“We can’t just let him get away with it like this.”
“We’ve already been shouting at him for an hour.”
“You’ve been shouting at him for an hour. I’ve been trying to get him to toss it into the sea.”
“He said he wants to keep it.”
“Fine. He can keep it. At the bottom of the hole he’ll be living in until he gets rid of the accursed thing.”
“But Mistress. He’s a sorcerer. A proper sorcerer. We can’t force him to do, well, anything, really. And when have we ever been able to convince him of anything either? He comes when he wants, leaves when he wants.”
“Then every time he comes, I’ll remind him of the thousand wonderful ways he can arrange to get that delightful little death ball out of this room, this city, this island, and our lives.”
The exasperated back-and-forth, with its subtle undertone of disguised affection, was interrupted by a low, moody murmur from Oneface.
“He’s sitting right there, you know…”
Mikka was indeed seated on a stool in a cleared-out corner of the room. He gave the impression of a child sent off to reflect on their actions by their parents.
“Shut up, Oneface. And will you stop touching that thing already? You already said it runs on runes rather than clockwork. You won’t be able to do anything except maybe convince it to explode on us earlier than it would otherwise.”
One-face looked up from the artefact on the table, and grumbled below his breath:
“But the way the metal fuses into the velvety undercarriage alone is worth studying for–”
“What was that?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You clearly did.”
“But it genuinely wasn’t anything disrespectful or obscene this time!”
“So you did say something, then!”
As Mistress stormed over to let off a little steam by haranguing Oneface, Mikka’s eyes lit up and, sensing an opportunity to escape the telling off that was sure to continue soon, started to tiptoe away from his seat.
Tentpole was watching to make sure Mistress wasn’t giving Oneface too hard a time when he noticed a movement in his peripheral vision. He spun round to see Mikka frozen in place with his cheeks puffed out. He seemed to be hoping that, so long as he didn’t move, Tentpole wouldn’t be able to see him. Their eyes met. Tentpole raised his eyebrows into an “I can see you…” expression. Mikka gave him a pleading look. Tentpole was feeling torn about whether to rat him out when he heard a voice snap behind him.
“Where do you think you’re going?!”
But by the time Mistress rounded on him, Mikka was already hanging from the ceiling hatch with one hand. He flicked the rope ladder into the other with his foot so she couldn’t follow. She tried to jump up and grab one of his ankles, and he pulled his body to the side, hanging as rigid as a floorboard, perpendicular to the floor. She glared at him. He stuck out his tongue.
“I’m off to see my sword instructor!” he said.
“Then take that unholy idol of yours with you!”
“Keep hold of it for the afternoon at least. I’ll be back before sunset. We’ll figure out where to stash it then.”
With a whish, the rope ladder unfurled back to the ground, and he was gone.
A few miles down the coastline, the long, wide sandflats gave way to seaside cliffs, sheer and stony and wave-beaten.
In the midst of a uniform landscape of dark green shrubbery, bright yellow clay and dark red stone, a cape of deep blue flapped wildly in a wind which bore towards the shore a storm which still hid over the horizon and would not touch the land til nightfall. The wind had come unobstructed across all of the sea, and seemed effronted at being halted by mere earth. Mikka stood at the cliff’s edge, looking down as the receding tide revealed the rocks which had hitherto been hidden under waves. They were ridged, like a deck of cards stacked against each other on their sides, with great gaps cloven in between them, into which the sea rushed high into the air.
In this harsh and wailing landscape, Mikka’s breath softened. His eyes slowly shut, and the exposed skin on his cheeks and the back of his hands cooled and reddened and then paled, offering no resistance to the wind’s chill edge.
A cry pierced the heaving, howling air.
Mikka’s left foot swung back in a semicircle. His right palm settled on the pommel of his sword. There was a sharpness to the movement, a threat in its abruptness, but it was as smooth as if he had not moved at all.
A peregrine falcon wended its way seaward, over the fields and through the gusts of wind, like a canny pickpocket through a packed crowd or a drop of rainwater through piled boulders. It came to that invisible spot – a few paces off the edge and fifty feet above – where the wind bounces off the cliffside to form an upward current. There, the noble bird stopped, hovering with the miraculous improbability of daily occurrence, tilting left and right as the winds buffeted at it, at first wildly, like a flag flapping on a pole, then with barely a flicker – an outstretched hand hesitating to land upon a shoulder.
