Avatar The Last Airbender: The Shadow of Kyoshi Page 2

  Speaking of which, she’d taken a risk by not incapacitating the boy like she’d done his elders. But he’d reminded her of Lek. The way his stupid babyface tried to arrange itself in a mask of hardness, his obvious need for the approval of his sworn elder brothers. His sheer, idiotic bravery. He was too young to be running with a gang in the slums of Ba Sing Se.

  No more exceptions for today, she told herself as she stepped over rusting junk and debris. She was still in the habit of labeling anyone roughly her age as boys and girls, and the language made her inclined toward softness, which was dangerous. Certainly no one would show Kyoshi grace because she was only nearing eighteen. The Avatar did not have the luxury of being a child.

  She pushed through a hallway barely wider than she was. Only the slightest cracks of illumination came through the walls. Glowing crystals were expensive, and candles were a fire risk, making light a premium in Loongkau. Networks of pipes dripped above her, pattering on the gilded headdress she wore despite the cramped environment. She’d learned to account for the height it added, and having to stoop had been a fact of her life since childhood.

  The smell of human density wafted through the corridors, a concoction of sweat and drying paint. She could only imagine what the lower levels offered the nose. The City Block packed more people into its limits than any other in the Lower Ring, and not all of its residents were criminals.

  Loongkau was a haven for the very poor. People with nowhere else to go squatted here and applied their industries, eking out livings as garbage pickers, “fell-off-the-wagon” marketeers, unlicensed doctors, dodgy snack vendors, and the like. They were ordinary Earth Kingdom citizens trying to get by on the margins of the law. Her folk, essentially.

  The shadowed confines of the City Block were also home to a more violent sort, evolving gangs of the Lower Ring whose memberships were swelling from the influx of daofei. Bandits who could no longer hold territory in the countryside were fleeing for the cover of Ba Sing Se and other large cities, blending in with the populace, hiding among the same refuge-seeking citizens they’d brutalized in years past.

  Those were not Kyoshi’s folk. In fact, many of them were running from her. But given it was just as likely for an apartment to be holding scared residents who had nothing to do with her quarry, Kyoshi was keeping her movements in check. Garden-variety earthbending that ripped up huge chunks of the surroundings would cause a dangerous collapse and harm innocents.

  The interior opened into a small market area. She passed a room full of barrels leaking bright ink over the floor—a home dying operation—and an empty butcher stall clouded with buzzing ant flies. Jianzhu’s study had contained his notes on the political and economic situation of Ba Sing Se, and the small reference to the City Block noted how enterprising its residents were. Curiously, it also mentioned that the land it was built on held some value due to its prominent location in the Lower Ring. Merchants in the Middle Ring had tried to purchase the block in the past and evict the residents, but the dangers of the gangs had always made such projects fail.

  Kyoshi paused near a vat of spoiled mango pomace. This was her spot. She bent an assortment of rock debris into a small circle and stood on it. She crossed her arms over her chest to make the smallest cross section possible.

  Before she went, though, she noticed a tiny object in the corner. It was a toy, a doll made of rags scavenged from a fine lady’s dress. Someone in the block had gone through great effort to sew a doll made of fabric from the Upper Ring for their child.

  Kyoshi stared at it until she blinked, remembering why she was here. She stamped down with her foot.

  Her little platform of earth, held together by her bending, turned as hard as the point of an auger. It burst through the clay tiles and rotting struts of wood, dropping her fast enough to make her guts lurch. She plunged through the floor and into the next level down, before doing it again, and again.

  Jianzhu’s tactical manuals noted that in enclosed fights most casualties happened at doorways and stairs. Kyoshi had decided to skip over those parts of the building and bore her own passage. She counted fourteen stories—more than she’d estimated—until she came crashing through the ceiling of a room that was solid earth underneath. The bottom of Loongkau.

  Kyoshi stepped off her platform, dust and crumbs of masonry cascading off her arms, and looked around. There were no walls in here, only supporting columns that propped up the great weight of the levels above. So the City Block has a ballroom, she thought wryly. The empty expanse was similar to the entertaining halls of wealthy nobles like Lu Beifong. There was a space like this in the Avatar’s mansion in Yokoya.

