The Dawn of Yangchen, page 7
He had to offer a token amount of resistance to her ploys to soothe his conscience. He’d sworn an oath to the Western elders to keep her safe. Luckily, she wasn’t planning anything as dangerous as fighting a giant armored spirit right now. “Tell me when,” Boma said.
“I will. Keep walking.”
The two of them strolled down the vaulted corridor of the hall. Searing brightness came through the windows, the higher sun reflecting off the snow. They reached the door Yangchen had memorized from the building plans Kavik nearly stole before she had the chance to. She took a quick glance around once they were shielded from view by a little foyer. “Now,” she said.
Yangchen twirled off her heavy hooded cloak and draped it over Boma’s shoulders. As he stepped out into the snow, he tried to get a little bit more height by straightening his back and rising on the balls of his feet. Anyone watching from the second floor would see the Avatar heading back to her bison.
The effect was . . . not good. Boma’s impersonation of her looked tipsy, and she’d failed to consider the obvious. Two people leaving were now one.
She didn’t have time to bemoan the shortcomings of her plan. She earthbent a section off the plastered-over wall next to her, keeping the bricks together as a single panel, to reveal a cramped nook. She stepped inside and pulled the brickwork shut behind her as tightly she could.
This maintenance tunnel was her access point to the underground flues running below the original gathering hall. In days long past, hot air and smoke from an ancient furnace flowed underneath the leaders of Bin-Er to keep them warm. Yangchen didn’t know why the system had been abandoned when the hall was rebuilt through successive generations. Maybe a cost problem. She flicked her hand open to hold a candle’s worth of flame and looked around.
She frowned once her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The dusty gap before her was between knee and waist high. The plans had been a top-down view only and made no mention of this axis.
No matter. She lowered herself, wadding up her robes and her body as much as she could, and shoved her legs into the crevice. With a series of grunts, she managed to get her whole body underneath the floor.
She had just enough space to roll onto her belly and start crawling. The heat chamber hadn’t been cleaned before it was abandoned for good, and she had to make her way across a layer of soot.
Her head bumped into one of the squat stone columns that supported the layer above her. These, at least, had been on the map. From the entry point, she wanted to go five columns north, twenty columns east.
Twenty. She had to hurry.
Ghostly cobwebs brushed across her face and flecks of ash wandered up her nose, forcing her to snort them out like an ostrich-horse. Boma and Sidao alike would have withered in shame at the indignity she was subjecting herself to.
For a good cause. And I remember doing more embarrassing things than this, many times over.
Theoretically, her ploy would work. Vital intelligence had been gathered over the centuries by eavesdropping behind secret hollows of the Fire Temple and opaque screens in the Northern Water Tribe palace. She could already hear an attendant pass above her, muttering to himself about the poor mood his master would be in later this evening. But she needed to make it back to the assembly room, and quick, if she wanted to gain any product of relevance.
Her bulky, dragging robes snagged on a crumbling column. Yangchen swore under her breath using words she’d overheard down at the docks. She rolled onto her side and tugged hard on her caught hem. There was a chak! where she expected to hear a tear.
The sturdy wool had pulled an entire section of mortar loose. Her eyes widened as a crack traveled up the column and across the upper surface of the chamber. Heavy stone tiles began to drop.
Her light went out as she traded firebending with one hand for earthbending with two, catching the masonry before a crash gave her away. She managed to stay the tiles farthest away, like a servant in a stage comedy floundering for spilled teacups, but the last chunk came down right over her and broke its fall on her ribs.
Yangchen gasped in the dark. The tile that had made it through the defenses she’d been so vain about earlier hadn’t traveled far, but it was heavy and sharp. Worse, the pain was excruciatingly familiar to someone who wasn’t her.
The right kind of hurt delivered at the right time could knock her off-kilter no matter how many of Abbess Dagmola’s exercises she’d performed in the morning. In the void of the chamber, there was no sight or sound of the present for her to latch on to. The chalky air scraped her throat raw. Her heart slammed against the walls of her chest, trying to break free.
