The Beast
The morning sunrise had never been so warm. Kyoshi had slept better on the hard-packed shore of the lake, without a bedroll, than she had any of the nights spent camping between Chameleon Bay and Hujiang. Perhaps that was because she had her own fire now. She didn’t have to share it with anyone else.
Rangi murmured into the base of her neck, a soft thrumming sensation. A shadow loomed over them both. Kyoshi blinked until she saw a pair of leather boots next to her head. Kirima squatted down closer to their level, her hands on her knees and her chin in her hands.
“Have a nice night?” the Waterbender said, batting her eyelashes. She grinned wider than the open sky.
Kyoshi rose to her elbows. Rangi slid off her chest and thumped her head on the ground, startling awake. The leg she’d thrown across Kyoshi’s body reluctantly unwound itself.
“Must have been nice,” Kirima said, barely able to contain her laughter. “Sleeping under the stars. Just two friends. Having a close, private moment of friendship.”
Kyoshi rubbed the drowsiness out of her face. She could leap to her feet and deny everything. She had no idea what would happen if she and Rangi kept pulling on this thread together. Few people in the Earth Kingdom would react anywhere near as well as Kirima.
But ever since that day in Yokoya, when she’d learned her fate while her hands were still dusted in white flour, her life had been an endless refusal, full of secrets unhappily kept to their destructive ends. She was sick of denying herself.
Not this time. This time would be different. A steady thought. The drumbeat in her head and heart let her know the truth. She would never back down from how she felt about Rangi.
Rangi caught her gaze and smiled, making a slight, barely there nod. A ready if you are signal.
She was. And they were.
“It’s exactly what it looks like,” Kyoshi said. “You have a problem?”
Kirima shrugged and waved her fingers, dipping into a moment of quiet seriousness. “I’m not the type to give you grief over whom you love,” she said. Her mirth returned immediately. “I am, however, going to give you tremendous amounts of grief about romancing within your own brotherhood. That’s like doing laundry in the outhouse. It never ends clean.”
Kyoshi got up. “First off, we knew each other before we met you. Second, my parents founded this stupid gang, and they were obviously a pair!”
“Good to see you carrying on the family tradition,” Kirima said. “Jesa and Hark were mad about each other.”
Nothing could douse the moment for Kyoshi like a reminder of her parents. She wondered if they still kissed, made eyes, whispered jokes after they’d dropped her in Yokoya. Perhaps unburdening themselves had made their relationship all the sweeter. She didn’t want to ask.
The darkness of her abandonment must have boiled to her surface as the three of them trudged uphill back toward town, because Rangi ran the back of her nails down Kyoshi’s hand, a playful and teasing distraction that held more meaning now than a hundred volumes of history. Kyoshi nearly tripped and fell on her face.
If this was what being true to herself felt like, she could never go back. Her heart was nestled somewhere above her in the nearest cloud. She wanted to scoop up Rangi in her arms and run, stepping higher and higher using that technique she still had to learn, until they found it.
Kyoshi was so happy that Hujiang itself looked prettier in the new light of day. Splotches of color caught her eye that weren’t visible in the torchlight of the previous evening, blues and reds from beyond the Earth Kingdom. The longhouses, she could see now, had individual touches like carved shrine alcoves and Fire Nation rugs hung over doors. It reminded her of the way ships would get personalities imprinted on them by their sailors. Dust had yet to be kicked up by the day’s business, and the air was cleaner, easier to breathe without the dingy haze.
They strolled through town—when was the last time Kyoshi had a stroll? Had she ever?—and sidestepped the strewn bodies of men who slept off hangovers, or beatings, or both. Kirima led them to one of the larger establishments, where she ducked through a door with one of its posts destroyed, like someone had been thrown out but not very accurately. She returned moments later, bending a large blob of water that she had to have found inside. It rolled down the steps like a slug.
Wong floated inside the reverse bubble, his head poking out the top. He snored comfortably.
“Wake up!” Kirima shouted. With a flick of her arms, the water froze. The big man jolted awake from the cold. He resembled a small iceberg with his face poking out of the summit.
“Ugh, leave me in this for a while,” he said, bleary-eyed.
Kirima liquified the water again, dropping him to his feet, and bent it away from his body, leaving him dry as a bone. She hurled the water back inside the building, where it landed with a giant splash. Someone inside screamed and sputtered.
“We’ve had enough of this town,” she said. Then she grinned at Kyoshi and Rangi, without any attempt to hide the meaning in her stare. “Or at least I have.”
Wong didn’t get the chance to interpret her stage gestures. A loud crashing noise from somewhere near the bazaar punctured the silence of the morning. It sounded like a house might have collapsed. Birds rose into the sky, fluttering in distress.
Rangi frowned and leaned her ear toward the disturbance. “Was that a landslide?”
“I don’t know,” Kirima said cautiously. “But the birds have the right idea.”
Now the clamor of men shouting in horror could be heard over the rooflines. “Never wait to find out what the trouble is,” Wong said, already jogging away from the source. “By then, you’re already too close.”
If that wasn’t ancient wisdom, it should have been. They followed him briskly back toward the inn. Hopefully Lek and Lao Ge were both there, ready to fly. Judging by how fast the ruckus was catching up, they wouldn’t have time to search the town on Pengpeng.
