The Dawn of Yangchen, page 19
“Jujinta’s probably going to love this mission,” Kavik muttered.
“Yes. Tell us more about this partner of yours,” Yangchen said.
Kavik explained everything he’d observed about the knife thrower, including his obsessive spirituality. In the association safe house, he’d seen Jujinta whisper to himself or kneel in a corner so many times that Kavik was able to draw for Yangchen a passable recreation of the symbol he worshipped.
“Interesting,” she said. “Do you think the boy is going to be trouble?”
Kavik remembered Shigoro rolling around the floor, bleeding from his arm. He vaguely remembered Jujinta guiding him through the body disposal process. It was too late to do anything about his partner now but cope.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” Kavik said.
“What’s the count inside?” Jujinta asked as they crossed the street.
“Should be five right now, give or take,” said their leader, a gaunt Earth Kingdom transplant named Pang who was missing his bottom front teeth, knocked out in some long-ago fight. “They’ve had people coming in and out over the course of the past couple days. Tael said they won’t be at full strength tonight.”
The association had nine people in their group, including Jujinta and Kavik. Two to one. Kavik did not like how a sense of satisfaction threatened to creep up his spine, being a member of a large pack about to overpower a smaller one. At least the stacked odds meant the association wouldn’t need Kavik to subdue the people inside. He could split off from the group and search for the logbook.
They came to the warehouse front. Pang raised his foot and kicked open the workers’ entrance, snapping the latch. He ducked inside, the rest of them following close behind. Kavik briefly wondered why the door hadn’t been barricaded, but if the workers had to leave in shifts for food and rest, it made sense that they wouldn’t block their own passage.
The bigger question was why there were no guards posted. The interior lamps, placed high along the walls at regular intervals to shorten the shadows, had all been lit. Stacks of wooden crates, some of them so large they could only have been dragged with winches, formed towers reaching twice as tall as a person, the smallest boxes neatly placed edge to edge on top, creating sheer faces down the sides. A moat of empty space surrounded each little castle.
He craned his head to the ceiling almost involuntarily, the way Tael had smugly observed. There was water above him, rainwater contained in a giant thin-walled metal tank. At first, he thought it would surely be too foul to drink, but then realized it was probably meant to be used for putting out fires inside the warehouse. With so much of his element nearby he felt a little bit like a sap for bringing his own.
The workers were nowhere to be seen. Pang made a sucking noise through the gap in his teeth. “They must have got spooked and hid between the crates. Gonna be a blasted kid’s game, chasing them around an orchard.”
“Nah, Sifu,” came a voice from the other end of the building. “We’re right here. And I think we’ll do the chasing.” A man stepped out from behind the boxes. And then another. And another. The line of workers kept growing.
“Their group is, uh, bigger than ours,” Kavik said.
Not only did they have more people, but each member of the warehouse crew was huge, nearly the size of Akuudan, with thick necks and knotted forearms. Ah, right, Kavik thought. These guys lifted heavy cargo for a living.
One of the association members angrily jostled Pang in the elbow. “You said there were five!”
“Tael said there were five!”
“This is five fives!”
Indeed. Two dozen very large, very angry workers stood across from them. A better example of why one needed to pay up for a good errand runner could not have been devised. Intelligence mattered. In all his Bin-Er jobs, Kavik had taken care to get his numbers right.
The warehouse crew, many of whom bore a family resemblance to each other, stepped forward and bellowed, sticking out their tongues and showing the whites of their eyes.
“We’re not leaving,” Pang said to his own men. “You want to explain to the boss-boss that you turned tail and ran, go ahead, but if you think for one second that—Hey!”
There was no one standing behind him. Two of the association members were already trying the door, but it had been closed and barred again, this time from the outside. Kavik slipped out of the way between the nearest crates, giving him a perfect framed view of Pang getting absolutely demolished by a running shoulder tackle from a man twice his weight.
