Scene 1: The Arrival of Red Bell.
The cavalry charge Monk Red Bell seems to feel it.
The first one comes through the stone, that is, the hoof vibration which is not supposed to be heard, drilling from the base of through the foundations of the Black Pass, through the ages of blood and ashes that are jammed into the ground. Then through his very own bodily. The bells which were riveted into his shoulders, into his spine, into his ribs they start humming, and then they are set to the various different tunes each note is a warning note.
It has taken him three days to get to this pass. His pulmonary organs are aflame. His legs are shrilly screaming. The bolts that attached his armor with his body are weeping blood once again, thin rivulets falling down his chest, his back, his thighs. He doesn't stop. He can't stop. He listened to the Pale Horse's passage, listened to the pass being relayed by the one armed lad, listening that all the cavalry were assembling.
He's late. The one armed boy with his demon in his sleeve is going to be being trampled up into ashes.
Red Bell comes out of the ash smoke running straight on through its flail, the Red Bell Hammer trailing, lopping a hole in the rock. He has three seconds to observe the battle field: the ghost cavalry was already prepared to attack, the one armed man was standing alone at the very narrowness of the pass, the lad at his heels was too small to count, too small to live.
He puts in the stake of the hammer.
It is an inverted funeral bell, the tallest part is the torso of the man, it is made of iron that absorbs light. The clapper is the spine of a corrupted king, distorted with the spirit of death of him in which it was used, and screaming each time it is hit. Red Bell rams the butt into the ground and thrusts the entire weight in front with his hips, his shoulders, his welded metallic armour.
The bell rings.
The voice does not go into the air. Through everything it of course passes. Through bone. Through qi meridians. Bloodless holes as in dead things that ought to have been buried. The pitch is low, too low, the kind of pitch that does not vibrate, but presses and squeezes the air before him into the shut-shape of a fist.
The first line of horse falls.
The screams of horses that are not horses do not have voices. Ghosts almost relinquished to the idea of being solid retain the memory only slightly and are destroyed by it. Armor crumples. Lances snap. The sonic wave reduces organs to jelly, and bones to dust, and the charging formation to a heap of rusted metal and burnt ashes.
The remainder of the cavalry turns round. The ghosts are acquainted with sound. They have heard it once, at the burial of a hundred corrupt men, of a thousand agonized dead. They are aware of what Funeral Monastery monk ringing his bell means.
Red Bell is caught in the middle.
Seven feet of strained flesh and tissue. The armor to his shrine bell is a mass of plates of dark iron, and rust-red bronze, all these being bolted through his shoulder, the collarbones, the spine. The bolts are indestructible to his skeleton the rites of forging them into his bone at the monastery were permanent. There is still fresh blood streaming out of where it was pierced, and it is mixed with sweat and ash upon his chest. His robemajority of his robes is a ragged black shroud, open at the waist, exposing the crimson sutra tattoos scuttling up his neck, the two fingers missing off his left hand, the manner in which his chest is rising and falling like a bellows feeding a furnace.
The only good eye he possesses is the left one, the one which never turns permanently bloodshot in a qi backlash he has encountered when he was naive and young is the one that looks at the one armed figure in the blood of twenty dead riders.
Shen Wuye. The Ash Saint. The murderer of his master whom he ran away with and who was brought up by the Widow Clan and harshly conditioned by the Funeral Monastery, who wears a demon on his empty sleeve and is unaccustomed to using it.
I am late, you see, you see, Wuye says. His voice is flat. Even now his black veins can be seen at his jaw receding slowly.
Red Bell throws his hammer to his shoulder. The strokes of his armor are in accord with the movement, a discordant symphony of iron and bone.
"You're alive." He grins. Neither is it an amiable phrase. His teeth are graved, black of old qi burns his gums. So I say that is early enough.
Scene 2: What the Bell remembers.
The latter brushes through in a second wave.
The Pale Horse is an educated man. Now he watches on hung back, through the ash mist, and allows his lieutenants to try these two. In rank and file, two hundred and fifty of them ridding their wedge, their lances at rest, their ghost-horses were galloping like a single huge animal. They have noticed the ruse of Red Bell. They will outflank, line, attack him and get him at angles that the bell cannot treat.
Red Bell comes forward. Wuye walks along with him. As they do, they have fought years not minutes together. The right hand of the hammer is concealed. Right is covered with sword broken.
The method used by Red Bell is Dirge of Hollow Mercy. He had expelled twelve years in perfecting it, since the day that he came crawling out of his grave. Burial chant pops on each swing, sutra on each strike. The bell does not wound, it desecrates. It causes the qi of the enemy to what is called beating to vibrate at the pace of expiry, to keep in mind that once they were supposed to cease whacking, cease breathing, cease being, way back.
The very first exchange sees him kill three riders. The hammer drives the first one in through the chest and the rim of the bell hits the armor and the ribs with the sound of the gun breaking through the heart of the rider like a grape. The second attempt to be round the fank Red Bell turns, and the head of the hammer strikes the legs of the horse, and the shriek of the rider turns to a gurgle, as the organs were turned to liquid. The third just misses, just gets past the blind side of Wuye, before Red Bell loses the fingers to take the lance in her hand, pulling the man near enough to headbutt. His head is different; it is more dense than it is supposed to be. The helmet of the rider is destroyed. The face of the rider crunches about it.
At the moment he is killing, he is chanting. The same being the sutras with which they chanted him at the time of his burial by Abbot Bone Coil, alive. It was the same sutras they sang now that the earth had fallen in and the nails had drilled in and he screamed to his dying voice and the bells in the coffin rattled as his heartbeat.