“Not you,” she dared to whisper, the need for silence pushed aside. “Not you. Not you.”
She didn’t know whose terror had paralyzed her, whose memories had boxed her in, but it didn’t matter. It was pure math. Out of a thousand lives, at least a few Avatars would have been debilitatingly afraid of confined spaces.
It was their fingernails raking across the soot, seeking purchase. Their voices closing shut in a chorus of suffocation. She fought to maintain control. Avatar Yangchen isn’t afraid of being buried alive. You’re not going to die here. You’re not going to die.
But she had perished so many times, hadn’t she? The downside of being endlessly reborn, the endless ends. Her body and mind remembered how to take a final breath. Yangchen clamped her arms around her stomach and curled in on herself, trying to compact into a featureless lump before the closing walls did it themselves.
WAKE UP.
A voice from her own memories. Not a previous Avatar’s. Jetsun’s voice.
WAKE UP.
Her own memories. Hadn’t the Water Tribe boy who’d tried to crawl through the walls of her room gotten stuck like this? He had survived. His name was Kavik, and he’d survived his ordeal. She was fairly certain.
She blinked slowly. No one else in the cycle had met the audacious burglar named Kavik. The boy’s name was Kavik, and he had nice teeth, and she’d held his frozen hands until they warmed. Yangchen had done that. Her name was Yangchen, and she wasn’t afraid of cramped spaces any more than she was of soaring heights.
She took a deep breath and gagged on dust. Right. She was in the middle of embarrassing herself for the sake of duty. Who but Yangchen could she be?
The bout of someone else’s fear had cost her time. Seconds, hours, she couldn’t be sure. She’d find out once she got to where she was going. Reaching out to judge the space, she aligned herself in the direction she hoped east was. She’d done this trick once before, through the pillars of an airball field, and Jetsun had been furious at her for a week.
Let it be said that the Avatar who followed Szeto was more foolhardy than fearful. Yangchen grabbed the crumbling columns to the left and right of her and launched herself forward, spinning like an arrow with offset fletching.
Her robes wound around her body while she bent a spray of air that kept her from colliding with floor or ceiling. She landed on her back and skidded to a stop. Amazed she hadn’t dashed her brains out, she snapped her fingers for a flicker of light and counted the columns. Twenty-two. Overshot by a bit, but close enough.
Voices above her, the creak of benches, told her she was back under the assembly room where she could listen to the shangs’ response to the fire she’d set to their seats.
There were people above her, but little conversation. In a massive stroke of luck, it seemed like she hadn’t missed much. The shangs were waiting, probably for Henshe, whose voice she hadn’t registered yet.
She would have to be patient as well. Yangchen made herself as comfortable as she could and settled in for her opponent’s turn.
OUTSIDE OPTIONS
Henshe splashed water from the basin across his face. It was cold enough to blue his lips if he dunked his head in it for more than a minute. He was a “Middler,” as the Water Tribe youths of Bin-Er liked to call people from the Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation, but he never really minded the frigid climate. It was and always had been the least of his concerns.
He squeezed his eyes shut, letting the liquid drip down his nose. Then he grasped the small wooden tub with both hands and hurled it against the far wall of the empty barracks. The water spilled across the floor. The basin made a hollow thunk and bounced instead of breaking, as if to make light of his rage.
This is what he’d been reduced to. Hiding in the washroom, weeping. He wanted to scream at the injustice of it all.
Henshe took his time drying his face with his sleeve. Ablutions were one of the few moments of the day when he wasn’t at the beck and call of the shangs. They’d harangue him in his dreams if they could. He walked past the empty wooden beds, the weaponless racks. Bin-Er, like its sister cities in the other nations, was allowed nothing to protect itself against the sovereign land around it.
In the hallway, he beckoned the leader of his watchers over, a young woman named Miki. He had placed attendants around the windows and corners and told them to stay on the lookout for anything suspicious. “Where’s the Avatar?” he asked.
“She left. I saw her take off on her bison.”
“And her companion?”
Miki’s eyes widened. “I don’t know.”