  She could see all the way to the far end since the walls held lumps of glowing crystal, as if the light for the entire building had been hoarded for this room. There was a desk, a wooden island in the emptiness. And behind the desk was a man who hadn’t given up his pretensions since Kyoshi had last seen him.

  “Hello, Uncle Mok,” Kyoshi said. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  Mok, the former second-in-command of the Yellow Neck daofei, goggled his eyes in surprise. Kyoshi was like a curse he couldn’t shake. “You!” he fumed, shrinking slightly behind the furniture as if it could protect him. “What are you doing here!?”

  “I heard rumors about a new boss settling into Loongkau and thought he sounded very familiar. So I came to investigate. I heard this group is calling itself a Triangle now? Do I have that right? Something with three sides.” Kyoshi found it hard to keep track. The daofei who were funneling into the cities brought their grandiose customs of secrecy and tradition into the realm of urban petty crimes.

  “The Triad of the Golden Wing!” he yelled, infuriated by her disinterest in his rituals. But Kyoshi was long past caring about the feelings of men like Mok. He could throw whatever tantrum he desired.

  The drumming of feet grew louder. The men Kyoshi had bypassed on the middle floors came filing into the room, surrounding her. They brandished axes and cleavers and daggers. Mok’s men had preferred outlandish weapons when they still roamed the countryside, but here in the city they’d abandoned the nine-ring swords and meteor hammers for simpler arms that could be hidden in a crowd.

  Bolstered by more than two dozen men, Mok turned calmer. “Well, girl, what is it you want? Besides checking in on your elders?”

  “I want you all to surrender your weapons, vacate the premises, and march yourselves to a magistrate’s courthouse for judgment. The nearest one is seven blocks from here.”

  Several of the hatchet men burst out laughing. The corner of Mok’s mouth turned upward. Kyoshi might be the Avatar, but she was vastly outnumbered and trapped in an enclosed space. “We refuse,” he said with an exaggerated roll of his hand.

  “All right then. In that case, I only have one question.” Kyoshi cast her gaze around the room. “Are you sure this is all of you?”

  The Triad members glanced at each other. Mok’s face swelled with rage, reddening like a berry in the sun.

  It wasn’t insolence so much as pragmatism, her instinct for tidiness and efficiency rising to the surface. “If not, I can wait until everyone arrives,” Kyoshi said. “I don’t want to have to go back and check each floor.”

  “Tear her apart!” Mok screamed.

  The hatchet men charged from all directions. Kyoshi drew one of her fans. Two would have been a bit much.

  Kyoshi stepped over the groaning bodies. When one of the Triad members was too still, she nudged him with her boot until she saw signs of breathing.

  Mok’s robe had blown off in the scuffle. He managed to budge the chair he was sitting on a few inches in flight before Kyoshi put her hand on his shoulder, pressing him back into his seat.

  “No need to get up yet, Uncle,” she said. Past enmity or not, he was still older than her.

  Mok roiled with an anger and fear that Kyoshi could feel through her grip. “So, you’re going to murder me in cold blood like you did Xu. May you be ripped apart by thunder
bolts and many knives for slaying your sworn brothers.”

  Kyoshi found herself bothered, more than she should have been, by Mok calling her a murderer. She and Xu Ping An had agreed to a duel, and the man immediately tried to kill her. Once she’d gained the upper hand, she’d given him a chance to yield. The former leader of the Yellow Necks had amply demonstrated he was beyond saving.

  And yet, during sleepless nights, she thought about Xu. The vile man infected her thoughts when she could have been dreaming of those she loved. She thought about Xu a great deal, his weight in her hands, and how, at the end of their fight, she’d decided.

  Kyoshi cleared her head. “Anything goes on the lei tai,” she said. Justifying the act out loud was bitter, ineffective medicine that she forced herself to swallow anyway. “I’m not going to kill you. You and your men got a foothold inside the walls rather quickly for a gang of countryside bandits who spent most of their history bullying farmers. You have a contact in Ba Sing Se helping you, and I want to know who it is.”

  Mok stiffened with purpose. True daofei never surrendered information to the authorities, even if it would benefit them. “The day I squeal to you, girl, is the day I—aieee!”

