Chương 28

Torchlight crowned the walls of Tianlong Castle. Lorn stood at the foot of the great ramp that led to its gates. The fortress walls rose forty feet above him, faced in gray stone blocks, and the central gate was a mouth of iron-studded oak set deep in the wall. Guardsmen lined the ramparts, their silhouettes small against the torchlight. At his back, the Shattered Summit Sect spread across the road in loose formation, their armor and weapons clinking as they walked.

Their gray faces were flat, expressionless, the look of men and women ready to kill, ready to die. Huihun coiled at his right shoulder. The dragon's blue fire burned low, but Lorn could feel the old soul's pulse as if it beat inside his own chest. The anticipation was a warmth beneath his ribs, vast but patient, a tide that had waited centuries for this shore. It felt like his own anticipation. He could no longer tell the difference. A shout came from the barbican.

Crossbows cocked behind arrow slits, the gates slammed shut, and a rank of guardsmen assembled in the torchlight beyond the first gate, spears leveled, shields locked.

"Halt!" The captain's voice echoed off the gatehouse walls.

"In the name of Jun Fang, Governor of Huidao, identify yourself, or be cut down where you stand!" Lorn raised his right hand. Blue fire blazed from his palm and leapt outward in a dozen streams that forked and split and forked again. Each stream hit the ground and erupted upward in a column of ghost-flame, and the columns took his shape. Twelve ghostly copies of Lorn stood in the road, wreathed in blue fire, and every one of them smiled the same flat smile.

They charged and hit the first gate like a wave, ran straight up the walls, and landed among the guardsmen. Steel clashed with ghost-flame along the ramparts. Lorn stood where he was and watched. His soldiers moved on cue, grapples in hand, and scaled the walls on either side of the barbican. The first portcullis rose with a groan of heavy iron chains, then the second gate swung inward, then the third. One by one the barbican's defenses peeled open ahead of him, and Lorn walked through.

Ghost-flame clones fought on either side of the passage, their blue light reflected in pooled blood on the flagstones. The guardsmen lay scattered where they had fallen. Lorn stepped over the bodies without looking down, and emerged from the barbican into the outer courtyard. The great skull of Wandering Flame loomed to his left, the centerpiece of the courtyard's garden. It was the size of a house, its empty sockets dark against the sky. Looking at it felt strange. Like something half-remembered.

He could no longer tell if it was Huihun's memory or his own. Five guardsmen charged him from across the courtyard, spears lowered. Lorn turned toward them and made a single horizontal chop with his right hand. A crescent of blue fire crossed the courtyard in the time it took to blink and caught all five men at the waist. The top halves separated from the bottom halves. Blood painted the white stone in a broad, wet stripe. His soldiers streamed through the barbican behind him and spread across the courtyard.

Two of them hit the main doors of the keep at a dead run, and the ironbound oak buckled inward. Lorn stepped through. At the far end of the entrance hall, a knot of guardsmen hustled three women through a side passage, a mother and her daughters, and the younger one looked back at him, her face white and wet with tears.

The girl's face dissolved from his mind before he reached the central corridor, replaced by the warmth beneath his ribs, the voice that was his voice and not his voice that said forward, forward, forward. His soldiers cleared rooms on either side as Lorn pressed deeper into the keep. At the end of the deepest hallway, in a chamber bare of all other ornamention, a white jade statue sat in quiet repose. The First Emperor Odoshinko, in his aspect as the Ascetic.

Cross-legged on a black platform, robes of carved jade draped loose across a body pared to sinew and bone. His eyes were closed. His hands rested palm-up on his knees, in a mudra of contemplation. A depiction of an ancient man who began his life as a wandering mendicant, became a hero, and then a conqueror, a builder, an emperor, and at last had set down his weapons and his crown, quit the capital he built with his own two hands, renounced the world and lived out the rest of his days in secluded contemplation.

