Fu’sieh walked past the chanting halls of the School of Violet Vacuity at the Western Heavenly Boundary – popularly known, by the few who have even heard them spoken of in rumour, as the Sunset Sect.
The young disciples going discreetly in and out of the back of the rooms did not recognize him. The cantors sitting on raised platforms at the front cracked an eye open, watching him pass with a mixture of surprise, curiosity, and trepidation. He circled round the kitchens, where a faint scent of boiled herbs suffused the air, along with the clipped, hushed bickering of orderlies tasked with delivering the meals to those senior disciples cultivating in solitude who still required food. Wending his way through the smooth boulders at the far end of the disciples’ area of the Sect – slick with the condensation which the air left when making contact with the protective wards – Fu’sieh came to the Caverns of Tammûz Kigal.
In a wide, flat valley of grey sand, with a streambed but no water running down the centre and steep cliffs to either side, meditation caverns had been carved. Suspended in the caves loomed hulking, shrouded figures – four to ten times taller than the average man – with cultivators sat in front of them on grass mats, contemplating the nature of their power. Now out of the bustle of the central area, Fu’sieh no longer walked, but skipped lightly, floating forward a dozen paces with each footfall. After a mile, he turned into a cavern much like any other.
The figure floating in green mist was colossally muscular, huge golden rings tight across its thighs and biceps. It had no discernible head, and possessed one shrivelled and misshapen foot. The grass mat in front of it was ragged, rotting, and unoccupied. In the far wall ran a thin crack, blocked from view by the creature’s girth until one stepped directly behind it. Fu’sieh squeezed through. After a minute, the narrow gap widened into a tunnel which spiralled downwards in roughly hewn stairs.
Despite the total darkness, he could tell the passage continued to expand as he descended by the roar of the waterfalls which occasionally sprayed the steps beneath his feet. In their increasingly resonant and overlapping echoes, he almost fancied he could hear the opening verse of a song she had used to sing, so very long ago, when he and Yue’mu were still only children.
| 悲時俗之迫阨兮 願輕舉而遠遊 質菲薄而無因兮 焉託乘而上浮 | Bēi shí sú zhī pò è xī, Yuàn qīng jǔ ér yuǎn yóu. Zhì fēi báo ér wú yīn xī, Yān tuō chéng ér shàng fú? | Grieved by the parlous state of this world’s ways, I wanted to float up and far away from it. But my powers were too weak to support me: What could I ride on to bear me upwards? |
The stairs ended, the passage flattened, and the sound of the waterfalls dimmed into the distance. Far ahead, a golden glow could be seen. Reaching it, he emerged, blinking, into a massive chamber.
It had no discernible walls, ceiling, or bottom. Instead, a thin stone bridge arched towards an island of rock floating, otherwise unsupported, in an endless sky. All around it alternated the colours of early sunset, flowing bands of blue and pink and orange mists, all played against a background of golden white.
Fu’sieh couldn’t look into it too long without feeling a sense of vertigo, and so he kept his eyes on the narrow bridge of stone beneath his feet. It was oddly carved, with feathers and scales down the length of it.
The greater part of the floating island was taken up by a pavilion whose thick, grey marble roof was held aloft by three pillars – each a thin lattice of interwoven silver filaments. In its shade stood a pedestal with a slowly swirling pool of water, an old and frayed but sturdy wicker basket, and a divan of the same impassive stone which hung above.
On the divan lay a woman in a white robe not much different from that of any other Sect disciple. The hair of her head and brows and lashes was the gold of fields of wheat seen from a distant mountain at dawn – less ethereal and yet more lustrous than the lights around her – but her eyes… Her eyes had no irises or pupils to mar them, and were the colour of looking straight up at the sun at noon.
Fu’sieh bowed low – and by the time he straightened, she had turned away from him again.
“Founding Master.”
Her voice seemed to come from the space around them, booming up from under the floating island and echoing into a lilting ripple by the time it reached the small, quivering bones of his body.
“Has Spring truly come again already?”
“It has, Master. And Summer is not far off. I come, therefore, to give report.” He cleared his throat. “The Sect continues to flourish. Four promising young disciples have been accepted into the Hall of Spinning Discs. Senior Master Mo’ti sent back another Rakksha spirit from the Realm of Smoke and Cinders.” He paused for ceremony’s sake. “Senior Masters Wen’tun and Se’fel have both passed on. The former in a failed attempt to break through to the Soaring-and-Unseen Stage. The latter peacefully, by her lily pond, surrounded by disciples, into a dream of Oneness which she requested we not observe from the outside. ‘The One and its Witness make Two’, she wrote in her death poem. Wen’tun we likewise have not been able to trace. The Sight-Seekers suggest his soul ruptured, splitting into three major fragments. Investigations continue. The other Senior Masters have not yet agreed on candidates to replace them. There was an attempt to bring a few forward, but no quorum was reached.”
