Thresholder

Perry did, in fact, have questions for Maya, lots of them. He’d tried to be quiet while she told her story, saying ‘uh huh’ or ‘wow’ or whatever, which was what he always did when listening to a story. If he’d interjected with all the clarifications and questions and things he’d wanted to relate to or debate, they’d have taken a fortnight.

A wizard who could reach into the multiverse was huge. It was one of the two things he’d need if he ever hoped to actually resurrect Richter. The very first step of any plan was to get back to where Richter was, the other Earth, and then he’d only need to cast a properly powerful spell or use some incredibly advanced technology that could revive someone who’d been dead for a long time. This information meant that step one wasn’t a pipe dream. Perry hadn’t been hitting the books from Seraphinus very hard, in part because they were a slog, but if there was a possibility that step one was a go, then he needed to at least lay the groundwork on step two.

Flora had said that Perry didn’t actually care about Richter, or that his caring was mostly for show, that bringing her back was just hot air. She’d thought — though never said in so many words — that resurrection was a bit of elaborate self-deception, a way of answering the ‘what are you doing here’ question. Now it was clear that there was a path, even if getting to the world that Maya had been to was out of reach for the time being. If it was possible to move between worlds, then it was possible for him to move between worlds, without relying on the portals to dump him back where he’d been.

That was consuming his thoughts, but the other thing he’d been thinking about was the bruise. Maya had said that her Aztec sun powers could heal through holes put in her, and she’d said that her biopunk powers had ramped up her body’s natural healing, but she’d been carrying around that bruise on her face for days. Either she was overstating her abilities — which admittedly tracked with what he knew about her — or there was something else going on.

The last thing he’d been burning with curiosity over had been Maya’s own world. She hadn’t said all that much about it, had called it boring, but he wasn’t sure he believed that. Even the other Earth, Richter’s Earth, had been fascinating to Perry. If it was a divergent Earth, he wanted to know, and if it was a totally different world that shared lots of similarities with his Earth, he also wanted to know. He couldn’t escape the feeling that she was hiding something from him.

Of course, the whole series of events had been from Maya’s perspective, and Perry wasn’t taking much of what she said at face value. As described, they did all sound like assholes, perhaps with the exception of the guy who’d been fighting in defense of slavery — he just sounded like a principled moron.

He’d been recording it all, as March recorded by default. In spite of the fact that it was past his bedtime too, Perry listened back to her account in bits and pieces, looked at Marchand’s transcription, paying special attention to places where she’d equivocated, stalled, and elided.

The next morning, things between them were different, warmer. Maybe she was worried that she’d said too much the night before, but Perry hadn’t felt anything like that. He liked the ruthlessness. He’d have slit throats in the middle of the night, if he could. He’d have taken out Cosme like that and slept easily at night — or at least slept fitfully while reassuring himself that it was the proper thing to do.

They had their rice porridge and boiled eggs, two of them as a special treat, along with half a peach. Today was to be a day of intensive training, and they would need it.

“Hey,” said Maya some six hours later.

They had worked up a sweat. They’d been lifting weights, and the instructors had added more to what they were lifting until they’d found their limits. This tailoring to their abilities felt like a first, and Perry was glad for it, because it meant that he was getting more from the exercises. Too much of what had come before had seemed to assume that he was a normal human with a normal body. Perry was by far the strongest of the trainees, with Maya a distant second. They didn’t measure things in pounds, but he was pretty confident he was at least doubling the world records back on Earth. Maya was at, perhaps, half his strength, which was impressive given the size difference between them.

“Hey,” said Perry as they drank water.

“If it’s just a matter of picking things up and putting them down again, we’ve got them whipped,” said Maya. Her smile was slightly shy, and Perry smiled back.

“Thanks for telling me all that,” said Perry.

“No problem,” said Maya. She shrugged. “Nothing set you off?”

“It was good information,” said Perry. “Helpful, for the next world, and maybe for this one if another thresholder does show up.”

“You’re still skeptical?” asked Maya.

“I mean, you’re skeptical,” said Perry.

“Still,” said Maya. “He found me, he found my counterpart.” She looked him up and down. “How long are you going to give it until you attack me?”

“Six months,” said Perry. He looked up at the Great Arc. “It would be good for us to figure out a way of locating the other thresholder. There’s a lot of ground to cover if we have to do it that way. And if there’s a signal, some kind of precursor strong enough, we need a way to find it.”

