Thresholder

Luo Yanhua was treating him like a child. Worse, she was treating him like a child she was uninterested in, some brat kid her mother had told her to look after. He asked questions and she didn’t answer them, or gave only curt, cursory answers. Perry had no idea whether this was an annoying test, a cultural issue, or if she was holding back so that he would speak more about himself and his own circumstances.

Perry had made a lot of corpses before, but had never dug a grave. In Seraphinus, the digging of graves had been the work of common laborers, as soldiers were supposed to save their stamina for the battlefield. He hadn’t just been a soldier, he’d been a knight, and such things were beneath him. There had been lots of work that he’d tried to pitch in on, but after a few reprimands, he’d stopped trying to pull his weight as far as the mundane stuff was concerned. It had been relatively easy to accept that his role in the war was killing orcs, trolls, goblins, and all kinds of other creatures.

Perry had never shirked hard work, but there was something about digging graves for these men that irked him. For one thing, you were supposed to bury your own dead, everyone knew that. The bandits had no honor, that was probably how they’d gone into the whole mess in the first place. The second thing was that Luo Yanhua was watching, not helping.

Grave digging was slow, brutal work that only got more brutal once the power armor’s battery had worn down. Perry had tried to calibrate it so that the armor would only compensate for its own weight, but it wasn’t strong enough to do that for an extended bout of manual labor, which meant that Perry was faced with the option of either crawling out of his armor entirely or continuing on with doing the hard work encased in metal. He chose the latter, mostly because it was heading toward noon, and once the ring lined up with the sun, he was worried that the wolf would come out to play.

Luo Yanhua hadn’t deigned to give him an answer about whether there was an eclipse at noon.

“Alright, so is this Mr. Miyagi makework, is this disciplinary potato-peeling, or is there some deep cultural meaning to this?” asked Perry once he’d dug the first two graves. He’d wanted to make a mass grave, which seemed easier, but Luo Yanhua had insisted they be separate.

“I don’t know the meaning of your words,” replied Luo Yanhua.

“Alright,” said Perry. “That’s fine, you’re not going to answer anyway.” The shovel he’d borrowed from the village bit another section of earth. “I don’t mind doing the work, I just want to know why I’m being made to do the work.”

“Bodies must be buried,” said Luo Yanhua.

“Right,” said Perry as he pushed the shovel in harder. He stopped himself, reeling in his frustration. He was in this for the long haul, and it wouldn’t do to tire himself out. “Is it a law that I must bury the bodies of those I’ve killed in self-defense?”

“It is a sign of respect to those who have fallen,” said Luo Yanhua.

“Alright, see?” asked Perry. “That I can accept. I just want to have some motivation for doing this, rather than letting these bodies be eaten by wolves or whatever would happen to them.”

“They would rise in the form of a crab, hard-shelled and deadly,” said Luo Yanhua. “Burial rites should be performed by friends and family, and we must assume that these men had neither. The rites must therefore be performed by a stranger, not only for the peace of the dead, but for the safety of the community.”

“And that I understand as well,” said Perry. “Bury people, otherwise they’ll come back as zombie crabs. Makes perfect sense. I’m hoping that you can give me some guidance on the rites, because I don’t know much more than sticking a body in a hole.”

“I do not speak your language,” said Luo Yanhua. “We of the second sphere treat language as malleable, something which can obey the force of will, so it is simple for us to communicate with you in this way, beyond the barriers of common sound. That does not mean that we will fully understand each other.”

“Ah,” said Perry. “And there was a word that you missed?” He paused for a moment to catch his breath, then got back to the shoveling.

“There have been many that I have missed, in the short time we’ve known each other,” said Luo Yanhua. “If you are from another world, there are concepts that you will know which I do not. ‘Zombie’?”

