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

  “Your ‘friend,’ and your other traveling companions, are defeated,” said the Giant of the Grass. “As to you, well, what remains between you and defeat is a series of inevitabilities, easily set in motion.”

  “One cannot afford to be too credulous of such suggestions, you know. Especially not where my friend is concerned.”

  “I know. Your friend surrendered after he learned that we had apprehended your Green Morning brothers; we did not overpower him…” The Giant grinned, a surprisingly open and delighted expression. “Directly. Forgive me. But perhaps this intelligence increases your credulity?”

  “Perhaps not.” Datang tensed to react.

  “Very well.” The Giant gave a look over Datang’s shoulder as steel settled on her neck. “My man wishes to return your straightsword, Ape’s Left Hand, but he is clumsy; act precipitately and he may misplace it.”

  With lead in her heart, Datang slowly made the Abasement to a Victorious Enemy. The steel followed her. “I yield the pitch of battle. The Giant of the Grass has vanquished me.”

  The Giant glided over to her between the tight-set bamboo stalks as though they were not there. She extended a hand to Datang in her abasement, who took it. The steel lifted off her neck. Datang stood. “The Ape’s Left Hand gave meritorious battle. The spirits of her enemies know it, and the Giant of the Grass knows it too.” Datang looked behind her to see the man to whom she and Netten had originally given chase, holding her straightsword with his unwounded left arm. The Crescent, she growled to herself, it was in his weak hand. I could have had it from him in a heartbeat. But she reclaimed the sword, then offered him the same abasement. “May I know your style,” she said, “if you have one?”

  “Your opponent has not yet shown valor meriting a style,” said the wounded brother, “and consequently is known by his name in the Green Morning, Lin Rinchen.”

  “This will be the day he gains a style, I think,” said the Giant of the Grass. “Monkey Trainer Lin Rinchen will suit.”

  Lin Rinchen summoned the two women with him, and they began threading their way through the high grass, presumably toward Datang’s comrades. The Giant of the Grass gestured for Datang to follow ahead of her; Datang almost neglected to realize that this was a security measure as much as a social grace. “You know more of such matters than I,” said Datang. “Yet I am a fencer of no great fame, and it seems to me you did the tiger’s share of the work in bringing me down.”

  “You are the fencer who made our friend the Florist of Gore look like a fish on a boat, and gutted him in the same fashion,” said the Giant of the Grass, “and who silenced the mewlings of the Golden Bat, and who slew seventeen alongside the Glib Ape on the Resting Place Between Heaven and Earth Pavilion. And you learned the bamboo step in an hour. I account that as some fame, Left Hand, and I account your fame at a higher value than most. The gallant fraternity does not readily acknowledge warriors like you and me.”

  “Oh, but they do,” said Datang. “How should I have heard of you, but from men deep in cups saying how handily they might defeat the Giant of the Grass?”

  They broke through to the road that Lin Gyat and Netten had carved. The three men stood there: Lin Yongten and Lin Gyat were restrained with nets and menaced with long spears with stormcloud-grey bamboo hafts, while Netten was unfettered, the men standing near him (Green Morning brothers all) evidently all too aware of his freedom to move. The Giant of the Grass hailed the other brothers, who stood at attention. “The Ape’s Left Hand has consented to accompany us. We will take the new road to the estate. Get carving.” The two men flanking Netten moved gratefully away and began hacking at the bamboo where Lin Gyat and Netten had left off. Netten abased himself to the Giant of the Grass, who returned the favor, then to Datang. “Left Hand, I am glad to see you unharmed. Giant of the Grass, you as well, although I wish we were not at cross purposes today. I cannot afford a long detention.”

  “I do not suggest you can,” said the Giant of the Grass, “yet it is not I who determines whether you face one. My prerogatives are considerably more limited.”

  “The matter may be one of rather widespread significance. I travel to Pongyo Gorge.”

  “And what is it you propose to do there, that might be of widespread significance?”

  “It may be that I challenge the Priestkiller Worm.”

