Threads 474-Glass 4

“What was that about?” Xia Anxi asked as they strolled down the street toward a clear patch in the industrial district where a garden had been laid down for the folk here to use in rest and meditations. It was a humble place as far as parks in the cloud districts went. There was a field of raked white sand and carefully arranged and shaped stones, suited to the qi of earth and fire.

“Just a whim. I had a thought that I might like to cultivate using the glass.”

“Do I even want to know?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

She hopped up onto a stone, sitting down cross-legged, and Qiyi’s silk rippled, briefly puffing out like a cat shaking off its fur as her dress expelled the small amount of particulates that evaded the great formations above. She watched them travel up, drawn in by the subtle currents of the wind.

The Bai retainer didn’t sit down himself, instead leaning against the polished iron fence that lined the path. “Sight. You’ve painfully sharp eyes, but I’d think you would be past such mundane tools, given your capability.”

“It’s not the seeing itself,” Ling Qi explained. “For that, my eyes are already better. It’s the method. The lens distorts what passes through it, and yet, it brings clarity and a true sight rather than confusion and deceit. I thought to cultivate on this thought.”

Xia Anxi looked as if he were rolling that over in his thoughts. “That seems a reach to me. The method the lenses use is not so different from that the mortal eye uses to take in light. Might as well say our own eyes distort everything we see.”

She laughed. “Might as well. If my experience at the summit taught me anything, it is how true that is.”

He searched her face, as if trying to find the dig in her words. He seemed more unsettled to not find it. “What plan lies between you and my lady, Baroness?”

She blinked, earnestly confused. “Pardon?”

He searched her face even more intently. “Ugh. I don’t know if that is worse.”

“It is possible Lady Bai and Lady Cai might be arranging a prank…?”

She wouldn’t put it past them, after their many betrayals the night before.

He looked deeply pained by her words, letting out a harsh breath. “Baroness Ling, I asked once, and we traded simple answers. I would ask again. What did you take from your journey through my thoughts?”

She rested her chin on her hands. There were literal answers. She’d taken nothing, only witnessed it. But whatever differences they had, they were both artists, and she’d not insult him by being obtuse when she understood the actual thrust of the question.

“I took the sound of the waves and the wharves, and the strum of mortal strings and sailors’ songs. There are many shades to those songs, and I sadly only heard a few. Xia Anxi may have nothing to do with those songs, but I won’t lie and say I cannot see the way they are the mortar of his foundations, even if they’ve been well built over.”

He let out a soft, quiet hiss. “You would, wouldn’t you? You, who so brazenly wears the grime and the dirt on your sleeves.”

Qiyi rustled. She was not dirty at all!

Ling Qi soothed the spirit with the thought. The words weren’t meant that way.

“I do. And where would I hide it if I had not? I don’t have such resources, nor the shame to use them. Xia Anxi, I meant my promise. I will not speak of anything I saw in your mind. They belong to you, and you are not an enemy of mine.” She tipped her head to him. “I won’t say I’m not curious though.”

She had done some searching, not to expose him, but to better understand the convoluted traditions of a clan as ancient as the Bai. The Bai were an immense clan, mind-bogglingly so. The White Serpents, their leaders, were closer to what she understood as a ducal clan. Then, the other six castes occupied places similar to comital or vicontiel clans, but the last, the gray, was for those mortals who still bore some signs of Grandmother Serpent’s descent.

The gray caste was most of the population of the Thousand Lakes.Despite the harsh restrictions she saw in their records, there must be the occasional throwback among the gray.

“Oh, am I to be the Baroness’ little project?” Xia Anxi asked.

“You were the one who brought this all up again. I was content to let it pass,” Ling Qi pointed out. “If anything, you’re the more curious one here.”

He pressed his lips together in a thin line.

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“I won’t claim I know you from a few snippets of memory, but I can speak of myself,” Ling Qi said candidly, turning her head to face the little pond in the center of the sand garden.

The air buzzed with their qi here. Xia Anxi’s screening techniques sent whispered wind and waves into the air, overwriting any echo of their words. Ling Qi just sent her statements to his ears alone. No one else needed to hear them, and so they did not, and could not, unless some higher realm chose to bend their Law to hearing them.