Thresholder

Perry surveyed Cicada Temple from a distance, using the cameras to zoom in as far as he could. He was up on a nearby hill, the better to look out over the temple grounds, which were expansive. March had made a map of the place, its exits and the areas where people congregated, and Perry had annotated that map, marking what he thought everything was. Going to Worm Gate wasn’t what he wanted to be doing, but if he did it, he wanted it to be with a plan to get out if things went south. March’s battery was at 76%, and it would tick down fast in a combat situation, especially if he was pushing it.

His plan was to lie through his teeth. That probably wasn’t great for cosmic karma, but then again, having killed and partially eaten four people probably wasn’t great either. He tried not to think about that.

Perry was going to lay everything at the feet of the other thresholders, both Maya and Xiyan. He wouldn’t mention being forced to transform, and certainly wouldn’t admit culpability in the deaths at Moth Lantern Hall, he would lie and hope that those lies were enough. He’d say whatever it took to escape the noose that was currently threatening to wrap tight around his throat. He didn’t know how long it would take for Moon Gate to start tracking him, but he was certain that they would. Retribution wasn’t a virtue, but it was something baked into their culture. Retribution was the entire reason he’d been sent to Moth Lantern Hall.

Perry strode toward the gate, armor gleaming and repaired, free of dirt and muck. He cut an impressive figure, more than he had when he first came to the world, and his sword floated behind his back in a way he hoped would make up for his lack of sheathe and still look unthreatening.

There was still the issue that he was naked beneath the armor. That wasn’t great. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do, aside from admitting that he didn’t have any clothes. Clothes were, unfortunately, valuable in this world, not just something that you had a dresser full of that you could hand out to any passerby. He’d been fortunate to have Maya to mend the clothes for him, since there were limits to how much Moon Gate would be willing to give over to him, and he’d had the clothes stolen from Lingfeng, which were now shredded.

Cicada Temple had a stone wall around it, piled up stones that had been mortared in place and then left to be covered in moss. The gate was made of enormous timbers, painted red and finely worked, the luster of their finish contrasting with the natural look of the stones. Perry had to admit that it was pretty imposing, even if he could simply fly right over it. The wall and gate weren’t for keeping the likes of him out, it was for bandits and wild animals, and, he supposed, for keeping people in.

As if to demonstrate how useless the gate was, a man in blue silk clothes came sailing up over the gate and landed right in front of Perry. He stood with his feet shoulder width apart, but wasn’t in a combat stance.

“You come seeking entry to Cicada Temple,” the man intoned, speaking English, or at least seeming to. If the jump hadn’t already given away that he was second sphere, the translation definitely would have.

“I come seeking refuge,” said Perry. “I have come from Moon Gate, who have moved against you and your people. They are responsible for a terrible crime at Moth Lantern Hall. I wish to speak on the matter with one of your masters.”

“You are Peregrin Holzmann,” said the man in blue. He lifted delicate fingers and brushed hair from his face, and Perry had enough experience with the second sphere to know that this was a way of signaling casualness. Hair didn’t fall out of place easily. “You are known to us. You claim to have come from another world.”

“I do,” said Perry with a nod. He was itching to run away, second guessing his decision to come here, but trying to hide out in the woods waiting for Moon Gate to gank him simply wasn’t the play.

The man watched him for a moment. His blue outfit was flashy, even by second sphere standards. “Very well. The grandmaster will speak with you.”

Perry felt his breath catch in his throat. “That would be an honor.”

“You have been expected,” the man said, bowing slightly.

He opened the gate, and Perry was led inside. His urge to run was rising. He didn’t really want to meet with the granddaddy third sphere master of this whole place, not when the guy had mind control powers. They weren’t supposed to work on second sphere, only first sphere, but Perry really desperately didn’t want to get up close and personal either way. He considered running, but the question was ‘where to’, and he had no good answer for that. He could potentially make it to some other kingdom, but he had no idea what he would do then. His enthusiasm for this world had dwindled to nothing.