“Uh, a corpse that comes back to life,” said Perry. He was sweating beneath the suit. It was built with tubes in it that helped to wick away heat. The skintight suit he’d worn underneath had been of a special wonder-fabric from Richter’s world, wicking away sweat like it was nothing and feeling like silk against his skin. It had unfortunately been utterly destroyed when Perry had transformed. Beneath the armor, he was wearing clothes that were starting to chafe, sodden with sweat.

“The manner in which the dead come back depends upon their death,” said Luo Yanhua. “An improper burial, a betrayal, a suicide, an accident, a drowning, a poisoning — all these bring their own afflictions upon the world.”

“Which is why you have rites to stop them,” said Perry. The digging was especially difficult on his lower back, which he thought probably meant that his technique was sloppy.

“You have a curious view of the world,” said Luo Yanhua. She was looking at him with a raised eyebrow, real emotion shown for what felt like the first time, unless he counted the anger she’d shown when she returned from her jaunt to the heavens. “A dangerous view.”

Perry stayed silent. He didn’t know why she was saying that, but it wasn’t a good impression to be giving. What he should have said when she’d suggested burying the bodies was ‘yes, of course, that’s the right and proper thing to do, respectful of fallen foes’. Better than that, he should have said, ‘Oh, those bodies? I buried them after the battle, as any right-thinking person would do’, but of course that was a lie that would be easy to get caught in, especially once zombie crabs attacked the nearby village.

He tried to think about how he’d started this, by following her in the village, and thought that was probably where he’d gone wrong. If he was going to spy, it should have been with the whisper-quiet drone, or in such a way that it was deniable, not that he could blend in here, armor or not. He was definitely not an ethnic match for these people.

He dug more graves in silence.

Around noon, the sky darkened, and Perry stopped his work for a moment, looking up at it. He had his helmet back in place, and wasn’t worried about an unexpected transformation, but there was something about a midday eclipse that sent a shiver down his spine anyway. The whole thing didn’t last long, but the ring was plunged into darkness, which meant that the sun was outside the ring, not inside. The ring was, then, spinning off in space. He frowned, trying to work out the physics of it. It didn’t seem stable in the long-term, not unless there were hidden thrusters at the side of the ring. And the way light would fall would mean that certain parts of the ring would get practically no light at all, worse than being above the Arctic circle … which was possibly how seasons worked, in this place.

Following the eclipse — which was probably the wrong name for it — Perry’s commitment to silence didn’t seem to faze Luo Yanhua in the slightest.

Perry thought the graves were a bit shallow, truth be told, but Luo Yanhua seemed satisfied with the work and asked no more of him. The bodies were laid in each of them in turn, and Perry had to do the additional hard work of moving the earth back into place. The soil conditions seemed good, with little in the way of roots, which seemed to be the benefit of having a spot in the clearing. Still, the whole thing took time, not to mention the physical exertion.

Perry hadn’t had much chance to test his limits as a werewolf. There was the whole wolf thing, of course, but even in human form there had been changes. He was hairier and his sense of smell was far more keenly attuned, which had been somewhat of a detriment in Teaguewater, whose odors had grown more offensive when he’d been able to pick out all the layered awfulness. The transformation had come with strength, too, not enough that the armor didn’t fit, and mostly in terms of feel rather than larger muscles. It wasn’t lift-a-car-one-handed super strength, but he was probably stronger than a normal man by a wide enough margin that he’d win a boxing match even against a professional.

A normal man probably couldn’t have done four hours of grave-digging in heavy metal armor without taking much of a break.

Luo Yanhua handled the burial rites, which seemed dead simple. She made a fist-sized pit in the loose earth that covered each of the bodies and poured a glug of sweet rice wine, followed by a simple coin, and a leaf from one of the nearby trees, something like a maple, but more in the shape of a star. The flask with the wine had been borrowed from the village, as had the coins. She said words which either needed to be in the local language or were said for the benefit of someone else, maybe the dead.

“Good,” said Luo Yanhua, the first words she’d spoken in more than two hours. She’d been doing nothing, only watching him dig graves.

“You have a measure of my character and worth?” asked Perry.