“You said your girlfriend had one,” said Maya. She folded her arms across her chest. “The suit can’t do it?”

“That took a dish the size of an elephant,” said Perry. “There was no way to shrink it down.”

“Bah,” said Maya. “But if magic can do it, then we just use magic, right?”

“Right,” Perry said slowly, though he was very aware that ‘just use magic’ wasn’t actually a plan.

He also wasn’t sure that it was fair to call what the second sphere people were doing ‘magic’. It seemed different somehow, far different from what the likes of Romuald had done.

Hard workouts were followed by guided meditation, though meditation also felt like the wrong word. Perry had done meditation when he was young, inspired by a few lines in a Roald Dahl book, but it had been more about emptying the mind. This was more about intense concentration on very simple things, but not emptiness in any real sense. A major part of it seemed to be getting an understanding of ongoing processes within the body, starting with the dead simple, like breathing and heartbeat, and moving on to more esoteric bodily functions, like the growing of bones, filtration of water by the kidneys, digestion of food, and all kinds of other things.

Luo Yanhua was leading meditation for the first time, and she was far more judicious about speaking English than the other instructors, favoring the outsiders.

Some of what she said made sense, and comported with what Perry knew about human biology, but other things seemed patently false.

“The pericardium meridian connects the pericardium — the protective sac around the heart — to the middle finger,” said Luo Yanhua. “It is therefore a meridian of utmost importance, a weak spot to be defended, vital in understanding the pathways of power through the body, fundamental to the functioning of the cinnabar field.”

The magic system, as Perry was thinking of it, was complex. There were ‘light’ and ‘dark’ pathways, which he thought were basically yin and yang, though the translation wasn’t bent that way for whatever reason. Meridians were divided into primary and extraordinary, and into light and dark, and on the whole it seemed like before anything could be properly learned Perry was going to have to do a whole lot of rote memorization. There were straightforward names, like the ‘liver meridian’, one of the primary ‘dark’ meridians, but they’d have functions that felt unconnected: in that case, influence over the eyes.

This raised all kinds of questions. The first, for Perry, was whether this was true in other worlds as well. If all of this was true, if the liver was somehow connected to the eyes and the middle finger somehow connected to the pericardial sac, was that true for every human throughout the multiverse, true not just on the prior worlds, but on Earth as well. Maya had thought that perhaps these systems were the same as the ones on her previous world, or that they would interact with each other, making her telekinesis better in some way.

Would it have been possible to learn these things on Earth? Perry thought that was surely not the case, but it nagged at him.

When Perry got back to his room, he had a long look at Gratbook and did a deep dive into a bunch of what he’d considered to be quackery. Much of what he’d read lined up with what Luo Yanhua had said, though many of the terms were different.

The recurrence of myths and legends from Earth was starting to seem like a running theme, one that probably warranted thinking about more. Mere convergence seemed unlikely, but the other likeliest answer, at least in his opinion, was that there was a flow of information, either the multiverse leaking in some way, or more directly, through multiversal travel. Even if some random wizard somewhere knew about the multiverse, Perry only currently knew of one method by which information could readily be spread between worlds without magic: thresholders.

So had some long-ago thresholder arrived in China and handed over a description of how meridians and vessels and vital energies worked in this place? There was no way of saying, but Perry found the idea uncomfortable. He had been thinking of Earth as his distant home, not something that was caught up in all of this. He’d considered his life there as good as dead, had made peace with the idea that he’d never see his friends or family again, but if Earth wasn’t just a place that thresholder were from, if it was a place that thresholders went to, then that meant that it was in danger.

It also meant that Earth could be fixed.

Perry had always thought of himself as a realist rather than a doomer, but Earth had felt grim to him, like it was slipping backwards in some hard to identify way. It was one of the things he’d spent his time arguing with people online about. Some people said that humanity and civilization were doomed, and others thought that this was the greatest time a person could possibly be alive, and Perry argued with both of them, at length. He was a facts and figures guy, had a dozen studies lined up and ready to fire away, but he did find himself coming down on the side of doomerism more often than not, if only because so many of the positive outlooks seemed like they were juicing the figures for the sake of optimism.

With the power of a thresholder, he could change it all. Even with just March he could change it all, not by going around and lopping off heads until the change happened, but with the schematics and data necessary for fusion technology and the inherent power of what he generously thought of as near-human AI. There was a good chance that it would just make the plutocrats and oligarchs more money, but at least it would help to slow down global warming.

