Chương 33: Lìchūn: Tempering 12

Liu Yinhua keeps her eyes closed for another breath, waiting for the warmth to turn sharp. Nothing strikes, and the cold from the shadow room has fallen away so completely that her skin feels confused by it, still braced for a touch that does not come. She opens her eyes slowly. The chamber is natural, or near enough to it that the worked parts seem natural. Pale rock curves overhead in smooth shelves, dry and warm, with thin mineral veins running through it like trapped light.

Narrow vents split the far wall, and heat breathes from them in slow waves, carrying a mineral dryness that catches at the back of her throat. Old water marks crust the stone in white rings, and little channels run across the floor and vanish into cracks, long empty. It is bright enough that she squints.

"You are filthy," someone says. Liu Yinhua freezes, and turns and— Long before the sect, before carved paths and lanterns and names pressed into stone, the mountain split open under a sky gone white with war. Spirits fought where rivers met. Stone rose against root. Root strangled old wells. Rain fell black in summer and steamed before it reached the ground. The earth grew sick with too many hungers, too many hands pulling at the same veins, too many old powers refusing to yield.

Forests flowered out of season and rotted in a day. Beasts birthed wrong. Springs frothed green. The lowlands stank sweet with bloom and death. Then the sun descended. Light, drawn down until every shadow crawled under stone and every hidden thing had to show itself. The wet rot of the world peeled back. Spores burned in the air. Blood dried on grass. Rivers shrank from their banks, and the mud beneath them cracked open like old pottery. Root-spirits screamed as their soft green fingers blackened.

Fever-spirits burst like oil in a pan. The earth smoked. The mountain rang. All things that could not endure brightness were given no time to beg. Spring ended beneath that light. Blossoms opened and fell in the same breath. Seeds sealed themselves in hard shells and waited underground. Water fled deep, deep into stone, where only patient roots and buried heat remembered the way to reach it.

The world became dry enough to live again, clean enough to hurt, empty enough for new things to grow- —a boy sits on a flat stone beside the largest vent, one knee drawn up and one foot bare against the rock. At first, he looks almost human, too bright, perhaps, and too still, but shaped like someone a few years older than her, with a narrow face, long white-gold hair, and eyes she cannot look at directly. Light gathers around him in a thin corona, paling at the edges of his body.

His sleeves are loose and colourless, if they are sleeves at all and when the heated air shifts, the lower half of him blurs like sun over stone. He looks at the scrape on her cheek, then at her sleeves, then at the bow she has dragged through half the mountain.

"You brought dirt into my room," he says. Liu Yinhua's fingers tighten once around the bow, then she bows. It is quick, because her body is tired and her shoulder hurts from the passage, but it is proper enough.

"This junior greets the honoured spirit," she says, scrambling to remember the right words. She cannot clearly see the level of the spirit before her, but she can guess. Fourth, maybe fifth. The boy tilts his head.

"Honoured?" She has no idea what answer he wants. She decides he might not want an answer at all and stays quiet. The spirit slides off the stone, and his bare feet touch the ground without sound. Light moves with him, dry and white and gold, and the chamber seems to lean toward him as if the vents are breathing in time with his attention. He walks closer, stopping several paces away.

"You smell like the dark room," he says.

"You looked at the shadow." She doesn't know the right answer, so she just keeps quiet.

"Humans always do. They want to know the shape of the thing eating them." He crouches suddenly, elbows on his knees, peering at her as if she is a beetle turned over in the dust.

"Then they light a torch. That is funny." Liu Yinhua closes her mouth around several possible responses and keeps them there. The spirit looks pleased by this.

"Yun sent you?" he asks.

"Elder Yun, yes," she says, and her mouth is so dry.

"She still sends people without telling them to bring water?" Liu Yinhua blinks despite herself.

"Water, honoured spirit?"

"Water," he says, as if she is slow.

"Wet thing. Falls from clouds. Runs downhill if the ground slopes."

"I know what water is, Honoured Spirit."

"You did not bring any."

"No."

"Yun is cheap." Liu Yinhua has spent enough time around dangerous people to know when agreeing would be foolish and disagreeing would be worse. She chooses a third path.

"I did not know to prepare an offering," she says.

"Please accept this junior's apologies, Honoured Spirit." The spirit clicks his tongue. It sounds like stone heating too quickly." Offering. Listen to you." The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. The light around him shifts, and it is only that his attention settles properly over her, and the room goes wider than itself. The world is white beneath a sky without mercy. Spring has ended. Green things rise too quickly and brown at the edges.

Rivers shrink into shining threads. Mud cracks, then hardens, then splits deeper. Fish bones show in the beds of pools.

Insects fall silent under leaves curled thin as paper. The sun does not blink. Flesh reddens. Water hides where only roots and patient things can find it. Rot dries before it can spread. Seeds wait in hard shells, alive because they know how to endure. The hills lie bare under the heat. Blossoms fall before bees can find them. Grass turns pale at the tips, then yellow, then brittle enough to break under the feet of passing beasts. The smell of wet earth leaves the world. Everything soft learns to retreat.

Everything hidden is forced to show itself. Worms curl beneath stones. Frogs vanish into cracked banks. Bones bleach where shade used to be— Liu Yinhua cannot breathe. Her throat is dust, and her skin is heat. For a breath, there is no chamber, no sect, no mountain, only summer stretched over a land until every living thing learns the cost of being less than perfect. Then it is gone. The spirit is still crouched in front of her, chin in one hand, watching her with open interest.

