David
Ping'an, a bustling city built on the rivers and streams converging into a lake, was ruled by a single family desperate to climb out of the shadow of their forefather. Out in the middle of this lake sat an island that they considered holy ground.
At the center of this island was a stone pillar that rose a hundred meters into the sky, taller than anything built in the twenty thousand years that the city stood. Around this pillar grew a courtyard of that same stone - a lighter color than the cobbled streets of Ping'an.
In this courtyard, the family that ruled the city celebrated a success they'd not seen in millenia. This ceremony was for their son who now sailed on the sea of his self, who had lit his golden stove - proof that he would rise like the tide and take their ambitions with him to the Heavens.
They were the Jiang - a family named after the river. They gave their children hopeful names like Tiankong - the open sky - or Shangtian - ascension. They named their inheritor on the capricious standard of talent.
This family, David was sure, was one where its best children schemed like the princes of a dying dynasty. Where its sons fought like wolves and ate each other like dogs. That could be the only explanation for that haunted arrogance, the desperate paranoia carved onto the face of Jiang Tiankong.
The stone courtyard on the island that split Sky River was silent but for a girl playing an upright fiddle under the noonday sun. She did not play in honor of that family celebrating their milestone, but for her own enjoyment.
Her name was Alice, a name like David - neither of which anyone else in the courtyard could pronounce. They did not belong here and knew things worthy of suspicion.
"Who sent you?" asked Jiang Tiankong, in the name of his family.
David rolled his eyes for everyone to see. "What do you mean 'who sent you'? Is it a crime to go to a party?"
The silence returned as Jiang Tiankong examined him carefully. His eyes went from David's face to his robes to the stone flute that he carried. Unlike the cultivators around him, David wore no jewelry nor any identifiable marks.
"Who are you?" Tiankong finally asked, changing the question. Most of the onlookers pretended they had lost interest but gave themselves away with furtive stares.
David smiled and tilted his chin how Wen would. "I am Daoist Cheng Wen, of Eagle Peak, from the True Sutra sect."
In for a penny, in for a pound.
"I was passing by Ping'an on the way to the Linked Cities and caught a ride upriver with a merchant delivering wine to your household. When we saw a group of musicians headed to your family's island, my sect sister could not resist playing a few songs with them."
"Why are you headed to the Linked Cities?" asked Jiang Tiankong.
David folded his arms. "I don't see how that is any of your business."
"Everything that goes on in Ping'an is my business," said Tiankong, without thinking.
He was immediately rewarded with the frosty annoyance of the cultivators who surrounded them - or worse. Fingers twitched towards weapons hung on belts and backs - and even the sound of the Song rose from a number of them.
Tiankong realized his mistake and held up his hands. "Of course, the hospitality with which the Jiang family receives their honored guests is legendary," he said.
The tension eased as quickly as it had come, but Tiankong was now in an even darker mood. He returned his attention to David and changed tract.
"I've never heard anyone from the southern continent with an accent like yours."
David sneered. "A fair point. You are, after all, someone who's explored every city and visited every town in every continent. I have something to confess. I have no idea where I could possibly be from, but I'm glad to have met you. I can finally discover my roots!"
Tiankong didn't go red as his younger cousin would have, but he did clench his fists. "When you get to my level of cultivation, you can tell when someone is lying," he blustered.
It was now Daoist Li's turn to sneer. "Even our masters can’t tell when we’re lying," she said. Her eyebrows danced and the sneer became a grin. "Not that I would ever lie to my master, of course."
She turned to David. "When you get to the Linked Cities, you must visit my Iron Scripture sect. People come to this continent from far and wide to cultivate. It's been this way longer than I've been alive, and longer than my master’s been alive."
David suspected that the reason was not the Iron Scripture sect, but he nodded lightly anyway.
Jiang Tiankong must have heavily insulted the cultivators around them because Daoist Li was now looking at him with disgust.
"Throwing your ability around like that is the mark of a small-minded person. My cultivation will be no worse than yours with the passing of time and this little brother here is even faster." She grinned maliciously, pointing at David.
