Chapter 6
In the first hour of dawn, on certain overcast days in east Marukan, the grasslands become a strange place. A thin mist blankets the still heads of grain, sometimes forming dense banks that obscure the horizon, filling the hollows and concealing features of the landscape. The little light that has crested the eastern horizon is filtered as through a veil of cloth; colors are indistinct and murky. Wise riders know to walk their horses on such days, for there is no way of knowing what lies over the next rise or on the other side of seemingly innocent streams.
Such a day came to the plains of Marukan strangely early in the summer, breaking a long streak of clear and sunny weather. In the West, a day’s ride from the Gray river, there was a small town of two dozen longhouses on the border of a small, still lake. It was still too early for even the most diligent of horsebreeders to be tending his herds, but across the lake, where a small copse of oaks bordered the water line, one man was already at work.
Zhou Wing nocked the arrow with one steady hand. He stood with his feet planted firmly at shoulder width, his left arm straight but relaxed. With a single fluid motion he drew back the arrow beside his cheek, both eyes open. He inhaled, waited, exhaled half his breath, paused... and fired.
There was a sharp crack as the arrow struck the tree, its shaft quivering for a moment in a knot of wood at chest height. Zhou Wing looked at it for a moment, lowering the short bow, then reached for another arrow from where he had planted them in the ground by his feet. He nocked the second arrow and drew it as he raised the bow. He inhaled, held the arrow steady as he sighted along the shaft, slowly exhaled...
“Not bad.”
His eyes flew wide open and his left hand jerked upward spasmodically. The arrow flew wide, tracing an easy arc through the sky to land silently in the center of the lake. Wing spun around and dropped the bow, finding that Selara was standing twenty paces behind him.
“You scared me.”
“I noticed. I didn’t mean to startle you, but that was a good shot. You’ve had training.” She walked toward him through the mist and dew laden grass.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone to be up so early, or I wouldn’t have borrowed the bow.”
“I was looking for you, actually. I wanted to have a word with you.”
“Here I am.” He began pulling the arrow from the trunk of the tree with a practiced twist, then inspected the shaft to be sure that it hadn’t been warped. “If it’s about anything that happened at the banquet last night, I’m afraid I won’t be able to enlighten you. I’ve no head for sake.”
Selara nodded her head and grinned as she followed him to the copse. “I noticed. I’m still not used to... well, being welcomed when we arrive. Things certainly have changed in the last month... I guess that’s partly due to your work with the plague...”
“I doubt that.”
“...or the tournament, or all the indoctrination Shu Zhuang has been doing. It was a good party, and I thought everyone was having a great time, except...”
“Except the one that usually enjoys such times the most.” They stopped walking round the lake, and both faced the misty water line.
Selara stooped and picked up a smooth stone from the bank and began turning it over in her hands. “Do you know what happened to her in Varsi? It’s like the time when we went for the tournament and found out about the spy, only much worse. Lately she seems to talk to you the most... and ever since then...”
“She hasn’t told me anything.” He peered out at the waters, dark and faintly reflecting the cloudy sky above. “But I can tell that something is wrong. You’re right... she hardly ate anything, and she left before picking a single fight.” He also picked up a rock from the lakeshore and tossed it into the waters; it struck and sank, but not a ripple reached the shore.
Six days earlier the team had returned to Varsi to help prepare the way for the solars. While Selara dined on chilled monkey brains with the voivode, Yao Ye prepared for her own trial.
She began early in the afternoon by going to the public baths and spending two hours carefully scrubbing her skin with pumice, soaking in steaming hot water and following with a bracingly cold dip in the cooling pools to close her pores. She spent another hour in vain trying to arrange her petals in a more comely fashion, finally giving up in exasperation (and for fear of bruising them). She trimmed her nails and examined her teeth carefully, then wrapped herself in two light silk kimonos of white and pale blue, followed at last by the deep blue kimono that she and Zhou Wing had selected with so much effort. Over and over she smoothed it with her hands, until she realized that they were shaking. Lastly she pulled on her matching slippers and placed in her hair a single true cherry blossom.
Her preparations complete, she walked to the door and stopped. For a moment she lost her balance and leaned against the frame, her blood pounding furiously in her ears. She waited for it slow, but instead it grew more furious. Her breath came in gasps and she clutched her chest.
She heard noises in the hall. She straightened herself and listened at the door, afraid that Toruna or Wing might see her like this. She knew she would never hear the end of it. She pressed herself flat against the door and waited for the footsteps to pass, then slipped out into the hallway.
It was already dark outside when she left. Yao Ye hurried through the rough streets of Varsi, taking the small steps that her tight kimono would allow. In a few minutes she reached the small villa that the circle was staying at; she knocked gently at the door and waited outside, holding her hands behind her and trying to appear demure. At length, the door opened and short man with a fabulous mustache answered the door.
“Yes? Oh, Yao Ye. Anything to report?”