He zigzagged through the alleys of the warehouse, trying to get to the back. Both to see if there was another exit and to get closer to the area where the logbook would be stored. If the office had interior locks, he wasn’t above bolting himself inside to wait out the worker’s ire.
A bright flash lit up the rafters, and he heard the telltale foom of air split by flame. Firebending had broken out; he wasn’t sure by which side. Distracted by the noise and light, he nearly ran into the waiting arms of the man blocking his path.
“Where you going, Sifu?” said the hulking worker.
The other way. But when Kavik turned to look, he saw another man had stepped into the lane behind him.
“You carrying drinks for the party?” said the second guy, motioning at the vessel Kavik was still clinging onto. “Cause I’m already thirsty.”
Both of the workers laughed, but the first one cut his chuckle short when he realized why someone would be awkwardly hauling a container of liquid around. “Wait.”
Kavik flung the entire jug without emptying it at the guy in front of him. A whirl of his arms accelerated the water inside, and the heavy missile slammed into his target’s gut hard enough to shatter the clay. The man gasped and collapsed to the ground, clutching his stomach.
Sorry. With a pull to match the push, Kavik yanked on the water, leaving the clay shards behind—because again, he wasn’t a monster—and whipped a speeding blob back the other way.
The second guy hunched over and held his forearms crossed in front of his face, hoping his toughness and bulk would protect him. But brawlers went high. Wrestlers went low. Kavik lowered the angle of his flying water and knocked the man’s feet out from under him. The poor worker took a hard landing on the hard floor and didn’t get up, only groaned and reached for a helping hand that wasn’t there. Sorry.
Kavik brought the water close to himself and cradled it into a sphere, Grasping the Bird’s Tail. Tayagum had laughed at him earlier for admitting to losing fights. But he didn’t lose every fight.
The logbook. The important documents would be in the back. Every building in Jonduri had its corner office, he reasoned. Kavik crept through the intersections, slowly weaving his element around himself, keeping it in motion, so he could strike with it at a moment’s notice.
The sound of snapping lumber made him pause. He peeked around the corner and almost got an eye taken out by a flying splinter.
Four men had trapped Jujinta by wielding long wooden planks, swinging them back and forth like torches against a jungle predator. Kavik’s partner fended them off with nothing but a dagger in hand, raised high. The first person to come near him would get plugged.
The problem was that the instant Jujinta picked a target and threw his weapon, he’d get rushed by the others. He’ll be fine, Kavik thought. He was doing great, holding up a bunch by himself.
Other priorities were at stake. Kavik moved sideways to skirt the fight, fully intending to just sprint the rest of the way to the back office. But some reflex, some twinge, made him pause and look one more time around the corner again.
From this angle he got spotted. Not by the workers but by Jujinta. The two partners made eye contact. The distraction was enough for a plank to come crashing down onto Jujinta’s shoulders. He toppled to the ground, and his opponents pounced, laying into him with vicious kicks and stomps.
Kavik swore up and down. At this rate someone else was going to beat him to the logbook. An association man wanting to salvage some small victory, or a worker trying to secure the most valuable asset they knew was inside the warehouse.
He glanced one last time in the direction he was supposed to be going and then stepped out into the open. “Hey, Sifus!”
They stopped kicking the living spirits out of Jujinta. So at least that goal had been accomplished. The rest was up in the air.
The four men still standing looked at Kavik and then each other before chuckling. “Look at this guy,” said the worker closest to Jujinta. “I don’t think he can count.”
Instead of splitting his water between the tentacles of Octopus form, which would have rendered them too thin to do much damage, Kavik wrapped all the liquid he had around his right arm, turning it into a massive limb big enough to wield a bundle of planks as a single giant club.
“One,” Kavik said. “That enough?”
Jujinta woke with a start, his face dripping. “What the—Where are we?”
“Shh,” Kavik said. “We’re still inside the warehouse.”
