The Black Tides of Heaven Read online

  Two near-identical children tumbled out of the cart behind her, laden with packs. One landed with their soles a hip’s width apart, fists lightly curled, balancing on the balls of their feet. The child with the mismatched eyes. The other one straightened up and stared at the Head Abbot with an intensity that was unnerving for one so young.

  The Head Abbot bowed to them, and Sonami bowed back. “Venerable One,” she said. “Allow me to introduce you to your new charges.”

  She touched the first child on their shoulder. “This is Mokoya.” She tapped the second one, whose wide dark eyes remained fixed on the Head Abbot. “And this is Akeha.”

  “I welcome you to the Grand Monastery,” the Head Abbot said. “Today you embark on a new journey of learning and discipline.”

  The children said nothing. The first child’s face presented a scowl, while the second one didn’t even blink.

  “Go on,” Sonami said gently.

  A junior monk and nun waited behind the Head Abbot. “Go with them,” he told the children. “They will show you to your rooms.”

  The children looked at each other, and the Head Abbot felt something pass between them in the Slack, as though they were communicating. He looked quizzically at Sonami, who only smiled.

  The children seemed to come to an agreement, and that agreement was not to put up a fight. Silently and perfunctorily, they trudged after the waiting acolytes.

  The first child, the odd-eyed one, took fewer than ten steps before their resolve shattered. They dropped their pack and ran back to Sonami, clutching the fine silk of her dress in their fists.

  “Mokoya,” Sonami sighed. She dropped to one knee and took the child’s hands in her own. “We’ve talked about this.”

  “Why can’t you come with us?” A tremor belied the stubborn pout in their voice.

  “Because I’m going to the Tensorate academy. Today you begin training for monastic life. Head Abbot Sung will take care of you. All right?”

  Their face folded up, equal parts rage and grief. Sonami said, “And you have Akeha. You have each other; you won’t be alone.”

  The other child walked over and put a hand on their sibling’s shoulder. The first flung themselves at Sonami in a desperate hug.

  Sonami held them. “Go on. You know this is what Mother wants.”

  The child detached from Sonami’s grasp and took their sibling’s hand. Without a word, they marched, sibling and all, back to where the acolytes waited with the abandoned pack. The Head Abbot had expected tears, but none remained. They did not turn back to look at Sonami again.

  The other child pinned the Head Abbot with an intense, baleful gaze as they walked by.

  Sonami got to her feet with a sigh and watched the twins go. “They are good children,” she said softly. “Understandably upset about leaving the only home they’ve ever known. But once the pain wears off, they’ll give you no trouble.” With a touch of amusement, she added, “Well, not much trouble, in any case.”

  The Head Abbot studied the young woman now standing before him. The two of them had barely spoken in the last five years; the Head Abbot’s messages through the talker network had been gently but firmly rebuffed. He had tried for a long time to divine if this distance was the Protector’s doing or Sonami’s choice, but in the end had concluded that he had to respect and accept it. As with all things in life.

  “You raised these children yourself,” he observed.

  Sonami nodded.

  “I must confess I’m surprised. Did your mother not intend for you to enter the Tensorate before this?”

  Sonami smiled slightly. “We agreed that I would do so after the children had been transferred to the Grand Monastery.”

  “Such concessions come with a price. What did you promise her in return?”

  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.

  They breathed in, and out. Cleared their mindeye, and—

  The kirin lurched out of the shadows at the same second they felt its presence in the Slack.

  Akeha jumped backward, tripped foot over foot, landed on the flat of their palm. Pain shot up their arm. The kirin reared, wings swallowing the sky, head brushing the top of the trees, screech shaking the bones of the earth. A creature that was half bird, half lion, and all terror.

  Akeha panicked. They’d never fought anything this big before. The creature before them was a blinding light in the Slack, sinew and flesh and bone. And blood. Warm blood surged through its veins. Overwhelmed by terror, they could only think, I have to stop it.

  They tensed through water-nature, slowed the flow of blood by force, and stopped the kirin’s heart.

  The kirin shrieked in pain. Startled, Akeha let go. They’d never heard anything scream like that before. Their stomach twisted, heavy and sour.

  And then the kirin staggered as if struck, as power surged through the Slack from somewhere else. The creature fell to its knees, missing Akeha by a handsbreadth. Its breath was hot on their face.

  With a noise that was both a groan and a cry, the kirin staggered to its feet and retreated into the trees. Badly hurt or just badly shaken, the creature had had enough. Akeha watched it vanish into the shadows, the rustle of its passage fading.

  Mokoya stood on the path behind them, trembling, wide-eyed, and angry. Akeha got slowly to their feet. Their arm sang with pain where it had broken their fall. “How did you find me?”

  “I told you. I saw you in the dream.”

  “It was just a dream.”

  “It wasn’t just a dream. I saw it exactly like it happened. When I woke up, you were gone, and I knew where you went.”