“Ah... no... sir. Actually, I was looking for Rivers Between Us. I... I needed to report something to him. Personally.” She looked shyly down at her slippers and turned her right foot slightly inward.
“Well, he’s not staying with the circle... bad idea, if you ask me. He’s two blocks down in the house with the nice roof garden. The door’s unlocked, and he’s probably still on the roof. You might want to wait for morning though...”
“No, I don’t think I can try this twice. Thanks!”
She hurried down the street, while Leaf Shakes the Wind looked after her curiously. The house was easy to find; she could see from below that there was a fruit tree overhanging the eaves of the building. She knocked once more at the door, but this time she received no answer. She waited for a full minute outside, every second a lifetime of agony. When no one came, she tried the door and found that it was neither locked nor barred. Inside was a dim hallway that lead to a narrow set of stairs. Walking slowly and quietly, she stepped up past the second floor until she saw the light of the night sky.
Faintly she heard someone whispering something, followed by the voice of the Master. “It’s probably just a messenger from Nameless Ravine... I think he’s trying to pick a fight with some abbot.”
Yao Ye stepped up into the warm starlight of the garden terrace. She blinked for a moment as she adjusted to the light. Her mouth felt paper dry; there was a lump in her throat that made it difficult to breath. When she could focus her vision, she saw that she was on a simply tiled garden terrace with beds of green plants and small potted trees. Opposite her, she noticed two people were seated in chairs by the roof’s edge. She could barely see them in the dim light, and at first she did not recognize either one.
The one on the right stood from his chair; he was a short youth with short, thick brown hair... but of course, it was Rivers Between Us. She began speaking, hardly noticing what she was saying. “Oh, hello Rivers. I was just passing...”
As her eyes adjusted, she quickly became silent. The person still seated behind him was a woman. She was older than Yao Ye, with red hair that framed her face, falling to he shoulders. Her skin was pale, as pale as bones by starlight, as milk under the moon. Her features were delicate, almost fragile. Each of these things Yao Ye registered in their turn, but what drew the fire into her cheeks was when she noticed her clothes, for this stranger was wrapped in cerements, as though prepared for her burial. The young woman looked back at the amalgam with a steady gaze, her face revealing no emotion beyond faint curiosity.
Rivers broke the silence. “Yao Ye, this is not a good time...”
“Is that her?” The words came out of her, but she listened to them with surprise, as though someone else spoke through her throat.
“What do you mean...” the youth began, but the woman behind him cut through his words.
“Yes, I am the one that tried to kill your friend.”
Yao Ye looked at her, then looked back at her master, breathing quickly. “And... and now, everything is fine between you, just like that?” Again, in her detached state, she was aware of how shrill her voice sounded after the calm, almost sorrowful beauty of this stranger’s words.
He shook his head and raised both his hands. “You don’t understand... It’s not what you’re thinking. Listen, maybe it would be better...”
“How could you! How could you go back and... after how much we all worried and... I’ve got to tell the others. When they find out, they’ll help you see...”
“They already know, Yao Ye. We’ve agreed to help her.”
Yao Ye’s mouth gaped open in surprise while her hands involuntarily clenched at her sides. She filled her lungs (watching Rivers flinch as she did so), but then walked past him to the small seated woman. Standing with her fists at her sides, she stamped her foot and shouted at the top of her voice, “Go away! Can’t you just disappear? We know that you’re a deathknight, so go back to...”
Rivers whispered urgently, “People can hear you...”
“Why can’t you leave us alone? Isn’t it enough that you’re killing our friends one by one while...”
“Stop!”
Yao Ye froze where she stood, her mouth half open. The woman had her head bowed, her red hair covering her features. Rivers stepped over between them. Yao Ye made a small noise in the back of her throat and trembled where she stood, but she didn’t move an inch from the spot.
Rivers Between Us looked at the spreading expression of horror on her face and quickly said, “Yao Ye, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...”
“If you didn’t mean it, it wouldn’t have happened.” She spoke in broken phrases, the effort causing two large tears to roll down her cheeks.
“I just wanted you to...”
“I know what you wanted. I get it now. She matters because she’s like you. She has the power. Oh, by all that’s holy, I see it now. How annoying I must have been, like a little buzzing fly to you. You must have been so relieved when I volunteered to be amalgamated, so that you could order me away from your manse. If I ever bothered you too much, you could tell me to shut up...”
“Listen... no, that’s not an order. What you said is not true....”
Yao Ye swallowed and said, “Will you please let me go now?”
He looked at her in confusion for a moment. “What?”
“Please. I can’t move, and I don’t want to do this in front of you. Please.” She barely whispered the words. Two more tears fell down her cheeks; her whole body was shaking violently.
Rivers reached out as if to touch her cheek, saying, “This isn’t what I wanted...”
“Let me go!” She screamed. From the street below came the sound of curious voices. someone called out, “Hello?”
