Old Ideas, New Visions

By Paul Severus

The White Mountains, where monsters held out against mortals, loomed close in the south. The abandoned mining town, eroded by long winters and wet springs, had a slight acidic odor. No birds had roosted here, nor did he see any scavengers, not even a spider web. No weeds curling around the failing wooden structures.  His first year, a teacher had told them animals leaving were the best warning against evil magic, because they sensed the poison, while people could outsmart themselves, ignoring risks to grasp at benefits. Li Ho wondered what his old instructor would have said if he knew their own rulers had sent him to a place like this. 

He adjusted his hood as the wind changed direction, whipping through these foothills to the plains of their enemies the Yen Dynasty.  He wore black scholarly robes as the outer layer so people would know how to respect him, but underneath dressed like a peasant for warmth. His left hand held his staff, with some silver battle runes carved into it.  Under his leather gloves his right hand had been bandaged, burned in the test of will he had passed for this mission, grasping the pain stick past alchemists’ ability to fully heal, so determined had his opposition been.  He wasn’t sure if Lu Teh’s hand would recover. His friend had passed out before letting go.

After the graduation ceremony, he was escorted into the office of the Minister of Mysticism responsible for working with the Ministry of Education and Examinations, Chu Hsi-chih. Li Ho bowed and stood at attention with the top graduates of the preceding two years. He and Lu Teh showed no sign of friendship, staying within strict protocols.

            “Congratulations. At this point, you have many options. You may begin, or continue, your careers in various ministries, or you can pass this test and continue advanced and secret studies on behalf of the Emperor.” He put a thorny burning stick on the table. All three of them had seen similar sticks used as punishment, with runes absorbing their blood, empowering the pain spell.

            “What sort of studies?” asked one of them, and the Minister dismissed him immediately, wondering aloud what part of the word “secret” he had failed to understand.

            After pain best forgotten, an alchemist applied potions and wrappings to Li Ho’s hand and left him alone with Chu, who told him about the Ministry of Shadows, which existed to find advantages against their enemies the priests had disallowed, or would if they knew. 

            “Why?”

            “The gods have commanded the three dynasties to fight for the throne, but they gave the Yen numbers and the Xu wealth. What have we but courage and wits?  Why should the Shan Dynasty obey the rules of priests that give advantage to our enemies?”

“But why a test of pain?”

“Some magical forces are painful to control. If you can’t handle pain, there’s no point in sending you no matter how intelligent. And we don’t tell you what you’re heading into before the test, because it helps prove your dedication is to our cause, not yourself.” The Minister escorted him to the door. “Most people find envisioning the loss of their hand all too easy and let go, yet judging by your essays, you are the most imaginative young scholar we’ve sent. Perhaps you will discover something the older scholars have overlooked.”

Approaching the mine entrance, he felt the sharp tingle of magic prohibiting entry. Removing his glove and bandages, he held his palm out, the rune burned into his skin forward, and walked through with only a ticklish sensation felt through his body. Once inside, he saw the silver runes etched above, some to discourage the curious, others to keep demonic forces from escaping. Such magic was the most dangerous to use. A devil would bargain but betray at the first opportunity, while demons resented enslavement and attacked with brute force.  Yet if controlled had powers beyond mortal technique.

If the Hands of the Gods found out about the town, the Ministry of Mysticism could honestly say the mine entrance had been hexed for protection. The Ministry had to hope the warrior nuns took them at their word.   Few could stop a sufficiently pissed off senior Hand from just burning everything to ash.

Focusing a touch of his life force through his hand, he caused a rune at the tip of his staff to light his way. At the end of the southern shaft, he passed under a metal plate that could be dropped from the ceiling and block the tunnel, then through two marble pillars supporting an archway into a perfectly circular room.  Stairs descended, from which lantern light and the patter of slippers against stone preceded a lean man not much older than himself wearing black, scholarly robes nearly as dusty as his own, hiking into the room.

“Oh, good, a new shit jobs man.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve been stuck with all the shit jobs for three years. Finally someone I can pass them on to so I can focus on my real work.”  He bowed as if to a near equal. “I am named Wang Chih.”

“Li Ho.” He bowed back at an angle admitting his slight inferiority in status. “But I didn’t learn four languages and come all this way just to do dishes.” Raised with the Shan dialect of Huaran, he’d learned the other two imperial dialects despite the ongoing civil war, plus Hoai from which most modern languages descended, and Arish, the language of nomads spread out over a desert where Hoai ruins were most often found.  He’d also studied runes, the written words invented by gods if one asked the priests or that of nature mastered by the gods if one asked sorcerers. Wizards agreed with the priests but used them as if they were sorcerers.

“Someone has to, or did you think the Ministry of Shadows recruited cooks? Who in their right mind would spend most of their lives in a mine if they didn’t really care about our research?”

Li Ho knew people sold themselves into slavery to get their family out of debt, including half the people in his grandfather’s kitchen.

Wang clasped his shoulder. “But don’t worry. When you aren’t cleaning up after everyone’s mess, you’ll be learning Hoai and the Old Words.”

“I can read and write Hoai, but I thought they were the Old Words.” He certainly understood the need to learn new languages for new subjects, but how was he supposed to do that while making two or three trips to some stream or well every day carrying water and putting it over a fire for boiling, just to clean dishes? And maybe they wanted clothes washed, too.  He’d seen how hard his family’s maid servants worked so his father could concentrate on government affairs and his children could study.

