Phoenix Extravagant, page 19
“You should leave too,” Vei said. “Once word gets out of what happened, you’re not going to be any safer than Jebi and I are.”
“I can’t,” Hyeja said. “Suni’s baby is due any day now. I promised I’d be there for them.”
“You’re a midwife?” Jebi asked. They wouldn’t have guessed it from Hyeja’s attire, but they assumed that she didn’t dress in such elaborate clothes for work.
“Among other things,” Hyeja said. “I’m a physician. I studied with some of the Western missionaries in Huang-Guan in my youth.”
Jebi almost asked if she’d met people with orange hair; thought better of it.
“My family disowned me, of course”—Hyeja spoke of it as though it were a distant pain, hardly worth mentioning—“but I learned many useful remedies. I can’t abandon Suni this close to the birth.”
Vei frowned. “You’re not required to give up your life for them, Mother!”
“Don’t worry about me,” Hyeja chided. “I have contacts in the Blossom District.” It was the old euphemism for the Virgins’ District. “I can disappear if I need to. As can your father and Namgyu.”
Vei didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t argue further. Jebi had only a faint notion of how one argued with mothers, having lost theirs at an early age. Bongsunga had all but raised them, and they wouldn’t have dreamed of arguing with their older sister in a similar situation.
“I want to see Arazi,” Jebi said.
“You haven’t touched your food,” Hyeja said. “At least do that. I don’t think your escape will be any less daring for having filled your belly.”
Responding to the note of authority in her voice, Jebi picked up their spoon and began eating. The stoneware bowl had kept the porridge warm, and they savored the taste as it went down. This might be the last good meal they enjoyed in a while.
At this point, Jebi realized belatedly that they no longer stank, and that while they remained sore all over from the beatings and abuse, someone had dressed them in fresh clothes. They were too loose, but Jebi didn’t care about details like that right now.
“Thank you,” Jebi said around a mouthful of porridge. “For the doctoring.”
“She’s very good at it,” Namgyu said with a sideways smile.
“If she’s a physician,” Jebi said, remembering just in time to keep their language respectful, “what do you do?”
Instead of being embarrassed by Jebi’s lack of manners, Vei merely looked amused, with the corners of her eyes crinkling in that almost-smile she had.
“I’m a calligrapher and interpreter,” Namgyu said. “There are a lot of illiterate people in the Virgins’ District, and they need someone reliable to read contracts, or write them, in Razanei or Hwamal. Sometimes other languages. My prices are high, but I’ve lived here all my life. They know they can depend on me.”
“I see,” Jebi said, impressed, especially at the mention of other languages. They had a fuzzy impression that other nations had other tongues—Huang-Guan reportedly had several spoken ones, although only one writing system, which sounded confusing—but had only rarely met people claiming to speak them. For that matter, Jebi had no way of telling jibberish from the genuine article.
Then they tucked their head down and finished the bowl of porridge, even though the act of swallowing hurt. It’s free food, Jebi reminded themself. They had no resources in the outside world. As little as they liked depending on someone else, they didn’t have any other option.
Vei had risen and was talking with her mother in a low voice. Jebi took the opportunity to examine the two at their leisure. Vei had inherited something of her mother’s fineness of features, especially around the eyes and nose, although her cheekbones and jaw must come from elsewhere in her heritage. The lithe build that Jebi had gotten to know so well—that, too, came from Hyeja.
Jebi suspected, from what Hyeja had said about being disinherited, that she came of one of the old families of scholar-aristocrats, rather than the merchant and peasant stock from which Jebi and Bongsunga were derived. They couldn’t imagine defying their family outright, to leave the country no less—except they had done it themself, hadn’t they? Starting with that damnable name certificate.
Jebi had gotten around to wondering what kind of Razanei officer allowed his feelings for two Fourteeners to sully his name when the man in question strode into the room. Vei straightened, although Jebi had not previously noticed that she had relaxed, even slightly. So did Hyeja. Only Namgyu remained calm, as though nothing unusual was happening.