Lorn looked at the statue. A part of him, faint and distant, recognized the beauty of it. A door slammed open behind him. Jun Fang, Governor of Dragon's Rest, came through it at a dead run. His robes of imperial gold were torn and streaked with soot, his scaled armor dented where weapons had struck him, but the jian in his hand held steady and his aura blazed the color of a sunset. He planted his feet between Lorn and the Ascetic, and the blade came up. Lorn raised his right hand.

Blue fire gathered in his palm and stretched into the shape of a jian, its edges sharp as soulsteel of the highest grade. He stepped forward, and the two blades met. Steel rang against ghost-flame. Jun Fang cut low and Lorn turned the stroke aside and brought his blade down in a vertical arc that the governor caught on the flat of his jian.

"You don't know what you're doing," Jun Fang said. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. Lorn pressed forward and cut left, right, left again, and Jun Fang met them all. The governor was good. Their blades tangled and broke apart and tangled again. Jun Fang countered with a slash that rose from hip to shoulder and forced Lorn to lean back.

"Such things are kept buried for a reason." He drove forward with a flurry that backed Lorn toward the statue's platform.

"Whatever you think you have to gain here, it's for naught." Lorn felt the annoyance surface like a stone through still water. He'd heard enough prattling already. He raised his left hand. Ten swords of blue fire materialized in the air around Jun Fang, each one aimed at a different part of his body. The governor's eyes went wide. He spun his jian in a desperate arc, caught one blade, deflected another, but the other eight drove home.

They pierced his armor at the shoulders, the ribs, the thighs, the stomach, and blood flowed from Jun Fang's open mouth as his jian clattered to the stone. He sank to his knees in front of the Ascetic's platform, pinned in place by eight blades of ghost-flame, and his head dropped forward. Lorn walked past him. He reached out with his right hand and blue fire consumed the stone. The Ascetic cracked down the center, tipped forward, and crashed to the floor in a spray of fragments.

Beneath the platform, a stairway descended into the dark. Lorn took the first step. His soldiers formed up behind him, and the ghost-flame dragon flared at his shoulders as they went down. The stairs ended at a corridor of dressed stone, pale and smooth. Iron braziers stood cold in their brackets. The first of the vault's defenses waited ahead.

"Formation," Lorn said. His soldiers knew the rest, and two point men moved ahead of the column. Pendulum blades, a dart tunnel, a chamber of stone blocks that slammed home in percussive booms. The point men timed their steps from muscle memory, and the column followed in pairs. One man was too slow in the block chamber, and the sound was brief and wet. Beyond the blocks, the stair wound deeper still, and the air grew cold and stale. Lorn raised his fist and the column stopped.

The chamber ahead sat in perfect dark, formation lines carved into every surface, a web that would reduce every scrap of qi to ash.

"Brass Spiders," Lorn said. Two soldiers set black cubes on the ground and stepped back. The cubes began to glow red from heat within, and then they split open to disgorge dozens of skittering spiders with bronze carapaces, each one the size of a man's palm. They spread across the floor and reached the first formation line. And they fed. Mandibles closed on carved channels and the glow of expertly crafted formations died, node by node, line by line.

Lorn watched and felt the soldiers behind him in the dark, the pulse of qi in their meridians, the texture of their fear. He wondered if he should feel it too. The question came and went like a leaf on a stream. When the last node went dark, Lorn stepped forward. And at the end of it stood a door. Forty feet from floor to arch, carved from a single slab of pale stone. The First Emperor in his aspect as the Sovereign, with the same stern gaze as their now buried replica. Lorn stood before it and thought of Lodin.

The thought arrived uninvited, his brother's face in the blue light of the replica vault, the moment before the rock came down. Lorn closed his eyes, and took a breath. There was a hollowed-out place inside his chest where guilt might have taken root, but Huihun's warmth filled that space, the way water fills a bowl. He placed his palm against the seam. Blue fire traced the line from floor to arch.

