1.48

The Young Griffon

“The old man you’re here to punch,” whispered the little king, Leo, “it’s the Gadfly, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“We’ll help you,” the little king decided. “Won’t we, Pyr?” His loyal sentinel nodded.

“I don’t recall asking for your help.”

The boys shared a look behind my back, still clinging to me like monkeys as I ascended through the various estates of the Raging Heaven Cult.

“Where we’re from,” Pyr, the little sentinel, said, “a student has to prove himself before his mentor will take him on. The greater the student, the greater his deed will be.”

“The two of you assisted me in combat against a hero’s virtuous beast,” I said, patting them both on their cloth-covered heads with pankration hands. “I know philosophers that wouldn’t have the guts for such a thing. Was that not enough for you?”

“Of course not,” the little king hissed, indignant. “What sort of king stops short at a beast?”

I found myself smiling.

“You two remind me of my cousins,” I said, amused. I nodded at a trio of young philosophers as they walked past. Their eyes lingered on the Rosy Dawn attire hanging around my waist, on the laurel wreaths wrapped around each of my biceps, and on the pair of mongrel children hanging off my shoulders. I clearly saw their suspicion of me at war with their confidence in the men that guarded the mountain. I did not belong, but I could not possibly be here against the will of the Raging Heaven. They hesitantly nodded back and hurried down the steps.

“You have cousins?” the little sentinel asked.

“How many?” the little king asked eagerly.

“Five.”

“And how many siblings?”

“None that I know of,” I said lightly.

“That you know of?” the little king’s brow furrowed. “What does that mean?”

“It means my father is a worldly man. He traveled the Mediterranean to its furthest limits when he was my age. Who is to say how many seeds he planted along the way?”

“Is he a powerful cultivator?”

“Of course he was,” the little king answered his brother’s question scornfully. “Just look at his son. The proper question is how powerful is he? Griffon?”

“I wonder,” I mused, looking up past the amethyst veins of Kaukoso Mons, past the Storm

That Never Ceases, to the risen sun. “A thought occurs to me.” The boys leaned in attentively.

“You said that the greater a student is, the greater their offering will naturally be to a prospective mentor. I’m assuming in the city of your birth that such transactions are often more materialistic than what you’re suggesting. Riches rather than actions.”

Their silence spoke volumes. I chuckled and flicked them both on their noses.

“I have no issue being paid with virtue over vice. However, the other thing that occurred to me – if a hopeful student’s offering is scaled to their worth, then wouldn’t a prospective mentor’s price be scaled in the same way?”

“That’s true…” Pyr slowly agreed.

“What’s your point?” little Leo demanded.

“You’ve offered to take up arms against the Gadfly with me,” I reiterated, waiting for them both to signal their agreement. “To stand against the Scholar, an act that I’ve personally seen Heroic cultivators cringe away from as if I’d asked them to dive into the Styx. What you’ve offered is more than most men would ever willingly give.”

I tilted my head back, smiling languidly at the upstart vagrants from the city of conquerors. Home to the Scattered Foam Cult.

“What makes you think that is nearly good enough to be my students?”

“What!?” the little king shouted, pounding on my back. “That’s unreasonable! That’s beyond unreasonable, even for a king – and you’re no king!”

“Who told you that?” I asked curiously.

“… you are?” The little sentinel whispered.

“Of course.”

“King of what? King of where?” little Leo pressed me.

“King of the greatest kingdom among heaven and earth. King of the only kingdom that matters.”

“Where?”

“Tell us!”

I tilted my head up. “King of the rising sun.”

Then I threw them both through an open door.

A medical pavilion had no business being opulent, but here we were. The Raging Heaven had decorated its place for the ill and infirm with tapestries of the first physician and exquisitely stitched depictions of the greatest of his works. Alchemical processes and the distillation of medications were stitched into a visual format, recipes that were pleasing to the eye. Carved into each of the supporting pillars that held up the roof was a line from the Hippocratic oath, the same oath that I had taken with Anastasia as my witness in the forests outside of Olympia.

The boys scrambled to their feet amidst the scolding of physicians. A man in a pure white tunic with sashes of indigo and gold wrapped tightly around his forearms and hands stalked over from a nearby bed to berate them. Panicked, the little sentinel placed himself between his brother and the approaching surgeon. The little king grit his teeth and balled his fists.

