Defending the Lands of the Five Fires 01 (Cleansing the Shrine of Sum Sakhius)

After their adventures in Khanbaliq, the company returned to their house in the city and allowed themselves a couple days of rest. There were long baths, good meals, and few responsibilities beyond deciding when to leave.

But then, one afternoon, Bo-Jing announced that they would depart the following morning. He was eager to return to his official post at Banua—and equally eager to leave Khanbaliq before the Emperor found some new reason to summon him to court.

Bangqiu used the quiet interval to send a thought-message to Kafka in the Happy Valley. The Monastery of the Two-Fold Path, he reported, was now free of the slavers and corrupt monks who had been using it as their stronghold. It should be suitable for reconsecration and occupation by genuine monks, although there remained certain practical difficulties involving ants and a badly neglected sewage system.

The company set out the next morning: Bo-Jing, Bangqiu, Nar-Nuteng, Ryu—Bo-Jing’s spiritual adviser, an adherent of the Two-Fold Path—and the rest of Bo-Jing’s retinue.

As they traveled north, Bo-Jing and Bangqiu discovered that their reputations increasingly preceded them. Where there was no inn, someone found them a snug house. Where there was no house, there was an encampment around a roaring fire, the smell of roasting meat, and a crowd of smiling faces.

Mostly, people wanted to hear about the coin Bo-Jing and Ganbaatar had presented to the Emperor. Where had they found it? What powers did it possess? What would the Emperor do with it? Would Bo-Jing now be rewarded with marriage to an Imperial daughter?

Others had heard about the feud with Gansukh and the Nergui horde. Some knew rumors of Bangqiu’s magic.

And nearly everywhere there seemed to be one or two young men eager to test themselves against the bright-eyed warrior maiden traveling in Bo-Jing’s company. Nar-Nuteng rarely declined the challenge.

Bo-Jing and Bangqiu, meanwhile, had begun thinking seriously about finding another of the ancient coins.

Along the road they met a mystic named Erke, who claimed to travel through the Valley of the Five Fires in the dreamworld. There, he said, he had heard a rumor concerning the Northern Coin.

“The horse of Khagan Harad still looks for his master.”

It was little enough to go on, but Bo-Jing invited Erke to travel with them.

Farther north, the welcomes remained warm, but the questions changed.

People were hearing stories from the western lands: men losing themselves to the minds of beasts, surrendering to hunger, rage, lust, and fear until little remained of the men they had once been. There were still occasional jokes about the barbaric habits of the Nergui horde, but most understood that this was something different.

Now, instead of asking for stories of Imperial treasure, people wanted reassurance.

Was it true that Bo-Jing and Bangqiu had fought wolves, giants, and flying monsters?

Had they really led men against the Master’s creatures?

And if those creatures came again, would they fight them again?

Yes, Bo-Jing told them.

They would.

By the time the company reached Banua, thoughts of the Northern Coin had begun to seem less urgent.

Ganbaatar greeted them with relief.

“So thankful you decided to leave the good life in the capital and return to little old Banua.”

He had already forbidden his people to travel west into Nergui lands. The stories coming from that direction were too disturbing, and Ganbaatar believed the Master’s beastmen might already be moving east.

But another report troubled him even more.

The shrine of Sum Sukhis had been defiled.

The shrine lay several days northeast of Banua, and Ganbaatar considered it the true jewel of his lands.

“A holy place for all people,” he told them. “No matter your faith, anyone who went there with an open heart came away with peace and joy.”

Until now.

Pilgrims had disappeared. Others had abandoned their journeys after finding themselves increasingly uneasy as the shrine’s stupa came into view.

Bo-Jing, Bangqiu, and Nar-Nuteng agreed readily to investigate. Ryu and several of Bo-Jing’s other associates went with them.

Erke declined.

He would remain in Banua and await their return.

The journey to Sum Sukhis took several days. At first they still encountered shepherds, travelers, and small settlements. As they drew nearer to the shrine, the country became steadily emptier.

Eventually they met a hermit who told them something of Sum Sukhis’s strange history. The shrine had been deliberately constructed in three levels: an upper story, a ground floor built around a sacred pool, and beneath them an underground level that had always been closed to pilgrims.

The design, the hermit explained, expressed a truth about the world.

Peace and holiness did not exist because evil was absent.

They existed because evil was continually resisted.

Now blue and purple oni had taken the shrine. They attacked pilgrims, desecrated the holy place, and filled its former silence with violence.

On the day the company finally reached Sum Sukhis, they encountered two of the creatures before they even entered.

The ten-foot-tall blue-skinned monsters were trying to knock down a tree in which an eagle had built her nest.

Bangqiu and Ryu used their magic to transfix the oni, sending them crashing rigidly to the ground. The eagle immediately descended and began pecking at one monster’s eyes, carrying bits of flesh back to her chicks.

