The Dawn of Yangchen, page 17
She wanted to crumple and toss the paper out of spite, to veer away from what was undoubtedly another carefully planned manipulation by Chaisee, but that would have accomplished nothing. She read further.
Given our new partnership in charity, I’m hoping we can be less formal with each other. By now you will either have solved the Saowon’s spiritual problems or let them drink fully of the bitterness they concocted for themselves. If you’re wondering how I know the full story, well, it’s amazing what you can learn about someone if you hold their debts.
I would wager you found a perfect solution, Avatar, because I believe in you. And I am not alone in that faith. Why, the other day I met a boy from Bin-Er, seeking employment from me. He believed in you a great deal as well, right up to the very end of our conversation.
The bottom dropped out of Yangchen’s stomach. Kavik.
I told you once that I could teach you how to deal with spies. The first step is catching them. Do you know the best way to catch a spy, Avatar?
The first half of a koan. But all koans were taunts to some extent, the enlightened mocking the uninitiated. Chaisee’s faint smile of victory was stamped all over the answer to this one.
You open your door and invite them in.
LOOSE ENDS
After taking their wounded compatriot away for medical attention, the association members drifted in and out of the building, mostly out, until very few were left. The ones who remained refused to talk to Jujinta, and by extension, Jujinta’s brand-new partner.
Kavik didn’t mind. Thanks to Kalyaan, he knew what an inherited shunning felt like.
What he was less comfortable with was having to watch Jujinta’s post-victory ritual, which started with deep, fervent prayer to some unknown spirit. The knife thrower scratched a series of marks into the wall, triangles upon cross marks upon straight lines, until an intricate geometric pattern emerged that somewhat resembled a bird spreading its wings. Kneeling in front of it, he whispered to himself, eyes closed, his mutters sounding like angry condemnations of some past unforgivable crime, far worse than the light stabbing he’d given Shigoro.
Well, that’s not creepy at all, Kavik thought.
When Jujinta was finished, he came over and sat down on the same bench Kavik was on. Even the way the guy rested was disturbing. He sat as if the back wall would contaminate him by touch and stared straight ahead the whole time, barely blinking. It would have been perfect meditation posture had it not looked like his muscles were fighting each other in a vicious stalemate.
After a while, the silence became too much. “You a bender?” Kavik asked him.
It wasn’t idle conversation. If things went Shigoro-shaped between them, Kavik wanted to know if he would need to deal with surprise fire. Hiding your ability was a common enough ploy in the errand-running business, useful for temporary advantages—ha-ha, secret bender out of nowhere!—and Jujinta’s impeccable blade skills would have been the perfect distraction. People could be good at two things.
Jujinta frowned, having understood the logic behind the question. And he didn’t like it at all, being pried into. Not one bit. “No,” he snarled without turning his head.
He could have been lying, but Kavik felt his body language told true. He thought the matter settled until after a whole minute, the Fire National retorted. “You anything but?”
Kavik squinted at his benchmate. Well, nuts to you too, buddy.
Tael came over to interrupt the slow-moving exchange. “It’s time.”
“There’s been enough light for an hour already,” Kavik said. His knees were stiff from sitting so long.
“Yeah, but we need the currents going the right way too. Or else you’ll be ground up by the Limpet’s Teeth and spat back onto the beaches. Come on.”
The older man led Jujinta and Kavik toward the back of the hall. A sweet, meaty stink, even more powerful than the default fishiness, crept through this end of the building. A washed-up land animal, rotting overnight? There was an intestinal rankness not born of the sea lying somewhere underneath. Tael pushed open a wide set of doors, letting the new daylight in over a small gravel beach. “Here’s your first job,” he said. “Disposal duty.”
Kavik shielded his eyes from the sun at first, but quickly switched his hands, clamping his mouth shut. Hot bile leaked past his fingers. Laid on a bed of seaweed, next to silvery fish too ugly and oily to sell, were a pair of dead bodies, beginning to bloat.
One of them was Qiu.