"You stayed upright," he says. Liu Yinhua draws in air too fast and almost coughs.

"My apologies, Honoured spirit," she manages, mouth dry. The spirit laughs, and it is a short sound, bright and dry, and the vents behind answer it with a faint hiss of heat.

"You are funny," he says.

"Small fire. Empty belly. Dirty clothes. Funny."

"This junior is honoured," Liu Yinhua says carefully, still trying to wet her throat.

"No, you are not. You are thinking about whether being funny will help you." She goes very still, and his smile widens. There is no malice in it, but there doesn't need to be.

"It might." Liu Yinhua lowers her eyes again, partly because looking at him is difficult and partly because he is right. Her thoughts have already begun sorting themselves around the shape of him. Spirit. Powerful. Not sect-bound, or at least not obviously, and familiar with Elder Yun, and connected to heat under the mountain, perhaps to the vents, perhaps to the hot springs, perhaps to something older than either.

"I am thinking," she says after a moment, "that I do not know the right way to speak to you."" Honoured honoured honoured," he says, waving one hand in a fluttering little imitation of a bow.

"Humans bend and make noises and then try to steal things." Liu Yinhua thinks of Guo Meilin's soft smile and Madame Xue's painted mouth and has to press her fingers once into her sleeve.

"I do not intend to steal from you, Honoured Spirit," she says.

"You could not." The spirit considers that, then stands. He is taller than he looked sitting down, and the light around him brightens as he turns, and Liu Yinhua's eyes sting until she drops her gaze to the floor. He pads back toward the vent and crouches beside a shallow stone basin she had not noticed. It is dry, and at its centre sit three things: two red stones dark as banked coals, a thin bronze slip, and her wooden token.

The token has changed, the fire character remains on one side, but the other has been marked with a small sun, burned deep and fine into the grain. The spirit picks up one of the red stones and tosses it to her. Liu Yinhua catches it badly against her chest.

"Do not eat it all at once," he says.

"I was not going to eat it," she says, almost reflexive.

"Humans eat everything. You eat roots, leaves, animals, mushrooms. Stones, if they shine enough for your tastes." He points at the spirit stone, and the way her hand clutches it.

"See?" Liu Yinhua cannot argue with that, really. The older courtesans eat the young. The customers are voracious. The fire spreading from her bare hands eats the tower alive. The spirit takes up the bronze slip next, turns it between two fingers, then flicks it at her. This time, she catches it properly. The metal is warm and thin, with three characters etched across it. She recognises none of them, but she doubts she can ask what they mean.

The spirit steps closer before she can question the slip, and this time he reaches for her right hand. Every instinct in her body objects. She lets him take it anyway. His fingers are warm and dry, not flesh, not quite light. The moment they close around her wrist, heat runs through the centre of her palm and up toward the narrow route she has been trying to find for days. It is not gentle. It is not painful either.

It is like standing too close to noon with no shade and no permission to pretend the sun is not there. Her half-opened hand route answers in a thin, startled line. The heat withdraws as quickly as it came. Liu Yinhua snatches the impulse to pull her hand back and locks it behind her teeth. The spirit releases her before she has to choose. She looks down at it, flexing her fingers once. The route is still difficult, but the place at the wrist no longer feels like a blur of wrongness. It is a gate with a bad hinge.

That, at least, can be worked on.

"When you come back, bring water," the spirit says, dismissive. Liu Yinhua looks at him, a little surprised by it.

"I may come back?"" If you bring water." She stores that away, careful and quick.

"How much?" The spirit looks at her as if this is the first sensible thing she has said.

"More than a mouthful. Less than a pond." Liu Yinhua bows again, not as low this time.

"I will remember, honoured spirit."

"You will try to remember everything," he says.

"That is why Yun sent you." The warmth in the room shifts. The brightness behind him deepens until Liu Yinhua has to close her eyes again. Summer stands at the edge of spring with bright hands, and blossoms open because heat commands them open, because green things are made to answer when the sun bears down, because petals and leaves and fruit and flesh all learn the same law beneath enough light.

Blossoms fall because heat has no use for hesitation, fruit swells until skin draws tight over sweetness and splits where it cannot hold itself together, grass yellows from the tips inward, rivers steam in their beds, wet earth dries to firm clay, and softness leaves the world grain by grain.

Heat enters and moisture flees, rot stops moving, fever burns through blood and leaves behind what can survive it, petals curl, leaves shrink, flesh reddens and toughens and scars, and all excess is pulled away until weakness shows itself in every damp place, every soft edge, every hidden hollow where corruption might have taken root.

There is a proper shape to things beneath enough light: a seed sealed hard around its centre, a bone cleaned white, a riverbed stripped to stone, a blade heated until the flaw rises, a wound dried before corruption can take hold, and the world resists because the world is full of water and softness and things that swell past their purpose, and heat corrects it, and heat teaches it structure, and heat leaves behind only what can keep its shape— When she is able to open her eyes again, the spirit is back on his flat stone by the vent, one knee drawn up, looking bored.

"Go away now," he says, flicking his fingers at her. Liu Yinhua closes her fingers around the sun-marked token, the bronze slip, and the hot red stone. Then she bows once more.

"Yes," she says.

"Thank you, honoured spirit."

"Bring water," he says again. The light folds around her before she can answer.