David now understood that Daoist Li wasn't defending him at all - this was just another act of instigation.
"You would dare compare me to trash like him?" Tiankong demanded, incensed. David was sure that he was angry - but the overblown reaction smelt a bit off to him.
"Yes, yes. It's pointless to make this comparison.” David sighed. “You're the greatest. I'll be going now," he said, trying to leave. He hadn’t wanted to get baited into conflict, but the sarcasm bubbling out of him refused to be suppressed.
"As if I'd let this opportunity go," said Tiankong. "You will have the honor of exchanging pointers with me.”
David sighed. "Sure. Please pointer me to the nearest boat, honored senior."
Tiankong smiled, mostly for the crowd. "I suppose it's obvious why you were defending Brother Jiayou now. You're very much like him - soft and yielding. You can go if you want,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect as he broke into a mocking grin. “But your woman stays."
"Excuse me?"
Tiankong was the one sneering now. "Are you hard of hearing? I said that you can go now. You'd better leave before I change my mind." He pointed away from the pillar to one of the docks. "The boat is that way, junior."
David took a step in Alice's direction. She was still playing the erhu with a deep concentration.
"Where are you going?"
David sighed again, realizing that the situation was probably past the point of no return - but he would try anyway. "To tell my companion that we're leaving."
As predictable as summer rain, Tiankong arrived at the conclusion he'd been fishing for. "I said only you could go. You're leaving that girl behind." He looked at Alice with something he tried to pass for undisguised lust - but it was still some variety of bad acting. David wasn't sure what Tiankong wanted.
"I'm merely informing her," said David, testing the waters. "I don't have any say over where she chooses to go."
"And I'm informing you that you can leave but she cannot. Why would where you're going matter to her then?"
David looked to Shangtian, who was steadfastly looking away into the horizon and then to the other daoists surrounding them. None of them showed him any support - they were here for the show. Daoist Chan, in particular, looked delighted.
So it had been a setup from the start.
An anger coiled in him and his words came out in that biting sarcasm again, throwing his caution to the wind. "What makes you think you can stop me?" he asked, before he could stop himself.
The sound of the Song rose in Jiang Tiankong - with a depth and consistency that he hadn't heard from anyone they'd met.
"Qing." Please - said as a statement and not as a question.
David looked at Tiankong, bewildered. All the Daoists looked on expectantly, and even Shangtian wasn't pretending that he wasn't watching anymore.
"Please what?" David finally asked, after a few seconds passed, completely lost.
Jiang Tiankong opened his mouth to answer the question, but was unable to find words. After a few moments, he appeared too livid to speak, so Daoist Li assisted him.
"You're supposed to start fighting now," she said, in a stage whisper that carried over the light wind.
"Oh." David said, suddenly recalling that was, indeed, what people seemed to say in kung fu flicks as they broke into choreography.
David looked over to the crowd that gathered by the pillar, which even included some of the elders of the Jiang family.
Alice, who had gone through most of the traditional Chinese music she knew, was now playing what sounded like the main part of a violin concerto composed in the transitional period from the classical period to the romantic era.
The erhu drew some of the eyes away from the unfolding spectacle, but most of the guests looked on with bated breath.
Tiankong realized that David had lost interest in their confrontation, which made him even more angry. "On the account of you being my junior, I've given you the courtesy of striking the first blow, which you didn't take. So don't blame me for not being polite!" he shouted, falling into a stance that David instantly recognized.
Jiang Tiankong was draped in a resplendent pale red robe and wore an ornate, filigreed gold hairpiece. He was leaning back with his right leg raised off the ground and his left leg bent. His fists floated in front of his face and his shoulders pointed outwards.
The pieces clicked together in his mind. An incredibly talented patriarch, the mulberry flower carved into a stone pillar, and now something that resembled the third stance of the Scripture of the Uprooted. Now that the matter was clear, he could almost understand why the Jiang family resented their ancestor.
The stance was unnatural. Tiankong's right knee was too close to his chest and his elbows formed too wide an angle. Even though his body was completely still from what must have been years of practice, there was something instinctively inaccurate about the way he held himself.
