Jade Empire: Six to One Odds

"I don't get a lot of students these days," the old man says.

He seems content to stare at a wall and smile beautifically, hands steepled on his bare belly. He has achieved the kind of old age that belongs in a landscape painting, with wrinkles that have formed their own elaborate topography.

The old man is Six Bears. He is also Old Master Choi.

Scholar Ling enters the cave with a moment's hesitation. Six Bears has not made himself easy to find. In an earlier age, or with lesser resources, this would have been a hunt of years, to find this hole in a mountain. Scholar Ling, however, is a Princess Regent, co-Empress in all but name, and has abilities that many people lack. Her flyer is hovering two hundred feet above the mountaintop.

The cave contains the following: one blanket, thick but threadbare. One pillow, inexpertly hand-woven out of dried reeds. One cooking fire, over which is suspended one kettle and one roasting salmon.

Six Bears finally deigns to look at her. He's wearing peasant trousers and a plain brown vest, with no shirt. At this altitude, fire or not, he probably should be dead of exposure.

Scholar Ling's not wearing much more, dark blue silk pants with a black bodice and a fighter's slippers, but she's a master of Dire Flame style. Snowstorms melt against her. She kind of wants to know what Six Bears's excuse is.

"You teach a difficult style," Scholar Ling says, finally. "A banned style."

"This is so," Six Bears says comfortably.

"I had not heard of it until last year, when I encountered an adept in the Imperial Arena." Scholar Ling folds herself into a sitting position at the mouth of the cave, where it is casual but outside of the honored master's hospitality. "I became curious."

"So you have found me."

"So I have."

The kettle begins to whistle. Six Bears removes it from the fire. "I do not teach dilettantes."

"I am not one."

"You're wealthy," Six Bears says. "You wear silk. You pay attention to your appearance. You speak carefully, without inflection. You are not out of breath, as you would be from climbing a mountain. I hear a distant sound above me, a sound that no living thing has ever made. If you are not a dilettante," he adjusts his crotch, "you are putting on an excellent front."

"I am Scholar Ling of the Two Rivers," Ling says calmly. She has heard of masters like this before, whose first test is a personal attack. "I was born in Dirge. I have had an adventure, and perhaps I have come away from it with something to show.

"But I am no jaded noble. I am a martial artist on the Way of the Open Palm. I am here to learn."

"Why my style, Scholar Ling?" Six Bears asks. He takes a noisy slurp, straight from the kettle. Ling catches a whiff of something that bears a faint resemblance to tea. "Banned. Forbidden. It drives people mad, you know. All but the strongest wind up in asylums, or talking to themselves all the time. Hell, I teach the style, and I'm an eccentric old man up top a mountain somewhere."

"My name is my reason," Ling says. "I am a scholar. Your style is rare. If you should die, it is extinct."

"This is... uncomfortably close to true," Six Bears says. He is a smiling Buddha. "There is something you're not telling me."

"That something is private," Ling says. "Nonviolent, I assure you, but private nonetheless. For our purposes, Master, I am a scholar here to learn of a difficult style."

Six Bears makes eye contact for the first time and lets out a loud belly laugh. Dust comes off the cave ceiling.

"Well, I'll be damned," Six Bears says. "If I've half an idea of what you're thinking, I'd teach this to you twice!"

"You are a crude little man."

"I live in a cave!"

"Your point is well-made, Master Choi." Scholar Ling stands, and brushes off her pants. "Shall we begin?"

----

Empress Lian the Heavenly Lily has had enough of this.

The day started off with a border dispute, meandered through several minor issues of protocol, and froze for an hour on the subject of troop movement. A blessed fifteen minutes were spent on the reclamation and reconstruction of Dirge; another blissful twenty were devoted to the ongoing attempts to disband the Lotus Assassins.

Then someone had mentioned protocol and it had all gone to several different hells.

Empress Lian the Heavenly Lily, a great believer in tradition, finally storms out of the room, leaving a flustered conglomeration of ambassadors, attendants, clerks, advisors, and diplomats stammering in her wake.

Scholar Ling has been gone for five days.

