The Dawn of Yangchen, page 28
Three people forcing a city to its knees. Three people holding off an army. Bending could be pushed to extremes, she knew all too well. But this was an entirely new level. None of her memories contained anything resembling the power she’d seen on display in Bin-Er.
The knowledge that this technique existed could not become widespread. Not now, when tensions across the Four Nations were still as raw as the emotions of a slighted king. Not ever, as long as humans were still human.
Kavik had asked what she would do with his brother and Chaisee. Reporting them to a head of state would cause Unanimity—she had a hard time setting aside the name—to leak into a world willing to fight over any scrap of advantage. She couldn’t risk taking drastic action personally either, not when Chaisee might have had more assets than just the three benders she knew about. As Yangchen had learned, an entire city could be held hostage.
The answer, had she been willing to give it to Kavik, was nothing. In her current state she could do nothing about Chaisee and his brother. For now, they were immune. Or at least Chaisee was. She could sit comfortably for the time being and receive the upside Unanimity was originally supposed to provide, with none of the drawbacks Henshe had suffered.
The Zongdu of Jonduri understood Yangchen’s hands were tied. Before her journey to see the Earth King, she’d received a message by hawk. The only sentence the tiny scroll contained was a taunt, even shorter than a koan.
Wise move. Yangchen had made no move, could make no move, and Chaisee knew it.
She’d been forced to become Mama’s ideal Avatar. Waiting calmly, virtuously, while her opponents smiled at her from across the board. They could chisel a statue of her in this state.
She dropped Nujian’s altitude when the lonely peak of the Northern Temple came into view. Pik and Pak would be waiting for her there, angry with her again, but she had to see to other matters first. She flew over the town and its hospital without stopping, and wove her way between the valleys, following trails of gravel between steep slopes of ice and rock.
A thin seam of green opened before her. Around the mountains there were a few completely isolated pockets of flat land that were nearly impossible to discover without an aerial view. Most of them went ignored, but a few had small hamlets that could be sustained as long as crucial supplies arrived regularly.
Yangchen descended upon the level patch. It contained a garden, three small stone hutches, and a natural spring of bubbling water. The view over the impassable terrain was starkly beautiful, curtains of clouds pulled back to reveal a stage that took the elements countless eras to dress.
She jumped down from Nujian. Abbot Sonam, leader of the Northern Temple, was there to meet her. They walked side by side, even though they didn’t have much space to stroll. She knew it was because he couldn’t bear to look her in the eye.
The disappointment and resentment in Sonam’s voice was thick enough to hold up the sky. “You have made jailers of us,” he said.
Across the patch of land, digging in the garden on his hands and knees, was one of Chaisee’s benders. The one named Thapa.
Six Airbenders from the Northern Temple surrounded him at a safe distance. They, and the monks who replaced them in shifts, had been selected from a community of pacifists for their martial prowess. They maintained a vigil over Thapa, like their brothers were doing for Yingsu and Xiaoyun in separate plots of land along the mountains.
Constant alertness throughout the hours of the day, watching mindfully in the moment, came naturally to them. The task was similar to the funerary rites Air Nomads were sometimes asked to perform across the Four Nations. A useful meditation, if she really wanted to stretch the definition of “shaped teachings.”
The monks parted to let Yangchen through. They had orders to subdue their charge if he made any aggressive moves, and that included the buildup necessary to perform his special technique. Kavik had managed to observe Xiaoyun through a window during the tail. Before each explosion they have to do a lot of deep, heavy breathing.
Thapa looked up at her, wiped his smooth, prominent forehead, and grinned. “Avatar.”
She kept as impassive as she could. “You enjoy gardening?”
“I do. Your brethren gave me some mountain flower seeds that do well in winter.” His smile widened. “But whether I’ll get to see them bloom is another matter. How long are you planning to keep me here?”
