The Eighth King (The White Umbrella Testament Book 1) Read online

  A Division of Whampa, LLC

  P.O. Box 2160

  Reston, VA 20195

  Tel/Fax: 800-998-2509

  http://curiosityquills.com

  © 2017 Matt Weber

  http://www.cobblerandbard.com/

  Cover Art by Eugene Teplitsky

  http://eugeneteplitsky.deviantart.com/

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information about Subsidiary Rights, Bulk Purchases, Live Events, or any other questions - please contact Curiosity Quills Press at [email protected], or visit http://curiosityquills.com

  ISBN 978-1-62007-957-7 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-62007-969-0 (paperback)

  Start Reading

  About the Author

  More Books from Curiosity Quills Press

  Full Table of Contents

  from the Corps of Celestial Stenographers

  On the hundredth anniversary of the Pongyo Gorge massacre, this retrospective of the event and its antecedents was vouchsafed to the corps of Celestial Stenographers by the White Umbrella Deity. The report appeared as a perfect scroll of unperforated fan-fold paper, with engagement holes edged in gold leaf and characters printed in a typeface of unusual grace and beauty, which disappeared in tiny bursts of silver lightning, dot by dot, even as they were transcribed. The Deity declined to explicate her actions; when asked for identification, she struck the supervising clerk dumb and branded the foreheads of the receiving staff with the mark of an effulgent golden wheel. After some deliberation, the Celestial Stenographers have elected to release this centennial commentary on the Thousand Arm Testament unabridged.

  Protecting the cabbage-cart

  id you ever notice,” said the swordsman with the cat’s step, “that all the best villains come in twos?”

  His companion did not immediately respond; she was making a note of something in a script too perfect to be handwriting, yet too expressive to be print. The cat-walking swordsman blithely elaborated: “The Laughing Duke and the Grim Dauphine, The Curious Twins, the Wer-Tiger and the Laundress—” This last with a wink.

  “You know I don’t read that sort of trash.” The scribe put no particular inflection on the word “trash,” uttering it rather as she might a perfectly inoffensive noun, like “bowl” or “pagoda.”

  “You should.” The cat-walking swordsman stretched both arms out wide and arched his back, and though his yawn was not needle-fanged, it gave the impression that perhaps it might once have been, or one day be so. “It gives you a sense of your place in things. There’s nothing new, you know. It behooves you to learn from your forebears.”

  “I never seem to grasp the thrust of these discussions,” said the scribe. “My duties are clear enough without literary referents.”

  The crossroads nudged up over the horizon—a rare sight among the Rafters of the World, peak-ridged and canyon-rent. The sun was sinking in the west; a late-spring dusk was gathering, pleasant enough but beginning to ripen with summer heat. It perhaps need not be mentioned that neither the swordsman nor the scribe was so much as misted with sweat.

  “I am not sure I like being called a villain, though,” the scribe added at last.

  “Heroes don’t scheme,” said the cat-walking swordsman.

  “We are agents of law.”

  “We’re agents of the Judge.”

  “Don’t split hairs,” murmured the scribe, touching the tip of the quill’s plume to the corner of her mouth.

  “Don’t make spurious elisions.”

  The scribe looked up from her note-taking at the phrase. Her gaze met the swordsman’s in an old dance, amusement veiled in skepticism circling around waggishness concealing eagerness to please. They had the good sense to cut that dance off after a few bars, as they always did.

  “I will always regret schooling you in letters,” sighed the scribe, returning to her work. “You have no sense for the turn of phrase. Your discourse reminds one of a village fireworks show—so ill-arranged, even the flashes of brilliance seem awkward.”

  “Consistency is a virtue in writing, Secretary, but not in all things.” The cat-walking swordsman made no special flourish to provoke his companion, as he might; but here a mortal observer would have found his gaze drawn to the battered hilt of the man’s straight blade, filigreed with the stylized body of a rat—the weapon’s blade met the hilt where the rat’s head would have begun. (We use the male pronoun non-generically, for no woman would have wasted her time watching these two when she could have saved her life and run away. Or, in any case, few women; we are aware of exceptions.) “Some of us rely on volatility. Another example of what makes us a good pair. Your power lies in complementarity and suasion, mine in opposition and brute force.”

