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The Autumn Bloom, he thought to himself. The Autumn Bloom.
Who in the name of Oma’s bastard children were the Autumn Bloom?
Jianzhu really was getting too old. He’d never heard of this gang before. He, the man who’d once single-handedly kept half the continent from falling into lawlessness, had let a new criminal outfit large enough to populate a good-sized village operate within shouting distance of the capital. The Autumn Bloom, whoever they were and whatever their goals, had a level of organization high enough to evacuate the settlement the moment they suspected an intrusion.
And more importantly, most importantly, the only thing that was important, was that they now held the Avatar in their clutches. The girl had been here at some point, that was certain. She must have planned to hide in the remote mountains and fallen into an ambush, like he nearly did. She’d been captured and taken to this headquarters. Shirshu followed living scents, and the animal would not have come here if she were dead.
Jianzhu cursed the spirits and mankind alike, cursed the threads of fate that had formed this knot. The Avatar had been kidnapped by daofei.
He threw his head back and stared at the sky for answers. Out of the corner of his eye he watched a bird fly away, its long tail plumage trailing behind it like a streamer. Some obscure cultures read the future through the patterns of winged creatures. Jianzhu wondered if that would have worked, if birds could have found the girl at birth and saved them this trouble. He heaved a great sigh.
Saiful rounded the corner and came back into the street, trotting back over to his boss. “Did you find anything inside, sir?”
“Just a corpse.” He looked at the young swordsman. Saiful, along with a handful of other men, had answered Jianzhu’s call for more fighters after the encounter with Tagaka left the ranks of his guard depleted. Perhaps a little too quickly and conveniently, now that he thought about it.
“Saiful, I didn’t tell you to send a message with one of our hawks,” Jianzhu said.
The young man looked surprised. “I was, uh, relaying ahead for supplies,” he said. His hand drifted toward his weapon. He was a capable warrior, unafraid to kill for pay. A mercenary who swore loyalty as long as the wages were good. When you got right down to it, there was really no difference between him and a daofei.
But lying was something he needed more practice at. “You’re from the Eastern Peninsula, aren’t you?” Jianzhu said. He clasped his hands behind his back. “I have a good friend who does a lot of business in the Eastern Peninsula. His name is Hui. Have you met him before, by chance? Perhaps he was the one you relayed for supplies just now?”
It had only been a twinge of suspicion on Jianzhu’s part, a bluff really, but mentioning Hui’s name let loose a flood of tells from Saiful’s face and body language.
“Let me guess,” Jianzhu said, digging deeper along this productive seam of ore. “Hui sent you to infiltrate my household, didn’t he? With orders to find out what happened to the Avatar.”
The slight step backward Saiful took let Jianzhu know that he’d struck upon the truth. “And being the smart young man you are, you realized the implication of the shirshu trail ending here. The Avatar—and, let’s be clear, we have been following the Avatar—has been lost to outlaws. That was the message you sent to Hui just now.”
Saiful was astonished that Jianzhu had performed the supernatural feat of reading his mind. Really, all Jianzhu had done was follow lines of information as they unfolded, like any good Pai Sho player.
The swordsman decided to follow a gambit of his own. He’d been found out, but they were in the isolated mountains, and he had his weapon and his youthful reflexes on his side. He warily drew his dao again.
Jianzhu rolled his neck, his joints creakier than in years past. The thing about Pai Sho was that most games didn’t need to be played to completion. Masters usually recognized when they were beaten and resigned while the action was still technically in progress. If this dance between him and Hui had taken place on the grid, then right here would be where Jianzhu was supposed to bow and pick up his tiles in defeat.
There was no stopping the message from reaching Hui now that the bird was in the air. The chamberlain would realize how big a mess he was hiding and assemble a case against him to the rest of the sages of the Earth Kingdom. If the girl was found alive and her identity proven, she’d be delivered straight into the hands of Hui, who in the end wouldn’t care which version of the Avatar he got, so long as he was taking it from Jianzhu.
By all logical reasoning, he was ruined. He’d lost.
But what only his close Pai Sho partners knew about him was that Jianzhu had never surrendered a game early in his life. On the rare occasions when an opponent got the best of him, he forced them to play out the lines to the bitter end. He made them jump hurdles for every piece of his they captured, and ran the late-night candles down to their last inches of wick out of sheer spite.
Jianzhu smiled grimly as he closed in on the young swordsman. Beating him always required a price in blood. He wasn’t about to drop the habit now.
QUESTIONS AND MEDITATIONS
Kyoshi kept pace behind Lao Ge through the streets of the market. The two of them were alone, a girl and her elderly uncle taking a relaxing stroll. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Except Lao Ge, when not in the presence of the rest of the Flying Opera Company, walked with the bearing of a dragon wrapped in the clothes of a beggar. And Kyoshi was . . . Kyoshi. Vendors in their stalls craned their necks to gawk at her as she passed.
“Aren’t we here to buy rice?” she muttered, feeling the pressure of so many gazes. “We passed two different pedd
lers already.”
“Any one of us could have done that alone,” Lao Ge said. He winked at a matron sweeping her stoop. She frowned and pushed a pile of dust at him. “You’re here to observe.”
Zigan Village was the main town that supplied food and manpower to Governor Te’s palace. Kyoshi had been impressed by its size as they walked in from the outskirts, but quickly noticed that the solidly built houses and traditional Earth Kingdom trappings were somewhat of a front. They hadn’t encountered an actual person until they were well into the heart of the village. Kyoshi found it hard to believe that the outer districts were completely vacant, but she’d seen nothing to the contrary.
Her ears perked toward the sound of an argument. A peddler and the farmer supplying him were nearly at blows.
“You can’t fool me!” shouted the peddler. “I know the harvest was good this year! What you’re charging me is an outrage!”
