Phoenix extravagant, p.18
Phoenix Extravagant, page 18
I need her to get out of here, anyway, Jebi thought, although they knew the real reason they weren’t about to betray their lover. Or more than they already had, anyway; they were starting to lose track.
Hafanden closed his eyes for a long moment, opened them. Gave Vei a searching look. “You can run,” Hafanden said, “but you can’t go far. And I know what you know.”
“That may be the case,” Vei replied, with that old-fashioned courtliness upon her, like a vassal to a lord in the storybooks. “What you know of me, Deputy Minister, is not the sum of who I am.”
“I never thought otherwise,” he murmured.
“Safe passage,” Vei said, implacable. “Sworn on the blood of your ancestors. Or I will run you through here and now, and take my chances that you’ll stop protecting those artists you find worthy.” Her voice dipped contemptuously on the last word.
“Fine,” Hafanden said. “I swear it on the blood of my ancestors.” And he leaned on his cane and waved them off with despicable calm.
“Your first mistake was coming down here yourself, you know,” Vei said. She wasn’t done yet. “The keys.”
“Which ones?”
“Don’t play coy, Deputy Minister.” Vei nodded at Arazi.
{Now,} Jebi said.
Arazi brought its great head down before Vei, equal to equal.
“We’re not going to be able to smuggle the dragon out in pieces,” Jebi said. “There won’t be time.” Sooner or later someone would realize that Hafanden hadn’t been seen in some time and come looking for him.
Hafanden’s mouth tightened. Then he handed over a key ring. “You’ll regret freeing the dragon,” he warned Vei and Jebi. “Whatever you think you’ve done, you can’t trust that thing loose.”
Ignoring him, Vei unlocked the dragon’s chains. It took longer than Jebi liked, and they couldn’t help fretting, wondering if Hafanden had signaled reinforcements, oath or no oath, and they would all die in the earth’s womb after all.
Arazi held still the entire time, until the last of the locks clicked free. Then it shook itself like a cat waking from a long sleep, and arched its neck toward Hafanden. Hafanden, give him that much credit, didn’t flinch.
“I have prepared for this,” Arazi said, this time out loud, in a voice like the music of metal on metal.
Before Jebi could ask what the hell it meant by prepared, the entire dragon collapsed in on itself, like an avalanche. Jebi’s hands flew up to their mouth as they swallowed a sob. “Arazi, no,” they gasped.
Vei’s fingers dug into Jebi’s arm. “Wait,” she said.
To Jebi’s astonishment, the dragon’s individual components reassembled themselves into several disparate mechanical spiderlings. Jebi was torn between fascination and queasiness. They’d never stopped to think about the implications of Arazi’s machine nature. A human couldn’t have reshaped themselves like this, puzzle-fashion; but apparently Arazi’s design, or some cleverness of its own devising, allowed it to accomplish this.
“Arazi?” Jebi whispered. “Are you still there?”
“We are following,” a multitude of voices said; one for every one of the spiderlings.
Jebi tried, and failed, to suppress the shiver that crawled down their skin. Sorry, they thought guiltily. They’d never liked spiders. But they could apologize later. {Why couldn’t you do this earlier?}
{The chains,} Arazi said. {You didn’t think they’d use ordinary chains to hold a magical creation, did you?}
“We need to get out of here,” Vei said crisply. “Follow me.” In an undertone, she added, “Hafanden will already have raised the alarm. We’ll have to move quickly and leave no survivors.”
Jebi quailed at the finality in Vei’s tone. “There’s no other—” They swallowed the rest of the sentence. What had they expected? That they’d be able to foment revolution without getting any blood on their hands?
The first part of their escape went easily—too easily. Hafanden had denuded most of the Summer Palace of its guards. This only meant, as Vei remarked, that the guards were gathering elsewhere to ensnare them.
The spiderlings—Jebi scrabbled for a better word, then decided it was a problem for a less hectic time—threw uncanny, many-angled shadows against the walls of the corridors and the rough-hewn floors. It seemed, at times, that the shadows wove a calligraphy both ancient and new, describing wonders and terrors from an age just out of their reach. Jebi told themself to pay less attention to their imagination—difficult when their head ached and the fever still burned within them—and more to Vei, who was leading the way.
