Chapter 20

The scream came from the twins’s tent. Pao, who was taking his turn at watch, grabbed his hammer and rushed to help, only to find that there was nothing he could do. It was just a dream.

Just a dream.

Just a dream, Won told himself as he forced himself to calm down.

The eyes of the dead man were not truly upon him, judging him and haunting him and calling for vengeance. The body remained in Tan’s ring, and they’d present it to the imperial lawmen when they got to the next city to see if there was a reward. But the man himself was dead, and he couldn’t hurt Won.

He couldn’t hurt Won’s sister. Or his friends.

Because Won had killed him to stop him from doing exactly that.

Except killing a man wasn’t like in the stories. It wasn’t something that he could just do and pretend had never happened. The bandit had been, well, a bandit. A thief and likely a murderer besides, if his threats had any weight to them. And Won thought that they did, having felt the man’s intent.

He had probably saved more lives than he’d taken, he realized.

That didn’t make the demon haunting him easier to bear.

Won took over his turn to stand watch early, sending Pao and the others back to bed. He stared into the flames of the campfire, seeing eyes that weren’t there whenever he looked out into the darkness.

Tan woke in the morning and, after taking care of certain things that usually need to be taken care of in the morning, put on his blindfold and began practicing his kata with his new sword.

With his third eye open, it was rather obvious when he looked at Won that there was something wrong with the boy. Tan frowned, seeing the alien Qi attempting to strangle the flame that was Won’s own spirit.

He recognized it for what it was.

“Zephyr, do you see that?” he asked his spirit.

“Your friend is haunted,” she said.

“Is he in danger? Can I help?”

“The ghost is weak. It has attached itself to your friends soul, but the gates of hell are open wide and the pull of the afterlife is snatching at it like a greedy toddler trying to pull a sweet from the hands of an older child who doesn’t want to give it to them. The problem will probably resolve itself in a week or two on its own, especially if you tell Won that his dream might have been a visitation and not just his conscience,” the spirit informed him.

“What if I want to do more than that?” Tan asked.

The spirit was silent for a moment. “It might be dangerous, but there is an old ritual I know.”

Tan listened to the ritual, then gathered Pao and Ko to discuss matters with them. They took him at his word that he’d seen a ghost haunting Won and that they couldn’t tell him yet if they were going to complete the ritual.

Pao announced that they were taking a break for the morning, and Won was so distracted that he just continued to stare into the fire. The others went about setting up the ritual in silence. When Won was finally called to join them, the haunted boy looked confused at the magic circles the others had drawn, and at the clay man standing in the center.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“The bandit is haunting you, Won,” Tan said. “We’re going to purge your spirit and free you from its influence.”

“And kill him a second time, huh?” Won said.

“You only die once,” Tan argued. “Even so, I can see him as he is now, and he’s a twisted, ugly, evil thing that’s clutching at your throat. He turned into a demon when he died, and now he’s trying to poison you to get his revenge.”

“You don’t have to convince me. I know what he was, and nothing you said is exactly surprising,” Won said. “Just tell me what to do.”

At Tan’s instructions, he stepped over the magical formations, cut his palm, and wiped a bit of his blood on the clay mannequin. Then he stepped back onto one of the cardinal points of the formation and, with the others, pumped it full of Qi.

The wind changed, and the air filled with the scent of blood. The mannequin’s eyes abruptly opened, showing the red of a demon as the demonic spirit was pulled from Won and forced into the clay doll.

“Little boy, little boy, I’m going to eat you,” the demon-puppet said. “Just like the other children I’ve killed. They call me Ten-wo, the demon cannibal, and I—”

“Now!” Tan said, and the others flooded the ritual with a hundred times the Qi they’d pumped in before. The demon screamed, and the clay burst aflame, turning to ash a moment later.

Tan spent a moment afterwards searching, and he examined each of his friend’s auras closely, but saw no remnant of their unwelcome guest. Pao caused the earth to eat the circles they had drawn in the dirt, and they returned to their campfire.

“I’m sorry,” Won said.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Won. It was a demon,” Ko said.

“I’m sorry that I killed him.”

“Don’t be,” Tan said. “He was evil. We knew that when he was alive, and his ‘turning into a demon’ act proved it when he died. You did the empire a favor, Won.”

“And I still feel guilty about it,” Won said. “I know it doesn’t make sense. I feel guilty. That isn’t what I felt when I was haunted, by the way. Then I felt harried and afraid of something I couldn’t see. Now that it’s gone, I feel … I knew that when I started cultivating I might have to kill someone some day. I thought that I was ready for it. I wasn’t.”

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“I don’t think that’s something that you can really prepare yourself for, Won,” Ko said gently. She put her arm around her brothers shoulder, and they sat like that for a while, watching the fire burn.

They set out again after lunch, Pao setting an even more grueling pace to make up for the time that they had lost dealing with the demon. They arrived in a city with an outpost for the army, where they inquired about bandits and had the man that they had killed described to them exactly.