“I’ll explain on the way.” Wang led him down the curving stairs, and they passed through the floors of two storage rooms filled with crates of supplies and bags of rice. The stairs depended upon lanterns in the rooms for their light, but a copper hand railing had been attached to the wall. From the fresh color, by the scholars rather than the Hoai. “The Old Words are the language of a civilization predating the Hoai.”

“You mean the gods also wiped out a civilization before theirs?”  When the Hoai had become powerful enough to challenge the gods, the divine beings attacked first, leveling their lands with a sandstorm and dropping mountains on their cities. The survivors passed on legends that still, after civilization had been restored, inspired popular performances about miracle workers, stout warriors, and magical creatures, but everyone he knew assumed the Hoai were the first mortal civilization.    

“That’s why this ‘tower’ was built pointing downwards. They had stumbled upon an older civilization, too.”

He grabbed Wang’s shoulder and forced the other scholar to face him. “You’ve found that other civilization?”

“Not yet, but there are a lot of collapsed tunnels further down.”

“Was their magic too powerful?”

 “We haven’t found any record left by who we call the Ancient Ones of their own demise, probably because they were busy demising. But their magic was different. For us and the Hoai, magic is a skill. For them, magic was a muscle. Each Ancient One only had the ‘muscles’ for a few types of spells, but as they used the magic, they became stronger and more skillful within their specialization.”

“By the gods. Do you think the dwarves know?” Dwarves, whose long tradition and patient discipline allowed them to etch runes into weapons more powerful than any made by those they called “surface dwellers.” Their homes inside the mountains had allowed them to ride out the divine cataclysm, their capital in the White Mountains watered by snow, illuminated by stain glass windows that could be shuttered with steel plates, and protected by runes.

“We’ve found references to a slave race, short, tough, and strong, but you know dwarves. Quiet as their mountains when among strangers.”

Do we know dwarves? Depending upon the bard, they appeared as their cities, rugged on the outside and beautiful on the inside, or as berserker mercenaries in legendary battles, or a cryptic old sage advising the young hero with wisdom distilled into poetry. On stage they were played by men shuffling about on their knees, probably giving people the wrong impression of their agility. Li Ho’s favorite song from the musicals was a duet between a mercenary and a sage mocking human foibles over their beers.    

Li Ho imagined himself writing the first book about the Ancients, becoming famous throughout the Huaran Empire and beyond, civil war or no, finding ancient ideas that could enlighten their violent times.

“The Hands of the Gods punish anyone caught using Hoai magic,” said Li Ho to the Minister.  The Hands could go anywhere, interrogate anyone, searching for those who used forbidden magic. Trained better than any soldier and wielding divine fire in the presence of evil, those rare women in white spoke with the brutal frankness of peasants but commanded respect even of the imperial family.

“We do not use Hoai magic, but accessing their magical theories gives us an edge. The same, legal spells, but made more powerful.”

Li Ho shuttered to think what the Hands would do if he revealed the existence of these “Ancient Ones” and their magic, which sounded closer to the divine and thus more offensive to their jealous gods.  

They descended through a room with messy bunk beds, where Li dumped his pack, into a kitchen made entirely of ceramic and glass, including the walls, and Wang showed him how to turn the spigots for running water, one way for hot and one way for cold, astounding Li Ho.  When he’d thought of mighty Hoai magic, he’d imagined summoning storms or controlling griffons to ride like horses. Such sophisticated irrigation hadn’t occurred to him.  Cleaning the dishes didn’t seem like such a bad price to pay anymore.

On the other side of the stairs, Wang showed him the wash room and squatter, explaining the standing bath. “You stand under this pipe and let the water fall on you. These control the temperature. You’ll have to clean this room, too.”

“The squatter has a lid.”

Wang pulled off the lid, revealing a grated opening and releasing a whiff of sulphur along with a sewer aroma. “We’ve had to give names to the insects that crawl up.”

“You mean there’s life down there living off our shit? How did they survive for centuries until we got here?”

“Veta experimented with their biology, and found some chemicals with interesting new properties. He believes they have alternative sources of nutrition down there. Mo pointed out that many species have long hibernation periods and there are species of fish whose eggs only hatch when rain refills their ponds.”

Wang introduced him around.  In the alchemy lab, he met Veta Khen, a bald, clean-shaven man who wore leather armor and lifted his glass mask to say hello. He had the nose and eyes of a beautiful woman. If his parents had been poor, they could have sold him to an acting troupe, playing women’s parts and enticing wealthy men who only married women to have sons.  But as an Academy graduate, he ended up here.

“Why does this room smell like rotten eggs?”

Veta smirked. “It took me awhile to figure that out. Hoai alchemists added a sort of suphler to a liquid they use to fuel fire in their labs. In it’s natural state, the fuel doesn’t have an odor, but it’s also poisonous in large doses so they made it smell bad as a warning.”

He’s risking poisoning the air in a building with no windows?

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Wang, “but we do have vents we can use to pull poisoned air out of circulation.” He pointed at a couple of places near the ceiling that looked like metal slatted windows.

“What are you working on that is worth the risk?”  

Veta sounded almost childishly excited. “In the Hoai texts I found references to making liquid light, and I’m trying to recreate the technique.”

            Li Ho almost asked why, but then imagined being able to carry a little glass flask into any dark room and just taking it out to see everything he wanted, or dropping it on the floor and light spreading away from his feet. And if light could be turned into water, couldn’t fire? What about air? Could people some day drink air and swim under “water”? 

