Unfinished, page 4
Master Liu looked over at her. “Go to the Heart of the people. That is where you will find answers I will not have time to provide right now.”
“I could go with you.”
“You cannot. I must learn the truth of what I see.”
She felt something then.
It was a strange sensation, and one that she was left slightly startled by. She had become aware of how he was using Tree Stands in the Forest, and how he pushed upon her, prodding her. He wanted her to know what he was doing, and how he could feel that power. She recognized the Tree Stands in the Forest. She also recognized how he had been pushing upon her so that he could guide her, but not toward a specific action, just guiding her so that she could see a specific pathway.
If she went with him, more and more branches would fade.
“Why?” Imogen asked.
“I don’t know. Not yet. But I do know that you must join the people. You must lead them. That is the path I have seen before us for a long time.”
“Then what?”
“Then you must find your own path,” he said. “Find your own bond. Find your own quest. But bring the people with you.”
He started up the mountainside.
The wind started to pick up, whipping around her. She could practically feel Benji’s voice in that wind, a prodding for her to let him go, to leave him to this, because this was his quest, and she could do nothing about it. She could almost hear Benji telling her something else, swearing at her, a warning as if she were going to go after him. If she had believed it would make a difference, she might have followed, but she still saw that strange emptiness, the pruning of the branches if she were to go with it, and she knew that if she were to try to do that, something worse would happen.
She stayed.
She watched as Master Liu made his way up the mountainside, his back straightening, her blade in his hand, and he continued to climb, moving steadily, quickly, and there was something almost determined about his gait, something that seemed to carry him rapidly, but there was something else to it as well. There was a changing of the pathways, a change in what she could see, something that was different, something that she caught a glimpse of, but she didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps there was the possibility that existed out there, possibility that changed with every step that he took.
And then the wind caught him. He stumbled, staggering, before catching himself. He continued on. The snow started to pick up, swirling violently around him, and then he disappeared.
Imogen waited for a long time. She put out the fire, holding on to her new blade, sheathed in bamboo, and she watched, thinking about the various possibilities, trying to think about the various sacred patterns that might provide her with answers, but nothing did. There were no answers out there. There were only more questions that came to mind.
Finally Imogen tore her gaze away, and she started down the mountainside.
She didn’t like leaving Master Liu behind. She should have pushed. But even if she had, would it have made a difference?
Perhaps not. Knowing the truth about him, knowing the truth about people, Imogen couldn’t help but question whether there was anything that would make a difference at this point. She knew what she needed to do now. After learning the truth about him, Imogen had chosen not to push him to follow her back. She wasn’t even sure if he needed to. He was a Porapeth, and given the lessons that she had learned from Benji, she knew the truth about the Porapeth, and how they were magic. Not that they just had magic, but that they were magic. But then again, if she was descended from Porapeth, then she had that same potential, didn’t she? Perhaps that was why Benji had chosen her.
Could that be why Timo went after Benji? Could he have known?
It seemed impossible that Timo would have known a secret of their people that she had taken until now to learn, but there was much about Timo that seemed improbable and had proven otherwise.
There were still so many questions, but Master Liu had been unwilling to answer them.
She could find the answers in the Heart of the homeland, he had said.
That was all he was going to tell her. But as she had watched him, she had wondered if perhaps answers from him weren’t even going to be helpful.
She descended slowly, and the trembling that she had detected before began to fade, disappearing into nothingness. She wasn’t sure if that was something that he had done or if the trembling had simply ended.
She paused at one point, turning her back to what she had seen, and looked into the snow, looked at the swirling energy, and tried to focus on what she could detect out there. There was nothing, though. There was only that emptiness. Only that cold and biting wind, and only the possibilities.
But there were possibilities.
This was what Benji had seen. And now Imogen had them.
She wasn’t sure what to make of them, or how to control them, or whether she could even control them. But she recognized that if they were to fade, that would be dangerous. She recognized that she had a role to play, and if she abandoned that role, she would leave her people, and something worse would happen to them. She had to protect them. She had to be there for them. She had to lead them. She was Imogen Inaratha, First of the Blade.
It was late in the day by the time she reached the village.
She saw Jorend first and he strode toward her, glancing over her shoulder.
He was a handsome man, strong, and yet now there was a worry in his eyes that had never been there before. He looked at her with concern, compassion, and he looked at her with an expression that struck her as friendly, something that she still marveled at. They had not been the closest when they had been in the sacred temple.
“What happened?” he asked.
“He stayed behind,” she said.
“What do you mean he stayed behind?”
“He chose to stay behind,” Imogen said. “That’s all I can say.”
There were secrets to their people, secrets that she wasn’t sure how or when to release. She frowned, and she focused on what would happen if she were to share with him the possibilities that they possessed, what would happen if she were to share with him what might happen to them. She focused on what might happen if she were to guide him, to tell him the truth about their people, how they were Porapeth, but she could not tell him.
