Chapter 3
The Weight of a Name
Word traveled at the speed of gossip, which at Tianlong Imperial Academy was approximately the speed of sound.
By the following morning, every student knew: the orphan who summoned a man had stopped a Thunder Leopard's strike with his bare hand. Or rather — the summon had. But as every seasoned summoner understood, a summon and their master were a single entity in two bodies. What the summon could do, the master would eventually learn to direct with more and more precision. The summon's strength was, in a real sense, the master's own.
The question everyone was quietly asking: what tier was the man actually?
Registrar Chen's official reading of 'incomplete, humanoid, unclassified' had satisfied no one. The measuring stone gave numbers. It always gave numbers. That she had offered words instead meant one of three things: the stone had malfunctioned, the reading was too low to be worth recording, or the reading was too high to be safely disclosed.
Senior Instructor Gao Ren knew which of the three it was. He had seen the stone's output with his own eyes. He had also, in twenty-three years at Tianlong, learned that some information was released when the time was right, and not before.
In the meantime, he had other concerns.
"Wei Liang," he said, stopping the boy outside the theory lecture hall. "Walk with me."
✦ ✦ ✦
They walked the eastern colonnade, where the jade portraits of legendary graduates watched from their carved alcoves. Gao Ren walked with his hands behind his back, his iron staff quiet for once.
"Your father," he began.
"I know what my father was," Wei Liang said, which was more interruption than he usually permitted himself, but the sentence had a particular weight that he had grown very tired of bearing.
Gao Ren glanced at him sidelong. Not with reproof, but with something more complicated.
"Do you?" He paused at a window that looked out over the outer training yard. "Wei Changfeng held the Crimson Pass for seventy-two hours with forty men and a tier-eight summon. When relief forces arrived, he was the only one still standing. He died two days later of wounds that should have killed him on the first day." A silence. "He didn't hold that pass because an emperor told him to. The imperial order had already authorized retreat. He held it because forty thousand civilians were still in the evacuation corridors behind him, and he had made a calculation."
"I know the story," Wei Liang said quietly.
"I'm not telling you the story. I'm telling you what kind of man makes that calculation." Gao Ren looked at him directly. "The kind that does not especially value his own continuance against what he believes is right. It is not a comfortable thing to inherit."
Wei Liang said nothing. There was nothing to say.
"Your summon," Gao Ren continued, moving again, "is being discussed at the senior instructor level. There are those who wish to have it reassessed. There are those who wish to restrict your public use of it until its classification is confirmed."
"On what grounds?"
"On the grounds that an unclassified summon is a liability. That unclassified things make people nervous." He glanced back. "On the grounds that the students of certain families have registered formal complaints about the combat assessment yesterday."
Fen Zhu, then. Or Fen Zhu's father.
"What did you decide?" Wei Liang asked.
Gao Ren stopped walking. He was quiet for long enough that a group of second-years passed them on the colonnade, bowing, and moved on.
"I decided that the son of Wei Changfeng has as much right to train here as anyone wearing a clan crest." He turned and walked back the way they'd come. "Don't embarrass me."
✦ ✦ ✦
That evening, Wei Liang sat on the outer wall above the orchid garden and opened his soul-space.
It wasn't summoning — not in the full sense. More like opening a door and leaning against the frame. Achilles appeared at the edge of his perception, the beach and the ship rendered in that sourceless afternoon light.
"You've been quiet today," Achilles said. He was sitting on his rock again. He appeared to simply occupy rocks whenever they were available.
"Thinking."
"About?"
"About what it means that you exist. In here." He touched his own chest. "What are you, exactly. Why you."
Achilles was quiet for a moment. The sourceless light made his bronze armor look warmer than it probably was in reality.
"I don't fully know the answer to that," he said, which was unexpected. Wei Liang had expected certainty — the certainty of a man who'd been called the greatest warrior of his age. "I know what I was. I know the things I did and the things that were done to me. I know what I valued and what I lost." He looked at Wei Liang steadily. "Why you — I think that's a question you'll have to answer yourself. These things are never accidents."
"My father had an iron-antlered stag."
"A fine beast, no doubt."
"He never spoke to it. Not like this. It was powerful and it obeyed and that was the whole of their relationship."
Achilles tilted his head slightly. "Perhaps that's why he was very good, but you will be something different."
Wei Liang looked at him for a long moment.
"You were the best," he said. "In your world. That's what the name meant."
"In battle," Achilles agreed. "There were other categories in which I was considerably less impressive." A pause that might have contained something private. "I am not the same man I was. Time in the soul-space — time in whatever space I occupied before you found me — changes things." He looked at his own hands, the sword-callused palms. "I am still good at what I am good at."
"Fighting."
"Fighting. Yes. And—" he seemed to search for the word — "—loyalty. I am very good at that, now. It cost me a great deal to learn, but I learned it."
Wei Liang was quiet. Then: "I'm going to need both."
Achilles looked at him with those flint-grey eyes.
"I know," he said simply. "That's why I'm here."