Drakemaster Page 2

  Dailus turned over the word “geomancers.” He thought he had translated it right. Two years gave him a fair grasp of the language of his captors, but the words the khan used combined the earth and witchcraft or magic. Earth witches? Mud witches? Dailus fell back on Latin, what little he had of it from working at various churches, and settled for “geomancers,” as something like “those who make magic from the earth.”

  “Here, my lord. What is your will?” Batzorig bowed low and straightened, hands spread, ready for the khan’s command.

  “These are yellow monks—Buddhists. They’re not geomancers.”

  “Oh. Are you certain, my lord?”

  “Have you found any compasses or symbols?”

  Batzorig glanced around at the bodies, the temple, the soldiers—anywhere but at the khan. “You said they would have sanctuaries, high in the mountains. That they would be like monks.”

  “Like monks! Not be monks. We can’t go about the countryside slaughtering everyone we find, not if we want to govern this place for ourselves. No wonder Kaifeng is in revolt!” The khan slapped his thighs. “Didn’t you send your scouts?”

  “Only one was available, and he seemed…” The general shook his head.

  One scout, the one that nobody employed unless he had to: Dailus’s own master.

  “It does not matter. I have failed you. A thousand apologies, my lord.” Batzorig bowed his head, shoulders slumping.

  “At least tell me that none have escaped to spread word of this?”

  “None, my lord.” Again, the general glanced around, his eyes briefly settling on the opposite mountaintop, where another peaked structure could be seen, linked to the temple by a thread of steps. “Absolutely.”

  “Thank the Eternal Sky for that! Tell your men they may take booty, then put this place to the torch.”

  “My lord, look there—so much bronze.” Batzorig pointed to the huge bell across the yard just as the crew succeeded in de-coupling it. It fell with a resounding crash against the stones beneath, cracking several, Dailus noted. Even in death, the bell had power. Jian Ho cringed from the damage. A strange man, that one, but their strangeness brought them together—shunned by the other men.

  Wang Lin Yo, silent as the khan berated his general, spoke up at last. “With this bronze, Master Sheng can make four or five firedrakes, at least, my lord khan!”

  The khan’s eyes lit up as if reflecting the glow of his firedrakes, then his light faded and he gave a sigh. “You have not heard? Sheng fell from his horse, struck by a dart, so the shaman tells me. He’s dead—assassinated. We need those firedrakes at Kaifeng, but without a master…” He rolled a shrug. “How long do you think the city can withstand a siege? If we bring up reinforcements or wait for a new master to cast the firedrakes?”

  Batzorig dropped to one knee and sketched in the mud, a long, wriggling line, a few swooping marks, a square. “They have the river, my lord. If we could divert it, take their water, we could re-gain our advantage.”

  “If the river was their only water source, and even then it would take months for them to run out—they’ve been planning this a long time, stockpiling fire lances. If the rebels have friends in the South to send reinforcements—or if they reach the geomancers—we might lose the entire region.” The khan stomped, splashing the muck, and Dailus flinched. “Without Sheng.” The khan shook his head, the horsetail slapping his shoulders.

  “There must be somebody else who could do it, my lord?”

  Wang Lin Yo’s brow furrowed, his priveleged position threatened without a drakemaster to supply.

  Dailus’s heart thundered in his chest, and he spoke a Hail Mary under his breath. Sheng, who ran the entire bronze-casting operation—killed! Leaving the army with a lengthy siege instead of a brief and glorious victory powered by firedrakes belching stone to shatter the walls of their enemy. The Tatars hated to wait. Dailus would have no hide left when Wang Lin Yo and Yusen had taken out their fury over that. What then? Would he ever get the chance to go home? Firedrakes: great hollows of bronze to contain an explosion instead of a voice. Like bells of fire.

  Dailus swallowed hard and said, “My lord khan.” He winced even as he spoke, tucking his body even closer to the ground, his hands pressed to the mud.

  “What’s that?” the khan said. “Speak up, slave, did you dare to address me?”

  “Yes, my lord khan.” Dailus tried a sidelong glance.