And because she couldn’t tell him, she wondered if perhaps it was better to wait.
“There was some danger on the mountainside,” she said. She looked at the village. The buildings were snug against the mountain. They all blended in, all made of the same plain gray rock with a central clearing at the heart of the village; a training ground for those who would eventually become sword masters. It was the closest village to the tiger temple, at least to this pathway to the tiger temple. And it was a place in which Imogen had gathered many of the disciples, along with those that she had brought with her. At least for now. Eventually, they would need to move on. And perhaps they needed to move on now.
“How are preparations going?” Imogen asked.
Jorend frowned, glancing up the mountainside, before turning his attention back to her. He blinked for a moment and then looked at her holding the bamboo-sheathed sword. He frowned at it. “I think I need more than that,” Jorend said.
She smiled tightly. “In time,” she agreed.
“That’s all you’re going to tell me?”
“If you would like me to tell you that Master Liu thought he could protect our people from some unseen and unknown threat, then I will. I don’t know what it was, and he convinced me that I should not go with him. And I didn’t.”
“Even if it means that we could lose Master Liu?”
“Even then,” she said. “I saw what would happen if I were to go.”
He regarded her for a long moment, but then he nodded. It was a measure of how much he trusted her now, how much he had come to understand the truth about her, that he didn’t challenge her.
And there really wasn’t anything more that Imogen would be able to say to convince him. She had traveled with him long enough now that he knew about her potential, and the gift that Benji had given her. What he didn’t know was why Benji had thought that she had some potential in the first place. For so long, Imogen hadn’t even known, and even now, she wasn’t sure that she could even understand the truth of their people, truth that Master Liu had so casually given her, and then he had been unable to give her anything more.
“We’ve been getting word out of some of the lower villages,” Jorend said. “Attacks. We don’t really know who it is, what it is, only that there has been movement. Magical movement.”
“Sorcerers?” The Society wouldn’t have brought an attack here, would they? There wasn’t any real reason for the Society to make their way into the Leier lands. They were far enough removed from the rest of the world, situated so far to the east that it was difficult for other people to even reach them, that it seemed impossible that they would even bother them.
“Not sorcery. At least, not the kind of sorcerer I would’ve detected. This was something else. I don’t know what to make of it, and I know the others don’t either, so…” Jorend shook his head. “We need to go so that I can show you.”
She smiled at him. “You want to show me? I just came down a mountainside, and had—” Imogen cut herself off, squeezing the hilt of the bamboo-sheathed blade, almost revealing the truth about it. But should she keep that secret?
Did it even matter?
There were no other sacred sword masters. The others had been lost when the temples had been destroyed, leaving only Master Liu—and now Imogen. Should she decide how that information was conveyed, and who was permitted to hear it?
“We need to investigate,” Jorend said. “I’ve been waiting for you, mostly because I don’t want to bring a large contingent down the mountainside if there is something of sorcery. The others aren’t prepared for that.”
It was unfortunate, but he was not wrong. The others weren’t prepared. There were quite a few of her people who had started to master the sacred sword patterns, but not enough could handle sorcery of the scale they had confronted so far. She was the one to defend them, and she was the one who needed to be present and needed to offer whatever she could in order to help her people.
“Enchantments?” she asked.
“Is that what you would call them?” he asked, and nodded off into the distance.
There were a few darkened shapes perched on the ground far away from the edge of the village. The renral had taken up roosting nearby, and there were some within the village who were afraid of them, but most of them realized what the renral had done for them and how they had saved them. Most of the people within the village were more than happy to welcome their presence, even if they didn’t fully understand why the renral were willing to help them.
The Leier didn’t have the same experience with renral as the Koral did. It was possible that the Leier might actually begin to feel the renral were allies, as they were. It was a strange thing for Imogen even to think about, stranger still that she was thinking about birds, such as they were, as allies, but they had proven themselves.
“I don’t know how to direct them quite yet,” Imogen said. “Maybe in time we’ll be able to, but…”
So far, she could ask the renral for help, but having been carried in their talons, she didn’t care for that mode of transportation. It was much easier to take an enchantment.
“How many did Rebecca make us?”
“I have about a dozen,” he said. “We can bring several of them with us, in case we need to take alternatives back, but I don’t think it will take that long.”
He pulled one of the enchantments out of his pocket and handed it to her.
Imogen shook her head. “I have my own,” she said.