  “In my records,” said the scribe, “I have summaries of at least three but no more than seven philosophies of the fence, issued by you in various altered states of mind, to which you have been adherent for intervals ranging from three weeks to the better part of a century. All espouse notions of complementarity and suasion, specifically highlighting their superiority to the tactics of opposition and brute force to which you now claim to subscribe.”

  “The Lotus,” groaned the swordsman, “it is impossible to converse when one’s interlocutor exhumes every lapse of judgment in a lifetime’s catalogue! Do I hector you so?”

  “You have not the prehensility of recall that I have cultivated, nor am I encumbered with your checkered portfolio of deeds.”

  “It is difficult to say which has given me more pleasure in life—my poor recall or my checkered deeds.”

  “It hardly matters which you choose,” said the scribe. “The answer will change, no doubt, within the hour.”

  The cat-walking swordsman thought on his rejoinder until the moment for rejoinders had passed, then shrugged in acknowledgement of its passing. They walked in a companionable silence, a pace apart, and although their strides seemed neither stretched nor rushed, they drew up on the crossroads rather faster than a trotting horse might have managed.

  “Complementarity is key, of course, for villains,” said the cat-walking swordsman, “which is why you and I are so well-fitted to the role. I rather fear for the efficacy of my villainy as a solo actor. But I think what I will miss most is the dread that an appropriately menacing dialogue can inspire in its witnesses. There is something sinister in the first and third person that vanishes with direct apostrophe. How many good men have we brought to their knees merely by discussing veiled hypotheticals?”

  “If by ‘good men’ you refer to scofflaws and other undesirables,” said the scribe, “thirty have kneeled to beg clemency after such discussions, and seven have gone past their knees to abase themselves entirely. Of the seventeen further who have fainted, six fell forward, bringing their knees in contact with the ground by physiological and kinematic necessity—”

  “This grandstanding ill suits you, Unerring.”

  “I have not yet spoken of the two legless men,” said the scribe, “or the dragon.”

  “These incidents are graven in my mind and do not require rehearsal,” said the cat-walking swordsman.

  “In answer to your question, though: The three good men who knelt before us were laboring under a misapprehension.”

  The swordsman made a noise of disgust or disbelief. “You forget, Secretary! We had the entire village of Ganda worshipping us as gods!”

  “That was the very misapprehension,” said the scribe, “and Ganda was not rich with men of quality.”

  At last, the pair set foot where the roads met. Signs indicated th
e direction from which they had come: Degyen; and where, continuing, they would proceed: Therku; and where an eastward turn would take them, Tanggang & the Garden, or a western, Rassha. Four bushes of winter jasmine decorated the intersection, one at each corner; at the south corner, a man with a grey goatee slept under a cabbage-cart. “Sleeping at a crossroads,” the swordsman said with a noise of disgust. “At dusk, no less? He begs to be menaced.”

  “This is a secular age,” said the scribe, “and not everyone has time to read ghost stories at their leisure. In any case, we are not ghosts.”

  “Well, I know a few.”

  “Your necromancies are inapposite and of questionable efficacy,” said the scribe. “You must learn to discipline yourself in the weeks to come, Retainer. I cannot do it for you.”

  “She says ‘weeks’ and thinks she does a mercy,” said the swordsman. “But the cat knows better. It will be more than weeks, my dear. The Judge spoke bravely, as a great man knows he must—but he is not ready.” His body undulated with a supple shrug. “And neither are we. This King was well loved, and the mice whisper that he mastered the Reflecting Pool Mind before his death.”

  “He is dead, though,” said the scribe, “which hampers its application.”

  The swordsman gave her an annoyed glare. “Your japes are harelipped and incongruous. Its application is irrelevant. It is the whispers that are of concern. They only strengthen his grip on the people’s fancy.”

  The scribe looked long and level at the cat-walking swordsman. “You forget, Retainer. We had the entire village of Ganda worshipping us as gods.”

