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almondinflowerCharacters: (this chapter)Waya, Touya, Suyeong, Isumi
Wordcount: 4000
Summary: In a world where divination is used to predict the future and govern nations, State Diviner Touya Akira and private investigator Waya Yoshitaka embark on a search for the heretic Sai, the ghostly diviner who may be the most powerful of them all.
This chapter: In which the mystery is revealed, and it becomes obvious that the author was totally lying about this being a detective story. i.e. it's all epic fantasy.
Earlier chapters.
After three days of shadowing An Taeseon, I was seriously starting to question the quality of my hunches. Or possibly my ability to tail someone.
“Any contacts that we can identify?” I demanded of Touya. It was my umpteenth time asking; and our seventh time or so skulking in a teahouse pretending to drink brewed chrysanthemums. The last six occasions, An had been having lunch or tea or supper or breakfast with one dignitary or another. Today, he was shopping.
I examined the horizontal signboard that hung above the store An had just disappeared into. As far as I could tell from the engraved characters, it was a vendor of foodstuffs, specialising in Dukian delicacies.
“Isn't this the kind of thing one sends the servants out to do?” I grumbled to the air.
“Never having had servants, you wouldn't know, would you?” replied Touya. “And not that I think you need reminding, but Isumi and I have finished the background checks on all of Ambassador An's associates as well as everyone he's met since we started this investigation. None of them are known to have adverse relationships with Lu Li. In fact, most of them are former Imperial Diviners and are eager to defend him.”
Touya's patience was wearing thin at last. I was surprised that he'd entertained my suspicions for this long. “Okay, maybe it's time to give up.”
He didn't answer. It was a warm, wet day, and I felt too lazy to take any immediate action. We kept our eyes on the shopfront, waiting for Taeseon to emerge. Touya gathered his teacup in his fingers and brought it to his lips. He blew gently on the fragrant liquid; it was steaming delicately. “I have a private meeting with the Emperor tomorrow. He asked me to invite you as well.”
“Oh. Right.” My curiosity brimmed over on several counts – what could Zhao Shi want with me? How had he even heard of me? They weren't exactly subtle questions, though; not the sort of topic one raised with Touya Akira when he was being tetchy. I resumed staring out the window. Touya brought out his Weiqi board and began reenacting divination patterns for it.
“No coins,” I warned him.
“Am I the one who's been exhibiting subhuman levels of logic? I propose that you refrain from giving me advice.” He set a white stone down with a hard rap.
The sky was dull; the street had begun to darken with small wet circles, and the pedestrians were scurrying for shelter. “You could try altering the weather. Lovely chaos-order experiment right there. Practical, too. I didn't bring a raincoat, did you?”
“He's coming out,” Touya said, and indeed An Taeseon was leaving the store. He was well-prepared; his roomy black umbrella bloomed out before he took a single step onto the sidewalk.
“Let's get moving.” I tasted my tea and gave it up as a lost cause. I had left it too long, and it was bitter.
We paid and scrambled downstairs. The wind blew rain in our faces as we stepped out; water entered my eyes. I scrunched them up and tried to blink the moisture away.
When I could see again, I did a double take. A familiar figure was standing in the entranceway of the comestible shop.
Hong Suyeong.
#
I ran forward and caught him by the hand.
His first, instinctive action was to shake me off. He'd always been combative that way.
“Suyeong!”
He recognized me and stilled. “Waya? What are you doing here--” He pulled me into the store. Touya followed. Inside, a woody, herbal scent pervaded the area. The wind blew in irregularly, spattering the fading, inch-sized tiles with rain.
Unsurprisingly, Suyeong was taller now. I hazarded that he was close to six feet these days. The trademark cap had disappeared; he was dressed to the nines. Cross-collar shirt, stitched in sashiko; a tasselled grey sash; silk breeches, disappearing into ash-coloured boots. He retained the conscientious and perpetually harassed air that I'd always associated with him. He was hauling a large suitcase.
It took him some time to adjust to the sudden turn of events. He greeted me, then Touya. It transpired that he knew the shopkeeper, and we were ushered into a back room where we could catch up quietly.
“Were you meeting An Taeseon?” I asked, launching a preemptive strike.
It landed. “You know Taeseon?”
“Oh, we've chatted once or twice. Happened to see him come out of the shop, just before I spotted you. Are you friends?”
“He was in charge of the novitiates when I was still in training.” Suyeong's hands were stained with ink. “I heard that you refused to join the State Diviners.”
“Yeah, well. Ideological differences with the state. I was kind of pissed off that they sent Shindou away.”
“So was I.” Touya had this way of dropping his words, simultaneously casual and too formal, exact without being stilted, that made you feel like his anything he said was desperately important. It was that manner of his, as much as the content of his words, that drew people's attention.
“It was your loss,” Suyeong said shortly. I recalled how he'd been crazy about Shindou's divination skills – all of us had been, in those final months. The slow unease, the stupefaction, and then the insecurity, when we realised he was beginning to eclipse us.
“Have you met him since he left Ki?”
