Her smile did not change as she said, “Grandchildren.”
The Head Abbot swallowed his first response. Into his silence, Sonami interjected, “Of all her daughters, Mother was most interested in my gifts in slackcraft. She thought any children I had would have potential.”
Carefully, he asked, “And this—you are happy with this?”
“It is how it has to be.”
The Head Abbot sighed. Sonami laughed lightly. “Venerable One, I am glad the children will be given to your care. I am confident they will be well taken care of.”
“Is there anything you want to tell me about them?”
Sonami hesitated. He watched intently as her answer percolated through layers and layers of careful thought.
Finally she said, “Do you remember you told me once that there was something different about me, as though the fortunes had embroidered a bright pattern in my soul?”
“I do.” And he had believed it sincerely.
“At that time I dismissed it as flattery, something an old man would say to fool a young child. But . . . I think I understand now.” Sonami frowned. “There’s something about these children that’s different. I don’t know what it is. One of them . . .” The Head Abbot frowned, and Sonami shrugged. “I don’t want to say too much. You will see for yourself. But I am glad that you will be directing their destinies, instead of Mother.”
“I see.”
“Trust in the fortunes,” Sonami said. “They will guide you well.”
Chapter Three
YEAR NINE
MOKOYA FINALLY MET DREAMS deep into the second night-cycle. Their breathing slowed and evened. Akeha opened their eyes surreptitiously, adjusting to the dark of the room, to confirm that their twin was indeed asleep.
Winter had silenced the frogs that sang outside the windows on warmer days. In that quiet, Akeha cautiously cleared their mindeye and tapped into the Slack. The world of arch-energies lay calm around the sleeping bundle of their twin. Mokoya had nightmares sometimes, and on those nights the Slack seethed around them like a wild river. But not tonight. In Akeha’s mindeye, the Slack enfolded their twin like a gentle blanket, shimmering in the colors of the five natures.
If there were no nightmares tonight, then Akeha felt better about what they were about to do.
They left Mokoya sleeping in their shared bedroom and quietly slipped through the open doorway.
The sleeping quarters for initiates and junior acolytes were patrolled at night by Master Yeo, the disciplinarian, whose booming voice and bamboo switch they feared almost as much as her withering stare. Akeha caught glimpses of her silhouette patrolling the pavilion they had to cross, and shivered.
Akeha knew how to muffle their footsteps, thickening the air around their feet so that sound was silenced. But they had not yet figured out how to turn themselves invisible. The Slack was elastic, but not infinitely so. They had to think of something else.
A prayer altar sat a dozen yields away, garnished with the usual accoutrements. One of those was a tray of prayer balls, stacked into a silver pyramid.
There. First, they got into a runner’s position. Then, with a tug through water-nature so small no one else noticed it, they toppled the prayer balls over.
Master Yeo whipped around and went to investigate the noise. Akeha streaked across the pavilion, unseen, while her back was turned.
Success.
Akeha tiptoed through the Grand Monastery, all the way to the vegetable gardens in the back, the soil bare and hard in the winter frost. Here, too, were the raptor enclosures, and as Akeha crept through the empty cabbage rows, the animals yipped excitedly, teeth and claws shining in the gloom.
“Quiet.” A small gesture through the Slack calmed them. “It’s just me.”
The Grand Monastery was set against the hard spikes of Golden Phoenix Mountain, whose tree-covered sides formed a forbidding, fog-shrouded wall. Its grounds were protected by a slackcraft fence, humming electricity ready to shock anyone who tried to get past it.
Except here, next to the gardens. One of the charge devices generating the fence, a hollow ball filled with blue light, flickered in and out of service. The fence was broken.
No one had noticed. The device was supposed to sound an alarm when it failed or was tampered with. Somehow, that had not happened.
Akeha hadn’t told anybody about this discovery. Not even Mokoya.
Now they hesitated. Mokoya would be upset that they were doing this. Several days ago their twin had woken, weeping, from a nightmare in which Akeha was attacked by a kirin in the mountain forest. Akeha had reassured them that firstly, kirin were extinct: nobody had seen one for a hundred years. And secondly, there was no way of getting into the forest.
Except now there was.
Akeha knew that if they’d told Mokoya about the broken fence, Mokoya would have stopped them from going. So they had said nothing.
They stepped past the buzzing charge device and into the wilderness.
The forest whispered around Akeha. The sky was clear enough and the moon bright enough that they weren’t afraid of getting lost. The ground changed as they wandered farther from the monastery, soft dry leaves yielding to mountain rock. Winter air bit at their exposed cheeks and knuckles.
Legends haunted Golden Phoenix Mountain. Akeha and Mokoya had spent hours in the Grand Monastery’s library, thumbing through yellowed pages and absorbing them all. A diamond-studded road, it was said, led to a series of endless caves with alabaster walls, filled with sweet spring water and miraculous fruit trees that no person of the seas or the black-soiled lands had ever seen before. Akeha was determined to find out if it was true.
A path emerged from the unchecked wilderness of the forest. In the moonlight the pebbles embedded in its dirt shone like diamonds.
Akeha followed it. The path led them on a gentle climb that threaded along the mountain’s slope. The trees parted, but the forest remained thick around them.
Every now and then, they would look up through the netting of leaves, tracking the moon’s passage across the sky. They had to stay aware of the time. They couldn’t get caught.
Akeha came to a small clearing in the forest, a break in the tree cover. The path they had been following forked here, one branch headed downhill, and the other headed up, into the depths of mountain territory. If there were secret caves in the mountains, Akeha thought, the second path would surely lead them there.
Something moved behind them, a large and unexpected presence. Akeha froze, and listened.
The forest breathed. Still. Silent. Akeha counted numbers as they waited, but there was nothing. It was just their imagination.
There was that sutra, the First Sutra, that Mokoya liked to recite in their head when they were nervous: The Slack is all, and all is the Slack, and a long-winded list of nonsense about the five natures. Akeha had a better, shorter list:
Earth, for gravity;
Water, for motion;
Fire, for hot and cold;
Forest, for flesh and blood;
Metal, for electricity.
Everything else is extra.