  “It is easier to be worshipped for an hour than believed for a day,” said the swordsman. “In any case, I am informed that Ganda was not rich with men of quality.”

  “And these provinces are? Not a moment ago you pronounced them full of mice.”

  “I do grow bored with all this talk of consistency,” said the swordsman, “though doubtless it will amuse me again in moments.”

  “I will not wait for those moments to elapse,” said the scribe. “We must part.”

  The swordsman grinned a familiar grin. “You go. I shall conjure a balm for your departure by terrifying this cabbage-monger until his hair goes white.”

  “No,” said the scribe. “I have said you must learn to do without this nonsense. You will leave the crossroads first, and I will protect this worthy peasant from your depredations.”

  “Bah,” said the swordsman. “He is of no account.”

  “We no longer have the leisure of sporting with men of no account. Our lazy centuries are done, Jhan. We can no longer be spendthrift of decades; we must reattune ourselves to the rhythms of men’s lives.”

  “To call them ‘rhythms’ is a surfeit of euphemism,” said the swordsman, with a gesticulation that wrapped the entire plain in scorn; prey-rodents hid in their holes, and two starving vultures took to the air, heckling, from some bear’s abandoned kill. “Men’s lives are sordid, frantic things, no more rhythmic than the scrabblings of rats at the walls of a marble basin, slowly filling—”

  “Enough.” The scribe allowed into her voice a minim of reverberation. “Such gassy metaphor ill becomes the Judge’s retainer, and it is always gratuitous to terrorize animals. How much more of this bootless mummery will you force me to record?”

  “Oh, rather little,” said the swordsman; and, with no more apparent effort than it took to raise himself on tiptoe, he leapt perhaps a quarter-mile into the air. The scribe watched him trace an elegant arc through the darkening sky, then land a tiny, perfect silhouette painted by the sinking sun. Her eyes were good enough to see his sword flash sunset-red in a far-off salute, and to see him turn and strut down that branching dirt road for a moment before it turned behind a hill.

  She was put off balance for a moment by the suddenness of her partner’s exit. When she had regained her composure, which did not take long, she spent a few minutes composing a report of the evening’s events; in this, as usual, she was entirely accurate in her portrayal of the cat-walking swordsman but lavished no special detail on his words or actions. That accomplished, she arranged her quill and ink, her papers, and the good wood slate on which she flattened those papers when she wrote, placing them all in a pocketed strip of leather which she had fashioned for that purpose. She folded it closed and tied it with a thong, as she often did—but this time she bound it tight and tied a good, strong knot that would not fall open at a pull. She looked once more down the road that the swordsman had taken, waiting patiently to make sure he would not return. When she was confident that he had truly left, she dug in a pocket of her dress and drew out two small, bright things, rather smaller than her smallest fingertip, which she quickly secured, one each, to the trailing ends of the thong that constricted her writing implements.

  With all in order, she closed her eyes, drew a deep breath through her nose, and opened her eyes again. She then walked over to the cabbage cart and kicked it over, opening a great ragged hole in its floor as though some great beast had bitten it and filling the sky with a geyser of splinters and shredded cabbage. Needless to say, this swift vandalism resulted in a fearsome rending sound; the cabbage-monger sat bolt upright for a few terrified moments before the plummeting rear axle of his wagon robbed him of consciousness. When he awoke, he would remember seeing a woman of considerable symmetry and polish, dressed in an elegant but faintly unfashionable qipao, although the details of her aspect would never return to his memory, not even in his deathbed dreams; even the color of her silks would evade him. But never, for some reason, would that cabbage-monger forget the glinting ornaments that tipped the thong around the leather satchel in her arms, ornaments whose weight and luster belied the true gold of their substance, though their style was typical of cheap brass baubles: a mouse, whose carved face held terror admixed with a dissonant trace of exultation, and on the other end, with exultation and terror in opposite proportions, a cat.