They were on top of a crate tower, to be exact. The fight as a whole had not gone well for the association, and getting to an elevated position was the only thing that Kavik could think to do while Jujinta regained consciousness. The problem was that now they were treed like pygmy-pumas.
“You defeated those men,” Jujinta said. “And then you healed me with waterbending.”
“Sure. That’s what happened.” It would be more accurate to say Kavik had scared them off by flailing about wildly. And he still didn’t know how to heal. He’d splashed Jujinta over and over again until he woke up. It was the only thing he could do with the little water he had left, and now it was gone.
They crawled to the edge of their stack and peeked over. Below, by the main walkways of the loading area, the other association members had been rounded up and forced to sit on the floor. The invaders looked woozy and beaten, but they were alive. Even Pang, who should have been flatter than a scallion bing after the hit he took.
“You there up on the boxes; you’re still outnumbered,” shouted the opposing leader, who was not the oldest or most battle-scarred member of their group, but a young man with long wavy hair cascading in abundance around his shoulders.
Jujinta hurled a blade over the side, barely looking, the way a child might throw a snowball from the cover of their fort. Kavik saw the spinning metal tumble point-first into the foot of a worker standing next to the leader. “Less so now,” Jujinta called out, as his victim shrieked and fell over, pinned to the ground.
Rather than get angry, the leader of the workers grimaced and rubbed his eyes. Kavik felt the same way. The longer this stalemate played out, the more dignity everyone lost.
“Please stop knifing people for the moment,” Kavik said to Jujinta as calmly as he could. He needed time to think.
Jujinta nodded. “Because I’ve only got two left. Good call.”
Pang started to laugh. Kavik thought it might have been from a head swell, but the association man was as lucid as could be. “You and your friends are history, you know that?” he said to the young man holding him captive. “Thanks to our boys up there distracting you, we got the logbook out. You’ve got no leverage now.”
In a panic, Kavik counted the captured men next to Pang. One missing. He flipped onto his back and slammed his elbows into the crate below him in frustration. If he hadn’t stopped to save Jujinta’s sorry carcass, he might have been able to complete his mission.
“You see, this is what I don’t get about you association people,” said the leader of the warehouse crew, his voice wavering. “What has Chaisee given you to deserve your loyalty, huh? Other than the chance to step on us? You’d suffer to keep her in power when she wouldn’t spare you one of her sandals to eat.”
The man ran a hand through his long hair, gathering the strands. His face was covered in sweat. “Negotiating with her was never an option, was it?” he murmured.
He walked over to the base of the tower Kavik and Jujinta were on, then took a Low Horse stance and inhaled deeply.
“No, no, no!” Kavik shouted in horror. “Don’t do that! We can talk!”
The crew leader punched forth a stream of flame at the wooden crates. The highly flammable wooden crates.
“What are you doing?” Pang screamed. “This whole place’ll go up before you know it!”
“You ever stand on a jetty and watch a really big wave come in?” the man said as he spread the fire back and forth. “Not knowing whether it’ll die down before it reaches you, or keep gaining strength until it smashes you in the face?”
His flames petered out and he flopped down next to Pang, resigned, his elbows on his knees. A campfire outing after a bad day. “We’re on the rocks together now, Sifu,” he said, staring at the blaze he’d created. “I think we’ll all sit here together until enough damage has been done.”
His crew seemed to agree. A couple of them took brooms and rolled up sheaves of paper, touching them to the fire. They started going down the crate stacks with their improvised torches. The air began to fill with smoke.
“What are the two of you up there going to do?” the crew leader called out. “Burn for Chaisee’s sake?”
Kavik looked at his partner.
“This is the worst job I’ve ever been on,” Jujinta said, sounding as matter-of-fact as he had outside at the tea stand. The crackling of flames grew louder. “Have you ever considered you’ve been cursed by the spirits?”