Rives bowed his head and whispered, “You can go.”
She turned and ran blindly down the steps. Her kimono caught on the rough wooden stairs as she did so, tearing the silk for a hand’s breadth up the side. She turned for a moment to free herself from the snag, ripping it further, and as she bowed to do this the single cherry blossom fell from her hair to rest on the floor.
Selara turned back to the lakeside path. “Well, whatever it is, she should have plenty of time to work through it while we stay at Mirror Lake. No spies, barbarians, or zombies here, so she should have nothing to do but think.”
“I don’t know that that’s any better. You know, now that I think about it, the night that you went to the dinner with the new crowned sun, I came back late to the inn from a housecall and saw her sitting by the fire downstairs. She asked me a strange question.”
“Strange for Yao Ye?”
“Yes... she was being serious. She asked me how the sun chose his people.”
“You mean, how do you become exalted?”
“I think so.” He swung the bow over his shoulders and walked more slowly.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her that I didn’t know, that nobody knew. The only thing that’s certain is that they’re extraordinary people, every time. I mean, we’ve all heard of Song of the Silver Wind and Storm of Amber; everyone knew that they would someday become leaders of the Marukan... we just didn’t know how far they would go. They’re not... they’re not quiet people, if you follow me. They never rest; always challenging the world around them and performing great deeds.”
“What did she say to that?”
“Nothing. She was so quiet... her voice sounded awful, now that I think about it.”
“Hmm...” She looked up at the dark gray sky warily. “Do you think the sun will clear up all this fog?”
“I hope so, but it doesn’t look likely.”
On the shore of Mirror Lake, benches were brought out so that Shu Zhuang could conduct his lessons. Word had spread throughout the Marukan that traveling teachers came and performed miracles in the span of a week, so every man, woman, and child rested from their labors, treating it as a sort of festival, and all gathered to learn from the sage. As per Toruna’s orders, Selara assisted him in the process by distributing materials, providing examples, and participating in lessons. Toruna herself spent much of her time talking with the village elders, though none of the other Daybringers could fathom what they were discussing.
Zhou Wing for his part, spent his time treating the illnesses and deformities in the village while Yao Ye tagged along behind him, carrying his equipment. Besides the usual crippling injuries from bad falls and foolish misadventures, it seemed that many of the people in the town suffered from a curious sleeping sickness. Wing prepared fumigation treatments, selecting local herbs with the appropriate properties and giving them to Yao Ye to pulverize.
They performed their work on the steps outside a longhouse. Zhou Wing talked as he worked to the mother of one of the patients.
“All of these plants come from the plains around you; if there is a recurrence of the sickness, you should apply this treatment at the first signs. Don’t wait for it to become this serious.”
“Oh, sir, we do, we do. Every time it comes back we do.” The woman had a sad look in her eyes as she nodded at these words.
Yao Ye frowned in silent concentration as she crushed the herbs in his mortar. Wing asked the mother, “It always comes back? There must be something in the environment causing the problem. We’ll have to take a look around, Ye.”
She didn’t respond, continuing to pulverize the herbs. Wing watched her for a moment, noticing that even after she had reduced the components to a fine paste she continued to grind, her eyes staring past her work. He reached out slowly with one pale hand and gently closed it over her own. She blinked. The pestle was stilled.
“Did you hear me, Ye?” Her skin felt like fire under his palm.
She looked up at him wordlessly, and he could feel her drop the pestle into the bowl. He took the mortar with both hands and said, “We should begin the treatment anyway. Come inside and tend the fire, Yao Ye.”
The anxious mother told them as they stepped inside, “If it would help, I’ll bring great-grandfather... he knows the most about the sickness.”
“Please do.”
The amalgams entered the longhouse where two children were lying in their beds, seemingly dead to the world. The healer placed the herbs in a pan over the fire, and soon a light haze filled the room around them. Yao Ye sat cross-legged by the fire, her head leaning against the wall, while Zhou Wing inspected his patients. As he turned the smaller boy in his bed, the child made a quiet noise.
“He is trapped in his dreams, but he may be able to hear me. Make sure that the fire stays low; any sudden light might drive him deeper.” Wing leaned over the boy and arranged him carefully on the sheets. He whispered in his ear firmly, “I’m going to activate your pressure points. You may experience a slight discomfort as I move the illness from your head and neck into your lungs, where you can expel it. Just shake you’re head when you feel like you need to cough. Do you understand me, child?”
The boy weakly nodded his head, though his eyes remained closed. Wing carefully positioned his fingers on the boy’s forehead, temples, and the bridge of his nose. As he did so he breathed in and out slowly, matching his respiration to his patient’s. The boy tensed, his brows showing the strain momentarily, and he breathed a faint groan. After a minute he began shaking his head, and Wing turned him so that he hung over the edge of the bed. He coughed once, then twice, but nothing came. Zhou Wing hissed over his shoulder, “Yao Ye, get a bucket or a rag, quickly!”