Cicada Temple was a sprawling place, and had tall buildings placed in the four corners of the temple grounds. If Crystal Lake Temple was a small town, then Cicada Temple was a large one, with multiple courtyards where training was taking place, and thick throngs of people going about their business. Perry’s host, whose name he still didn’t know, walked in front with his hands behind his back, and Perry followed.

There were bugs everywhere, and Perry tried to step carefully, hoping that he wouldn’t accidentally kill one. In Moth Lantern Hall, Lingfeng’s final attack had seemed to sap the life from all the moths, but Perry wasn’t quite sure what the sect’s overall relationship with bugs was. He passed a woman tossing something in a bowl, and on closer inspection, saw that it was a bunch of dried crickets. He wasn’t sure whether they ate them or what, but it was a sign that insect life wasn’t considered precious. One of the towers was being circled by a swarm of butterflies, and Perry saw a vat of worms in a building he passed, but it was the small bugs that caught his eye more often, the way mayflies or something like they were spread against a wall, or the the beetles that scurried along the temple paths.

They were going to the largest of the tall buildings, which was set far away from the gate.

“You are naked beneath your armor,” said his host.

“I am,” Perry admitted.

“You have the scent of blood on you,” continued his host. “What circumstances have brought you here?”

“I was attacked,” said Perry. “Not by a member of the temple, but by an enemy of mine, someone from another world.”

He had no idea who Xiyan even was. There was still a chance that she’d been mind controlled, or was an agent of someone, or that the real Xiyan had been killed and had her place taken. There was too much fucking magic, that was the problem, and even if Xiyan was the third thresholder, he had no idea what her powers were or why she’d decided to skulk around and play spy. She had disabled March, and if Perry hadn’t found a workaround, or if he’d fallen for the honeypot earlier, he’d have been dead, with Maya none the wiser. He was completely healed, but could still feel the blade plunging into his chest, the sheer force of it. He shivered, involuntarily, remembering the sight of his guts coming out.

It was better not to think about these things, but very little time had passed.

They arrived at the building, and Perry was ushered into a waiting room where there wasn’t much to do. It wasn’t a good wait. There was too much for him to think about, too many things that he would really rather not be swimming around in his head. Meditation wasn’t working. He kept thinking about the woman he’d killed. Her name was Fang Chenlei. Why was her hair blond? He had never asked. Maybe some people had blond hair, or maybe she’d dyed it, or possibly it was just a side effect of some technique or reagent or her internal alchemy. He wished he knew. It was bugging him.

An hour later, he was pulled from the waiting room and was brought into the main room of the building. The room rose up three stories, with balconies around the upper levels looking down on them, and it felt sacred in a way that made Perry think this wasn’t where business was normally conducted. Maybe it was just meant to feel like that, as though he was in the presence of a deity.

A small man was sitting on a pillow, and another pillow had been set out for Perry. Perry sat, feeling awkward inside the armor.

Grandmaster Sun Quying had huge white eyebrows, so big they were almost ridiculous, especially because they sat above small, beady little eyes. Perry immediately imagined the eyebrows as the antenna of a moth. When the Grandmaster smiled, he showed a gap between his front teeth. He was old, undoubtedly, and unlike with Master Shan Yin, it showed on his face, with wrinkles and imperfections that hadn’t been ironed out by the working of the second sphere. Maybe once you got to the third sphere, you simply stopped caring about such things, or maybe he was just fine being a weird little dude.

“Peregrin Holzmann,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying, the words splitting his smile. He had a large mole on his chin, off to the left. “Thresholder.”

“Yes, grandmaster,” said Perry, bowing. “Your name is known across the Green Snake Valley. I am honored that you decided to speak with me personally.”

“Why have you come here, Peregrin?” asked Grandmaster Sun Quying.

“Moon Gate has moved against you,” said Perry. “I come with a warning and seek shelter from them. You know by now that there are three dead in Moth Lantern Hall. I was there, and watched the woman who did it — I tried to stay her blade. We were instructed to go there by those in charge at Crystal Lake Temple.”

Grandmaster Sun Quying nodded. “I know well what happened at Moth Lantern Hall. It was the slaying of my kin.” He didn’t seem perturbed.