Under other circumstances, Jebi would have gladly leaned on Vei. She was strong enough to support what was left of Jebi’s weight. But this time Vei had her sword out in earnest, and Jebi didn’t want to foul her sword arm when they ran into more of Hafanden’s people.
Jebi tried several times to count the junctures and turnings and stairwells before giving up. They could have blamed the distracting clattering notes that Arazi’s spiderlings made as they skittered in Vei’s wake, but the truth was they could have been in the shade of a willow in a perfectly landscaped garden with the breeze blowing and they would have gotten distracted anyway, given their current condition. After the—fourth? fifth?—time the entourage turned left, Jebi gave up and focused instead on staying upright.
At last, perhaps nearer the surface world, perhaps not, they encountered guards.
“It figures he’d pick this bottleneck,” Vei muttered, perhaps for Jebi’s benefit. Jebi had no idea how tactics and terrain worked other than very basic concepts like keep the high ground, which everyone knew from childhood play, and if the enemy has you surrounded, you’re fucked, a basic principle in baduk, which the Razanei called go. In particular, they had no idea how to apply maxims like those to real-world situations, unlike Vei.
The guard captain—Jebi recognized the insignia, even if they couldn’t quite place their face—saluted Vei ironically. Jebi was more concerned about the troops backing them up. Ordinarily Jebi was good at estimating the number of people from a glance, but their head ached so much. Twenty? Fifty? Something in between?
“I request your surrender, Duelist Prime,” the captain said. “We’ve sent to the military for reinforcements. You can’t hope to escape.”
“Hope, no,” Vei said with an equanimity Jebi wished they shared. “Plan, yes.”
It would be nice if you’d divulged this plan to me, they thought.
Still, just because Vei had plans of her own—whatever they were—didn’t mean Jebi couldn’t contribute. While Vei and the captain exchanged words that Jebi could hardly puzzle out, mostly because they’d never had a head for military jargon, Jebi knelt and scooped up some of the dirt. At least there was dirt, here in one of the less-used passageways.
I am going to look very stupid if this doesn’t work.
What the hell. Very stupid was better than very dead if they didn’t help. Considering that Vei was facing off against cold steel on their behalf, they would never forgive themself if they let the guards cut her down.
A flicker at the edge of Jebi’s peripheral vision and shouts told them that the fight had begun, but they had no attention to spare for specifics. Besides, they knew from experience that Vei moved in a blur and didn’t stop moving until everyone was down. It wasn’t as though Jebi could call out useful tips; everything they knew about the sword arts could be written on a pimple.
It took all their self-control to let the clamor of battle fall away around them. Jebi dug in the bag for the mortar and pestle, and the precious supply of Phoenix Extravagant. They spat into the mortar, mixed the spittle with the pigment and scraped chunks of dirt. Who had known that their recent adventures in mud-painting would serve as practice for battle art?
Visualizing the glyphs in their mind before setting fingers to the wall’s cool surface, Jebi began painting. They didn’t have access to the wider variety of pigments in the workshop anymore, but they had the few rare pigments that Vei had liberated, and they knew that dirt didn’t come from nowhere. The life of everything that lived and moved eventually returned to the earth; they’d even heard stories of ancient creatures trapped in the earth. They’d seen traces of those fossils in the excavated passageways. Surely some of those long-ago creatures’ virtue haunted the dusty leavings? It was worth a try, anyway.
Jebi’s experience with the combat-oriented glyphs was more theoretical than practical, despite their sessions with Nehen. They’d never liked the idea of writing grammars to harm people—and who else would they be targeting but people, since the other side didn’t have automata of their own? They didn’t want to kill anyone, just scare the guards off and deter them from following them and Vei and Arazi.
Jebi ran out of mud; made some more, grimacing at the taste of dirt, the texture of grit between their teeth. But Vei was still fighting—they heard another shout, recoiled—and they had to do their best. Was that thud a body falling? Or something else?
