Chương 14

The night air was a welcome refreshment after the heat of the gambling den. Dae Han stretched his arms overhead and cracked his neck.

"Well," he said.

"Good luck with all that. I'm headed back to Yi Dian to collect a sack of gold."

"Wait a moment." Dae Han turned and looked at Lodin.

"I would have wandered around for days trying to find that out," Lodin said.

"You knew exactly who to ask and you took me right to him. Thank you. That helped a lot." Dae Han shrugged.

"I got paid." Lodin considered him. The man had moved through that den like a fish through familiar waters. He knew people here, knew how to find what was hidden. And he'd been following Lodin. Watching from afar, trying to figure out…

"So… The more complex a system is, the more potential combinations exist in it. The secret to a strong build is to have a broad knowledge of that system, take things created for specific functions or situations, and to fit those functions together into something no one's done before. Do it right and you can build something unstoppable." Dae Han raised an eyebrow.

"Go on…" Lodin smiled wryly.

"You won't be able to copy my build. Or counter it. But if you want me to explain how it works, I'll do it if you keep helping me find Lorn." Dae Han went still. His expression shifted, and for a moment his face was naked with want. The cagey wanderer, the man who kept his cards close, looked like a child who had just been offered a key to a locked toy chest. Then he blinked, seemed to remember his composure, and gave Lodin a slow nod.

"Deal. But I'm not walking into a nest of demons with you."

"No need." Lodin paused, took a moment to think.

"There's supposed to be a place in Thousand Bridges called Joyful Garden," he said. Dae Han nodded.

"Nice place. Expensive, but nice."

"If you're gonna be in Dragon's Rest a little longer, go there. It's where I'll be staying." Dae Han's eyebrow rose a little, but then he shrugged and nodded.

"Fair enough. If you need my help, find me there." The roguish cultivator gave Lodin a bow, and turned to make his way through the city. - - - - Lodin walked through the Terraces as the night deepened around him. The streets here were clean and quiet. Walled gardens lined the roads, and the homes beyond them were dark, their wealthy occupants long asleep.

Iron lanterns stood on finely wrought pedestals at intervals along the path, each one an island of amber light that did little to push back the shadows between them. Kang Dae Han's curiosity made Lodin's mind drift back to the training grounds behind Master Yan's compound, to a day when the sun had been warm and the air had smelled of pine, and Lorn had been happy. They had been sparring. Lodin remembered the way his fists cut the air, the rhythm of his footwork on the packed earth.

Lorn stood across from him, pale and thin, his long white hair tied back, the dark lines of the sak yant tattoos visible on his arms and neck and chest. The tattoos had been Master Yan's solution to a problem alchemy alone could not solve. The pills and elixirs strengthened Lorn's body over time, nourished it, kept his muscles from atrophy, gave him the baseline to survive. But survival was not combat.

A cultivator with all Gates open and all Seals at zero could channel vast amounts of qi into mighty Techniques, but he could not throw a punch, let alone stand up straight on his own power. So Master Yan had inked sacred patterns into Lorn's skin, anchors for qi that let him move his own body like a puppet on strings. Clothing and items could serve the same purpose, but those could be taken away. The sak yant were permanent. They were part of him.

Lodin threw a strong right hand and Lorn's whole body moved to the side, just far enough to get clear of the blow. His yantra tattoos glowed faintly as they carried him to safety like a marionette.

"You're getting better at that," Lodin said. Lorn grinned.

"I've been practicing." Lodin threw a check hook and Lorn slid back, just out of range.

"I figured something out," Lorn said.

"Yeah?" This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Lorn took a turn on offense, with a surge forward he went into a pattern of sword-hand strikes and wheel kicks.

"You know how the Void Gate lets you move through space? And Dominion Gate lets you touch other minds?"

"Sure." Lodin threw a hook. Lorn ducked under it, his spine bending at an angle that made Lodin's own back ache to look at, and countered with a sweep Lodin hopped back from. He only knew because he'd been taught as much. Lacking the potential for a direct experience of it, his knowledge of the powers of the Gates would be purely academic for life.

"And Unity Gate lets you make connections. Bonds." Lorn circled to the left, his feet gliding over the packed earth.

"If you use all three together, and your Gates are strong enough, you can project yourself, your awareness, across huge distances." Lodin paused.

"How huge?"

"Other provinces," Lorn's eyes were bright.

"Other worlds, even. I've been reaching out, making contact with people all over the empire. Scholars in the capital. Monks in the mountains. My reach might be limitless." Lodin stared at his brother.

"I can feel them," Lorn said.

"Right now, if I wanted to. I could touch their minds, talk to them. It's like having a thousand friends I've never seen." Lodin did not know what to say to that. He didn't understand it, not really. The world Lorn described was as foreign to him as the bottom of the sea. But Lorn was smiling. Lorn was excited. Lorn, who had spent so many years trapped in an inert prison of a body, was reaching across worlds. At the time it hadn't occurred to Lodin to ask about who he was talking to, who he'd found out there.