The Sect Master showed no discernible reaction to any of this. If anything, she gave the impression of a young girl, raised in the Inner Palace of a great kingdom, who is taken out for an excursion and stares through the carriage window at two butterflies dancing around each other in the wind – her expression a mixture of boredom and distracted delight.
Fu’sieh swallowed, though his mouth was very dry, and continued.
“There is a very recent incident of note. An intruder breached the School’s perimeter. None of the outer wards show any signs of having been tampered with, and the guardian spirits did not sense his entry – though one did notice him leave, and alerted the Senior Master. We gave chase, but he managed to slip away – we believe to the city of Tremallan in the North. Senior Master Yue’mu has taken charge of the investigation. Guardian Spirit Yawning Moat is overseeing a review of the School’s defences.”
He paused again, his mouth hanging open for a moment.
“The case is as troubling as it is puzzling. There are many unexplained factors. The intruder does not fit the description of any of the secular sorcerers we know to associate with Tremallan, nor is there any hint of how he could have obtained such detailed information about the layout of our Sect. The abilities he displayed, though flashy, do not indicate a particularly profound cultivation state, and yet he was able to–”
The Sect Master flicked her hand, a hint of annoyance playing at one side of her mouth. Fu’sieh felt a ripple pass through the air – one which left every leaf of the trailing vines of silvered ivy stock-still, yet stopped the motion of his breath at the breastbone. He took a step back and kept his gaze lowered until she spoke.
“What of your own cultivation?”
He mulled over his response for a long minute.
“I thank Master for inquiring. As you know, I alone among the First Disciples follow the Way of Law. I do not find the conversation of demons enlightening, and have few friends among the Fae.” He paused. “I came to an impasse at the height of summer, as the Yang phase crested. I could not decide whether all the order I had succeeded in discovering was imposed from within or was faithfully derived from without – and this proved an impediment to any further progress. I resolved to enter seclusion to meditate on this, but Sect matters have proven too urgent for me to withdraw for an extended period.”
He was beginning to warm to the topic. The thoughts he left pending in autumn were starting to come back to him, along with images of his earliest days of study, when his discoveries of the syntax of star charts had so enthralled him, and set him on this path.
“See, the issue is: when one observes a given phenomenon, having previously established a prima facie correspondence between two evaluations of such forces as can be said to–“
“Fu.”
“–have been the proximate cause of… yes, Master?“
“You’re not going to get anywhere if you keep nannying your sister like this. She neither asked for, nor cultivates such a Way as to be able to appreciate, such misplaced maternal ministrations. In fact…” Her face grew serious for a moment, and he straightened. “Step back from Sect affairs entirely. Do not concern yourself with the wranglings of the other Senior Masters. Consider your debts paid. No matter how much noise they make, how urgent the situation seems, how fever pitched the battle – turn your gaze down to your feet, fold one hand over another, and know your business lies in the hearth of your own household. By which, I hasten to add, I do not mean me, or Yue’mu, or even young Xian’ling.”
He waited for her to continue, but when she remained silent and started to grin at something only she could see in the scarlet hues spreading across her subterranean sky, he bowed and turned away.
“I have been wondering if, after all,” He stopped short when her voice rang out again. “Change truly is more fundamental than Essence – and Necessity, just the obstinate after-image of Potential.”
Her expression shifted from the impassivity of mountains to the wistfulness of the poets who wander through them, and finally settled into a wry grin.
“And yet, in the final reckoning: no matter how many lovers you have had, once you drink from the marriage goblet, how many of them would you bother to remember?”
He waited many minutes more, as she worried at one full lip with the tip of a tooth and smiled to herself. When he finally turned around – this time for good – and made his way across the narrow bridge, his face furrowed into a deep frown.
He did not understand why she had reprimanded him, and warned him off in such decisive terms. And he had no idea what her closing words meant. All he knew was that they had nothing whatsoever to do with his difficulties – she had just been humouring her stray musings. His heart was steady enough that he could admit he felt disappointed. Toyed with. Betrayed, even.
He left the grand, golden cavern, but as he made his way up the stone steps, he found that he could make out words in the crashing of the waterfalls.
“You could consider consulting the works of the Gaon scholar-rulers of Tisfōn. They were obliged to administer a city of five radically divergent species – of which their own was the smallest in number. As I recall, some of the commentaries to their legal code contained fairly illuminating treatises on the question of legal imposition versus consultation. …as well as the unexpected benefits of hiring amphibious legal scribes.”
Then he heard “Selah”, and a laugh, though the last one may just have been the water falling again. Fu’sieh stopped short, thought for a minute, knelt on the cold and dampened ground, and bowed in the direction of the Master’s Cave.
David Leon 