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

  “We had also drunk a jug or two by that point,” Lin Gyat added.

  “—in any case,” continued Lin Yongten, “I deemed it most prudent to separate the two men and each attempt to have the truth from them in our own wise. Envied of Snakes, as you know, is iron in both constitution and subtlety, wherefore I left him with the more voluble partner and the jug of wine, his work cut out for him. Meanwhile, by mutual gesture and certain rude vocalizations, the Eloquent Dragon and I agreed to take a breath of air in the streets of Naga-gyo, where peace and quiet would grease the wheels, as it were, of social intercourse.”

  “It was a yet stranger communication than the Eager Edge intimates,” said Lin Gyat, “for the Eloquent Dragon’s eloquence seemed to inhere in some quite odd and repetitious manipulations of his lips and tongue, supplemented by long stares and the occasional raised eyebrow. The Sickly Dragon was quite exasperated by the attempt to separate him from his brother-in-arms, and I will not dissemble, I felt the same way myself—until this moment, when our friend has made his motivations clear, for which I thank and congratulate him.”

  “I do not know what transpired between Envied of Snakes and the Sickly Dragon,” continued Lin Yongten, “but it was the work of a moment to reveal that my dragon was more eloquent than he let on—though not in the tongue of Uä—and barely any greater toil to put him in a most vulnerable position for further interrogation. I am not well versed in the Gardener dialects, but I know enough to understand when he told me that his camp was to the north, and to read the sinister gleam in his eye when he invited us to carouse with the brothers there. It was clear to me from that moment that he had—with, I hope, some accuracy!—determined us to be a threat to his force’s nefarious plans, and, unsure of their ability to dispose of us deux à deux, purposed to lure us where we would be hopelessly outnumbered. I very nearly declined the invitation, but the opportunity to set eyes on the immensity of the host that no doubt awaited seemed golden. Unfortunately, though, I had no opportunity to apprise Envied of Snakes of what he was likely to encounter when we arrived at the Gardeners’ camp.”

  “You seemed profoundly distracted during the ride,” said Lin Gyat, “though now I see that you were merely contemplating the depth of the Eloquent Dragon’s wretchedness. You took pains to ride your horse within stabbing-distance of him, and your eyes pierced him like spears. And his yours! Imagine the sweat-bathed thoughts coursing through my brain-pan! Better, do not. I have not suffered such exotic confabulations since first I met the Ape’s Left Hand, who left me with a lust that demands fearsome remedial measures—”

  “Snakes are rumored to be blind,” murmured Netten, “but it is said that the blind betimes outsee the sighted.”

  “Well,” said Lin Yongten, “you can imagine what transpired. I attempted to stay near Envied of Snakes, that I could stay his hand when first we set eyes on Gardener red and kill our spy-counterparts quietly; but, as he has averred, the Eloquent Dragon hounded me with idle conversation for the duration of the ride, and Envied detected the camp before I did. His rifle was out before I could draw breath, and, exploiting the principle of geometry mandating that any two points must needs share a straight line, he had both Dragons’ brains out of their skulls before I could so much as exhale. This excellent shot gave rise to a fine report that resounded through the forest like the Green Crescent Deity’s own celestial enfilade, and the Gardeners understandably made haste to investigate. They took exception to our handling of their spies, and the rest is written in the stars.”

  “Do you know,” said Lin Gyat, “it is a funny thing, for I had been nursing a resentment since the Eager Edge abandoned me to the Sickly Dragon’s company in that despicable swill-well that serves Naga-gyo for a public house—I believed the whole affair his fault. And yet, hearing him tell it, I am stricken with contrition, for it becomes clear that the balance of the error lies with me!”

  “And what was it that you and the Ape’s Left Hand discovered at the House of Ogyal?” Lin Yongten asked politely.

  “My unsuitability for the throne was reconfirmed,” said Netten succinctly. “But that is of no moment now. It is your discovery that is the most interesting, for it explains the slaughter of the Cold Water Salmon.”

