Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 58 Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

"You're too late."

The girl shuffled off a stolen cloak, discarding it onto the gravel behind her like a shadow. Her feet were bare and bleeding and she wore little more than the rags of a blue padded jacket and torn silk trousers. Around her narrow hips was a length of twine. It was through this that a child's sword was stuck.

"Too late for what?" she said. Pulling the blade from her makeshift belt, Tris crossed the elegant half-moon bridge in a handful of steps and halted a few paces from where Zaq sat on his rock.

A very elegant rock, carved from jade.

The Emperor was crying and when Tris took a closer look she saw that his face was screwed up like that of an anguished child. Scrolls littered the ground around his feet.

"Something wrong?" Tris said.

This was meant to be ironic. Tris was holding her blade and she could see in his eyes that the Emperor knew why she was there. All the same, he took her question seriously.

"He thought he was dreaming me," Zaq said. "He thought I was the darkness."

"Really?" said Tris. "And should I know what you're talking about?" Tris had less than no idea what the man's words signified.

"You came to stop me. That's why you're here, isn't it?"

"I came to kill you," said Tris. "Stopping you isn't enough." She looked from the rock to her blade and then back again. "You need to stand up," she said.

"Why?"

"Why do you think?" Tris said crossly.

Zaq shrugged, then wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "I don't know."

"Because I can't kill you if you're sitting down."

"Is that in the rules?"

"Well," said Tris, somewhat reluctantly. "It's in mine."

"Then I'm going to stay right here," said Zaq. "I mean, what would you do?"

Tris frowned. "You can't sit there forever," she protested.

"Maybe," said Zaq. "Maybe not."

In Tris's opinion the Emperor wasn't giving her the attention she deserved. She had a firm idea of how this should go and the Chuang Tzu begging for his life, expressing disbelief or at the very least demanding her reasons came high on that list.

"You know," Zaq muttered after a while, "I probably could... I mean, I don't really eat and sleep scares me." He was ticking the points off on his fingers as he went. "My muscles retain their tone whether or not I exercise. I don't know if I can actually control my waste functions but it seems possible. After all, I can control everything else.

"You should try dangling your feet in the stream," he added, when Tris just stared at him. "It might help the blisters."

"What's with the butterflies?" Tris asked eventually. Once curiosity finally overcame her irritation, it seemed an obvious enough question.

Zaq looked up from his scroll. There was ink on his fingers and his brush had splayed at the bristles where he'd been pressing too hard. His ink stone was broken in three and he'd taken to grinding one of the broken ends directly into a saucer of water. Tris was sure that wasn't how it was meant to be done, but then what did she know?

"Try one," he suggested.

And then Zaq went back to his scroll, alternating perfect circles with sketches of crude flying machines which hovered around a small hill town.

"Go on," he said a moment later. "Here. I'll show you how." Reaching out, Zaq held his hand absolutely still until a butterfly skimmed across the grass towards him.

"Watch," Zaq said.

And as Tris watched, the flicker of purple stamped on the Chuang Tzu's outstretched fingers, the man blinked and the butterfly fell dead, twirling to the ground like a fallen leaf.

"You try it."

Tris held out her hand to a butterfly and across the 2023 worlds 148 billion people sucked in their breath as Tris's body arched backwards and she hit the ground at Zaq's feet.

"That was stupid," he said.

Flames licked up both sides of the Changlang, a 2572-foot corridor built along the northern shore of a lake which bordered the Emperor's Summer Gardens outside the Forbidden City.

Only a few of the famous paintings lining its walls looked likely to survive the inferno now sweeping the wooden corridor's entire length. Tris's calling card.

Zaq hated it when people wouldn't stay dead.

"This is between me and her," Zaq said. Although he said this to himself since the Librarian was no longer talking to him.

It was muddling and strange and more frightening than he'd expected and Zaq wasn't quite sure why he was still there. If America joined Beijing, the Loyal Prince would no longer be solely Chinese. Most probably it would not even be called the Loyal Prince. Someone else would discover the 2023 worlds. There'd be no first Chuang Tzu, never mind a fifty-third... He'd rewritten history and changed everything.

So why wasn't everything changed?

Unless, of course, the man he needed to kill had not been killed. The more Zaq thought about this the more certain he became that this was what had happened.

He was trapped here, waiting for the American Emperor to die. And his own assassin was out there somewhere. No one else could have fired the Changlang and few would want to, fewer still would dare and none but the girl could have made it this far.

He blamed the Library.

The plateau should have stopped her, as it had a thousand before. And if not the plateau then the ice bridge. She'd got past both, which was unknown, and survived the stamp of a butterfly when none but the reincarnated could do that and live.

All 2023 worlds knew this and so did Zaq, because he'd patched himself into a feed. So now he watched himself staring into space, talking to nothing and sitting on the step of a pagoda while the Dragon Throne sat empty behind him.