  “What are you? What is this?”

  At a gesture from the khan, two of the captains grabbed Dailus’s arms and hauled him up. He sagged between them, trying to disguise his height.

  Wang Lin Yo bowed repeatedly. “Forgive me, my lord! Please, please, please forgive me! Surely there was no intent to disturb your reverent person—”

  The khan thrust out his hand, folding back his over-long silken sleeve and grabbed Dailus’s chin, lifting his head to stare into his face. “A European?”

  “Just a slave, my lord,” Wang Lin Yo babbled, “He belongs to Kurdun—that is, to Yusen, your—that is—” The flustered overseer almost blundered into Yusen’s past, into the things they never spoke of. He bowed again, and opened his mouth, but the khan cut him off with a look, still gripping Dailus’s chin with work-hardened fingers.

  Dailus’s jaw ached where the khan’s grip overlaid his earlier beating, but he refused to lower his gaze. Let the khan seen him as strong, capable of what he was about to propose.

  “No wonder it dared to speak to me. Europeans have no discipline. And Yusen, well, you could hardly expect him to take a firm hand.” The khan gave a short chuckle, echoed by Batzorig and a few of the men.

  “No, my lord, certainly not.” Wang Lin Yo’s voice dared amusement.

  “Certainly not, but when you are given the charge of him, I expect you to do better.” The khan released Dailus and stepped back.

  “Yes, my lord.” Wang Lin Yo spun about almost too fast to see and slammed his foot into Dailus’s chest.

  Gasping for breath, Dailus staggered against the grip of the Tatar captains. He floundered, but he would not fall. This was his first chance in two years to rise above the wretched place he’d been given. “A b—bronze caster, my lord. I c-cast bronze.”

  Wang Lin Yo landed another kick that shot pain through Dailus’s chest and sent him tumbling free of the captains’ grasp to writhe on the ground. The words over his head came and went on echoes of pain, as if the bell’s great log had struck his own breast.

  “A bronze caster? Is this true?”

  “So Yusen claimed. The slave is disgusting, my lord, but not without knowledge. At first I had to hit him just to make him shut up.”

  Huddled on the earth, fist pressed against his heart, Dailus wished he had absorbed those lessons. His chest radiated pain with every half-breath. He had seized the chance to improve his lot, and now he would die for it.

  “Any others? Anyone else you have with knowledge? Then he’ll have to do. At least, he’ll have to try.” The khan chuckled again. “Yusen might have finally redeemed himself with this. Beneath the Eternal Sky, Batzorig, would you ever have imagined such a thing?”

  “No, my lord.” The general offered a short laugh of his own. “What is your will?”

  “Send for Yusen and tell him to haul his slave down to the plains, to General Munkjar’s tumaan. Wang Lin Yo’s crew will follow with more bronze. In the meantime, Yusen and his slave will make us a firedrake worthy of the khanate.” The khan’s grin lit his round face and brightened his eyes. “Or they’ll be shot from one.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The long light of the setting sun cast the astronomical instruments into strange shadows that interlaced like gears across the floor. They lapped at Bao Xing’s tiny feet as she bent over her charts and paper, her brush furiously moving, her long fingers spotted with ink. She had to finish her measurements, finalize the astronomical chart and understand what the stars were trying to tell her. The Celestial Throne shone brightly, orange and gleaming among
the vivid stars around it, but the pattern of the Dark Lance looked wrong. The other celestial weapons surrounding it in the pattern might mute the effect of this worrisome sign, but one of the wandering stars edged toward it, moving backward. If she were right, it would ring the Lance and signal the advent of a radiant energy that would damage the Imperial Palace and devastate the Han people. Terrible danger could be coming, more terrible even than the Mongols, if such were possible. Last night’s observations were obscured by an inauspicious cloud, but she had the historical record—her father’s and grandfather’s observations going back for decades, surely she could—

  “Bao Xing!”

  She jerked at the voice, and her pen left a few drops of ink across her careful work. “Yes, Papa!”

  “What do you see? Are they coming?”