And then the wind made its way into the feathers too, and the weight of the heavens pressed down through the bird’s vision and melded themselves into its intent, collapsing all distinction between the body and the space it occupied, unmaking at a stroke the wall between the self and the world’s will.
The falcon rested its weight on the wind, the only point of stillness in a maelstrom of constant and contrasting motion, in a moment so silent and prolonged it can only be described as having touched eternal duration.
From that thin and perfect axle of the cosmic wheel, the whole orb of sky, land and sea was revealed – for with total stillness of body came the scouring clean of mind, and with the windows of the senses thrown open, the world at large flooded in to take the place that self had occupied.
Suddenly, the spell was broken. Before any watching eye cloud blink, the falcon dropped down, precipitous and instant, onto the unsuspecting water vole whose whisker-twitch had betrayed its position to that panoptic vision. It did not hear the breaking of the air around it until an incomprehensible seizure of pain ran through its spine, and the ground rushed out from under it, and the thin, momentary film of panic was broken through to an endless blackness.
At that moment, a blinding flash of light lit up the cliffside. The slick rocks turned sheer white, like a mirror held to the desert sun.
Mikka’s sword cut an arc through the air, turning into a blade of light a hundred feet long. The strike did not stop there, but pushed out further, subdividing with the air currents, until it dissipated into a delta of a thousand shining streams, miles out to sea.
Wherever it passed, the air around it turned into a thin vapour with its heat. And in the instants after the light began to fade, a rainbow tapestry could be seen over the waves: the currents of the air themselves made visible, multi-coloured light flowing out into thousands of intricate strands.
The hilt of a sword snapped against the lacquered scabbard. The sound of the wind rushed back into the world after it had held itself in silence in that moment of awe. The cry of a falcon rang out triumphant, as sharp and clear as diamond. Mikka swung his rear foot forward, drew in one long breath, and opened his eyes.
The bird flew off to feed its young. The last glimmers of the rainbow faded, leaving only the heaving grey of windswept seas. As if in protest at the dazzling disturbance, the clouds broke out into a stodgy drizzle.
Mikka turned westward, toward Tremallan. He looked down at his feet as he walked, thinking.
He had stolen the artefact, almost exactly as planned. He had brought it back to Tremallan, as promised. He was willing to assume the internal conflicts in the Sunset Sect meant they would be too busy eyeing each others’ movements to try and reclaim it immediately. That meant he had some time.
The artefact – or the Idol, as Mistress had so amusingly dubbed it – was only half the treasure. It was like a locked chest – without its key, it was worthless. He had no clues on where to find that missing piece, however. The client had insisted that, so long as the artefact was in Tremallan, the key should come to it. But that wasn’t good enough for Mikka. If there was one thing he couldn’t do, it was sit on an egg, patiently waiting for it to hatch. He needed to stay on his feet, and move. That meant finding out what this key was, and how to use it. As to what would happen when he used it… well, he wasn’t very clear about that either. All he knew – and all he really needed to know – was that the moment the artefact was unlocked was the moment the client would arrive. And from the moment the client arrived, it wouldn’t be long until they paid up.
He crouched on the rotting planks of a foundered ship, ready to leap away, but stopped, as if hearing his name called by a distant comrade. The quirk at the edge of one lip turned into a full-bodied smile.
Xian’ling sighed.
She was seated on a rock on a wide pebble beach in the midst of a herd of elephant seals. A little rowboat full of children who had come to watch the migrating seals bobbed up and down in the bay. The five-tonne bull at the head of the harem charged at Xian’ling and roared in her face, his great, floppy snout bouncing wildly about with rage. But he did not strike her with his fangs or mast-thick neck, and she did not even seem to notice him, though his breath smelled foul with rotten fish and blew her hair out behind her like a flag.