Henshe stared at her. “You lost track of a slow-moving old man?”
The woman couldn’t answer. She was a non-bender with a younger brother at home, Henshe remembered. Not the healthiest scamp, always sick with some kind of cough or another.
“I’ll tell you what, Miki.” He gestured at a bamboo scaffolding reaching all the way up to the highest window of the hall, long forgotten from an interior repainting job abandoned halfway. “Why don’t you go check that he’s not on the roof, spying on us this very moment?”
“The—the roof, sir?”
“I know it’s steep and a little icy, but it’s where I need you the most right now.” Henshe placed his hand on her shoulder. “We’ve been put at a disadvantage because we didn’t consider anyone watching us from an elevated position. Let’s not make the same mistake twice.”
Henshe paid all his watchers out of his own coffer, and he’d specifically chosen people with few alternative means of making a living. Without his continued blessing, they’d be on the streets. Miki’s lip trembled, but she went to the scaffolding and, with difficulty, hauled herself up to the first level.
The joints of the structure were loose from neglect. The bamboo wobbled and creaked under her weight, months-old dust raining down. She looked back over her shoulder before attempting to climb any higher. Henshe smiled encouragingly at her.
“You’re doing great, Miki,” he said. “Keep up the good work.”
A few deep breaths were necessary before he parted the doors to the assembly room. The men and women inside were already standing. Had they been mirrors in the sun, he would have been cooked alive.
Henshe maintained his grin. “What a meeting, huh?”
Teiin, famous among the Bin-Er commonfolk for never saying a word in public, was the first to lose it. “I don’t like being pointed at, Henshe!” he screamed. “I don’t like being pointed at! You said you would handle the Avatar! That wasn’t handling it!”
Teiin whipped around so he could tear into Sidao, who was supposed to be their spy on the inside of the Avatar’s retinue. “And you! What do we pay you for, you idiot? You let her scout the docks for nearly a month? How hard is it to keep track of a single girl?”
“She’s unpredictable!” Sidao wailed. “None of this would have happened if you all had kept the flow of traffic within limits!”
Wrong response. The people who paid you were never at fault. Henshe watched as the merchants swarmed upon Sidao, a school of fish devouring a floating corpse. Something about this city stripped away decorum from its people and exposed the raw skeletons underneath. A high-ranking Fire National would never throw a tantrum in a formal setting. An Earth Kingdom citizen forgetting to maintain face? A Water Tribe trader withholding their legendary generosity? Unheard of. Unless they were shangs.
An Air Nomad having us by the throat, Henshe mused. Only in Bin-Er.
As fun as it was to watch Sidao suffer instead of himself for a change, Henshe did need to do his job. He walked up to the raised dais where the Avatar had sat and stamped his foot like bailiffs of years gone by. “My friends,” he said. “Please remain calm.”
Mistress Noehi, who had so enjoyed provoking the Avatar earlier, chewed on her knuckle like a soup bone. “Calm?! The Earth King is going to raze us to the ground, Henshe! You try staying calm!”
He was. He was trying. Unlike the rest of them, he couldn’t afford public panic. Henshe continued to beat a jig on the platform until everyone was paying attention to him. “My esteemed friends! As hard as it is to believe, we should be grateful to the young Avatar.”
There was no way Henshe could get away with saying that if he hadn’t a solution in store. So the shangs gave him the benefit of the doubt and let him continue. “She’s reminded us of the fatal flaw in our system,” he said. “We exist purely at the whim of a petulant Earth King. Nor are we any less vulnerable to the Fire Lord, or the Chief of the Water Tribe, should they decide to back out of their trade agreements. Any head of state could end us if they wanted to.”
Noehi snorted. “Are you saying you have a way to fix that flaw?”
“I do. You’ve heard me talk about it before. Unanimity.”
A few of the younger shangs, those who had more recently come into their positions, didn’t recognize the code name. “I thought the Unanimity project was a goose-monkey chase,” said the old stalwart Teiin. “A theoretical obsession of your predecessor. He never shared with us the details, only the possibilities.”