  “Just a moment, I’m almost done, Papa.” She blotted the drops, but too quickly, and one of them smeared the characters of the pole star, the emperor’s star, into something else entirely.

  “There is no more time for that, Bao Bao.” His voice drew nearer, then his shadow fell alongside hers, merging with the circular shadows of the astronomical instruments. At his approach, the compass needle shivered on a water bowl engraved with the pattern of the stars.

  Bao Xing blinked back tears. His hand stroked her hair, then rested too heavily against the back of her neck and she looked up, following his gaze. Across the valley, smoke curled and flames danced where the Cloud Mountain monastery stood. A dark file of soldiers moved back toward the river far below, but another, smaller group pressed onward, up the steep track to Bao Xing’s own quiet peak.

  When the soldiers came, all of this—her father, their instruments, their scrolls and diagrams—all could be gone in moments, and he wanted her to leave, to dress in boy’s clothing, smear her face and vanish into the country, leaving the tower and their observations, to be burned or broken at the soldiers’ will. There had to be another way.

  “Here, Papa, the chart isn’t ready yet, I know, but the signs suggest there’s danger. Look at the way the clouds circle at the Dark Lance—”

  Her father reached out and took the brush from her hand, setting it back on the inkstone. “Bao Bao. There is no time any more for signs. Even if there were a greater danger than the army at our mountain, there is no one we could warn.”

  “But Papa—”

  He settled his thin hand against her face, warm, comforting, too frail. “You must take your eyes from the sky and look to the earth, Bao Bao. You have to go.”

  She pressed his hand to her cheek. “If they don’t find something worth taking here, some treasure, they’ll kill you.”

  “The only treasure I have is you,” he told her, “and I am not afraid to die.”

  “And the work will be unfinished.” She turned on her stool to face him. “Who will carry on, if not for us? You once told me that the future of the land might rest on this.”

  “Even if we knew on what day, at what hour a thing might come to pass, how would we act upon it? We, alone, are not enough to stop some great catastrophe. Even if we knew the Dark Lance would strike, the emperor moved south. We could not reach him.”

  “Then we should have gone with him!”

  The shadow of grief passed her father’s face. Her mother had been dying when the last of the emperor’s family fled. She had been too weak to travel, and they dare not move her. Mother had wanted Bao Xing, at least, to go with the imperial court, even if it must be a distant and diminished court.

  “Go. This last time, Bao Xing, be a dutiful daughter and leave your father to his fate.”

  Bao Xing lowered her head, her fingers hesitating over the brush, then taking up the handle of the cane that hung from the side of her work table. She propped herself on it and made her cautious way to the stairs, inching down them. When her father wasn’t there, she usually dropped to her bottom and bumped her way down as she had when she was a child but young ladies of marriageable age could not behave in such a way. Bao Xing descended as far as the second floor, outside the door they never opened, the room where her mother had died. Bao Xing used to pause and glare on the long, tedious way up the stairs. Her courtly mother’s wish for her future had crippled her, binding her feet to make her the perfect bride. After Mother’s death, Papa couldn’t bring himself to let Bao Xing go, and so it was her father’s gifts she took up instead, her father’s work she pursued and her father’s dreams she took into her heart. Her mother’s dream had given her nothing but pain and sorrow.

  Carved into the closed door, Double Happiness suggested the devotion her parents had known in their own marriage. Bao Xing had rejected all of that, stuck only with her miniature feet as a reminder of what might have been. Hide herself as a boy, and she would hobble through the mountains, begging for her keep, doing what she must to honor her family.

  She blinked away tears, picturing her father, dead, picturing her mother, dead years before, her face made up perfectly, her paint, her hair complimenting her great beauty. Her mother was pleased, at least, not to grow old and ugly, but to pass from the world at the summit of her splendor.

  A dutiful daughter. Her father said she was his only treasure. Might there be another way to show her duty, and to honor her father, a way where they both could live, and even continue their urgent work? Perhaps by setting aside her father’s legacy, she could preserve it, and him.