The sound of Tiankong's Song roared suddenly, lifting him off the floor like a bird of prey as he propelled himself forward with the leg he balanced on, straightening it out for lift. His sleeves flapped in the wind.
Tiankong was fast. And though he could have been faster had he pushed off the ground from a better angle, David still couldn't scramble quite out of the way in time. Tiankong's right leg clipped David on a lower rib, just right of his diaphragm. The breath was knocked from David's body with an involuntary huff and he staggered back, sucking in deep breaths. He had no time to recover - Tiankong had slipped into a different stance, another of which he recognized.
Tiankong split the distance between them with a toe balanced forward on the ground, his right leg crossed over his left and a fist pointed to the floor. His arm formed a straight line with the rest of his body. This was the second stance of the Scripture. He leaned into the toe, flattening the bottom of his foot and swung his other foot up to meet David's chin.
It was more telegraphed, so David was able to jerk out of the way, but he ended up hitting the floor and rolling away. A flash of vision on the other man indicated that he was going into the ninth stance - a jumping stomp.
But as Tiankong left the ground yet again, the thought of the wall carvings didn't leave David's mind - because the ninth stance was paired with the tenth in the fifth carving. The tenth stance - five deep lines which depicted a figure on the ground with his knees pressed together and open palms raised to catch that stomp.
And in the span of half a second, David realized that his assumption that the stances were carved in a random order was completely incorrect. They were paired not out of convenience because there were eighteen windows, but because each pair was a functional answer to the other.
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David snapped his spine straight and threw his weight forward, pushing himself to his knees and raised his palms into the sky, catching Tiankong just under the knee, forcing the straightened leg to fold. The back of Tiankong's foot was so close to the back of David's head he felt it ghost over his hair. Before it could actually hit him, Tiankong lost his aerial balance and he flew backward, flipped by the reversal of his momentum.
Even with this indirect hit, the sheer force of Tiankong's descent from the sky drove David so hard into the ground that the stone beneath him split with the impact and a wave of little cracks like spiderwebs jagged past his robe which pooled about him.
David tasted blood in his throat. He sucked in air greedily, though his throat felt raw and almost bruised.
Tiankong landed chest and chin first, not with a crash but with an undignified thump and an even less dignified clack of his teeth. A wave of silence blanketed the courtyard. Everyone at the ceremony was now watching them. The violin stopped.
David looked over to the pillar, at Alice. Her eyes flitted in surprise from Tiankong to the Jiang elders, to David and then back to Tiankong. There was a trace of worry in her thumbs which she ran over her fingertips so quickly there was almost a spark.
He expected her to dash over to him, but she surprised him. She slid the guqin onto her lap and her fingers found the strings.
Three notes stuttered into existence - uncertain, proud, then louder than life. It was a melody that this world knew, a melody that Alice had played him while they sat together for an entire day and night, that Jiang Meihua had played when Wen took a man's arm off with his sword. Liushui - flowing water.
It had, David assumed, the desired effect. It was hard to tell with Alice sometimes. Maybe it was an attempt at distraction. Without a doubt, it was a success at melodrama. Jiang Tiankong had paused in his attack to soak in the sudden whispers that accompanied the soundtrack to this madness.
Whatever her motivations for playing the guqin, it gave David the time to stand.
From the exchange of three blows, David could tell that Jiang Tiankong had more raw qi than him - by a lot. It would not be entirely correct to say that his song was louder. That was a hole in the descriptive analogy by which he perceived the breath of the universe - the energy inside him.
Something else was different as well - there were two competing, harmonious Songs coming from Tiankong.
David listened for that low thump of a kick drum which was the immediate indication of the qi circulating around his body. Everyone who was awakened had that. Unique to Tiankong in this courtyard was a higher and more frantic snare that filled the empty space between the beats of circulating qi. This was likely the core that was the cause of celebration.
These seconds of silence were too much for Tiankong, who snarled and pushed himself off the ground.
