The Book of Swords Read online

  She backed away from the table. She spared a sideways glance for Darda and spoke in a low voice. “Mother, they were cheating us. Jelin said there wasn’t enough to go around but Darda hid food from us!”

  Darda’s voice shook with fear and defiance. “It was our food before all this happened! We didn’t owe it to you! It was food for my boy; he needs it to grow! Jelin and I weren’t eating it! It was food for Cordel!”

  Her father appeared to hear none of this. He had lifted the loaf to his mouth and was worrying a tremendous bite from it. Around that mouthful he yelled, “Drink! Something to drink. I am thirsty!”

  Water was what there was, and Taura filled a mug with it and took it to him. Her mother had risen, staggered, then folded up to huddle by Gef. Her idiot brother was rocking back and forth. Instead of seeing to her own wound, her mother was trying to calm him. Taura took the cloth that had wrapped the loaf and went to her. “Let me see your wound,” she said as she crouched down beside her.

  Her mother’s eyes flashed dark fire. “Get away from me!” she cried, and pushed Taura so she sprawled on the floor. But she did snatch up the cloth and hold it to her ribs. It reddened with blood, but only slightly. Taura guessed that the blade had sliced her but not deeply. She was still appalled.

  “I’m sorry!” she said stiffly. “I didn’t mean to hurt you! I didn’t know what to do!”

  “You did know. You just didn’t want to do it. As is ever your way!”

  “Family first!” she cried out. “You and Papa always say that. Family first!”

  “Does he look like he is thinking of his family?” her mother demanded. Taura looked over at her father. The cheese was almost gone. He had pushed a piece of bread into the pot of honey and was wiping it clean of sweetness. As she watched, he shoved it into his mouth. The discarded honeypot rolled to the edge of the table and fell to the floor with a crash.

  Her mother levered herself to her feet, leaning on Gef’s shoulder. “Get up, boy,” she said quietly, tugging on him, and he rose. She took his hand and led him back to where Darda and Jelin’s son huddled. “Stay there,” she warned him, and he sank down on his haunches beside them. Clutching her side, she stood between them and her husband. Taura got slowly to her feet. She backed to the wall and looked from her father to her mother.

  The fire crackled and Papa ate noisily, tearing at the bread with bared teeth. Rain and wind came in the open door. In the distance, people still shouted. Darda clutched her baby and sobbed into him and Gef made his babyish crooning in sympathy. Jelin was silent. Dead. Taura crept closer to the table. “Papa?” she said.

  His eyes turned toward her then back to the bread. He tore off another mouthful.

  “Family first, Papa? Isn’t that right? Shouldn’t we stay together, to fix our house and raise our boat?”

  His gaze roved around the room and her hopes rose that he would speak. “More food.” That was his response. His eyes had a glitter in them she had never seen. As if they were shallow now, like puddles in the sun. Nothing behind them.

  “There isn’t any,” she lied.

  He narrowed his eyes at her and showed his teeth. Her breath caught in her throat. Papa crammed the last of the bread into his mouth. He stuffed the cheese in after it. He rocked from side to side in the chair as he chewed it then stood. She backed away from him. He picked up the mug, drank the last of the water and dropped it. “Papa?” Taura begged him.

  He looked past her. He walked to the couple’s bed. He took Jelin’s extra shirt from its peg on the wall. He put it on. It was too small for him. Jelin’s wool cap fit him well. He peered around the cottage. Jelin’s winter cloak was on a hook beside the door. He took that, too. He swung it around his shoulders. Then he rounded to look at her accusingly.

  “Please, Papa?” Could not he be who he had been, just for a time? Even if he cared nothing for them as the bastard had said, could not he be the man who always knew what they must do next to survive?

  “More food?” He scratched his face, his blunt nails making a sound in his short beard. His gaze was flat.