Her head snapped up and she looked around herself. The boy began coughing again. Wing whispered more urgently, “Now, Yao Ye, or it will take weeks to scrub the smell out!”
Without thinking, she stood and rushed over to the healer’s side as the boy’s coughing became more furious. At the last moment, she knelt down and pulled out the skirt of her robe. The boy coughed out a ball of brown, foul smelling sludge into Yao Ye’s lap and gave a final sob, grabbing Zhou Wing’s waist.
Wing looked at Yao Ye with embarrassment, but then realized that she was actually laughing. She stood up, carefully holding the disgusting mess in front of her. Wing risked a half smile and said, “I’m sorry Ye, I though you would bring a dish cloth or something.”
“Oh, it’s my own fault. I’m so clumsy.” She turned to Wing as he supported the boy with his arms and smiled at him. “But you, when did you get so good at this?”
Wing helped the child into a sitting position. “Well, I suppose it’s all the practice, maybe. Although I still prefer them when they’re unconscious.”
“Well, I was impressed.” She lifted the robe up and over her head. Wing’s face turned bright red and he spun around, only to hear her giggling at him. “You idiot, I’m still wearing my clothes underneath.”
At that time the door opened again and an ancient man entered, his face tanned as dark and rough as leather, his back still erect and boots still on his feet. He looked with clear eyes at where the two young amalgams stood laughing at each other and announced over them, “You asked for my help?”
“So it’s the lake, you see! Ever since this clan moved to Mirror Lake, back during some drought fifty years ago, they’ve had trouble with the sleeping sickness.” Yao Ye spoke eagerly, her eyes shining brightly by the campfire light.
Toruna shook her head thoughtfully. “I don’t know, that sounds like a stretch to me. You heard him too, didn’t you Wing? What do you think?”
He scratched the back of his head as he stirred his stew. “It’s possible, I suppose. There could be some kind of contagion in the water.”
“There’s more! Yao Ye has been investigating and found many signs that point to foul deeds and black magic. There’s a legend that there’s a serpent at the bottom of the lake that lives in an enchanted castle. Boys from the village used to try to dive to the bottom, because they thought there had to be a beautiful lady trapped in the castle. Well, about twenty years ago they stopped diving when two of the boys didn’t come back up. They never found the bodies!”
Selara chuckled from where she reclined. “Hey, I’m glad that you’re feeling better, but that’s just a silly story. You can’t honestly think that there’s something down there that’s causing the problems in this village...”
“I know it, and I’m going to go down there and fight it, whatever it is!” She stood and lifted her fist in the air, grinning from ear to ear.
Toruna shook her head. “Not a good idea. We’ll requisition a sobeksis to inspect the lake for danger and, if necessary, relocate the village. It’s too risky diving blindly, whatever is down there.”
“Oh, come on! How else are we going to win glory if we don’t take some initiative? I’m not afraid!”
“No one is doubting that, Yao Ye, and that’s part of the problem.” She wiped a hand over her face and began collecting the dirtied dishes from the meal. “You seem incapable of recognizing the risk inherent in a course of action, and apparently you’ve forgotten that our mission is not one of personal glory.”
Shu Zhuang nodded his head, and even Selara chimed in. “There are better ways to research this. You should relax. There aren’t any enemies here. Why go looking for trouble?”
Yao Ye pressed out her lower lip, but said nothing. The others went about their business, preparing for bed, but Zhou Wing watched her. “How could the others not see her transparent defiance,” he asked himself. He made up his mind to watch out that night and see if she tried anything.
Though tired from his work that day, Wing did his best to stay up late into the night, sitting under a blanket by the wheel of their cart. The rest of the team went to the houses where they had been put up for the night, but he had excused himself, claiming that he preferred to sleep under the stars. Of course there were no stars that night, which made his reason sound all the more lame. In fact, there was a gentle drizzling rain that was slowly soaking through every stitch of clothing that he wore. In the end, it was the miserable discomfort of the weather that allowed him to stay awake long enough to notice the sound of stealthy motion in the dark.
He was on the far side of the cart from the village, so the approacher didn’t notice him even after climbing into bed of the vehicle. Zhou Wing waited a few moments more, listening, then slowly stood and put his hands on the cart’s sides. He whispered quietly, “What are you doing?”
There was a yelp, and there was Yao Ye, halfway finished with putting on her gunzosha armor. “Butt out, Zhou Wing. You know what I’m doing.”
“Are you mad, putting on that armor and then swimming? You’ll drown in seconds!”
“The integrated air reservoir will hold me until I get down there and get my bearings; from there with the exoskeletal fibers I should be able to push off and come back up for air if I need to. It’s a lot safer than skinny-dipping in the cursed lake.”
Wing was taken aback for a moment. “When did you get so good at this?”