But as Tiankong rose to his feet, he seemed a little bit unsteady. He slipped into the fifteenth stance, bending his knees more and more as he walked towards David with deliberate steps. It was too late to come up with a better plan. His mind flashed to the eighth carving and so he lifted himself onto his toes, took a step back and then propelled himself forward with a fist over his heart and a raised palm.
They met in two places. Tiankong's wrist coiled and a pointed finger darted towards David's right eye like a snake. David's fist brushed the back of Tiankong's hand as he dipped his head forward and sought Tiankong's heart with his palm.
A Tree Bowed in Prayer, he named it. Alice was such a bad influence. What a stupid name for a stance.
David wasn't able to divert the finger completely. It swerved past his cheek, giving him a deep gash and slicing off a chunk of hair at his temple. He had also failed to land a clean hit over Tiankong's heart. The man had hastily leaned to the right so the palm only found his collarbone, but the sound was still satisfying - like a baseball bat hitting an overly ripe melon.
To his credit, Tiankong only stumbled back a few steps. He coughed twice and swallowed hard. But now he looked shocked.
"You stole our scripture." His words were quiet, but the wind carried the accusation into every ear.
David shook his head, blood in his ears and adrenaline in his veins. "Your scripture," he said, breathing heavily, "was poorly transcribed."
The shock turned into an apoplectic anger as David finished.
"You’re full of errors."
A single line of blood escaped the corner of Jiang Tiankong's lips. A drop fell from his chin onto his pale red robe, leaving a visible stain.
Tiankong roared and the sound of his Song rose - an intertwined helix of sound and memory and something like defiance. It drank in the song of the waves, of the wind, of Ping'an, and the very air around him distorted in heat and shimmered a light red.
Tiankong slowly drew the Mountain Cutting Sword at his waist and the unbroken metallic whine of a blade dragging past an anvil rent the air as the distortion flooded into the blade. When the sword had left the scabbard halfway, the distortion faded and Tiankong whipped it at David with a flourish.
A crescent of pale red, somehow solid, somehow light, surged at David, but he was ready. David threw himself to the ground and it passed over him, sloping upwards gently until it was twice his height as it left the courtyard.
The light found a willow tree in the far distance and passed through its trunk without making a sound, disappearing into the sky.
At first, there was only the distant groaning of wood. After a few seconds, the top half of the tree crashed to the ground, leaving its hanging fern-like leaves spread across the ground. Its dark stump showed a clean, angled cut. It smoked.
Only the sound of Alice's guqin could be heard in the ensuing silence. David took a look over at the pillar. The musicians and serving girls who had been crowded around were long gone. Alice sat alone, playing her instrument as David and Tiankong fought.
In fact, even the cultivators all huddled safely on the far side of the courtyard, watching from a distance. Closer than most of the guests was a girl in green silks. The excitement on her face mirrored a few others in the audience. The rest seemed worried.
There was a spike of noise from Tiankong's song again, and the sensation of heat. David rolled out of the way - and not a moment too soon because the light of Tiankong's sword, smaller than the last, left a deep gouge on the stone where he'd fallen.
Another spike. David threw himself to his feet, pushing off the ground in any direction, dodging another blade of light.
"Stand still!" Tiankong shouted in frustration, throwing one crescent after another at David as he dipped in one direction and dodged in another. More willow trees in the distance were lost and the grey stone of the courtyard earned another three craters.
When Tiankong noticed that David was slowly creating distance from him, lowering the chances of being hit even further, he tried to close it while still swinging his sword.
Then, he stopped and, in a motion different from the last - with a far louder and cleaner refrain of his Song, threw the sword at David.
It approached faster than that solid light it had created. Had Tiankong thrown his sword when he had first drawn it, David thought that he would have been skewered - but after over a minute of this dance, Tiankong had inadvertently taught him how to dodge.
David turned immediately after the blade whistled past and realized, in sudden panic, that Alice was immediately behind him. But before it even reached her, the panic was gone. The sword was travelling at an upwards angle.
It flew nearly a foot over her head and sank hilt deep into the stone pillar with a grinding crunch, where it quivered like an arrow.
Jiang Tiankong and all the spectators stared at the sword stuck in the pillar with undisguised horror for a few moments.