“No.” Spoken rapidly, eye contact delayed and brief. My heart sank.
“Bad move,” I remarked. “You should have said 'Yes, of course, but he left months ago.'”
“I'm not lying,” Suyeong said. He was, I noted, awfully poor at dissimulation. His eyes were even darting back and forth.
“Where is he?”
“I don't know!” Suyeong turned his head, hunting for ports of escape. I moved, deliberately and slowly, to block the exit. Touya placed himself in front of Suyeong. Suyeong was about an inch taller, but seemed the smaller and weaker of the two. When he saw Touya a distinct guilty flush came into his cheeks.
“When Zama-Ouza's body was found, there was a Ladder of Changes on his board, connected to a Star of Chaos. At Diviner Wang's death there was a Shattered Wall enclosing a Flower of Chains. I've never known anyone who loves those two patterns as much as Shindou did." Touya locked gazes with Suyeong. “Two people have died. Do you intend to let this continue?”
Suyeong turned away.
“Can we talk in private?” he asked.
#
We brought him to the consulate. Isumi was at home, and greeted Suyeong with effusive enthusiasm (almost deceptive, I thought -- it took Isumi only a glance to see that something was wrong.) I watched Suyeong to make sure he didn't indulge in any more mendacity, or attempt to make excuses; but he emanated a strange, overt sense of relief.
We gathered in a sitting room and he told us his story.
#
Shindou came to Duk this spring, about three months ago. We'd heard a lot about him and Sai, as you can imagine – most of it was baseless gossip, but a few people in the royal court were aware of the true story. The king even had to pass a law banning forbidden divination, because of the mad tales that people were concocting about Sai. Two years ago there were many diviners trying to use Weiqi to control chaos and order, but nobody succeeded, so the scandal gradually died down.
Anyway, I'd kept up with the news about Shindou as best as I could. Around the time he appeared in my country, a rumour was floating around that Sai had succeeded in re-embodying himself. But when Shindou knocked on my door that evening, he was alone.
He didn't look well either. He was thin, almost emaciated, and his hair was dull. He asked me if he could stay for a few days. I was more than happy to host him. But it soon became clear that Shindou wasn't his old self – he didn't speak unless he was spoken to, he didn't come out of his room even for meals, except when I asked him to. After about a week of this, I was going out of my mind.
Then Ko Yeongha found out. You may have heard of Yeongha - he's one of the highest-ranked Royal Diviners, and a close friend of mine. I'd often talked to him about Shindou, and how impressed I was with Shindou's divination abilities when I visited Ki.
He insisted on meeting Shindou. I didn't want to let him, at first – Yeongha likes to be provocative, and Shindou didn't seem to be in any shape for it. But Yeongha can be terribly persistent. He secretly went to my house when I was at work. When I got home, he and Shindou were screaming at each other. I was furious at Yeongha after that. The next day, however, Shindou said he wanted to see Yeongha again.
I don't know how he managed it, but Yeongha persuaded Shindou to tell him the entire tale of how he ended up in Duk. The rumours were true: Sai had found a way to recreate his human body using divination, with Shindou's help. But that wasn't the end of it. Soon after, Touya Meijin came hunting for them.
#
Suyeong paused. “We found out that Touya Meijin had sealed Sai away at the expense of his own life.”
Heart hammering, I looked at Touya, who remained expressionless.
He said: “Continue. You haven't told us how Shindou killed those two men.”
Suyeong reached into a pocket in his shirt and pulled out a worn piece of paper, folded many times. “You've heard how, in ancient times, the diviners used geomancy to create their Weiqi boards?”
He went to a grand piano that stood next to our chairs, and spread the sheet out on its closed lid, revealing a map of the continent. Black crosses and circles lay scattered on the landmass, surrounded by copious annotations.
Suyeong pointed to the city of Ki, underlined by the characters that said Shrine of Profound Darkness, and to Wuzi. “I have been hunting the nine flower-points – you would call them the star-points. To be precise, I'm looking for the origin of heaven, the tengen.”
“That's where Shindou is?” I asked. Suyeong nodded. A rapid stream of puzzles clicked and fired through my mind. “He's trying to resurrect Sai, isn't he? That's the first thing he would do.” The boy who had left Ki, given up his entire family and homeland, rather than allowing the the authorities to exorcise the ghost embedded in his soul-- I stood and began to pace. “And the deaths were – the result of the chaos-order backlash? An attempt to manipulate the border between the living and the dead?”
“Yes,” said Suyeong.
Touya didn't seem surprised. I wondered whether he'd been expecting something of the sort, or whether the news of his father's death had dulled out most other reactions. Probably a bit of both.
Isumi studied the ink-smudged map. “Using the land itself as a goban, controlled by wielding a board at the site of origin – it's possible. But you would have to find three hundred and sixty one points that were suitable. And the hoshi in particular would require very specific properties.
“Properties that places like the Shrine of Profound Darkness would possess.” My voice sounded grim to myself.