  “It may be; and yet I think the death, however horrible, of a freeman, however skilled, is of no particular significance outside his circle of intimates. Nor, if I may speak bluntly, is his wish to seek that death superordinate to a duke’s desire for audience.”

  “Then I am to receive no assistance from you in attaining my destination?”

  “The very obverse of assistance, I fear.” Something changed in the Giant’s steps; she was making ready to resist Netten. In concert, the spearman behind Datang dipped his point nearer her neck.

  “Regrettable,” said Netten. “Well, let us see the duke, then, and persuade him of my mission’s importance.”

  “A commendable plan.” The Giant’s shoulders visibly relaxed.

  “Will you free my friends?” asked Netten.

  “No,” said the Giant of the Grass. “Our control over you and the Ape’s Left Hand relies on their continued peril, I fear.”

  “Have no fear, Netten,” Lin Gyat cried from up ahead. “We are not discommoded by these fetters. The women of Degyen apply more fearsome cinctures in more tender contexts.”

  “The Lotus,” murmured the Giant of the Grass, “where did you come upon such a tumorous mass?”

  “The western foothills of the Cradle Mountains,” said Datang, “where all manner of beasts and witches dwell.”

  “He is what one would get if a witch experimented on a beast.”

  “I think of him as what a witch would get if a beast ‘experimented’ on her,” said Datang. “But reasonable women may disagree.”

  “That is lucky,” said the Giant. “It would sadden me to have to kill you now, when our conversations are just beginning.”

  “You had hoped to wait until my escape attempt?” said Datang.

  “Just so,” said the Giant of the Grass, and the wistful lilt in her voice sent a chill down Datang’s spine—for it was entirely sincere.

  It soon became clear what the Giant of the Grass had meant by the “new road”—a straight westward route took the party of patrollers and prisoners to a great swath in the cerulean bamboo, about wide enough for three horses, that had been cut by something that left the stalks more badly mangled than Netten’s cauterizing spirit-blades or Lin Gyat’s monk’s spade. Datang considered herself no woodsman, but the torn stems were still blue and weeping where they ended, testament to the route’s novelty. The new road cut almost straight south, though it did bend slightly west. “Why was this path laid?” Datang asked the Giant of the Grass, after the party had spread out more comfortably on the commodious route.

  “A party coming from the north wished to come south through Imja.”

  “Where were they headed?”

  “We do not know.” The Giant’s face tightened. “None survived from the patrol that met them. Our brothers underestimated their firepower. It is not often we see twenty armed with rifles. Judging by the dispersion of the corpses, I would say each of the twenty was a crack shot at range.”

  “But they did not threaten you?”

  “No, the new road veers away from the estate and the villages and empties out on the southern edge of the Earthen Sky.”

  “Then they merely wished to pass through.”

  The Giant shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  “And you met them with a century.”

  The Giant shrugged again. “I met them not at all. Our bamboo-stepping brothers have been on double shifts since the incident, ensuring no such failure of intelligence occurs again.”

  “You have evaded the question.”

  “When I evade a cut in combat, I count it a success. In any case, it is not I who controls the disposition of the
duke’s armed forces.”

  “Oh, to be sure,” said Datang. “And yet—you do distance yourself from the actions of this man whose orders you take money to follow.”

  “The Lotus,” said the Giant of the Grass, “should I pretend proximity to them? The man is a duke, Left Hand. His decisions are blessed by heaven and old blood. They have nothing to do with me, much as I might wish otherwise.”

  “Shrastaka has a duke as well, Giant of the Grass,” said Datang. “He is a cunning old tippler fond of thieves and children, and of putting down border raids from the sun-worshippers of the western Garden. He is not much interested in intercepting his countrymen on their travels through the lands he supervises.”

  “I thought I detected a trace of an accent,” said the Giant. “Rassha has smoothed it out handily, though; before long you shall be speaking like a woman of the capital, born and bred.” She sighed, as though preparing to reason with a child. “I do not doubt the duke of Shrastaka is a kindly ruler, and since his grandfather was duke, it seems to you that his family has sat the ducal throne forever. But that is not so, and no one knows it better than the duchies that predate the line of Tenshing. Imja is older than Uä, much less Shrastaka. Imja may outlive Uä. Much less Shrastaka.”

