Ten Thousand Futures

The hound stood in four places and cast one shadow.

Its forequarters occupied the plate square beneath the bell. A hind leg remained inside the torn rabbit. The wet outline of its ribs showed through Jia Nuo’s harness buckle near the north wall. Its shadow, however, lay whole across the courtyard stones, narrow at the waist and long enough to reach Tianhui’s feet.

Lan Jue held two fingers against the pulse of his living channel. Luo Pei held his wrist.

“Thirty-seven force-bearing cycles,” Lan Jue said.

“Under current load,” Luo Pei added. “If your pulse climbs, she loses cycles before you spend them.”

His hundred-cycle training had been done flat on a mat, unbitten and unbruised, with Luo Pei stopping at the first tremor and Lan Jue adjusting the formation between attempts. This body could repeat a quiet path a hundred times. It could not drive force through that path while a road-animal tore at the village and expect the same number. Thirty-seven was not lost progress. It was the honest budget for the body he had brought into the yard.

Tianhui flexed his right hand. “Thirty-seven.”

Luo Pei leaned close enough that only he heard her. “At thirty-eight, I put you down myself.”

The threat contained no humour. He believed it.

Shen Qing had cleared the space around the square. The well stood behind Tianhui. The shrine and children were ten paces to his right. Dren held the northern edge with her seal cloth. Irlan remained outside the boundary, one bleeding hand pressed into his map. Tova had placed himself between Qiao Rui and the plate square despite Dren ordering him back.

The hound’s head rose from the central stone.

Tianhui opened his channel.

Cycle one carried qi into his palm. Cycle two spread it through the response plates. At cycle three the hound snapped at the pressure and vanished from the square.

It reappeared through the harness buckle by the north wall.

“North,” Shen Qing called.

Ren Yu struck the leather rather than the creature. Her blade severed the old strap. The hound’s ribs collapsed, but a wet line travelled along the cut leather toward Jia Nuo’s wife.

She saw it coming and did not move. Hu Gan dragged her behind the grain wall. She struck him twice in the chest and screamed that the harness belonged to her husband. He kept dragging.

Cycle seven. Tianhui turned the nearest orientation plate a quarter-circle. The cracked copper showed west while the actual pull ran south. The hound followed the lie for half a body-length and appeared beside the drainage trench instead of the shrine.

Pei Chao stared. “You made the damaged plate useful.”

“It was already useful. We had merely objected to the use.”

“Do that again.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on NovelFire.

Tianhui stepped where the plate claimed west would be. His body moved south.

The sensation was vile and exhilarating. For an instant his inner ear, eyes and channel disagreed, then the adapted route accepted the false orientation and placed him on the hound’s blind side. Three thousand years earlier he would have dismissed the method as a contractor’s trick. Now the cracked plate gave him a step no intact inheritance could have taught.

Pei shouted over the noise, “Cracked-Plate Step.”

“No.” Tianhui drove his palm into the hound’s shoulder. “That name is unacceptable.”

The strike forced the creature back into the square.

“Name it after the fight,” Shen Qing said. “Move.”

Cycle twelve. The hound split its jaw between two plates. Dren snapped her cloth over one opening and shouted, “Close the other.”

“We need it choosing,” Tianhui said.

“We need it dead.”

“Those conditions may become related if you stop trying to solve them in the wrong order.”

Dren’s face did not change. Her cloth remained ready.

At cycle fourteen, a pale foreleg pushed from Anu’s copper ring. Keshi recoiled but stayed beside the shrine stone. His mother grabbed the bowl with both hands and nearly threw it across the room.

“Do not move it!” Xiulan shouted.

The mother looked at the leg reaching toward her son. “Then come hold my hands.”

Xiulan did. Neither woman pretended the arrangement was calm.

Cycle nineteen. The hound struck Fu Lan’s spoon and emerged beneath her walking stick. Fu Lan dropped the stick, seized the pot beside her and poured boiling millet water through the pale muzzle. The creature screamed in three locations.

“It dislikes breakfast,” she said, already backing away.

Cycle twenty-three. The district barrier rang.

Four stakes around the grain road carried Shen Yao’s authority seal and the signatures of his clerks. The hound abandoned the family objects and bit the bronze mark. Every guard wearing the same insignia jerked toward the courtyard as if a cord had tightened behind the breastbone. One fell against the wall and dislocated two fingers. Another clawed at the embroidered patch on his sleeve.

Registrar Shen cut his own insignia free with a document knife. “Remove every mark. Tear the cloth if it will not come.”

The guards obeyed. Pieces of official blue landed in mud and ash. For two heartbeats the hound tried to follow the shared authority through all of them at once. Its body shuddered, stretched thin, and became visible from shoulder to tail.

Cycle twenty-eight.

Shen Qing’s sword struck the spine. The blade entered, then stopped against something harder than bone.

The hound turned toward Tianhui.

He had touched every plate, sustained the pressure, redirected its path and become the point by which the formation made sense. The creature did not need to understand him. It needed only the relation everyone else had built around his decisions.

It came through his channel.

Cold entered at the palm. Tianhui’s fingers locked. Beneath the skin, a pale paw pressed from the centre of his hand and began climbing toward the wrist.

Luo Pei felt his pulse change. “Now.”

Lan Jue drove a resonance needle into the channel below his elbow. The needle carried no qi and no courtesy. A sharp current forced the muscles open and broke the hound’s direction.

Tianhui gasped.

“Thirty,” Lan Jue said.

“You could have warned me.”

“You were warned by the existence of the needle.”

Luo Pei tightened her grip on his wrist. “Thirty-one. Save your breath.”

The hound tore free of his palm and reappeared inside the square. Its entire spine showed for half a heartbeat.

Shen Qing struck the third vertebra.

Every active plate in Hejingshui rang. The hound convulsed. Its shadow broke into six strips and tried to crawl toward the nearest anchors.

Cycle thirty-seven.

Tianhui released the channel.

His knees folded. Luo Pei caught his shoulder; Lan Jue caught the arm with the needle before it tore sideways. The hound escaped the square, but one pale leg remained pinned beneath Shen Qing’s sword, solid enough to kick grooves into the stone.

Tianhui sat hard against the well and began laughing.

He could not help it. The cracked plate had lied, his body had learned the lie, and for three steps the world had become new again.

Shen Qing looked down at him. “Is that part of the injury?”

“Not yet,” Luo Pei said.

Tianhui wiped blood from his palm. “We can force it to choose a body.”

From the far side, Anu’s answering knock sounded through the copper ring.

The trapped leg stopped struggling.

It tapped the stone in reply.

Three. Two. Three.

Keshi’s face lost all colour. “That is wrong.”