Perry stayed still. He was getting pretty good at not giving anything away in his motions. He also still had his helmet on, as they hadn’t asked him to remove it, so his face was cloaked, his words masked and filtered.

“Tell me,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “How do you move between worlds?”

Perry was momentarily befuddled. “The … discussion of technique is …” He faltered. “There is, unfortunately, no technique, grandmaster,” said Perry. “The portal opens only when my chosen foe is defeated.”

“But your chosen foe is not yet defeated?” asked Grandmaster Sun Quying.

“No, grandmaster,” said Perry. “I am being hunted by them as we speak. They have a technique that I believe allows them to move quickly from one place to another, making them hard to track.” That was a hell of an extrapolation based on Xiyan going out the door of his room and into a snowy field. He was going to have to cross-reference it with the video of the woman in the armory, but it was hard to believe that it wasn’t Xiyan. She’d tried to disembowel him after double-checking that he was weaker under the new moon and that his armor was still broken.

“Then you will have a place to stay with us,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying with a nod. “I have interest in these other worlds, virgin and unclaimed. You will tell me about them and their techniques.”

“Yes, grandmaster,” said Perry.

It was hard to overstate how much it had been drilled into him that this was something which Was Not Done. You didn’t ask other people about their techniques. You didn’t get firm descriptions of them. You certainly didn’t have them outright told to you. Maybe it was different between second sphere and third sphere, but it felt uncouth. In a proper setting, between master and student, it was acceptable to demonstrate, but then only in a slow, measured, and deliberate way. There was nothing like this here.

“First, tell me of the world you came from,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying.

“That might take some time, Grandmaster,” said Perry.

Grandmaster Sun Quying raised an eyebrow. “Do we not have time?”

“We do, Grandmaster,” said Perry with a small bow. “Shall I tell you of my world, Earth?”

The Grandmaster sat back, looking quite pleased with himself. “Yes, let us hear of it.”

This took hours. The Grandmaster displayed very little patience for Perry’s preferred method of telling things, and interrupted with all kinds of questions, but they weren’t bad questions. The Grandmaster wanted to know about every little bit of technology, about religions, about the different people, about democracy and space exploration and the internet. In any other context, Perry might have found the curiosity refreshing, but some of the questions the Grandmaster was posing felt like they had dark implications.

“And there are limits on what power one man can possess?” asked the Grandmaster. “You have mentioned weapons, ‘firearms’, propelled bits of metal, but if anyone can have them, then how does the ruler of your kingdom protect himself?”

“The President has lots of guards,” said Perry. “They make sure he’s safe. He’s usually a man of no power except that of persuasion and sometimes wealth. They’ve been assassinated before, usually by men with no particular special talents or training.”

“Fascinating,” said the Grandmaster. “So if someone dealt with the firearms, there would be nothing in the entire world to stop a person.”

“There are greater weapons,” said Perry. “But they aren’t used for personal defense. Explosives that can rip steel to shreds in an instant, bombs that can vaporize a building.”

“Steel is no match for the power of the third sphere,” said the Grandmaster with a dismissive wave of a hand. “There are so few defenses on your world, but I suppose that is no surprise, given that no single man has the power of even one of my lesser disciples.”

It took hours to get through everything, and Perry was feeling talked out, like he’d been drained of all his energy just from having to explain a whole world.

Grandmaster Sun Quying had used the term ‘virginal’ or ‘virgin’ to refer to Earth on three more occasions. Perry hoped that was a translation error, that the proper word he was using in his native language didn’t have the mildly creepy connotations, but it was impossible to tell, and there was just something about the vibe that put Perry off.

Perry didn’t want the people from the Great Arc to spread out across the multiverse. He didn’t think there was a huge danger of that, given that he had no idea how the portals worked, but it felt like a risk to say as much as he could say on the matter. He also didn’t know what happened when someone went through the portal that had opened for a thresholder. Maya had said a friend of hers had gone through, but Maya hadn’t known what the end result of that was either. Maybe it was death, maybe it meant becoming a thresholder, maybe it just meant getting stranded somewhere.

