Tales of the Three Kingdoms: Silver Falcon Falls

The sound of shattering ice echoed against the distant frozen peak of Lofty Mountain, followed by a deep, cruel inhuman laugh. As the reverberating laughter faded the silence of falling snow reigned supreme once more in the mountain range known as "the Center of Heaven and Earth."

Again it was split by the sound of cracking ice and a giant's laughter.

The sound was loudest in a tight channel high in the mountain range. To the mountains, this channel might have been a bed for a forgotten rapid or perhaps a path carved by the winds barreling in from the west. To mankind that high channel between mountains was a passageway, a pass from the plains to the capital, from the northeast corner of the Land Under Heaven, to the center of empire.

Ice cracked again and the remnants of it tinkled like hailstones amid the booming laughter, before silence returned to the cold mountains.

At the midpoint in that twisting, winding pass that would have taken no more than a few days to navigate by fast horse, between two exceptionally steep mountains to either side, something unnatural had arisen. A wall of ice – square the way humans were wont to build, but of colossal proportions – ran the width of the pass, splitting the Land Under Heaven, the world, and the cosmos into "West of the Pass" and "East of the Pass."

There was no going around it. There was no going over or under it. But in the center of that unnatural, colossal barrier of sweating cold, there was a ramp wide enough only for a single large man. It was up this barrier that a warrior called Brave Rooster now strode, looking insignificant compared to the peaks of stone around him, the elemental wall before him, even compared to that other humanoid creature that waited in the center of the ramp.

Brave Rooster broke into a run as the wind coming off the mountain seemed to pick up and focus itself.

He hefted his battle-axe – "Chicken Cleaver," they had dubbed it during the rebellion when it had made cowards of a hundred or more rebels – and prepared to swing.

The axe went back, then it went forward. And the mountain air turned brutal.

The axe began to slow in the face of that jet-stream.

That's when Brave Rooster first felt it. The cold. The unimaginable, unbearable cold that the focused mountain wind contained, as if it had collected the frost off of every thin-air mountain peak for a hundred li around and sent it all straight for Brave Rooster. The skin of his knuckles didn't have time to register just how frigid it was before they began to turn black with frostbite then white with hoarfrost. His muscles had just enough time to protest as they turned solid, the axe coming to a stop mid-swing. His bones had time to scream in agony as the mountain air carried the rime up his arms, toward his shoulders, then past his neck, to immortalize his last horrid expression in a motley of grays and pale blues.

A moment later, a blade cleaved through him, shattering the corpse into a thousand pieces, leaving nothing but a pair of oozing stumps sticking out of Brave Rooster's boots where a warrior had once stood, too cold even to properly bleed. The man called Frost Giant laughed upon his ramp.

Within the pass, his dark mirth boomed and echoed. It rattled the dozens, if not hundreds of crystalline shapes, crowded up against the sweating wall to either side, or at the bottom of the ramp, or in the first stage of trying to scale the nearly sheer stone faces to either side of the ice-wall.

Some of the frozen figures within the garden of ice were statuesque in their death-poses, fighting on until the very end, roars of courage on their cold-dead lips. Some were only partially immortalized, an arrow or rock from above having cleaved off a part of them before the cold wind claimed what was left.

Others were suspended in their last desperate displays of cowardice, as the ice took them and held them for eternity. One block of ice was on its knees in supplication, now headless.

Some had once been in golden armor or red, the mottled green of the southern skirmisher or the white of the horse-lords of the north. Some even wore the grays and blacks of Frost Giant's own master.

Whatever colors they had worn in life, now they were all as dead and gray as the chunks of Brave Rooster, some still oozing, others weeping as they thawed. None, once having set foot East of the Pass, had been able to cross back over the Frost Giant's wall to return to the west.

Still others had met the same fate as Brave Rooster, shattered by the Frost Giant's own cleaver upon the challenger's ramp, legs or shoes or even just smudges of discolored ice the only things to mark their bravery.

Into this scene strode a man as tall as an oak, as wide as an ancient willow, standing before the cold in nothing but a simple green cloak. He held an oft-repaired polesaber out to one side, topknot streaming in the wind.

***

The sound of the latest shattering corpse echoed out of the mountains, to the foothills East of the Pass, where a command tent flew a dozen or more banners at the head of a vast army.

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The man they called the Tiger of the Southlands slammed his fist into the map table, shattering several of the clay figurines assembled upon it.

"We can't go around him, we can't outlast him, and we can't beat him. So we're stuck here."

"There's always the southern route," said Orchid Mantis, a foppish old scholar in vibrant green gown embroidered with a riot of pink flowers.

The Tiger, in contrast, looked a true warrior, streaked in blood and soot, red armor scorched black in places and chipped or broken in others. "And face an army three times our size on open ground!?"

"It's that or sit here mewling like cubs," retorted Mantis, then turned to the fellow beside him and said out of the corner of his mouth, "And here I thought the Tiger of the Southlands had a Mandate for bloodlust."