In the library, a hexagon of crammed bookshelves twice the height of any other room, he met Mo Shih, a Grey Nun.   She rose and bowed, and both men returned her gesture. Members of the Grey Order wore robes cut in the same style as Children of the Compassionate and Enlightened one, but the Grey Order refused philosophical speculation and anything else that might cloud seeing facts.  Their entire order only had one monastery, where they eventually retired, wrote a book about their lifetime of research, and settled down to teach.  They only accepted outside employment in exchange for food and shelter, but even so sometimes made a pest of themselves. One had been studying insect life around a village and to pay his way advocated for the farmers in a legal case, winning money from Li Ho’s uncle and embarrassing his father. As a boy, Ho had shared his family’s anger, until overhearing an argument between his father and uncle revealing they knew they had wronged the village.

“Mo Shih is our main translator, but Veta and I both help.”

“Are all these Hoai texts?”

“The books are. These scrolls are from the Ancient Ones.”

“They used scrolls? We’ve advanced beyond that.”

“Yes, but it seems the Ancient Ones’ wisdom was more intuitive than ours, their knowledge of the world more direct, almost telepathic. For them, scrolls were used for long letters, treaties, last words before going on dangerous quests, or recording such a quest.”

“It sounds like they didn’t want to expose themselves to some things or some people telepathically.” He imagined a sorcerer being infected by demonic madness and leaving a written record to warn others without risking spread of the corrupted thoughts.

 In the next room down, Wang introduced him to Pao Yuanchang, who wore his white beard twisted and tied liked his ponytail, sitting at a table with books and gems ranging from smaller than dice to nearly the size of a scholarly fist. Li Ho had always told himself he cared more about knowledge than money, but his eyes widened at the wealth.  Pao studied a gem through a jeweler’s eyepiece, and didn’t look away their entire introduction.  Wang had to explain how the Hoai had been able to create more powerful spells by etching inside gems in three dimensions, as opposed to modern Huaran runes written on flat surfaces, because Pao was too disinterested in the newcomer to take his attention away from work.

“But it can’t be safe to be doing rune research so close to an alchemy lab,” said Li Ho. “Or the other way around.”  The Ministry of Mysticism didn’t even allow those departments to do their work in the same building.

“I’m sure the Hoai knew what they were doing,” said Wang with jovial confidence.

“But a misadventure in one could cause danger in the other.”

“The floors between rooms here are three times as thick as in Huaran structures, and all the doors are solid iron.”

Li Ho imagined alchemical gases floating up or flowing down the stairwell, or a rune accidentally summoning a demon or elemental spirit and causing havoc. “But we don’t.”

Wang put a hand on Li Ho’s shoulder with a grip that he probably meant to be reassuring. “See those runes on the ceiling? Those are protective runes left by the Hoai. Those were the first runes we learned how to use, and how there are applied to labs back at the Ministry. We’re doing valuable work here. Trust in the human spirit of exploration.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s get some food in you,” said Wang. “There’s one more person to meet, Su Hsun, but he’s in the conjuring room and that’s locked up tight.”

“If the rest of their magic is this powerful, can anyone handle the demons they could summon?”

“Hence the ‘locked up tight’ part. Even so, we’ve lost people. Just opened that door and no one was in there. Whatever portal they opened, they either fell in or were taken. You have to maintain control while different planes of existence overlap, which is damn tough to pull off.”

“Have you?”

“Haven’t even tried, but I don’t have to be an acrobat to appreciate doing multiple flips and twists in the air, either. There’s one more person I should tell you about, so you don’t get scared when you meet her.”

“Scared? What happened?”

“According to her, when the gods punished the Hoai, it disrupted an alchemical experiment that exploded and burned her soul into the air element, so she exists as echoes in these tunnels.”

“Wait, a Hoai ghost is haunting this place?”

“No, not a ghost, an echo. If you hear her, you will be standing in her mind. The tower is sort of like her skull.”

He didn’t see much difference. Ghosts were too tied to the material plane by grief or love, and often both, while this alchemist was apparently stuck here by accident, but if ghosts didn’t attach to a physical element, all they could do was influence dreams.  “How come I don’t hear her right now?”

“Most of her is in the lecture hall, it was designed for perfect acoustics, but if you go in there you’ll hear her mind just going and going. But out here, she can speak with a single voice, funneling her memories so they don’t overwhelm us. I’ve spent most of my time preparing a book about how to pronounce Hoai.”

“Are you planning to talk to one?”

“Besides Echo? Some of the doors have verbal locks. I can’t wait to open them.”

Those must be the most dangerous doors.

When the others joined them one by one for dried beef and boiled rice and vegetables, Mo walked with the steady gait of a peasant.  Li Ho had never seen an educated woman without her feet bound, unless the Hands of the Gods counted, yet couldn’t believe the Ministry of Shadows would allow anyone from outside the Shan Dynasty to know about this place. He tried not to stare.

Eventually Su Hsun entered, his bugged-out eyes unfocused and his dry, gray hair around his neck like a scarf. He wore a pair of leather gloves, and when introduced, Su felt his face despite being able to see, then dug his fingers into Li Ho’s cheeks just above the jaw. It hurt, but Li Ho had expected to get smacked by his grandfather at least once a week.  The wizard didn’t let go until Li Ho winced.

“My apologies. When my mind returns to this plane, it takes a while for me to be sure I’m not hallucinating.”

“We’re not in the conjuring room.”

“Now I’m surer of that. Some minds are so overwhelming, they threaten to drown our own.”