“I’m not a fan of mud in my vizor. Gross. Remind me to hit you again later.”
She finished putting on her armor and grabbed her shockpike. Wing tried to bar her exit from the cart. “Ye, wait. This is practically suicide.”
“I know, ok! But this just might be my chance...”
“To what? To become exalted? It doesn’t work like that, and you know it! There are thousands of bold women in the Marukan doing amazing things every day. What makes you think the Sun will pick you?”
“Because I need it more. Get out of my way, Wing!”
Wing was pushed aside as she stepped down and began striding toward the lake, lowering her visor as she went. He looked back at the village, then looked after her and began following. “This is madness. Yao Ye, stop!”
She whirled on her heel and shouted, “Poor choice of words, Wing!” He could hear her voice breaking slightly as she spoke, but could see nothing through the helmet. “Give me one good reason why I should.”
“Well...” He thought for a moment. Why did it matter to him if she risked her life at the bottom of the lake looking for monsters? As he hesitated, he noticed that Yao Ye was standing still, actually waiting for an answer. He lamely continued, “Because... it’s dangerous...”
Her voice was as bone-chilling as the misting rain that saturated his robes. “That’s what I’m hoping.” With that she waded into the lake and began swimming.
Wing watched her for a moment, stunned for reasons that he couldn’t quite fathom, but when she began to swim out of his range of sight he snapped out of the spell. He shouted inarticulately, “Wait, Yao Ye!” and then dove into the water after her.
Swimming as hard as he could, he seemed unable to catch up to her. The powered armor supplied her with additional buoyancy and strength, so it was a hopeless race. He watched helplessly as she paused, a dark shape on dark waters, rose for a moment, breaking the water, and then dipped down in a surface dive. He reached the spot seconds later, took a deep breath, and then tried to sink down after her.
Beneath the surface of the lake, all was darkness. He had the sensation of weightlessly falling into a vast depth, much farther than the size of Mirror Lake seemed to warrant. He had no way of measuring time or distance save the mounting pressure in his ears and lungs and he went deeper and deeper. Once he thought he felt an armored boot slide past his fingers, and he scrambled to try and grab it, but at that moment he knew he had to surface or become part of the lake’s legend. He turned and kicked upwards.
The sensory augmentation of the gunzosha commando armor provided Yao Ye with a different vision entirely.
At first the lake seemed bottomless; its shallow shores quickly gave way to an almost parabolic dish lined with steep, slick slopes. She swam downward with even strokes, watching as her air meter became slowly depleted and then began flashing, warning her that her supply was exhausted. She felt the suit’s air begin to grow hot and stale, but she continued to dive, ignoring the brief sensation of something clinging to her boot as she descended. At length she did see something below, a strange shape squatting on the level lake floor.
It’s sides were black and rough, mottled and opaque. It’s shape was that of a sphere, however, as though a forty yard wide dung ball had come to rest at the bottom of the waters. She swam to it and gingerly touched its exterior, finding it hard at first, like a carapace, but when she swam closer to it, her lungs nearly bursting with agony, the wall suddenly gave way. Her hand passed through with almost no resistance, like pushing through melting butter, but when she tried pull it back out the wall became hard again; her arm was trapped! She tried to push off with her legs, but they fell through as well. Yao Ye found herself waist deep in the dark substance and sliding still further in with each passing moment. As her head was pulled into the dark sphere, she had one last glimpse of the distance surface above and the shape of someone swimming toward the shore before she passed out.
Three hundred miles away, the earth rumbled beneath the plains of northeast Murakan. Horses flared their nostrils and bolted, trying to escape their pens, and those with awakened essence felt a shiver, as though something entirely alien had passed through the dragon lines and pushed aside everything in its path. A tiny girl traveling late that night with her father, a tinker, asked, “What does this mean, papa?”
He continued walking, leading the donkey that she rode on with a steady hand and weary feet. A strange light filled his eyes for a moment, and he spoke. “Little Shari, you know that this is the beginning of the third age, when gods and man work together to rebuild this fallen world. Is it no wonder that we should even now be feeling the birthing pangs of this bright new future? The rot has sunk to the core, and to dig it out will require great upheaval. Heavy times are coming, my girl, heavy times.”
Tugging at his sleeve with one frail hand, Shari asked him, “What do you mean, father?”
As quickly as it had come, the light passed from his eyes and he shook his head. “Aye what? Was I talking? Blood and stones, I had another spell. Come on girl, just another mile and we should be out of this rain.”
