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After a hundred years had passed, Rangi broke contact, gently and deliberately breathing a wisp of steam down Kyoshi’s neck, a parting gift of heat that drifted underneath her clothes.
She leaned in for one last seductive whisper. “You still have seven minutes left to go,” Rangi said.
Kyoshi kept her complaints to herself. It was a decent trade, all things considered.
“Your water and air chakras are overflowing,” Lao Ge said.
He sounded like it was an embarrassment, as if Kyoshi had wandered outside her home without being fully dressed. She’d braved coming to him while the others were still awake, bedded down by the embers of the campfire. Rangi was probably staring at the sky, vigilant to her last moments of consciousness.
Lao Ge lay on his side in the grass, his head propped upon his hand so he could watch a pair of fireflies circle each other, tracing erratic patterns through the air. Kyoshi had long since gathered that the man had very little need to ever look at her.
“I don’t know what chakras are,” she said.
“What they are is either open or closed. For the sake of predictability, I prefer working with people who have all seven of them open or all seven of them closed. An accomplice with only some of their chakras unblocked can be easily swayed by their strongest, most gnarled-up emotion.”
Kyoshi assumed the term had something to do with energy movement within the body. Not much of a stretch, since controlling internal qi was the basis of all bending.
“Your feelings of pleasure and love are butting up against a wall of grief,” he said. “And guilt. Grief I can work with, but guilt makes for a poor killer. Have you second thoughts about your man?”
“No,” she said. “Never.” Lao Ge rolled over to his other side. She waited, letting him examine her to see she wasn’t bluffing. Jianzhu was part of her blood by now. He was the back of her hands.
But this Te person was not. “I don’t know if I can help you kill the governor,” she said. “Helping Mok free a prisoner is one thing, but an assassination in cold blood is another.” Kyoshi wondered why she didn’t reject Lao Ge immediately the other night. Speaking the action out loud made it ludicrous. “There’s no reason for me to help you.”
The old man blew his nose on his sleeve. “Have you ever heard of Guru Shoken?” he asked. Kyoshi shook her head.
“He was an ancient philosopher, a contemporary of Laghima’s. Not as popular though. He had a proverb: ‘If you meet the spirit of enlightenment on the road, slay it!’”
She wrinkled her brow. “I can see why he’s not popular.”
“Yes, he was considered heretical by some. But wise by others. One interpretation of that particular saying is that you cannot be bound by petty concerns on your personal journey. You must walk with a singular purpose. The judgment of others, no matter how horrific or criminal they label your actions, must hold no meaning to you.”
“I can’t do that,” Kyoshi said. “I care what she thinks of me. I don’t know if I could handle disappointing her.”
Lao Ge knew whom Kyoshi was talking about. “Your hesitation seems to be less about your own morals than hers. In fact, without your Firebender tethering you to this world, you might feel no compunction at all. Perhaps that’s why you feel guilt. You’re only one step away from Guru Shoken’s ideal, and it disturbs you.”
This was the sorry state of Kyoshi’s Avatarhood. Heartlessness the new enlightenment. Murder the means to self-discovery. If she ever resurfaced in the legitimate world, she would create a stain as dark as loam in the history books.
“Don’t look so compromised,” Lao Ge said. “Yangchen was a devoted reader of Shoken.”
Kyoshi glanced up at him.
“She studied his opponents as well,” he said. “But I don’t feel like giving you their philosophical arguments. It doesn’t serve my purposes.”
She remembered the notes in her mother’s journal, about the rumored longevity of Tieguai the Immortal. “Are you him?” she said. “Are you Shoken?” If her wild accusation was right, it would have made the man before her older than the Four Nations themselves.
Lao Ge snorted and rolled on his back, closing his e
yes. “Of course not.” He settled in to sleep. “I was always much better looking than that fool.”
CONCLUSIONS
Jianzhu had learned his lesson. No caravans. No roads. As soon as he received the message from the shirshu tracker team, delivered by hawk, he’d gone through the enormous, preposterous expense of buying rare eel hounds. The fastest cross-country mounts besides a flying bison. A whole herd of them.
In the annals of the Earth Kingdom, ancient nomadic barbarians had traveled great distances, surprising footslogging armies with such tactics. A single rider would bring multiple mounts on a journey, switching between them on the fly to keep the animals as fresh and speedy as possible. From the ranks of his newly replenished guardsmen, he’d chosen two on the basis of their riding ability and set out with eight eel hounds between them. They’d been told as little as possible, but from his urgency it was easy to guess that their quest was important.
They reached the mountains of Ba Sing Se in astonishing time, with barely a witness to mark their passing. Early on, one mount had broken its leg in a singing groundhog’s hole and needed to be put down. Another died from exhaustion on the far shore of West Lake.
But other than that, the constant, mindless riding, the wind in his hair, had been good for Jianzhu’s spirit. As much as he missed Hei-Ran’s company, he needed the occasional freedom from her watchful gaze. The party had brought more messenger hawks with their baggage, carefully caged and hooded. Jianzhu had promised to send word to her as soon as possible.
