When Jun came to a few minutes later, Cobu and his men were gone. When he was able to think past the pain in his head, he realized that the heavy banging he could hear over the continuing bedlam was the sound of boards being nailed over the doors of the Scroll Hall, imprisoning him in his own house.
Swaying unsteadily to his feet, he staggered for the doors and pulled on them, panting and groaning, until flashing sparks filled his vision. The heavy wood didn’t budge.
Jun slumped to the floor with his back against the door. The windowless, stone-walled, single-entry Scroll Hall was designed to be private and secure, which ironically made it an excellent impromptu prison.
Jun closed his eyes. Cobu’s blow seemed to have knocked his jaw out of alignment. You’re fucked. Sai had never actually sounded as nasty and unhelpful as the voice in the back of his mind did now. Might as well give up. What else can you do?
Nothing, he agreed. He’d failed as the Guardian. All his years of striving and training, in the end—meaningless. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was deluded all along.
A miserable, gurgling groan made him crack open his eyes. It had not, to his surprise, come from him but from Steward Tang, who was crawling across the floor through the burnt ashes of the fake Scroll, smearing a wide stripe of blood across the floor. To Jun’s astonishment, he leaned against the pillar where the Scroll of Heaven usually rested on its carved ivory stand and pushed, heaving with effort and leaving bloody handprints on the wood. “Help,” he gasped.
“What are you doing?” Jun exclaimed, hurrying over and crouching next to the wounded man. Steward Tang’s angular face was as pale as bleached bone and contorted with pain. His shirt and pants were soaked dark red. Jun swallowed, looking around hopelessly for something with which he might bind the man’s stab wound. There was nothing. “You should try to lie still,” he said, thinking that it likely wouldn’t matter but feeling the need to say something.
“Help … me … move this,” Tang panted. When Jun only stared at him in bewilderment, a little of the man’s decorously forbearing manner returned, and he sighed. “Guardian Li, if you wish to escape, we must move this pedestal. As you can see … I can’t do it alone.”
“There’s … another way out of the room?” Jun didn’t wait for Tang’s response. He wrapped his arms around the thick pillar and began heaving with all his remaining strength. Tang pushed from the other side as best he could, both of them with teeth gritted from the effort and pain. The ivory scroll stand wobbled and toppled off the top, tumbling onto the floor and cracking along one side; they ignored it. Rocking the heavy post, they managed, after several minutes, to scoot it bit by bit off the square area rug upon which it stood.
Steward Tang collapsed, hands clutching his stomach.
Jun rolled back the intricately patterned rug, splotchy with Tang’s blood. Underneath, set into the otherwise uniform stone floor, was a wooden trapdoor about the size of a tea table. Jun grasped the metal ring and pulled; the door lifted with a disused groan, revealing a straight hole with metal ladder rungs set into the stone on one side, the space just large enough to allow one person to fit. The secret passage dropped straight down into pitch blackness; Jun could not see the bottom.
“A tunnel?” he exclaimed. “Who else knows about this?”
“This room was designed to protect the Scroll, including allowing the Guardian to escape with it in an emergency,” Tang wheezed, eyes closed, sweat coating his face. “Only the Guardian and his chief steward are ever told about this other way out.” He gestured down into the dark passageway. “Take a light. The tunnel runs under the Island and lets out under the south bridge.”
“Where would I go?” It was a long way from the Island to the exterior gates—he knew because he’d run through the city yesterday, when he was fresh, relatively uninjured, and not a hunted man. He had nothing with him now, no money or supplies, no allies in the city.
“The Fragrant Spring Inn,” Tang said. “I did as you asked. I found Prodigy Yin. His wounds were treated and he’s waiting for you there.”
Jun seized one of the lamps from its wall bracket, holding it over the tunnel entrance. Firelight flickered over stone. The handholds were worrisomely flaked with rust. Who knew the last time they’d been used, if ever, and whether they would hold his weight or give out and send him tumbling to his death—but what choice did he have?
Jun stood at the lip of the hole, then looked over at Tang. The steward was lying very still, breathing shallowly, his eyes slitted nearly closed. There was no chance he’d be able to climb down, but if Jun left him here, he was sure to bleed to death.
