Wood
485 Words
Chapter 16 – Wood
Noon at the north canal was hot and still. The water ran clear over stone, feeding Khotan's fields. On the far bank, the Protectorate General's men had driven stakes and stretched ropes, preparing to break the sluice with levers and black powder. In their center, on a low table, lay the wood shard, a piece of deep green jade veined with brown, pulsing slowly like a heart under bark.
The General himself stood beside it, a man in purple lacquer armor, his face hard. Du was not with him, confined to his tent according to Jin.
Mei walked to the canal edge with Yala, Wei, Roxana, and Tenzin. She carried four shards in the loom weight, earth, water, fire, metal. Yala carried wind on her chime. They did not hide them. The shards pulsed openly, answering the wood shard across the water.
The General raised a hand. "Deserter Li Mei. Surrender the jade and Khotan keeps its water."
Mei's low voice carried over the water. "Order your men back and Khotan keeps its people."
The General nodded to his alchemist's assistant, a young man with Du's old ledger open. The assistant placed a farmer from a nearby village beside the wood shard, an old man with shaking hands, a conscripted bearer.
"Use it," the General ordered.
The assistant whispered the word "shon" and pressed the farmer's hand to the shard. The wood shard flared green. The farmer gasped. Mei felt the price from across the canal, a skill being pulled out like roots, the man's knowledge of irrigation, of when to open a gate, of how to read a field's thirst, gone in a heartbeat.
The canal water shivered. A c***k appeared in the stone sluice, a thin line spreading as the wood shard forced the stone to remember being a tree, to split and grow.
Yala grabbed Mei's arm. "Now."
Mei opened the loom weight. Four shards rose into her hands, each a different temperature. Yala held out wind. Together they spoke the five words: "sa, chu, me, rin, lung."
The five shards answered, not as a chord this time but as a shield. Earth steadied the stone, water cooled the c***k, fire burned the black powder fuses before they could catch, metal held the levers straight, wind pushed the dust back into the soldiers' eyes.
Mei felt the combined price hit like a wave. Earth wanted years, water wanted memory, fire wanted voice, metal wanted skill, wind wanted breath. Five debts at once.
She had prepared. She spoke clearly, her damaged voice firm: "I offer the years I would have spent in Chang'an as a clerk, years I will never live because I chose the road."
The earth shard accepted, taking a future that would never be.
Yala whispered, "I offer tomorrow's breath at dawn, which I may not need if we fail."
The wind shard hesitated, then accepted
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