Tsui Yio Cho
RANK/POSITION: Master Student of Hawk’s Palace, never officially initiated as a full Guardian
SEX: Female
SPECIES: Human
HOMELAND: Heavenly Mountains
AGE: 18
HEIGHT: 4’5’’
WEIGHT: 90 lbs
HAIR/EYES/SKIN:
Japanese type: Black hair, oiled and braided. Brown eyes. Deeply tanned, with a scattering of sunburn scars across the cheekbones.
APPEARANCE:
Her peasant clothes sit on her like a sheepskin on a mountain lioness.
TYPICAL CLOTHING:
Local peasant shirt and trousers, with forearms and lower legs wrapped in extra lengths of cloth, square-cut jacket (Heavenly Mountains type). Sandals or soft leather boots.
On formal occasions Cho would prefer to wear wide, cloth-belted trousers and a stiff quilted jacket with wide sleeves, emulating a kimono with its over-jacket (she does not currently carry such clothing)
DEMEANOUR: Poised, sometimes brooding, with a ready if mischievous sense of humour once she unwinds. Truly free only in battle.
MOTIVATIONS:
Survive. Perfect herself. Return to Mount Fire and kill the traitor sorceress Ling Wa, preferably with her own hands.
BACKGROUND:
Tsui Yo Cho is swept out of Hawk’s Palace and down the Shrouded Falls on the night of the attack, three years ago. Blinded either by the traitor Ling Wa’s magic or by the powder thrown by Ling Wa’s assassins, she is jostled and trodden upon by fleeing or fighting monks and pushed down from the battlements into the river boiling around the rocks at the head of the waterfall. It is the eve of her initiation ceremony as a full Guardian, which would have involved prayers, ritual fighting and the Black Spear. Cho has just turned fifteen.
She is found downriver by peasants, three quarters dead and feverish. They take her in, then realise that Hawk’s Palace has fallen. After some discussion, they burn her clothes and continue to care for her anyway, hoping that she will have the good grace to either die or mend and leave the village soon.
Instead, Cho settles in. Her body mends but she is still blind. And the burden of the nightly nightmares of a smiling, blood-spattered Ling Wa, followed by screams in utter darkness, is made still heavier by Cho’s shame: at having escaped where no one else seems to have.
An extra pair of hands is always wanted in a mountain village, where new fields must first be gnawed from the rock, ledge by narrow ledge. And Cho is strong, and growing stronger. So, if grudgingly at first, her help is accepted by the villagers.
During the winter, some of the younger villagers persuade Cho to teach them to fight. This is done in secret because out of fear of retribution from far-off Mount Fire, the village elders forbid it. The less monkish pranks seen in the village, the better, is the edict.
Teaching others the beginnings of the five elements and three forces makes Cho’s memories return: painful memories they are, but among them lives the Guardian’s eternal longing for perfection. Before Cho knows it, she has taken up her own practice again.
Early in spring, Cho’s eyesight gradually returns. She attributes this to her prayers to Lady Hawk and Lady Crane and an oath that she has made to learn to “live by her hands”. It is not much later that she learns of a rumour about a group of armed women living in the mountains farther north. She has to go and see, of course.
They exist. They are Guardians all right, a dozen familiar faces and some additions from Crane’s Palace. They receive her. They embrace her and smile to her face.
When are we going back to retake Hawk’s Palace? she asks. Soon, they say. First they need a message taken, they say; a message to the Lady Ochi, an elder Guardian and Cho’s former mentor, who, they say, has gone down into the Western Plains: to enlist a friendly hunting tribe’s aid.
Cho determines to ignore the prickling on her neck. Surely one must trust one’s sister Guardians? Half of her can’t wait to see the Lady Ochi again anyway. She agrees to take the message.
A day out from the Guardians’ camp, she is ambushed and faced off by two of them, the Hawk I Na and the Crane Kiko. They demand surrender. Cho refuses. The ambushers hesitate. There’s a parley.
Ling Wa has been seen calling across and smiling to Cho, it seems, on the night of the attack. By contrast, no one has seen Cho fight the attackers. The story about the Lady Ochi was a ruse to get Cho away from the camp until they could decide what to do abut her.
Cho explains about the blinding and the fall. She has scars to show where the rocks bit her.
Kiko seems convinced. I Na remains hostile. There’s more negotiating. Kiko suggests a non-lethal duel of honour, to decide the matter. I Na insists that Kiko let her be the one to fight.
Cho fights I Na and overcomes her. She steps back to breathe; which is when Kiko steps in and slits the unconscious I Na’s throat – and makes ready to either kill or capture Cho, I Na’s “killer”. From now on, Kiko says, the others will trust her blindly: to be led straight into the jaws of War Master Kung and Lady Ling Wa. Cho fights and kills the traitor and takes her sai and jacket. She leaves a warning message with the bodies for the others to find, doubting that they will believe her.
Embittered and ashamed at having caused the death of Guardian I Na, Cho resolves to return to the village. She will leave her monk’s life behind and never fight again.
It is not to be. On the winding goat path to the ridge beyond which the village’s topmost fields lie, she is greeted by trickling, greasy smoke. The village is a smouldering ruin, its people crucified and burnt on the rubble of their own homes.
It is a raging Cho who follows on the killers’ heels, Mount Fire warriors on a rampage. She starts by picking them off, one by one at first, drunk and gorged stragglers, then sleepers in the night. Not one of that patrol returns to tell the tale. By the time the bodies are found, she has already moved on to new hunting grounds.
She stalks the mountainsides now in search for Mount Fire warriors to kill, getting food and shelter where she can: from villages half frightened of her at first, then as she moves ever closer to Mount Fire, occasional shepherds only. She learns swiftly not to kill near where she hopes to eat. Mount Fire retribution to villages is quick and thorough.
The nightmares still come. Now when she sees Ling Wa smile before the darkness falls and water rushes around her, a glassy I Na glares at her in reproach.
It is bitter work, killing: merely to move on and kill again. A year and a half later, Tsui Yo Cho still survives. She has recently reached the level of master student, which back at the Palace would have been celebrated in a special ceremony. The day Cho was first able to stop her bleeding from a sword cut by focussing on the three forces alone, she celebrated by finishing off her opponent first and then going after the rest of the troop – rather than withdrawing, as would have been prudent. Two of the troop escaped.
They know now where she is. They will come. Maybe she will welcome them, she thinks. Surely if the traitor Ling Wa is with them, she will welcome her. She determines to go for the sorceress even if her eyesight should fail her again.
She sits on a sweltering hot mountainside to bind her footrags tighter. The herbs crackle and smell sweet and dusty. The sun beats. There is drowsiness in the air.
A bird flees!
The bird rises from the treetops downhill. It is too far away to hear really, but Cho will always swear later that she heard the rush of every single feather in that wingclap. She will also swear that the bird who woke her was a hawk (another impossibility because those birds are never seen in that area).
Mounted warriors are breaking from the trees in a wide line. They have come then, dozens of them, and Cho, instantly awake, is up and already running to meet them.
Only they do not meet her at all. They are going another way.
Cho slows, then stops as the hunt thunders past and disappears around a fold in the mountain.
They all appeared to be following one man. Not following him, but homing in on him. Like a pack closing in on the kill; only they were having difficulty closing.
Cho has to go and see, of course. Not just because this is the first time she has seen Mount Fire warriors hunting one of their one. But because of the bird that was a hawk when it couldn’t have been, and woke her when it couldn’t have.
And because of the weapon the hunted man was carrying as he bent low over his horse’s neck: a weapon that – the third impossibility, surely, all the more at this distance – looked precisely the same as Lady Hawk’s own Black Spear.
