David

The man sitting on the pillar took a deep drink. He hefted the jug of wine in one hand, gripping the bottom between pinky and thumb, and must have lost half the liquid that poured from the wide brim before he’d gotten a mouthful.

Like the rain, not a drop of the spilled wine touched his cheeks or his clothes.

"Houjiu, houjiu, houjiu," the man muttered up at the sky. Good wine, three times. He was more than a hundred meters away, but if David were to close his eyes, he would have guessed the man was right beside him.

Despite their similarities in appearance, the man's voice didn't sound anything like that of Jiang Tiankong. They may have had the same baritone register, but the man slurred and chopped his words like one of the city's dock workers directing ships.

He turned his attention to Elder Shu, who still knelt with her head bowed. Her eyes remained steadfastly trained on the slate of the courtyard.

The only sound that could be heard was a light rain on the river.

"Shu-er," said the man. His tone carried a faint note of disappointment, but there was something fond about the way her name rolled over his tongue. "Do you remember the last time I visited?"

Elder Shu's only reaction was the subtle sag of relief in her shoulders. This was clearly not what the man was looking for, because he suddenly scowled. The man took another drink of wine.

"Do you know why I don't visit often?"

She said nothing, bowing her head lower.

"It's because of this," he said, disgusted. "Why are you kneeling? Why haven't you said a word to me? Do you hate me so much that you refuse to meet my eyes?"

Elder Shu continued to kneel - speaking no words and bowing even lower. She trembled.

"Do you blame me for saving you, but not your meridians?" he said softly. "Would you prefer if I'd let you drown?"

He took another drink.

"You are angry at me," he said, "because when you were a young girl, an immortal promised to cure you, but you didn't realize that you'd misheard. I said that I would try my best."

He stared downwards at the pillar on which he sat, high above the courtyard, and then at Jiang Tiankong. "Sometimes your best just isn't good enough."

The man continued to stare at Jiang Tiankong and Elder Shu continued to kneel.

"What was his name?"

The seconds stretched on and then the man lost patience entirely. He turned to the crowd at the edge of the courtyard. "Is there a member of my family who can communicate like a human being?"

There was another, longer silence. The man took another drink and looked into the sky. The silver of his hairpin gleamed. Alice slipped her hand into David's and began running her thumb over his palm. She seemed nervous.

A boy who looked to be twelve, with a spear on his back that sported a purple ribbon, stepped onto the courtyard and then knelt.

"Jiang Shangtian greets Great Jiang, grandfather of his family, patriarch of-"

The Jiang patriarch was glaring at him. Shangtian swallowed visibly - but he understood why the man was angry now.

"He's Jiang Tiankong, the family's inheriting son."

"And how is it that we've arrived at this situation - where my grandson is on the floor like a common dog, and the memorial stone I built for my beloved is split in half? Start from the beginning." The patriarch was calm and well-composed, but David knew better. The air itself had gotten heavier. Alice's nails dug into his palm.

Shangtian frowned in contemplation. "We sent invitations to every sect and family that we had any relationship with to attend the Core Formation ceremony-"

"What is a core formation ceremony?"

Shangtian looked bewildered. "Did First Grandfather not receive the invitation? We burned it on the jade altar."

"What?" The man looked furious. "That is for emergencies. You are to split it in half if faced with a calamity that could end the line - that's literally carved on it." The patriarch took another drink. "And what would burning something on it do? Do I look dead to you?"

Shangtian blushed. "May First Grandfather live another ten thousand years, ten thousand times," he chanted.

The patriarch sighed, then narrowed his eyes at the boy. "How is it that you're having a core formation ceremony when I can't feel your dantian?"

The red in Shangtian's cheeks deepened. "It was his ceremony," Shangtian said, pointing at Tiankong.

The Jiang patriarch looked from Shangtian to Elder Shu, who still hadn't moved, to Tiankong, on the floor. He became more and more perplexed.

"But he's old. Isn't this a little embarrassing?"

Another silence descended on the courtyard, but this one was more awkward than somber. Alice did not laugh, but David felt her fingers twitch against the back of his hand.

"He wasn't old," said Shangtian. "He turned eighty last winter."

The look he received in response to this was unmistakable - pity. The Jiang patriarch tilted his head back and upended the jug over his mouth, finishing the rest of his wine, then set it down and pushed himself off the pillar.

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He landed silently onto the courtyard. It was still drizzling lightly. The Jiang patriarch was the only person in the inner city of Ping'an who wasn't soaked. It made for an unnatural scene - like he was the subject of a poorly edited photo.

He paced around, looking at the cracks in the stone and the smoking tree stumps with a critical eye. Inevitably, he zeroed in on the remains of the Red Earth sword. He picked it up.

The ruby pommel was cracked, and the blade of the sword - a sensible, medium-toned steel, was folded up like an accordion. The Jiang patriarch gave it a tap with his finger. It made a strange clanging noise and vibrated oddly.

"Most curious," he said. "Whoever did this has a strange mindset. They understand what a sword is, and what it represents, but took offense to the way it carried itself - and so in conflict, rather than snapping it..."

He trailed off, looking for a word. "Retuned it," he said, with a mirthless grin. "Clever. It might take a while for me to track him down."

Shangtian made an uncomfortable noise. "First Grandfather?" he asked, uncertainly.

The Jiang Patriarch turned to look at David. "Found you."

He examined David and Alice, to judge who they were, and in doing so allowed them to judge him.

David listened for the sound of the Song and found that Alice was doing the same - but the usual sound of silkworms in the darkness chittered in time to rain falling on water, to waves caressing the shore.

"He exorcises specters and demons by means of charms and spells. He gathers emanations from both Heaven and Earth and collects the essences of the sun and moon. He cultivates himself with the yin and yang and achieves rebirth by means of fire and water," Alice mumbled, entranced and undoubtedly quoting something.