The ground shuddered, and the Sovereign split down his center as the two halves ground apart, and beyond them a vault opened, wide and deep, its ceiling lost in shadow. It was filled with treasure. There were weapons in polished racks, spirit stones in open crates, the cores of arch demons and divine beasts, alchemical reagents sealed in crystal vials, scrolls in wax-stamped cases. The Shattered Summit soldiers spread through the room, hands on weapons and scrolls, and someone laughed. Lorn walked past all of it.

There was only one treasure in this room, and it sat at the back. On a pedestal of white stone, a cube sat in silence. Dark iron, no larger than a walnut, its edges worn smooth. A chain coiled around the pedestal, meant to be worn around the neck. Lorn lifted it. The cube was cold in his hands, heavier than it should have been. He turned it over and found a single latch on one side, unlocked. The warmth behind his ribs surged. At last. The voice resonated in his bones, too deep for the ears. Open it.

His thumb found the latch, and he hesitated. The hesitation surprised him. It came from somewhere beneath Huihun's warmth, from a depth he had thought was silent. A question surfaced, small and quiet, the kind of question an unhealthy mind buries so deep it forgets the burial. Is this what I want, or what the dragon wants? The warmth in his chest swelled and the question faded. Lorn flicked the latch, and the lid fell open. Light erupted from the cube, red and gold, the color of autumn and of embers.

It gathered in the air above Lorn, and took shape of a dragon. It was larger than Huihun, translucent, red and gold scales along a serpentine body. Its eyes blazed amber, warm and clear. It glided and coiled in the air like an eel through calm waters, and as Lorn watched it breathed in a deep breath of relief. Then Huihun exploded from Lorn's shoulders. The blue dragon reared up and lunged, jaws wide, and Lorn felt centuries of anguish compressed into a single desperate act.

Blue fire engulfed the space between them. Lorn felt the force of Huihun's need like a hand around his heart, a pressure that made his vision blur and his breath seize. The red dragon screamed, lashed out with a tail of flame that struck the blue dragon across the face and sent Lorn sideways from the reflected force. The two dragons circled in the air above the vault. Blue fire and red fire tangled and spat and tore at each other. Huihun lunged again.

The red dragon twisted aside and the blue jaws snapped shut on empty air. And Lorn saw the red dragon's face. He saw revulsion in those amber eyes. The red dragon recoiled the way flesh recoils from a flame. Both dragons swelled in size. Lorn's hands shook, and the empty cube rattled in his grip.

"Get out!" He screamed at the Shattered Summit soldiers who stood frozen at the far end of the vault, their arms full of plundered weapons and scrolls, their gray faces slack.

"Get out, now!" They ran. He reached for Huihun, reached with his Gates wide open, tried to pull the blue dragon back, tried to project calm toward the red one, tried to bridge the gap between them the way he had once bridged the gap between his own mind and a soul trapped beneath the earth. Huihun did not listen. The blue dragon lunged again, and this time its jaws found purchase. Blue fire closed around the red dragon's neck and Lorn felt the contact like a bolt through his spine.

For one instant the two halves touched, and something vast and wounded moved through him, a pain so deep and so profound it defied any description. The red dragon tore free. It blazed white, too bright to look at, and shot upward. It struck the ceiling and passed through stone the way light passes through glass, through three hundred feet of earth, through the floors of the castle above, and its glow vanished from Lorn's senses like an ember sucked into the sky. It was gone. The vault went quiet.

Huihun screamed its frustration, but there were none left to hear it but Lorn. Blue fire lashed the walls, scorched the treasure, set scrolls ablaze. Lorn dropped to his knees as the dragon's pain tore through his body, and the cube clattered from his grip and rolled to a stop against the pedestal. Huihun curled around his shoulders, diminished, a guttered flame, and the sound the dragon made was not a roar or a scream but a low, broken keening that Lorn felt in the roots of his teeth.

He closed his eyes and reached for the hollow place in his chest where the warmth had been, where Huihun's certainty had lived, and found it cold. The question surfaced again, quiet as the first time. Is this what I want? He had no answer. He knelt alone in the dark, in the empty vault, and the silence pressed down on him from all sides.