A luminous, eldritch moon, shining through the oculus in the Council House, casting swarthy foreshortened shadows on the glassy marble. The door to the Shrine ajar. Noise like storm rain on ceramic tiles, heard from indoors -- a cacophony of stones, dancing on the Shrine's nine boards like waves on a windwracked sea. And Shindou kneeling at the heart of it all, hand outstretched in midair and poised to fall on the grid, superimposed with a translucent fluttering outline of fingers, a wide sleeve, wild alluring hair, burning eyes, occupying the same space as Shindou and yet beyond –
That had been my last night as a novitiate.
“Shindou left in the middle of the night,” Suyeong continued. “By the time I realised he was gone, the trail was cold. Even after that, it took me some time to guess his plans.”
“And how does An Taeseon fit into all this?” asked Isumi sharply. “Why is he casting suspicion on Lu Li?”
Suyeong seemed more than a little afraid of Isumi. Oddly, I didn't blame him. “Yeongha is with Shindou. We didn't want anyone else to find out.”
The rain had stopped. The awning windows, still shut, were decorated with stationary and slowly trickling drops. Through the glass I saw a hint of rainbow in the clouds.
Isumi spoke, more to himself than to any of us: “Ko Yeongha, the most celebrated young diviner in Duk. In other words, he's the Touya Akira of your nation. Of course Taeseon would want to protect him. And you were prepared for the execution of an innocent man in order to save your country's reputation?”
“I didn't mean--”
“Of course you didn't mean to. That's the excuse of all the people who'd like to believe they are good.” By now Isumi had all of us mesmerised, even Touya. He had the kind of voice that seemed soft-spoken, but in fact held both volume and fluency. “The honourable thing would be to meet with the Emperor and tell him everything that you know.”
“Isumi.” I didn't think it wise to push Suyeong too quickly, too soon.
“It's all right,” Suyeong said quietly. “I will go. But the two of you, Waya, Touya, you must promise me that you will find Shindou. You know him better than I do, don't you?”
Touya and I looked at each other. I was surprised by the fierce agreement I saw in his eyes, and the corresponding emotion that surged inside me.
“We will,” said Touya.
#
Touya and I obtained maps from a nearby street vendor and retired to the library to copy Suyeong's notes. He'd identified nearly eighty locations as potential hoshi points, some of them thousands of miles away.
“A death in Ki, a death in Wuzi, nine days apart. An earthquake at the Hill of Flowers in Duk, nine days before that.” Touya used a midnight blue fountain pen with a golden nib. He sat at the bay window, silhouetted against an approaching sunset. “The original attempt to re-embody Sai required nine separate divinations.”
“Yes, that's how I caught him. He sneaked out once too often.” I was lying belly-down on a rug, pored over my map. “Could we cast a divination on the maps themselves, to narrow down the likely location of the tengen?” We had agreed fairly quickly with Suyeong's hypothesis that the geomantic origin of heaven was the only place that Shindou - and Yeongha - could be.
“I don't know. More and more of my divinations are failing at the moment, perhaps because of how close we are to a hoshi point.”
“Whatever Shindou is doing over there, it's disturbing the chaos-order alignment of the continent.” I gave voice to a thought that was bothering me. “Do you think he knows about the deaths he's caused? Do you think he caused them intentionally?” The notion of using divination principles to bring back a dead person was so foreign that I only had a very hazy notion of how it could be done. But it was theoretically possible that one needed to sacrifice lives in order to perform a resurrection.
“I don't know.”
“Your father--”
“Won't be coming back. Concentrate on what we can do.”
“What if Suyeong was lying about part of his story?”
“You'd have noticed, wouldn't you?”
He raised his head just slightly, and I saw how proud and stiff his posture was, and how brittle his hands, pallid despite the outrageous gold tint of the sun sinking at his back. If I cast a rock at him he would break; if I got up and put my arms around him, he might collapse--
And if I brought him a goban, he would pull himself together. So that was what I did.
We sat at the window, the kaya grid lying between us, our attention all for it rather than each other. I placed the first stone.
White to tengen.
In the language of traditional divination, this placement signifies the heart of chaos in the circumstance under scrutiny. It is usually followed by a diamond of black stones surrounding it, chaos under the control of order. In Sai's divination, the new divination, the heretical divination – where the aim was not to mirror the existing forces of chaos and order but rather to direct and marshal them – the meaning was different: I assert the dominance of chaos in the universe.
Ironic that Shindou, who had always astounded us with his clarity of vision, his knack for seeing to the heart of things, would always begin the act of divination with a simple black-or-white judgment.
“What are we divining?” asked Touya. His eyes were dusky with the shadow of sleep deprivation.
I shrugged. “You tell me.”
He began laying out a jagged wall on his end of the board while I added eyes to the lower left corner. We didn't speak of what we were doing, although a quick survey of the situation showed that he was doing something in Sai's style – and I, half-consciously, was reconstructing patterns I had seen Shindou use in the past. Within minutes the board was heavy with more than a hundred stones.