—don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it—
More mud. More glyphs. They had to connect them in particular ways, arrange everything with the same care as a geomancer arranging furniture to ensure a building’s good luck, or plants for a garden’s fortunes, or even a nation’s. Connect the pieces, and build in a break—suggest an eruption.
This isn’t working, Jebi thought as they dragged their fingers across the stone to complete the last curve. I’ve fucked it up.
And then the earth trembled.
Even though Jebi had hoped for this, they mistook the shaking for the unsteadiness of their own limbs at first. Then the tremors increased in intensity, and they knew their art had summoned the magic they required. They’d called for rupture and breakage, the hard sharp spill of cracks in the otherwise stable earth.
Vei kept her balance—Jebi spotted her an impossible distance ahead in the passageway, a wake of bodies behind her like a fanciful train. Like a red peacock, Jebi couldn’t help thinking. The phrase kept repeating itself in their head, a refrain that wouldn’t go away. They slumped against the wall, spent; saw blood on their hands. They must have scraped the skin off their fingers without realizing it—not much of an injury, but it had already been a taxing day, and the smell of all those bodies made them feel faint.
The Razanei reacted much more frantically, although Jebi heard their cries as through a curtain of mist. It took Jebi another few moments to recognize the word they were shouting to each other, one they’d rarely heard: “Earthquake!”
I outsmarted myself, Jebi thought as the walls buckled and the Razanei trampled the dead in their haste to get out of the way. The Razanei dreaded earthquakes, even built their temples and dwellings to withstand them. Jebi knew that much from the novels. But despite its proximity to Razan, Hwaguk was geologically stable; Jebi hadn’t heard of any earthquakes in Hwaguk even in the oldest lore and legends.
Maybe, given the Razanei’s alarm, they should run, too. If this was a sensible application of magic, as opposed to a fucking dangerous one, the Razanei would have been using it all along. After all, what if the entire Summer Palace collapsed and buried them alive? Arazi would survive, but Jebi found themself hyperventilating at the prospect of being entombed in this of all places. Dying with the stink of corpses in their nostrils. What a way to go.
Vei had grasped the peril while Jebi was still dazed, and dashed back for them. “Tell Arazi to follow us,” she said. “We have to get out of here before this place collapses!”
Jebi was wracked by a coughing fit triggered by the dust in the air, but Arazi seemed to get the idea. The spiderlings scampered over the heaving floor and up towards the surface, visible as a faint sky-colored gash in the ceiling, with an agility that Jebi could only envy.
Vei grabbed Jebi’s arm and dragged them. Jebi twisted their ankle on a protruding chunk of rock that hadn’t been there one second ago, whimpered. Before their dazzled eyes, the Summer Palace was falling apart.
Jebi hobbled as fast as they could, still coughing and spitting out dirt. As they scrabbled past the tumbling walls they thought they heard the keening of a long-ago dragon from the deeps. But they broke through to the surface and its sweet chilly air, and collapsed in relief when they’d gotten clear of the artificial earthquake.
FIFTEEN
“WAKE UP,” JEBI heard a soft, worried voice saying over and over again.
Don’t wanna, they thought, refusing to squeeze their eyes open. Their head hurt as though someone had split it with an axe. The axe would have been preferable. If they’d died, they wouldn’t be in pain. Jebi had the impression that the honored ancestors didn’t go in for trivial inconveniences like headaches.
Firm, strong hands propped them halfway up. Jebi groaned in protest.
“Now I know you’re awake,” the voice said, coming into focus. Vei. “Come on, Jebi.”
“I don’t have any projects due right now,” Jebi mumbled, which might or might not have been true. “Lemme get some more sleep.”
“Jebi,” Vei said again. “I need to know you’re all right.”
“Be all right if you let me sleep.”
“I need to know you’re all right.”
Their escape from the Summer Palace returned to them in fragments and snatches. The flash of steel, the mud paintings, the waking of the earth. The way the whole complex had collapsed like a giant’s fist had closed around it.
A different voice interjected, “Maybe they’d like something to drink.”
“Yes, Ajummae,” Vei said, her voice revealing exhaustion.
