She sighed. “Whether or not the cable is attached? That is the question.”
“And the answer?” he asked.
“Xin ren. Say it.”
Automatically he repeated what she had said, struggling with the pronunciation. “Xin ren.”
“It means to have trust,” Lin Mae said, holding his gaze with hers. “To have faith.” She gestured at the semi-circle of silent, watchful crane warriors standing behind them. “Here? This army? Our flag? We fight for more than food or money. We give our lives to something more. Xin ren is our flag. Trust in each other. In all ways. At all times.”
She turned back to him. William stared into her eyes, held her gaze for a long moment. Then he looked once more at the ground far, far below.
Eventually, turning back to her, he said, “Well, that’s all well and good. But I’m not jumping. I’m alive today because I trust no one.”
Lin Mae regarded him with something like pity. “A man must learn to trust before he can be trusted,” she said.
“Then you were right,” replied William. “We’re not the same.”
11
Ballard’s quarters reminded William of the cluttered, cave-like interior of a Turkish market stall. Lit by several lamps, it was crammed with books and trinkets; with maps, charts and wall hangings; with bits of machinery and strangely shaped stones; with bottles and jars and boxes containing who knew what variety of material?
Selecting a bottle of cloudy yellowish-brown liquid, Ballard poured three generous measures into a trio of copper cups, two of which he passed to each of his visitors. Pero sniffed dubiously at the liquid and exchanged glances with William. Grinning at their wariness, Ballard drank from his own cup. Pero watched for a moment before following suit, sipping the concoction tentatively at first, and then, raising his eyebrows, drinking more eagerly.
As William took a sip from his cup, tasting something potent and sweet that he guessed was made from stewed fruit, Ballard began to speak.
“You’re stuck, gentlemen,” he said. “I hope you realize that. You know their secrets. They’ll never let you leave now.”
He allowed his words to sink in, a smug smile on his face. Then he gestured at his quarters with a sweep of his hand. “Posit the future. See what becomes of even the best of us. Once renowned in the finest courts of Christendom, what am I now but a pampered drunk with a pen and a rice bowl? I make spirits for the elders, bore the young with Latin, and translate every piece of nonsense that comes down the Silk Road. I have spent half my life on this joy forsaken rock and yet I live only by the Oath of the Nameless Order.” He intoned the words with solemn irony. “Discipline. Loyalty. Secrecy.”
He raised his cup with a sneer. “I’m afraid, gentlemen, you have joined the choir. Your only hope is me.”
As he gulped at the potent liquid in his cup, tilting his head back to savor every last drop, William looked at him. The light from the flickering candle Ballard held in his left hand turned his leering, skull-like face into a writhing yellow mask.
“The flavors of black powder are simple, gentlemen,” he said. “Charcoal, sulphur and nitre. It is the recipe and profundity of their integration wherein the magic lies.”
He lowered the candle towards a small pewter bowl perched on the end of a cluttered workbench. Without warning there was a flash of brilliant light that caused both William and Pero to cry out and leap back. For a few terrible moments William felt sure he’d gone blind—and then little by little the white disc at the center of his vision faded. Blurrily he saw a curl of pale grey smoke rising from the pewter bowl, and Ballard grinning wolfishly at the dramatic effect of his little demonstration.
“A taste. A glimpse,” he hissed. “A few pilfered grains from Strategist Wang’s hoard. He has mastered the transmutation of these elements. The tablets of his formulae I have seen with my own eyes in the gated heart of his Hall of Knowledge.”
Pero was still watching the curl of now thinning smoke as if mesmerized.
“Bouchard spoke of a weapon,” William said.
Ballard grew sly. “There are many weapons here.”
“Why have we not seen them?”
“There are many things here you haven’t seen. And many things you should pray will not be needed before this siege is over.”
He fell silent as if inviting them to ask him to elaborate. But William refused to rise to his bait. The man reminded him simultaneously of a variety of repulsive creatures: rat, snake, spider, cockroach. In the end Ballard sighed.
Adopting the tone of a rather pompous teacher, he said, “The Tao Tei siege has never lasted more than nine days, nor less than seven. The only certainty is this: they will return. And when the battle drums begin to sound, the guards of the various Corps—Tiger, Bear, Crane, Deer and Eagle—will leave their posts and take up their positions along the wall. That will be our moment.”
He fixed his eyes on them like a mesmerist attempting to bend them to his will.
“We want to be riding away as the battle rages,” he said.
“What about the armory doors?” William asked. “You have keys?”
Ballard rolled his eyes. “I have black powder. Enough for several doors.”
“He brings us in,” said Pero, his face flushed with alcohol. “We get us out.”
“How?” asked William. “Do we have horses I don’t know about?’
Pero nodded. “They have a stable here. A big one.”
“And nowhere near enough guards,” added Ballard.
William gave him an incredulous look. Was Ballard seriously proposing that they steal a couple of horses and fight their way out? With heavy irony he said, “That sounds like a busy morning.”
Pero grinned a drunken grin. “Once we get that far, what else is there? Kill or be killed. Right, amigo?”
William said nothing. Pero leaned across, almost toppling over, and punched his friend on the arm.
“To win the thing we came for? What would we not do, eh?” His eyes were shining, his voice exuberant, as if he hoped his enthusiasm would rub off on his friend.
But William simply looked at him, and then at Ballard.
And still he said nothing.
Escorted by a squad of Deer Corps soldiers on horseback, pine oil torches raised above their heads to cut through the darkness, General Shao and Lin Mae thundered along the length of the Wall. General Shao sat astride a huge, gleaming black steed, and Lin Mae rode beside him on a smaller but no less impressive animal that was as white as lotus blossom. The desert beyond the Wall was as black as pitch, the Gouwu Mountain glowing in the far distance with a bilious green light. Though there was not a single sigh of wind, the air rang with cries from the inspection towers that spanned the Wall at regular intervals, a message passed down the line: “Troops unaccounted for at the West Tower!”
Passing through the arch of the final tower before the one from which the guards on duty there had recently fallen ominously silent, General Shao reined in his horse and raised a gauntleted hand. As Lin Mae and the rest of the squad slowed, they saw a horrendous sight ahead of them. Scattered across an upward slope of the undulating Wall were at least a dozen bodies, and parts of bodies – all that had remained of the soldiers that had formed the night watch on the West Tower.
Lin Mae glanced at the General. His face was stern and watchful, his upper body stiff with tension.
“Something’s wrong here,” he said. “This is not a common attack. The Tao Tei never leave the bodies.”