How the Moon Fell Below the Mountains Read online

How the Moon Fell Below the Mountains

  by Matthew Lee

  Copyright 2016 Matthew Lee

  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

  Silvermoon stood by her bedroom window, deep in thought, and contemplated the falling snow. The flakes gathered thickly on the pine trees that stood guard throughout the palace's inner ward. As the branches turned to long, lumpen fingers like an arthritic old lady's bloodless hands, the young woman thought about the kind of man she wanted to marry. Clever, compassionate, wise and brave – was this too much to ask? Instead she got one foolish boy after another trying to seduce her, and none of them with a single thought in their heads for anyone besides themselves.

  In Tian Xia, First Kingdom under Heaven, when a daughter of one of the noble families came of age, tradition meant she was generally expected to pick out a promising candidate for a husband by herself. Countless suitors had already flocked to Silvermoon's door. Some of these men were beautiful. Some were skilled with a blade. Some were well versed in courtly discourse, and many of them were titled. But Silvermoon found them all insufferably self-centred.

  She knew she wanted something more from her future husband than a masculine physique and a dependable sword arm, but she wasn't quite sure what. She knew she wanted to do more with her life than end up as a trophy for some puffed-up young official desperate to advance his career, but she couldn't quite decide what she ought to do instead. Still, if there were just one prospective consort out there who had the answer, Silvermoon wanted to find him, even if she had to reject every other eligible young man in the province in the process.

  After all, tradition hadn't put anything in writing about how long she had to take over this.

  Unfortunately, Silvermoon's father had very definite ideas about tradition, regardless of whether or not they were actually written down anywhere, and lately he'd finally lost his patience.

  Silvermoon's father was Golden Hawk, Lord Regent of Kong Du province, in the regional capital of Mo Xan Dai. Golden Hawk was responsible for eight hundred thousand souls, and sat only two ranks below the Emperor of the First Kingdom himself. He wielded power over laws, taxation, the regulation of magic, and countless other mechanisms of government within the region, and like many fathers he could not understand why this didn't impress upon his daughter that he knew best. So he told Silvermoon, in no uncertain terms, that one way or the other she had to choose a groom.

  And she had to do it within the month.

  Silvermoon inwardly cursed her misfortune, and wished a thousand agonisingly painful deaths upon the idiot males of Kong Du who had failed to come up with a single genuinely interesting potential husband between them. But she smiled, bowed her head, and retired to her quarters to consider her options. Perhaps there was some favour she could request, or a quest she could ask to be completed? What treasures went unclaimed in the darkest corners of the kingdom, and might the search for them turn up a worthy mate? That sort of thing always worked in the old stories.

  The following day Golden Hawk issued a proclamation. All the men of Kong Du, from the mightiest noble to the lowliest bravo, were invited to journey to the ancient mountain range of the Dragon's Nape. From there they would descend into the flooded city of Lao Feng, the long-abandoned ruin beneath the peaks, where the wind sang a formless lament up and down the chasms that riddled the Nape like sword wounds. There these intrepid hunters were to salvage what treasure they could. The Nape was treacherous, yet not impossibly so, and it was well-known the potential rewards were considerable.

  Lao Feng had been laid to waste more than a century ago, when the Jade Ocean first broke into the tail end of the Dragon's Nape, at the coastline seventy leagues due east. The seawater rushed along the fissures beneath the mountains, gathering strength, and when it arrived beneath Lao Feng it breached the city's flood defences with little more effort than a seamstress pushing a needle through a piece of silk. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives.

  This was back when the Emperor's great-grandfather had reigned, and the barbarians from the northlands were still the power behind the throne. The Hong dynasty was long gone, and had been followed by an age of relative austerity. No-one built such magnificent follies any longer, and people spoke of Lao Feng with mingled awe and derision. The current regent in charge of the ruins would not authorise expeditions into the depths. But it was common knowledge people had been down there anyway, and discovered countless riches.

  There were dangers down there besides the Jade Ocean. The first explorers brought back stories of sallow, inhuman wraiths haunting the depths. By this point everyone knew the rumours that the rulers of Lao Feng had called upon forbidden magic to hold back the flood. But if these creatures had once existed, they'd been quiet ever since, and Golden Hawk agreed it was high time for further investigation. He applied to the neighbouring province for permission, and after brief negotiations, had it granted. When a messenger brought word conditions beneath the Nape were favourable and the initial descent was well under way, Silvermoon was captivated despite herself.

  Every further missive over the subsequent weeks and months, no matter how scant, fired her imagination. She dreamt of dashing soldiers of fortune cutting down slavering monstrosities by the score in glittering, crystalline caverns hidden far beneath the mountains. And then one day the survivors finally returned, in a long, ragged caravan that drew near Mo Xan Dai as early morning mist lay heavy on the farmers' fields. Children ran ahead parroting garbled stories of wonders beyond anyone's imagination, and Silvermoon dared to believe that perhaps her frustrated whim had been a wise choice after all.

  Not everything the caravan brought back was a wonder. Golden Hawk had to press more than two hundred courtiers into service to sort through the haul. Much of the day became a dreary parade of cracked and weathered tableware; rickety furniture; jewellery gone green with age, missing links or entire stones, and salt-stained paintings near faded altogether over time. The historians seized on much of this, the old men emitting shrill, piping cries like a flock of startled birds, but none of it really resembled any sort of badge of honour.

  But there were trophies to be had, and three men who had retrieved the finest of these.

  Old Pig was a pit boss from Shuxing in the north, a great barrel of a man dressed in green silk, with a huge grey beard. He'd found a mechanical eye resting on a ledge behind a tumbling waterfall, in a tranquil subterranean grotto beyond a flooded mine shaft. Deftly the big man twirled the eye between his fingers, and caught the fading daylight with its lens. Visions swam along the walls of the regent's throne room. There were countless moving pictures of a vanished age, long before the Hong or even the Pao emperors ruled the First Kingdom. People could see a house and a family clothed in garments centuries out of date, and whose speech, the palace lip-readers confirmed, was almost comically archaic.

  Saffron was a baker from Gu Dailian in the south. He was young and slender, almost feminine, in vibrant yellow robes and wearing scarlet feathers in his hair, and Silvermoon's heart beat faster when their eyes met. Saffron had found a pair of hands that clutched at a thorny creeper, which twined through a phosphorescent rockface at the end of a vast, empty banqueting hall. When the hands were allowed to touch any musical instrument, from a peasant's fiddle to a rack of temple chimes, they sprang to life and played with dazzling virtuosity.

  Three Strides was the son of a minor dignitary, a lower-ranking noble who ran the customs office in Lao
Xe, to the west. He was a strapping figure of a man in silver thread, with a hawkish profile and dazzling green eyes. He'd found a diadem, hanging from a mannequin half-eaten by mould, where it lay buried beneath a rock slide that blocked a towering staircase. The diadem was a lovely thing, a circlet of pale gold lined with rose quartz where a sheaf of crystal feathers sprouted from the peak. Three Strides placed it upon his brow, at which the feathers trailed a brilliant stream of light, and he began to float into the air. All those present gasped in amazement.

  All eyes were on Silvermoon, waiting to see which she would judge the most wonderful of the three treasures.

  “I don't know what to say,” Silvermoon admitted. “I think –”

  “I do!” called a voice from the back of the crowd.

  All those present whispered in amazement at the idea someone would be so rude as to interrupt the lord regent's daughter. Then they began to cry out in alarm, while the interloper pushed his way roughly through the crowd without a care for who he brushed aside. He