“I can't read this at all,” I confessed, my eyes tracing the heavy mess of black and white. A set of cross-patterns in the lower right quadrant caught my eye and I frowned. There was something weird and familiar about, it, something – “Hold on.” I started scrambling the stones around, inverting and rotating shapes. I removed the stone at tengen. “That's odd,” I muttered, continuing to make minor changes here and there. “This looks like one of the boards Kuwabara made me do.”
“Kuwabara-Honinbou?” Against the darkening vermilion of the sunset Touya appeared subdued, still retaining that strange fragility. I felt as if I was fanning a dying ember; one wrong movement and I would extinguish the glow.
“He sends me these really odd tasks every now and then. This one, for instance - 'Predict the weather at midnight in three days. Use the following crane's nest formation in both corners.' So I did, and that was how the pattern came out. 'Clear skies, a gibbous moon, chiaroscuro effects for the nocturnal pedestrian.'” Studying it now, it was striking how much it resembled Shindou and Sai's style of divination.
Touya brought out another three stones: black at tengen, white at cross stars. “A chiaroscuro hall, a geometry open to the sky, the night that does not wax nor wane. A city, far to the east.”
I examined the board again and my breath caught. We were looking at at a geomantic and geographical description of the Shrine of Profound Darkness.
“Show me everything Kuwabara-sensei asked you to do.”
“From memory? There have to be at least thirty of them!” He gave me a flat look, and I hastily began adjusting stones. “Fine, fine, I'll do it.”
Touya had some grid paper with him, which he used to make records, while I struggled to recollect each individual task. After the twenty-first board, he announced that we were done. He had picked out nine divinations and made subtle alterations to each of them, so that each described a location rather than the original message.
Three of these were recognisable as the places we'd already identified as star points, which meant that the tengen was among the remaining six.
I clicked my tongue in frustration. “That old man—so he was hunting Shindou all along? Why can't he ever be straightforward about anything?”
“He's Kuwabara-sensei.” Touya's tone was almost fond (or rather would have been, if it hadn't still been Touya speaking.) “It simplifies our task, though.”
“Let's narrow down the geographical possibilities for the tengen point. Where was your father when you last lost track of him?” I glanced cautiously at his features, but the delicate, vulnerable composure he was displaying did not give way.
“Shortly after he visited Wuzi. A week before the equinox. He was headed to the south coast, but it doesn't sound as if he made it there.”
“And Shindou appeared in Duk,” I consulted Suyeong's notes, “fifteen days later. Considering the terrain and the available transport systems that still leaves us with a couple hundred thousand square miles to canvas.” Geography was something I did know quite a bit about, fortunately (I'd grown up in the country, right at the very edge of Ki's sovereignty), so I fixed Suyeong's map by excluding all the places that were simply too far from the likely area to be hoshi points, as well as drawing asterisks on the ones that were possible but unlikely.
Touya continued to write down interpretations of the modified boards. “'The serenity of water falling north. A glade of rocks.' That might be the Monastery of the Waterfalls in the Fengwei Mountains. 'An ancient stone. The inscriptions of order, west of the holy mountain.' 'The plain of memorial, the absence of sun.' Why would Kuwabara send you these and not someone else?”
“Not sure. Maybe he thought I intended to search for Shindou.”
“Why didn't you? Search for him.”
“Honestly? Plain old cowardice.” I dropped my pen on the carpet and had to crouch down to pick it up. “When he left, it happened so quickly that I couldn't think what to do. By the time I officially resigned from the novitiates, I was busy figuring out what to do now that I no longer had a profession. And looking for Shindou would have been – too hard, I guess.”
Touya said softly. “I can relate to that.”
Twilight had fallen; we were working in half-darkness. There was a light switch behind Touya and I reached out to flip it on, brushing his shoulder with the underside of my wrist as I did so. “Better late than never. We'll find him. It doesn't matter what he's done, or what he's trying to do.”
“We haven't found the tengen yet.”
“Ah, that,” I smiled down at the map in my hands. “I think I might have some good news about that one.”
#
An Taeseon gave the impression of having chewed a basketful of lemons when Touya and I, accompanied by Yang Hai, Isumi and Suyeong, trooped into his office early the next morning.
Isumi took charge immediately. “We'd like you to withdraw your testimony in the trial, in exchange for our cooperation and secrecy in the matter of Shindou Hikaru and Ko Yeongha.”
Taeseon rapped his fingers against his desk in a rhythm that sounded thoroughly disgruntled. “Those two children. Far more trouble than they're worth. Well, is there something for me to sign? I do hope you'll at least be more efficient than Suyeong has proved thus far, considering the number of people now involved.”
“We 've found the tengen,” said Touya.
An raised a brow. “Is that so? Rather impressive. My congratulations to you.”
“There is something else we wanted to bring up with you,” Isumi said, exchanging glances with Yang Hai and Touya. “Something we'd like you to contact your head of state about.”
“Oh? I'm all ears.”
“With the tentative approval of both the Yihian Emperor and the Oligarchs of Ki, we'd like to set up a trilateral commission to legalise active-control divination -- that is, divination used to control the future.”
