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

  “And from there, where?”

  “From there, we take the royal post, and secure our own safety. I would be grateful to know the locations of any of the Pretender’s rearguard outside the Plain, if there is one, but we can glean that ourselves if need be.”

  “All fine,” said the Ape impatiently, “but you have not told me your destination.”

  “Can it matter? Rassha is besieged; the Khodon Pass is too defensible for any of the King’s minor armies to break through. This has always been the way in Uä.”

  “It was not the way in the Green Morning,” said the Ape. “Men had courage enough to fight over the pass, and died like flies for their trouble—but more than one general broke through.”

  “And then what?”

  The Glib Ape chuckled. “That is fair enough. I believe the only general ever to break through the pass and go on to win his war was Red Tenshing, when Rassha was no more than one of these farming-towns—and not the greatest of them, at that. But he had the blood of the man who buried the Worm, and he commanded the Rigors even then. The plainsmen rose up and tore through the Duke of Dhaul’s rear like—” He paused in thought, then shook his head and chuckled. “Well, the reference is before your time. Those peasants were mown down like hay as well, you know. But a man can choke to death in a haystack.”

  “Spoken like a natural campaigner.” The Ape gave her a dark look but did not reply. “Well, I do not boast Red Tenshing’s command of the Rigors, and the plainsmen do not dance to my tune. May I keep my destination a secret?”

  The Glib Ape grew serious again. “You may. Only—”

  “Yes?”

  “If it is my tent, and you have only insisted on this enigmatic attitude to build suspense, you may find me too cross to welcome your advances.”

  “And the sun may impale itself on the Poisoned Peak tomorrow; but fencers deal in probabilities.” She elected not to repress the smile that teased her lips. “I would not do such a thing, though. I have no skill at the coquette’s game.”

  “You underestimate yourself.” He ran a hand through sloppy hair. “I confess, Left Hand, I offered you this option, and I will honor it, but I did not think you would take it. For you to stay in Rassha—well, that is a danger to your life, the more so in light of your battle valor and lust for glory, for I will have this city; and, if I do not, you may well take the field in chastisement. But at least you would be nearby, and I could find you and speak to you again once the affair was concluded. I did not think it likely that you would join me in my tent—but I did not think you would go where I cannot find you. I am not easy with it.”

  “Ah, Glib Ape,” Datang said lightly, although she was surprised to find herself sincerely touched. “There is nothing to worry about. When your doomed bid fails, you will be imprisoned; and when your army disperses, I will be free to return to Rassha and visit you in the catacombs beneath the Orchid Palace. If you love me so, surely my taunts through the bars will be like music to your ears.”

  “A symphony,” said the Ape. “I would welcome the day. But it will not come.”

  Datang sighed. “You do know I will report your presence?”

  “I would expect no less from a corporal of the Cerulean Guard.” The Ape gave a yellowed grin. “You have come far in the world since your giant catamite laid me out with that sucker-shot.”

  “So much the worse for you.” Datang’s thoughts snagged again on a question that had nettled them more than once. “Ape, when turned we from libation to dormition at the Typical Moniker, you knew my allegiance. Moreover, you knew my value, and you had several hours in which I was irreconcilable to waking life; yet I left on my own horse, free and unrestrained. Yet when next we met, in the western foothills, you tried to capture me. Why not before?”

  “Drink as a friend, then don enemy’s colors under cloak of night?” the Glib Ape asked with a shock deliberately ill-feigned. “What gallantry in that?”

  “Forgive me,” said Datang, “if I do not see you as a man much constrained by gallantry.”

  “A keen perception,” said the Ape, “save where gallant she-fencers are concerned. Suchlike, in my experience, find gallantry in men attractive.”

  It is conventional, in recounting such exchanges, to describe the woman’s reaction as involuntary: A blush, a flustered phrase, the urge to smile somehow subjugating the will to equanimity. To be sure, such responses are hues in good standing on the palette of human experience. Yet, in this instance, it must be said that Datang chose the breadth of her grin and its duration with perfect forethought; and, with forethought, that its breadth was wide, and its duration long indeed. “Experience is the midwife of wisdom, to hear the sages tell it. You said there was a second thing you wished to say to me?”

