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The more Kyoshi heard about this Te person, the more she despised him. She opened her eyes. “He’s going to abandon his household to an army of daofei?”
“What did you expect from a wealthy official?” Lao Ge said. “You sound disappointed. Perhaps you assumed Te would stride onto the field of battle at great risk to himself and fight off Mok’s forces single-handedly with an incredible display of earthbending, protecting scores of innocent lives? I don’t know where you got that image from.”
Her hackles rose. It seemed like the old man never let an opportunity to sing Jianzhu’s praises go by. She tried to calm herself by returning to her meditation.
Kyoshi had been denied access to this kind of training in Yokoya, but Rangi had found moments to teach her the basics on their journey. With their bloody task looming over her head, she found the practice calming, centering. She was like cool stone deep below the—
“So you’re telling me you’ve never wondered about my age?”
Now he was trying to goad her on purpose. It was astounding how easily he flipped from the hypnotic, terrifying vision she knew he could be into an oafish child with wrinkles and white hair. She was wrong to have thought that calling him sifu a few times would have given her consistent, uninterrupted access to a guru of death.
“I can’t say that I have,” Kyoshi muttered through her teeth.
He sounded slightly wounded by her lack of interest in his secrets. “It’s just . . . the people who’ve openly confronted me in the past with the name ‘Tieguai the Immortal’ . . . to a man, they all begged me for the secrets of longevity. The only ones who didn’t were you and your mother.”
First, she didn’t believe he was anywhere near as old as he claimed. And second, desperately grasping for more power and control over life was what people like Jianzhu did. Te too, probably.
“Sifu,” she drawled. “Oh, please, impart upon me the mysteries of immortality, for I wish to watch eras pass before my eyes like the grains of an hourglass.”
“Of course!” Lao Ge said brightly. “Anything for my dear student. You see, it all comes down to maintaining order. Keeping things neat, clean, and tidy.”
“Excuse me?” This was genuinely offensive to Kyoshi, as a former housekeeping servant. She’d let go of her standards for cleanliness the first morning outside of Yokoya, after waking up covered in Pengpeng’s shed fur. But with his drinking and aversion to changing clothes, Lao Ge toed the line of rancidity. What did he know about tidying up?
“Aging is really just your body falling apart, on the smallest, most invisible levels, and neglecting to put itself back together,” he said. “With the right mental focus, you could take an inventory of your own body and place each little piece that’s not where it should be back into the correct order.”
Kyoshi had to assume he was tailoring his lessons to her background and that the real process was much more complicated. “The way you describe it, you’d have to decide what version of yourself you’d be stuck as, forever.”
“Exactly! Those who grow, live and die. The stagnant pool is immortal, while the clear flowing river dies an uncountable number of deaths.”
“Is that another proverb of Shoken’s? Because it doesn’t sound like any spiritual lesson I’ve heard.”
“It’s my proverb,” Lao Ge whined, his feelings hurt again. “All this fretting about spirits. I’m trying to teach you about the mind. An infinite world that’s been neglected by far too many explorers.”
The mind. Kyoshi’s mind drifted to another existence, one where she was sitting happily across from Kelsang in a green field as he told her about the wonders of the Spirit World. His warm and gentle voice guiding her consciousness until they crossed the boundary, hand in hand, to a land where human concerns couldn’t weigh them down.
She’d lost that. She’d lost him, and the sickness that followed would never fully heal. Kelsang’s absence had put her in stasis. If Lao Ge wanted her to be stagnant and forever trapped, she’d already mastered the lesson.
Kyoshi looked at this substitute who sat before her, the strange joke she got instead of her true teacher. It was an exchange poor enough to make her weep. “Spirit creatures are more interesting than mental riddles,” she said.
“My dear,” Lao Ge said softly. “As you’ll discover one day, the mind has specters of its own.”
THE FACE OF TRADITION
The time had come. The moon was full to bursting. It spilled its light over the fields surrounding Te’s palace, sharpening corners and altering colors in ghostly detail. Mok knew enough to schedule his raid when his men could see what they were doing.
The Flying Opera Company picked its way down the rocky hillside. “Does everyone know the plan?” Rangi said.
She was asking as a formality. Rangi had drilled each step into their skulls. It had been satisfying to see the others get a measure of Fire Nation discipline as revenge for what they’d put Kyoshi through.
Going to see Mok before the assault was part of the operation. If he let them move as they pleased, and did not let his temperament and vanity reign, then with luck on their side they would deliver him exactly what he wanted. One prisoner, unharmed.
Te’s foolishness was on full display as they approached Mok’s encampment south of the palace. Kyoshi counted at least five hundred daofei preparing for battle, sharpening their swords and honing their spear thrusts. Had none of Te’s household guard noticed this many armed men converging on his location? Jianzhu would have smothered t
his miniature uprising before it—
She shook her head. For one night, and one night only, Jianzhu was immaterial.
They tiptoed by a large group of bare-chested men arranged in neat rows, deep in Horse stance, chanting gibberish in unison. Their captain walked among them holding a bundle of lit incense sticks in his hand. He ritualistically swept the smoking ends over their torsos, leaving trails of ash on their skin. Kyoshi looked closer and saw that each man had the characters for “impervious” inked on their forehead.
