THE SAND-DRAGON COURIER

The Binding

Chapter 19 – The Binding

They rode north from the tamarisk shrine with seven shards beating against Mei's hip like a war drum out of rhythm. Earth warm, water cold, fire hot, metal sharp, wood cracked and weak, light bright, shadow cold and quiet. Together they pulled, not toward Khotan or Kucha, but toward the center of the Taklamakan, where the old maps marked only white space.

Du rode with his new ledger open across his saddle, his blurred eyes close to the page. He had copied Tenzin's monastery scroll from memory, the nine dragons around the pit. At the center, where the ninth dragon should be, he had written Binding om, broken.

"The binding shard was never a piece," Du said on the second night, his voice hoarse. "It was the keystone. The monks shattered it to make the prison. The other eight shards are locks. Binding is what holds them together."

Tenzin nodded. "My teacher said the same. To open the prison you do not need nine shards. You need eight locks and the will to break the keystone again."

Mei looked at her loom weight. Seven locks, one cracked. "Where is it?"

Roxana pointed to the horizon, where heat shimmered. "The old city. The one the desert ate. My grandmother called it the Navel."

Wei tightened his grip on his staff. "I was there thirty years ago with the engineers. We dug for water and found a cavern roof. The officer ordered it sealed with stones and never reported it. That is where I lost my arm, to a fall, not to battle."

They rode three more days, following a line of buried pottery shards and dead tamarisk roots. The General's men were behind them, lost in shadow, but Mei knew they would find the way eventually.

On the fourth dawn they crested a dune and saw it, a depression in the sand a li across, with black stones poking through like broken teeth. In the center, a square shaft descended into darkness, ringed with Tang engineering marks, fresh.

"The General got here first," Roxana hissed.

They dismounted and crept to the edge. Below, torchlight flickered. Voices echoed up, the General giving orders, his purple armor glinting. Beside him, on a stone table, lay the wood shard, still cracked, and a new chest, open, holding a piece of dark amber jade, the binding shard, whole and pulsing slow and deep.

Du gasped. "He found it intact. That is impossible."

Tenzin whispered, "No. Look. It is not whole. It is not whole. It is fused. He has glued the pieces with something."

Mei saw it then, the binding shard was a mosaic of fragments held together with molten gold, like a broken bowl repaired. It pulsed, but unevenly, like a heart with a scar.

The General lifted the binding shard and placed it in the center of a circle of the other shards he had collected, wood, and from a second chest, a piece of pale yellow jade Mei had never seen, the last dragon, unknown.

"He has eight," Wei said. "He is missing only ours."

The General spoke, his voice booming in the cavern, "With binding restored, the prison opens. The weapon below will end the Tibetan war and secure the west for a hundred years."

He placed his hand on the binding shard and said the word, "om."

The cavern shuddered. The seven shards in Mei's loom weight screamed in answer, pulling her forward so hard she stumbled to the shaft edge.

Below, the circle of shards flared. The binding shard cracked the gold holding it, the pieces straining. The dark thing in the pit, far below, breathed in, and the chains holding it groaned.

Mei knew she had seconds. She opened the loom weight and let all seven shards fly from her hand, not down to the General, but out, around the shaft, forming their own circle above his.

She shouted the seven words she knew, her low voice cracking: "sa, chu, me, rin, shon, hrih, duh!"

Earth, water, fire, metal, wood, light, shadow answered. Seven lights, seven prices due at once.

Mei did not bargain this time. She paid in full, what she had saved.

"Take my years between twenty and thirty," she told earth. "Take the memory of my mother's lullaby completely," she told water. "Take the rest of my voice, all but a whisper," she told fire. "Take my skill at riding," she told metal. "Take my hair's color, already white," she told wood. "Take my ability to see the color green," she told light. "Take my name from my friends, but leave it in my book," she told shadow.

The shards accepted, each taking a real piece. Mei felt herself age ten years in a heartbeat, her back bending, her hands spotting. The lullaby vanished entirely from her mind. Her voice reduced to a breath. Her legs forgot the saddle. Green drained from the world, leaving it blue and gold. And when she turned to Roxana, her cousin looked at her with confusion, then recognition returning as she read the name from Mei's notebook held out to her.

The seven shards flared and dropped, slamming into the General's circle, disrupting it. The binding shard, already cracked, shattered completely under the impact, gold and jade exploding.

The cavern roared. The chains in the pit snapped taut again, the dark thing shrieked and fell back. The General was thrown back, his purple armor cracking.

Mei fell to her knees at the shaft edge, nineteen years old in mind, nearly thirty in body, white-haired, whispering, unable to ride, unable to see green, but holding her notebook open to her name.

Du caught her, his blurred eyes weeping. He wrote in huge letters across his ledger: She paid. Prison holds.

Below, the General crawled from the rubble, his eight shards dull, the binding dust. He looked up and saw Mei, and for a moment, he remembered her, the deserter who had cost him an empire's weapon.

Then shadow took the last of her presence from him, and his face went blank.

Roxana pulled Mei back from the edge as the shaft began to collapse, stones falling to seal the pit again.

They rode away from the Navel as the desert wind covered their tracks, seven shards now dull and quiet in Mei's loom weight, their prices paid.

That night, Mei wrote with a shaking hand, the letters large so she could read them later: Tenth use, seven shards to stop binding, price paid in full: ten years, mother's song gone, voice to whisper, riding skill gone, green sight gone, name fading from others. Prison sealed. I am Li Mei Anahita. Remember me.

Her company sat around her, each saying her name aloud, each touching her shoulder, anchoring her in their memory.

Du closed his ledger and spoke, his voice clear, "We will keep the count. You will not be forgotten."