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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StalkingBlue" data-source="post: 1254397" data-attributes="member: 645">Passage They are merely questions,  Cho tells herself as they step forward through the trapezoid-shaped archway into the wide tunnel beyond, which is to lead them through to the Gorge of Osiris.  The party is going to meet the mad holy man Aos and Elros have encountered before, and judged too powerful for them to fight and vanquish.  The air in here is neither warm nor cool.  Merely questions.  The trouble is, long uncomfortable practice has taught the monk that ‘merely’ is something questions like these rarely turn out to be.  More likely to find yourself tripped up in the questions beyond the questions, the veils beyond the veils, the truths beyond the truths beyond the words thought and actually spoken.  Good deeds and evil deeds.  Was not there a koan, one about pairs of opposites?  Unsurprisingly, the memory escapes her.  They have walked almost half the length of the tunnel between sunglare and sunglare (will they pass unhindered then?), when a being with the head of a beast but the overall shape of a man steps forward from the shadows.  Fox’s snout, hound’s ears:  a jackal.  This is the priest Aos and Elros have met here before;  the one who calls himself by the name of Anubis, the Aryptian god who judges the dead.  The man (if that is what he is) stands to one side, half inviting, half forbidding.  The tunnel, in fact wide enough for five or six to fight abreast, suddenly seems narrower.  The ancient yellow stone flakes, like the wall of the cell in Artuaat.  Merely questions …  “Who seeks passage to the Underworld?  Identify yourselves!”  the jackal-headed priest demands.  His voice is a man’s.  Not a good time to be seen, the monk decides and moves towards the back to observe in peace – and by a shirt’s thickness avoids collision with Sigurd, who is striding forward, eager to be in the lead.  “I am Sigurd, Jarl of Ravenmark.”  “Sigurd Jarl of Ravenmark, what good have you done in your life?”  The Northern warrior leans forward on his sword as he lapses into a joyous declamation of his deeds.  “I have killed men.  I have killed demons.  I have killed a red dragon in the mountains ...”  Surely there is a pattern here, a pattern to be taken from Aos’s and Sigurd’s answers?  Pairs of opposites.  What was that koan again?  She finds not the koan but a chant and a night of bitter cold.  *** “Wind eats rock.  Fire drinks frost.  I am the balance to hold them in check.  I am the Void between them.  Wind eats rock …”  The wind flattens the fire and groans through the jutting remains of the ancient battlements.  It is Midwinter Night Watch, her first.  Older students swathed in thick layers of clothes move around the circle of coatless children around the struggling fire, take turns chanting, feed pinecones to the flames, correct postures with a gentle nudge.  They are on the roof of Broken Tooth Tower, or rather on the part of it that will not crumble under your weight as you climb the steps winding up from the rear of Forms Hall.  First year lessons are hard, and simple.  This lesson is simply about staying;  and surviving the night.  It is cruelly cold;  and perhaps cruellest is to know that if you cannot bear it, you are free to go.  There is a shuffling of places and Yukio takes over the chant, Master Student Yukio whom the children secretly call Sun-on-the-River, for her quick easy smile.  The child, too stiff with cold to sigh, cringes with relief:  Yukio’s voice seems to warm you when nothing else can.  “… hold them in check.  I am the Void between them ...”  ***“But what good have you done?”  The jackal-headed priest’s interruption of Sigurd’s tale brings Cho back to the tunnel.  Sigurd takes a sharp breath.  Clearly the mad priest is not as easy to satisfy as the Northerner expected him to be.  Then again, that much might have been expected.  Aos reported that he stated having killed men as his evil deeds.  Sigurd shifts position and starts over, more soberly this time.  A tense exchange of words follows, in which it appears to be established that the demons Sigurd has killed had done evil.  The priest nods.  “What evil have you done in your life?”  Sigurd’s reply throws Cho off thinking about opposites and patterns.  “I have been a coward too many times in my life,”  he says calmly.  “Also I feel that I have betrayed my people.”  The priest is silent while he appears to weigh the warrior’s answer.  “You may pass,”  he states finally, and turns to Leo.  A coward?  A traitor?  Sigurd strikes her as a number of things – but surely neither of these?  “What good have you done in your life?”  the priest is asking Leo.  And Cho is no closer to discovering her own answer.  ***“Good girl.”  An echo from even further back, and it does not refer to her, somehow this one never does.  “Be a good girl now, Anemone, and get soap and water.  Your sister has got her shirt dirty again.”  “It is not my blood,”  she mutters, though even at the age of four she knows dimly that such niceties never seem to make a difference.  And it was not my fault either, she thinks.  Please?  I was merely going to watch the Evil Man?  She has had to go see, of course.  Practically the entire village has turned out to watch the stranger being driven through the main street:  a man from down South, covered with filth and trailing a stink.  He has done Evil and been cut for it (she thought at first they have cut his arms off but they are merely tied cruelly behind his back), and now he is being taken to Bu Pei to be given to the river priests.  If he lives that long.  Tone implying that it might be better for him if he did not.  “Will the priests drown him?”  she has asked and one of the boys has called her stupid.  “Stupid yourself!  You said he was Evil-Man-of-the-Mountain, when everyone knows that Evil-Man-of-the-Mountain stands ten feet high and has red skin that writhes and fire coming from his eyes!”  “Did not!” “You did!”  “Did not!”  “Did!”  In the wake of the three Guardians serenely passing with their prisoner, neighbours pull the two children apart and resignedly drag each of them off to their respective homes.  “Hold still,”  Anemone says in that tone she has when she is almost ready to tear your hair out.  The child stands still and submits to being brushed down harshly with soap and cold water, thinking how it was not her fault at all and soon she will go to be a Guardian and there will be no more brushing, nor tearing of hair …*** In the tunnel in the desert, the mad priest moves his head slightly as if sniffing the air.  Leo has replied that all he has done in life was aimed at helping allies and friends and reaching his own full potential.  “And that can never be considered evil,”  Leo says.  He is glowering at the priest in the shadows now, as if locked in some arcane battle of wills.  A heartbeat or three later, his stare gives way to a rather smug look.  “You have been judged and may pass,”  the priest proclaims.  This time Cho is too slow in trying to slink further back into the shadows.  The jackal’s head swivels around and his eyes glint directly at her:  he has seen her.  “Identify yourself,”  he demands.  “This traveller’s name is Tsui Yio Cho,”  she says in an attempt at respectful formality, which as always sits awkwardly with the words of the Common Tongue.  “What good have you done in your life?”  At which, as the worst possible moment, the forgotten koan returns to her mind.  What is the sound of a single hand clapping?  It is the one she has never been able to find an answer to.  *** Five masters glower down at her from the dais.  Silence has descended on Forms Hall.  Hot air swishes and giant carapaces crack in the ducts below as the spiders wake from their long summer’s sleep:  first heating day.  It has snowed last night.  The sound of a single hand clapping … a single hand clapping … sound of a hand …She is nine and the words run circles around her helpless brain.  *** The silence in the tunnel in the desert thickens.  Steel clinks faintly as one of the armoured warriors shifts behind Cho.  The priest’s eyes glint at her above his jackal’s snout:  waiting.  “I have tried to stay true to the path I have chosen,”  she says helplessly.  “What good have you done?”  he repeats.  What does good matter?  she thinks.  What does evil matter? The one thing that counts is following your path, is it not?  And preserving the balance?  “I am from a land of mountains,”  she says,  “far away from here.”  That of course must be the answer:  the age-old balance between two opposing forces.  We who guard and cull.  He who burns and destroys.  Kung.  And he has upset the balance.  He must be brought to his downfall.  Where to find the words?  “It is cold there,”  she goes on, unsure now whether she is explaining or requesting guidance.  Spirits and demons speak through a mad man’s mouth, that much everybody knows;  why not also a god?  The priest’s jackal eyes glint, waiting.  “Our gods wear different faces,”  she says.  ***The girl kneeling on the flagstones claps her hands. A waking snort bursts on the far left of the dais, where the Eldest has nodded off while this student was groping.  “Like this,”  the girl says.  “Only but a single one of them?”  And looks defiantly up at five stares of patient disapproval.  ***In the tunnel in the desert, the monk takes a breath.  It is no use.  Defeat;  once again.  “I do not understand what it is that you ask of me.”  “What evil have you done?”  Cho shakes her head, suddenly tired.  “My answer is the same.”  “You cannot pass,”  the man or god declares.  “You are not ready.  I hereby raise you, and charge you to return to the living and seek the answers so you may return.”  His magic washes over her, sweeps effortlessly through her defences, sends her to her knees gasping.  And he turns to Tarquin to continue his questioning.  Not ready.  And then, as she struggles to breathe and find strength to force herself back on her feet, two things happen.  Tarquin states that he has done neither good nor evil in his life, and is proclaimed barren of soul and is also, but permanently, denied passage.  And for Cho, a veil is suddenly torn away from a deeper layer of truth.  I found other answers to that koan, but never one that satisfied them.  And yet they would have made me a Guardian.  Would they still?  That of course is the true question, the one that matters.  Truth behind truth, veil behind veil, question behind question.  Vertigo rushes through the monk, as between two heartbeats, truth opens to reveal a glimpse of a world suddenly larger than it seemed before:  a world so large that Warmaster Kung and his rise or downfall and even the suffering between the two passes in the Mountains might seem small and insignificant by comparison.  A world so large that many things appear possible:  even a return;  even a life healed and whole.  The glimpse ends.  Nothing remains but the flaking walls and floor of the tunnel;  and the priest Anubis, and her longnosed friends.  There is talking.  Cho gropes for focus.  Leo and Aos are prevailing on Anubis to allow Tarquin and her to pass for the sake of their quest, for the purpose of rescuing a person from the clutches of Set.  For this purpose alone, the mad priest finally agrees;  on the condition that the two of them promise to come back from the Underworld when this task is done.  “Will you come back?”  the priest asks.  She stands, shakily.  “I will come back if I can.”  Startlingly close behind and yet in a different world, Tarquin echoes her words.  Would they still?  Would they?  The priest retreats into the shadows.  Three beast-headed monsters emerge from a side passage and are greeted by the double singing of Aos’s rapier unsheathed and Elros’s first arrow launched:  tension suddenly released into promise of combat and a passage freed.  The sound of a single hand clapping.  Shield me, Lady.  I will return if I can.  </blockquote>

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