  “The Cold Water Salmon,” said Lin Gyat. “The Lotus, what a familiar name! Who is he?”

  Datang, contrariwise, was making connections. “The Northern Border. Someone wanted to conceal the invasion on the Northern Border until it was too late.”

  “The King’s Lama.” A great grimness settled on Netten’s face. “What I do not understand is why.”

  It was an incongruous thing to feel, at such a dour pout on such a great man, but Datang could not help but smile. “You respected the King’s Lama. Of course you did. He had your best interests at heart. He may still.”

  Netten’s visage lost no sternness at Datang’s tender words. “I did respect him,” he said, “and your use of the past tense is more apposite than you know. But I do not see how my respect for him occludes my understanding of his motives.”

  “Thus,” said Datang. “Your father’s great selflessness allows you to believe that he would start a war to save your life. The same selflessness you thought you saw in the King’s Lama prevents you from believing that he would countenance a war to save his own.”

  “Of course!” said Lin Gyat. “I have always suspected the King’s Lama of concealing Gardener heritage.”

  “No, large friend,” said Lin Yongten. “But the Ape’s Left Hand is right. The lama has the measure of the King. The first hint of trouble at the border, and he would have led the van to save Therku and Naga-gyo.”

  “Led it,” said Datang, “straight through the Pretender’s army.”

  “What of it?” said Netten, irritable. “I could imagine no more felicitous thing than to crush the Pretender and the Gardener invasion all at once. He would give up the advantage of city walls, of course, but Gyaltsen and his armies are more than equal to the task. The King countenanced siege to starve the Pretender out, not for fear of defeat—much the same determination I made when the King was on the other side of the parapets.”

  “He might have won,” said Lin Yongten, “but at what cost?”

  “Victory is always bought with blood,” said Netten. “Rassha’s soldiers value theirs no less than Therku’s peasants do their own.”

  “Well-reasoned,” said Lin Yongten, “but lives are not the only cost of battle. What the King’s Lama needs is time.”

  “Time for what?” Netten nearly roared. “The man is ancient as it is!”

  “Time for the King to master the Reflecting Pool Mind,” said Datang, “and save his Lama’s ancient hide from the Priestkiller Worm.”

  The word “worm” seemed to ring softly in the forest, as though the snow refused to absorb it.

  “That is time we all need,” said Netten at last.

  “Your father did not think so,” said Datang.

  “This land follows the White Way, and the lamas lead us,” said Netten. “We can no more abandon them than a mountain traveler can abandon his guide.”

  “Yes,” said Datang, “that is what they tell us.”

  “This Worm is a beast beyond description,” said Netten. “Its bloodlust is without end, its power—” He stopped when he saw Datang’s eyes. “Is that, too, ‘what they tell us’?”

  Datang shrugged in her best imitation of Lin Yongten. “You know the answer. I would not dare tell you what to make of it.”

  Netten spat. “You need not continue mumming deference to the Gracious Regent.”

  “Thank you; but I will continue exercising respect for the judgment of Netten, whose moral education is unequaled among the Rafters of the World, and who is my friend.”

  It would be a mistake to say that Netten’s face softened here, but it is perhaps fair to say it cooled; he looked at Datang as though at a new woman, with a keenness that nearly made her blush. “Is that so, Left Hand? Will you go where I ask? I woul
d not abuse your friendship; you are certainly not bound to assent.”

  “For now,” said Datang, “I will go where you ask, for I have no better guide. Nor could I, I would like to say—but, Netten, I was nearly killed by a woman you trusted, one grim night on a ghostly farmstead: I have seen how your associations blind you. I will not promise to share that blindness, any more than I would ask you to share mine.”

  Netten looked at Lin Gyat and Lin Yongten. “Has the Ape’s Left Hand well summarized your sentiments?”

  “Well and admirably,” said Lin Yongten.