On to Chapter 8.
Wordcount: 4000
Summary: In a world where divination is used to predict the future and govern nations, State Diviner Touya Akira and private investigator Waya Yoshitaka embark on a search for the heretic Sai, the ghostly diviner who may be the most powerful of them all.
This chapter: In which the mystery is revealed, and it becomes obvious that the author was totally lying about this being a detective story. i.e. it's all epic fantasy.
Earlier chapters.
After three days of shadowing An Taeseon, I was seriously starting to question the quality of my hunches. Or possibly my ability to tail someone.
“Any contacts that we can identify?” I demanded of Touya. It was my umpteenth time asking; and our seventh time or so skulking in a teahouse pretending to drink brewed chrysanthemums. The last six occasions, An had been having lunch or tea or supper or breakfast with one dignitary or another. Today, he was shopping.
I examined the horizontal signboard that hung above the store An had just disappeared into. As far as I could tell from the engraved characters, it was a vendor of foodstuffs, specialising in Dukian delicacies.
“Isn't this the kind of thing one sends the servants out to do?” I grumbled to the air.
“Never having had servants, you wouldn't know, would you?” replied Touya. “And not that I think you need reminding, but Isumi and I have finished the background checks on all of Ambassador An's associates as well as everyone he's met since we started this investigation. None of them are known to have adverse relationships with Lu Li. In fact, most of them are former Imperial Diviners and are eager to defend him.”
Touya's patience was wearing thin at last. I was surprised that he'd entertained my suspicions for this long. “Okay, maybe it's time to give up.”
He didn't answer. It was a warm, wet day, and I felt too lazy to take any immediate action. We kept our eyes on the shopfront, waiting for Taeseon to emerge. Touya gathered his teacup in his fingers and brought it to his lips. He blew gently on the fragrant liquid; it was steaming delicately. “I have a private meeting with the Emperor tomorrow. He asked me to invite you as well.”
“Oh. Right.” My curiosity brimmed over on several counts – what could Zhao Shi want with me? How had he even heard of me? They weren't exactly subtle questions, though; not the sort of topic one raised with Touya Akira when he was being tetchy. I resumed staring out the window. Touya brought out his Weiqi board and began reenacting divination patterns for it.
“No coins,” I warned him.
“Am I the one who's been exhibiting subhuman levels of logic? I propose that you refrain from giving me advice.” He set a white stone down with a hard rap.
The sky was dull; the street had begun to darken with small wet circles, and the pedestrians were scurrying for shelter. “You could try altering the weather. Lovely chaos-order experiment right there. Practical, too. I didn't bring a raincoat, did you?”
“He's coming out,” Touya said, and indeed An Taeseon was leaving the store. He was well-prepared; his roomy black umbrella bloomed out before he took a single step onto the sidewalk.
“Let's get moving.” I tasted my tea and gave it up as a lost cause. I had left it too long, and it was bitter.
We paid and scrambled downstairs. The wind blew rain in our faces as we stepped out; water entered my eyes. I scrunched them up and tried to blink the moisture away.
When I could see again, I did a double take. A familiar figure was standing in the entranceway of the comestible shop.
Hong Suyeong.
I ran forward and caught him by the hand.
His first, instinctive action was to shake me off. He'd always been combative that way.
“Suyeong!”
He recognized me and stilled. “Waya? What are you doing here--” He pulled me into the store. Touya followed. Inside, a woody, herbal scent pervaded the area. The wind blew in irregularly, spattering the fading, inch-sized tiles with rain.
Unsurprisingly, Suyeong was taller now. I hazarded that he was close to six feet these days. The trademark cap had disappeared; he was dressed to the nines. Cross-collar shirt, stitched in sashiko; a tasselled grey sash; silk breeches, disappearing into ash-coloured boots. He retained the conscientious and perpetually harassed air that I'd always associated with him. He was hauling a large suitcase.
It took him some time to adjust to the sudden turn of events. He greeted me, then Touya. It transpired that he knew the shopkeeper, and we were ushered into a back room where we could catch up quietly.
“Were you meeting An Taeseon?” I asked, launching a preemptive strike.
It landed. “You know Taeseon?”
“Oh, we've chatted once or twice. Happened to see him come out of the shop, just before I spotted you. Are you friends?”
“He was in charge of the novitiates when I was still in training.” Suyeong's hands were stained with ink. “I heard that you refused to join the State Diviners.”
“Yeah, well. Ideological differences with the state. I was kind of pissed off that they sent Shindou away.”
“So was I.” Touya had this way of dropping his words, simultaneously casual and too formal, exact without being stilted, that made you feel like his anything he said was desperately important. It was that manner of his, as much as the content of his words, that drew people's attention.
“It was your loss,” Suyeong said shortly. I recalled how he'd been crazy about Shindou's divination skills – all of us had been, in those final months. The slow unease, the stupefaction, and then the insecurity, when we realised he was beginning to eclipse us.
“Have you met him since he left Ki?”