The garrison officer’s eyes bulged out when Tan produced the corpse from a spatial ring, then rushed off to find his commander. The commander appeared, bowing to the cultivators and offering them wine and dates to eat and drink as they waited for the garrison to confirm the bandit’s identity and gather the reward for his execution.

The children ate the dates, but nobody drank the wine, preferring the tea that the commander served a few minutes after remembering that he was dealing with children.

Once the bounty was completed, the children were given tokens proclaiming that they had performed a service for the empire, which they put on their necklaces, the ones that already had a talisman given to them the year before by Tren and Wensho.

Aside from those tokens, they were given a sac of coins and precious gems, which they promised to divide up equally between them when they returned home. Then they were off again, dashing towards the horizon in their journey to the east.

The rest of the trip to the Whispering Guides Sect was quiet and uneventful. More quiet than it should have been. The death of the bandit leader continued to weigh heavily on the children. Even Tan, who insisted that they had done the right thing, was not his usual self.

Won, having dealt the final blow against the bandit and been haunted by its demon, was quiet and withdrawn. His sister tried to get him to cheer up by challenging him with friendly japes and jabs, but he did not rise the way that he usually would. Pao was silent out of respect, although he too was troubled.

They’d done what had needed to be done. They’d earned recognition from the empire for their services. They were heroes.

Pao never realized that being a hero meant feeling like crud.

On the sixth day of their journey, he called a halt early in the day.

“We need to talk about it or it’s going to keep bugging us. We’ve purged the bandit’s demon, but he’s still haunting us,” Pao said.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Tan said. “He was going to kill us. He’d killed other travelers and was going to kill us if we hadn’t been stronger than him.”

“But we still killed him, Tan. Doesn’t that bother you?” Ko said quietly.

“Of course it does. But it was the right thing to do. He was an evil soul. A demon with the flesh of a man. If we hadn’t—”

“Tan, shut up,” Won said.

Tan looked surprised.

“I heard you crying last night. I know you’re acting,” Won said.

“I wasn’t—”

“I was crying too. Just silently,” Won added. “Tan, why didn’t you kill the bandit? Why did you make me do it?”

“What are you talking about?” Tan asked.

“You’re the strongest of all of us. You let yourself get hit so that I’d have to do it,” Won accused.

“I did not!”

“Then why was it me who killed the bandit who was seven stages ahead of me instead of you, who’s the most advanced of any of us?” Won said.

“Because—”

“Leave him alone, Won,” Ko said.

“No! If he’d have gone full out, with that sword of his, then he could have killed the bandit easily! Instead he made me kill him and now I’m the one who has blood on his hands! Tan, don’t you know—”

“That’s enough Won,” Pao said. “Tan, did you hold back when you were fighting the bandit leader?”

Tan looked defensive. “No.”

“Then that’s all there is to say, Won. The bandit was stronger than any of us individually. Without the weapons Master and Mistress Shen gave us, we might have been killed,” Pao said. “That goes for Tan as much as any of us.”

“Master and Mistress put a lot of faith in us, sending us out alone,” Ko said. “I don’t think they knew we’d be attacked, but they gave us weapons to defend ourselves in case we were. I know you’ve all felt it too, from your weapons. They’re more than just tools. I think they have spirits in them.”

“They don’t,” Tan said. “It’s something else. Fake-spirits. Not spirits like Zephyr or a spirit stone but something else. But you’re right. They’re not simple tools. They remember how to fight, and they’re trying to teach us how they should be used.”

“Won, it wasn’t just you who killed the bandit. It was your bow, using you to do it,” Ko said. “And I’m happy that you did it. That man did evil things. Terrible things that he wasn’t even ashamed of. He bragged about them even after he was dead.”

“It still makes me a killer, Ko,” Won said quietly. “I’ve killed someone and I can’t go back to who I was before that.”

“I know. But you’re still my brother and I love you,” Ko said, and she hugged him.

Won hugged her back, and he began crying in her arms.

The others looked away while the twins comforted each other.

“I really didn’t hold back,” Tan said once the two had separated.

“I know. I’m sorry I said you did,” Won said. “I just … I lost something when I killed him.”

“We all did,” Pao said. “And I think I know what it was.”

The others looked at him, waiting for him to speak.

“Innocence,” Pao declared. “We’re no longer little kids who’ve been sheltered our whole lives. We’ve been in a real battle and survived. But part of us died. That bandit killed our innocence, and I curse him for it.”

The others remained silent for a moment as they contemplated his words.

“So what do we do now?” Tan said eventually.

“We go get Hoten, and then we go home,” Pao said. “Nothing’s changed. Not really. We just … aren’t as innocent as we were before.”

“Yeah,” Won said, nodding. “Okay then, let’s go.”

So they continued on their way. They made camp that night, and arrived the next morning.

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