  That was all he said. He was thinking only of what he needed now. Nothing for what tomorrow might bring. Nothing for where he had been, what had happened to him, what had befallen the village. “You ate it all,” Taura lied quietly. She scarcely knew why she did so. Papa gave a grunt. He nudged at Jelin’s body and when he didn’t move, he stepped over it to stand in the open door. His head turned slowly from side to side. He took one step out the door and stopped.

  His sword was still on the floor. Not far from it, the sheath lay as well. She heard her mother’s breathed prayer. “Sweet Eda, make him go away.”

  He walked out into the night.

  The other villagers would kill him. They would kill him and they would hate Taura forever because she hadn’t killed him. Because she’d let him kill Jelin. Darda would not be silent about that. She would tell everyone.

  Taura looked over at her mother. She’d taken a heavy iron pan from the cooking shelf. She held it by the handle as if it were a weapon. Her eyes were flat as she stared at Taura. Yes. Even her mother would hate her.

  Taura stooped to pick up the sword. It was still too heavy for her. The point of it dragged on the floor as she reached for the sheath. “Follow a Strong Man” the carved lettering told her.

  She shook her head. She knew what she should do. She should close the door behind Papa and bar it. She should say she was sorry a hundred, a thousand times. She should bind Mother’s wound and help Darda compose her husband’s body. She should take Papa’s sword and stand in the door and guard them all. She was the last person they had who might stand between them and the Forged ones roaming the streets.

  She knew what she should do.

  But her mother was right about her.

  Taura looked back at them all, then took Darda’s cloak from the hook. She put it on and pulled the thick wool hood up over her damp hair. She heaved the sword up so it rested on her shoulder like a shovel. She stooped and took up the fine sheath in her free hand.

  “What are you doing?” her mother demanded in outrage.

  Taura held out the sheath toward her. “Following a strong man,” she said.

  She stepped out into the wind and rain. She kicked the door shut behind her. A moment longer she stood in the scant shelter of the eaves. She heard the bar slammed down into the supports on the door. Almost immediately, Darda began shrieking, anger and grief in furious words.

  Taura stepped out into the night. Her father had not gone far. His hunched shoulders and stalking stride reminded her of a prowling bear as he moved through the rain toward his prey. A decision came to her. She pushed the empty sheath through her belt and gripped the sword’s hilt in both hands. She considered it. If she killed him, would her mother forgive her? Would Darda?

  Not likely.

  She ran after him, the bared sword heavy and jouncing with every step she took. “Papa! Wait! You’ll need your sword!” she called after him. He glanced back at her but said nothing as he halted. But he waited for her. When she caught up with him, he walked on.

  She followed him into the darkness.

  ⬩  ⬩  ⬩

  Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among many other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus awards. In 2015, he published his first novel, The Grace of Kings. His most recent books are The Wall of Storms, a sequel to The Grace of Kings, a collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, and, as editor and translator, an anthology of Chinese science-fiction stories, Invisible Planets. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  Here a young girl pressed into service as an assassin faces one final test of her skills�
��if she lives through it.

  ⬩  ⬩  ⬩

  Beginning in the eighth century, the Imperial court of Tang Dynasty China increasingly relied on military governors—the jiedushi—whose responsibilities began with border defense but gradually encompassed taxation, civil administration, and other aspects of political power. They were, in fact, independent feudal warlords whose accountability to Imperial authority was nominal.

  Rivalry among the governors was often violent and bloody.

  —

  On the morning after my tenth birthday, spring sunlight dapples the stone slabs of the road in front of our house through the blooming branches of the pagoda tree. I climb out onto the thick bough pointing west like an immortal’s arm and reach for a strand of yellow flowers, anticipating the sweet taste tinged with a touch of bitterness.

  “Alms, young mistress?”

  I look down and see a bhikkhuni. I can’t tell how old she is—her face is unlined but there is a fortitude in her dark eyes that reminds me of my grandmother. The light fuzz over her shaved head glows in the warm sun like a halo, and her grey kasaya is clean but tattered at the hem. She holds up a wooden bowl in her left hand, gazing up at me expectantly.