She reached for the renral enchantment, and she tapped on it, activating it, and felt a surge of power flow from her. It was as if she was using some hint of Lightning Strikes in the Storm as she activated the enchantment, and she could feel that power flowing out from her and into it. Was she using magic when she did that? She thought that the power of the enchantment came from the enchanter and not from the person activating it, but then again, she had never really known for sure. When she had been in Yoran, using enchantments there, she had not ever considered the possibility that she had the power necessary to activate the enchantments. The only thing that she ever thought about in Yoran was that she could use those enchantments.
Now the enchantments were a part of their everyday world.
The renral began to unfold, growing larger and larger, and finally, when it was fully activated, she climbed onto its back. It looked much like the real renral, down to the level of detail in the thick wings, the feathers, and even the slick, smooth surface of its skin. Or stone, as it was in this case.
Jorend was climbing onto his renral when another figure came running toward them.
“Where are the two of you going?” Eleanor asked. She had on her Koral shaman robes, with a belt cinched at her waist, and a hint of irritation snapping in her voice.
“We’re going to look downslope,” Jorend said. “Come with us.”
She frowned. Eleanor was a strong woman and had the determined set to her jaw that many of the shamans had, and there was always a hint of power that radiated from her, a sense of power that Imogen had come to attribute to not only the Koral shamans but all sorcerers. They may not be as refined as sorcerers from the Society, but the shamans definitely had power of their own.
Eleanor pressed her lips together, looking back at the village. “I suppose the others will be fine without me for a little while.” She glanced back at Imogen, and then she flicked her gaze toward the slope. “What happened to the other?”
“He stayed behind,” Imogen said.
Eleanor had the sense not to push, which Imogen appreciated about her.
Eleanor withdrew an enchantment, and she activated it. This one was an enormous renral, but it wasn’t nearly as refined as the ones that Imogen and Jorend sat upon. It was of her own making, and though she didn’t have Rebecca’s skill, there was still something quite amazing about the massive scale of her renral.
Eleanor shrugged slightly. “I might have been a little aggressive in its creation,” she said.
“You could carry a house with that,” Jorend said.
“Not a big house,” Eleanor said. She climbed onto it. “And it will help us if we need it.”
“What do you think we might need?” Jorend asked. “To carry a moose back here?”
“I seem to recall the last time we had these enchantments carrying us someplace, we very nearly lost ourselves. I was just thinking that if we had the need to carry something else, then I would prefer to be ready for it and not be surprised by what we might encounter.”
“Come along,” Imogen said.
They all tapped on the enchantments at nearly the same time, and the renral surged into the sky. They flew, streaking down the mountainside, and it didn’t take long before Imogen began to see something.
It was a line of shapes. But not just shapes. Magically enchanted shapes.
She had started to guide her renral down when she felt a surge of power.
It blasted at her.
Tree Stands in the Forest.
She activated the sacred pattern with little more than a thought, and it surrounded the renral, protecting them. The blast struck, and it sent her shooting backward, and then they had to circle higher.
“What was that?” Jorend asked when they reached an altitude that the attack could not reach.
Imogen continued looking down across the mountainside, staring into the distance, and she shook her head. “I don’t know, and I’m afraid we had better find out.”
Chapter Five
She moved carefully, creeping down the mountain. There were nearly two dozen Leier, about a quarter of that number of shamans with them, all of them moving steadily down the mountainside, trying to figure out just what it was that she had encountered from the air. They had flown part of the way, but none of them had wanted to fly all the way. Imogen led the attack, guiding them forward, but there was a part of her that questioned whether such a thing was even sensible. She was the leader, wasn’t she? If something happened to her, what would happen to the rest of the Leier? Would they fall because she wasn’t there to guide them?
Imogen closed her eyes and focused on different possibilities, searching for an understanding of how she could protect her people. She didn’t know the answer, but increasingly, she felt that there had to be some answer that she could reach for if only she grasped the possibilities the way that Benji once had.
Eleanor nudged up alongside her. “You know what it looked like,” Eleanor said, her voice a hushed whisper. They still had quite a way before they reached the creatures that had attacked them, so Imogen didn’t think that the whisper made much sense. “When I was younger, and still in my homeland, we used to encounter different enchantments like that. At least, we thought that they were enchantments. We didn’t call them that. We recognized them as power, and a possibility of what we could do if we continued to master our potential. There were some who tried to replicate them.”
Imogen paused, and she turned to her. “What do you mean you tried to replicate them?”
“Well…” Eleanor looked down the slope. It was growing dark, so they were nothing more than shadows, but Imogen was not willing to wait with that line of creatures down there. She didn’t know how quickly they could move or attack. “We used to try to model them. In my land, we didn’t have access to the same power you had in yours.”
Imogen arched a brow at her. “I am Leier.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I guess I mean we didn’t have the same access that you had when you were outside of these lands. We wanted to know, though, and we wanted to try to do whatever we could so that we could see if there was something that we could learn, but unfortunately…”
“Tell me more,” Imogen said.