Hopping worlds was clearly Grandmaster Sun Quying’s ambition.

A first sphere servant came in and gave them a break. He had a pile of clothes for Perry, and whispered words for Grandmaster Sun Quying.

“Our friends from across the valley have arrived,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “I find the discussion invigorating, and we’ll continue it later, once our guests have been dealt with. Shall we?” He stood up from his pillow, and was surprisingly short.

“I didn’t leave on good terms,” said Perry.

“All lies, I’m sure,” replied Grandmaster Sun Quying with a wave of his hand.

Perry followed behind him, armor clunking along. The grandmaster took a gnarled staff from one of his servants and used it to walk — the top of it looked like worn down roots, which his fingers fit between, and the bottom was tipped with a gold cap. Perry wondered whether it was anything more, a weapon or a tool, but he couldn’t tell, not with the helmet on.

The path to the gate was slow, not just because Grandmaster Sun Quying was moving at a sedate pace, but because he stopped to speak with people as he went by. He was like a politician, shaking hands and waving hello, and often engaged in pleasantries with people who had bowed low to him. As Perry watched closer, he saw the ones that didn’t bow, almost always those engaged in labor, and maybe he was imagining it, but there was something of a glassy look in their eyes. If Perry was right about what that meant, then the Grandmaster was directly controlling perhaps a third of the people within Cicada Temple.

Eventually, they arrived at the gate. It was wide open, and six of the dozen sphere disciples were standing by it in their multicolored clothes, creating a formidable guard. Beyond the gate stood Luo Yanhua and Grandmaster Li Meifeng.

“Does it take such strife in the valley for us to meet?” asked Grandmaster Sun Quying.

“We have come for Peregrin,” said Grandmaster Li Meifeng.

“Have you now?” asked Grandmaster Sun Quying. He looked at Perry. “I was told the young man was no member of your sect.”

“He murdered a young woman earlier today,” said Grandmaster Li Meifeng. Her lips were firm. “We are not here as members of a sect but as seekers of justice. Peregrin must pay for his crimes.”

“You are mistaken,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “If that’s all, you may leave.”

“We are not leaving without him,” said Grandmaster Li Meifeng. Her voice was firm, but Perry didn’t see how she possibly hoped to win this fight. Even if she’d had a whole posse of martial artists, this was Worm Gate’s home turf.

“Perry was responsible for the massacre at Moth Lantern Hall,” said Luo Yanhua, speaking up for the first time. Her eyes were on Perry, and hadn’t moved from him. “I did not want to believe it was true, but the evidence against him is overwhelming. Moonlight causes him to undergo a transformation and become a murderous, oversized wolf. He has not learned proper control.”

“I am well aware of his affliction,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “Nothing goes on in this valley that I do not know of. He has assured me that it was your other guest who was responsible for the tragedy.” He placed both hands on top of his staff. “If you would like, I would offer you the hospitality of this temple. I have not yet had the pleasure of a proper conversation with Miss Luo Yanhua. But the peregrin has come to roost here, for a time.”

“The king will hear of this,” said Grandmaster Li Meifeng. Her lips were tight. “A judge will be dispatched.”

“What might a judge find, once he starts investigating?” asked Grandmaster Sun Quying. “I suppose we might both be interested in the results of such an inquiry. In the end, justice will prevail, I am sure.”

“The armor Peregrin wears,” said Grandmaster Li Meifeng. “Investigate it closely. He has trapped within it the soul of a man.”

Grandmaster Sun Quying turned to Perry and frowned for a moment, then raised the staff and tapped Perry’s armor with the golden-capped tip of it. “I will speak with the young man about it, of course. It’s a serious accusation.” He turned back to Grandmaster Li Meifeng. “Was that all?”

“We leave,” said Grandmaster Li Meifeng. She blasted up toward the moon as a beam of light and after only a moment, Luo Yanhua did as well.

“Very good,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. He gave a small laugh. “Did you enjoy your time with them, Peregrin? I hadn’t asked.”