Kavik’s mad scramble only lasted a few paces before he emptied his stomach over the surf-polished pebbles. He had the distinct sensation of people other than Tael parting way for him to be sick. A few of them chuckled.
“First time with a raw corpse, huh?” someone said, not unkindly. “It’ll getcha, for sure.”
Kavik clutched his midsection and spat and spat and spun around. Seeing the bottoms of Qiu’s swelling purple feet made him retch again. Why was he—his body here? Why wasn’t he in Taku?
“Everyone here has just seen the persons named Kavik and Jujinta get on a boat with a fellow dressed like a high official from the Earth Kingdom and a youth with pockmarked skin wearing the latest fashion from Bin-Er and go on a voyage,” Tael announced. “Only Jujinta and Kavik came back. There must have been foul play. We’ll testify as such, should authorities from outside Jonduri come asking.”
Tael rubbed an itchy eye. “New guy. This is how we keep you loyal. Guilt by association. Be glad we respect the law in these parts. I’ve heard the real unsavory criminal-type groups in the Earth Kingdom force their new members to foul the play themselves.”
“What did these two do to get so unlucky?” Jujinta asked, unperturbed.
“They’re spies. And if there’s one thing the boss-boss does not like, it’s spies.”
Tael went in for a closer look at the Earth Kingdom official. Kavik couldn’t comprehend how he managed not to gag. He lifted the man’s drooping, foot-long beard and let it fall again. “He’s the real deal, a sage. This other one”—he nudged Qiu’s body with his foot and Kavik felt the toe in his own ribs—“is a broker come bearing gifts way too big for his worth. That’s the surest way to tell someone’s a plant attempt.”
The envelope. The envelope he’d stolen from the Avatar’s room. Kavik had put the cause of Qiu’s death into his own hands.
“Come on, get them into the boat before you miss your window,” Tael said. “You want to be rowing with the tides, not against them.”
Kavik had to be prodded toward Qiu’s head. Jujinta squatted down and grabbed the body by the ankles, rolling up the salt-eaten trousers to get a better grip on the clammy gray flesh underneath. “Lift with your knees,” he grunted.
Far, far away, over the horizon. That was where Kavik had to send his mind, in order not to begin shrieking uncontrollably when he took Qiu by the wrists and his former broker’s dead fingers flopped in reciprocation around his own. He barely looked away in time to avoid Qiu’s head lolling backward to accuse him of murder with slack, open jaws.
He dipped in and out of coherence. He was vaguely aware of two thuds hitting the bottom of a skiff, and then he and Jujinta were out to sea, each of them rowing an oar.
“So what you’re going to do is encase the corpses in a block of sea ice,” he heard Jujinta say. “We push the ice and let it float away. By the time it melts, the current will have taken it to a shark-squid feeding ground, and there won’t be any remains left to identify.”
Kavik hadn’t remembered Tael giving them instructions. They must have gone over them while he was wrapped in blankness. Or maybe his partner already knew how to dispose of murder victims.
It was easier to freeze water around Qiu and the other man, new best friends in burial, once he got some momentum going. He could pretend he was layering ice upon ice. The foot sticking out, he quickly covered. There was no kernel to the mass if he couldn’t see it.
As the little icebergs drifted away, Jujinta prayed, again.
The rest of the job passed like the sun behind clouds. Rowing back to shore. Tael telling them they did good, and they should report for more work next week. Jujinta’s stare drilling into Kavik’s back as he navigated from one end of the gambling parlor to the other—that’s where this fever dream had begun, right? A gambling parlor? Kavik was no longer sure.
He staggered home in broad daylight, past the wet market. The sound of cleavers thwacking into their bloody blocks made him want to throw up again. On the boat, Jujinta had offered to do some knifework—to make the pieces smaller, that’s why Tael had sent them both—but Kavik at least had the wherewithal to refuse any more indignities upon the deceased.