“That depends on if you answer my questions.” Where did you learn this technique? Who taught it to you? What was Zongdu Chaisee’s involvement? Yangchen had interrogated each of the Firebenders separately.
And gotten absolutely nothing so far.
“Mmm, I still don’t think I’m ready to share yet,” Thapa said. “I’m rather enjoying my little vacation. Wealthy people pay large sums of money for this kind of setup, you know? Yesterday I saw the most beautiful sunset of my life.” He tapped his blunted trowel on a rock.
Despite Thapa’s ease with his surroundings, Yangchen knew she had not converted him to the monastic life. He was stalling. He knew exactly how untenable the situation was for her. All three of her “special guests” did.
At first, she’d wondered if they were fanatics to some cause of Chaisee’s, or wayward travelers like Jujinta, searching for a purpose to go along with their immense power. But after spending time with them, she’d come to realize they were something far more dangerous.
They were opportunists. Smart ones.
The Firebenders understood their own value, and that it was better to be in the Avatar’s custody instead of an unscrupulous authority who would grind them to dust to extract their secrets. So they kept their lips sealed. Chaisee? They didn’t know a Chaisee. The most they’d admit to was being hired by Zongdu Henshe to do exactly as he commanded. Prior to that, they might as well have never existed.
Knowing Yangchen possessed no leverage over them, they seemed content to wait her out until the situation broke their way. The opportunity to escape would present itself. Or someone would find out where they were and come for them. She couldn’t keep them as hermits in the mountains forever, and they knew it.
Henshe and Yangchen were both wrong to think of them as merely pieces on the board. They were players in their own right, hungry to improve their position. And they muddied the waters to the point where she could no longer see in front of her own face.
How long before I surrender? Yangchen thought. How long before I beg the White Lotus to take you? A last resort. She didn’t want a secret society to have their power any more than she was content to let Chaisee keep it.
Information tended to spread. The Earth King would draw closer to these benders by the day. So would the Fire Lord and the High Chieftain, investigating the incident in Bin-Er through informants and rumors. Yangchen was flying through a dark, dangerous gorge, and her room to maneuver was rapidly shrinking around her shoulders.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” she said to Thapa. “Else we might put your talents to the summer barley.” She turned around and went back to Nujian, Sonam following her for the short return trip.
“You cannot keep them here that long!” the abbot whispered once they were both on the other side of her bison. “What you have done to your brothers is an abomination!”
“I’m sorry but I had no choice. I will apologize to each of them for forcing such an abhorrent task into their hands.”
“No, Avatar.” Sonam shook his head, sad that she’d missed the point. “The problem is that they might enjoy the job too much.”
He glanced over to the monks guarding Thapa. They were young men, strong benders all. “Holding dominion over another human being is a mighty temptation,” Sonam said. “If we developed a taste for such power, began to crave it . . .”
“Then we would no longer be Air Nomads,” Yangchen said. Sonam handed her Nujian’s reins. “Just go,” he said. “Please.”
Her next stop was less of a hassle. Zongdu Henshe was nowhere near as difficult to guard.
In fact, they’d given him a room that was part of the Air Temple itself, one of the structures built into the stone farther down the slope, below the gently overhanging cliffs. His accommodations were as good as any honored guest of the Air Nomads.
He’d still raged the whole first day and night, unable to absorb the fact that his alternative was the Earth King’s hospitality. It became clear very quickly that he was not the true mastermind behind the scheme. Chaisee had successfully kept him in the dark about most of Unanimity’s details.
She still had to check on him though. Yangchen knocked on his door and entered. Henshe looked up from where he sat on the bed. He hadn’t availed himself of any of the books they’d given him except to hurl them at the walls. They lay scattered in the corners, spines bent, pages torn.
He seemed to be in a calmer state now, perhaps helped by the small pillow he squeezed his fingers into over and over. “I understand my predicament,” he said to Yangchen by way of greeting. “But I understand yours too. How much time do you really think you have before the truth slips through your fingers and is loosed upon the world?”