Lian opens the door to her outer chamber, slips in, and locks it behind her. She's left the fastest of her attendants three hallways behind, still stammering about what Lian is meant to do and how none of them mean any offense.

Lian does not understand how they do not understand how fundamentally useless they are.

She unfastens her yellow silks as she walks, skirt and blouse falling behind her. There are no windows in her chambers, which are deep within the Imperial Palace where very few are allowed to go. She feels as safe as she ever will.

The Empress Lian is half-naked when she opens her inner chamber door, which explains her half-shrill scream when, unexpectedly, she sees someone inside.

That someone is Scholar Ling, who is seated and reading a scroll. She looks up at the Empress Lian with a smile. "I apologize, Empress."

"I could've--I mean, I thought you were still on your trip. No one was supposed to be in here." Lian takes a deep breath, and forces a chuckle.

"I know." Scholar Ling lets the scroll retract into its case and places it on a table. As usual, she's dressed in blue; her new title just means it's a richer shade, with better materials. She wears silk now, by imperial request, rather than cotton. "Trouble at court?"

"There is always, and will always be, trouble at court." Lian continues to undress, unraveling the elaborate undergarments that an Empress must wear to fit into her clothes. The cloth falls away, revealing pale skin over an acrobat's build. "They know they may speak freely to me, as they could not to my father. They are abusing that right."

"Us?"

"You are the savior of the Empire, my love." Lian, now naked, opens the wicker chest at the foot of her bed. "I will gladly spend an afternoon speaking of your merits, but you are not a man. Our relationship will not produce an heir.

"There are other things, of course, matters of state and protocol. I have a lifetime of diplomacy ahead of me, to make up for my father's mistakes. But for now," and Lian pulls out a thin black leather breastplate, "I need to be somewhere else."

"Actually, my Heavenly Lily, I had wished to keep you here for a time."

"Really?" Lian turns around, hiding a bit of herself behind the armor of the Silk Fox. "And what did you have in mind?"

Scholar Ling stands in one motion, without using her arms. Lian watches her move with the same faint disbelief she always does; Ling is impossibly graceful, and impossibly, Ling is hers.

"Did I tell you what style I went off to learn?" Ling asks.

Lian, unable to help herself, rolls her eyes. "You talk of styles, at a time like this?"

Ling is wearing an enigmatic half-smile. "It was an art I saw only once, a year ago, when I fought in the Imperial Arena at your behest. That annoying promoter told me the style was banned, and I have to admit, I see why."

"That's fascinating, my love," Lian says, and turns back to the wicker chest.

"The style is called Phoenix Unity."

Ling's voice is now, abruptly, coming from Lian's left. Lian straightens up, dropping her armor, and finds Ling standing at an intimate distance.

Their lips meet before Lian quite knows it was going to happen. Their kiss is broken abruptly when someone takes ahold of Lian from behind.

That someone is Scholar Ling, who pulls Lian into a second kiss. Her hands roam across the Empress's body, caressing, and Lian's moan is one of shock.

She pulls her face away from Ling's and looks around the room. Ling is on either side of her, somehow, and standing across the room. Two more are on the Empress's bed, and a sixth has just locked the door to the inner chamber.

They are all looking at her, and all half-smiling.

"You can see why this style might have been banned," the Scholar Ling by the door says.

"These... these are all you?" Lian says, barely able to process this.

"They are spirit and mind more than flesh," the Lings on either side of Lian say, in perfect unison.

"But yes, they are all Scholar Ling," a Ling on the bed says, and gently pulls Lian towards her, into the other Ling's arms.

"You learned this style...?" Lian asks, as she melts into Ling's embrace.

"I told the master the truth," the Scholars Ling say in one voice. "This is a rare style, worthy of preservation."

Ling's lips find Lian's neck, and nibble their way across it. Lian arches back, which brings her face underneath that of another Ling, who kisses her softly as the other licks down her body. Elsewhere, the other Lings are helping themselves undress as they converge on the bed, and the Empress writhing on it.

"Of course, my Empress," the Scholar Lings say, those whose mouths are not occupied, "you can see the other reasons I wished to know this style."

For a very long time afterward, matters of state were firmly set aside.