  “The young often outlive the old,” said Datang, disliking the direction of the conversation.

  “When countries age, the roads that are their bones grow strong. The customs that are their muscles grow strong. The teeth and claws that are their armies grow strong, and the mind that is their knowledge grows vast, sharp, and nimble. The vyings of such ancient leviathans mandate different concerns from kitten-duchies such as Shrastaka.”

  “And thus Imja sends a century to intercept travelers.”

  “Lest you forget, Left Hand, these travelers carved this road. Had they taken one of the main thoroughfares, they would not have been harassed.”

  “If they believed that, they would have taken one of the main thoroughfares. Would we have been allowed to pass undeterred had we merely been more forthright with our navigation?”

  The Giant of the Grass smiled thinly. “You are an august constituency. Your case is sui generis.”

  “There are more august constituencies,” said Datang; and, although the sentiment was idle, she was surprised to see the Giant tense up, much as she had when she resisted Netten’s request. She feigned not having noticed the response. “Well, it seems we have exhausted the conversation.”

  “I fear so.” The Giant of the Grass was silent for a bit. “I spoke too dismissively of your home. I do not malign the worth of Shrastaka—except perhaps in the sense of an investment, which, you understand, accumulates worth simply by dint of long compounding.” She smiled. “Perhaps what I mean is, I see a worthy principal in Shrastaka, but, through no fault of its own, it has not had the chance to amass interest.”

  Datang laughed, uncertain. “Is that a compliment housed in an insult, or the obverse?”

  “Whichever you like. The balance sheet comes out the same. Yet, you understand, I do not say there is no value in Shrastaka, no potential to join the ranks of the old duchies with luck and time.”

  “If we are in an accounting frame of mind, that might be accounted a small consolation,” said Datang.

  “Some in Imja would deny your home’s potential. In Gyachun and Dhakamma too, and Palden that was.”

  “Which those of us with younger blood call Rassha and the Great South Plain.”

  The Giant of the Grass smiled. “I am from Degyen, like your huge friend. My blood is no older than yours. But one does not need to be a wind horse to understand a wind horse, nor yet to court its favor. You trod the halls of the Orchid Palace once. Did you not sense that those men and women were unlike you?”

  “My purpose was protection, not zoology. But,” she cut off the Giant’s reply, “yes, I could see how the courtiers and mandarins differed from a vintner’s daughter—in eloquence, in posture, in any virtue you care to name.”

  The Giant grinned. “That is a Shrastakan point of view, and a fine one in its way. To Imja, though, your courtiers and mandarins are as jumped-up as the dukes of the Plums. Rassha is new, Left Hand, never forget it. Barely less new than you.”

  Progress down the new road was quick; they skirted Imja’s capital of Dzangbo closely enough to see pagodas and onion domes over the bamboo. Then they took a smaller path, more cleanly cut but equally new, west toward the ducal estate, visible only in the form of a watchtower whose dizzying height only became apparent as they drew close.

  The tops of the bamboo to the west had just begun to glow green-blue with the sunset when the four friends and their captors were finally admitted inside the estate walls. These were perhaps fifteen feet high, barely even the height of the bamboo, but a killing field had been cleared outside the walls, and the parapets bristled with archers, grey arrows nocked to grey bows. Once inside the walls, Lin Gyat and Lin Yongten were unfettered at last, save for cuffs joining their hands behind their backs; all weapons were confiscated, including the straightsword that Lin Rinchen had returned to Datang. “The Duke dines late,” said the Giant of the Grass, “but a reception has been prepared. He will see you in an hour, after you have put off the sweat of the road and your riding garb. I’m afraid you will be separated until that time,” she said with little trace of apology. “My men will escort the Green Morning brothers and the Gracious Regent to their quarters; I will accompany the Ape’s Left Hand.”