“I do,” said Luo. “You will accompany me to the Moon Gate’s Silver Fish Temple, where we will provide you with food and shelter.”

“That’s it?” asked Perry. “That’s all I had to do?”

“That’s all,” Luo Yanhua nodded.

“I have questions,” said Perry. “I mean, you know that. When will I have those questions answered?”

“Soon,” said Luo Yanhua. “It is the custom of the second sphere not to share too much with the first sphere.”

Perry tried to think about how he would respond if he were the perfect guest. Probably he wouldn’t show his annoyance. “Knowledge can be dangerous,” he nodded. “All things in good time.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, a slight movement that carried weight given how deliberate everything she’d done was. “That is not your natural inclination.”

“No,” said Perry. “But I’ve been to other worlds, and I know enough to know that I’ll need to adapt.”

Luo Yanhua nodded, seeming to think that was a bit of sage wisdom.

In some respects, he’d resolved to treat this place as Seraphinus 2.0 and assume that everything worked off chivalry and honor. The problem, the core problem, was that he had no firm understanding of what this place had in terms of codes of conduct. So far, his list was relatively short: don’t spy on people, don’t mess with second sphere weapons, and bury the dead. There are a lot of other assumptions he was following as well, but it was difficult to set them in order, simply because so much felt like it should be taken for granted. Theft and assault were probably not cool, but Luo ‘Sky Piercer’ Yanhua had seemed like she was willing to put an arrow through him for looking at her from a distance, so perhaps assault was less frowned upon than he’d been assuming.

He followed her back to the village, where they returned the things they’d borrowed, the shovel for him and the now-empty bottle of spirits for her. She was still holding onto her bow and had her quiver with her, the ones that it seemed like she’d gotten from the moon.

“Are there any questions you will answer?” asked Perry.

“Yes,” said Luo Yanhua.

“Just … not questions about the shape of the world?” asked Perry. “Not information on how society is organized, things like that?”

“I would answer those,” said Luo Yanhua, without pause. In her mind, the divisions must already have been drawn between the permissible and impermissible.

“Those people in the village, they’re all first sphere?” asked Perry.

“Yes,” said Luo Yanhua.

“And you’re second sphere?” asked Perry.

“I am,” Luo Yanhua nodded.

Perry wanted to ask what they had to do with the spirit root, and what a spirit root was, but that seemed like the kind of thing that was kept from the first sphere for whatever reason, most likely in order to hoard power. The swordsman had talked about it freely, but Perry supposed that had been in a language that the bandits around weren’t speaking. He wanted to ask how many spheres there were, but that also seemed like something she might balk at.

Flora had been the same way, nervous when he asked about gaining power, though he wouldn’t have described Luo Yanhua as nervous. Where Flora was tense and guarded, this woman was practically a robot.

“What kind of things do you do for fun?” asked Perry.

Luo Yanhua didn’t react to the absurdity of that, she only walked a few more steps in silence before answering. “I compose poetry. I share the rites of daily life. I spend time in my sanctum, evolving it.”

Perry wanted to know what those words meant, what a ‘rite’ was beyond just the thing with the graves, what a sanctum was, how it evolved, how he could get one. It was causing him no small amount of excitement, which he was trying to tamp down.

“What’s there to eat around here, for a guest of first sphere?” asked Perry.

“Dinner tonight will be rice porridge with pickled vegetables and preserved eggs,” said Luo Yanhua. “Or perhaps … stir-fried vegetables, wheat noodles, steamed buns. Simple fare.” She took two silent steps. “What have you eaten in other worlds?”

“In the last one, bread, potatoes, oat porridge, offal, sausage, stews, that sort of thing,” said Perry. “The world before that was,” he paused a tick, realizing that diet might be one of those things that would get him in trouble. He tried to remember what he’d seen of the food preparation in the village. They’d had chickens, or at least some kind of feathered bird in cages and pens, but Perry hadn’t seen horses or cows. There’d been a single pig. “Venison, beef, pork, lamb, geese, swans, salmon, sturgeon — unbelievable amounts of meat, really, breads with a bit of sugar, all kinds of fruits.”