  “I could not make head or tail of her reasoning,” said Lin Gyat, “but I find much to admire in tail and head alike, and my association with you has led me to the most diverting violence I have ever found outside a bear-baiting pit. I would not part from you for the run of the Garden Emperor’s Lotus Seraglio.”

  Netten examined the three of them once more, then fixed Datang with his gaze. “I have spoken with a deity,” he said. “I will not truckle to fashionable atheisms.”

  “I believe you,” she said, “and I endorse neither truckling, nor fashion, nor atheism. But lamas are not deities.”

  Netten’s gaze was dark, but he allowed the point. “We may let that matter rest there. Now: If you go with me, we return to the Orchid Palace. I reject my father’s disestablishmentarian sentiments, but hearing them has put the self-indulgence of my behavior until now in sharp relief. I am done playing at guardsmanship and palace intrigue. I mean to train the King.”

  “I had thought,” Lin Gyat yawned, “that you viewed the issue of training as a difficult one, in light of the Gardener invasion and the sack of Therku.”

  Netten grimaced. “Ah, Envied, that is just. But I believe the truth must suffice. The King’s Lama did not trust the King. Eager Edge, you said the lama had his measure, but I am not so sure. A truce with the Pretender might be reached; forces could be combined against the red cavalry, with hostilities to resume after the integrity of our borders is assured. If not, I can persuade the King to lead from behind. He is hotheaded and strong-willed, but he could not achieve what he has achieved without the rudiments of wisdom. He knows that kingdom trumps province, and spirit blood.” He rose stiffly from the log around the dwindling fire, and Datang was shocked to note that the sun had nearly set on that eventful day. “Come,” he said, “let us race the moonrise to the post.”

  “We ask nothing better,” said Lin Yongten.

  I have spoken before of the exigencies of storytelling, and the desire to elide events so as to produce a satisfying thematic unity and density of incident within a scene. To approximate the effect without sacrificing accuracy, I shall omit a few amusing conversations held on the way to the post, and from the post to the nearest inn, which happened to be the Typical Moniker on the Road of Bulls. Let us leap ahead, instead, to the small protuberance of Shrastaka which the four friends were required to traverse before entering Gyachun and then, by means they had not yet determined, making their way back into and across the Great South Plain. The terrain was flat plateau, slowly greening, though the Bat Mountains serrated the southwest horizon; the sky was preternaturally clear; they were making good time to the next post stop and thence, if all went well, to the Pavilion of Delight, a shabby establishment whose name was nonetheless excellently underwritten by its fine roast goat and light wheat beer.

  It was Lin Gyat who saw the pillar beyond the mountains, in the sky. He made a noise, and the others saw it too. At first it was a column of white, rising slowly, as though the horizon were receding at some immense tidal pull; but then it stopped and fanned out, like one of the fountains at the Orchid Palace’s Seven Ocean Courtyard. A stain of white inched across the far-off sky. Datang thought she could see the shadow that it cast—on Imja, over the mountains, where it must have been.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I have a conjecture,” said Lin Yongten.

  “We must turn back,” said Netten.

  “Back?” said Lin Gyat. “There is nothing to shoot back there, and no wheat beer either.”

  “Back to the fork, then southwest on Red Tenshing’s Road and the Road of Reason,” said Netten. “We cannot afford to entangle ourselves on the Great South Plain now.” He spent a moment lost in thought, then swung a leg over his horse’s back to dismount. “I beg your pardon. It is the First Blight, Left Hand, and there are rituals I think I must perform.”

  Lin Yongten’s face went the merest shade of dark, but he nodded. “We will grant you the space we can, and deter strangers.” But Netten had already assumed the half-lotus and begun to breathe deep, whispering exhalations through his nose.

  The rest withdrew, Lin Gyat down one side of the road and Datang and Lin Yongten down the other.

  “He is conducting the preparatory meditations outlined in the Book of Tenshing,” said Lin Yongten, as soon as they had put some distance between Netten and themselves. “He thinks he is still King.”