There was little need for her to burn the buildings of the Summer Gardens. All of the doors had been left unlocked and the shutters open. The guards who might have stopped her had been absent since Zaq dismissed them months before. But she had burnt the Changlang anyway, stalking the length of its corridor with her head high, a blade stuck in her makeshift belt and her face grim. The only incongruous thing about the figure who swept through in a storm of fire had been her hands. She'd dragged them across the walls and paintings like a child rattling her stick against a fence.

And everywhere Tris's fingers had touched flames sparked.

Zaq looked pitiful sitting on those steps. A tearful young man in a dirty blue cloak and tunic, his chin in his hands and his attention focused, when it focused at all, on the burning line of the Changlang.

He wanted to be braver. Most of all, he wanted to be born someone else, someone completely different. A person the girl didn't want to kill.

"I'm going to find her," said Zaq.

A hundred and forty-eight billion people wondered if this was a good idea.

"And turn off the feed," Zaq added, pushing himself to his feet.

Silence greeted this order.

"Do it."

"You'll cause chaos." The order had been shocking enough to make the Librarian reappear. So now he stared from a puddle. As unhappy to be talking to Zaq as Zaq was to listen.

Walking to the edge of his terrace, Zaq stared down the wooded slopes of Wanshou Shan to a flickering wall of flame that had once been the greatest collection of classical paintings ever gathered into a single building.

"It's chaos already," he said.

Zaq found her at one end of a wooden pavilion in the Summer Gardens, kneeling with her back to him. She seemed be trying to crack open a small wooden chest. On the wall in front of her was a carved and gilded phoenix.

Tris had changed into a yellow silk jacket with a dragon embroidered across the back in white-gold thread. On her head was balanced a simple black hat that looked like an upturned bowl with the bottom cut out.

The sword was stuck through her belt.

Flames licked against one window and the sky outside danced with embers that flickered and spun in the night wind. The Changlang had burnt easily, being old, fragile and made mostly from cedar, and sparks from that fire had danced and then fallen onto a nearby roof.

A thousand golden butterflies rose in the night sky and threatened the roofs on which they landed. Zaq half expected the Library to fill the sky with clouds and batter the fires into submission but the night stayed almost clear and almost dark, with that silver tinge which came from the sun reflecting on distant worlds.

The room in which Tris knelt stank of smoke, charring shutters and a petrochemical reek which was oil-based paint bubbling beneath early tongues of flame. It was a complex smell, heavy with hydrocarbon. And though Zaq would have liked to stay to savour its richness, he realized this was probably unwise.

"So," Zaq said, "what are you looking for?"

"You..."

Tris scrambled to her feet so fast she almost tripped. Only to realize that a dozen paces still separated her from the Emperor and anyway he was unarmed. So she drew her own blade and stepped away from the sandalwood box.

"Nothing," said Tris.

You must be searching for something, Zaq almost said, then shrugged his reply away. Why would she tell him anyway?

"So what now?" he said, hoping it sounded nonchalant.

"Fuck," Tris said. "I don't know." She tossed her blade from hand to hand. "What do you think?"

"I think the world's going to end."

"Only for you," she said.

Her juggling with the blade was very impressive. Unfortunately for the 148 billion waiting to be impressed, the Librarian had taken Zaq at his word and the feed was gone. Zaq's head was empty and the single mirror on one wall showed only a burning room.

It was a wonderful feeling.

"Let's dance," he said.

And Tris looked at Zaq then, seeing him for the first time. A man who looked not much older than she was but must be twice her age.

"Dance?"

Zaq indicated the embers swirling beyond the window. "You got anything better to do?"

Tris was still working on an answer to this when the phoenix so lovingly carved into the panel behind her proved unable to live up to its own legend and crumbled onto a bed of embers.

Through the open door ahead she could see the Changlang burnt down to a smouldering line. A dozen small pavilions between the wooden corridor and her also smouldered, ceramic roof tiles exploding in the flames into which they'd fallen.

All around them bonfires lit the Yihe Yuan, until the Summer Gardens glowed with a richness they'd never possessed before and gilded pavilions grew ever more golden as they were varnished with flame.

She should leave now, before it was--

"Too late," said Zaq.

A huge shutter crumbled as its lacquered wood broke apart and the sudden inrush of air fed the blaze. More oxygen was all the pavilion needed to explode into flame, fire flowing across the floor like running water. Wooden panels on the ceiling began to char and the last unvarnished wall grew fat with flame as smoke fought to escape through doors and windows.

The heat was beyond anything Tris had experienced. Almost beyond anything she could imagine. This had to be dying, Tris realized. And all the while the Emperor just stood opposite her, seemingly unmoved and unharmed, the flames now so close that his cloak had started to char at the edges.

"You did this," she said, each word tearing at her throat.

He shook his head.

"Yes," said Tris, "you." Stepping forward, she drew her blade to finish what she'd travelled the worlds to accomplish. She expected him to twist sideways or block the blow, to turn and run.

Instead Zaq stepped forward, put out one arm to steady Tris as she began to fall and barely grunted when she used all that remained of her strength to ram the blade under his ribs and into his heart.

Time froze?