“A rich and varied diet,” said Luo Yanhua. “And the world before that?”

“Er,” said Perry. He thought about Richter’s world, and what he’d eaten there. He wasn’t sure he had the language to describe it. “This world, this ring, is it — is there a lot of variety to it, to the cultures?”

“There is more variety in the lower spheres,” said Luo Yanhua. She was thoughtful, the question apparently both permissible and interesting to her. That was good, because it meant she was more likely to talk. “Green Snake Valley is inland. There are lakes, but little of the fresh fish and seafood of other places.” She looked up at the ring and pointed with a slender finger. It was hard to tell where, if she meant to be pointing at anything specific. “The Great Arc has many oceans, and many kingdoms on the edges of them. Crab, shrimp, clam, squid, shark, whale, the bounty of the oceans.”

Perry winced when she said ‘shark’ and then ‘whale’. Diet being a touchy subject was something that went both ways.

“You were saying, of your past worlds?” asked Luo Yanhua.

They were walking together, with her leading the way, down a dirt road that had turned into one paved with stones. It was surprisingly modern, though Perry had no idea how much stone paths had evolved since medieval times. He didn’t actually know enough about Chinese history to know whether the medieval period had been quite the same, but he did know enough to know that China had never been much of a monolith. He also wondered how on the mark ‘China’ even was, as a parallel to this world.

“In the world I come from, I was in a place with all the variety of a thousand kingdoms,” said Perry. “You could sit down to a meal and have anything, from anywhere. Tacos, sushi, pasta, anything your heart desired, stores with a thousand different bottles of wine, two hundred cuts of meat, anything you wanted really. Specialty shops lining every street, regional cuisines from every part of the world.” There was more and less than that, really, though it would be hard to describe. Certain ingredients were nearly impossible to track down, and certain regional cuisines just weren’t popular enough to have a shop, and of course everything in Tacoma was sanded down and Americanized in one way or another, even if it was a hipster sort of sanding down where some of the foreignness was emphasized for ‘authenticity’.

“You left all that?” asked Luo Yanhua. “You sound as though you miss it.”

“I do, sometimes,” said Perry.

“Did you leave for noble reasons?” asked Luo Yanhua.

Perry pursed his lips. It didn’t seem fair of her to ask that, not when she was denying him so much. The topic of food had been safer for both of them.

“I was … needed,” said Perry. “Called.”

That was a religious term, Christian, and he didn’t figure that the concept would translate. It wasn’t particularly true either, except that part of the schtick with being a thresholder was that you kept getting matched up with people who were, if not monsters, then at least misaligned. He’d felt it most keenly in Seraphinus, where stopping Pulver had been a matter of keeping the kingdom from bloody defeat.

All that had been an easier framing to believe in before he’d met Cosme.

“What is your mission in this realm?” asked Luo Yanhua.

“It’s something I need to keep secret, for the time being,” said Perry. “Sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologize,” replied Luo Yanhua. “It is a sign of wisdom to know when something should not be shared.”

Perry considered that. If not handing out information was wise, then she was Solomon.

Much of the walk was silent, in part because Perry didn’t know what was permissible.

His mind went to the geography of the ring, whose vast expanses lay to the north and south. He had some questions about all of it, deep questions that he thought weren’t likely to get any solid answers. Some of those questions were geography questions, not the matters of the physical place, but the human geography, stuff like population growth, migration, urbanization, and cultural landscapes. Some of those questions seemed like they’d be safe to ask.

“Do they speak the same language all over the Great Arc?” asked Perry.

“The first sphere is divided by language,” said Luo Yanhua. “Though the second sphere can act as translators, should the need arise.”

“You’re all polyglots,” said Perry.

“More than that,” said Luo Yanhua. “We bend language to our will.”