  “He wants to help,” said Datang.

  “Have I said anything different?”

  Well,” said Datang, “I think there is a difference between highlighting a man’s goodwill and highlighting his pretensions.”

  Lin Yongten smiled a small, thin smile. “And there may be at that. Yet I have always known Netten to be a man of good will; it is the pretensions that are new, and troubling.”

  Datang nodded longer than she had to and spent a short time in thought. “Do you hold his father’s view of the lamate, or his own?”

  “I hold no view,” said Lin Yongten, “save that he has no business antagonizing the Worm unless he learns the Reflecting Pool Mind.”

  “The King must face the Worm regardless.”

  “That is why he is King,” said Lin Yongten. “Do you know that there is a punishment written in the law specifically for a man who takes the King’s throne without a King’s claim? It is an agonizing death, and vile. The King’s first crowned act was to pardon Netten of it.”

  “I do not doubt it,” said Datang, “but I do not imagine our friend’s suicidal impulses are so easily awakened.”

  “Awakened?” said Lin Yongten. “Left Hand, he was told his whole life that he might die by Worm-fang. The only model for his fate is White Tenshing, who gave his life for a stalemate and a few decades’ reprieve. The thought of violent death is the north to his soul’s lodestone; it is swift, orderly, it can be planned for. The havoc of senescence must seem distasteful by comparison.”

  Datang met Lin Yongten’s eyes. She smiled, deliberately enigmatic; he arched an eyebrow. “My father made his fortune at the sufferance of soil and rain,” she said, “and there was not much that could not ruin us by going wrong. There was a year—it was the Year of the Leaping Carp—we had an arrangement with a few families in a little border village called Xiaoshui; they would send summer-laborers to us for the high season, and our cash would take them through the winter. But there was a border-skirmish that year, and they could not come. We all picked, vinted, and bottled from dawn to dusk that summer, and still we fell behind the rotting of the grapes. Even our farmhands were too weary to take the night shift; there were mornings when we would find entire vines stripped by duffer macaques. Sometimes we would find one that had stuffed itself sick and bedded down in the vineyard. My brothers and I would not allow them to be killed, but woe betide the ape discovered by my father…” She shook her head a touch, as though to dislodge the smile from her face. “We had to borrow to front the cost of bottles. The moneylender called himself Doctor Silver; he was no doctor, but he had been a Green Morning brother somewhere. When the first payment came due and we did not have it, he showed me the Eight Weapon Hand for the first time. He showed it to all of us. The sound it made—is it more a buzz, would you say, or a hiss? The air shimmered around it. He walked up to me. No one moved to stop him—and I thank all the deities, when I remember to, that they did not. He extended the weapon, and I closed my eyes and prayed that death would come quickly.

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bsp; “When I opened them, he was gone. But the rug in the courtyard was covered in my hair. He had cut a hank off it here.” She made a slicing motion near the right hinge of her jaw. “My mother trimmed it to an even length before she put me to bed that night. I woke at midnight and hacked the rest of it off with a kitchen knife.”

  “And you wear it short to this day,” said Lin Yongten.

  “That is what I would tell a stranger, to whom I owed nothing but a stimulating tale; to you I will confess that I have let it grow from time to time. But I do not like the feeling. I cannot be near a fire without worrying that it is burning; I cannot fight without the nagging sense that something is coming at me from the side.” She sighed gently through her nose. “Why have I related this anecdote, Eager?”

  “Why, indeed?” called Lin Gyat from down the road. Lin Yongten arched his eyebrow once more in invitation.

  “Every freeman and vassal of these Rafters of the World has faced more death than Netten,” said Datang. “If he longs for order in death, it is not because he is strong in the face of death; it is because he is weak in the face of disorder.” She looked over at Netten, who continued his meditations undisturbed. In so doing, she caught sight of the great column behind him, still rising like an enormous fountain into the sky. “But I do not think Netten is weak, Eager. I think he means to live, if he can. Wherefore your dissent?”