  “The Crescent!” said the Glib Ape. “I nearly forgot.” He leaned over the parapet, into the Resting Place Between Heaven and Earth Pavilion. “Here she is, men, fresh and ready!”

  Datang stared at the Ape and drew her sword. “You puking whoreson scullion,” she said. “Has this been a trap all along?”

  But he was gazing down one of the ladders to the parapets, up which a large cohort of the Versicolor guard was swiftly shinnying. His hands glowed with the amber light of what Datang now recognized as the Eight Weapon Hand. “Precisely,” he said, with a wolfish eagerness.

  “Then why stint to face me, worm? Manifest your blade and let this bastard of love and violence be finished.”

  “Ah, but the trap is not for you, my love—it is for them.”

  Datang’s eyes bulged. “There are nine of them!”

  “You killed five on the Street of Dogs while wounded, did you not?” He pointed behind her. “And you have miscounted. But there are only seventeen.”

  “And how comes an enemy general to gossip with the men of the royal guard, as these Versicolors are stipulated to be?”

  “The path of the heart-follower wends through strange precincts,” said the Ape.

  “Spare us all your apish circumlocutions.”

  “I asked after your style, and ‘twas these men who answered. Xiao xin, one comes for you!”

  Datang whirled to deflect the falling arc of a broadsword, wielded by a Versicolor fencer with features curdled in a somehow familiar scowl. “Come,” she said, “I have no quarrel with barbers, but they ought to announce their intentions.”

  “It is not your hair I come to cut,” snarled the fencer, lunging again.

  Datang countered with Eastern Paw Plucks Western Peach. “That’s well,” she said; “you cannot seem to lay steel on it. But ‘Incompetent Barber’ hardly trips from the tongue—what may I call you?”

  “Odzon,” her foe proclaimed, “brother of Lamto, whom you foully murdered!”

  “They were plotting to ambush you,” the Ape put in. “I merely told them to follow me and they would get the chance.”

  “They will not!” said Datang, repelling another stroke from Odzon with such ferocity that he nearly stumbled.

  “I know that,” said the Glib Ape. “But I have allowed you to kill them all at once, on favorable ground—is that not generous?”

  “When have I ever asked you for charity?” she huffed, beginning the fanning strike of Clearing the Spider’s Web—then, when she saw Odzon prepare to take the cut on his bracer, flipping her weapon smartly in the opposite direction to arc over his blade, neatly piercing his throat with Plucking Grouse from the Branch. She kicked the dying fencer in the chest; he flew back, scattering heart’s blood like rubies, and knocked the assailant behind him off the parapet before plummeting himself.

  “You move from Ape to Lion with facility,” the Glib Ape noted as the next assailant cursed Datang’s ancestors and charged her.

  “I am well acquainted with all the Humble Family,” said Datang, meeting the charge with a good stop-cut from Grooming Mother, “excepting only the Bull, whose rhetorical precepts clash with mine own style.”

  “You know it well enough to counter it with stylish con
tempt,” said the Glib Ape, “which I admire. Yet, if I may observe—”

  Datang hooked the charger’s ankle with Finger-Toed Foot Grips the Vine and finished him with Upstart Drums the Challenge. “I am too busy to stop you.”

  “The Ape is your touchstone. You always return to the Ape.”

  Datang leapt seven feet to avoid the next assailant, whose momentum carried him naturally toward the Glib Ape; the long-armed strategist batted him off the parapet and casually immolated him in midair with a stream of amber flame from his right hand. When Datang landed, it was in the proud posture of Cloud-Strutting, with a thrust that did not kill her fifth assailant but laid his cheek open, which—perhaps in combination with the Glib Ape’s uncanny attack on his comrade-in-arms—crumbled his resolve. He scrambled away, and Datang let him go; the next among his twelve remaining comrades pushed him off the parapet with the ragged cry, “Death or honor for the Versicolor Guard!”

