SOMETHING FROM NOTHING
Some say the heavens dictate the rise and fall of empires.
Clearly, those peasants have never met me.
My abilities as a strategist have earned me many sobriquets, from the Dragon’s Shadow to the Tactician of Thistlegate. Rising Zephyr is my personal favorite. “Zephyr” will do, if you please.
“Peacock!”
Unless you’re Lotus. Then it’s too much to ask for.
I struggle to steer my mare around; horses don’t appreciate genius.
Neither does Lotus. “Hey, Peacock!” she hollers over the creaking wagons, crying babies, and cracking whips. She urges her stallion up along the other side until we’re somewhat eye to eye, the heads of people and oxen coursing between us. “They’re catching up!”
Consider me unsurprised. Miasma, prime ministress of the Xin Empire in name, acting empress in reality, was bound to close in on our soldiers and peasants, who now—thanks to Lotus—realize they’re about to die. A child bursts into tears, an auntie trips, a young couple spurs their mule faster. No luck. The steep forest path is doughy from last night’s rainfall, kneaded to mush by the hundreds we’ve evacuated.
Still hundreds more to go.
“Do something!” Lotus shouts at me. “Use your brain!” Her hair has frizzed into an impressive mane around her face, and she waves her ax as if she’s itching to use it.
Wouldn’t help us. It’s not just Miasma we’re up against: Our own numbers are bogging us down. We must evacuate everyone, Ren said sternly when I suggested it was time we flee our current town for the next. Miasma will slaughter the commonfolk just for harboring us.
Miasma may still yet, at this rate, but there’s no arguing with our warlordess Xin Ren’s benevolence. Most strategists wouldn’t be able to cope with it.
I can.
“Think of a plan!” Lotus bellows.
Thanks for the confidence, Lotus. I already have—three, in fact. Plan one (ditch the commoners) might be off the table, but there’s plan two (cut down trees and pray for rain), and plan three (send a trustworthy general to the bridge at the mountain’s base to hold off Miasma).
Plan two is in motion, if the humidity is any indication. I’ve set General Tourmaline and her forces on felling trees behind us. The trunks will wash down in the coming storm, and the resulting dam should delay Miasma’s cavalry by a couple of hours.
As for sending a trustworthy general to the bridge …
My gaze cuts from Lotus to Cloud, Ren’s other swornsister. She’s helping evacuees farther up the muddy slope, her ultramarine cloak rich against the muted greens of the firs.
Cloud thinks better than Lotus under pressure. A shame, because I don’t know if I can harness her. Last month, she released Miasma from one of my traps because Sage Master Shencius forbids killing by way of snare. That’s all very nice, Cloud, but was Sage Master Shencius ever on the run from the empire? I don’t think so.
“You.” I point my fan at Lotus. “Ride down to the bridge with a hundred of your best and employ Beget Something from Nothing.”
Lotus gives me a blank look.
“Just … make it look like we have more forces across the river than we actually do. Stir up dust. Roar. Intimidate them.” Shouldn’t be too hard for Lotus, whose sobriquet only suits her if you visualize the root, not the flower. Her war cry can shake birds out of trees within the radius of a li. She forged her own ax and wears the pelt of a tiger she killed as a skirt. She’s as warrior as warriors come, the opposite of everything I stand for. At least Cloud knows her classical poems.
But Lotus has something Cloud doesn’t: the ability to take an order.
“Intimidate,” she repeats under her breath. “Got it.” Then she’s galloping down the mountain on her beastly stallion and referring to herself by name in that gauche way some warriors do before riding into battle. “Lotus won’t disappoint!”
Thunder swallows the rumble of her departure. Clouds brew in the sky, and leaves drift around me in a breeze more stench than air. Pressure builds in my chest; I breathe through it and focus on my hair, still clasped back in its high ponytail. My fan, still in my hand.
This won’t be the first time I’ve delivered the impossible for Ren.
And deliver it I will. Miasma isn’t reckless; the impending rains combined with Lotus’s intimidation will make her think twice before pursuing us up the mountain. I can slow her down.
But I’ll also need to speed us up.
I jerk on the reins; my mare balks. The insubordination! “Turnips and figs later!” I hiss.
Jerking harder, I trot us down the slope.
“Forget the pack animals!” I bark to the sluggish stream of people. “Leave the wagons! This is a command from Xin Ren’s military strategist!”
They do as they’re told, scowling all the while. They love Ren for her honor, Cloud for her righteousness, Lotus for her spirit. My job is not to be lovable but to get every peasant off the mountain and into the town over, where Ren should already be waiting with the first wave of evacuees, the other half of our troops, and—hopefully—a boat passage south so that I can secure us some much-needed allies.
“Hurry!” I snap. People plod a little faster. I order someone to help a man with a broken leg, but then there’s a pregnant woman who looks seconds away from labor, children without shoes, toddlers without parents. The humid air thickens to soup, and the pressure in my chest climbs to my throat. Harbinger of a breathing attack, if there ever was one.
Don’t you dare, I think to my body as I ride farther down the line, shouting until I’m hoarse. I pass a girl shrieking for her sister.
Ten people later, I cross a younger girl in a matching vest, bawling for hers.
“Follow me,” I wheeze. I barely see the sisters reunited before lightning strips the forest bare. The animals whine in chorus—my horse among them.
“Turnips—”
Thunder claps and my horse rears, and the reins—
They slip through my fingers.