“No.” Spoken rapidly, eye contact delayed and brief. My heart sank.
“Bad move,” I remarked. “You should have said 'Yes, of course, but he left months ago.'”
“I'm not lying,” Suyeong said. He was, I noted, awfully poor at dissimulation. His eyes were even darting back and forth.
“Where is he?”
“I don't know!” Suyeong turned his head, hunting for ports of escape. I moved, deliberately and slowly, to block the exit. Touya placed himself in front of Suyeong. Suyeong was about an inch taller, but seemed the smaller and weaker of the two. When he saw Touya a distinct guilty flush came into his cheeks.
“When Zama-Ouza's body was found, there was a Ladder of Changes on his board, connected to a Star of Chaos. At Diviner Wang's death there was a Shattered Wall enclosing a Flower of Chains. I've never known anyone who loves those two patterns as much as Shindou did." Touya locked gazes with Suyeong. “Two people have died. Do you intend to let this continue?”
Suyeong turned away.
“Can we talk in private?” he asked.
We brought him to the consulate. Isumi was at home, and greeted Suyeong with effusive enthusiasm (almost deceptive, I thought -- it took Isumi only a glance to see that something was wrong.) I watched Suyeong to make sure he didn't indulge in any more mendacity, or attempt to make excuses; but he emanated a strange, overt sense of relief.
We gathered in a sitting room and he told us his story.
Shindou came to Duk this spring, about three months ago. We'd heard a lot about him and Sai, as you can imagine – most of it was baseless gossip, but a few people in the royal court were aware of the true story. The king even had to pass a law banning forbidden divination, because of the mad tales that people were concocting about Sai. Two years ago there were many diviners trying to use Weiqi to control chaos and order, but nobody succeeded, so the scandal gradually died down.
Anyway, I'd kept up with the news about Shindou as best as I could. Around the time he appeared in my country, a rumour was floating around that Sai had succeeded in re-embodying himself. But when Shindou knocked on my door that evening, he was alone.
He didn't look well either. He was thin, almost emaciated, and his hair was dull. He asked me if he could stay for a few days. I was more than happy to host him. But it soon became clear that Shindou wasn't his old self – he didn't speak unless he was spoken to, he didn't come out of his room even for meals, except when I asked him to. After about a week of this, I was going out of my mind.
Then Ko Yeongha found out. You may have heard of Yeongha - he's one of the highest-ranked Royal Diviners, and a close friend of mine. I'd often talked to him about Shindou, and how impressed I was with Shindou's divination abilities when I visited Ki.
He insisted on meeting Shindou. I didn't want to let him, at first – Yeongha likes to be provocative, and Shindou didn't seem to be in any shape for it. But Yeongha can be terribly persistent. He secretly went to my house when I was at work. When I got home, he and Shindou were screaming at each other. I was furious at Yeongha after that. The next day, however, Shindou said he wanted to see Yeongha again.
I don't know how he managed it, but Yeongha persuaded Shindou to tell him the entire tale of how he ended up in Duk. The rumours were true: Sai had found a way to recreate his human body using divination, with Shindou's help. But that wasn't the end of it. Soon after, Touya Meijin came hunting for them.
Suyeong paused. “We found out that Touya Meijin had sealed Sai away at the expense of his own life.”
Heart hammering, I looked at Touya, who remained expressionless.
He said: “Continue. You haven't told us how Shindou killed those two men.”
Suyeong reached into a pocket in his shirt and pulled out a worn piece of paper, folded many times. “You've heard how, in ancient times, the diviners used geomancy to create their Weiqi boards?”
He went to a grand piano that stood next to our chairs, and spread the sheet out on its closed lid, revealing a map of the continent. Black crosses and circles lay scattered on the landmass, surrounded by copious annotations.
Suyeong pointed to the city of Ki, underlined by the characters that said Shrine of Profound Darkness, and to Wuzi. “I have been hunting the nine flower-points – you would call them the star-points. To be precise, I'm looking for the origin of heaven, the tengen.”
“That's where Shindou is?” I asked. Suyeong nodded. A rapid stream of puzzles clicked and fired through my mind. “He's trying to resurrect Sai, isn't he? That's the first thing he would do.” The boy who had left Ki, given up his entire family and homeland, rather than allowing the the authorities to exorcise the ghost embedded in his soul-- I stood and began to pace. “And the deaths were – the result of the chaos-order backlash? An attempt to manipulate the border between the living and the dead?”
“Yes,” said Suyeong.
Touya didn't seem surprised. I wondered whether he'd been expecting something of the sort, or whether the news of his father's death had dulled out most other reactions. Probably a bit of both.
Isumi studied the ink-smudged map. “Using the land itself as a goban, controlled by wielding a board at the site of origin – it's possible. But you would have to find three hundred and sixty one points that were suitable. And the hoshi in particular would require very specific properties.
“Properties that places like the Shrine of Profound Darkness would possess.” My voice sounded grim to myself.