  Netten bowed. “That is as it should be, the most skilled captor accompanying the most dangerous enemy.” His eyes alit on Datang’s at the word enemy, which she imagined he said with some small but perceptible emphasis, a nearly chastening tone.

  The Giant glared at him. “Remember how I caught you, Regent. It was not by being more skilled than you.”

  “To contradict such an august personage in her very lair would be the height of effrontery,” said Netten, “so I will decline to do so.”

  The Giant snorted. “Your effrontery is not so subtle as all that.”

  “Indeed; my observations are barely subtler than those of an ape, pointing at that which anyone with eyes can see.”

  “How many miles of this did you put up with?” The Giant of the Grass seized Datang’s arm and very nearly yanked her down the corridor that led, presumably, to her quarters.

  The Giant did not seem keen to hear an answer to her query, and thus Datang busied herself with observation, doing her best to situate herself in space and in the estate’s maze. The house was built of stone every bit as solid as the Orchid Palace, but where the seat of Uä was carved from polished mulberry granite, the walls here were of rough basalt, with few hangings but copious torchlight that made the bumps and crenellations of the stone loom like malevolent mountains. The torches made the air close as well, though the estate’s drafty construction kept it from feeling truly warm. Datang did notice, after a short time, a bit of obscure decoration that made the hallways easier to identify: There was a polished strip up by the ceiling, and different corridors contained different leaf motifs carved into that strip. But Datang had no names for the leaves, and, nameless, the patterns soon ran together in her mind.

  “We live more modestly than the King’s court,” said the Giant of the Grass, “but sometimes the simplicity is a relief. You will learn your way around soon enough. The estate is not so large.”

  “It is larger than my father’s winery, and I believe it is larger than the sector of the Orchid Palace that I ever laid eyes on,” said Datang. “And, for a vintner’s daughter, the duke’s lust to detain the Gracious Regent has no air of simplicity.”

  “Well, it is not complex either,” said the Giant. “The Gracious Regent’s movements are of interest to Dhakamma. He is an unprecedented form of human life. Master of seven Rigors, passing fluent in the movements of courtly society, known and beloved by dukes and ditch-diggers from the howling borders of Therku to the diversely envenomed marshes of Degyen—and yet not King, having
freely surrendered the office. My master only wishes to understand his intentions.”

  “‘Only’—unless those intentions are inimical to Imja.”

  The Giant shrugged. “It is inconceivable that a man who was once King would do something inimical to the duchy that forms his nation’s keystone. And yet—a duke must guard his land’s interests, and may discommode freemen to do so.”

  “You have said that.”

  “It seems to bear repeating,” the Giant said tartly. “Think of it this way, if you prefer: A duke’s prerogatives exceed a freeman’s. That means a duke’s friend has advantages over a freeman’s; and a freeman’s friend should take a fine measure of her convictions before she resolves to oppose a duke’s.”

  “I think I preferred your talk of noble ranks. My father was a vintner, but it does not mean I spent my childhood counting grapes and weighing bottles.”

  “To be sure; you tasted the contents of those bottles as well, to know their value. And for other purposes,” the Giant said with that strange ambush of a grin, “of which we will speak when we are at our leisure. But it is value that keeps the presses moving, value that fills the casks. Women are widely held to be loyal. So are men of quality, I know; but men of quality are praised when they betray for their advantage, because men are expected to pursue advantage. You and I are expected to pursue the advantage of others, and the comfort and praise we receive for doing so can choke us as surely as a down mattress. You may loathe my talk of prerogatives, but you should think on it. The Green Morning brothers you call friends are stone-cold killers by reputation, and I know what your Eager Edge does in the back alleys of bars, and to whom, and I know he broke with all the rest at Goat Ridge when the King began tearing tanks apart with whips of fire. And I know, because I have eyes, what your Envied of Snakes would do to you without hesitation, had he ten minutes alone with you in the dark.”

  He has had, thought Datang, and did not—if only in deference to the moon. But she had no belly to debate the matter. “It is interesting you do not boast such compendious knowledge of Netten.”