Perry was not yet positioned to go back to Earth. He wasn’t even really positioned to help out most worlds he might come across. He’d come close to doing something in Teaguewater, but it had been murky there. In Seraphinus, he’d helped defend the kingdom, which he felt was for the cause of good, but they’d been an imperfect society. And in Richter’s world, he’d had no more ability to change things than on his own Earth — less, maybe, because he wasn’t a legal citizen.

He was feeling a weight of responsibility settle on his shoulders, and he found it uncomfortable. If he came across a world like the one Maya had described, a place where he could effect change and end slavery, he thought he’d be compelled to, at least so long as he wasn’t going to get shot in the face moments into the first encounter. In some worlds, he’d be powerful, and in others, like this one, a relative weakling, but he’d felt the same way when Cosme had explained his uplifting plans.

He wasn’t so sure anymore.

When the ‘quiet time’ finally came, Luo Yanhua led Perry to her chambers on the second floor of the temple as scheduled. She did this publicly, and they got a few looks, but Perry tried to hold himself high and act as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Part of the purpose of this, if Perry understood her right, was that she wanted to be seen.

The second sphere all had their quarters on the second floor, above everyone else aside from the master, which felt a bit on the nose for Perry. It was only his second time going up the temple’s wooden steps, which were worn with what must have been thousands of bare feet traveling across them over the years. The entire place reeked of age.

Luo Yanhua’s room was surprisingly small, and more surprisingly, cluttered. There was none of the austere minimalism that had marked master Shan Yin’s chambers, though everything was neat and ordered. Cubbies were taken up by scrolls, and there were books, actual bound books of the sort that Perry had seen only a few of in his time here. He had thought that books were rare, that they had nothing like a printing press, and while that might still have been true, it was seeming more doubtful. She also had what looked like a rock collection on one shelf, various shades of jade ranging green to yellow to white to black. These all sat inset on wooden platforms which seemed to have been carved specifically for them, matching the irregular shape of the rocks.

“So many books,” said Perry.

“This is my private library,” said Luo Yanhua. She had a desk in the room with an ink well and several brushes made from animal hair. “Master Shan Yin has his own collection, though he keeps it more private than I do.”

“Where?” asked Perry.

“This is a dangerous thing to ask,” said Luo Yanhua. “Many have gone astray seeking ancient texts, hoping to learn techniques that they are ill-prepared for. There is temptation in quick power.”

Perry looked over the books and scrolls. There was a bed, but it had taken him some time to find, as it was on top of the bookshelves, lofted with relatively little room between the top of the bed and the ceiling. “I wouldn’t be able to read them anyway,” he said.

“No,” said Luo Yanhua. “All texts are written in their own language, the better to guard them against prying eyes. Some are ciphered so that even those of the second sphere cannot read them without patience and practice. And many techniques cannot be learned at all through this medium, not unless you are a scholar of particular excellence.”

“You’re a scholar?” asked Perry.

Luo Yanhua gave a gentle laugh, seeming genuinely amused. “I am a wandering scholar, yes. It is my role here. In another few decades, I will move on from this place, to another sect. I am of Moon Gate, but my destiny has not been firmly tied to it, not in the way that it is for the others. I teach only rarely, and spend much of my time in study. I help this place, but accrue less benefits from my work.” She gave a small nod, as though she was conferring understanding.

“That’s what makes you an outer disciple?” asked Perry.

“I am myself, but I am an outer disciple by virtue of my detachment, yes,” nodded Luo Yanhua.

“And … is that by choice, or because of your circumstances, or … ?” He felt confused.

“I would become an inner disciple if it were possible,” said Luo Yanhua. “But the elevation of a disciple is a matter for the masters, and as you may have noticed, this temple is quite full.” Perry hadn’t noticed. It felt like a lot of students, but in theory the ‘teachers’ were also students themselves, continuing along and gaining more power and practice, refining their techniques.

The comparison struck him after a moment, and he almost tried to put it into words, but he was certain that she’d find it insulting, and he didn’t know whether his way of thinking was worth anything. Lingxiu wasn’t a professor, not as such, he just had a graduate degree and was stuck as a teaching assistant at a local college while he worked on getting his PhD under the actual professor figure, Shan Yin. And following the analogy, that made Luo Yanhua … an adjunct professor? Someone on the outside of the system, pitch-hitting, looking for the security of professorship but unable to get it because of budgetary concerns or a shift away from tenured positions?

Perry didn’t think that was quite it, but he found the analogy to be both striking and distracting.