No, not home exactly, the safe house. Muscle memory developed in Bin-Er kept him from breaking cover and taking the most direct route. He remembered to pause every so often and sweep for tails. When he burst through the inn doors, surprising Akuudan and Tayagum, he could say with confidence he hadn’t been followed. Once he regained the ability to string a sentence together.
The Avatar was waiting for him. By the looks of it, she’d just beat him there, maybe by minutes. Her disguise lay in a pile, a cloak and a wide hat, a simpler getup than the one in Bin-Er, put together in haste. She sprang to her feet when she saw him.
“You’re alive,” she said, looking utterly relieved.
The fact that she had reason to believe otherwise only made him angrier. They’d talked about the dangers of this mission. Kavik had agreed to them. But right now, a flood of blame was dammed behind his throat.
Unable to speak, he leveled a trembling, accusing finger at Yangchen, and discovered there was an object in his hand.
A small coin purse he didn’t have before. His payment for dumping Qiu into the water.
REMEMBERANCE
Kavik, eight years old, had cursed the hunt. He was sure of it. He’d forgotten one of his amulets, or committed a taboo before heading out, or had made the right gestures to the spirits but without the proper respect in his heart. And now he and Kalyaan were separated from the others, turned around in the vicious blizzard that had swept down upon them like a predator.
It was his fault. He wept, his tears freezing on his nose. His sorrow earned him a plap! of a mitten over his face.
“No,” Kalyaan said, looming overhead. “We’ll be all right.”
This was prior to Kavik’s growth spurt, and his older brother was still a giant who could block out the harsh skies themselves. The two of them trudged in the direction they believed was home, until the snowdrifts became overwhelming. Kalyaan built them a quick shelter, and they spent the first of many nights shivering and hungry.
The storm only abated in spurts. And during the brief lulls they could travel in, the land was a paper sheet, offering blankness instead of signs to orient by. Kavik couldn’t tell how long they’d spent lost. They might have been wandering in a spiritual pocket, a floating space where the realms bled into each other. Kalyaan cut strips off his own mitten and chewed the pieces of hide to make them soft enough for his little brother to swallow. A desperation tactic so Kavik would have the energy to keep walking in the cold.
Even then, they returned to camp with Kavik drooped across Kalyaan’s shoulders, barely conscious. They’d been gone for a month, nearly mourned as dead. His older brother had saved his life and carried him back to their parents. There was simply nothing Kalyaan couldn’t accomplish to keep his family safe.
He’d lost two fingers to frostbite, though. The spot where he’d opened his mitten. “Don’t worry about it,” he told a fretting Kavik. “Middlers think eight’s a lucky number.” He wiggled the stumps on his hand for emphasis.
Kavik did worry about it. He had been a burden, and the signs of his weakness were now permanently etched upon the person he looked up to most. And he was still convinced the expedition had turned unlucky because of him in the first place. The original, unknown offense had not been accounted for.
Since then, Kavik often wondered if he was supposed to have paid a greater price and left a part of himself behind on the ice like Kalyaan had. Maybe he’d cheated the spirits by surviving intact.
Because looking back on it, right around that time was the beginning of the turn. When hunts started souring across the region, slowly at first, but then inevitably, failed season after failed season forcing more people to cross the straits in search of work in the Earth Kingdom and the newfangled shang towns sprouting up.
His family leaving the North Pole, drifting apart, Kalyaan abandoning them, the misery of Bin-Er—the footprints may have been different, but they could have all come from the same shape-changing beast, walking in an unbroken line from the past to the present.
If so, Kavik only had himself to blame.
The Avatar was the one who caught him. Her airbending pushed Kavik back to his feet, a second set of hands reaching across the room, and the rush of wind against his face roused him like a slap.
“You’ve got to stop passing out in my inn,” Akuudan said.
Kavik was not in the mood for teasing anymore. His ribs were bellows, trying to squeeze too much air through too small a hole. Yangchen, recognizing something in his agony, put her hand up for silence from the other two. “Breathe,” she said to Kavik. “Breathe first. Don’t try to talk until you’re ready.” Her posture was that of an animal expert, ready to rush to his side if he collapsed but not wanting to spook him yet by coming closer.