“That’s why the door into that room must always be locked,” said Veta. “The last time one of us forgot, something roamed into our tower trying to communicate.”

“Its language was too complicated,” said Mo. “Like complicated musical patterns can sound like noise to the unaccustomed ear.”

“How do you know it wasn’t just a mess?” asked Li Ho. “Demons are beyond the divine order of the world.”

Mo smiled and Su looked like he had a sudden headache while the rest chuckled.

“All magic is chaos springing out of the natural order,” said Mo gently. “And all spells are orderly attempts to tame chaos to impose the order that we wish, an order invented by the dissatisfied chaos of our souls.”

“I don’t think the priests would appreciate hearing your philosophy.”

“I am more insulted by your accusation of philosophizing than of saying the priests wouldn’t like it.”    

Wang nodded. “We’re all here to learn what priests don’t want us to. Welcome to the freedom of obscurity.”

After he lay his exhausted body in his bunk, his mind raced, denying sleep.  Deprived of the sun, the scholars kept their own hours, so someone was almost always awake, but that didn’t mean they would be watchful. Teachers at the academy could become so absorbed in their reading they failed to notice nightfall until they couldn’t see, so danger could be squiggling into the inverted tower.  In the dark, any sound could be little creatures scurrying from the shit hole that smelled faintly of hell, or the slithering of a demon squid from another dimension, or the footfalls of a person driven mad and deciding since he didn’t measure up, he should be put down in his sleep. Perhaps Mo was a spy, gathering secrets. In the operas, spies from the Empire Over the Sea moved like ghosts and could see in the dark.

What they had told him strained his mind like an anvil thrown on a hammock, that the Chaos of the demons the gods had defeated before creating the world was necessary for magic, that there had been a civilization before the Hoai the gods had thrown away.  Did that mean if this age didn’t measure up, it was only a matter of time before the gods buried everything he knew and started over? Did that mean the thousands of people who died in dynastic wars to rule this empire and era wasted their blood and courage? 

These wizards had to be wrong, or else the priests would have banned all magic, not just certain kinds like mind control and necromancy. And surely the gods truly wished competition to improve mortals, not just suffer painful deaths.

While he did dishes from last night and the morning, as far as his body told time, Veta and Wang drank green tea while teasing him about missing spots where he didn’t see anything left. 

“Where is Mo from?” 

“It doesn’t matter,” said Veta. “She wears the Gray. They don’t care about politics.”

“She is helping the Shan Dynasty,” said Wang.

“Only until she learns enough to write her book,” said Veta.

“You can’t let her do that!” Not if I can’t.

Veta and Wang glanced at each other a little sadly, and Wang talked about how she’d sworn to only write a history book, not a magical tome. Yet he realized they would never actually let her leave. When they didn’t need her any more, the Ministry would kill her to keep their secrets.  If he warned her, it would be treason against the Emperor.  

He turned back to washing dishes. “You act like all of this is so normal.”

“I’ve had three years to get used to it,” said Wang.

Yet as the days passed, two people never acted normally. Su Hsun always wore gloves over hands a little too large for his arms, and one day began wearing his brittle hair over one eye.   Mo never acted like a woman, always ingratiating herself with the scholars by acting like one of the guys, yet never really acted like a man, always willing to put aside her work to translate for them.

“You are very generous with your time,” he asked, dropping by the library after cleaning the washing room.

She smiled without looking up from her books. “You never know when another person’s work will add perspective to your own. How is your Hoai study coming along?”

He hadn’t been sleeping well, so had trouble concentrating. When he lost focus, his mind raced straight to the mysteries his colleagues kept talking about and their implied dangers.  When he was a kid, he’d had nightmares about the flying squid demon killed by the Monkey Prince in Journey to the South, and in the dream they returned as tentacles swarming out of the conjuring room.  He couldn’t use the squatter without imagining spider eyes salivating over his buttocks. Fortunately the giant spider the Monkey Prince slayed in another part of the story couldn’t fit up the sewer pipe. 

“I’d rather be studying the Old Words.”

“Su is the real expert on that. It’s the language of our plane of existence demons are most likely to know. Apparently, the Ancient Ones lived long enough to develop actual relationships with them.”

He sat up a little straighter. “I’d like to get a start.”

Smirking, she walked to a shelf and pulled out a book so wide, long, and heavy that, had she been a proper woman, he would have helped her. As it was, he let her do it herself, and she plopped it on the table.

“Hey, be careful with that. It’s an old book.”

“But not fragile at all. The leather the Hoai used for book binding is the toughest we’ve ever seen, especially for books with magical lore.”  She opened it, revealing doubled lists of words. “These columns are Old Words. These columns are Hoai words or definitions for the Old Words.”

“But those Old Words aren’t… is that supposed to be some sort of alphabet?” Less imaginative cultures used symbols for sounds instead of the more artistic representations of words.

“The Old Words have sounds that aren’t in our language or Hoai, so the Hoai made up symbols to stick in their place. Echo will help you, when it comes to that.”

The sound symbols looked like the Vong alphabet, leading him to wonder if those isolated mountain warriors had a longer history than anyone suspected. “But you’re saying the Hoai wrote the book on the Old Words, so I have to learn Hoai first.”

“It would save everyone else time.”

“Fine.”

Early one morning, Li Ho and Wang pulled a small wagon down the old road reinforced with brickwork against erosion and avalanche. He kept an eye out for anything hungry, especially Huks, a type of goblin driven out of the Underworld by stronger tribes, small but they only attacked with superior numbers. They passed an abandoned village, slowly being reclaimed by nature, with weeds, flowers, and bushes encroaching upon cleared land and old wooden structures.

