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Article Excerpt
They DON'T LOOK dangerous," Xiao Ling Yun said to the aide. Ling Yun wished she understood what Phoenix Command wanted from her. Not that she minded the excuse to take a break from the composition for two flutes and hammered dulcimer that had been stymieing her for the past two weeks.
Through a one-way window in the observation chamber, Xiao Ling Yun saw five adolescents sitting cross-legged on the floor in a semicircle. Before them was a tablet and two brushes. No ink; these were not calligraphy brushes. One of the adolescents, a girl with short, dark hair, leaned over and drew two characters with quick strokes. All five studied the map that appeared on the tablet.
"Nevertheless," the aide said. "They attempted to assassinate the Phoenix General. We are fortunate to have captured them."
The aide wrote something on her own tablet, and a map appeared. She circled a region of the map. The tablet enlarged it until it filled the screen. "Circles represent gliders," the aide said. "Triangles represent dragons."
Ling Yun peered at the formations. "Who's winning?"
At the aide's instigation, the tablet replayed the last move. A squadron of dragons engaged a squadron of gliders. One dragon turned white -white for death--and vanished from the map. The aide smiled. "The assassins are starting to slip."
Ling Yun had thought that the Phoenix General desired the services of a musician to restore order to the fractious ashworlds. She was not the best person for such a purpose, nor the worst: a master musician, yes, but without a sage's philosophical bent of mind. Perhaps they had chosen her on account of her uncle's position as a logistician. She was pragmatic enough not to be offended by the possibility.
"I had not expected prisoners to be offered entertainment," Ling Yun said, a little dubious. She was surprised that they hadn't been executed, in fact.
"It is not entertainment," the aide said reprovingly. "Every citizen has a right to education."
Of course. The government's stance was that the ashworlds already belonged to the empire, whatever the physical reality might be. "Including the classical arts, I presume," she said. "But I am a musician, not a painter." Did they want her to tutor the assassins? And if so, why?
"Music is the queen of the arts, is it not?" the aide said.
She had not expected to be discussing the philosophy of music with a soldier. "According to tradition, yes," Ling Yun said carefully. Her career had been spent writing music that never strayed too much from the boundaries of tradition.
The most important music lesson she had had came not from her tutor, but from a servant in her parents' house. The servant, whose name Ling Yun had deliberately forgotten, liked to sing as he stirred the soup or pounded the day's bread. He didn't have a particularly notable voice. It wavered in the upper register and his vowels drifted when he wasn't paying attention. (She didn't tell him any of this. She didn't talk to him at all. Her parents would have disapproved.) But the servant had two small children who helped him with his tasks, and they chanted the songs, boisterously out of tune.
From watching that servant and his children, Ling Yun learned that the importance of music came not from its ability to move the five elements, but from its ability to affect the heart. She wanted to write music that anyone could hum, music that anyone could enjoy. It was the opposite of the haughty ideal that her tutor taught her to strive toward. Naturally, Ling Yun kept this thought to herself.
The aide scribbled some more on the tablet. In response, an image of a mechanical dragon drew itself across the tablet. It had been painted white, with jagged red markings on its jointed wings.
"Is this a captured dragon?" Ling Yun asked.
"Unfortunately, no," the aide said. "We caught glimpses of two of the assassins as they came down on dragons, but the dragons disappeared as though they'd been erased. We want to know where they're hiding, and how they're being hidden."
Ling Yun stared at the dragon. Whoever had drawn it did not have an artist's fluency of line. But everything was precise and carefully proportioned. She could see where the wings connected to the body and the articulations that made motion possible, even, if she squinted, some of the controls by the pilot's seat. "Who produced this?"
The aide turned her head toward the window. "The dark-haired girl did. Her name is Wu Wen Zhi."
It was a masculine name, but they probably did things differently in the ashworlds. Ling Yun felt a rebellious twinge of approval.
Ling Yun said, "Wen Zhi draws you a picture, and you expect it to yield the ashworlders' secrets. Surely she's not as incompetent an assassin as all that. Or did you torture this out of her?"
"No, it's part of the game they're playing with the general," the aide said.
"I don't see the connection," she said. And why was the general playing a game with them in the first place ? Wei qi involved no such thing, nor had the tablet games she had played as a student.
The aide smiled as though she had heard the thought. "It personalizes the experience. When the game calculates the results of combat, it refers to the pilot's emblem to determine her strengths and weaknesses. Take Wen Zhi's dragon, for instance. First of all, the dragon's design indicates that it specializes in close combat, as opposed to Mesketalioth's--" she switched briefly to another dragon painting "--which has repeating crossbows mounted on its shoulders." She returned to Wen Zhi's white dragon. "However, notice the stiffness of the lines. The pilot is always alert, but in a way that makes her tense. This can be exploited."
"The general has an emblem in the game, too, I presume," Ling Yun said.
"Of course," the aide said, but she didn't volunteer to show it to Ling Yun. "Let me tell you about our five assassins.
"Wu Wen Zhi comes from Colony One." The empire's two original colonies had been given numbers rather than names. "Wen Zhi has tried to kill herself three times already. She doesn't sleep well at night, but she refuses to meditate, and she won't take medications."
I wouldn't either, Ling Yun thought.
"The young man with the long braid is Ko. He's lived on several of the ashworlds and speaks multiple languages, but his accent suggests that he comes from Arani. Interestingly enough, Ko alerted us to the third of Wen Zhi's suicide attempts. Wen Zhi didn't take this well.
"The scarred one sitting next to Ko is Mesketalioth. He's from Straken Okh. We suspect that he worked for Straken's intelligence division before he was recruited by the Dragon Corps.
"The girl with the light hair is Periet, although the others call her Perias. We haven't figured out why, and they look at us as though we're crazy when we ask them about it, although she'll answer to either name. Our linguists tell us that Perias is the masculine form of her name; our doctors confirm that she is indeed a girl. She comes from Kiris. Don't be fooled by her sweet manners. She's the one who destroyed Shang Yuan."
Ling Yun opened her mouth, then found her voice. "Her?" Shang Yuan had been a city of several million people. It had been obliterated during the Festival of Lanterns, for which it had been famous. "I thought that the concussive storm was a natural disaster."
The aide gave Ling Yun a singularly...
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