How, by the twisted star?
“Phaestion will not ask you to yield when you face him,” he says.
“If he did, it would be a mistake.” I drop to the ground so fast not even Faria can catch me. I shoot out my feet in a kick that trips him. He crashes, the rod flying from his hands. Before he can scramble, I leap on top of him, pressing my blade to his throat.
“Well done, Edmon! Still, you would have lost.” He pushes me off him.
“Had you not wasted time to talk,” I counter.
“Perhaps,” he muses. “As long as you’d make the same choice to win again.”
Phaestion was the only boy I was ever close to. He saved my life, and I saved his. He’s arrogant, entitled, impossibly beautiful, and utterly flawed. He loved me but couldn’t own me. I don’t know what it will be when we see each other again.
“Why do you keep talking about him?” I ask.
“Do I? Let us be quiet now,” he says, groaning. “These tired old bones only creak. They can’t see the future. What I do know is Tao is a battleground for ambition, and it’s not prescience to know your loyalties are going to be tested.”
“There’s only one test people understand here—the Combat,” I answer.
“Strength and power. Father or brother. Your choice will have consequences,” he says.
I sit down next to him. “I don’t think I’m going to have to worry about it anytime soon. They locked me up and threw away the key.” My shadow crosses his face in the slim light. Light? “Master?”
He nods. “I sensed it almost an hour ago. A shift in the spectrum. Six months is upon us.” I sense urgency in his voice. “I’ve saved the last lesson for now. I pass to you the secret of the Dim Mak as it was passed to me by the Zhao monks. You will be able to take life with a touch of your finger, but you must make the second promise.”
His words hang between us.
“If I teach you, you will kill someone of my choosing at the time of my choosing.”
Why would he need me to do the killing?
“Agree” is his only answer.
Who? The Warden? Some ruffian of the Wendigo? Some stranger I don’t know who wronged him long ago? I suppose there’s only one way to find out if the techniques he teaches will actually work. This is a distinct disadvantage in practicing it, I surmise.
“Take this upon yourself or don’t,” he says. “Either way, let us enjoy the few hours of moonlight we’ll have together in honesty.”
I take a deep breath. I answered in my heart long ago. “I give you my oath.”
The rising moons Chang and Hou wax their pale beams through the cell window. We study. I probe with my fingers against my skin. I feel the meridians flowing. Faria instructs me to apply pressure to change their vibrations. Some pressures lead to paralysis; others stop the resonance completely. I’ve learned the contact reflexes and sensitivity, the ability to sense meridians within myself and others already. Now he lays out the final piece of the puzzle.
“Gentle at first, then sharp like a knife,” he instructs. “The mandibular pressure point hit at the precise moment can cause bowel dysfunction. The brachial arteries staunched may cause paralysis of limbs for days or until you release it, like so.” He demonstrates. “After fingers are applied to the sacrum, a man will be locked permanently upright. Applied thusly, it will break the coccyx and release spinal fluid, resulting in collapse of the brain stem.”
So it goes. For hours. The first time I paralyze my own arm, I go giddy, then I panic. “I can’t feel my arm! By the star, I can’t feel it!”
I try to return vibration to the limb, but I’m so flustered I can’t do it. Faria refuses to help. I try to calm myself. It’s the better part of an hour before I’m able to replicate the technique and return the feeling.
“Emotions are energy. Love, hate, fear, panic. Focus them and you have lightning. Rage in all directions, obstacles will stand unmoved. Concentration is precision.”
We don’t sleep. The moons wane.
“I’ve shown you all I know,” Faria says finally. “The rest is up to you. Remember, fighting isn’t right or wrong. It is an expression of the self. The universe is energy, and you are the lens through which it passes. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Master,” I reply, not totally comprehending, but I’ve six months alone to figure it out.
“Let us sit in our last moments,” he says.
I lean against the wall. I truly take in his visage in the pale moonlight. More than old, he’s dying. His oddly colored reddish hair is now dull and gray. It has sprouted fraying ends from his unkempt head. The paint of the facial tattoos is tucked deep into the crevices of his leathery skin. He looks emaciated, a skeleton with barely enough muscle to hold up his frame. His white eyes, which at one time seemed fierce in their blindness, now seem faded. It’s hard to believe this is the man who beat me in a fencing match a few hours ago.
I stand tiptoed and look out the porthole of my dungeon. The world beyond is like whipping cream scraped across the landscape in mountainous, snowy swirls. It’s beautiful in its pure bleakness.
“Have you been modulating your pupil dilation?” Faria asks.
“Yes,” I respond. “Still it has been six months.”
Faria nods. I sit back down. “Master, how did you come to Tao?” I ask.
He smiles with brown teeth. “It’s a long and tragic tale and of no concern.”
“If I wasn’t interested, I wouldn’t have asked.”
“I’m surprised you waited this long. You’ve guessed I’m not from around these parts.”
“It was your winning charm that gave you away,” I joke.
“Long ago there was a war. A war that exploded suns, extinguished millions of souls. This was hundreds of years before the generations of Nightsiders that scurry the oceans of Tao today. The historians that deign to recount it called it the Chironian Civil War.”
“Chilleus and Cuillan,” I whisper. I remember the great myth that Phaestion and I both loved as children.
“Chilleus and Cuillan were legends even to me,” Faria says, nodding. “Anjin commanders who served long before I was born into service. Chiron was a moon of the Titanus star system. My people were conscripts.”
He says the word with a bitter inflection. There’s more to it than simply being drafted, I think.
“Wars are petty things. They rob men of dignity, turn them into meat and guts. Never fight a war not of your choosing, Edmon Leontes,” he says. “When our great war was over, the Titanus star was no more, and the people of its worlds and moons were scattered to space.”
“You always said fighting was the truest expression of self.”
“Martial art is not war, boy,” he says sharply. “There’s nothing personal about war.”
I now wonder if Faria is any less deluded than any of my teachers.