“And the cultures are different, in the first sphere,” said Perry. “Different because there are different climates, different foods, different materials for building. All that shapes the culture, on top of all the regional aspects that don’t feel like they come from material conditions like what wood is available to use.” His eyes went to a piece of the Arc to the north, which was clearly desert. “Or whether they have wood at all. And in the second sphere … is it permitted to tell me?”

Luo Yanhua thought for a moment. “You wish to know the material conditions of the second sphere?”

“Yes,” said Perry. Desperately. “You were talking about what the first sphere ate, but said nothing about the second sphere. Not rice porridge?”

“We partake as a matter of following the rites,” said Luo Yanhua. “But when there is no food our bellies do not go empty in the same way. The internal alchemy of the first sphere is haphazard, sloshing back and forth, a fire that requires constant fuel. The same is not true of the second sphere. We take neither food, nor water, no breath, not unless there is cause to.”

“Thank you,” said Perry.

“For what do you owe me thanks?” asked Luo Yanhua.

“For actually telling me something,” said Perry. “It’s not anything that I can use, but it’s good to know, it’s what I want to know.”

“Trivial things,” said Luo Yanhua. “Obvious things?”

“Yes,” said Perry.

She was stepping lightly on the stones of the road, never over-extending, yet always sometimes placing her feet directly on the stone, never across them, never in the crack. “Yet you do wish to know how to reach the second sphere. It is easy to see your thirst for power, the swell of your spirit root in anticipation.”

Perry couldn’t argue with that — literally couldn’t, because he didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. He didn’t know what a spirit root was, and she hadn’t told him, but he assumed that it was some kind of metaphysical thing, or perhaps a metaphor for some personal attribute he was lacking.

“It’s possible then?” asked Perry. “To move from the first sphere to the second? Or is it immutable, the barrier?”

Luo Yanhua gave a laugh. “I should not answer, but you are so earnest in your question, as though you would simply accept me if I told you that it were beyond mortal means — but you’re not mortal, are you?”

Perry was silent. Had she seen that he was a werewolf? Did they have werewolves here? Or was it simply obvious from the grave-digging that he had more stamina and strength than he should have?

“I was of the first sphere,” said Luo Yanhua. “I transitioned years ago, after long preparations. I was born in a fishing village on a coast far from here, the Gold Sands Beach. It is a difficult path, hardening the mind and body.” She looked at him. “Not all have the spirit root.”

“And people who don’t have it, they’re just … stuck in the first sphere?” asked Perry.

Luo Yanhua shook her head. “It is not so, this idea of ‘stuck’. I go among the villages, talk to their people, see to the needs that I can see to. They live good lives in accordance with the civic virtues, the familial virtues, honoring the land and each other. The first sphere is not lesser, it is prime.”

“Divisible only by itself and one,” said Perry.

There followed a long silence. Despite the dusty roads they’d been traveling, and the occasional spot of mud, Luo Yanhua’s clothes had stayed immaculately clean. That would be a handy power to have, if it was part of the second sphere suite. There was obviously more than just fluidity, grace, clean clothes, and being a polyglot, but all the incidentals were appealing in their own right. If ‘transitioning’ into the second sphere meant getting all that stuff, Perry was going to find the shortest path to it. Being able to dent metal with a punch and teleport to the moon was practically a side benefit, the cherry on top.

“I do not understand your wisdom,” Luo Yanhua said eventually.

Perry’s mind froze for a moment as he tried to recall what he’d said. He was hungry, and the water pouch in his suit was now empty, despite being filled before he left Teaguewater. He was also going to need to take the suit off to use the bathroom sooner rather than later.

She’d been talking about the joke. “Ah, nevermind,” said Perry.

“I will think on it,” said Luo Yanhua. “We are almost to our destination.”

