Sky Pride

Epilogue 1- Beating With Sticks, Slapping With Hands, Part 2

Abbot Whitebrows ached. The carriage laid a worse beating on him than any battle he had fought in the last forty years. Not that there had been many, even of the secret sort that his Temple had officially renounced centuries ago. He had won those fights too. Still ached. No matter how “iron” your “Iron Fist Technique” was, it still hurt your knuckles when you broke a fool’s jaw.

He wouldn’t usually take a carriage anywhere. He wouldn’t usually be allowed, by law, in a carriage. The law didn’t change. It was just that a remarkable number of people, ranging from provincial governors and going all the way down to street sweepers, were eager to look the other way. They sounded relieved when they learned he was going south. It saved them having to ask.

He had been making the long march, until recently on foot and by boat, from his Pure Lands Temple all the way to the furthest southern reaches of the country- Burning Flag City. Not alone, of course, twenty experienced monks were traveling with him. It was just this last step, the stretch from Red Reed Crossing to Burning Flag City, that saw him separated from them and crammed into this horse drawn torture machine.

The Abbot never wanted to come to Burning Flag City, and had said so loudly and often. He wanted nothing to do with that wretched place. He had leaned back in his chair and declaimed, in his best Abbot voice, that it would take the Heavens themselves to move him. Literal divine intervention would be required to drag him there.

He had regretted his rash words many, many times since the day the immortals invited the Martyr Venerable to take up residence. The reports of miracles- the turning rosary, the faint sounds of chanting in the temple, children spontaneously healing, had become too much to ignore. He couldn’t shake the irrational notion that he had somehow baited the heavens into punishing his rash words. Foolish, but the idea clung to his mind like a particularly inescapable leech. It seemed fated. Divinely ordained. A view that was not aided by the curious force that had directed him to this carriage.

“I still canʼt believe you ran over a diviner. With your dainty little feet, you literally ran over a poor, innocent diviner.” His brother, out of his beggar garb and disguised as an implausibly wealthy merchant (which he, among other things, was,) carrying a State Business exemption (which was legitimate) to ride in the carriage, grinned at him. “All those years of you boasting about your light body technique, how deftly you embodied the crane, the darting dragonfly, and you still, somehow, managed to trample a diviner so crippled by the heavens, my Beggar Sect would have retired him with a disability pension years ago.”

“That’s not a real thing. The pension I mean. And who the hell has dainty feet? YOU have dainty feet. Look at those slippers.”

“It might be, you don’t know.” His brother evaded the main point with well practiced grace.

Whitebrows gave his brother a moderately filthy look. “He threw himself in my path. Which you know. It was an extortion scheme.”

“An extortion scheme that saw you coincidentally running into my carriage? Hell of a scheme I must say. I’d recruit the poor devil, but those weird kids ran off with him.”

“Are you saying you couldn’t catch a bunch of kids? Actually, why didn’t you catch those kids?” Whitebrow silently berated himself for not asking the obvious question two weeks ago. It was hard to drag his mind away from the chaos that was waiting for him down south.

“I tried. They ran too fast.”

“Pardon?”

“They ran too fast. They must have been immortals, because they were gone by the time I turned the corner of that wine shop. Why didn’t you catch them?”

Whitebrows shook his head, unwilling to admit that, for a few seconds, he had simply been unable to process that the shabby diviner was a real person and not some kind of goblin. Then he frowned as the carriage slowed down.

“Sorry, Master, Sorry Abbot, we’ve reached the back of the queue to get into the city. It seems likely that we will be waiting a few hours. We might even be stuck out here overnight.” The coachman leaned around the side of the carriage to make his report.

“Nonsense. Can’t we go cross country to another gate? It’s all open grassland.”

“Not sure the axels would hold up, Master, and from what I can see, we are actually in one of the shorter lines. Maybe today’s admission quota has been met.”