“I assure you it’s completely real, and it’s finished,” Henshe said. “Dooshim was working on it with Zongdu Chaisee of Jonduri, just in case a scenario like this one ever occurred.”
The shangs were nervous despite the project representing the very answer they were looking for. Henshe found their indecisiveness abhorrent. At least the Avatar had the courage to escalate.
“We have been caught out in a bad position,” Henshe said. “Unanimity is how we recover our footing. We never had a solid position to fall back on when it came to negotiating with the Earth King, but we do now.”
He paced along the dais, around the grand chair and the small table where the Avatar’s tea setting remained. “If we bring it into play, neither the Avatar nor the Earth King will have power over us. We’ll have complete impunity. The Earth King will sign any charter you want him to sign. We’ll be able to rewrite the laws in Omashu if we feel like. And the Avatar will be forced to keep her nose out of other people’s business.”
This was where the nun had erred. To reach agreement on something, you overpromised first and worried about the delivery later. You sold the moon for a silver piece and handed over a ladder. “Now,” Henshe said, “I will do what I always do and solve this problem for you. Any objections?”
None, for once. Henshe picked up the half-full cup the Avatar had left behind and raised it in the air. Toasting himself since no one else would, using his opponent’s words. “To our future.” He drained the rest of her tea.
One of the stupidest parts about being the zongdu was how you were judged on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis. Have one bad conversation in the morning and you were a failure forever. Make a convincing speech in the afternoon and you were solid. A reliable presence.
Today Henshe was so-so at his job. He’d brought a sliver of hope to a disaster with nothing but sheer confidence. As the shangs left, Mistress Noehi gave him parting words. “What’s mine is mine, Henshe,” she said. “I’m not giving up what I’ve earned. You’d better see to that.”
“Of course.” Henshe hid his scoff with his bow. Noehi acted like she’d clawed her riches from the sea with her bare hands, when she probably had never seen a spiraled oyster that hadn’t already been shucked. Her father had been granted the pearl monopoly simply because he’d had the same calligraphy tutor as the Earth King, and then he died of a heart clutch, leaving the entire business to his daughter.
Earned. That was the thing about these merchants. They feigned enterprise and risk-taking when all they were doing was drinking from a river no one else was allowed to approach.
After they left, Henshe almost didn’t realize Minister Sidao was still in the room. Once it was just the two of them, the Avatar’s advisor sat down on the dais itself and hugged his knees, as if Henshe cared about his troubles and was going to offer a shoulder to cry on.
“I’m as good as burned,” Sidao moaned. “There’s no way Teiin or anyone else will keep me on after today.”
You’re old enough to be my father, you pathetic sea slug. “Don’t worry about it,” Henshe said, staring at the man’s back. “You’re not burned until she signs your dismissal. In fact, you have the most important role to play here. I need you to personally deliver the message to Zongdu Chaisee in Jonduri that we’re moving forward with Unanimity. She needs to quit dawdling and make sure the shipments get to Bin-Er as soon as possible.”
Sidao stroked his beard, latching on to the glimmer of hope that his pockets would remain as heavy as always. “You’re not going to send her a messenger hawk?”
“Chaisee doesn’t do important business by hawk; she doesn’t think they’re secure enough.” One of Henshe’s many annoyances with her. “This is going to require an in-person visit.”
“What exactly is Unanimity?”
Like I’d share that information with a gob like you. “A means of making a very convincing argument. Chaisee will explain everything after you deliver the message.”
“My traveling rights are linked to the Avatar’s official business,” Sidao said. “I’ll have to trick her into declaring Jonduri as her next official stop.”
Henshe was struck by the peculiarity of two grown men plotting their hearts out against a young girl, an Air Nomad no less. We’ve declared war on the Avatar, he thought. She just doesn’t know it yet. “That shouldn’t be hard. She’ll want to try her message again with a different audience; I’ll bet she’s already planning to visit Jonduri as the next stop on her tour. Make sure you give her the impression that she’ll get what she wants there.”