She had been ten miles out to sea, watching a panicking crew of three youths who had taken one of their father’s fishing vessels for a joyride and could not figure out how to steer it back, when it suddenly occurred to her that there was really nothing much for her to do out here.
The swordsman’s trail was hard to follow, but not overwhelmingly so. It followed the river to the shore, meandered about on the beach, and turned straight toward Tremallan. He was clearly hiding there, and making no great secret of it. But Xian’ling was not allowed to enter Tremallan. And so, what more could she do?
Investigating the theft had just been a ruse to escape her training and go play in the world outside. But somehow, now that she realised the ruse was rumbled and that her mission was completely pointless, she felt all the enthusiasm drain out of her.
The bull elephant seal had retreated a fair distance. After a long minute of inner turmoil, it finally talked itself into biting the intruder’s neck off. It charged her once more, but skidded to a rolling halt when it saw the terrifying blankness in her eyes. The seal, and all its forefathers stretching back countless generations, lived and died and successfully reproduced through their ability to size up the strength of their opponent – a strength counted purely in raw mass and muscular power. Despite Xian’ling’s slender, even dainty frame, that marrow-deep instinct screamed at him to stop, to turn, to run away. And thus, he was saved where a less specialised combatant would have failed to see, and fallen.
The cascade of pebbles he sent skittering over her bare feet drew her attention out of the sunken pit and back to her surroundings. With a subtle frown, she looked over her shoulder to the cliffside above the beach, where a figure stood looking down on her.
He was dressed in dark blues, fitted tightly to a lithely muscular form. His cloak and the long tails of his headband billowed behind him. He swung a smile her way so wide with mischief and undisguised interest that she immediately turned away with a huff.
It really made no sense to be upset like this. She’d just been given a million million things to play with, and now all she wanted was the one thing that had been made off-limits. It was incredibly childish, she knew. But something about it reminded her of being excluded from the games of the junior disciples. The normal ones, who weren’t personally instructed by a Senior Master, and who had often known a life outside the School. They had been mature, well-behaved children, and let anybody join. Anybody except Xian’ling.
She was just starting to reflect deeply on her personality and preferences and how she functioned – quite possibly for the first time in her life – when she suddenly remembered the man watching her. She glanced up at the cliff with her spiritual sense, refusing to turn her head. He had squatted down, and watched her now with his cheeks propped up on his leather-gauntleted fists.
What was the matter with him, anyway? Clearly, someone brazen enough to earn the ire of the entire School would be precisely the sort of person to stroll tauntingly up to one of its members like this. But even so, the way he looked at her was so infuriatingly impudent! Teasing, even! What made him think he… think he…
Xian’ling’s face blanched with the pent-up force of belated recognition.
She spun round, mouth hanging open, all discretion forgotten. He was staring at her with the same impish grin as before. No, was it wider now? In any case, it was him! It was the thief himself! And after she had just given up on even looking! The first person to break in and take something from the School in all its history had inexplicably appeared right behind her, without her even sensing his approach. And now he was waggling his eyebrows!
With a slight nod of his head, he stepped backwards from the cliff’s edge and disappeared from sight. Xian’ling scrambled to her feet, shaking with indignation. Just as she leapt up into the skies…
Do not let them see you flying.
Her Master’s words flew back into her mind. She flicked her eyes over to the rowboat. Every one of the children had long since forgotten about the elephant seals, and sat staring spellbound at her – the mystical selkie of otherworldly beauty.
Xian’ling immediately interrupted her spell, but the momentum of her leap flipped her over in the air, and she crashed face-first into the pebble beach. She stayed like that – buried up to her hips, bare soles of her feet pointing up at the very clouds she had meant to pierce through – for a full minute.
When she finally stood up again, the thief was standing at the cliff’s edge once more. He scratched his head, gave her a bashful smile and a shrug, and disappeared for good this time. She turned to the boatful of children. None of them were laughing. But none of them looked away, either. She radiated spiritual force, sending the bull seal cowering into the sea and the herd of females swooning, and stood tall with all the dignity of an Immortal Master of the School of Violet Vacuity. One of the children blinked. The others just kept staring at her.
She scowled, kicked a pebble against the cliff wall, and stomped off, fuming.
David Leon 