  “Alas,” said Datang, “I have no honor to spare.”

  Matters proceeded in much the same vein for several minutes, and Datang was forced into begrudging admission that the Glib Ape had indeed allowed her to face her would-be murderers on favorable ground—a favor he actively maintained by slaughtering a detachment of three who took the obvious expedient of leaving the combat to ascend the next ladder up and attack Datang from behind, and one who drew a crossbow. But when the numbers were down to four, one returned with halberds (and a crowd of spectators, for even in the jaded city of Rassha one does not storm into a public house and demand halberds without attracting some little interest). Datang now faced a swordsman and two halberdiers all coming at her from the front, with a third halberdier in reserve. She stooped to pick up a knife from a fallen foe for off-hand defense and took a stinging cut on her back from a halberd; the only thing for it was to roll backward, which tripled the pain, and every panting breath she took sent fire up and down her back.

  “You could throw the knife,” the Glib Ape observed from directly behind her, “but, even if it struck home, your off-hand would be empty and the man in back would simply advance to offer you the same threat—and it might not strike home. I think I would keep the treasure I earned and trust my own instincts in pursuing it.”

  Datang did not reply, but she saw that her opponents were hesitant to advance with her so close to the Glib Ape. “Come, then! He has five kills to my eight—if you kill me, do you truly think he will leave you be?”

  “Our quarrel is not with this simian,” said one of the halberdiers, “but with the murderer first of Lamto, then of Odzon, and now of countless fine men of the Versicolor brassard. Come and meet your doom, slut.”

  “I killed several of your number on the Street of Dogs as well,” said Datang. “Yet you delay the attack?”

  “Cease hiding behind this innocent and you will see how we delay.”

  Inspiration struck Datang. “You wish to bring justice to a murderer of fine men? This is the Glib Ape, strategist of the Pretender’s army, and he has destroyed fine and loyal soldiers at the Hill of Faces and countless other battles of the Great South Plain!” And with that, she leapt up in the air with the Crane’s Migration Step to land with the Glib Ape interposed between herself and the four Versicolor soldiers. “If you wish my blood, spill his first!”

  They hesitated, paralyzed by indecision. The Glib Ape rolled his eyes and sent a plume of flame from his palm, blasting the parapet out from under them. He turned to Datang. “That was unchivalrously done.”

  Datang flicked the blood from her sword, spattering the Glib Ape with a red arc. “And what was your role in that shambles, then? Managing the battlefield so the Ape’s Left Hand and the Versicolor Guard could act out some pantomime of honorable combat? Seventeen against one: It is either a gang murder or a fox in the henhouse.”

  The Ape’s ugly face twisted in a moue of mock offense. “You duelists always slight logistics. It is no small task to find a single hour of a single night in which seventeen particular men are free for dispute! To say nothing of the necessity that their interlocutor be off duty as well. And, as lagniappe, you tell me that you have found the encounter wanting?” The long arms spread in a gesture of conciliation. “Well, I underestimated you, and I am sorry. In my experience, woman fencers often hanker after the chance to prove themselves in the sort of restricted circumstances that would allow them just this sort of display—the iterated duel, if you will. They often do not appreciate the rarity of such circumstances until they have gained experience to match their talents.”

  Datang looked archly at the Glib Ape. “And you have engineered such challenges for many promising woman fencers, then?”

  “None of your acquaintance,” said the Glib Ape.

  “The Red and White.” Datang shook her head. “Safe passage to the mouth of the Great South Plain, then?”

  “Where and when will you leave the city?”

  “The Tiger Gate,” said Datang, “with the petitioners, tomorrow.”

  “Very well. Keep your eyes open for a petitioner in a grey brassard. He will lead you to a good guide. But should you change your mind about my tent—”

  “Leave off, Glib Ape.” She turned to descend the ladder; but, seeing the burned and broken corpses spread on the flagstones of the Resting Place Between Heaven and Earth Pavilion, and noticing a door of the Orchid Palace thrown open and darkening with guards, she opted to leap the other side instead. Her legs nearly gave way on the landing from the pain in her back. She glanced up the parapet toward the Glib Ape, expecting him to follow her route; but he was gone.