A luminous, eldritch moon, shining through the oculus in the Council House, casting swarthy foreshortened shadows on the glassy marble. The door to the Shrine ajar. Noise like storm rain on ceramic tiles, heard from indoors -- a cacophony of stones, dancing on the Shrine's nine boards like waves on a windwracked sea. And Shindou kneeling at the heart of it all, hand outstretched in midair and poised to fall on the grid, superimposed with a translucent fluttering outline of fingers, a wide sleeve, wild alluring hair, burning eyes, occupying the same space as Shindou and yet beyond –
That had been my last night as a novitiate.
“Shindou left in the middle of the night,” Suyeong continued. “By the time I realised he was gone, the trail was cold. Even after that, it took me some time to guess his plans.”
“And how does An Taeseon fit into all this?” asked Isumi sharply. “Why is he casting suspicion on Lu Li?”
Suyeong seemed more than a little afraid of Isumi. Oddly, I didn't blame him. “Yeongha is with Shindou. We didn't want anyone else to find out.”
The rain had stopped. The awning windows, still shut, were decorated with stationary and slowly trickling drops. Through the glass I saw a hint of rainbow in the clouds.
Isumi spoke, more to himself than to any of us: “Ko Yeongha, the most celebrated young diviner in Duk. In other words, he's the Touya Akira of your nation. Of course Taeseon would want to protect him. And you were prepared for the execution of an innocent man in order to save your country's reputation?”
“I didn't mean--”
“Of course you didn't mean to. That's the excuse of all the people who'd like to believe they are good.” By now Isumi had all of us mesmerised, even Touya. He had the kind of voice that seemed soft-spoken, but in fact held both volume and fluency. “The honourable thing would be to meet with the Emperor and tell him everything that you know.”
“Isumi.” I didn't think it wise to push Suyeong too quickly, too soon.
“It's all right,” Suyeong said quietly. “I will go. But the two of you, Waya, Touya, you must promise me that you will find Shindou. You know him better than I do, don't you?”
Touya and I looked at each other. I was surprised by the fierce agreement I saw in his eyes, and the corresponding emotion that surged inside me.
“We will,” said Touya.
Touya and I obtained maps from a nearby street vendor and retired to the library to copy Suyeong's notes. He'd identified nearly eighty locations as potential hoshi points, some of them thousands of miles away.
“A death in Ki, a death in Wuzi, nine days apart. An earthquake at the Hill of Flowers in Duk, nine days before that.” Touya used a midnight blue fountain pen with a golden nib. He sat at the bay window, silhouetted against an approaching sunset. “The original attempt to re-embody Sai required nine separate divinations.”
“Yes, that's how I caught him. He sneaked out once too often.” I was lying belly-down on a rug, pored over my map. “Could we cast a divination on the maps themselves, to narrow down the likely location of the tengen?” We had agreed fairly quickly with Suyeong's hypothesis that the geomantic origin of heaven was the only place that Shindou - and Yeongha - could be.
“I don't know. More and more of my divinations are failing at the moment, perhaps because of how close we are to a hoshi point.”
“Whatever Shindou is doing over there, it's disturbing the chaos-order alignment of the continent.” I gave voice to a thought that was bothering me. “Do you think he knows about the deaths he's caused? Do you think he caused them intentionally?” The notion of using divination principles to bring back a dead person was so foreign that I only had a very hazy notion of how it could be done. But it was theoretically possible that one needed to sacrifice lives in order to perform a resurrection.
“I don't know.”
“Your father--”
“Won't be coming back. Concentrate on what we can do.”
“What if Suyeong was lying about part of his story?”
“You'd have noticed, wouldn't you?”
He raised his head just slightly, and I saw how proud and stiff his posture was, and how brittle his hands, pallid despite the outrageous gold tint of the sun sinking at his back. If I cast a rock at him he would break; if I got up and put my arms around him, he might collapse--
And if I brought him a goban, he would pull himself together. So that was what I did.
We sat at the window, the kaya grid lying between us, our attention all for it rather than each other. I placed the first stone.
White to tengen.
In the language of traditional divination, this placement signifies the heart of chaos in the circumstance under scrutiny. It is usually followed by a diamond of black stones surrounding it, chaos under the control of order. In Sai's divination, the new divination, the heretical divination – where the aim was not to mirror the existing forces of chaos and order but rather to direct and marshal them – the meaning was different: I assert the dominance of chaos in the universe.
Ironic that Shindou, who had always astounded us with his clarity of vision, his knack for seeing to the heart of things, would always begin the act of divination with a simple black-or-white judgment.
“What are we divining?” asked Touya. His eyes were dusky with the shadow of sleep deprivation.
I shrugged. “You tell me.”
He began laying out a jagged wall on his end of the board while I added eyes to the lower left corner. We didn't speak of what we were doing, although a quick survey of the situation showed that he was doing something in Sai's style – and I, half-consciously, was reconstructing patterns I had seen Shindou use in the past. Within minutes the board was heavy with more than a hundred stones.