Captain Dzuge would have stood out as a soldier even in ordinary clothes. Jebi had to prevent themself from flinching from the blue uniform, neatly pressed, with its gold buttons. He had massive shoulders and moved ably on his crutches. His motions reminded Jebi not so much of Vei, although they saw the resemblance in the triangular shapes of their faces, as Jia. Jia had had the same sense of vitality.
“I got word from one of my contacts,” Dzuge Keizhi said in a raspy tenor. “They’re mobilizing the military. You left one hell of a trail behind you, daughter mine. They’re going to send someone to question me soon.”
“I’ll be out of your way,” Vei said, and bowed. “My companions, too.”
He gestured impatiently. “I’ll buy you what time I can.”
“You should plead ignorance if you’re not going to go into hiding,” Vei said. “Say that Mother and Ajummae took me in, and you can’t find them.”
“You shouldn’t be worrying about this,” he returned. “We can take care of ourselves. Get out of here.”
Vei hesitated for a moment, then bowed to each of her three parents in turn. “I will send word when I can.”
“You do that,” Hyeja said. “You know where to go?”
“Of course, Mother,” Vei said.
We do? Jebi wondered. They submitted to Vei helping them up, then strapping them to a wooden frame with a judiciously calculated weight of bags. Any more and they would have staggered. Vei bore a less encumbering rucksack, but that made sense: she was responsible for their defense.
Vei led Jebi out into the courtyard, where Arazi had reassembled itself. The dragon’s masked head was poorly concealed amid the branches of a well-established plum tree. Even so, Jebi knew—how they knew!—that Arazi wasn’t standing at its full height; it had ducked its head down so that it rested lower than its withers.
“Arazi?” Jebi asked softly.
“I had a chance to talk to it earlier,” Vei said, bowing almost as politely to the dragon as she had to her parents. Parents outranked allies.
Jebi hobbled up to the dragon and saw, in the mid-afternoon light filtering through the trees—how many trees did the captain keep in this luxurious manse, anyway?—that they weren’t the only one going around with extra gear. Someone had rigged the dragon with a set of foot- and handholds leading up to... a set of saddles? The whole setup looked precarious. “Um,” Jebi said, peering up.
“We have to outpace our pursuit,” Vei said.
“Where are we going?” Jebi demanded.
Vei smiled tightly. “My other parents have contacts in the Hwagugin community. I have a good idea where one of the revolutionaries’ biggest recruitment camps is. We’ll land there and try to find some higher-ups to give our information to.”
“They’ll want to seize Arazi,” Jebi said, feeling as though a fist had closed around their chest. They gazed at the dragon, imagining it chained up again.
“They can try,” Arazi said, tranquil. “You will tell them what you know, and then we will continue on our way.”
Jebi didn’t think it would be that easy, but far be it for them to dash Arazi’s hopes, or Vei’s either, for that matter.
“I’ll go up first,” Vei said. “Are you feeling steady enough to ride?”
Jebi squeaked. “Ride?”
Vei’s mouth quirked at the corners. “Can you think of anything likely to be faster than a dragon this size? Especially since Arazi assures me that it can fly.”
{I can definitely fly,} Arazi said with disturbing confidence.
{Have you ever tried it?}
{I’m a dragon. I can fly.}
“Um,” Jebi said. “Are you sure those are secure?”
A voice called from the highest story of the house: it was Namgyu. “I can see the blues,” they warned.
“My mother and my ajummae rigged the harness,” Vei said. “It will hold. I’ll go up first. I obtained a pistol in case of emergency, but to be honest I doubt it will do us much good. Our best hope is speed. We’re certainly going to be conspicuous.”
Jebi forced themself to watch as Vei clambered up to her seat. She waved with entirely too much cheer once she was settled. “Now you,” she called down.