  Kyoshi reminded him that times had changed since they first met with a crushing squeeze of her fingers. She dented the nerves of his arm until the terms of their new relationship sunk in.

  “It was someone from the Middle Ring!” Mok said, once he stopped squealing in pain. “We used go-betweens; I don’t know their name!”

  Kyoshi let go and took a step back. She’d been expecting him to name a Lower Ring criminal, a local who’d maybe sworn brotherhood to him in the past. The Middle Ring was the domain of merchants and academics. Something didn’t add up here.

  Mok clutched his shoulder and scrambled away from the desk. “Wai!” he shouted at a door behind him. “Now!”

  In her distraction, Kyoshi had forgotten the third leading brother of the former Yellow Necks. The door burst open in an ambush before Kyoshi could react.

  Brother Wai sprung out, knife raised, a snarl on his lips. He wasn’t wearing the leather strap that covered his severed nose, and without it his gaunt face had a skull-like appearance. Wai had been a fast, vicious man back in his Yellow Neck days, and he still was.

  But when he saw the intruder was Kyoshi, dressed in her full makeup and regalia, he gasped and nearly halted in midair. Wai was one of the few witnesses who’d seen her in the Avatar State, and the experience had overawed the spiritual man. He stepped back to give her space, nearly knocking his brother over in his haste, and dropped to his knees. The knife that had been aimed at Kyoshi a second before, he placed at her feet like an offering.

  “Oh come on!” Mok screamed as Wai bowed his head to the ground and prostrated himself before the Avatar.

  Kyoshi stepped out of the City Block into the street. The day had gotten brighter and hotter. A squad of peace officers, uniformed guardsmen of Ba Sing Se, waited for her, lining in wings to the left and right of the exit. The junior men who’d never seen the Avatar before stared at Kyoshi as she emerged from the darkness. One of them dropped his truncheon and fumbled to pick it up.

  Kyoshi walked past the rank-and-file guardsmen, ignoring the whispers and barely acknowledging the bows, until she reached Captain Li by the door. He was a sallow-faced man who’d been on the job too long, his retirement delayed by gambling debts. “The cordon is set,” he said to Kyoshi in a pipe-smoker’s wheeze. “No trouble out here so far.”

  Most of the Lower Ring citizens went about their business, ignoring the presence of the law, but Kyoshi noticed a few people watching with fake disinterest, probably spotters for other unsavory organizations. Working with Captain Li meant flirting with a violation of Kyoshi’s daofei oaths. She’d sworn to her elder sister Kirima under a blade held by her elder brother Wong never to become a lackey of the law.

  But Li had been her tool, her informant, not the other way around. He’d provided her the intelligence she needed to close her unfinished business with Mok, and numbers for cleanup once she was done. “Is the building safe?” Li asked, tilting his cap to dab at his forehead with his cuff.

  “The Triad members are down and ready to be extricated,” Kyoshi said. “You should summon a doctor.”

  “I’ll get right on that,” Li replied in a dull tone that let Kyoshi know how seriously he took the suggestion. He put his fingers to his lips and whistled. “All right, boys! Get the vermin out of there!”

  The guardsmen hustled into the City Block, free to move fast after Kyoshi had swept the twists and nooks of danger. She waited patiently to see the results of her work. The Triad of the Golden Wing needed to be counted and catalogued in the light of day. Being hauled away like dry goods would cause their mystique to blow away in the wind. Hopefully.

  She heard loud voices and the sound of a struggle emerging from the darkness of Loongkau. Two officers dragged out a man who hadn’t been among the Triads who’d attacked her. He was dressed poorly, but a pair of glasses fell from his head. He had to have been a jeweler or a tailor to have invested in such an expensive device.

  A boot crushed the glasses into the dust before she could say anything. With mounting horror, Kyoshi watched another set of officers come out, hustling a woman by the back of her neck. She held a wailing child in her arms. The man with bad vision heard the cries and began thrashing harder in the guards’ grasp.

  These weren’t Triad members. They were one of the poor families who lived in the City Block. “What are your men doing?” Kyoshi shouted at Li.