The mixed coniferous and deciduous forest had given way to something that was extremely Chinese, bamboo forests, which would have given away the sort of place he was at once. The road narrowed, with the stone path only barely wide enough to walk through, not permitting a cart, and the bamboo was crowded around it, thick and tall, putting them into their shade. Marchand dialed the brightness of the display up, meaning there was no need for Perry’s eyes to adjust.

After two hundred yards or so, the path took a turn, then suddenly ran up into a cliff, which had been hidden by the bamboo. The path was carved into the cliff, steep and without railing, and Luo Yanhua began the trek up without any ceremony. Perry followed. Most of the work he’d done grave-digging had been with his arms and back, and his legs still had plenty of stamina left in them, even though he was, for the most part, carrying the armor rather than being supported by it. He could have used the sword, but worried that it would reflect poorly on his character in some way. Luo Yanhua seemed to value hard work for its own sake.

The Green Snake Valley, as seen from the sky, had been dotted with these small cliffs that stuck up from the valley like scattered skyscrapers of rock, the debris of some monumental catastrophe, at least to Perry’s eyes. The rock was worn from wind or something else, with little that was jagged or broken, the crevices like folds in dark gray cloth. Most were topped with greenery, which sometimes spilled down one side, tucked into anywhere that soil could cling to.

Mountain-top training temple, Perry thought to himself. As they rose above the bamboo, he could see more of the cliffs, and wondered whether those, too, had been colonized by the martial arts masters. He couldn’t see any buildings, but it was possible they were hidden. It was also possible that he was being taken to a place without buildings, nothing more than a mat to sleep on and a fireplace to heat up the rice porridge. She had said ‘temple’ but not explained what she meant by that.

When they got to the top though, there was a grand temple whose surrounding area had been paved, with short grasses and mosses now growing up between the pieces of stone. It was a single building with two wings flanking it, turned in like the stiff arms of a man trying to give a workplace-appropriate hug. It took up almost the entirety of the top of the cliff, though the edges had plenty of bamboo, fencing them in and shielding them from having a view of the valley, except on one side, to the north, where there was a spectacular view of the Great Arc. A small square pool sat in the middle of the grounds, and when Perry drew closer, he saw, beneath the lily pads, tiny silver fish swimming around.

There were maybe a half dozen people milling about, and another two dozen who were engaged in training martial arts, moving slowly and deliberately through forms. They were all dressed in blue and white clothes, not quite a uniform, and were being led by a man with flowing white hair who Perry immediately pegged as someone of the second sphere. Looking around, there were a few of them, always with a little something extra to them, something in their hair, clothes, or makeup. A man by the pool had silky black hair tied back in a ponytail, his sword’s hilt almost choked with gold and jewels. A woman sat on a cushion beneath a crooked tree with a massive tome open in front of her, her two-toned white and black hair up in seven separate buns.

“This is Moon Gate’s Silver Fish Temple,” said Luo Yanhua. “I will make the arrangements for you to stay with us for a few days, and speak with the temple master, Shan Yin. He will have questions for you.”

Before she could move away, a woman bounded up to them, stepping from inside the temple.

She was different from the others, not dressed in the same style of clothes. Instead of the sweeping fabric of the second sphere or the dull, functional wraps of the first sphere, she had on black lycra shorts that showed off golden-brown legs and white sneakers with vibrant green laces. Her top was a hooded sweatshirt with loud colors and flashy patterns, and in her hand was a needle the size of a sword. Her right arm had a bracer on it, carbon-fiber black.

Striking, almond-shaped brown eyes sized Perry up. Her skin was a warm tone, but darker than anyone else around. She didn’t match the local ethnicity either. Thick, wavy black hair was bunched up behind her head, because the hood was up. She was shorter than Perry by a good margin, and she had a lean, athletic build, at least from what he could tell. Of everyone that Perry had seen, she was the only one with piercings.

She turned her head to one side, then another, cracking her neck as she looked at him.

“Alright,” she said. She swept the needle-sword down and pointed it at Perry. “You finally showed. What flavor of asshole are you?”