"You want blood? How about I start with yours." The Tiger stepped forward and reached for his sword.

"Enough, both of you," said the man seated in the place of honor, looking south over the capital districts that the Coalition East of the Pass was meant to have begun taking back almost a month ago. Noble Lion was as tired as the rest of us, but his composure never broke. At his gesture the sand and clay figurines reformed, resuming the places they had been before the Tiger's fists had shattered them. "Hot courage is a poor match against mountain frost," ruled our young, noble general. "I won't waste good men and good leaders over personal challenges. Is that clear?"

Ever the politician, Orchid Mantis gave a supplicating bow of his head. The Tiger still gripped his sword as he stared at his rival, but with a flick of his gaze toward the general he had sworn to follow, even the fiery warrior sat down.

"There's no help for it," said Noble Lion. "I'll simply have to face him myself."

Many voices rose up in protest at that, the loudest and sharpest of them was White Stallion. "Don't be an idiot!" she said, and all other voices cut off. Under military law, such disrespect toward the leader was punishable by death. "Your Yellow would beat his Black nine times out of ten, but both of your gifts are defensive. He has position. If you try to take it, this will be the tenth. Suicide is not valor."

When Noble Lion did not even reproach White Stallion, most of the lords looked confused, but few of them knew the Lion and the Stallion like I did. Noble Lion simply nodded and steepled his hands over the northern border of the Land Under Heaven and said nothing.

"YOU ALL DISCOUNT MY BROTHER SO QUICKLY!" came the voice from the edge of the command tent, where rows of attendants and personal guards lined the walls behind their seated lords.

"Who asked you to speak, sausage man?" slurred a man in rich, but disheveled robes seated beside Orchid Mantis. "Or was your brother the sausage man? I can't keep you all straight with all the scowling and the muscles."

Golden Goat was drunk, as usual. Never having to refill your cup was a blessing for some but a curse for others. Grand General Noble Lion looked at his half-brother reproachfully, but then turned his attention to the first man who had spoken. Or rather, Lion directed his gaze toward the man seated before the first man who had spoken.

"Poorboy, was it?" started Noble Lion. "If you cannot control your bondsman, I will ask you both to leave. I invited you to sit at our table only out of respect for your ancestor who fought by my ancestor's side."

"And because I vouched for them," added White Stallion.

"Well, yes of course, Stallion. But I swore to impose order, no matter who vouches for whom." Noble Lion's tone was more that of a lover than a general, and perhaps some of the other put together what I already knew.

"You're quiet, Sparrow," Noble Lion said, drawing every eye toward me, at the far end of the table. "Why do I take it as a bad sign when you, of all people, are quiet?"

I made one last note on my ivory tablet, the kind that Imperial ministers once carried to court – when there was a court – then I crossed out the name "Brave Rooster" and flipped it over to review my own roster.

"I think the brash bondsman is right. We should not assume that our latest challenger should fail. Prepare for it, perhaps. But assume? No."

I glanced up from my tablet long enough to meet the eye of this Poorboy, who gave a small bow in thanks. He was tall, young, noble-looking even. Perhaps his ears were a bit too large for him to be considered outright handsome, but he had the type of face you could trust. The brash attendant behind him however, looked ready to fly off the handle at any moment. Now he could be considered good-looking in an I-can-push-my-own-plow or an I-can-carry-that-keg-by-myself kind of way. Provincial, simple, but heroic in the way that all farm boys dreamed of being. They had said they were three brothers, but they couldn't have looked more different from one another. The third was out there somewhere facing the Frost Giant on his Weeping Wall.

"You want to wait for the sausage man to come back before making our next plan?" That was Golden Goat again.

"I'm not waiting for anything," I said, drawing a line between two of my five main officers' names, then putting the tablet down. "But when they called him Carver I don't think they meant that he carved meat."

Golden Goat made to speak up, but his wits were too slow and I beat him to it.

"And even if they did, I remember another butcher who managed to rise all the way up to Rank 114: Imperial Regent. Perhaps if anyone had thought to make use of his Mandate a bit sooner, there would never have been a rebellion, or a coup, much less the all-out war we currently find ourselves in."

Golden Goat squinted one eye at me, as if trying to decide which of the three of me he should be addressing.

"Do we know," said Noble Lion, turning from me to this Poorboy, "what this Carver's Mandate is? What star he was born under, even?"

Poorboy simply smiled and sat back in his chair, crossing his arms. His eyes flicked up toward the entrance of the tent just as a chunk of ice crashed onto the map table and bounced the length of it before coming to a frosty, oozing rest. The overlarge head of the man called Frost Giant stared up at Noble Lion, with rictus expression of surprise.

"That's our brother," drawled Poorboy, leaning back in his chair. The brash man behind him echoed it even louder. "THAT'S OUR BRRRRROTHER!"