  He looked confused at her question. “Getting rid of the bad element. Certain folks have been waiting to demolish this eyesore for a long time.” He turned hesitant, a haggler afraid to part with too much of his money. “Do . . . you want a cut? If you do, you have to talk to my man in the Middle Ring.”

  The Middle Ring. In a flash, she understood.

  Someone with big, lucrative plans for Loongkau wanted the residents scrubbed from the city block but needed an excuse to do it. They’d let the Triads in first, to get the law and the Avatar involved, and then bribed Captain Li to clear out innocent and criminal folk alike.

  “Stop this!” Kyoshi said. “Stop this right now!”

  “Aiyaaa,” Li lamented without a speck of sincerity. “I’m sorry, Avatar, but I’m acting within the confines of my duty. Rightfully, I can vacate these premises of criminals as necessary.”

  “Mama!” It was the little girl’s sobbing that set Kyoshi over the edge. “Papa!”

  Kyoshi drew her fans and snapped them open. She raised clumps of earth from below the dusty top layer, where the clay was still moist and malleable. Fist-sized clods shot forth, slamming over the mouths and noses of Li and his officers, clamping over their skin like muzzles.

  The guards let go of the family and clawed at their faces, but Kyoshi’s earthbending was too strong to be resisted. Li sank to his knees, his eyes goggling out.

  They had time before they would suffocate to death. Kyoshi put back her fans and slowly went to each guard in turn, yanking off their headbands one by one, checking the square metal seals of the Earth King fastened to the cloth.

  The badges of every official in Ba Sing Se had identification numbers engraved on them, a testament to the city’s massive bureaucracy. These men, despite the shrinking supply of air to their brains, could understand the gesture of her taking their headbands and tucking them into her robes for safekeeping. One visit to an administration hall, and she could learn their identities. She could find them later. Most residents of Ba Sing Se had heard the rumors. They’d heard stories of what Avatar Kyoshi was, and what she did to people.

  Kyoshi saved Li for last. He’d turned purple in the time she’d taken to make the rounds. After snatching his headband from under his cap, she let the clay fall from his mouth, and the others’ at the same time. Li’s squad dropped to the ground, gasping for breath. The captain landed on his side and his inhalation rattled like di
ce in a cup.

  She leaned over, but before she could say anything, Li threw a name at her, hoping to buy clemency. He really had no backbone. “His name is Wo! The man paying me is Minister Wo!”

  Kyoshi needed to shut her eyes so her frustration wouldn’t leak out. There were probably a dozen Minister Wo’s in Ba Sing Se. The name alone was meaningless to her. The city was too big. The Earth Kingdom was too big. She couldn’t keep up with the corruption leaking from its holes.

  She gathered her breath. “Here is what’s going to happen, Captain,” she said as calmly as she could. “You are going to clear the block of the Triads and no one else. Then you are going to find paper and brush. You will write me a full confession, detailing this Wo person and every bribe you took from him. Every stroke of it the truth. Do you hear me, Captain Li? I will check. I want you to pour your very spirit into this confession.”

  He nodded. Kyoshi straightened up to see the woman and her daughter looking at her with wide, frightened eyes. She started to approach them, wanting to ask if they were hurt.

  “Don’t touch them!” The man who’d lost his glasses threw himself between Kyoshi and his family. With his near blindness, he wouldn’t have seen her trying to help. Or maybe he had, and decided she was a danger to his wife and child anyway.

  Farther away, around the edges of the cordon, more bystanders had gathered. They whispered to each other, the seeds of fresh rumors taking root in the soil. The Avatar had not only ripped apart the occupants of Loongkau, but she’d turned her insatiable wrath upon the officers of the Earth King’s justice as well.

  The stares of the ordinary citizens and the terrified family made Kyoshi’s skin prickle with a feeling that corrupt men like Li or Mok could never force on her. Shame. Shame for what she’d done, shame for what she was.

  Her makeup covered the flush in her cheeks and camouflaged the furrow in her brow. She gave Li one last meaningful tap and then walked away from Loongkau as slowly as she’d arrived, an impassive statue heading back to the altar that gave it life. But really, underneath her paint, she was fleeing the scene of her crime, her heart threatening to pound her chest into dust.