“I learned things,” said Perry. “Other than that … their welcome was not warm, and they didn’t grant me membership. I was forced to stay on the outside, and the only reason they kept me there was in the hopes that I would do their dirty work for them.”

“It will be different for you, at Worm Gate,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. He nodded to himself. “Now come, you were telling me about your worlds.”

Over the next few days, Perry felt like he was in a bit of a Scheherazade situation, forced to speak at length to the grandmaster about all kinds of things in order to get a stay of execution. He didn’t think that execution was on the table, but he did think that the grandmaster had designs on the multiverse and considerable motivated interest in unraveling what these other worlds were like.

In exchange, at least for a time, Perry was given finely made clothes to wear, a spacious bedroom on the second level of the grandmaster’s large building, and meals of enviable size with as much meat as he wanted — which was a lot.

“There are differences in philosophy,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying over dinner. Twenty people sat at the table, but the grandmaster and Perry were the only ones who spoke. “Food is required only because of imbalance, yes, yes, this is known, but imbalance is a regrettable fact of life. There is a cycle to the view on balance. We spend much of our time in the second sphere ensuring that we can live without food, water, even air, but once those are mastered, once they are no longer necessary, we introduce them back in. There is nothing so succulent as a well-grilled piece of meat, fat dripping from it, and the energy a skilled individual can take from it is enormous, almost beyond compare.”

Perry was sitting at the foot of the table, a place of prominence. To the Grandmaster’s right was his favored concubine, a girl that Perry hoped was of age. She was first sphere, the only one at the table who was, and she looked at the Grandmaster, who was hundreds of years older than her, with adoration.

“There is, I suppose, one thing more succulent,” he said, gazing into her eyes.

Grandmaster Sun Quying definitely gave off all the wrong vibes, even leaving aside the puppetry thing. A third sphere being so enmeshed with the first and second spheres was like a guy in college hanging out with highschool girls.

The grandmaster kept up the grilling, day in and day out, though after the first three days the work of grandmastering had apparently begun to pile up, and Perry was left to his own devices for more of the day.

For lack of anything better to do, he went to go watch their training.

At Crystal Lake Temple and Silver Fish Temple, the first spheres trained in large groups and the second spheres trained alone, or sometimes in pairs. Here, it was different, maybe because they had enough of the second sphere disciples that a class made more sense. Perry thought it was more likely that they just had a different culture.

The second spheres of Cicada Temple all had the second sphere style, which mostly consisted of well-made clothes with elaborate cuts, embroidery, and patterns. Woven into this overall aesthetic, which verged on gaudy, were small details of insects. Perry hadn’t even noticed it at first, but the closer he looked, the more he saw: one of the women had two large ‘eyes’ on her back, as though she was a butterfly trying to deter predators, and one of the men had a vertical line going down his back as though he was a beetle about to spread its wings and take flight. It wasn’t necessarily such a bizarre place to take fashion inspiration from, and Perry almost liked some of the flourishes and coloration.

He was close enough to listen to the instructor, though he wasn’t taking part in any of the actual training. The moves all had bug themes to them, in the same way that lots of Moon Gate’s techniques were named after the moon, or sometimes water, which apparently had strong moon associations. The martial style was totally different, mostly about quick snaps and explosive bursts of motion, and from what Perry could tell, this also came from a difference in how they were treating the vessels and meridians — though at least the names of those were the same. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if he’d needed to learn an entirely new set of terms for everything.

On his fourth day at the temple, Grandmaster Sun Quying offered him a membership in Worm Gate. It was the sort of offer that Perry didn’t think he could refuse, not if he still wanted a home. Perry accepted, though not without reservations. The only thing he felt any comfort about was that the Grandmaster clearly saw him as a long-term project, not someone that would simply get thrown away.

Perry needed every scrap of help he could get from Worm Gate. He had no idea where Maya had gone, and Xiyan was still out there somewhere, presumably hunting him with everything that she had. It was a terrible position to be in.

He had a sinking feeling that as terrible as it felt, there was plenty of opportunity for it to get much worse.