  The King’s Mandala

  Whirlwind of Tigers

  t happened, in the reign of the latter King Tenshing Astama, that the holy city of Rassha, then capital of this nation of Uä that makes its home in the Rafters of the World, was besieged by a pretender to the Orchid Throne. This was not Rassha’s first siege, nor even its first pretender, and it suffered from no excess of vulnerability; its walls were thick enough, its towers high enough, and its pantries full enough, whereas recent events had badly depleted the stores of the surrounding farms of the Great South Plain and soured the farmsteaders on military affairs. Nonetheless, as winter waned, the call went out for loyal fighting men. That call was given voice by the boxers of the Green Morning, who slipped past the Pretender’s armies under cover of night—or, in the case of Phog the Lesser, duelled a champion for the right of passage at each camp he came upon, after which all men of the gallant fraternity knew him as Oaken Skull. It went out to the inner provinces, of course, of Imja, Gyachun, and Dhakamma, posted on hand-calligraphed bills and echoed in the lurching typefaces of the new press-printed broadsheets; and it went to the outlying provinces, then called the Plums, of Therku, Degyen, Tanggang, and Shrastaka, where it spread hold by hold and keep by keep, routed through the tiny towns that then were little more than single streets separating the post and depot from the public house. And it was not long before the proprietor of one such depot in Tanggang (who had spoken directly with Phog the Oaken Skull, before the latter’s storied campaign) passed the call to a bondsman of Shrastaka come to purchase six new barrels for the Vineyard of the Flying Tiger. That bondsman passed it along to his employer, the vintner, who had three sons. The vintner heard it solemnly, and spent a portion of that evening in grave conversation with his wife, and an equal portion in prayer (which went, as was the custom at the time, unanswered), after which he raised the issue with his youngest son, Kunsang, over their breakfast of dried grapes and milk tea. Once raised, the issue was as good as settled—which is why the vintner contemplated so vigorously before he raised it, for fath
ers understand that their children’s enthusiasms are not always well-advised—and on the next day, a horse and rider left the gates of the Vineyard of the Flying Tiger just before the sun began to crest the horizon, making fine silhouettes of the towers of the Orchid Palace over the walls of Rassha, which could be seen on clear days thrusting through the foothills to the north.

  A few words are necessary to describe Kunsang as he was at that time—a few, because he was young, and uncomplicated in the way of the young, especially those who have grown up in some comfort. He had a good figure, strong but lean and of a pleasant height, with thick hair that flowed pleasantly in the wind when he sat ahorse; a good mind, though little inclined to the detail-work of making or selling wine; a good character, which allowed him to apply the powers of his mind and body toward that which he viewed as their highest use, which was the practice of boxing and the fence. In addition, he was possessed of a good bearing—which was wasted, in his view, on the women of Shrastaka, who (in his mind) were preoccupied with blood and gold to the exclusion of those higher qualities which, in time, would elevate the one and attract the other; good breeding, which served principally to convey to Kunsang a sense of frustrated entitlement, although his line was connected to the landed gentry only through a long-dead third son and had thus been dispossessed for centuries; and good training, with meritorious fluency in the spear, halberd, and broadsword, the last of which was his preferred mode of the fence, to say nothing of the Lion and Dragon forms of boxing. To put it even more succinctly, then, he was able but unaccomplished; he was good but he had not done good.

  However, before we continue, it must be conceded that the rider who left the Vineyard of the Flying Tiger that morning was not Kunsang. If it seems disingenuous of us to have described him in this context—intending, as we so evidently do, to follow that rider into the tale that follows, or perhaps awaits—well, we have done so only because such a description is easily credited when applied to the eager young son of a minor scion. And, as it happens, it is an accurate enough description of the rider as well, for that shadowed individual was easily Kunsang’s equal in figure, bearing, and breeding; whereas it must be said that Kunsang’s agility of mind, tenacity of character, and fighting polish had been learned, in large part, from that dawntide rider, who possessed all in yet greater measure. Her name was Datang, the vintner’s third child and first daughter, and although she too was lean and well-formed, her hair, which she kept cut above her jawline, did not flow. She preferred the bow and straight sword to the broadsword, and counted the Ape and Owl forms among her conquests alongside the Lion and Dragon, and only Kunsang knew that she had begun her study of the martial rigors with the elements of the Crane’s Migration Step.