“I have exactly as much as you do,” she said.
Henshe was caught off guard by her ominous but true statement. He shook his head and continued. “I have something to trade.”
“What?”
“A name. A person.” His lips pressed into lines of smugness. “I have a deep plant in Chaisee’s organization, very high up, very trusted by her. If you had his identity, you could threaten to burn him to Chaisee. He’d be forced to turn to your side. You could use him to take her down.”
Henshe got up from the bed. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “You clear me of any wrongdoing, convincingly, and make me whole from my losses. I’ll give you this person’s name, description, family. What do you say?”
He was trying to sell out Kavik’s brother. Kalyaan. The one Yangchen already knew about.
“I don’t want it,” she said.
“What? But I can—”
“I said I don’t want your information.” If Kavik had ever given her a gift, it was the look on Henshe’s face right now. “Goodbye, Zongdu. Until we next talk.”
He at least had the courtesy to wait for the door to close before screaming and throwing the pillow.
The tower stairs never seemed to end. Onward and inward they circled, sending Yangchen into loops upon loops. If she were a spider-snake, she would have swallowed her own tail at least a dozen times. She trudged higher, taking each step slowly.
The handle of the bucket bit into her palms, the contents sloshing over her toes. She needed the water to drink and wash. She would know its weight. The interior of the tower was speared through with warm light coming through its windows. The sunset. She ignored it.
She reached the Avatar’s quarters of the Northern Temple. She used them so rarely when she visited, preferring to stay in the visitor’s dormitories with her sisters, that she hadn’t exercised her right to decorate it yet. The interior remained in the exact same state Avatar Szeto had left it.
She shouldered the door open and put the bucket down. The room was completely empty except for the bed and the desk. The walls were bare. To an outside observer, Szeto would look like a man who clearly had nothing to hide.
What a messy life that was. She slumped into her predecessor’s austere chair and squeezed her head between her hands. The gray fuzz. Back with a vengeance.
Only one thought was sharp enough to cut through the fog, and it repeated itself over and over. It called to her as deeply as the dark wells of Ma’inka, grew in strength until it was as loud as the roaring waves of Jonduri.
She could stop.
After she dealt with the Firebenders, after she dealt with the Earth King and Bin-Er, after she dealt with Henshe and Chaisee and Kavik and his brother—and why not, Mama and the White Lotus as well—she could stop trying to reshape the world. What had she been doing, throwing herself headlong against suffering where she found it? Where had she not multiplied the people’s miseries instead?
She should stop.
She’d still be the Avatar. The figurehead, the object of veneration you turned to well after desperation had latched its hooks into your flesh. As Lohi of the Saowon had proven, that was what people asked for first and valued most. The problem addressed, not prevented. The salve, not the cure.
Her heritage provided the perfect excuse to withdraw. She’d embrace negative jing and retreat far, far away, becoming a mountain peak that humanity could see but never reach. They’d be better off. She wouldn’t hurt anyone with her mistakes.
She wouldn’t save anyone either.
Yangchen was struck by how little the prospect weighed on her. She didn’t feel guilty for considering the future lived over the future earned. She didn’t feel much of anything. Her parade through Bin-Er might as well have happened in another life, on the other side of a boundary marked by regret.
The blankness she had to push away every morning could be allowed permanent residence in her body, her heart, and her gut. She could embrace it fully. She didn’t owe anyone anything.
I’d have time to find Jetsun.
She heard a whoosh and a thump, and her head jerked up. Another whoosh, another thump, and Abbot Sonam was standing outside the door she’d forgotten to close. “Avatar,” he said, huffing and puffing. His head had beaded over with sweat.
Had he spin-jumped up the tower? He wouldn’t have acted so rashly had it not been important. She stood up quickly in alarm. “What is it? The Firebenders? Henshe?”