The waves of the patriarch's Song whispered his name like it was something the world owed him. Jiang Xiangyue. The river wishes for rain. The Heavens had taken something important from the immortal in front of him.

"It is considered impolite," said Jiang Xiangyue, "to grasp and grope at somebody's Principle."

Appropriately chastised, David stopped listening for the immortal's Song. The silence stretched on.

When he finally spoke again, it had been several minutes. "There are some things I do not quite understand," said the patriarch. "Hopefully they will be clarified in short order."

David nodded carefully. He assumed that if the patriarch had the will, both David and Alice would have been smears on the pillar by this point.

"What are your names?"

Alice, who remembered the names that Zhou had written on the recommendation letter - likely useless given recent events - answered immediately. "I'm Yingying and my older brother here is-"

Jiang Xiangyue gave her a flat stare. "Please don't waste my time."

Alice pouted. More silence. She came to a decision. "You wouldn't be able to pronounce it."

"I would like to try."

It was the answer that David had expected. He pointed to himself. "David."

"Alice."

Xiangyue did not try to pronounce their names. Instead, he looked more contemplative than before. "That is your mother tongue," he guessed, correctly. "You've used it more than the common speech, which has been the standard in every realm for many aeons. Even the most iconoclastic rebels in the far Fields don't slide into that familiarity when they adopt another language."

"It is the language you think in," he said.

There wasn't any use in denying it.

"There are several possibilities here," said Xiangyue. "I'll start with the least likely. Eighty years ago, my sect suffered an unspeakable calamity. Its name was stricken from the door and our pillar of records was levelled. From it, the name of one of our founders was dug out."

He paused. "If I asked you to name the Empress, could you?"

David stared at him blankly.

This was the reaction Xiangyue was looking for. "You have no relation to the entity my junior referred to as the Phoenix, then. Yet this story was familiar to you."

Xiangyue was pacing now, still deep in thought.

"You are not reincarnators," he said. "That was my second thought. There is a deep-seated inferiority complex in those who manage to keep their thoughts after they've touched the wheel. Invariably, they cultivate from the moment they can stand and, by your age, are already laying siege to the gates. And then, when they are tested by the Heavens, they discover that their principles are still no good - and they do it again. How could the skies fear anyone who creates a safeguard for a failed tribulation?"

He had stopped pacing and was examining them again with a more critical eye. Previously, David had to listen for the sound of his Song, but now it was something that couldn't be ignored. It washed over him - an unpleasant feeling.

"You wear the robes of the Falling Leaves," said Xiangyue, sharp and angry. "But you weren't alive when we fell." He looked confused. "And they belong to you. No dissonance exists between you and this age - traversing time is an idle fantasy at best, and moving faster in the right direction makes even less sense."

"More curious still are the strings of karma knotted around you. You have both touched the lightning - and common understanding is that if these strings aren't Severed, you cannot survive a tribulation from the heavens. And that leads us to the most inexplicable piece of this puzzle."

Xiangyue stared at Alice. "A girl with a bone age of seventeen stands before me and she has karma with the Fourth String. Nobody has karma with that saber. It’s the only weapon that’s never left the sect."

"I've lost it," said Alice, looking miserable. "We're looking for it."

Xiangyue gave a short bark of laughter. "Be glad that you did. Had I seen you with it, I would have killed you without hesitation." His smile faded. "I still might."

His Song crashed into reality like waves upon rocks, unfettered. Out of the corner of his eye, David saw that Shangtian and the guests of the Jiang family had sunk to the ground. Some of the cultivators stubbornly kept themselves off the floor by leaning into their weapons.

The sound of Silkworms and the march of his own Song pushed strong and proud against the Waves. Neither David nor Alice moved an inch, but Alice's grip on his hand tightened to the point of cutting off his blood flow.

Abruptly, it went away. Xiangyue looked over at the wait staff and the musicians, most of whom were unconscious, with a touch of guilt.

He turned back to them. "Stranger still. I expected, when pushed, that the malice you've hidden from me would show in your qi - it always does. Compared to my aunts and uncles in the sect, I am not well educated, and even less wise, so I’m not the best judge of character."

Xiangyue looked at the guqin that lay on the ground at Alice's feet. "You can play," he said. "Come, we'll have a song - that, above all, will show me who you really are."

He stepped towards the crowd at the edge of the courtyard, who backed away from him hurriedly - even those who wore the white bibs of the Jiang family. "I will borrow a guqin," he said, addressing the few musicians who remained awake.

Meihua, who was braver than most despite the little line of blood running from a nostril, handed her instrument to him, bowing.

"Do you require compensation, my dear?" Xiangyue asked, all easy charm.

She shook her head, even as she found her voice. "Why does my lord require my guqin when he wears one on his back?"

Jiang Xiangyue chortled. "Were I to play this," he said, tapping the case on his back, "cartographers would no longer include a Ping'an on their maps."

He smiled at her and dug from his robes a little bronze coin, square and oblong. "You've done me two favors now - an offering of an instrument and another of honesty. Should you face any troubles, offer this to any river and I will do my best to repay you." He looked at her seriously. "It is something that only you can use, so don't spend it unless you're very, very hungry."

Meihua accepted the coin with both hands, as if it were made of glass.

Xiangyue walked back towards David and Alice. He stopped ten paces from them and sat down, crossing his legs. He balanced Meihua's guqin on his knees and then looked up at them, waiting.

When Alice handed David his flute and sat herself down across from him, Xiangyue spoke again.

“I am Jiang Xiangyue, of the fifty eighth and last generation of the Falling Leaves. My dearly departed master, my beloved, was Yu Jianlan. Today, I will play for you. And you will play for me.”