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He was more puzzled by what had spurred him to behave so. Maybe it was sheer contempt for his enemy. Jianzhu had often told him to try and avoid feeling contempt in his political duties. It made you act irrationally, blinded you to your own gain.
Jianzhu.
Yun gazed around him, his hands on his hips. He decided, quite logically, and of his own accord, that he should start digging. Straight down.
He dropped to his knees and buried his fingers in the damp soil, parting the dirt. He shoved clods of earth—spirit earth?—out of his way, yanking at the remaining roots that laced themselves across his path. He tore at the fibrous weave, sap bleeding into the lines of his palms. Forcing his way through the layer of living vegetation, he encountered darker clay. He went deeper.
He dug as the animals did, not like badgermoles with their bending but in the manner of clawed, malign, lower beasts that never saw the light of day, creatures that laid grubs and grew fat and pulsing and luminescent in the darkness. He flung clods and castings behind him and over his head, though which way was up no longer mattered. He bored deeper and deeper, darker and darker, until the only sound in the pitch black was his own breath, his exhalations hot and trapped against his skin.
Yun woke faceup. He had to pry his eyelids apart with his fingers, glued together as they were with dried tears and sediment. He was lucky. Had he passed out under the sky with them open, the burning sun would have blinded him permanently.
The other part of his body he feared for were his nails. They should have been chipped, shattered, worn down to flakes. He’d scratched away at so much soil and stone with hands that weren’t meant for it. But they were fine. Dirty, yes. Kyoshi would certainly give him a scolding later. She hated it when he absent mindedly picked the grime from under his nails throughout the day.
“There’s such a thing as soap!” he shouted in imitation of his friend’s distress.
His voice bounced off the striated walls of a gully. The runoff that had carved it was long gone. Nothing grew here.
I . . . may be dying of thirst, he thought to himself.
Yun staggered out the path the rain would have taken, had there been any. The earth was so barren and devoid of animal signs that he thought he was still in the Spirit World, doomed to wander a wasteland, until the land sloped away to reveal a town below him.
He picked his way down the rocky hillside, hunching and limping until he remembered he wasn’t injured, just tired. And possibly delusional. There was no way any of what he’d gone through could be real, was there? The Spirit World was as much of a state of mind as it was a place, according to some scholars.
The settlement bore marks of cheap, rapid construction, the type of boomtown constructed to exploit opportunities and people in equal measure. He could tell with a couple of footsteps that most of the brickwork wouldn’t last more than a few years. Yun kept his mouth shut despite being on the receiving end of a few hard stares from the villagers on the outskirts. Blundering in and shouting, Hey, what place is this? Where am I? was an invitation for trouble.
But try as he might, he lost all caution and composure once he saw the well at the center of the square. He ran toward it, stumbling over his own feet, frantic like a pet for its returning master.
A very large man sitting on the porch of one of the nearest buildings saw him and slowly got up. He walked over, placing himself firmly in Yun’s path. A heavy club dangled from his belt. Yun slowed to a halt.
“This is Governor Tuo’s well,” the guard said. “If you got tags, you can drink.” He flicked the carved wooden chits that hung from a string around his neck.
He had the twang of Xishaanese in his fourth-tone syllables. Which meant Yun wasn’t far from where he’d first exited the human world, dragged into that cave by Father Glowworm. This town must have been built as part of a new mining operation, its citizens the workforce brought in from afar.
He wondered how many of the villagers knew they could glimpse their futures farther along the mountain range. They only had to look at the abandoned ruins where Jianzhu had brought him and Kyoshi. Once the veins of ore dried up, so would the money. The workers would be discarded just like the husks of their homes. No more use to anyone.
Yun ground his heel into the dust. Through his earthbending he could feel the shape of the well. The weathering told him it had been dug in the distant past, probably a century before any human being realized there was wealth to be extracted from the mountains.
“Did Governor Tuo put that water in the earth? Did he drill that well himself?” Yun’s tongue rasped over his lips. It was difficult for the walls of his throat to part from each other. The worst part was he knew Tuo, and the parsimonious governor was exactly the type of man who would refuse someone a drink like this.
The guard’s hand moved to his club.
“Look,” Yun said. “Let me have some water and I’ll make sure you’re rewarded beyond . . .” The sentence died in a gasp. He was too weak to offer the man a fortune beyond his wildest imagination. It occurred to him that he no longer had any fortune to give. There was a trove of wealth in the mansion in Yokoya and he owned exactly none of it.
“Go try one of the shops,” the guard said. He drew his weapon and pointed to the corner of the square. “They can give you their water if they want. But this here is the governor’s well.”
All right. All right. The first shop in that direction was a teahouse, as far as he could tell. It was just another step added before his destination. No need to despair yet.
Yun teetered over to the building where a chimney sent puffs of friendly white smoke into the air, indicating a stove was burning away, boiling water for tea. The entrance was on the other side. He navigated the alley using the walls for support, skimming his hand against the texture of the brick, and only made it halfway through before slumping to the ground.
Now this is a familiar feeling, he thought, his back pressing against the outside of a building he wanted to be inside. Just like the good old days in Makapu, listening in on the classroom. His teeth chattered. He hadn’t realized how cold he was.
His head tilted lower. His thoughts drifted to Kyoshi again. He could feel her warmth against his flank as if she were next to him. She wasn’t though. She was in Taihua, the wrong mountain range, on the complete opposite end of the Earth Kingdom.
Yun blinked awake from the sleep that threatened to claim him and never let go. How did he know Kyoshi was in Taihua?
He tried reaching for her again. Their distance across the physical realm didn’t matter. He was certain of it now. Her spirit was a beacon, a shimmering signal in the darkness. Steady. Reassuring. Unique. It was everything he wanted.
He yanked himself back to his own place in the world, ashamed. Of course her spirit stands out among all others. She’s the Avatar.
