It was Ailyn's grave.
From an inner pocket of his jacket, he pulled with shaking hands a weathered, corroded bell.
He whispered, "I brought this for you, as I promised…"
He laid the gift before the marker. The tinkling, glad sound it made drew hot tears to his cheek.
Grief squeezed his heart. His chest was a hollow, gasping emptiness. He could barely draw in air, his throat was so tight.
Raidon had learned Ailyn perished in the first tremors preceding Nathlekh's sudden rise in altitude. She'd been dead more than ten years.
That knowledge did nothing to lessen Raidon's grief.
The staff he'd paid to watch over her in his absence had scattered to the four winds after her death, but Raidon had found one working in a scullery. This one described Ailyn's fate to Raidon in shaking, terrified tones.
The monk wondered again what thoughts had flashed through her head, as the walls of their dwelling collapsed, and the servants had rushed from the domicile, leaving her alone. Had she cried out for him?
An anguished sob escaped Raidon, and he collapsed across the grave marker.
According to Shou tradition, if surviving relatives and descendants pay sufficient respect to their dead, the dead in their turn exercise a benevolent influence over the lives and prosperity of their family. Thus it was not uncommon for a Shou household to set aside a small area called a shrine, where small carved representations of one or more dead relatives were set. While a few shrines were populated with a plethora of figures with a one-to-one correspondence to dead ancestors, most Shou households kept only a single figure to represent all those loved and lost.
In his absence, Raidon hadn't been able to see to it that this simplest and oldest Shou tradition of mourning was followed.
Even after her death, he had disappointed his adopted daughter, Raidon thought, his head pressed against the cool clay of Ailyn's grave marker. He was despicable.
It was as if scales dropped from his eyes, revealing Raidon to himself with hideous new understanding. All his philosophy and mental disciplines, his Xiang Do and pride in his skill- were these anything more than crutches he used to hold up his own ego? No. They were but facades that hid his true, demonstrated deficits for the things that mattered most in the mortal world. He'd allowed his "monster hunting" and vapid search for his long-vanished mother to distract him from the one thing in his life with true meaning.
His daughter.
His dead daughter.
Raidon screamed, clutched at his queue and pulled, thinking he would rip it out. "Raidon!"
The monk paused. Who'd spoken? His grief had broken his mind, and now he hallucinated. The idea of descending into the innocence that madness offered was sickening and appealing in equal measure.
"Raidon, look to the cemetery entrance," came a voice from nowhere. The voice had a familiar cadence.
His overmastering, sorrow couldn't prevent his eyes' quick flick upward. He saw through the press of clay markers to the cemetery's granite entry arch.
A small mob of people poured through the graveyard gate, chanting a slogan over and over, though not in any particular harmony. The unruly group was led by none other than the guard who'd tried to refuse the monk entry into Nathlekh. The guard was not wearing his official tabard of the city-instead, a liquor-stained smock.
The slogan they chanted abruptly became intelligible to Raidon: "No fey in Nathlekh! No fey in Nathlekh!"
A distant part of himself was surprised how quickly his desolation ignited to red fury.
Before he quite realized it, Raidon was striding toward the mob. His hands itched to strike something, and these small-minded bigots had just volunteered to be his targets. That which remained of his training attempted to forestall his path. But Raidon's impulse would not be quelled.
Ailyn was dead because he'd failed her. What else mattered?
When thirty paces separated the mob from Raidon, the guard called for the chant to cease with an upraised fist. He began, "The new kingdom of Nathlan does not accept non-Shou! Especially not Shou with blood polluted by the half-breed elves! I told you before to stay out. Since you were too arrogant to listen, we…" The guard's shouted speech trailed off. The mob around him continued their inane chant.
The monk continued his steady advance, eyes fixed on the guard. The smoldering height of fury burning in Raidon's visage wasn't the reaction the guard expected. He tried to retreat, and failed. The press of his riled-up followers pinned the man in place.
Realizing his danger, the guard yelled, "He is about to attack-grab the outlander!" The man's voice squeaked with alarm.
The rabble's chant turned into a roar as they streamed forward. The guard stayed back, his fear ebbing as the mob blocked Raidon. The guard's brave face returned, and he called out something in a jeering voice, but his words were lost in the screaming mob's imprecations.
A red-faced, screaming Shou grabbed at Raidon's new silk jacket. Another in pleated corduroy tried to club the monk with a rusted mace. A boy scratched at his face with painted but chipped fingernails.
Raidon evaded the grab with a counterpunch that dropped the Shou, and a simultaneous kick sent the mace spiraling into the face of a third man, who crumpled. The boy laid two long welts down his cheek, but his attention was already shifting to more significant threats.
Two corpulent women rushed him, their hair unrestrained and harpy-wild, their meaty fists gripping sharp cooking implements. Simultaneously a hard-faced smith, still in his singed smithy apron, came up behind Raidon with a hammer. Raidon bobbed around one woman's flailing knife and arrested the smith's hammer swing with a palm-thrust to the smith's shoulder with his right hand. With his left arm, he caught the other woman at the elbow with his own, joint to joint as if preparing to do a jig, then swung her around by turning his own body. He flung her down into the path of two new attackers: dockmen with boat hooks. The woman tripped one of the men and distracted the other long enough for Raidon to leap to the top of a nearby clay marker. His damaged foot burned, but Raidon's anger flamed hotter.
Above the fray he saw the original guard, who still hadn't moved as the mob surged to do his bidding. The guard's gaze jerked up and fixed on his nemesis. Raidon pointed a finger at him and shook his head slowly back and forth. It was a promise that no matter the obstacles, Raidon would not be denied his target.
The man's face paled, but he waved back to the cemetery entrance. An actual force of Nathlekh guardsmen in uniform was assembling there, and the man seemed to take confidence from that sight. The guard yelled. Raidon made out his words above the mob's din by reading his lips. "If you hurt me, you’ll face them!"
Raidon soundlessly mouthed back, "I don't care." Then he bounded over the heads of the reaching throng to another clay marker, closing a quarter of the distance between himself and his target.
"Raidon, this man is not responsible for Ailyn's death. If you kill him in your despair, your soul will be stained," came a new voice, somehow audible over the screaming rabble.
It was the same voice that had warned Raidon of the mob's appearance. Whoever or whatever it was, its reasonable advice inflamed his ire all the more. He replied, as he leaped again to a marker a mere ten paces from the guard, "Invisible spirit, mind your own affairs and leave me to mine!"
"Your affairs are my affairs, Raidon," came the instant response. "You have become my sole view into the world, and though I am pledged to obey a holder of the Sign, my pledge to the Sign itself is the greater duty. If you force me to it, I must protect its sanctity before your wishes. Past lapses must not be allowed to repeat themselves."
The words of the invisible demon intrigued that small portion of Raidon's mind not overwhelmed with murderous grief. But he did not pause. The monk hurdled the last of the screaming Shou that surged between him and his target. He charged, leaping high off one last clay monument as if it were a ramp. A flying elbow to the guard's crown would-