“No one wants to live too close to our mine,” said Wang. “They are afraid we’ll release a demon by mistake.”

“Just like the Poisoned Lands.” Where ghostly parasites lived under perpetual cloud cover created by evil wizards. The creatures could only leave by night, so had to return by sunrise.  Everyone lived outside that distance, although some very expensive poisons could be made from plants infected by those mystical energies if harvested before they actually died, a risky way to make money, since harvesters had to return before sunset and then avoid being arrested. 

Just as the sun began disappearing, they reached a village clinging to the mountainside, their homes half carved out of the rock, their rooftops angled to avoid snow accumulation.  Despite the poverty of peasants and emptiness of the road, Li Ho felt a little relief being out on the road with Wang, out of the claustrophobic mines.  The academy, like most of Shanjing, had been so crowded sometimes he pretended constipation just to be alone in the squatter, tolerating the stench.

As the villagers herded their animals and birds into their homes to protect them from the carnvinous Huks, the local wise woman held a small mirror up so she could check their faces, then sprinkled a garlic and pepper powder over them while intoning magical words.  They had more effective powders back at the Academy, but if she had kept up spiritual disciplines over the years, she could make do with cheaper ingredients. Only after she was satisfied did she let them enter.   

They planted their terraced fields only after the spring runoff, and when needed irrigated with bamboo pipes from water captured in ponds built with bricks. The downward breeze played the wooden windchimes hanging from each door.  Women outnumbered men, and many of the men had lost an arm or a leg, as the Ministry of War swept the villages every few years to draft men as laborers or soldiers in campaigns against more powerful enemies. In the absence of able-bodied men, women whipped oxen and harvested grain, with men and children helping as they could.  But despite their grim expressions, the peasants easily accepted Wang’s money for the few extra chickens and eggs they had to spare. 

Wang paid a little extra for them to stay the night. The animals stank, but their body heat warmed the caves. The prettiest girl cooked them a light dinner, looking after them with friendly care. When Wang offered her a little more money, she shook her head, bowed, and left. The villagers locked the doors and windows tight.

“There just aren’t enough lovely ladies in this part of the world,” sighed Wang.

“There’s nothing wrong with holding out for a husband,” said Li Ho. He hoped their father didn’t sell her to the city as anything from a house maid to a whore. She was too old to start her training as an entertainer. Even if he did bring her home, his father would never allow him to marry a woman without bound feet. At best she would be a maid he slept with from time to time, while she spent all day working for whoever he did marry. He wasn’t going to put any woman through what his auntie had suffered at the hands of his jealous mother.      

“Tell me you’re not a virgin.”

“I’ve been a guest at the House of Winter Blossoms from time to time.”

“I went there in my student days, too. Not the most glamours in Shanjing, but they read up to chat with their academic clientele.”

As they lay down to sleep, Li Ho day dreamed about what fascinating pillow talk he could have with Snowy Morning, the courtesan who counted him among her favored. Someday he could tell her stories about the Ancient Ones, once masters of even the lore wise dwarves, but then she might tell her colleagues just for the satisfaction of having the best gossip, and they might tell their customers to impress them, and then the Hands would find out and put the truth down like a rabid dog.

He had his first lesson in pronunciation of Hoai from Echo, like sitting in the middle a breezing circling around him, every word brushing along the side of his head. She spoke her own language with her original voice, soft and inquisitive. When speaking Huaran, for each word she used the voice of a person she heard use that word, resulting in a hodgepodge. The entire lesson, as his ears and mouth worked together, his mind whispered around the idea that Echo might be a unique form of undead, and they only survived by draining life from mortals. Yet her touch against his skin felt a little warmer than the rest of the air, rather than cooler, so he told himself to ignore his doubts.  

At dinner, he asked Mo why she joined the Gray Order instead of the Children of Enlightenment and Compassion.

“Because I think they’re wrong. They believe right makes might, and I don’t think there is any connection between the two concepts. I watch ants go to war, spiders eat their mates, wasps inject their eggs into other insects like little parasites that hatch and the babies eat their way out of them, so I can’t think there is anything inherently benevolent about the world or the gods.”

He remembered the drain of men from the villages, the high taxes upon towns and city, and armies always returning smaller.  “The Children don’t worship gods. Priests complain about them abandoning the gods for a lesser, inner light.”

“The Children don’t think they do. I think in their meditation they stumbled across a basically benevolent but passive spiritual being they mistook for the source of creation, one too vast to understand in a mortal lifetime. So really, they’re just priests of a different god and don’t realize it.”  She held up a finger to forbid further questions. “But you’ve lured me into philosophy, you naughty boy.”

As he cleaned the dishes that evening, Wang came up next to him. “It’s not going to work.”

“What isn’t?”

“With Mo. She’s too smart and disciplined. You’ll never crack her.”

“You never wonder?”

“Sure, I’ve day dreamed a little. She’s the only woman here. But the last guy who tried anything with her nearly got his wrist broken. She could have, but let him off with a warning.”

Li Ho frowned. He thinks I want to seduce her while giving me proof she could be a spy.  Breaking wrists wasn’t a lady-like skill, although women in the Empire Over the Seas carried knives to ensure death before dishonor, and if was an assassin from their islands, she might kill all of them at her whim. “Where is he?”

“He tried to summon a demon before he was ready and it jumped into his mind. He ran out of the conjuring room and died bashing his head against a wall to get it out.”

