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“You’ve . . . basically got it,” Yun said after they sat down. “Tuck your tailbone in a bit more and don’t hunch your shoulders.” He stayed facing her, taking up his own pose not too far off. She could have reached out and poked him.
Jianzhu produced a small brazier and a stick of incense, which he placed between them. “Someone help me light this with firebending?” he said.
They stared blankly at him.
“It was worth a shot,” Jianzhu said. He lit the incense with a precious sulfur match and backed away until he reached the edge of the terrace, positioned like the high mark of a sundial.
The air took on a sweet, medicinal note. “Both of you, close your eyes and don’t open them,” Jianzhu said. “Let go of your energy. Let it spill from you. We want to let the spirit get a taste of it, so to speak, so it knows it can come forth.”
Kyoshi didn’t know how to control her energy. But if Jianzhu was telling her to throw away the idea of containing herself, to stop minimizing the space she took up, to let herself grow and rise to her full dimensions . . .
It felt wonderful.
The next exhalation she made seemed to go on forever, drawing from a reservoir inside her that had no end. Her sense of balance ran wild, the pull of the earth coming from each and every direction in turn. She swayed within the stillness of her own body. Her eyelids were a theater of the blank.
A rasping noise came from the mountain. The sound of millstones with no grain between them.
“Don’t open your eyes,” Jianzhu said softly. “Hear sounds, smell smells; take note of them naturally and let them pass. Without opening your eyes.”
The breeze picked up for a moment, dispersing the incense smoke. In the time it took to settle back down, Kyoshi thought she detected a whiff of something damp. Almost fungal. It wasn’t so atrocious as it was . . . familiar.
Familiar to whom? she thought, giggling silently as the incense took over again.
“You know what would be funny?” she said. “If it was . . . you know . . . neither of us.”
“Kyoshi,” Yun said. His voice sounded slurred. “I need to tell you. Something important. Me and you.”
She tried to speak again but her tongue was too big for it. Jianzhu hadn’t told them to shut up yet. That was weird. Jianzhu was Master Shut Up. Was he okay? She had to check if he was okay. It was her duty as a member of his household. She disobeyed and peeked.
Yun was meditating peacefully. Had he spoken at all, or had she imagined it? She tried to turn her head toward Jianzhu but went the wrong way, looking at the mountain instead.
A hole had been opened in the rock, a tunnel of pitch-darkness. In its depths, a great glowing eyeball stared back at her.
Her shriek caught in her throat. She tried to scramble away, but her muscles failed her as if her joints had been sliced by a butcher. Nothing connected to anything.
The eye floating in the mountain was the size of a wagon wheel. It had a sickly, luminescent tinge of green. A web of pulsing veins gripped it tightly from behind, giving the sphere an angry appearance, as if it would burst under its own pressure at any moment.
It swiveled over to look at her, her futile struggle catching its attention.
Yun! her mind screamed. He wasn’t moving. His breathing was slow and labored.
Jianzhu was unfazed by the horrific spirit before them. “Father Glowworm,” he called out in greeting.
A cordial, mellifluent voice rumbled from deep within the mountain, the echo concentrated by the walls of the tunnel. “Architect! It’s been so long.” The eye darted between the three of them. “What have you brought me?”
“A question.”
The spirit sighed, a low, nauseating hum that Kyoshi felt in her bones. “That chatty little upstart Koh. Now every human thinks they can march up to the oldest and wisest of us and demand answers. I thought you had more respect, Architect.”
Jianzhu stiffened. “This is an important question. One of these children is the Avatar. I need you to tell me which one.”
The spirit laughed, and it felt like the earth bounced. “Oh my. The physical world is in poor shape indeed. You do know I’ll need their blood?”
Kyoshi thrashed back and forth. But whatever Jianzhu had drugged them with rendered her flailing into mere twitches of movement, her cries into halting breaths. Yun’s eyes opened, but only by the smallest degree.
“I know,” Jianzhu said. “I’ve read Kuruk’s private journals. But you’ve tangled with many of the Avatar’s past lives. I must have the unerring judgment of a great and ancient spirit such as yourself.”
A carpet of slime spilled from the hole in the mountain, flowing over the terrace. It was the same moldy, rotting green as the eye, and it reached toward Yun and Kyoshi in tendrils, the shadows of fingers against a curtain. There was a scraping noise against the stone floor. It came from pointed flecks of debris floating in the wetness, bone-yellow roots and crowns.