  “Would you like some pagoda-tree flowers?” I ask.

  She smiles. “I haven’t had any since I was a young girl. It would be a delight.”

  “If you stand below me, I’ll drop some into your bowl,” I say, reaching for the silk pouch on my back.

  She shakes her head. “I can’t eat flowers that have been touched by another hand—too infected with the mundane concerns of this dusty world.”

  “Then climb up yourself,” I say. Immediately I feel ashamed at my annoyance.

  “If I get them myself, they wouldn’t be alms, now would they?” There’s a hint of laughter in her voice.

  “All right,” I say. Father has always taught me to be polite to the monks and nuns. We may not follow the Buddhist teachings, but it doesn’t make sense to antagonize the spirits, whether they are Daoist, Buddhist, or wild spirits who rely on no learned masters at all. “Tell me which flowers you want; I’ll try to get them for you without touching them.”

  She points to some flowers at the end of a slim branch below my bough. They are paler in color than the flowers from the rest of the tree, which means they are sweeter. But the branch they dangle from is much too thin for me to climb.

  I hook my knees around the thick bough I’m on and lean back until I’m dangling upside down like a bat. It’s fun to see the world this way, and I don’t care that the hem of my dress is flapping around my face. Father always yells at me when he sees me like this, but he never stays angry at me for too long, on account of my losing my mother when I was just a baby.

  Wrapping my hands in the loose folds of my sleeves, I try to grab for the flowers. But I’m still too far from the branch she wants, those white flowers tantalizingly just out of reach.

  “If it’s too much trouble,” the nun calls out, “don’t worry about it. I don’t want you to tear your dress.”

  I bite my bottom lip, determined to ignore her. By tightening and flexing the muscles in my belly and thighs, I begin to swing back and forth. When I’ve reached the apex of an upswing I judge to be high enough, I let go with my knees.

  As I plunge through the leafy canopy, the flowers she wants brush by my face and I snap my teeth around a strand. My fingers grab the lower branch, which sinks under my weight and slows my momentum as my body swings back upright. For a moment, it seems as if the branch would hold, but then I hear a crisp snap and feel suddenly weightless.

  I tuck my knees under me and manage to land in the shade of the pagoda tree, unharmed. Immediately, I roll out of the way, and the flower-laden branch crashes to the spot on the ground I just vacated a moment later.

  I walk nonchalantly up to the nun and open my jaw to drop the strand of flowers into her alms bowl. “No dust. And you only said no hands.”

  —

  In the shade of the pagoda tree, we sit with our legs crossed in the lotus position like the Buddhas in the temple. She picks the flowers off the stem: one for her, one for me. The sweetness is lighter and less cloying than the sugar-dough figurines Father sometimes buys me.

  “You have a talent,” she says. “You’d make a good thief.”

  I look at her, indignant. “I’m a general’s daughter.”

  “Are you?” she says. “Then you’re already a thief.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have walked many miles,” she says. I look at her bare feet: the bottoms are calloused and leathery. “I see peasants starving in fields while the great lords plot and scheme for bigger armies. I see ministers and generals drink wine from ivory cups and conduct calligraphy with their piss on silk scrolls while orphans and widows must make one cup of rice last five days.”

  “Just because we are not poor doesn’t make us thieves. My father serves his lord, the Jiedushi of Weibo, with honor and carries out his duties faithfully.”

  “We’re all thieves in this world of suffering,” the nun says. “Honor and faith are not virtues, only excuses for stealing more.”

  “Then you’re a thief as well,” I say, anger making my face glow with heat. “You accept alms and do no work to earn them.”

  She nods. “I am indeed. The Buddha teaches us that the world is an illusion, and suffering is inevitable as long as we do not see through it. If we’re all fated to be thieves, it’s better to be a thief who adheres to a code that transcends the mundane.”

  “What is your code then?”

  “To disdain the moral pronouncements of hypocrites; to be true to my word; to always do what I promise, no more and no less. To hone my talent and wield it like a beacon in a darkening world.”