Yao Ye woke, and in waking she knew herself to be dreaming. She was in a great hall beneath a domed roof, and though she saw no source of light, no candles, torches, windows, or doors, she could clearly see its dimensions; four times as tall as herself at its tallest and twice as wide. A deep red glow seemed to filter in through the curiously shaped walls and floor. As she looked more closely at the walls, she recoiled from them, scampering crablike across the floor in her haste to make distance. They were full of faces. Looking down, she saw that the faces were beneath her as well, making the floor as uneven as a poorly cobbled road. She quickly stood, but found it was difficult to place a step on the rounded heads. Even calling them faces seemed an act of generosity, for they were so grotesque that she never would have credited herself with having the imagination to conjure them on her own. “We truly do travel to other worlds when we sleep,” she thought as she looked at squashed and misshapen ovular heads, some with eyes and some without, and some with organs that no human head ever possessed: fanged and bulbous protrusions, overlapping sets of gills inset in the cheeks, lips pierced by layers upon layers of wicked, barbed fangs, and all kinds of spiny growths that skittered against her armored feet. When one of these slid between two plates near her ankle, she screamed more from terror than pain, for at that moment it became obvious that this was not a dream. She had been swallowed whole by the curse of Mirror Lake.
Yao Ye picked up her spear and began to search the room, hoping to find some sort of exit. The walls seemed to be whole, but it was hard to say, since the blasphemously distorted features made them difficult to explore. She took a few steps away from the wall, noticing that there seemed to be some sort of opening in the center of the floor. It appeared to be a hole, but at the edges of the hole, some four yards across, the heads became particularly prickly, eventually giving way to foot long, thick spikes.
She approached the hole gingerly, stepping on jaws and noses, eyes and ears. When she had come within a half dozen paces of the pit, she noticed a subtle motion within. A slender figure began to rise from the pit. As black as a moonless night sky, as lean as a starving wolf, the shape rose effortlessly and without visible means of support from the inky darkness beneath. It rose within arm’s length of the ceiling, twice as tall as Yao Ye but thin as a pole.
It twitched for a moment in the air, shuddering like a leaf in the wind, before it seemed to unfold above her. Delicate and paper thin, a set of six long and narrow wings slowly unwrapped and radiated out from its pure white, emaciated, corpselike body. From it’s ankles to its wrist and throat it was wrapped in thin iron chains, lashing the legs together but leaving the arms separate. It made not a sound when it rose and unfolded. As Yao Ye’s wide eyes slowly trailed up the body, the last thing she saw was its face. The pale skin seemed to be molded in the shape of an elderly gentleman, smiling gently down at her. It’s eyes, however, were not the eyes of any mortal man, for each of them was covered in a constant sheen of black ichor that dribbled out and trailed over its cheeks.
Yao Ye took a step back. Her heart thumped like a wild rabbit in her chest, but she held her ground.
The mouth opened. It spoke in a hollow, soft voice with melodious undertones.
“Are you The Savior?”
Yao Ye looked to her left and her right, then posited hesitantly, “Yes?”
“Then welcome, honored guest.” It bent at its waist slightly, and as it did the chains rattled ever so faintly, and a bass murmur seemed to escape from them.
Yao Ye frowned and flipped up her visor. “Wait, you don’t want to fight me?” At first her face was masked with confusion, but it quickly turned to rage. “No, this is not happening! You’re the demon, I’m the demonslayer. We’re gonna fight right this instant! Get down here!”
The kindly face, covered in oily tears, inclined ever so slightly toward her. “Then, you are not The Savior, and I must continue my vigil. You have entered the womb of the apocalypse, where none may depart till the beginning of the end. While we wait here, we pass the time with song and dance, for this is our way.” The smile spread slightly, revealing toothless gums. “Will you dance for me, plaything?”
Yao Ye gripped her shockpike tightly in her fists. “Shut up and die, you creepy malphean wierdo! But not too quickly... this is important!”
“Fear not. Your suffering will be truly epic, a symphony of sorrow that will be whispered by the metodies for millennia in the halls of Malpheas.” It spread it’s arms rapturously as it spoke, and as it did so a slender, smoking, brass baton materialized from the air in its left hand.
Yao Ye’s tiger grin spread across her face. “That’s what I wanted to hear,” she whispered, and leveled her pike to strike. As she did so, however, the demon lifted its left hand with a graceful motion and gestured toward the ground beneath her. As it did so, a ray of glittering obsidian flowed from the baton and struck the twisted faces. Each face touched by the black light opened its mouth with a sound like rotten fabric ripping, and each open mouth began to howl in a single pure tone. The noise slammed into her and hurled her into the air to smash against the ceiling and then fall with a thud to the floor.
She quickly pulled herself to her feet once more, hearing the clicking whir of the vitality-boosting subsystem as it began to infuse her battered limbs with essence. She gave a panting laugh and shouted, “Did you see that, Unconquered Sun? That hurt like anything, but I’m getting up. Want to give me a hand here?”
The demon wrapped its arms around its chest and cocked its head to one side. “Already mad, after the merest overture? No matter. My music has a remarkably sanative effect. Let me peal the delusions away from your psyche with a little... andante.”