“I guess if he didn’t have the discipline to resist a woman, he couldn’t resist a demon.”

“More like if he couldn’t resist his wee wee, he couldn’t resist getting in over his head. When you understand the difference, Su Hsun might let you in the conjuring chambers.”

“Why does he get to make that decision?”
            “He was the first wizard to work here and led the team that recovered this place from the pus demon.”

“The what?”

“We don’t know if it was really a demon or not, just that when the miners accidentally broke into the tower, all this gunk spread like the pus from an infected wound, consuming the miners who couldn’t get out fast enough. By the time the alchemists arrived, it was polluting the town. His team eventually dissolved it, using a concoction of mixed fire and spirit elements, and it’s really good at cauterizing wounds with half the pain.”

That was the smell I noticed. “Why not no pain at all?”

“You dose a fighter with too much pure spiritual element, he doesn’t want to fight anymore, and that’s a heresy.”

So is this entire project.

Li Ho scrubbed away at the squatter grate, letting the steady stream of water wash the shit he’d loosened swirl down the drain.  He’d never thought he’d use water so liberally, but they assured him it came from the vast, eternal snowfields atop the White Mountains looming over everything in the southern parts of the empire. 

Constantly having to push aside the image of pus rising out of the grate, he kept reciting vocabulary words in his mind as his hand scrubbed, just as his student days doing chores around the academy.  Was Teng Ping doing alchemical experiments with servants washing his bottles? Had Cheng Po gone to work for the Ministry of War, engraving silver runes into the weapons of champions and marrying the beautiful girl his parents had luckily betrothed him to?

But none of them were here on the slicing edge of mystical studies, he reminded himself, switching from a brush to the scraper.

Eventually he’d be conversing with Echo freely and snatching the deep truths of other worlds out of demons.  Just a matter of time.  

But did Echo have any ill intentions towards them?

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

He woke up gasping from a nightmare. In the dream, instead of empowering runes with spiritual energy, Pao was secretly draining blood from each of them.  Li Ho felt his arms for needle punctures, and felt silly when he didn’t find any.  If Pao had been up to that, surely someone would have noticed before he arrived.

Passing through the half-circle of double doors, he entered the lecture hall. During the Age of Legends, scholars had come here to share their findings about the era before theirs, what people in Li Ho’s time called the Age of Myths.  He was assaulted by so many sounds he covered his ears as the doors closed behind him.  He heard memories of words, music, laughter, and screams of delight, fear, and pain.  What was it like to have memory without visions? Does she miss them?

“Hello, Li Ho,” whispered Echo on the wind of her own body.

“I’ve come to hear the Old Words!”

Which sparked her memory of a poem, unless the language sounded so lovely even as prose. He didn’t understand a word of it, but it tugged at his heart.  He wanted nothing more than to bring this beauty to the world, but that would be treason.

And then it turned ugly and twisted in a mouth maladapted to its smooth music, and he knew it had to be a demon condescending to speak the Old Words to some conjuror. A fear ran deep in him, worse than of snakes or spiders, because he had killed those things.

“Why did you make me listen to that?”

“Why did you enter my mind uninvited? I have no more control over my thoughts here than you have inside your little skull.”

“Can you speak the demon language?”

“Better than when I was mortal, because all I need to do now is remember how the demon said it, without the limitations of mortal tongue or throat, but it would make no more sense to you.”

As if to demonstrate, she shouted in that language meant for different mouths and he fled before his ears bled. He slammed the doors behind him and leaned against them, panting.  Su Hsun struggled by, hiking up the stairs to the kitchen as if relearning how to walk, but spared the breath to have a little laugh at his expense. Each time the old wizard grabbed the copper railing to steady his walking, his gloved fingers latched onto it more cautiously, his thick hand harder to fit between the rail and the wall.

Eating with Veta, he confessed to intruding upon Echo’s inner mind. The young wizard nodded sympathetically. “I think we’ve all given into temptation. When she’s annoyed by it, she speaks demon.”

“Does that mean she can cast demonic spells?”

“In theory, but who would want demonic spirit, or whatever they use as spirit, flowing through them? It’s not like the relationship between gods and priests. The gods made us to be able to give ourselves to them, if we so choose, and use their miracles, if they so choose.” He smirked. “A reward for obedience keeping so many in their thrall.”

He sat up from a dream, his heart punching at his chest.  A Hand of the Gods had descended into their tunnels like a star fallen too close, banishing shadows and burning away evil.  Li Ho and most of the others had averted their eyes while Su fled deeper. Only Mo tried to fight, striking at vulnerable spots, but had trouble seeing in the divine light and the Hand struck her back against the wall.  Glaring, Mo summoned the shadows to her, revealing the mystical powers of assassins from the Empire Over the Seas.  Dark and Light wrestled against each other, and for a moment, all was lost in shadow.

            The Hand burst through the darkness, grabbing him by the throat, lifting him, slamming him against the stone wall, her burning eyes promising divine retribution.

Reading Hoai research journals, he learned more about demons than his entire time at the Academy.  The scholarly work the first writer had focused on concerned a city demons had built on the outer shell of reality. They walked on the night sky as if a glass floor, and above them stretched nothingness. The walls were ice from stolen water, they saw by cool light they captured as they consumed heat sapped from stars.  They dedicated their intellects to creating an entirely new reality of their own, growing like a soap bubble on the world until it could split off and float away. They only communicated with mortals who desired their lore and offered sacrifices in return, the shedding of blood releasing spiritual energy to empower their experiments, taking the sacrifices with a special green flame that even consumed fire, transferring it to their realm.