Many times. The obvious solution was the water reservoir, nearly at eye level now that they were so high up. But still distant. He wound his arms and tried to pull his element to him. Nothing. The tank was too far away, and the seals were too tight. “I need an opening,” he muttered.
Jujinta got to his knees but was wobbly from the hits he’d taken. “Stand back.” He took one of his two remaining knives, sighted down the handle, and hurled it hard across the distance, sticking the point in the metal.
Nothing happened. The weapon wasn’t heavy enough. “I have to hammer it deeper,” Jujinta said. He hefted his last knife in his hand, as if he were making adjustments in his head for miniscule variations in weight and balance.
“You miss and we’re both out of weapons,” Kavik said.
Jujinta paused. He whispered to himself so softly Kavik almost didn’t hear him. “A Yuyan does not miss.” The words sounded painful for him to say, barbs lodged in his throat.
Whatever the notion meant to Jujinta, he shook it off and made his second throw, duplicating his previous movements so exactly that Kavik was convinced he’d inhaled too much smoke and witnessed the same moment in time twice. The last knife went flying through the air and landed in the pommel of the first, driving the blade further into the tank. A spray leaked around the knives, and then they were ejected by the pressure. Water poured out of the hole.
“That’s actually harder than what Shigoro did,” Jujinta said, before he slumped over and lay down again, resting his arm over his eyes.
Kavik didn’t know what a Yuyan was, and he had a feeling his mysterious partner would be less than forthcoming if they ever talked about it. But that wasn’t important right now. Jujinta’s precision had opened a breach.
The walls of the tank were no longer an obstacle. Kavik widened the stream, tearing a bigger hole, unleashing a huge amount of stored-up pressure. The weight of water. He couldn’t stop this much if he wanted to. He redirected the torrent coming out of the tank and splashed it along the flames, dousing everyone and everything inside the warehouse.
As the men below shrieked beneath the indoor waves, Kavik realized he was in control right now. The only Waterbender present. A king atop his mountain.
And right now, the king had a mission to complete for the Avatar.
THE RECKONING
“You did not think this through,” Tael said as he led Kavik through the wreckage in the warehouse.
True. It had been a spur of the moment thing. And like most impulses, split between regrettable and victorious.
Some of the crates Kavik had sliced open with blades of water, shearing the faces off whole stacks where they were neatly aligned; others he’d burst open with internal pressure, ripping nails and pegs free from their holes. Everyone inside except for him and Jujinta had gotten knocked off their feet by a flood of slimy rainwater full of debris.
As the last man standing in the aftermath, Kavik had sifted through the wreckage before reinforcements from the association arrived. And to his deepening dread, he’d found nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that could have spurred a power grab. No money, no weapons, no hidden locked containers inside the crates.
The most likely explanation was that he’d just missed something. But it turned out Tael was the type of jerk who would rub a pet’s nose in the spot they’d made to teach the poor animal a lesson.
“Komodo-rhino hides, scraped, five pallets,” Tael said, peeking his head inside. “Derelict.”
“Komodo-rhino hides, scraped, five pallets,” Kavik repeated. He winced as he put a mark next to the entry in the very logbook he’d came here for. “Derelict.”
“Chop seal blanks, ten dozen. Fine, surprisingly.”
About half the shipments were declared ruined after he and Tael poked through them. “Chop seal blanks, fine.” Kavik was getting every bit of information he could have possibly hoped for, in great detail, with an extra eyewitness confirmation. A spy’s dream. The only problem was that the logbook he was holding contained a tally of how much money he had personally cost the Zongdu of Jonduri tonight, and it grew in giant steps with each shipment declared unsalvageable.
It was like forcing the prisoner to build his own gallows. “Spotted sea prunes, dried, twenty barrels, derelict,” Tael said. “Striped sea prunes, dried, twenty barrels, derelict. Mink-snake fur, collars and ruffs, full crate, derelict. Camel-yak wool, second grade, five hundred skeins, derelict.”