The delicate hand waved again, this time in two quick sweeps. The horrible noise erupted simultaneously from both the ceiling and the floor, shearing across her and bodily lifting her in a flat spin to smash against the wall. Yao Ye blacked out for a moment.
A second later, she was awake. The powered armor forced the blood pooling in her legs back into her head. She could still feel the razor twinge of a cracked bone somewhere in her lower leg, but she ignored this out of hand. She stood again, leaning against the wall.
“Okay... that was a good one... with the noise that hurts and all that...” She stooped over and picked up her shockpike once more. No, she told herself. This still wasn’t half as desperate as the time she beat up that tiger guy. She needed more drama while she could still stand. “But you know, when I first saw you I thought that you were at least a second circle demon, but I have to admit, that training Eurymanthoi hit a lot harder.”
“A critic? Well, for mending my technique, I’ll reward you with a special composition of my own making.” The old man inhaled sharply, like fish gulping on dry air.
Yao Ye dropped into her stance. Under her breath she whispered a final prayer, as she recalled another important day in her training. It was always hard to focus on the lesson when Rivers was instructing, but she remembered the expression of compassion on his face as he spoke to them, and this unlocked the words from her memory.
“If you should run into a first circle demon, you’ll know them by their simple motives, their straightforward tactics. Alone, with your equipment, you stand a fair chance of surviving. Forget about it without your armor. If you have your team, there’s no contest.”
He leaned in close to them over the lunch table as he spoke his next words. Yao Ye tried to ignore his sparkling brown eyes and focus on what he was saying. “If you encounter a demon of the second circle, you are to immediately inform your team leader that she needs to summon the azure chariot. That is not optional.”
The man that would later become Cat-Eyed Dream said, “What if we don’t have a choice, or if the sorcerer has been injured?”
Rivers nodded. “Uh, hide? Whatever you do, don’t fight, or worse yet act in any way interesting. Among the fates that are worse than death, that would be one I would mark high on the list.”
Ara Suriman, the hill tribesman, said, “What if we encounter a demon of the third circle?”
She didn’t remember the rest, because she was too busy trying to maneuver herself over far enough that their knees could touch. At the moment, she knew there was only one way she could win this fight, and she couldn’t do it alone.
The demon began to writhe in its chains. Almost reflexively, she began to shout her battle chant, and as she shouted she stomped over the gruesome floor towards it. “I’m not here to save you or to listen to your crazy music talk. We are the... well...” She stopped for a moment, then marched onward. “I am a Daybringer, and I’m here to Do Good, Be Awesome...” At that point she began to run, and at the edge of the pit she leaped up at the thing. “...And Annihilate the...”
And at that moment, her shockpike intersected the body of the foul thing. The chains shattered, spraying outward and rebounding against her armor and walls. A tear formed in the fabric of the creature, stretching all the way from its throat to its groin, and as it opened black light poured out. It washed over her, but it did strike her. It filled her, but it did not lash her. For a moment, she felt her bones within her begin to vibrate and twist, as each one of them began to resonate with the music of the infernal. She quickly lashed upward with her pike, pushing off of the chamber’s ceiling so that she could escape from the hateful, cacophonous vortex, screaming as she fell... into the pit.
As she fell into the darkness, she saw the walls of spears flying past her, and the thought entered her mind: “I hope the bottom isn’t...”
And then she hit the bottom. Fortunately the spears were closely spaced, and she was sure that only one or two pierced the plating. She choked back a sob as the pain still writhed through her bones from the infernal melody, and she whispered to the walls a desperate plea this time.
“Where are you, Sun God?” She could hear the faintest of chuckles, like a grandfather laughing indulgently at the follies of his children. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Do you want me to kill demons, or do you want our Rivers sleeping with deathknights? It’s now or never...”
And then she saw a light in the darkness. Turning her head painfully to her side, (noticing the blinking red indicator in the display reminding her that her biorhythms were fluctuating at dangerous levels), she saw something floating in the pit with her. It was hard to see, for it flared with a piercing green light, but every second that passed it grew a little dimmer. The shape resolved itself into an enormous black hammer, as tall as Yao Ye and almost twice as thick. It was flat black, reflecting nothing, but she thought she could see some sort of tracery on its surface. As she looked at it, she heard a soft voice in her head.
“He won’t help you... But I will...”
She whispered, “who...”
“Take me. I am yours and I always was. I’ll give you the power you need, and more.”
She struggled against the spikes, slowly extricating herself. “Is there a price?” She tried to move the leg with the cracked bone, but it seemed to have resolved itself to being less than whole.
“Die now, or negotiate later.”
“I don’t negotiate with strange hammers in devil pits...” She looked up and saw that the demon was descending towards her, ever so slowly. “...but Yao Ye doesn’t die in this hole either.”
She reached out and grabbed the shaft of the hammer.
