may be running out. You must study the game—we’ll provide analyses for you, as we hardly expect you to become a tactician—and study the dragons. Compose a suite of five pieces, one for each dragon—for each pilot.”
“Pilot?”
“They’re pilots in their minds, although we’re only certain that Periet and Mesketalioth have the training. Maybe the secret is just that they found blockade runners to drop them off.” The aide didn’t sound convinced.
“One piece for each dragon. You think that by translating their self-representations into music, the supreme art, you will learn their secret, and how to defeat them.”
“Precisely.”
“I will do what I can,” Xiao Ling Yun said.
“I’m sure you will,” the aide said.
Xiao Ling Yun’s ancestors had worshipped dragons. At the harvest festival, they poured libations of rice wine to the twin dragons of the greatmoon and the smallmoon. When the empire’s skies were afire with the summer’s meteor showers, people would burn incense for the souls of the falling stars.
You could still see fire in the sky, most nights, festive and beautiful, but no one brought out incense. The light came from battles high in the atmosphere, battles between the ashworlders’ metal dragons and the empire’s Phoenix Corps.
When she was a child, Ling Yun’s uncle had made her a toy glider, a flimsy-looking thing of bamboo and paper, with tiny slivers to represent the wing-mounted flamethrowers. He had painted the red-and-gold emblem of the Phoenix Corps on each wing. “Uncle,” she asked, “why do we fight with fire when the gliders are made of wood? Isn’t it dangerous?”
Her uncle patted her hand and smiled. “Remember the cycle of elements, little one.”
She thought about it: metal cut wood, wood split earth, earth drank water, water doused fire, and—“Fire melts metal,” she said.
“Indeed,” he said. “The ashworlds abound in metal, mined from the asteroid belts. Therefore their dragons are built of metal. We must use fire to defeat metal.”
“But wood burns,” Ling Yun said, wondering, despite all her lessons and the habits of obedience, if her uncle was right in the head. She turned the glider around in her hands, testing the paper wings. They flexed under her touch.
“So does the phoenix,” her uncle said.
Ling Yun squinted, trying to reconcile fire-defeats-metal with fire-burns-wood and fire-goes-down-in-flames.
Taking pity on her, her uncle added, “The phoenix is a symbol that came to us by conquest, from the southern spicelands.” He laughed at her wide eyes. “Oh, yes—do you think that for thousands and thousands of years, the empire has never been conquered? You’ll find all the old, ugly stories in the history books, of the Boar Banner and the Tiger Banner, the woman who brought down the wall, the Outsider Dynasty with its great fleets . . . ”
Ling Yun took note of the things that he had mentioned so she could look them up later.
“Come, Ling Yun,” her uncle said. “Why don’t we go outside and test the glider?”
She sensed that he was preventing her from asking further questions. But if he didn’t want her to know, why had he told her about the phoenix in the first place?
Still, she loved the way the glider felt in her hand, and her uncle didn’t visit very often. “All right,” she said.
They went into the courtyard with its broad flagstones and pond, and spoke no more of the elements.
Ling Yun started composing the suite on the wuxian qin, the five-stringed zither. She had brought her favorite one with her. The military was accustomed to transporting fragile instruments, thanks to the Phoenix Corps, whose gliders had to be attuned to the elements.
For suicidal, dark-haired Wu Wen Zhi, Ling Yun wrote a disjunct melody with tense articulations, reflecting the mixed power and turmoil she saw in the girl’s white dragon. White and red, bone and blood, death and fortune. The aide had said Wen Zhi had killed six people since landing in the empire. The dragon had nine markings. Ling Yun trusted the dragon. Wen Zhi did not strike her as the subtle type. The aide’s response to this observation was a pained laugh.
Ko’s drawing was more of a sketch, in a relaxed, spontaneous style that Ling Yun’s calligraphy tutor would have approved of. The colors worried her, however: black and grey, no sign of color, a sense of aching incompleteness. Yet the reports that came every morning noted Ko’s unshakable good cheer and cooperativeness. Ling Yun felt a strange affinity to what she knew of the boy. She had no illusions that she understood what it was