They did not, or could not, react to the faint echo of distant thunder.
In the corner of his eye there was a flash of purple. Jiang Shangtian had pulled himself onto the platform, but thought better of it because he immediately lost his nerve and slipped back into the crowd.
When nothing happened for the longest twenty seconds of David's life, he heard a relieved sigh from Tiankong behind him. David cursed mentally - he'd turned his back to his opponent. It would have been the most stereotypical way to die.
The reason that Tiankong had thrown his sword at David became clear immediately as the man bent to pick up another one with a large, ruby pommel. It was the sword that he'd offered to Jiang Shangtian, which had lain forgotten on the ground during their fight.
Tiankong hefted it in one hand, and then the other. "The gift given by Kun Jiayou was worthless. Color me surprised." Even now, he couldn't resist throwing a sneer into the clump of pale red robes in the audience.
David didn't necessarily disagree. There was a different kind of weight to the sword in Tiankong's hands as he shook off the scabbard with a practiced wave. It was shorter than the mountain cutting sword - and despite the ostentatious pommel, felt far more grounded. It was thin and sharp. The blade did not gleam nor did it drink in the light. It looked well polished and well used - a deep contrast to the man who owned it.
"I don't keep count of how many I've sent down to the yellow springs with my Red Earth Sword, but I'll be sure to give you an auspicious number," said Jiang Tiankong as he sprinted at David.
The guqin rang out behind him.
Unlike the meandering red qi, Jiang Tiankong moved quickly, and his sword was hard to track. The sword form that Tiankong practiced left little steel blurs in the air around him. The sword never stopped moving.
David kept a tight lid on the trepidation rising in his chest and tried to figure out an answer to a problem he couldn’t quite see.
His cool head prevailed when Tiankong was only six paces away. David forced his attention to Tiankong's wrists and shot forward and past the swordsman when he saw the wrist point far to the left, elbowing it in crossing.
As he'd expected, Tiankong was swinging it very lightly and quickly, so that was enough to knock it off course and send the sword towards the floor. It sank into the courtyard as if it were a block of jelly and not stone. David scrambled forward another few paces before skidding to a halt and turning.
There were now ten paces between them. David noticed that the noonday sun had hid behind clouds and it had started to drizzle - closer to a mist than rain. Here, David could hear the way Alice's palms tapped the wood of the guqin as she played. She was no more than twenty feet away.
They began to circle one another, neither of them willing to close the distance.
Tiankong finally spoke, his face neutral. "Seventeen years old?"
David nodded carefully. Tiankong's song had lost its steady rhythm - the snare of his core was almost out of sync with the kick of his circulation. It diverged further as his anger mounted.
The impassivity slowly became a deep bitterness in step with the Song. There was only a single warning - the slight narrowing of Tiankong's eyes as he leapt forward. Instead of swinging the sword, he stabbed upwards at David's chest, fast and true.
David reached for his own Song as he threw a halfhearted kick at Tiankong's chest. But that was just for show - instead, he split the thumps into groups of four and paired his movements with the downbeat.
And he met the tip of the sword with his palm.
Through his palm, the warm, sickly, dusty sword qi entered his body. It could have been worse - the tip of the blade somehow didn't slide out the back of his hand. Instead, the sword and Tiankong's qi lifted him off the floor, sending him flying backwards through the air.
David continued to reach for the Song despite the sudden crackle and the whiff of char from his palm. It was a lucky thing - because instead of being sent out into the trees surrounding the courtyard, his back met the stone pillar with an almighty crack.
"Ow."
Alice threw a look over her shoulder at him.
As he slid down the slick stone, he was glad that the crack had come from the pillar and not from any of his bones. The foreign sword qi ripped through him and expelled itself as a mouthful of dark, brackish blood when his own Song forced it out.
"So this is why they're always spitting blood in wuxia films," he mumbled to Alice, in English, from the puddle at the base of the pillar. Her hands were shaking and she was playing the wrong notes.
When he stood unsteadily and shook the water off, spraying her with little drops, Alice rolled her eyes and turned back to the guqin. Her hands kept shaking, but her next notes were clean and true.