In between killing, he sees Wuye looking at him. The boy is relaxed and lancet like in his face, and he looks like a man who murdered so many people that it is merely a movement, a case of breathing. But his eyes his eyes have sight of what Red Bell is. What he was.
And that is why Red Bell says, in crushing a spearman in his palm, the body of the man still trembling on the tip of the hammer, how it came that a man who was willing to be the pinnacle the life force out of the dying widows is a monk who digs graves to inter the same type of creature.
Wuye loses his sword and takes away the head of a rider. The blade is singing, a high, thin note, which is in harmony with the chant of Red Bell. He said, assume that some one hammered a hole in your breast until you saw God.
Red Bell laughs. It is a voice as of falling rocks, like of bells breaking, like something that ought not to sound on the funny side.
"Close enough." He strikes again and bells the bell, and the wave of sensation goes up up his arms, through his chest, and into the bolts which support his armor to his flesh. Abbot Bone Coil discovered me after the raid. I had joined the demon cavalry three nights. Three night of burning, looting and killing. Three nights of taking what I could get out of whoever was weak enough to resist.
He is reminded of the widows. Three of them, in one village which had already been half damaged. He had used the death gasping to pierce into Corpse Dirge realm, when they were near death and uttered their last orgasm and death cries, he had used them as asbest waves on a fire. He even dreams about them, occasionally. He refers to such dreams as his initial sincere prayers.
The Abbot did not kill me, he put me in a coffin. nailed the inside with iron and covered me with the skin of the people I had killed and smothered me alive down underneath the Black Pass. He cracks another rider, he can feel the spine of the man melt, he can feel the wetness of his blood spraying on his chest. The bells in the coffin used to ring with my heartbeat during a period of seven days and on the eighth day, I crawled out. I thought that, since I would be a kind of monster, I would be the one that only kills other monsters.
The wave two is crashing. Left riders who rely on the safety of the Pale Horse curve away, and vanish in the ash smoke, to purchase a resumption of safety. Red Bell does not follow behind. There is blood oozing out of his bolt wounds, his lost fingers jerking with imaginary pain.
He turns to Wuye. This is worsened by the fact that his voice is more soft, nearly gentle.
I am not here to judge you, brother Wuye. I am here to see that when you finally get to be whatever you always put in your sleeve, that it is me that digs you up. Clean. Honest. Funeral.
The black veins of Wuye are pulsed. They have crawled up in the struggle and touched his cheek, the end of his eye. His demon in his stump is hungry. Red Bell can have a glimpse of it by observing the movement of the pinned sleeve, as though it was being pushed against the cloth by an insider.
You reckon I was turning into one of those? Wuye asks.
I believe that you are terrified of it. Red Bell plunges the butt of the hammer, rests on it and takes his breath. That is good. Fear is a good sign, it means that you are a good enough human, so that you feel that you are ashamed.
He is gazing at the boy. The scars, the black veins and how his hand tremors when he does not see anyone. This is not the first time he has witnessed this. He has view of a hundred cultivators at this end where they still have the option of making their decision.
However, fear never prevents the change, it is only choice. He beats up a rider who was too near his, staples him on the rock, and sees the life out of his eyes. And you, brother are out of options.
Scene 3: The Oath of the 7 th.
The cavalry breaks.
Not defeated just testing. The Pale Horse is now enlightened. He whips around his blind stallion, the white horse that goes nowhere, without sound, without purpose, its empty sockets also making some wayback into the ash. His army fades behind him, as riders turn into fog, the lances turn into shadows, the solidness of their existence drifting out of a man, the hand being taken out of his throat.
He'll return tomorrow. And the day after. And day after day until Wuye dies or the pass is dust.
Red Bell is bent down kneeling by the bodies. He pushes his way through the bodies like so many dead bodies counting them, examining them, seeing if they are rotting or not, whether there is anything that can come to life before sunrise. Here a sutra is spoken in whispers over each body, here a bell is struck upon the head of the hammer a diverse melody with each burial, a dirge which is in actual time.
This is a thousand time he has done this. A thousand burials. Thousand souls went to ash with a purty song.
At the completion of this he rises. His joints pop. His shot holes are bleeding no more, the muscles are already beginning to close round the iron. He looks at Wuye, who stood in the same spot not having moved, who watches the opening of the pass as the Pale Horse will come back any day.
Well, I took an oath, Red Bell says. Even when I got the monks I made a vow to bury anything that endangers the remaining part of humanity. He allows the words to suspend. So does that apply to you, if it should come to that.
Wuye doesn't react. Quite blue, his face like marble, and his eyes are on the mist.
But I swore as well to stand abreast of anything that bore it on. Red Bell gestures towards his hand. His that was the one with two fingers picked off, the hanging ends hardened over, the callus developed over the years of holding on to the hammer. We are in agreement, brother, as long as we can get.
A long moment. The ash falls. The refugees are silent watching and waiting to know whether this giant with his bells riveted to his flesh will squeeze the one handed saint or free him.
Wuye seizes the hand.
His hold is powerful, although the arm was lost, although the demon throbs in his stump, although even now, it is possible to see black veins on his jaw. Palm of his is hard and spotted, palm of a man that went to swords and days and hands of dying children.
Red Bell makes him come near her, embraces him in an arm, and strikes the hammer again on the stone. This note is low, emphatic and a note to build on.
or seven days, he says. Then we lie together to kill your brother. Or like I bury you attempting.
In the background, a boy is standing looking in the refugee camp. He is little, poxed, he has a coat too large, which is stuffed in at the armhole of the left side against his chest to prevent falling over. His hand is gripping the fabric in the storm of the prayer flag.
his face can not be read. But he does not avert his eyes.