As if sensing Jun’s hesitation, Tang whispered, “Guardian Li, please hurry. I beg you not to make my last act as steward a waste.”
“I’m not the Guardian,” Jun reminded him with a grimace. “The real Scroll was never in my hands.”
Tang struggled to sit up. He was trembling, as if he were very cold. “It’s the Guardian’s duty to always serve the country, and the steward’s duty to always serve the Guardian. You earned the title and therefore the responsibility.” His voice fell until it was barely audible. “Find the Scroll. It rightfully belongs with you and no one else.”
“Did you know?” Jun asked dully. “That Yama would steal the Scroll?”
The steward shook his head sadly.
“Why would he do this?” Yama’s words to him—“You have my condolences”—came back to Jun in the fullness of their dispassionate cruelty. The man had known that as soon as his ruse was discovered, it would be Jun, and Yama’s own steward and household staff, who would suffer. “Was he in league with the Silent Flute Society after all? Has he been biding his time for six whole years before handing the Scroll over to them?”
Tang gave a weak chuckle. “Guardian Yama has no regard for any political cause, nor anyone else who sought the Scroll, including those who sponsored or trained him. ‘Silly games by foolish men—all of it,’ he’d say. The complete word of Dragon…” Tang’s chin sagged to his chest and his bloodstained hands drooped to the floor.
“Steward Tang, stay with me.” Jun gave the man’s shoulder a shake. It felt terribly cruel to rouse a man who was dying before his eyes, but he needed to understand why he’d been set up. “What did Yama mean … the complete word of Dragon?”
“The hidden knowledge contained in the Scrolls,” Tang mumbled, his lips barely moving, “opens the path to … great power … and immortality itself.”
Jun’s hands went still. Yama had shut himself up for years, ignoring most of the outside world, because he was seeking the key to eternal life? “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Plenty of people have studied the Scroll. None of them have gained special powers or lived forever.”
“The answer cannot be found in half of a whole. Heaven and Earth are one.” Tang’s hand closed over Jun’s arm, staining the sleeve. “You must go.”
Jun could no longer hear any shouting or noise from outside the Scroll Hall. Had everyone already been killed or taken away? When would Cobu return? Jun glanced at the boarded-up doors, then down at the terrifying hole in the ground that was his only way out.
He placed his own hand over the steward’s. “I’m sorry.”
Tang failed to answer. His chest did not rise, and when Jun lifted the man’s hand, it came away limp and lifeless.
Jun picked up the lamp and stood, looking down at Tang’s body and feeling an ache deep in his soul that he could not name. He had only known the steward for a day, and now he was dead, and for what?
All of them—Cobu, Chang, and Yama—were willing to use, deceive, and disregard others for the sake of something that none of them truly understood. If the Scroll was a gift to humanity from Dragon and his Blessed Consort, then why did it cause so much strife and pain?
“I’ll find the Scroll,” he promised Tang, who couldn’t hear him any longer.
With equal parts dread and resolve, Jun lowered himself into the tunnel, holding the lamp with one hand and slowly making his way, rung by rung, down the ladder of metal bars into the cavity below. As his head dropped below the level of the room’s floor, claustrophobic fear crept up his spine, threatening to weaken his limbs. He concentrated on placing one hand and foot at a time, moving as quickly as he could while testing each step to make sure the metal would hold his weight before lowering himself farther.
The lamp shook badly in his hand. How far did this shaft go?
A noise came from the room above: the sound of scraping and heavy things moving. Cobu’s soldiers had returned and were removing the planks they’d nailed to the door of the Scroll Hall.
The top of his searching right foot touched solid ground. He pushed off the rest of the way. Flashes of pain lit up in his sore joints as he landed, and he bit down on a moan of agony and relief. Jun swung his lamp around; the light danced wildly over rough rock walls until the glow of it disappeared into darkness on one side, revealing a passageway barely tall enough for him to pass through without crouching.
The sound of angry shouting erupted from the room above. Heart pounding in his throat, Jun plunged into darkness.