Examining the bodies, Bo-Jing noticed something unsettling. Both oni were covered with large pus-filled sores and bloody boils.

Ryu spoke with the eagle. She told him that the monsters lived in the “quiet stone house.”

They had, she said, “taken the silence away” with fighting and screaming.

Inside the shrine, the party found the sacred pool just as the hermit had described it. Nearby, a staircase descended below ground.

At the foot of the stairs stood two oni guarding a closed door, their backs toward the party.

Bangqiu addressed them in their own language and in his most commanding voice.

He had come from the Master, he announced, and required a full report.

The guards immediately became defensive. They insisted that they were faithfully carrying out the Master’s orders. They were guarding the place as commanded.

But something underground was making everyone sick.

Most of the oni wanted to leave.

The chief would not allow it.

Bangqiu informed them that he would speak with the chief immediately.

The guards obligingly escorted the visitors back upstairs.

The other oni seemed almost pleased by the novelty of guests. Bo-Jing, displaying both his sword and the power of the Eastern Coin, helped persuade them that the strangers were powerful allies of the Master.

The creatures were violent, certainly, but not in any organized way. Their aggression came and went in bursts, sometimes directed at the visitors and just as often at one another.

At one point, apparently on a whim and perhaps hoping to entertain their guests, two oni seized a third and threw him over a balcony into the sacred pool below.

All of them bore the same sores and lesions.

The chief was less welcoming.

By the time Bo-Jing and his companions entered his quarters, they found themselves surrounded by a dozen enormous creatures. The chief himself was suspicious and openly hostile.

Bo-Jing acted first.

Calling upon the power of the Eastern Coin, he spoke a single sharp command.

The chief collapsed, motionless.

For a moment, the oni stared.

Then one of them lunged for the fallen chief’s yak-skin cloak and wrapped it around his shoulders.

“I am the new chief!”

Another immediately challenged him.

Within seconds the room dissolved into a brawl.

Somewhere in the confusion, Bangqiu made the cloak disappear.

It took the oni a little while to notice.

When they did, their outrage turned once again toward the visitors.

Bangqiu had already vanished from sight.

Invisible, he climbed outside through a window and called down to them.

“The chief’s cloak is outside! Whoever reaches it first will become the new chief!”

To prove the claim, he allowed the cloak to become visible and dropped it to the ground.

The oni crowded at the window. They considered jumping, but even oni could recognize a bad idea when staring down from sufficient height, and instead began shoving one another toward the stairs and over the balcony.

By the time they reached the ground, the cloak had vanished again.

A short distance away, it reappeared.

The oni charged after it.

Then it vanished once more.

While Bangqiu led the shrine’s occupants farther and farther away in pursuit of their wandering symbol of authority, Bo-Jing and the others slipped out.

Near the exit they encountered two oni unlike any they had yet seen.

Disease had transformed them almost beyond recognition. Their swollen skin had stretched into a pale, sickly violet. Most of their teeth were gone. Their bodies were a mass of sores.

They attacked without fear and with almost no regard for their own survival.

When Bo-Jing and his companions cut them down, it seemed less like defeating enemies than releasing creatures that had already been destroyed.

The party exchanged grim looks.

Then Bo-Jing led them back downstairs.

The door the oni had been guarding had been smashed open.

Beyond it, the company found more diseased creatures and put them down.

And then they found the source.

Deep beneath Sum Sukhis rested a boulder of black stone nearly as massive as the shrine above it. Sickly purple light pulsed within it like a heartbeat.

Almost immediately, their skin began to itch.

Their thoughts changed.

Anger came easily. Suspicion seemed reasonable. Cruel impulses arrived with the seductive simplicity of common sense.

They withdrew and continued exploring.

Nearby they discovered two chambers whose walls were covered in unfamiliar writing. The moment they entered, the oppressive feeling lifted. Touching the inscriptions brought an extraordinary sense of peace.

Bo-Jing could not read the characters, but they reminded him of writing he had seen in Bangqiu’s books.

The party left the shrine and made camp outside, waiting for Bangqiu to return from his successful campaign to establish the yak-skin cloak somewhere else on the northern frontier.

When he finally rejoined them, they told him what they had discovered.

Together they entered Sum Sukhis once more.

Bangqiu could indeed read the writing.

As he spoke the words aloud, a profound calm settled over them.

When they returned to the chamber of the black stone, they discovered that something had changed. A gentle yellow radiance now surrounded the enormous boulder. Its purple light still pulsed within, but the corruption no longer touched them.

They could stand beside it without feeling their minds turn against them.

The evil had not been destroyed.

It had been contained.

Bangqiu considered the broken door through which the oni had entered the undercroft.

A wooden barrier and good intentions, he announced, were clearly inadequate.

He raised his hands.

Stone flowed across the opening.

When he was finished, the passage beneath Sum Sukhis had vanished behind a seamless wall.