  Bao Xing put out her hand and opened the door. It creaked inward and she hobbled through into her mother’s domain, a foreign place of rich fabrics, delicate embroideries, bottles of paints and drawers full of gold and pearl combs to pin up the silken darkness of one’s hair. Bao Xing closed the door behind her and sat at the table, taking up a bronze mirror that showed her weak reflection, startled to find the faint image of her own mother staring back. In the years she had been her father’s daughter, she had become her mother’s as well. The time had come to reveal it.

  Bao Xing worked as carefully as she ever had on any chart of stars. She dressed in a robe so fine it caught upon the roughness of her hands. She painted her face with pearl dust into a pale, perfect moon. She applied rouge to her lips and cheeks and tweezed away her brows, drawing them in perfect form. She combed back her long hair and twisted it into careful knots, tucking in a series of golden combs shaped like butterflies that jingled with jewels. At her ears, she hung a pair of enormous pearls. On her tiny feet, she wore a pair of slippers that showed months of stitches worked in silk. She shook down the sleeves of the gown so the silk draped well beyond her fingertips, signaling that she was a woman who had no need of work—and concealing her ink-stained fingers. With every stitch of clothing and brush of color, she concealed her heart, trying to embody her mother’s perfection: a beautiful, painted corpse.

  Outside, footfalls sounded, voices shouted, someone pounded on the door of the house. Her father hurried down the stairs, but Bao Xing opened the chamber before he had passed the landing. He stumbled to a halt, gasping. “Bao Xing?”

  “Tell them my name, Papa. Tell them I am for the khan—the khan and no other.” She stared hard at his widened eyes and gripped the carved cinnabar of her cane so tightly the carving ground into her palms.

  “They will take you away.” His eyes glistened. “What will become of you?”

  She didn’t want to think of that. Invoking the khan should be enough to protect her. She hoped. Bao Xing swallowed. “I will be his and you will be in peace. The prophecy of the Dark Lance, Papa. You told me that our very world depended upon it. The truth must be found.”

  He gave her a quick, fierce embrace, and hurried down before her, shouting, “I am coming, please forgive my lateness.”

  With her mother’s serenity, Bao Xing descended the stairs, leaving her father’s world behind her, surrendering the stars.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Clad in a loin cloth and his slave bracelet, Dailus sweated along with the crew to shift the huge iron handle into place. Two-ended, with a great ring at the center to ca
rry the crucible, the thing was as long as four men and took at least six on each end to maneuver it. He waved and pointed, gesturing carefully to steer the men. So close to the furnace, the roar of the flames made speech impossible, and the heat drove all moisture from his eyes and body. Panting, longing for water, Dailus forced himself up the two steps to glance into the molten bronze. Its surface shimmered and shifted, brighter than the sun, with streams of darker imperfections resting on top like black islands.

  With another gesture, he summoned one of the men to hand him a long iron paddle. The man sauntered over and retrieved it, using it as a prop for his slow walk back. Dailus glared and snapped, and the rest of the crew snickered. Wang Lin Yo must be distracted for them to flout Dailus’s authority, knowing he could not personally enforce it with a whip. At last, the other slave offered up the tool, letting it sway so that Dailus must lunge to grab it, and the heat on his left side became briefly unbearable. He flinched back, gripping the rod with both hands, his muscles trembling. If he fell in, the whole project was ruined—but at least, he thought with grim humor, they could beat him no longer. He balanced carefully, scanning behind him to make sure the area was clear.

  The other slave bounced back a little, withdrawing his hands as if he had been pretending to push Dailus into the crucible. He couldn’t hear their laughter over the sound of the fire, but he saw the flash of bright teeth, and his friend Jian Ho’s scowl. With an expression as commanding as he could muster, Dailus gestured the man back, out of the dangerous area. Balancing the weight of the paddle so he wouldn’t fall in, Dailus crouched and leaned, scooping the slag from the surface. With a practiced pivot, he swung about and rapped the paddle against the steps, shaking free a few splashes of molten metal.

  Someone shrieked. Dailus dropped the scoop on the landing and spun about. The insubordinate slave danced away from the steps, his too-long trousers on fire.