Immediately, green fire burst from the weapon. It melted the alloyed armor from her glove. It burned the padding underneath. When it touched her skin, she felt a jolt as cold as ice sliding into her, rolling up her arm and sliding just beneath her skin to the shoulder before stopping, her muscles tingling and twitching. Yao Ye lifted the grand goremaul before her, and it felt to her as light as air, as light as her own hand even. Suddenly, Yao Ye felt like fighting again.
The kindly voice above her had become a snarl. “Her? This flea? You wouldn’t dare demean...”
“SILENCE.” The voice came again, only louder this time, overpoweringly so. It drowned out the demon as a waterfall drowns out a brook.
“Quiet you! I do the talking!” She stood, waist deep in spikes, surprised to find that her leg would support her again. She experimentally tossed the hammer lightly in the air so that it spun three full revolutions before resting in her hand once more. The Daybringer turned to the winged thing. “Let’s finish this dance.”
She leaped, and this time as her hammer fell toward the black void it smashed through the dissonance with a sound like a hundred brass horns screaming the arrival of some horrible god-king. She barely heard herself shouting “Ghost Eating Technique!” as the giant tetsubo shattered the beast, its essence writhing through the hammer and into her like a rampaging bull. The excess essence burned within her, more than she could contain; she choked on the power for moment before it dissipated into the armor.
And she was alone in a big spikey pit. It was gone, as utterly as one of the most feared solar charms in all the spirit courts could make it.
Yao Ye, still dripping slightly from open wounds and standing heavily on her one good leg, turned to her new hammer and said, “Now let’s lay some ground rules. For starters, what’s your name?”
Silence filled the pit.
“Hey? I’m talking to you... hello? Magic hammer?”
Then the walls began to dissolve.
Selara rose from the lake for the fifth time, gasping into the air and lifting her visor. “I’m certain... there’s nothing down there, at least not that I can see right now. Except that strange structure...”
Toruna cut her off. “Which we are not entering. Any of us.”
Zhou Wing and Shu Zhuang stood by the lake shore. Wing paced nervously, perspiration dripping from his face. Old Zhuang bowed his head and muttered thick prayers in a constant stream, the resigned concern of a father written on his face. Dawn was just beginning to rise over the horizon, but the clouds of the previous day remained unbroken. The whole village was gathered by the lakeside, watching with growing anxiousness. When Wing had run back into the town, rousing his team from their beds, the rest of the people had quickly risen with them, hastily constructing makeshift rafts and pushing them out into the waters with long ropes and hooks, hoping to snag her and pull her to shore.
Wing cursed and spat out, “I knew I should have tackled her. Maybe I could have knocked her out... with a rock.”
Toruna shook her head angrily. “You couldn’t hurt her if you tried. Her spirit is too strong, and so is her amalgamation. It’s my fault. I knew she would resist. I have failed in my mission.”
She said the words so bitterly that the other three amalgams looked at her with surprise. Her face was still blank, as hard as glass, but she stared fixedly at the water. Thus it was Toruna who first noticed the signs of the change. She pointed and shouted tersely, “Look!”
Welling up from the depths, a black cloud rose, blossoming outward like a wall of foul smoke under the water. It filled the lake in the span of a minute and began staining the rock shore with each ripple that lapped in. Once it had filled the lake, something began to rise from it’s surface. A figure coated in the thick black substance emerged, dragging behind it a fantastically enormous tetsubo. As it rose, a sudden flash of light washed over the lake. Everyone in the village turned as one to the northeast, where a sudden green flare rose on the skyline and was gone in an instant.
The black shape continued to walk up the shore, limping heavily on one leg. As it left the water, it reached up and flicked open the visor on the helmet. Yao Ye panted out, “Um... sorry about all this...”
Toruna opened her mouth to speak, but Zhou Wing forcefully stepped in front of her. “You! How could you...”
“I know. I messed up... I should’ve waited...” She was panting heavily, her eyes downcast. “I didn’t mean to ruin the lake... and bust up the armor... and lose the pike... and...”
A flock of birds nesting by the lakeside took flight. Shu Zhuang’s eye’s flew wide open, and Selara put her hand in front of her mouth in shock. Villagers nearby gasped as the imprint of Wing’s hand began to appear in deep red on the side of Yao Ye’s face.
Shaking his pale fist in her face, Wing struggled to turn his rage into words. “Don’t you know how worried we’ve been, what you put us through? After all the time... and... I’m never speaking to you again!”
And Wing walked away from the shore and the girl, back through the village. Yao Ye put her hand up to her face, stunned more than hurt, and whispered softly, “Zhou Wing?” She sank slowly to her knees and leaned back against the hammer.
Selara looked at Toruna. “Where did that hammer come from? What’s going on here?”
Toruna spoke flatly, “This is very bad.” Shu Zhuang nodded his head.
Selara said, “I know, the village will have to be moved, and there’s no telling what that light meant.”
The sorceress turned to watch the healer walking away and said, “Those may be the least of our problems.”