Jebi’s eyes flew open at the intrusion. Where are we now?
Vei had installed them in a spacious room with the view of the exit obscured by a set of folding screens. The screens featured a lattice motif that Jebi had seen in older Hwagugin homes, not the flowers and butterflies that were popular today. “What?” they asked intelligently.
The ajummae in question was a middle-aged person whose asymmetrical haircut, however old-fashioned, indicated they were a geu-ae like Jebi, or didn’t mind being mistaken for one. Jebi couldn’t remember the last time they’d seen a person of that age in clothes quite so colorful. Their jacket featured stripes of red, yellow, and green, in the style for the young.
“Who are you?” Jebi demanded. Their hands flew to their mouth. What was wrong with them? Besides the headache, anyway.
“You’re probably disoriented,” the ajummae said with the kind of brisk kindness that Jebi associated with older relatives. “I’m Namgyu, one of Vei’s parents. Her mother is preparing some food for your journey, and Captain Dzuge Keizhi is out looking for signs of Armor’s watchers. He was grateful for a break from his paperwork, anyway.”
“The automata—”
Vei restrained Jebi from sitting all the way up, which was just as well, because the headache was suddenly throbbing with renewed ferocity. “We don’t have much time,” she said, “but I came to my father’s manse for help.”
Jebi squinted blearily at her. “I didn’t know you were still in touch with your father.” That must be the Captain Dzuge whom Namgyu had referred to. They’d assumed that Vei must be estranged from him, since she’d never mentioned him before.
Vei shook her head. “Who do you think taught me the art of the sword? He’s retired now due to a battle injury: lost most of one leg to gangrene.”
“I’d never thought about it,” Jebi admitted. But that was true: swordplay at Vei’s level wasn’t something one picked up by studying on the weekends, or taking lessons from itinerant swordmasters. You needed real expertise.
“One of my first memories is of my father letting me try to lift his sword,” Vei said, tranquil. “I couldn’t, of course. Then he had one of his retainers bring a wooden practice sword for me. I was so disappointed that I wouldn’t get one with an edge yet. Then he had them bring out a chicken, and he killed it right in front of me. There was so much blood.”
“Did you eat the chicken?” Jebi asked, because tact was not a thing that happened when they had a headache.
“Of course,” Vei said. “Soldiers know not to waste food. It was a stringy old bird, but that wasn’t the point. He wanted me to take the blade seriously; to know that killing is something you can’t ever take back, and that I’d have to learn it anyway. Because I was an officer’s bastard, and I had two Hwagugin parents.”
Jebi noticed, even in their current state, that she didn’t say Fourteener.
“I’m the third,” Namgyu said, their eyes crinkling, “although that part is less well known.” They raised their voice. “Hyeja, do you need help with the food?”
“It’s just about ready,” an alto called back.
“That’s my mother,” Vei added, helpfully. “Sorry you have to meet my family all at once.”
“There aren’t more?” Jebi asked.
A woman with a deceptively youthful face entered with a tray of porridge. This smelled good—especially after what they’d served in the Summer Palace—with savory hints of chicken. She affected Western dress, an elaborate satin gown trimmed with ribbons and ruffles, and necklaces of baroque pearls.
Bongsunga would have had words for people like Namgyu and Hyeja, none of them polite. For their part, Jebi noticed the way Namgyu’s eyes softened as they regarded Hyeja, and the other way around. It didn’t take very close observation to sense the love they had for each other. If that affection encompassed Vei’s father as well, it was an unusual arrangement, but not one unheard of, at least in Hwaguk.
Hyeja set the tray down on the table next to Jebi. She must have guessed the direction of their thoughts, for she said, “If you’re wondering if this is acceptable in Razan, the answer is no, not under terms that we would have found livable. The officers and nobles take concubines as they choose. But lovers as equals—that would be hard to explain. It’s one of the reasons the captain decided to stay with the occupation.”
“I wasn’t planning on asking,” Jebi lied.
Hyeja’s eyes crinkled. “Eat. I’ve packed up some food for you and Vei to take on your journey.”
