From “A Touch of Heart,” by Adam-Troy Castro and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, available on 11 July from Lightspeed Magazine.
The gate-keeper left his post. A long time later he returned, a curious rictus on his face, and without a word opened the gate.
“Su Feiyan will see you now,” he announced with absurd formality, and closed his eyes as Dou entered the splendid grounds.
Dou heard the soothing tones of a piba-mandolin, and he followed them to a pagoda that seemed to grow, mushroom-like, directly out of the mountainside. It was a scented place, surrounded by a garden greener and cooler than the land that surrounded it, so peaceful in its way that even Dou’s raging blood calmed, if only a little. He drew close, not knowing whether he should enter without invitation. Then an ancient man emerged from the pagoda, wearing a silk mandarin cap the likes of which Dou had never seen.
The man performed the form of salute known as the bow with clasped hands, or gongshou, and then seemed to look without effort into Dou’s innermost being.
“You have traveled a long way,” Su Feiyan said.
Dou removed the knapsack from his back, where its leather straps had long left callouses on his skin. “Your estate is secluded,” he noted.
“I have lived a life disturbed with blood and turmoil. I seek quiet isolation, to calm my spirit while life remains in me. But I see that you mean no harm to me, and so I bid you welcome.”
“Blood and turmoil?”
“I am retired from the Black Touch.”
“Ah.” Dou had not understood the impulse that had led him to seek out an audience with this man, but now a certain excitement flared within him, and he found himself unable to hide a responding smile, except by stroking the unkempt, stringy white hairs that passed for his beard. “I heard of your order once, when I was a child. You were said to be the most divine assassins in the province–in the prefecture–or perhaps the county–or quite possibly the world.”
“Divinity is not to men,” Su said. “It is true that those in the order can perform tasks that you might consider miracles, but only in the service of reducing the labor required by our various commissions. We have always believed that in those cases where one can solve a problem by crooking a finger, it disturbs the world less to do so than by making it a labor for oxen.”
“But you are a talented assassin, are you not?”
Without explanation, Su bent forward and picked up a stone. He held it up to the sunlight, as though to examine its finer features, and then promptly put it into his mouth and ate it. “Assassination is the most blunt of our methods. We know six Modes of Transmigration, and seventeen ways to manipulate the vital energy qi that flows through the tripartite mid-region of the human body. We can puppeteer the mind, waltz through walls, spoon time, transform colors into sounds and words into daggers. We can also submerge secrets in the vortices of the twin rivers of space and time, where only we can retrieve them. Next to these arts, the ability to end a human being is mere sleight-of-hand. But yes; I have killed, in the service of restoring life’s balance, or solving those problems that could not be resolved in any other way. Please do not tell me that it is what you want.”
“It is. I offer my life’s savings in exchange for the death of my neighbor Gan Shihuangdi.”
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
July 9th, 2017 at 4:17 pm
The beginning of the story is not really amenable to excerpt, so I did a scene a little further in.