The eye crept closer. “I can tell how upset you are by the truth,” it said in a soothing sweet tone. “Don’t be. Who needs Avatarhood? You will find your own use, and your own immortality. Once I strengthen myself on your blood, part of your essence will exist within me, forever.”
The problem with any game was that eventually, the opponent decided to stop playing. Father Glowworm suddenly rushed Yun, spiraling through the forest, tendrils of slime grasping and parting the trees like the beads of a curtain.
“Now, be grateful!” the spirit roared. “For we are about to become one!”
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Brother Po once told Kuji the nickname for the dao sword was “all men’s courage.” Hold the sturdy chopping blade that let you hack away at a foe with abandon, and you’d feel braver immediately.
Kuji did not feel braver as he gripped the haft of his dao with clammy palms and watched the door. And his blade did not feel very sturdy. It was a rusted, chipped specimen that seemed like it would shatter if he waved it in the air too vigorously. As the most junior member of the Triad of the Golden Wing, he’d had to wait at the back of the line as weapons were passed out in turn. This sword had come from the bottom of the crate.
“Now you’re a real soldier, eh?” someone had joked at the time. “Not like the rest of us hatchet men.”
Brother Po stood by the doorway holding his small axe, the favored weapon of most of the Triad’s seasoned fighters. He looked calm on the outside, but Kuji could see his throat bobbing up and down repeatedly as he swallowed, the same way it did when he was going for a big money play in Pai Sho.
If Kuji had confidence in anything for protection, it was in his gang’s turf—Loongkau City Block was practically a fortress. On the surface, Loongkau looked no different than its neighboring districts of Ba Sing Se’s Lower Ring. The visible portion on the block rose a haphazard couple of stories into the air like a budding mushroom, in defiance of gravity and sound architecture.
But it was an open secret that the complex extended illegally into the ground layer by layer, far below the surface. Each level had been dug out below the previous one without a solid plan or understanding of safety, shored up by using only improvised supports of wood scrap, mud brick, bits of rusty scavenged metal. And yet Loongkau held solid without caving in, possibly with the aid of the spirits.
The inside of the block was a knot of twists and turns, staircases and empty shafts. Hives of squalid apartments squeezed the available pathways into narrow choke points. Loongkau was littered with natural traps like the room where Kuji and Po waited, which was one of the reasons why lawmen never went inside the City Block.
Until now. The boss had gotten a tip that the Golden Wing’s stronghold was going to be hit this very day. Every brother was to take up positions until the threat was gone. Kuji didn’t know what kind of enemy could get his elders so riled up. By his guess it would have taken more lawmen than the Lower Ring possessed in order to lay siege to Loongkau.
Regardless, the plan was sound. Anyone trying to make it to the lower floors would have to file through a narrow bottleneck that ran by this room. Kuji and Ning could get the drop on an intruder, two-on-one.
And it was unlikely they’d see action, Kuji reminded himself. The level above was being prowled by Throatcutter Gong, the boss’s best assassin. Gong could stalk and kill a mongoose lizard in its own jungle lair. The number of heads he’d taken could have filled a haybarn—
A crash came from one floor up. There was no sound of a voice accompanying it. The little apartment began to feel less their turf to hold and more a box confining them like animals in a crate.
Po gestured with his hatchet. “We’ll hear them coming down the stairs,” he whispered. “That’s when we strike.”
Kuji tilted his ear in that direction. He was so desperate to hear any approaching signal that he lost his balance and stumbled. Po rolled his eyes. “Too loud,” he hissed.
As if to prove his point, someone flew through the doorway, snapping the hinges, and collided with Kuji. He shrieked and flailed with his dao but at best managed to smack the person in the head with his pommel. Po grabbed the attacker and raised his hatchet to strike, but checked his swing at the last second.
It was Throatcutter Gong, unconscious and bleeding. His wrists bent the wrong way and his ankles were bound with his own garrote wire. “Brother Gong!” Po shouted, forgetting his own lesson in stealth. “What happened?”
From the wall opposite the hallway they were supposed to be focusing on, a pair of gauntleted arms burst through the brick. They wrapped around Po’s neck from behind in a chokehold, cutting off his words. Kuji saw his elder’s eyes go white with terror before Po was pulled out of the room straight through the wall.
Kuji stared at the emptiness in stupefied disbelief. Po was a big man, and in a blink, he’d been taken like a raven eagle’s prey. The hole he disappeared through revealed only darkness.
Outside, the floorboards creaked from the weight of a person walking, as if complete silence were a cloak the enemy could wear and discard at will. The treading of heavy boots came closer and closer.
The doorway filled, blacking out the faint light from the hall, and a tall, incredibly tall, figure stepped inside. A thin line of blood trickled from its throat, as if it had been beheaded and glued back together. A dress of green silk billowed underneath the wound. Its face was a white mask, and its eyes were monstrous streaks of red.
&n
bsp; Trembling, Kuji raised his blade. He moved so slowly it felt like he was swimming through mud. The creature watched him swing his sword, its eyes on the metal, and somehow, he knew it was fully capable of putting a stop to the action. If it cared to.
The edge of the dao bit into his opponent’s shoulder. There was a snapping noise, and a sudden pain lashed his cheek. The sword had broken, the top half bouncing back in Kuji’s face.
It was a spirit. It had to be. It was a spirit that could pass through walls, a ghost that could float over floors, a beast impervious to blades. Kuji dropped the handle of the useless sword. His mother had told him once that invoking the Avatar could safeguard him from evil. He’d known as a child she was making up stories. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t decide to believe them right now. Right now, he believed harder than he believed anything in his life.
“The Avatar protect me,” he whispered while he could still speak. He fell on his behind and scrambled to the corner of the room, blanketed completely by the spirit’s long shadow. “Yangchen protect me!”
The spirit woman followed him and lowered her red-and-white face to his. A human would have passed some kind of judgment on Kuji as he cowered like this. The cold disregard in her eyes was worse than any pity or sadistic amusement.
“Yangchen isn’t here right now,” she said in a rich, commanding voice that would have been beautiful had she not held such clear indifference for his life. “I am.”