Threads 510 Ith 4

The passage of the lift was ponderous. She understood they were moving quite quickly by mortal standards, but she had grown used to faster transportation. It would occasionally jerk and grind or even grind to a halt, eliciting whispers from the formation engineers and hasty corrections to qi flows.

The passage they were traveling through was even more unsettling.

The domineering pressure of the Duchess’ passage lingered in the bleached stone. Though the passage was some three meters wide and half again as high, she could almost see the vague outline of a humanoid shape in the contours of the resolidified rock.

The Duchess had gone on a walk, tittered the courtiers. Ling Qi had felt a sovereign’s power well enough that the jest fell flat. It wasn’t funny at all to stand under the echo of will that had burned through countless kilometers of stone and punched through caverns that now lay bare, all life incinerated, mere shadows cast on white stone in ash.

She was also familiar enough to know that this passage was a show of restraint, control, and mastery of Law. Xia Ren’s tunnel would not have been nearly so small.

The squirming strangeness, the way the stone seemed almost to breathe and shift, and the twisting of space she remembered from her own journey into ith territory were all dead here. The stone was silent, and the path razor straight and descending at a smooth slope.

Ling Qi tried to imagine this passage, expanded to fit a marching army. She admitted that her imagination failed her.

It took some hours to finish the descent. Light began to filter in from the end of the passage, and the soft bioluminescent glow was present in some areas of the underground. Qiyi squirmed uncomfortably around her, and her skin prickled with the toxic impurity in the air, but with her filter mask on, she had no difficulty breathing.

The lift came to a halt as they emerged from the tunnel and out onto a ledge in the wall of a vast cavern. In the distance, Ling Qi saw the city of the ith for the first time. In their reconnaissance mission, they had never gone past the vast defensive wall that enclosed the city of the Ya, but here, they had appeared inside it.

It was a sprawling organic thing. Arches and spires of pale limestone grew up toward the vast ceiling far overhead, and fanciful fangs of organically shaped stone hungdown. At the core of the city was a column that rose from floor to ceiling. It was but a twig compared to Xiangmen, but it must have been hundreds of meters around at the base.

To her mortal sight, the city was dull, gray, and drab, but under her senses, it was aglow. Heat whorled through deliberate variations and striations in the rock formations, and the weak fire qi created glittering patterns as vivid as the brighter districts of the cloud. Stretches of land grew knobbly fungus that scattered glittering powders in what she assumed were the equivalent of parks and meditation gardens. It was easily as large as a normal imperial city, if much more organically patterned.

Curving around the city was a mighty river of black, roiling impurity that flowed into a huge inky reservoir or lake before resuming its flow, disappearing somewhere in the far darkness. Above it, rootlets of Xiangmen dangled, curling out from the ceiling, so narrow they were only about the size of normal tree trunks. From them dripped a steady rain of sludgy liquid.

More rootlets curled around the ceiling structures of the city, and the thickest were grown into the central pillar.

She could not ignore one other detail. On the ground extending out from where they stood now, there was a vast fan of bleached ground, shining stark and white. It extended across the kilometers, only slowly fading as it approached the walls. Like the little pocket caverns they had passed, everything the radiance had touched was sterile and dead.

That, she supposed, was the Duchess’ statement. Submit, or she would resume her walk.

A space had been made where the tunnel terminated, a construction wide enough to receive the lift and a platform to hold those waiting for it. Down from there extended a sloping path that zig-zagged down the cavern wall, like the mountain roads on the surface.

There were ith waiting for them, one of whom she recognized by the signature of her qi. Tcho-Ri was the Voice she had spoken to at last year’s tournament at the Argent Peak Sect.

Without the enclosing armor she had been sealed in on the surface, it was harder to restrain the instinctive revulsion that churned in her gut as she looked at that eyeless, vaguely canine face. Rubbery grey skin, a few shades lighter than the ones she had seen before, with bristly black hairs spread across her scalp. Heavy metal piercings hung from long, twitching ears, but it was nothing like the almost flayed open ritualist she had seen in the ith temple.

Tcho-Ri and those with her were also dressed decently. Sort of. The heavy robed mantles thrown over their shoulders were clearly something they weren’t used to wearing, but it showed they were picking up imperial expectations.

“Guests from the great empire, Tcho-Ri greets you humbly.”

An iron band around Tcho-Ri’s neck flashed, and though Ling Qi could understand the yips and barking sounds actually emerging from her throat just fine at this point, the slightly reedy old woman’s voice it projected was useful for the ministers’ staff. Perhaps it was even helpful to the ministers themselves. She shouldn’t assume the ministers would have communion built into their cultivation.

It was a strange idea that she might have capabilities that her superiors in cultivation did not, or at least, not passively.

The iths’ bow was awkward. They had clearly practiced, but the natural slope of their spines didn’t match up with the expected motions. Ling Qi glanced at the ministers. She could not read what they did not wish to project, but they were not visibly expressing displeasure.

Then again, neither was Tcho-Ri, but the staff on both sides were less perfectly controlled. There was sullen tension in the ith group and disgust and unhappiness among the imperial group. Both were professional on the face, but she could feel the lines on which tension would grow.

Ling Qi almost wished she could stay here and try to keep this tension to a simmer herself, but her obligations didn’t allow it.

“We are pleased with your prompt greeting, unfortunate as the circumstances may be,” Minister Tang said. Speaking first, he showed that his people would take the lead.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“It remains our wish that this matter remains cordial, for all the strain which your distant cousins might cause,” Zhu Fan said, indicating he would not be a passive observer. “Let us no longer rely on disruptive measures such as this in the future.”

Tcho Ri’s left ear twitched, and her clawed fingertips tapped against the ground. She tilted her head back, indicating submission and agreement.

Or so Ling Qi thought. Even the ith’s body language was difficult.

“Yes, we wish to keep the strain on our relationship as low as possible, but there are also other security concerns that must be kept in mind,” Ling Qi finished.

“It’s gonna be awkward trying to get your cuts in without stepping on anyone’s ego. You owe me for playing messenger here!”