  And Mokoya had predicted the kirin, too. The creature was supposed to be extinct. But they had known it would appear. How?

  Akeha frowned. “Are you saying you dream about the future? Only prophets do that.” There hadn’t been a prophet recorded in the Protectorate for hundreds of years.

  Mokoya bit their lip, and Akeha recognized that expression. Their sibling was one surge of anger away from tears. They grabbed their twin’s hand, balled into a hard fist that would not relax. “Moko.”

  “You could have died. What were you doing?”

  Akeha glanced toward the hidden peak of Golden Phoenix Mountain. “I was looking for the hidden caves.”

  “Why?”

  They shrugged. “We need somewhere to run if Mother comes to take us. I don’t want to go back.”

  Mokoya pulled their hand away. “She won’t come. She doesn’t care about us.”

  They turned so that Akeha couldn’t see their face. But Akeha knew with absolute clarity that they were more frightened than angry. The twins had a sense of each other, of emotions and anxieties, and they could hear each other’s voices through the Slack if they listened hard enough.

  “Don’t be frightened,” Akeha said. “I’ll protect you.”

  “Protect me from what? The future?”

  “Anything.”

  Mokoya turned back, cheeks painted with damp streaks. “What if it’s true? What if I’m dreaming about things that haven’t happened yet?”

  “I said anything,” Akeha repeated, and pulled their twin into a fierce hug that blanketed up all protests. “We don’t have to tell anyone. It can be our secret.”

  Mokoya settled into the hug, but their mood remained rough and shaky, and Akeha knew they weren’t convinced or comforted by that, either. “Let’s go back,” Akeha said. “Before anyone notices we’re gone.” The ache in their arm had almost subsided, and the fear and nervousness had faded into whispers. They could pretend that nothing had happened.

  * * *

  It was the sobbing that woke Akeha. All night they had floated on the edge between sleep and consciousness, plagued by visions of nightmarish shapes. Now their twin was hunched over at the edge of their shared sleeping mat, skinny frame shaking in the dark.

  Akeha crawled over and tapped them on the shoulder. When Mokoya didn’t respond, they shifted so that the both of them were face-to-face. Mokoya’s was a crumpled, runny mess of fear and desperation. Another bad dream: the Slack seethed with the stress that trailed in the wake of their twin’s nightmares. It had been weeks since the last one, but the intensity of the dreams seemed to be getting worse.

  Mokoya stopped to gulp down two lungfuls of freezing night air, then continued crying. Akeha reached out and took their hands and said nothing. This was becoming a familiar routine.

  Eventually Mokoya’s sobbing petered into small sniffles. They wiped their snot with a thick sleeve as Akeha asked, “What’s happening?”

  They shook their head, lips still sealed. Akeha pressed on: “What did you see?”

  “Bad things.”

  “I know it was bad things. What kind?”

  Mokoya could not meet their eyes. “I saw a naga.”

  “Where? Here?”

  Mokoya shook their head. “At the spring procession.”

  The spr
ing procession was in two weeks, in the center of Chengbee. As Akeha considered this bit of information, Mokoya said, “You were there.”

  “Why would I be at the spring procession?”

  “I don’t know, you were in the forest too, how am I supposed to know what’s going to happen, I don’t control any—”

  “Okay, okay. There’s a naga at the spring procession. I’m also there.”

  “We were both there.”

  “Of course. What happened?”

  “It fell. The naga. It was flying, it took over the sky. Something happened. It fell onto the houses.”

  As Akeha frowned, Mokoya added, “People got hurt.”

  “Why did it fall? Was it attacking the city?”

  “I don’t know,” Mokoya hissed, and their expression, which had been approaching normality, slid back toward furious tears. “I just saw it.”

  “Did you get hurt?”

  Mokoya buried their face in their hands, fingernails digging into the skin. “I don’t know. It just happened.”

  Akeha gently pulled their hands away from their face. Mokoya put up a token resistance, and their hands slowly uncurled in Akeha’s. “Listen,” they said. “That was just a silly dream. Naga don’t come this far north. They live in the unknown south, in the Quarterlands, right? Even when they get lost, they don’t go farther than Katau Kebang. They can’t reach Chengbee. It’s impossible.”

  “Nothing’s impossible.”

  “Well, somebody will see it, right? And then they’ll catch it. So it won’t happen.”

  “It was really big, Keha. Naga are really big.”

  “I know.”

  “You said the same thing about the kirin.”

  “That was different.”

  “You said kirin don’t exist anymore. And there was one. Just as I saw in my dream.”

  Akeha sighed and let go of Mokoya’s hands. They were right. There was no easy explanation that could wave away what Mokoya had seen.

  The twins looked at each other in the half-dark chill, not daring to voice their fears. There was always an explanation, that was what they had been taught, that was the way they had been raised, but this—the Slack was doing something strange to Mokoya, when it shouldn’t.