But any musical accompaniment would have been tainted quickly. There was a droning in the air that started not too far into the plain. I thought I was hearing things, but the gods frowned along with me each time it increased in volume.
The noise was atmospheric, as if every single molecule of gas around us was contributing to the soundwaves. Perhaps Princess Iron Fan had become the sky itself. I shuddered at the thought.
I knew that taking a
peek with true sight would blind me, perhaps permanently. The waves of magical power were so thick that they were nearly tangible, like the arms of a kelp forest parting to let us closer before they swallowed us whole.
The infernal droning became more and more intense. We must have been walking toward its source. It scrambled my neurons to the point where I no longer had any idea how long we’d been traversing this empty floor. The ground seemed to suck at my ankles. Only sheer bullheadedness kept me wading through the quicksand.
Suddenly, a lucid thought flickered through my head. I’d heard a sound like this before. When Quentin had summoned Guanyin to Earth the first time, he’d chanted in a way that made it seem like there were hundreds of him packed into the room, a monkish overtone concert.
This was like that, times a million. This was someone’s voice, amplified to the nth degree. The amount of power needed to turn a vast outdoor expanse into an echo chamber made me queasy.
And yet we kept going. Understanding that I was listening to a person, to language, let me identify syllables like droplets making up the ocean.
Shui le shui le shui le shuile shuileshuileshuile . . .
Sleep. The imperative form. Someone was casting a sleep spell, the most basic of basics, but with the energy of a thousand birthing suns behind it. I saw a dot on the horizon, the singularity at the source.
We kept going. We kept going until that dot on the plain turned into a shape, and the shape turned into a man.
It was the Jade Emperor.
26
The King of Heaven looked much different from the last time I’d seen him on Earth. The puffy, sweaty, middle-aged bureaucrat was gone, switched out for a gaunt, starved hermit who hadn’t seen the underside of a roof in a long time.
His face was burned and hardened by exposure, like fired clay. Fraying, unadorned robes hung loosely off his shoulders. His eyes were closed in meditation, and he sat cross-legged on the white marble floor.
Erlang Shen began to shake with laughter. Silently at first, and then with growing force. He doubled over. Dropped to his knees.
“I can’t believe this!” he shrieked, wiping the tears from his eyes. “This is too much! Really!”
He collapsed and rolled over onto his back, clutching his ribs, kicking into the air, pedaling an imaginary bicycle. He’d lost it completely. Everyone else was like me, straitjacketed with fear.
“Don’t you get it?” Erlang Shen cried with joy. “He’s the threat! He’s the cause of all of this! He brought us to this plane and trapped us here! You don’t know him like I do! Everything that happened to us was because he willed it so!”
None of that made any sense. Erlang Shen was seeing what he wanted to see, drawing conclusions that aligned with his hatred.
I couldn’t tell him so. My throat wouldn’t work. Neither would my arms and legs. The sense of wrongness shooting through me was paralyzing. If the Jade Emperor was casting sleep like this, a single bullet with enough powder behind it to level a city, then the command should have devastated us. But we were still awake. Which meant something else was the target.
Erlang Shen sat up suddenly, like a revenant. “Come on!” he yelled at us. “None of you see the irony in this? The Jade Emperor’s the person whom we had to kill this entire time! After everything we’ve been through, this is a gift from the Way!”
He singled me out. “Nothing to say? No little quip about how I went to Hell for wanting to kill him and now I get permission, signed and stamped by the Universe? No mockery? Nothing at all?”
I couldn’t respond even if I wanted to. None of us could. In his mania, Erlang Shen had missed his uncle opening his eyes, just a crack.
? ? ?
The pyroclastic flow of energy that washed forth from the Jade Emperor wasn’t magic. Magic altered reality. This was our new reality. Oblivion, at his behest. He was less of a god and more of an eldritch horror.
My eyelids were taped open, immobilized. I could feel my atoms being shaken apart. The solid light that represented the King of Heaven’s power was visible to my naked eye. It washed over Quentin, Guan Yu, Guanyin, and the Great White Planet like it did me, rendering us into photo negatives, robbing us of color, freezing us like backdrop paintings.
But not Erlang Shen. The thundering sea parted around him. Deigned to let him through. He didn’t even seem to notice what was happening to us in comparison to himself.
In frustration at our silence he screamed incoherently and flung his fist in our direction. Then Erlang Shen turned back to his uncle with murder in his eyes.
With the water he’d held on to he formed a long, slender blade. He stalked toward the Jade Emperor, who still sat unmoving in repose.