This was not strictly accurate. What actually happened was subjective in the way everything is when one gets down to that level. Time slowed to a crawl as the Library rewrote reality inside the skulls of Zaq and Tris, the handful of seconds separating Zaq from cardiac failure and the alveoli in Tris's lungs from rupturing suddenly extending before both of them like a slow glide to infinity.

And as the speed at which their thoughts began to operate ripped apart their neural nets, the flames which had been roiling around them slowed and slowed again until they barely crawled up the walls.

"Why?" Zaq said. But then he knew.

Because what Tris thought was what he thought and there were no boundaries between them. They looked at the world through the same eyes. And that world was fucked, seriously screwed, far weirder than either had imagined.

Zaq saw...

Well, he imagined that he saw himself. It looked like him only he couldn't remember any such incident. He was in a bath, marble and old. The room was painted in flat greens, golds and reds but then his rooms were always painted in those colours.

There were no servitors, he was naked and the water in his bath had turned cold. So cold that a scar on his wrist had grown blue and the skin around his nails become frayed and white. The fingers of his right hand, the one that gripped a knife, were so pale they seemed to belong to someone else.

It was a very beautiful knife, with a wavy line along one edge from where it had been forged, and fragments of room reflected in the blade's surface as if looking into a river or a bowl. Zaq had a feeling the knife might have been given to him by someone; he found it hard to remember.

Actually, Zaq found it hard to think, full stop. In locking him into this moment the Library had trapped him inside such pain that it overwhelmed his sight and hearing, his sense of smell and his very self.

"Hell," said Tris.

The Library nodded.

"Remember now?" Tris said.

She was talking about the room and the cold bath and about the boy who came through a door, a plate of dim sum on his tray and a rat perched on one shoulder. Through the eyes of that rat had peered a brain of a rodent and more billions of people than Tris could imagine. The servitor was about Tris's age. In fact, Zaq was pretty certain that the servitor was--

"Wrong," said Tris. She could feel the knife in Zaq's chest as clearly as he suffocated beneath her struggle to draw breath, both frozen into each other's pain on the wrong side of death.

"Look again," she demanded.

It was as if he refused to recognize himself or found it hard to care about what had happened to the boy with the rat. As if he saw life through a sheet of glass. Except... Tris corrected herself. It was a sheet of darkness and ice. And then, as Zaq finally remembered sitting in the bath, Tris understood everything. (Something she could have done without, really.)

"What?" Zaq said, looking up.

The boy grinned, shut the door behind him and looked around at the ornate room and whistled. "Wow," he said. "Fucking neat."

"Out," said Zaq.

"Zaq," said the boy, "it's me. I've blagged you some dim sum." He held out the tray as if he expected the Chosen of Heaven to join him in eating congealed food.

"There was this weird guy in the kitchens," he added, oblivious to Zaq's fiercest scowl, "wanted me to--"

"Don't," said Tris.

Zaq rose from the water, blade in hand.

He was naked and so was the blade which took the boy's head from his shoulders. As a spout of arterial blood pissed itself almost to the ceiling, Tris screamed and the boy began to crumple, his knees buckling as the torso toppled forward to hit the floor.

How could you?

From the far corner, the rat and the servitor's head both stared at Zaq with looks that only grew less accusing when the rat blinked and death began to soften facial muscles and glaze the boy's eyes.

"But he's not even--"

"Of course he's fucking real," Tris shouted, her voice a wind which scoured the edges of Zaq's mind. "They were all real," she said. "Every servitor you killed, that concubine you raped..."

She stopped, considered what she now knew. "You really didn't--"

"No," said Zaq. "I didn't know."

He saw it all now. The horror of what he'd done, which was as nothing to the horror of what he had been. A monster.

"Who was he?" Zaq began to ask and realized he already knew. Tris had been too young to watch it happen on feed, little more than a baby. No, Zaq knew that was untrue. She'd been unborn when her--

"Your father?"

This didn't seem possible, yet it was true and there was something else, something obvious.

Eli ate the apple, said the Library, as if this explained everything. And strangely enough it did. Both of them instantly understood why it was always this fruit that tradition demanded. And with the memory of juice running down Zaq's chin and Eli reaching out for his share the final piece fell into place.

"My brother," Zaq said. "Your father."

She's your half niece, said the dark. You had different fathers. This seemed possible, even likely. Although, since Zaq could barely remember his mother, how anyone might expect him to remember the man who...

I can still save you.

"How?" said Tris, knowing it was to the Chuang Tzu that the strange voice had been speaking.

I can loop time back to when you were young. Or we can let your flame pass to the next candle. The Library sounded regretful, as if things really hadn't been meant to end like this.

"Save us," Tris said.

The Chuang Tzu said nothing. He felt sick and stupid, ignorant to the point of wanting to disappear, to be anything other than what he was. He didn't want to be young again or inflict his memories on the next Chuang Tzu. He wanted everything to be different.

The Library thought about that.

"Billions will die," said Tris.

"No," insisted Zaq. "They will simply become someone else."

"Right," said the Library. "Let me find the tipping point."