The Kunlun Files

Chapter 8: The Wind God Passes

Three days after the land god warned me about the wind, it arrived.

It came in the late afternoon. The sky had been a washed, harmless blue all morning; then a wall of gray pushed in from the northwest, fast, the way a lid slides over a pot. Below my window the street trees bent in unison, and somewhere down the road a stack of delivery boxes went tumbling, cardboard scattering across the lanes. People hurried with their heads ducked. A scooter lay on its side, alarm wailing, and no one stopped for it.

I was watching all that when my eyes adjusted to what stood above it.

High over the rooftops, where the sky bent and darkened, I saw him: the wind god, stern-faced, holding the wind banner, directing the gale's direction and force like a conductor who tolerates no wrong note. The banner swept left, and the wind went left, flattening a row of shop signs. It lifted, and the wind rose, peeling loose tiles off a roof and carrying them spinning into the dark.

Guiding the wind is the wind god's duty.

Below him, the land god stood his ground. He had raised a barrier over his stretch of earth with his own divine power — a faint dome, visible only if you knew where to look — because when a gale like this passes through, no one can predict what it will do. Guarding the land is the land god's duty.

Earth, water, wind, fire — each has its god, and each god keeps to its office.

I watched the wind slam into the barrier. The dome rocked, held, rocked again. The wind god noticed. The banner came around in a hard arc, and the gale gathered itself, narrowed, and drove at one point like a spear.

A seam split open along the barrier's edge.

The racing wind poured through the gap the way water pours through a breached dam, and the land god threw both hands up to hold it. For a moment he did. Then the whole barrier shattered, silently, into drifting flecks of spent light. The land god caught at the flecks as they fell — a useless gesture, like gathering smoke — then let his hands drop.

The land god watched his own handiwork blow apart. The look on his face — I can only call it desolate.

He stood there for a while, in the middle of his unprotected ground, while the wind did what it wanted. Then the wind god passed on, the sky's lid slid off to the southeast — but the wind stayed, restless, worrying at what it had broken: trees stripped, signs down, the street glittering with broken glass.

The land god turned around and began, piece by piece, to put the wreckage right.

Down on the street, two men were shouting over the fallen scooter — one of them had parked it, the other had nearly tripped on it, and in the wind's aftermath they stood nose to nose, pouring a whole season's worth of grievance into each other's face over a machine neither of them really cared about. I had seen this before. I had seen what one of these quarrels could cost the land god when he stepped in.

This time he didn't step in. He couldn't. He glanced at them once, from where he knelt mending a seam of earth-energy, and turned back to his work — and that, I think, hurt him more than the broken barrier did.

A gale on that scale easily breaks the land's feng shui and scatters its gathered energy. And energy, once dispersed, does not simply gather again — it takes time, and it takes a chance granted by heaven.

This wind had not come in friendship.

The land god had spent too much of himself holding that barrier against the storm, and he was visibly running on empty. His outline had gone thin, the way a flame thins before it gutters. Even so, he didn't allow himself a moment's pause. He moved along his ground, stooping here, pressing a palm there, mending the torn earth-energy with what power he had left — trying to keep the damage as small as it could be kept.

I went down, caught up with him, and handed him a bottled drink from the corner store.

"The wind god is practically your colleague," I said. "Couldn't he show a little mercy when he brings a wind through?"

He took a sip. "If he showed mercy, it would be dereliction of duty."

"He does his duty faithfully," I said. "And how much you manage to shield — that is the fortune of the creatures on this ground. That's how heaven's machinery works."

"It was my ability that fell short," he said. "The barrier broke."

"You gave it everything you had. Besides — half of what happens to this land is called down by the souls and creatures living on it. Their own doing."

He didn't answer that. But I saw his eyes redden slightly at the rims.

"Thank you for the drink," he said. "I should get back to work."

I watched him go on with his mending, and there were things I wanted to say, and no way to say them.

Every heart has a barrier of its own. Built badly, the barrier becomes a knot — a dead knot. Get over it, and each soul returns to its own mountain, its own sea. Fail, and you stay stuck at that knot, dying and coming back to life over and over. You think you are meeting someone for the first time, suffering at their hands for the first time. You don't know that you have already died at this person's gate a dozen times, and been reborn, and come back to die again.

You think certain things are happening for the first time, that certain faces are new. The Stone of Three Lives knows better: you have met a thousand times before. The stranger who cut you off in traffic. The neighbor whose dog barks at you and only you. New faces, old knots.

Down on the street, a strip of fallen signboard rattled along the pavement in the wind. The land god had moved on to the next seam, one knee in the gutter, palm pressed to the ground like a doctor feeling for a pulse.

I knew why the land god's eyes had reddened.

On this ground that he guards, in this world of arrivals and departures, so many souls have already passed through once, and twice, and again — and so many things have happened here once, and twice, and again. Births, quarrels, funerals, reconciliations. He watches over every one of them with his own power. What he cannot do is untie the knots in their hearts for them.

And every knot left untied becomes, further down the road, a trial on the soul's way through rebirth.

He knew that. He had watched it happen more times than any god should have to.

I stood there a while longer, until he moved out of sight, still mending what the wind had torn.

I didn't know it yet, but the wind had blown something loose in my own ground too. It was already on its way to me. It arrived two mornings later, as a pain in my chest — and a voice, telling me it was time to throw old things away.