But he learned of other demons, too.  Those that had served the chaos gods. Those that were animals with hell their natural environment. He recognized the names of devils that were fallen gods, but the Hoai suspected that instead of being evil, they had lost some vague political battle in Heaven.  Veta Khen was the most willing to answer his questions, as long as Li Ho washed the alchemist’s bottles while they talked.

“You should wash your sheets more often,” said Wang. “They stink of sweat.”

“I’m surprised you noticed. The whole place stinks of us.”

“Lousy air circulation, to be sure, but you’ve been sweating more.”

“Reading about demons has been giving me nightmares.” Last night he’d dreams that Su channeled demonic power into Pao’s runes to see if it made them more powerful.

It did, and they all suffered for it. Froze into statues. Melted away. Exploded. Their bodies possessed and their minds locked inside to witness the horrors done by their own hands.

One week, he and Mo drew the lucky straws and walked to a lake for some fishing, a weekly trip the scholars always made in pairs. It was far enough away they brought a tent to stay the night. The entire walk there, he kept reminding himself that even if she was an assassin, there wouldn’t be any point to killing him. That he knew of.

“You’re sure the Huk won’t bother us?” he asked as they passed through the scattered trees.

“They can smell alchemical stink on us so stay away.”

But at the end of the day, after they set up camp, he didn’t want to sleep around her.  The longer he stared at the night sky, the more he thought about those demons existing on the other side of the black, like ticks on the creation of the gods, and for the first time hoped the heavens were a lot further away than the Monkey Prince’s hop in children’s stories, when the prankster tried to steal a star and give it to the Sun Dragon as a jewel to win her favor.

Li Ho lay in his bunk examining his bare arms by the light of a small, white paper lantern. The Academy instructors believed that the first sign of a demonic infection was disloyal thoughts, ideas whispered out of the back of one’s mind that could get someone in deadly trouble. Demonic power only visibly manifested when someone used their power, and the more power one used, the more obvious it became.

It was obvious at the very least Su and possibly Pao had been poking beyond the divine borders of creation, perhaps Echo had summoned a demon, too. Why else would she have gone to the trouble of learning a demonic language? What if Su and his colleagues hadn’t cleansed the place as well as they thought?

 Slipping his feet into sandals, he padded softly down the stairs, holding the lantern slight ahead of himself, to the alchemy lab. Picking out a clean knife, he braced himself, then cut into his forearm just enough to draw some blood and dripped it into a vial. After he ran a few tests, he found his blood clean. 

In the morning, they pushed out with a boat left behind by the miners and sat out in the middle of the wide blue lake with their fishing poles.

“Do you wish we could tell people what we’re learning here?” asked Li Ho.

“The priests aren’t entirely wrong. When sorcerers get a hold of this sort of lore, too often they go power mad. Having that demonic spark in their souls makes them see us as expendable, pitiful animals to be used or thrown aside.  During Hoai times, when there weren’t Hands of the Gods to keep a lid on them, they became cruel wizard kings.”

As opposed to the sometimes cruel kings of the warrior sort.

“How did you end up here?” asked Li Ho.

“I was studying the ages of mountains by their strata.  I often went into mines as a part of my research and found this place in the official records as abandoned. When I arrived, I found these fellows and we made a deal so I could stay until I’m ready to retire and write my book, even if only full members will be allowed to read it.”

They plan to kill you long before that. Are you going to try killing them before you leave?

“Are you okay?” asked Mo.

He leaned away. “What do you mean?”

“I can tell from your eyes you’re worried and not sleeping well.”

Or have you been spying on me? Are you looking for a weakness? “It is overwhelming to realize how small we are. My entire life, I’ve been told the most important thing in the world is for the Shan Dynasty to defeat the Yen and Xu pretenders, but the Hoai scholars who worked here studied a world so vast we’re like bugs fighting over a pond.  They seriously thought they could find demons strong enough to challenge the gods.”

“Perhaps some of those devils are gods in their own realm, but feel evil in ours because we for us ‘different,’ ‘wrong,’ and ‘evil’ are all mixed together.”

If the Empire over the Seas gains this knowledge, they could challenge us.

If the Shan Dynasty uses this power against our enemies, will we have to fight the gods next? Will we desire to fight the gods, with all that demonic energy flowing through us?

Li Ho squatted in the wash room, removed the lid, and lowered a fishing hook with a worm on the end between the bars. Lower.  Lower. Lower.

He didn’t know what to expect, just kept waiting for something to bite, or maybe sink into pus. Either way, he could pull up a sample.

The line shuddered, but without any increase in weight.  Startled, he pulled the line back up as fast as he could, seemingly forever. 

When the hook came up between the bars, something had snatched the worm off, either biting or grabbing both ends and ripping it off. 

At dinner, Veta cheerfully discussed his experiments with Mo with a tone carefully balanced between bragging and questioning, but always trying to spark conversation.  Veta always paid Mo extra attention, but Li Ho wondered if he flirting with a nun or flirting with death.

“If I could only turn light into a liquid form,” said Veta. “I could then figure out how to liquify the spiritual element and make us all immortal.”

“What do you think healing potions are?” asked Mo.

“Those are spiritual elements mixed with water, impure.”

 “Maybe figuring out your mysteries was why the gods got rid of them.”