“No.” The smile on his face outshone the flushed glow of his skin. “I’m so sorry that I forgot to tell you. I mean, it was understandable given the circumstances, with all the goings-on and—”
“Abbot, please.”
Sonam caught his breath. “Do you remember that woman in the hospital?” he said. “The one you healed with your Waterbender friend?”
Yangchen needed a moment to recall. The patient whom she would have lost if it hadn’t been for Kavik’s help. They’d done that together at least. The extra pair of hands had paid off.
But the memory was bittersweet. There was a reason why she hadn’t wanted to think about it much. “What about her?”
“We found her son. We found her missing son! The search party found him just in time! He’s alive and well!”
Yangchen blinked slowly. Her voice came out a creak. “Oh. Good. That’s good.”
“Without you and your companion—Kavik, was it? Without the two of you saving his mother, we would never have rescued the boy.” Sonam beamed brighter than the sun had over the mountains. “Avatar, you never gave up on her. Don’t you remember?”
Did she remember. She always remembered. Her lip trembled and she began to weep. The abbot smiled, thinking happiness, alone and pure, had brought tears to her eyes. He didn’t know that he’d dragged her back from the edge in shackles. Sentenced her to another turn of the wheel.
Yangchen could pretend all she wanted but it was no use. She would remain the instrument of her own suffering. She’d keep fighting, keep struggling, just like she’d commanded the unconscious woman to do in the hospital. It was her fate to make the same choice over and over again, as generations of Avatars had done before her. To know the past was to know the future.
“They’re still in town,” the abbot said. “I can take you to them now.”
She saw their ages reversed, Sonam the youth sparkling with energy, she the eroded, weary fixture. “Tomorrow. We’ll have plenty of time tomorrow. No need to rush.”
The abbot bowed and left. She stood motionless where she was, until the sun finished setting and only darkness filled the window. She decided to turn in early. She still had much to do, and she would need her strength.
High in her tower, Yangchen went to bed. And for once fell into a deep, dreamless, restful sleep.
EPILOGUE
Kavik heard Yangchen’s name on people’s lips often these days as he moved through the streets of a slowly recovering Bin-Er. It was the young Avatar who’d put a stop to the spirit attacks, they said, just like she’d done in Tienhaishi. Since then she’d been spotted flying in and out of the city regularly, never leaving for too long, and there hadn’t been any more ravages through the sky. She’d become humanity’s champion when they needed her most.
The residents of Bin-Er also took comfort in the increased presence of Air Nomads from the Northern Temple, who normally didn’t linger long but now could be seen in every neighborhood. Monks and visiting nuns distributed food and clothing while the flow of supplies returned to normal. They lent a sense of calm and peace with their presence, while also giving the impression they formed a shield of sorts against further depredations by spirit or man.
All signs pointed to this theory being true. The Earth King had not invaded. The shangs and their headkickers had stayed out of sight, as if rightfully shamed by the increased attention upon Bin-Er. The control offices suddenly found their ink, and people started going home.
Even stranger, folks who’d fled the city came back of their own accord, down from the mountains. Some of them professed to have been healed by the Avatar herself, claimed to be alive only due to her graces. It was among these returnees where belief was strongest. Little shrines of wildflowers popped up overnight on street corners. “Yangchen’s steps,” they were jokingly named, as if life bloomed wherever the Avatar’s feet touched the ground. But some people called them that without irony, and any time one of the arrangements was thrown out or blown away, it was quickly replaced.
Everywhere, Kavik was reminded of the Avatar. Knowing she could see him if she wanted to but didn’t was the lightest punishment possible for his transgression. It still hurt. He assumed Jujinta, Akuudan, and Tayagum had learned the truth, as they hadn’t visited either.
He wandered the streets as if he still had the responsibility of an Avatar’s companion. He knew this was what Jujinta must have been doing in Jonduri, drifting until his purpose came along. Kavik had already squandered two perfectly good ones.