Or more importantly, who had found him. As Lodin found the gates of Tianmu Cemetary, he imagined he was about to find out. The cemetery gates stood at the end of a winding lane. Their iron bars were old but well-maintained. They were open, and as Lodin passed through them the cemetery spread before him in terraces, the graves arranged in neat rows that climbed the hillside. Stone markers and monuments stood pale in the moonlight. The air smelled of incense and cut grass.

Lodin moved along the central path, past tombs carved with names and dates and the symbols of noble houses. Offerings sat before some of the markers. The dead were well tended here. At the back, there's a columbarium built into the hillside. He found it at the far end of the cemetery, where the terraces gave way to raw stone. A structure of pale marble set into the rock, its face divided into hundreds of small compartments, each one sealed with a square marker. Urns for the ashes of the dead.

Walk to the far end, past the shrine. A small shrine stood at the center of the columbarium, a stone altar with an incense burner and a statue of some deity Lodin did not recognize. He passed it and kept walking. The last column of markers is in shadow even at midday. The far end of the columbarium sat in darkness. Just as Hong Nguyen said, the moonlight did not reach here. Lodin's eyes adjusted, and he scanned the rows of markers. Third row up. No name. Just this. He found it.

A marker like all the others, but blank. There was no name, dates, or family crest. Just a lotus flower pressed into the stone. Lodin reached out and touched it, and counted to three. He stepped back as the wall shifted. Stone ground against stone, a low rumble Lodin felt in his chest. The section of the columbarium before him swung inward, slow and heavy, and revealed a passage beyond. A staircase curved down into the earth, lit by torches that burned with white fire.

The steps were broad and shallow, the walls smooth, the descent crafted for ease and comfort. The stairs ended before a set of grand oaken doors twice Lodin's height, carved with lotus flowers and inlaid with silver. The air was still. Behind him, the white flames crackled soft and distant. He reached for the handle. The doors parted before he could touch them, drifted inward with glacial slowness, and the hinges made no sound despite the weight they bore. He stepped into darkness.

What little he could see reminded him of the foyer of a mansion, its high ceilings lost in shadow, polished floors that gleamed faintly where the light from the stairwell touched them. Lodin stood still and let his eyes adjust. Shapes emerged from the black. Lacquered furniture. Silk hangings on the walls. He moved forward. The central room was vast. Clusters of lounge furniture surrounded a sunken pit meant for musicians and servers. The air smelled of stale incense and dust.

Everything was deathly still and silent. Lodin stopped to examine a huge mural on the room's far wall. The painting stretched from floor to ceiling, thirty feet wide at least. At its center was a dragon. Serpentine and vast, its scales painted in shades of gold and amber and deep red. It coiled through clouds of smoke, and wounds marked its body from its head to the tip of its tail. Three figures stood against it. Two men and a woman, rendered small against the dragon's bulk but standing firm.

A man holding a jian, another man with a two-handed war club, and a woman wielding a long spear. Behind the three figures, the land stretched out in careful detail. There was a crescent shaped bay, its waters painted in shades of blue and green. Mountains rose beyond it, and the tallest of them was rendered in shades of black, its slopes dark and barren. The coastline bent in a familiar shape, and the position of the bay relative to the mountain was one Lodin had seen before.

He had stood on the docks in Saltside and looked up at that same mountain. He had walked through the Terraces with that same harbor at his back. The painter had captured Dragon's Rest as it must have looked long ago, before the city existed, before the wall was built on the dragon's spine, before the skull became a monument in a courtyard. Just the raw land. And above it, the dragon that had given the city its name, Wandering Flame, wounded and dying, facing three figures whose names Lodin did not know.

Lodin stared at the mural for a long moment. He did not know what it meant. But he filed it away and moved on. He passed through into a banquet hall. A long table ran down the center, set with porcelain and silver. Chairs for thirty, maybe more. All empty. Beyond that lay a corridor. He followed it and found a chamber carved from the rock itself. A spring, fed by some underground source. Steam should have risen from the water, but the pool lay flat and cold.

"Forgive me sir, but I don't see your name on our guest list." The voice came from everywhere around him. It was a man's voice, Lodin thought, though a delicate one, soft and soothing. It gave the impression that its owner was either old or physically frail. Lodin's hands balled into fists.

"Where's my brother," he said. There was a long pause. Then gentle laughter echoed all around him. And as it did, the darkness deepened. Other sounds joined the soft laughter. Low growls. Hisses. The chittering of rodents, or insects, or perhaps both. The scratching of claws. Hundreds of sounds, from every direction, all of them growing closer and closer. Forms began to emerge from the unnatural dark. A spider with the head of a human. A huge, bone-white serpent. An ogre with red skin and burning eyes.

And more, dozens more, hundreds more, crawling out of the dark toward him on the floor and the walls and the ceiling. Lodin grimaced and settled into his stance.