Tiankong was less pleased that David had survived - but he looked more determined now that he'd landed his first solid hit in a while. There was a sudden outburst of noise from the crowd. People were pointing at the pillar.
David glanced upwards over his own shoulder quickly. A large, deep fissure ran upwards from the point of his impact, through the carving of the mulberry flower, and split the pillar in two. The weight of the stone had already forced it apart far enough to see the sky through the crack.
"What are the chances you can fix that before the Patriarch shows up?" Some things were just too funny not to say.
If Tiankong's Song was erratic before, now it could be confused for one of Zhou's students at Cloud Mountain City. The snare of his core grew in speed and intensity.
Tiankong said nothing and attacked. This time, his feet did not touch the floor - instead, he was gliding forward, with his sword outstretched, defying gravity. His left knee pointed him to David like an arrow. A single straight line stretched from the tip of his sword to his right toe.
It was a classic scene of a battle between two cultivators, scored to the sound of a beautiful girl playing a guqin in the rain. It could only end one way.
The eighteenth stance of the Scripture of the Uprooted was a simple thing - the depiction of a figure walking forward with a palm out. It had confused him the night David received the Scripture from the wall.
Seeing Tiankong flying towards him revealed what it was supposed to look like.
David sank into the sound of his Song, holding out his right hand, and willed himself to meet the tip of the sword head on - and the Song obeyed, picking him up off the floor and pushing him forward.
His palm collided with the heavy, grounded steel of the Red Earth Sword and overcame it. Instead of snapping, however, the steel bent and folded upon itself like an accordion. Before David's palm met Tiankong's chest just beneath his ribs, David caught a flash of disbelief as their eyes met.
That same sound - of something heavy hitting something soft and wet. It was more sickening than satisfying now, as Tiankong flew backwards three quarters the distance of the courtyard and landed on his feet.
He seemed alright for just a moment, then his legs folded beneath him. His back remained straight, even as he fell.
Tiankong looked up at the sky.
David felt almost ashamed when he heard the soft, terrified whimper that escaped Tiankong. Louder than any shout, louder than the cracking pillar, louder than the Song
There was still the desperate, stubborn snare from his core, but David realized that he couldn’t hear a single measure of the low, slow circulation of qi that should have accompanied it.
Tiankong closed his eyes. The sound of the snare brightened - in pace and volume, for just a moment, then it too faded.
Tiankong's eyes did not open again. He pitched forward onto the stone of the courtyard, limp.
There was nothing redeemable about Jiang Tiankong in life, but a poem passed David’s lips all the same - only loud enough for Alice to hear.
“We return you to the mountain of stone, and back through oak and pine. Beyond the clouds you’ll stay in forever, and run streams to mankind.”
The final notes of Flowing Water echoed in the silence of the courtyard.
Elder Shu, who had given Tiankong the scripture of the mulberry trees, who had been proud, whose eyes had shone with hope despite her age, let out a single wail - short and horrified and so, so, tired.
She broke free of the other elders who held onto her sleeves and leapt soundlessly onto the platform beside her grandson.
But before she could kneel beside him to check for a pulse in vain hope or embrace him for a final memory, she froze. She stood still and silent and scared, with her gaze caught by something above David and Alice.
Elder Shu's knees hit the floor, followed by her forehead. She raised her head off the floor and let it fall again - and then once more. Her eyes remained fixed on the grey stone.
David and Alice followed the gap in the pillar where David’s back had cracked it, along the ever-widening fissure and past the carving of a mulberry flower split in two, to the very top of the pillar, where Elder Shu had been staring.
On it sat a man with his legs dangling off the side. He was nearly the spitting image of Jiang Tiankong, with only a few key differences.
He wore light, grey robes that the rain shied from. On his back was a familiar sort of bulky cloth case which could only have contained a guqin. His features were sharp and bright despite the overcast skies. Holding up his lustrous, black hair was a little silver pin with the bagua on its end.
In his hand was something David had watched a woman throw into the river - a deep, brown jug of sorghum wine.