During their misspent childhood, Jebi had occasionally climbed trees and roofs. There was also the time they’d gone over the wall to their neighbor’s house before one of the servants caught them at it and shooed them out, back when they’d been little. They would have gotten away with it if they hadn’t ripped their pants in the process; Bongsunga had snitched on them when she saw them trying to mend the tear on the sly. Years had passed since those escapades, however, and Jebi didn’t trust their sense of balance after their recent adventures in the Summer Palace.
If I fall off, I will look like an idiot, Jebi thought, deciding that fear of humiliation could be as powerful a motivator as anything else. They squeaked once when Arazi shifted, then realized that it was compressing itself to reduce the distance between the foot- and handholds. “Thank you,” Jebi muttered; they were now even more embarrassed, but that was no reason not to be gracious about the help.
Jebi made it to their seat behind Vei and fitted themself awkwardly into it. Hyeja and Namgyu had a good sense of human anatomy and the amount of flexibility that could reasonably be expected of someone who had recently undergone minor torture. Jebi’s legs ached as they straddled the dragon’s back—they’d never realized before just how broad its vertebral pieces were—but they could endure.
Jebi looked first to the left, then to the right. They didn’t see much beyond the elaborate winter landscaping of Captain Dzuge’s garden and glimpses of the neighboring manses, which featured similar vistas of carefully arranged trees and rocks that had probably been imported from Huang-Guan for their picturesque qualities. What the view from this vantage point didn’t reveal, but they and presumably Vei also knew, was that the roads of the capital were all narrow, except for the two big thoroughfares that quartered the city—one north-south and the other east-west—to connect the four gates at the city’s boundaries.
{Are you really going to fly?} Jebi asked.
A strange chiming drifted back toward Jebi. After a moment, they realized the dragon was laughing. “Going through the city would be a bad idea,” it agreed. “But in this form, I am a creature of storms, and the sky is my element.”
Jebi clung to the saddlehorn as Arazi maneuvered itself out from under the cover of the trees. Like a snake, its multitude of articulated parts gave it alarming flexibility.
Arazi gathered itself, thrumming with tension, then leapt over Captain Dzuge’s house. In spite of their best intentions, Jebi screamed, convinced they were going to crash into it and bring the whole structure tumbling down on top of them. They had already sworn never to repeat the earthquake trick.
Instead, Arazi gained altitude, tensed again, gained more altitude. The wind cut into Jebi’s face, forcing tears from their eyes. Jebi squeezed their eyes shut, wondering if they were imagining the whole thing. Distantly, they heard Vei laughing in delight.
After several heartstop lurching moments, Jebi peeled one eye open, then the other. The city spread out beneath them, the trees no bigger than toothpicks. Jebi hoped devoutly that Arazi wouldn’t go any higher. They didn’t think their nerves would endure it if they left the sheltering earth behind altogether.
“—more!” Vei shouted at them, craning her head back.
“What?” Jebi shouted in response.
“It’s cold!” Vei said, which Jebi could understand only by reading her lips. “Should have bundled you up more!”
Jebi mimed that they were fine, more to reassure Vei than because they believed it.
They nerved themself to look down again. The hell with flying dragons as war machines; Jebi could see all sorts of applications in surveying and reconnaissance. Which Hafanden had already thought of, no doubt. One could make spectacular maps from this top-down view, instead of the traditional three-quarters view that the cartographers of both Hwaguk and Razan favored. Jebi could think of whole new conventions for traditional subjects, like the Eight Immortals meditating on their mountaintops. Would it be heterodox to paint them from above, looking down on them from a superior vantage point, rather than from below the way all the old paintings had it?
Then they saw the fire.
“We have to turn back!” Jebi yelled at Vei. “They set your father’s house on fire.” But the wind tore their words away.
{Arazi, tell her!} Jebi said, desperate to catch Vei’s attention.
From this distance they could barely discern what color the swarming figures wore, some dark color. It had to be the Razanei military’s blue. And while Jebi hadn’t seen much beyond the barest glimpses of the neighborhood, they could identify that plum tree.