“Senior!” I greeted him gaily, stepping into the medical pavilion where mystikos of the Raging Heaven came to be made well. The man looked sharply my way as I entered. He was tan, shorter than Scythas with a stockier build; cultivation had rendered him aesthetically rugged rather than runty. As his influence crested against mine, I identified him as a Philosopher of the fifth rank. He was old enough to be my father.

This was a man that had gained entrance to the Raging Heaven through specialized knowledge of medicine alone, rather than through exceptional cultivation. Which meant that he was an utterly unremarkable man in one sense, and a valuable resource in another.

“Who’s your senior?” The irritated physician demanded, picking the little sentinel up by the back of his peplos. His younger brother tensed, and I saw murder in the coiling of his body. “I’ve never seen you in my life, and I’ve especially never seen these two-”

With the hands of my violent intent I struck the physician at a vulnerable juncture in his wrist, catching the little sentinel with pankration hands when the physician’s hand spasmed open, releasing him.

The physician’s pneuma flooded the medical pavilion. In the light of the risen sun, pure white sheets seemed to glow as they fell to the marble floor – patients that could move threw off their covers as a cultivator’s fury roused them from a dead sleep. I saw his peers, men and women of varying rank within the Sophic Realm, prepare themselves for a fight. Some immediately made their way over. Others hastened to finish up their current work, bound by the first physician’s oath.

“Perhaps an introduction to start,” I said, raising my flesh and blood hands in friendly surrender.

“You come into my asclepieia,” the stout physician said furiously, advancing on me while the boys stood their ground at my side. “Disrupt my patients. Strike the hand with which I heal-”

“My name is Griffon,” I said, offering him a hand. He slapped it aside, standing nose-to-nose with me. He had to crane his neck back to do it, of course, but the sentiment was there.

“I don’t know who you think you are, and I don’t care to know either,” he said dangerously, the waves of his pneuma crashing against mine. I weathered it without retaliation, raising an eyebrow. “But around here, juniors do not strike a physician’s hands. You think this entire mountain is yours to torment? It’s not. You would-be soldiers need to remember who it is that makes you whole again after tribulation strikes you down.”

I met his furious eyes, and a broader picture began to form inside my mind. I flooded the healing house with my violent intent, thirty hands of roaring pneuma that flexed and grasped at the open air. The tension grew thick enough that I felt I could open my mouth and take a bite out of it. The healing man in front of me, a physician that had no doubt devoted his life to mending rather than harming, did not falter for even an instant.

So it was like that.

“My apologies,” I said, bowing my head, and with each hand forced the boys to bow theirs as well. “This one is not yet familiar with a physician’s conventions.”

I didn’t raise my head or allow the boys to raise theirs until the physician stepped back, having found the sincerity in my gesture that he was looking for. I smiled brightly, and he scowled. His brow was heavy, as was his jaw. His eyes were dark slits as they regarded me.

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“A serene environment is as important as any medicine where the humors are concerned,” he said flatly. “Your brothers and sisters within this cult depend on that serenity to heal. For some of them, it’s the difference between life and death. Do your roughhousing outside.”

“Of course, senior.”

“Otus,” he snapped. “It’s Otus. Now get out of my pavilion.”

“That I can’t do,” I said, and it was then that Otus the physician realized I still hadn’t dismissed the manifestations of my violent intent. Instead, they had found purchase on blankets and hanging veils of silk used for privacy. They ripped and they tore.

“What-!”

“I’m here to visit a patient,” I said mildly. The boys looked up at me, confused. Ah. There she was.

A beautiful woman that could have been five years older than me, or fifty, pulled the sheets up to her neck as two of my pankration hands tore her veil of silk down from around her bed, revealing her to the rest of us.

“There you are,” I said, stepping through the physician. He stumbled back against another patient’s bed, the ill mystiko reaching out to study the stout doctor.

“Who are you?” the woman in the bed demanded. She dragged herself up into a sitting position, moving with her arms. From the waist down she was motionless. “I’ve never seen you before.”

Her pneuma lashed out, but it was crippled. It broke before it reached me, hardly more than a ripple in a still pond. Her body was broken and her cultivation had broken with it.

“How did you know I was here?” Her eyes darted to the myriad physicians present in the healing house. Somehow, none of them stopped me. There was an expectant dread in the asclepieia. Somehow, even Otus seemed to be waiting for something.

I supposed I might as well deliver it to them.

How had I known she’d be here?

“A raven told me.”