Jade War

“Baby,” Niko exclaimed. “Little baby.” He had begun to string Kekonese words together into short sentences. After several frustrated tantrums, he no longer tried to speak Stepenish.

Hilo swung the toddler up in his arms and set him on the edge of the bed. After sixteen hours of labor, Wen’s eyes were ringed with exhaustion but shone bright with triumph. Hilo leaned over and placed a kiss on Wen’s brow, then on the baby’s head, breathing in his son’s indescribable sweetness. Niko reached out to pat the infant’s wispy hair. “That’s your little cousin,” Hilo told him. “The two of you have to take care of each other from now on.”

FIRST INTERLUDE Lost and Found

A well-known figure in the ancient history of the Tun Empire is a man named Ganlu, who was a warrior, healer, religious philosopher, and advisor to Emperor Sh’jan the Third. Ganlu is described in Tuni historical texts as a bearded foreigner who came from the Island in the West. Accounts differ as to the date of his arrival, but it is said that when he saw the vast plains of the Great Basin of Tun he fell to his knees and praised the gods, famously exclaiming (in a phrase that would later be appropriated by various Tuni rulers and generals as justification for imperial expansion): “Glorious land, where a man can walk for his whole life and never reach the sea!”

Ganlu traveled for many years. In the wake of recent famine and war, the Tun countryside was plagued by lawlessness and banditry, against which common villagers were often helpless. Wherever Ganlu went, he confronted crime and immorality, taught martial skills to the ordinary people, treated sickness and ailments with his healing touch, and espoused a philosophy of peaceful living, neighborly obligation, and communion with the divine spirits of the land, rivers, and sky. His teachings formed the basis for krajow, the Tuni fighting arts, and greatly influenced the Shubai religion.

Eventually, the traveler’s reputation reached the ears of the emperor, who summoned Ganlu and his disciples to the palace and asked him to become a royal advisor. Ganlu refused three times before consenting, each time asking the emperor to offer evidence of his virtues as a monarch. Ganlu’s acumen as a counselor and the founding of his schools of krajow are recounted in further legends, which differ in detail but hold in common that Ganlu derived extraordinary power and wisdom from an enchanted stone given to him by his forest goddess mother and which he wore close to his heart at all times. It is said that Ganlu lived until the age of one hundred and seventy; upon his death, his spirit went into the stone, which was kept in the Imperial Palace so that the emperor could continue to consult it.

While historians agree that Ganlu was a Kekonese Green Bone and that his teachings bear considerable resemblance to both Abukei folklore and pre-Deitist spirituality, only recently have they concluded that he was most likely the third son of the king of Jan during the early part of the Three Crowns period in Kekonese history.

Kekon has no record of this man, other than a royal genealogy set down at the time with an unnamed reference to “a young prince, lost.”

CHAPTER 22 The Grudge Hall

Anden played relayball twice a week now, with Dauk Corujon and a group of his friends, in the grass and dirt field behind the neighborhood high school. One day, two weeks after the dinner at the Dauks’ house, the Pillar’s son had ridden by the Hians’ home while Anden was outside, standing on a stepladder and fixing a broken gutter. Instead of speeding past as he usually did, Cory stopped his bicycle and called up to Anden. “Hey, islander, you play relayball?”

Anden wiped his hands on his pants and came down the ladder. “Yeah.”

“Are you any good?” Cory asked, not in an arrogant or scornful way, merely curious. The young man looked Anden up and down.

“I played on the team at the Aca—” Suddenly, he didn’t want Cory to know he’d gone to the Academy, that he’d been trained as a Green Bone. “At my school in Janloon.”

“What position did you play?”

“First guard.”

Cory nodded. “Fifthday evening, all right? I’ll come get you.” He pushed his bike forward and pedaled off again before Anden could say yes or no.

At the first game, Cory introduced him to a group of similarly aged young men and said, “Look here, crumbs, this is our new first guard, Andy.”

“Anden,” Anden corrected quickly, and perhaps more forcefully than he’d intended. He smiled to soften the unintended rudeness and said in a friendlier voice, “I go by Anden.” He hadn’t meant to strike yet another awkward note with the local Pillar’s son, now that they’d finally had a conversation of more than twenty words and he was being brought into Cory’s group of friends. It was just that back home, his cousin Hilo was the only one who ever called him Andy; it seemed strange for someone else to do so.