Mo’s tone teased Veta, but Li Ho couldn’t have agreed more. All of this was treason. Everyone here was a traitor, not to the Emperor, but to the ideals of the Empire. Does the Emperor know? Did the Ministry of Shadows tell him? Which is worse, that the Emperor knows or the Ministry has the power to do all this without him? What the hells should I do?

In another nightmare, the Emperor ordered the use of a weapon he’d devised from Hoai lore.  He would store water in small glass spheres that could be thrown and, with the right divine word, draw out their inner fire and explode. Any soldier with a slingshot could be as deadly as a fire sage who had attuned to flames for a decade.  The Emperor presented him with a medallion, hanging it around his neck, while fiery explosions tore about the world around them.

The valley around Shanjing grew granite teeth and closed upon the city like the jaws of a flytrap.  Buildings smashed into each other, crushing everyone.  Li Ho tried to run, dodging falling bricks and rolling boulders, but didn’t quite make it.

Waking, his heart beat as if he’d sprinted the stairs, his chest squeezing it.

As Veta worked on his experiment, Li Ho cleaned some other equipment. Dust was always drifting down and no one wanted to contaminate the results, but he had trouble concentrating.

There’s something seriously wrong with Su.

Don’t worry. He’s a tough nut.

Why is he hiding his body if he’s not corrupted?

He’s changed by exposure to demon realms. Nothing unexpected.

Have these people lost their minds?

Veta yawned and told Li Ho to wash up the lab equipment he’d used. After the alchemist left, Li Ho cleaned up and sat at the table staring at his right forearm and holding a small knife with the other.

Always the risk. Can never be sure. The infections from different creatures take longer to reveal themselves.

This time he made a long incision, gritting his teeth all the way down, then using the blade, he poked around under his skin until he was satisfied it looked just like the anatomy books, nothing unwarranted or of peculiar colors.

While Li Ho washed dishes, Pao walked up and snapped at him to finish because he liked using a particular knife to cut his vegetables. 

To hell with it.

Li Ho spun around and thrust that very knife into the wizard’s right lung, leading to a quick, gurgling death.  Watching Pao die, Li Ho felt relief at finally returning to the correct path.

He returned to the bunks, found Wang sleeping, and slit his throat.  As he bled out, Li Ho snatched his staff.  Going down the stairs, he heard Veta and Mo flirting in the library. He didn’t want to fight both of them at the same time yet, but Su Hsun was alone somewhere. He went to the alchemy lab and gathered Veta’s more explosive baubles into a satchel.  He could use them to kill Veta and Mo after dealing with the most dangerous one.

Echo’s voice expressed shock in a multitude of tones and voices.  Li Ho ignored her, so she summoned enough air towards herself to begin shouting a warning.  Against the wind, he hustled towards the lecture hall, threw open the doors, tossed in a bauble marked “reverse tornado,” and then plastered himself against the wall outside the room, next to the entrance.  All the air in the room blasted outwards, the dust blinding him.  After the wind finished howling, Echo fell silent.

He hurried down to the conjuring room and threw a bauble marked “acid” at the rune lock on the door.  After it sizzled away, Li Ho kicked the door open and stepped into a rainbow of never-before-seen colors.  Standing in their midst, Su Hsun spun around from his confrontation with four demonic eyes arranged as if on corners of a square standing on a tip, each a different, unfamiliar color. Su’s hair hovered in the magical energies, revealing his right eye turned a hostile green surrounded by sickly yellow.

Focusing through a pounding headache, Li Ho threw a fire bauble, but Su caught and squeezed. The fiery explosion merely burned away his glove, revealing a demonic, violet hand. Li Ho thrust his staff at Su, the battle runes glowing until a lightning bolt lashed out, but either the older man or the demon reaching through him batted it aside.   Distracted, Su lost his struggle of will with the demon.  The old conjuror’s neck and limbs stretched and the ends narrowed into hooks.  Even as Li Ho tossed random explosion baubles, Su turned into the hand of the demon, discolored by the elemental forces, its hooks turning into claws closing around the young scholar, setting off all the baubles at once.

As dust blew out of the mine, Veta and Mo stumbled out, coughing and trying to protect their faces with their wide sleeves.  Distant explosions still echoed out of the tunnel, and they ran until vibrations faded under their feet.

They slumped next to a tree. Veta struck the ground with the side of his fist. “Years of work, lost in that mess.”

“You need a better memory,” teased Mo.

He made a rude suggestion, then shook his head.

“Aren’t you supposed to kill me now?” asked Mo.

“Yes, but a fascinating mind is a terrible thing to waste and you probably know ten different ways to incapacitate me.”

“The best ways to dislocate joints is a popular class at the monastery. Don’t you miss your friends? You worked with them for years.”

“None of us cared about each other as much as we did the work. If we were prone to emotional attachments, we wouldn’t have accepted the assignment. You worked here, too.”

“But I knew you planned on killing me when you didn’t need me anymore. Echo promised to warn me.”

Veta grunted and stood. “No point in hanging around. I’ve got to make some money and build a proper lab.”

“Aren’t you going to report back to the Ministry?”

“We sent them monthly progress reports. When they don’t get the next one, they will sent someone to check. I don’t plan on being around here to take the blame.”

“Don’t alchemists need a lab to make money?”

“I passed the medical exam with a first-place score, so I’ll work something out. Want to come along and help everyone live forever?”

She smiled with friendly skepticism. “I’m going to catch some fish to eat on the way home. I have a lot to write, even if the history will end up in our closed stacks, no novices or outsiders allowed without permission.”

Mo stood, they bowed, and wished each other good luck.