* * *
Death and I have met before. In this regard, I’m no different from hundreds if not thousands of orphans. Our parents died to famine or plague or some rampaging warlord, rising up in droves under the empire’s waning power. Death may have spared me then, but I know it’s there, a lingering shadow. Some people have the physical abilities to outrun it. I don’t bother. My mind is my light, my candle. The shadow flees me, not the other way around.
So I’m not scared, when I dream of heaven. It’s familiar. A white wicker gazebo. Nested limestone terraces. Magnolia-bloom skies. Wind chimes and birdsong and always, always this melody.
This melody of a zither.
I follow the familiar music, over lakes of pink clouds. But the pink fades, and the dream becomes a nightmare of a memory.
Clash of steel. Steeds thundering down the street. A spearhead erupts through a torso, red. I grab your hand and we run. I don’t know if these warriors are friend or foe, which warlord has seceded from the empire now and named themselves king, if they’re empire forces come to relieve us or kill us. We’re just orphans. Less than people, to these warriors. All we can do is run from them. Run. Your hand tears from mine; I scream your name.
Ku!
The fleeing tide is too thick. I can’t find you. Finally, the dust settles. The warriors leave.
You’ve left me too.
I bolt upright, panting.
“Steady.” Hands, closed around my upper arms. A face: hawk-beak brows, nose bridge scarred. It’s Tourmaline, Xin Ren’s third general—the only general of Ren’s with a fitting sobriquet, seeing as Tourmaline’s disposition is as solid as the gemstone. We tolerate each other, as far as warriors and strategists go. But right now, Tourmaline isn’t the person I want to see.
She’s not the sister from my dream.
“Steady, Zephyr,” she coaches as I lunge against her grip.
Gasp by gasp, I release my disappointment. Tourmaline, in turn, releases me. She hands me a waterskin. I clutch it, hesitating. Water will wash the name from my tongue, the name I haven’t spoken in six years.
Ku.
But the dream wasn’t real, and when Tourmaline says, “Drink,” I do.
Tourmaline sits back. Dried mud cakes her silver armor. “You, Zephyr, are god-blessed,” she says, and I cough on a mouthful of water. “That, or you did something good in a previous life.”
Reincarnation and gods are both the stuff of peasant myths.
“I reached you seconds before the wheels of a wagon did,” Tourmaline continues, stoic. I could have done without the image, but if anyone had to find me on the ground, better it be Tourmaline than Lotus or Cloud. Those two would have squawked about it to everyone and their mothers. On the subject of everyone—
My gaze darts to my surroundings. We’re in a tent; it’s night; something gamey is roasting outside. All good signs we weren’t decimated by Miasma.
Still, I need to hear it to be sure. “We made it to Hewan?”
Tourmaline nods. “Exactly ten li, a mountain, and a river away from Miasma’s forces. The rain came just as you said it would. It’ll take them at least a day to clear a path, four to go around.”
“Lotus?”
“Will be the talk of the empire. Think lots of drums and bellowing. Miasma’s generals ran so fast, you’d think we had a hidden force of ten thousand.”
I choke down some more water. Good. Miasma is the paranoid type. She’ll hear the war sounds, see the difficult terrain, and think ambush. A maneuver like that requires more forces than we actually have, but as long as Miasma believes in Lotus’s illusion, we’ve bought ourselves however long it’ll take for her to gather reinforcements—a day, by my estimates.
Then I remember the limping man, the groaning woman, the crying sisters. If they’re alive—“They are,” Tourmaline confirms—they owe it to the ideals of one person. “And Ren?”
“She was meeting with the Hewan governor, last I checked,” says Tourmaline.
She steadies me as I rise. Hands braced against my lower back, I eye the scant pile of belongings that survived the journey with me. My white robes are muddied beyond salvaging, and I wrinkle my nose at the replacement set. Beige. Blech.
Tourmaline breaks the quiet. “You shouldn’t ride off on your own like that.”
“I can ride fine. It’s the horse. Your turnip-and-fig trick didn’t work.” Or I was the fool, for taking a warrior’s advice.
Tourmaline blinks, once and slow. “I found no turnips or figs on your person.”
“I promised them as rewards.” Obviously, the horse did not earn them.
Another drawn-out blink.
“I’ll let you dress,” Tourmaline finally says.
She leaves the tent. Alone, I groan and put on the beige robes. I fasten my broadbelt, reach down—hand hovering over the wrapped bundle that is my zither—and pick up my fan. I beat the crane feathers clean and smooth out the kinks, fingers slowing to trace over the single kingfisher feather. A gift from my last mentor, who’d lived longer than the rest. One star cannot light a galaxy, he’d said as he’d sewn on the feather.
I’m not a star, I’d countered. I am the universe itself.
But even the universe is subject to unseen forces. The next night, a meteorite punched my mentor and his outhouse clean into the ground.
I can predict meteors now. Trace the paths of all stars, foretell weather patterns nine times out of ten. The environment, as it stands, is our only ally. Using it to our advantage has earned me the sobriquet of Fate Changer. But the work I do isn’t magic. It’s memorization and analysis and application. It’s limiting the factors I can’t control, and reducing our reliance on miracles.
Today, without a doubt, was a miracle. It pains me to admit it, but unless a meteorite kills Miasma next time, even I can’t save us, not if we keep on traveling with so many commoners.
It’s time I had a talk with Ren.
I slip my fan’s bamboo handle between the broadbelt and my waist, clasp my hair back into its ponytail, and head out of the tent, into the night.
Copyright © 2022 by Joan He
Copyright © 2022 by Anna Frohman
Copyright © 2022 by Tida Kietsungden