It took Kavik five full minutes before he could explain to everyone the initiation process for Chaisee’s errand runners in Jonduri. And how the first body taking a ride out to sea courtesy of his efforts was Qiu, the same Qiu Yangchen and Kavik had planted information on in the Bin-Er teahouse. They’d killed him. Together.
Yangchen blanched. “How could this have happened? You didn’t say your broker was coming to Jonduri!”
“He obviously changed his mind after I talked to him!” Kavik said. Qiu could have caught wind of Chaisee’s recruiting drive, same as they did, and spotted an opportunity for a higher price for the information than he could have gotten in Taku. Except Chaisee had smelled a plot and responded in the most extreme manner possible. “What do we do?”
Yangchen’s gaze was slack, her cheeks red. “What do we do?” Kavik asked her again.
“Avatar,” Tayagum said. “This is your call.”
“I don’t know.” Her lips parted and closed, half-formed words failing to take shape. If she had solutions, she was letting them die on her tongue.
This was the wrong version of Yangchen. Kavik needed the schemer who’d had him over a barrel the whole time in Bin-Er. The one who was always a step ahead. This frozen, befuddled girl, he didn’t recognize.
“You can’t not know!” Kavik said to her. “We’ve been following your orders and now two people are dead! What is the plan here?!”
“I said I don’t know!” Yangchen’s response sent the papers in the room fluttering. “If you could just shut up for a moment! There’s too many of you! There’s always too many of you, and none of you ever stop! You never stop!”
She picked up the hat and cloak and stormed out the inn.
“Avat—” Akuudan cut himself off so he didn’t address her by her true identity while the door swung open. With surprising agility, he vaulted over the counter with his one hand.
Kavik followed him outside, Tayagum close behind. The inn shared frontage with a row of produce stands, which Jonduri’s many little restaurants kept busy. Customers toted away baskets of bitter gourd and cabbage, shooting starfruit and papaya. Kavik’s eyes flitted from head to head. He and the others were only moments behind Yangchen, he knew what her cover outfit looked like, and still the Avatar was gone. They’d already been thrown.
“We’re never going to find her,” Akuudan muttered.
Kavik thought about the last time he’d seen her anywhere near this upset. It was at the Northern Air Temple, when she’d thrashed her way through a sleepless night, rising and falling through a forest of pillars. Besides the noise from her bending, she hadn’t uttered a sound. And that had to be difficult.
He had a hunch. “Where’s the loudest beach around here?” he asked.
The crash of surf below the cliffs of Tiger-dillo’s Roar was deafening. White water coming in met the brown, sandy backflow going out, in a line of battle that undulated along the coast. The rocks weren’t the tallest, nor the steepest or the most jagged, but they were slick with spray.
Kavik spotted a toe of undisturbed beach peeking out from behind an outcrop and suddenly wished his hunch were a lot stronger. Descending the cliffs would be difficult; getting back up nearly impossible for anyone who wasn’t an Airbender.
Well, this would be an act of faith, he supposed. Kavik took off his boots and sat down on his rear. He edged forward, and as soon as he felt himself slipping, he frosted the rock under his hands and feet, making his skin stick and halting his slide. Through the cracks in the stone, he wiggled his way down. He scraped his calves and elbows a couple of times, hissing when the salt crept into the cuts.
He dropped the last few feet to the sand. The numbness in his fingers and toes would go away; Jonduri was simply too warm for him to be in the same danger from the cold as he was in Bin-Er. Above, the cliff formed a slab roof, shading the small stretch of calm beach, half a tunnel over his head.
On the other end was Yangchen. Her disguise lay in a damp pile along with her heavier outer Air Nomad robes. She walked a small circle in lighter garments, her arms at her sides, and in the center of her ring a small whirlwind spun, made visible by a column of dust.
Kavik stood back, not wanting to interrupt a meditative practice. But he needn’t have worried about being the spoiler. The little cyclone lost its edges, and Yangchen staggered out of the circle’s path.