  The Shrine of Indelible Wisdom

  he Orchid Palace was built on the plan of a slipper blossom, with four residential and business wings arrayed like petals around the central structure. For its part, that central structure was patterned much like the slipper of the slipper blossom; although, in physical distance, the throne room was not far from the entrances of the palace, the corridors connecting entrance and throne room described a long loop, arcing away from the palace and back toward it. It is popularly thought that this plan was conceived to instill humility in those seeking audience with the King—emphasizing that, though they might be in close proximity to the throne, they should not forget the distance that separates them from its occupant.

  But minimal inquiry is necessary to reveal the natural inspiration for the design. The structure of the slipper blossom is such that an insect seeking nectar must make a long pilgrimage over the inner surface of the slipper, leaving pollen as it goes; in this way, the blossom is fertilized. One might then go on to wonder, with some justice, what useful residue a petitioner to the King would be likely to leave in the corridors of the Orchid Palace. Such an inquiry would benefit from observation of a little-remarked feature of the arcing corridors connecting entrance and throne room. Along the wall, where it meets the floor, a design is subtly carved in bas-relief: Slippers and slipper blossoms, alternating, and upside-down. This is the architect’s clue that the purpose of this structure is inverted, relative to its homologous structure in the flower itself. The purpose of these long corridors is not to collect a useful residue from petitioners, but to leave one on them, in service of improving their petition. Anyone who has had the privilege of walking the Halls of Blooms and Slippers will remember the physical sign of that residue: At the zenith of their arc, the Halls pass the entrances to the Shrine of Indelible Wisdom, which pour forth billows of incense as fragrant as it is tenacious. But it is clear, we hope, that the fragrance—pleasant though it is—is meant to serve merely as an olfactory correlative of the more numinous benefits one might expect to glean from proximity to the realm’s holiest shrine, and to its highest priest.

  Some observers, writing with the benefit of distance from the White Kings’ reign, have seen fit to point out what they view as an irony: namely, that the highest-ranking members of the Court were permitted to bypass these improvements by way of two well-hidden secret passages. This scribe, for her part, will not hold forth
on the matter—but it is unarguable that Tenshing Astama was not alone among the White Kings in his frequent use of the Halls of Blooms and Slippers, not to attain the Orchid Chamber from the palace’s entrances (through which he rarely passed), but rather from the Orchid Chamber to attain the Shrine itself, which was his destination as we join him now.

  The yellow-robed acolytes manning the Shrine’s entrance hall made their customarily elaborate, time-consuming abasements; as they proceeded, Tenshing thought, as he always did, that he should send a note ahead of himself on these visits, so that he might be greeted by a higher-ranking cleric free to issue a more efficient acknowledgement of the throne. But, then, it was always good to know who might be ascending in the ranks as the years pressed on—if press they would, he mused, not for the first time; if the Priestkiller Worm did not preempt them. But soon enough a priest was fetched who had the requisite rank to provide escort to the King, and he passed through halls of progressively more splendiferous decoration—meticulous carvings of deities and great men, demons, ghosts, and bats, all rendered in goatcherry, which drinks paint but, in the hands of a patient painter, holds colors with unequaled vividity and fastness—until he attained the cell of the King’s Lama, paneled in plain planks of the same wood and in all respects as spare as the Orchid Chamber. The King’s Lama was seated on the immaculate floor, writing at a low desk, a few bound volumes stacked beside the paper. The other priest departed; King and Lama exchanged their abasements, and Tenshing joined Uä’s highest priest on the floor.

  “Have you seen your last petitioner, Your Grace?” asked the lama.

  “I fear she must wait another day,” said Tenshing.

  “Do not delay too much in meeting your obligations,” said the King’s Lama. “Especially small ones, for they are easily put off; yet they wear on the mind out of all proportion to their importance. What can an old priest do for the King of Uä?”

  “I am uncertain in my lineage, Holiness,” said Tenshing.