  I laugh. “What is your talent, Mistress Thief?”

  “I steal lives.”

  —

  The inside of the cabinet is dark and warm, the air redolent of camphor. By the faint light coming through the slit between the doors, I arrange the blankets around me to make a cozy nest.

  The footsteps of patrolling soldiers echo through the hallway outside my bedroom. Each time one of them turns a corner, the clanging of armor and sword marks the passage of another fraction of an hour, bringing me closer to morning.

  The conversation between the bhikkhuni and my father replays through my mind.

  “Give her to me. I will have her as my student.”

  “Much as I’m flattered by the Buddha’s kind attention, I must decline. My daughter’s place is at home, by my side.”

  “You can give her to me willingly, or I can take her away without your blessing.”

  “Are you threatening me with a kidnapping? Know that I’ve made my living on the tip of a sword, and my house is guarded by fifty armed men who will give their lives for their young mistress.”

  “I never threaten; I simply inform. Even if you keep her in an iron chest ringed about with bronze chains at the bottom of the ocean, I will take her away as easily as I cut your beard with this dagger.”

  There was a cold, bright, metallic flash. Father drew his sword, the grinding noise of blade against sheath wringing my heart so that it leaped wildly.

  But the bhikkuni was already gone, leaving behind a few loose strands of grey hair floating gently to the floor in the slanted rays of the sunlight. My father, stunned, held his hand against the side of his face where the dagger had brushed against his skin.

  The hairs landed; my father removed his hand. There was a patch of denuded skin on his cheek, as pale as the stone slabs of the road in the morning sun. No blood.

  “Do not be afraid, Daughter. I will triple the guards tonight. The spirit of your dear departed mother will guard you.”

  But I’m afraid. I am afraid. I think about the glow of sunlight around the nun’s head. I like my long, thick hair, which the maids tell me resembles my mother’s, and she had combed her hair a hundred times each night before she we
nt to sleep. I don’t want to have my head shaved.

  I think about the glint of metal in the nun’s hand, quicker than the eye can follow.

  I think about the strands of hair from my father’s beard drifting to the floor.

  The light from the oil lamp outside the closet door flickers. I scramble to the corner of the closet and squeeze my eyes tightly shut.

  There is no noise. Just a draft that caresses my face. Softly, like the flapping wings of a moth.

  I open my eyes. For a moment, I don’t understand what I’m seeing.

  Suspended about three feet from my face is an oblong object, about the size of my forearm and shaped like the cocoon of a silkworm. Glowing like a sliver of the moon, it gives off a light that is without warmth, shadowless. Fascinated, I crawl closer.

  No, an “object” isn’t quite right. The cold light spills out of it like melting ice, along with the draft that whips my hair about my face. It is more like the absence of substance, a rip in the murky interior of the cabinet, a negative object that consumes darkness and turns it into light.

  My throat feels parched and I swallow, hard. Fingers trembling, I reach out to touch the glow. A half second of hesitation, then I make contact.

  Or no contact. There is no skin-searing heat nor bone-freezing chill. My impression of the object as a negative is confirmed as my fingers touch nothing. And neither do they emerge from the other side—they’ve simply vanished into the glow, as though I’m plunging my hand into a hole in space.

  I jerk my hand back out and examine my fingers, wiggling them. No damage as far as I can see.

  A hand reaches out from the rip, grabs my arm, and pulls me toward the light. Before I can scream, blazing light blinds me, and I’m overwhelmed by the sensation of falling, falling from the tip of a heaven-reaching pagoda tree toward an earth that never comes.

  —

  The mountain floats among the clouds like an island.

  I’ve tried to find my way down, but always, I get lost among the foggy woods. Just go down, down, I tell myself. But the fog thickens until it takes on substance, and no matter how hard I push, the wall of clouds refuses to yield. Then I have no choice but to sit down, shivering, wringing the condensation out of my hair. Some of the wetness is from tears, but I won’t admit that.