“Not exactly,” Evan admitted.
“How involved are you with the Cult?”
“As deeply as one can be.” Evan hesitated, then, “I would have told you that night.”
No need explaining to which night Evan referred. The night Mai Uhn Wa had turned his back on Evan, Greggor and the entire organization. The night he had left Liao to answer for his crimes against the State.
Mai Uhn Wa felt a touch of sadness and, in a way, disappointment. When he’d first met Evan, the young student had been searching for something to fill the void hollowed out of his life. His parents killed shortly after the Night of Screams. Raised as a ward of the state. Mai had sensed the longing inside him to connect with something larger, and also recognized Evan’s incredible natural talents. A future leader. He had planned to nurture Evan into that role himself, and had been just as proud to learn Evan had gone on without him.
But a cult? Mai had thought Evan destined for leadership, not servitude.
“A civilian organization,” Mai asked, betraying none of his thoughts. “They are worth our time now?”
“He is worth it,” Evan promised. He. Mai was to meet with the leader of the Cult.
They were nearly at the barn. From the ground it looked more wrong than it had from the air. Built partly into the hillside, as a mining shaft might be, the barn was painted gray with darker streaks added to make it look like naturally aged wood. One of the larger doors stood open, swinging neglected in the chill winds that gusted through the short valley. Mai pictured a barren floor with a rickety table and no chairs, around which a few fanatics met with a candle for light to whisper of government insurrection. And built into the hillside? A bolt-hole for safety.
Might take a military force all of twenty minutes to dig them out.
Mai followed Evan into the barn, built on a ferrocrete pad, and stood in awe of the bunker-quality doors recessed into the hillside. Twenty hours, he quickly amended his first estimate.
“There are petragylcerin charges built into the pad, ready to take off the entire side of the hill. The doors are also primed with charges, and we can bring down fifty meters of corridor inside, sealing off the primary access.”
He used a palm-scanner to key open the bunker, rolling back blast doors that would have made an Overlord–class DropShip proud. A large number of barrels pointed into their faces. These were the first people Mai had seen, and they all were on the wrong end of assault rifles. Meaning the trigger end.
“He sleeps for us,” Evan said carefully, though certainly the Cult members recognized one of their own with access to such a vault.
Like water flowing into a series of drains, the guards melted into side passages, leaving the main chamber open. Dimly lit by overhead spots, Mai saw that it ran far back into the hillside. Twenty days, he decided. Weeks to dig out this bunker if the fanatics caved in the ceiling behind them. Leaving those trapped inside free to do… what? Slip out by an alternate tunnel? And with what treasure? A bunker like this wasn’t built as a bolt-hole. It was built to protect something. Or someone. What kind of man led this Cult?
“What does he want from the Ijori Dè Guāng?” Mai asked. “Or is it from the Armored Cavalry?”
Evan hesitated. “He wants for nothing,” he finally said. The two walked along the long, narrow corridor, following ventilation ductwork and cable runs, alone with each other’s company. “This is about what we need, Mai Uhn Wa. You and I. I do not bring you here lightly.” They traipsed down a short flight of stairs, hewn into the surrounding rock. “I found something within the Cult that I needed. Something I have never been able to duplicate within the Ijori Dè Guāng. Now I realize that I was never the right person to do so.
“I kept the Light of Ijori burning, but I cannot bring illumination.”
And the Cult leader could? Was that what Evan tried to say? A room opened up at the end of the corridor, full of bright light and the hum of large machinery. The elder man decided to withhold final judgment for a few moments more. If he trusted Evan was the man he had always believed, he had to trust that Evan had seen something in this Cult leader worth following.
Evan had. And so did Mai Uhn Wa when he stepped across the threshold of the underground shrine.
There was no better description of the room, even though it was packed along three walls with power relay systems and a collection of chemical tanks. A high-tech shrine, devoted to a single person. Mai stared at the coffinlike encasement mounted to the fourth wall, through frost-tinted ferroglass that dimmed, but did not hide, the figure inside. A God to many Capellans.
It wasn’t the Cult of Liao, the world.
It was the Cult of Liao, the man.
Sun-Tzu Liao slept peacefully in the cryogenic chamber, body surrounded by a swirl of frozen gasses. Age lined his slackened face. Gray hair, streaked with poor remnants of youthful black, swept over his mantled shoulders. Golden robes cloaked Liao’s Eternal Father, and helped to hide the various medical leads and tubes, which snaked along at the back of the chamber.
Mai stepped forward, slowly, and brought up one hand to touch the coffin with the tips of his fingers.
“He is a man, Mai Uhn Wa.” Still, Evan whispered. “And he is dead.”
“You withheld this from me? Even that night?”
He could not see Evan’s shrug, but heard the bitter memory in his words. “You turned away from us. Why would I trust you with anything so important?” He stepped closer. “And I was still in shock at the revelation.”
Mai was still reeling himself. The room swayed uncertainly around him. “Dead,” he repeated. “He is not preserved?”
“Chancellor Liao is preserved, but not in life.” Evan checked a readout panel on the side of the chamber. “He came back to Liao to die, Shiao-zhang Mai. His body was failing, and he performed one last act to strengthen the Confederation at a time when it wavered before the Republic. He ‘ascended.’ He let his disappearance rally his people, and Daoshen was eventually able to broker a new peace.” Evan almost left his explanation there, but then continued. “Even if he could be helped medically now, we are not certain about the cryogenic technology. It is old. Many people who’ve tried to use such devices suffered irreversible brain damage.”
Which explained why no one had ever tried to revive the Chancellor. That, and the fact that Daoshen Liao might not appreciate the idea of his father—the Divine One—as a mere mortal held permanently at death’s door. And so the religion had begun. The great secret, holding Sun-Tzu’s body in trust for the people of Liao.
With so many thoughts, plans and their repercussions running through his head, Mai Uhn Wa did not notice for several minutes the title Evan Kurst had awarded him. “You spoke to me as—”
“Shiao-zhang,” Evan said again. The honorific rank of a Warrior House Leader. “We need each other, Master Mai Uhn Wa. So much of what I am is because of your influence and vision. So much of what you want to accomplish, I can help make real.”
Evan had not been talking of the Cult leader earlier, but of Mai Uhn Wa! And by commending this secret into Mai’s hands, Evan relinquished himself as well. But, “This is too big for us, Evan. You don’t even begin to understand what this could do to the Confederation.”