“I was a scholar, in my own world, before I became a thresholder,” said Perry.

“A scholar?” asked Luo Yanhua. “Of what sort?”

“Geography,” said Perry. “The interrelation of things, the ways that material conditions affect social conditions, uh, lots of other things. It hasn’t proven all that useful in my travels through the worlds.”

“You don’t need to know how things are connected together?” asked Luo Yanhua.

“I’ve had much more need for skill with a sword,” said Perry. Also skill with a super hightech piece of military equipment that’s got a brain of its own and could probably mow down this entire temple unless you guys can dodge or deflect bullets.

“I have brought you here today to help with my research,” said Luo Yanhua. “Are you comfortable with that?”

“Yes,” said Perry. “Of course. You just need questions answered?”

“Questions, for now,” said Luo Yanhua. “Your transformation interests me, and there’s fruitful material for a publication there.”

Perry held up a hand. “Publication?”

“I am a scholar,” said Luo Yanhua. “There are many virtues, civic and social, and I follow those as well, but I hew closely to the academic virtue. It is my core tether. There are many aspects to the academic virtue. We believe in not just learning more, but in disseminating that information.”

“... huh,” said Perry. “That … would seem to conflict with proscriptions about the spheres?”

“Ah,” said Luo Yanhua. “No, I did not mean that these publications go to the first sphere.”

“Right,” said Perry. “And it’s things like … what, exactly?”

“In this case, it would be a publication on your transformation when exposed to moonlight,” said Luo Yanhua. “I will investigate your internal alchemy, watch the flows of energy, observe the transformation itself, and put out a few publications, so long as you stay at Moon Gate. It shows promise.” She was normally reserved, almost painfully so, but there was real eagerness when talking about the research project. She was thinking about how many papers she’d be able to write about him, and that was what was cracking her porcelain demeanor.

“Alright,” said Perry. “Of course. Anything to repay the generosity you’ve shown us.”

Their conversation lasted for most of the quiet time, their voices low. Perry revealed everything he knew short of how he’d actually become a werewolf, partly in the hopes that she’d have some kind of solution for him so he wouldn’t have to keep hiding out in the armor, unsure whether the three moons would trigger something. None of the moons were full, but he wasn’t actually sure why the full moon was the trigger, whether it was a matter of luminance or something more mystical.

“We will explore this condition together,” said Luo Yanhua. “There is fertile ground here, a crop of papers ready and waiting.”

“Was this something you wanted all along?” asked Perry. “Because as different as I think my own academic career was, I share some of the same value. I’d want to know for knowing’s sake, and want to share that knowledge.”

Luo Yanhua looked to the side. “I had been working on a different publication at the time we met,” she said. “I had seen you as a distraction from it. Now, things have changed, and it is clear the previous work will have to be scrapped. It’s been too long since I have done my duty as a scholar and brought something new before my peers, but this … this is something. It is a relief.”

“Fell through?” asked Perry. “Sorry, I’m not clear on what you’d have been researching, and I know it’s second sphere stuff you probably can’t tell me, but —”

“It was a collaboration,” said Luo Yanhua. “The subject matter is not important, but my partner in the research is no longer interested in working with me, which has scuttled two years of work together. It has put me in a position of some distress.”

“Glad I could help,” said Perry. “It’s serious, this publication business?”

“Deathly,” said Luo Yanhua. “The tether is tight around my neck. The man I was working with knew that to break our arrangement would be almost the same as delivering a killing blow to me. We are feuding, in a sense, though we’re attempting to keep our relationship civil.”

“Ah,” said Perry. “And let me guess … Lingxiu?”

Luo Yanhua nodded. “He has not taken his injury well.”

“I’ll help however I can,” said Perry. He paused for a second. “Let me know when and where I can help, what you need from me.” He paused again as the thought came into his head. “It’s publish or perish.”

She didn’t laugh, didn’t get the joke, but she was feeling relieved, and happy enough, at least by her standards. They had used up all of the temple’s quiet hours, and while Perry had mostly been talking about himself and answering her questions about what it felt like to transform and how it had been to fight other wolves, or as a wolf, he felt like he’d gotten to know her a bit better.

It would be good to have her as an ally. He hadn’t seen her use her bow yet, but the second sphere weren’t to be trifled with. In a fight, she probably wouldn’t step in for him, not if it was about honor or standing, but any little bit helped, especially if their position at Moon Gate proved precarious.