The Sack of the Summer Palace

Lin Ben's eyes opened reluctantly. There was pain on the right side of his head, and when he put his fingers to it, there was blood. He heaved himself up from the floor; his back hurt where it had been half-slumped against the wall. Gregarious Lin and the Iron Rhetorician were where they had been, still insensate. Aditi and the King were gone. 

He stumbled from the hall, unsure where he ought to go. He remembered dimly that Colonel Gawang had been knocked cold by the Cat Who Swats at Thunderheads, then grimaced at the prospect of his own duel to come. But greater needs pressed. The King's escape must be made known. 

He was half-deaf in his bloodied ear, and it was not until he descended to the second floor of the keep that he realized the low roar in his head was not the product of his injury, but actually the roar of voices from the courtyard. He began to jog, stumbled, then slowed down again, walking as fast as he could without becoming dizzy. It took him longer than it ought to push open the double doors.

When he did, for a moment it was as though the palace had been deserted; there was no one in the courtyard before the palace. Bonfires, cauldrons, and tents remained, and an image leapt to mind that would haunt him for the rest of his days, for all that he never saw it in the world: A sea of tents full of bloody bones, still swaddled in bedrolls and blankets, and scored with fang-marks. Then the screams and shouts pushed the image away, and he turned to the left, toward the succulent garden, and saw men hacking at each other with hatchets, shovels, saws, swords, and any other weapon or edged implement that might be to hand.

Lin Ben shambled toward the melee almost uncomprehending of its meaning; when a hatchet came whistling down at him, he barely dodged it before reflex took over and he awkwardly disarmed the logger who had made the swing. The logger came for him with a scream and a raised fist, and Lin Ben almost absently poked him in the stomach with the haft of the hatchet, which took his breath. He aimed a half-hearted kick at the fallen logger and missed, then shambled on, toward the nearest Green Morning brother.

"Lin Lagba," he said when he found him. "The King is gone."

"Ah," said Lin Lagba. "Sit with me."

Lin Ben took a seat behind Lin Lagba, who was slumped on a reeking mattress behind one of the keep’s counterforts. "What happened?" Lin Ben asked.

"Some lumberjack put a hatchet in my belly, and I am dying."

"I know," said Lin Ben, faintly annoyed. "But why?"

"The Cat killed that scullion of yours. Chesa."

At once Lin Ben felt as though he imagined his skeleton would, if it found itself suddenly stripped of skin and meat to collapse into a heap in the unmerciful air. "Why?"

"She stood in for you." Lin Lagba coughed. "Lin Chatang of the North, jiao Catskinner. She spoke in that funny way they do up here, and low in her throat, like a man, or a boy anyway. Perhaps we were not all taken in. But enough were—until the doctor took her jacket off to see what could be done." He smiled weakly. "We rallied around you, Ben, although you were not there. No timber-hauler kills a brother's woman and walks away."

"The Cat is dead, then?"

Lin Lagba coughed again. "I do not know. Dalha said he was a wer-tiger. Does that mean he is dead? Or immortal, or both?"

The question made Lin Ben's eyes widen; he rested his forehead on one hand. "He is no wer-tiger. Only the catspaw of a laundress."

"That clarifies the matter. Did you say the King is gone?"

"Gone and gone. He clouted me with the Eight Weapon Hand before he left, but not before I saw Aditi unlock the royal suite. And the entire throng off in the succulent garden, waiting to see whether the wer-tiger would defeat its eighth man, and only one with brains or belly to make sure it did not. Chesa died for you, Lagba, and for all our brothers, and everyone else in the circle of the firelight. And this was your thanks for it."

But the light had left Lin Lagba's eyes.

Lin Ben closed those eyes before he stood. He knew he ought to spread the news of the King's escape; he knew he ought to join battle for his brothers; he knew he ought at least to bring his friend to a shrine that could ensure his ghost would not linger. But there was no strength in his arms or in his heart, and only barely enough in his legs to carry him to the Road of Birds and a few steps to the south before he slept.

That would change, though, in time.