“I can't read this at all,” I confessed, my eyes tracing the heavy mess of black and white. A set of cross-patterns in the lower right quadrant caught my eye and I frowned. There was something weird and familiar about, it, something – “Hold on.” I started scrambling the stones around, inverting and rotating shapes. I removed the stone at tengen. “That's odd,” I muttered, continuing to make minor changes here and there. “This looks like one of the boards Kuwabara made me do.”
“Kuwabara-Honinbou?” Against the darkening vermilion of the sunset Touya appeared subdued, still retaining that strange fragility. I felt as if I was fanning a dying ember; one wrong movement and I would extinguish the glow.
“He sends me these really odd tasks every now and then. This one, for instance - 'Predict the weather at midnight in three days. Use the following crane's nest formation in both corners.' So I did, and that was how the pattern came out. 'Clear skies, a gibbous moon, chiaroscuro effects for the nocturnal pedestrian.'” Studying it now, it was striking how much it resembled Shindou and Sai's style of divination.
Touya brought out another three stones: black at tengen, white at cross stars. “A chiaroscuro hall, a geometry open to the sky, the night that does not wax nor wane. A city, far to the east.”
I examined the board again and my breath caught. We were looking at at a geomantic and geographical description of the Shrine of Profound Darkness.
“Show me everything Kuwabara-sensei asked you to do.”
“From memory? There have to be at least thirty of them!” He gave me a flat look, and I hastily began adjusting stones. “Fine, fine, I'll do it.”
Touya had some grid paper with him, which he used to make records, while I struggled to recollect each individual task. After the twenty-first board, he announced that we were done. He had picked out nine divinations and made subtle alterations to each of them, so that each described a location rather than the original message.
Three of these were recognisable as the places we'd already identified as star points, which meant that the tengen was among the remaining six.
I clicked my tongue in frustration. “That old man—so he was hunting Shindou all along? Why can't he ever be straightforward about anything?”
“He's Kuwabara-sensei.” Touya's tone was almost fond (or rather would have been, if it hadn't still been Touya speaking.) “It simplifies our task, though.”
“Let's narrow down the geographical possibilities for the tengen point. Where was your father when you last lost track of him?” I glanced cautiously at his features, but the delicate, vulnerable composure he was displaying did not give way.
“Shortly after he visited Wuzi. A week before the equinox. He was headed to the south coast, but it doesn't sound as if he made it there.”
“And Shindou appeared in Duk,” I consulted Suyeong's notes, “fifteen days later. Considering the terrain and the available transport systems that still leaves us with a couple hundred thousand square miles to canvas.” Geography was something I did know quite a bit about, fortunately (I'd grown up in the country, right at the very edge of Ki's sovereignty), so I fixed Suyeong's map by excluding all the places that were simply too far from the likely area to be hoshi points, as well as drawing asterisks on the ones that were possible but unlikely.
Touya continued to write down interpretations of the modified boards. “'The serenity of water falling north. A glade of rocks.' That might be the Monastery of the Waterfalls in the Fengwei Mountains. 'An ancient stone. The inscriptions of order, west of the holy mountain.' 'The plain of memorial, the absence of sun.' Why would Kuwabara send you these and not someone else?”
“Not sure. Maybe he thought I intended to search for Shindou.”
“Why didn't you? Search for him.”
“Honestly? Plain old cowardice.” I dropped my pen on the carpet and had to crouch down to pick it up. “When he left, it happened so quickly that I couldn't think what to do. By the time I officially resigned from the novitiates, I was busy figuring out what to do now that I no longer had a profession. And looking for Shindou would have been – too hard, I guess.”
Touya said softly. “I can relate to that.”
Twilight had fallen; we were working in half-darkness. There was a light switch behind Touya and I reached out to flip it on, brushing his shoulder with the underside of my wrist as I did so. “Better late than never. We'll find him. It doesn't matter what he's done, or what he's trying to do.”
“We haven't found the tengen yet.”
“Ah, that,” I smiled down at the map in my hands. “I think I might have some good news about that one.”
An Taeseon gave the impression of having chewed a basketful of lemons when Touya and I, accompanied by Yang Hai, Isumi and Suyeong, trooped into his office early the next morning.
Isumi took charge immediately. “We'd like you to withdraw your testimony in the trial, in exchange for our cooperation and secrecy in the matter of Shindou Hikaru and Ko Yeongha.”
Taeseon rapped his fingers against his desk in a rhythm that sounded thoroughly disgruntled. “Those two children. Far more trouble than they're worth. Well, is there something for me to sign? I do hope you'll at least be more efficient than Suyeong has proved thus far, considering the number of people now involved.”
“We 've found the tengen,” said Touya.
An raised a brow. “Is that so? Rather impressive. My congratulations to you.”
“There is something else we wanted to bring up with you,” Isumi said, exchanging glances with Yang Hai and Touya. “Something we'd like you to contact your head of state about.”
“Oh? I'm all ears.”
“With the tentative approval of both the Yihian Emperor and the Oligarchs of Ki, we'd like to set up a trilateral commission to legalise active-control divination -- that is, divination used to control the future.”
On to Chapter 8.