In a more fanciful mood, Jebi would have likened the scene to a whimsical candle or lantern set alight. It was hard to believe that something that looked so small was real; that they’d woken up in that house not so long ago. They didn’t subscribe to the realist schools of painting that had invaded from the West; they preferred the more usual convention that portrayed more important things larger than less important things, the way any sensible person would.
Arazi slowed, circled, and tears started up in Jebi’s eyes again. This time they couldn’t blame the wind, or the cutting chill of the air.
“We have to help them!” Jebi shouted. “They’re your family, Vei.”
They couldn’t let Vei turn her back on her own parents the way Jebi had turned their back on Bongsunga.
Arazi banked, began veering back toward the house.
Vei shook her head emphatically. Jebi glimpsed her face as she gazed down at the scene. Could she tell who was winning, or whether her parents had gotten away? Numbers didn’t mean everything, in a fight; Jia had said that so often that it had to be at least partly true.
“How can you be so heartless?” Jebi cried.
“Go,” Vei said to Arazi.
After a reluctant pause, the dragon banked again and resumed its flight away from the burning house. The flames leapt higher, blazing orange and red. Jebi wondered if the fire brigade would arrive early enough to prevent the entire district from burning down.
I can’t believe they did that, Jebi thought, staring down despite the strain in their neck and their aching eyes. They almost didn’t notice the way the wooden frame dug into their side, the way they were twisted around to look behind themself. Even during the initial conquest, the Razanei had scorned to use fire. It was self-interest: the moment they consolidated their hold on the peninsula, they came up with flimsy pretexts to seize the nicest houses and parcel them out to their officers and functionaries. Captain Dzuge’s house would have been one of those, and however well he seemed to get along with his two lovers, Jebi couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the house’s original owners, and how they would feel when they heard that it had burned down.
Who am I kidding? Jebi asked themself. They’d accepted the captain’s hospitality; brought danger to Vei’s family. Never mind that Jebi hadn’t been conscious at the time. They had to make sure that the sacrifice meant something.
SIXTEEN
THE FLIGHT AWAY from Administrative City Fourteen lasted minutes, hours, days. Jebi had a good sense of passing time when they weren’t trapped underground, and also a good sense of how long it took to walk from one point to another. What they did not know was how fast travel by flying dragon was. The landscape sped by beneath them on a scale that Jebi could only have dreamed of in times past.
The Summer Palace and their confrontation with Hafanden evanesced like a dream in the first moments after waking, up here. The sun beat against their back like a sentinel’s lantern. The wind scraped their skin raw. Jebi was wearing gloves, but even the scarf they’d wrapped around their face did little to ameliorate the effect. They wanted to ask Arazi to slow down, but knew they didn’t dare linger. Their best hope of safety lay in reaching the rebels’ recruitment camp as quickly as possible.
They’d left the city far behind. Jebi remembered spotting the West Gate far below, the white peak of its roof standing out from the surrounding buildings, and from the worn wall that zigzagged to either side. The road leading to it curved like a restive snake, following the river that bisected the city.
I may never see the city like this again, Jebi said, entranced by the idea. It was like seeing a particular moment in time, amber-trapped. Even if Arazi took them on another flight like this one, there was no guarantee that the city itself would remain intact. Not after everything Jebi had learned about Hafanden’s plans.
“My father once asked if all these mountains had names,” Vei said as Arazi sped onward, exaggerating her speech so Jebi could read her lips more easily. “Razan is mountainous too, in places, but he comes from the plains on one of the larger islands.”
Jebi had difficulty envisioning this. “The islands are big enough to have plains?”
“The two largest ones are,” Vei said. “They’re more varied than you’d think, according to him. He told me stories of his travels as a younger soldier... he didn’t see as much of Razan as he would have liked. And then he ended up settling here.”
“Did he ever miss Razan?” Jebi asked, because they would have, in his place.
“This is his home now,” Vei said, which didn’t answer the question.
By now Jebi had recovered enough tact not to press further, and besides, having to gesticulate and read lips made conversation taxing.
