing felt the faint thrill in his spine of essence as the power within him recognized its master.
Yao Ye shrieked and nearly fell out of her bed. “Rivers! I fought a monster!”
“So I heard. And you’re alive! It seems you did remember your orders.”
Wincing slightly as she moved, Yao Ye pulled her legs (horribly crushed seven days earlier) under herself and kneeled on her bed, then practically dragged the sorcerer down to sit beside her. He seemed slightly embarrassed, especially with two warriors clad in gunzosha armor watching him like hawks from three paces away, but he was also looking at Yao Ye with worry.
“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to visit. We had a fatality on the southern front, and I’ve been locked in the hidden city working... well, I’m sorry. Are you in much pain?”
Yao Ye sighed and leaned into River’s shoulder. “I’m in constant pain. Sometimes I think I’ll die, but then I think of you, and I still think I’ll die but in a different way.”
The other members of the team withdrew slightly out of modesty. Wing muttered angrily, “It’s pathetic the way she throws herself at him. Can’t she recognize a sorcerous compulsion when she feels it?”
Selara looked at her, but her eyes did not harden this time. “I don’t think it’s the sorcery... well, not entirely. Besides...” she looked at Wing slyly. “Why do you care?”
“Well, she sort of had her arm ripped off trying to save my life. I’m entitled to worry about her. What happens on the day she realizes that he’ll never make a pass at a girl who can’t say no... oh dear.”
Rivers asked her with concern, “Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”
Yao Ye wrapped her good arm around his waist and batted her fierce red eyes at him as she said, “My doctor said I’d be able to leave my bed tomorrow... I was thinking of going to the bath house... I’d really love to go, but I’d need a lot of help... my legs still ache and I can’t get the wrapping for new arm wet yet, but I think...”
The horrified team members did not hear the end of this conversation, since a quartermaster had arrived at that moment and arrested their attention.
“I thought I might find you here; the support team recovered your equipment from where you left it, and it’s all there. You’re Yao Ye’s team, the Daybringers, right?”
Shu Zhuang, Selara, Toruna, and Zhou Wing looked at one another for an instant, and events of the past week, seemed to wash before their eyes in a flash. Wing bit his lips and lowered his head, turning to one side. Selara spoke, blinking her eyes rapidly.
“We try to be worthy of that honor.”