A horrendous snorting, choking sound rolled through the streets. Back in her mansion days, Kyoshi had once seen an ambassador bring a pet poodle monkey that was so inbred in the name of “cuteness” that it had trouble breathing through its miniaturized snout. That was what she heard now, on a scale a thousand times larger. The exhortations of a creature that would never get its fill of air.
Two men ran screaming out of a longhouse, right on their heels. An instant later, the building front exploded, planks and beams torn to shreds by a dark, wiry mass that writhed with fury. A rope or a whip flung out with the speed of a cable under tension and lashed the men across the back. They fell to the ground, skidding on their faces, momentum making their legs scorpion over their heads.
“Tui’s gills!” Kirima shouted. “What is that thing!?”
Behind them was a beast that Kyoshi had never seen the likes of before, a black-and-brown four-legged monstrosity that stood higher at the shoulder than some of the huts. It managed to be hulking with muscle and yet lissome as a serpent at the same time. Claws as long and sharp as sickle blades reaped at the ground, opening damp wounds under the dusty surface.
But the most hideous part of the creature was its dark void of a face. The furry, elongated skull had no eyes, only a flowering pink snout that wriggled with its own fleshy protuberances. It was as if a parasite from another world had attached itself to the nose of an earthly beast and taken control over the entire animal. Two large dark holes, nostrils, sucked air in all directions until they pointed straight at Kyoshi.
She backed away slowly, ineffectually, surprised she could manage that. The nausea of terror chained her, robbed her of survival instinct. Her skin felt wet and cold.
Again, was the only thought running through her mind. Again, Jianzhu had loosed a nightmare on her, an inhuman specter that would drag her away into the darkness, screaming. It had to be him. There was no one else who could have scraped the depths of her fear like this. Somehow, she knew in her bones it was he who taunted her with this living aberration.
A wall of earth shot up between her and the animal. She hadn’t bent it.
“What are you doing?” Wong roared as he followed through on his attack. “Either fight or run! Don’t stand there where we can’t help you!”
The monster clambered over the wall he made with ease, its claws letting it climb as fast as it ran. Kirima pulled more water from a nearby trough and smashed at the beast’s shoulders, trying to knock it off-balance. Rangi kicked low sheets of flame at the places it tried to land its forepaws, reasoning that it was as effective to break an animal’s root as it was a normal opponent.
That’s right,Kyoshi thought. I’m not alone this time.
The street was wide enough to accommodate her earthbending weakness. She knifed at the air in front of her, and the entire surface of the road began to grind and shift. A fissure opened, and one of the animal’s paws fell in. If she could close the gap fast enough, she could pin it by the—
The monster, rather than avoid the jaws of her trap, dove headfirst into the rift. Its entire body disappeared belowground, leaving a pile of castings behind.
“This thing can burrow!?” Kirima sounded more aggrieved than afraid, like an experienced gambler discovering the table they’d joined was blatantly rigged against them.
Kyoshi felt vibrations beneath her. It was impossible not to, with a creature that size, but they were indistinct and directionless. Not a help in this situation.
“Spread out,” Rangi said, eying the ground.
“Shouldn’t we stay close?” Kyoshi said.
“No,” Rangi said. “Then it’ll get more than one of us in a single bite.”
Kyoshi may have been feeling warm with newfound camaraderie for her gang, but no one had told Wong and Kirima. After hearing Rangi, they immediately leaped onto the roof of the nearest house, elements trailing below the soles of their feet, leaving her and Kyoshi down below.
The soil loosened around them, a perfect circle caving in. Rangi tackled Kyoshi out of the center of the formation, boosting herself sideways with flame jets from her feet. They landed hard on their sides, shoulders bruising. The creature burst through the surface, rearing toward the sky, the ground giving birth to a shape of death that blacked out the sun above.
There was a zipping sound, and then a thud. The animal screamed, and its claws came down short of Kyoshi and Rangi’s bodies. It shook its head furiously.
Another impact, and this time Kyoshi saw it. A smooth, fist-sized stone had struck the beast hard on the tip of its sensitive nose, sending it reeling. She looked up and made out Lek’s silhouette on the roof of their inn, the sun behind him shrouding his face.
“Move, maybe?” he shouted.
A hail of perfectly aimed stones gave them cover, each missile landing uncannily on the one spot that the animal seemed to feel pain, no matter how much it thrashed about. It backed away, trying to hide its nose. As Kyoshi and Rangi fled toward Lek, several arrows struck it in the hindquarters. It turned to face the new threat.
The daofei had gotten over their surprise and were now mobbing the beast, thrusting spears at it and pricking its fur with shortbows. They sought the glory of bringing it down. The animal lashed out with its tongue, sending a row of men falling to the ground, but more swordsmen-turned-hunters stepped over their limp bodies to replace them.
Kyoshi didn’t care to understand the bizarre scene playing out before her. She and the rest of the group ran for the hills.
They arrived at Pengpeng’s cave in the mountainside winded, their legs and lungs burning, to find Lao Ge feeding the bison a pile of cabbages. He tossed them one at a time high in the air for Pengpeng to catch between her broad, flat teeth. There was probably no use asking him how he’d acquired the produce.
“A lot of help you were!” Lek shouted. He was assuming, like Kyoshi was at this point, that Lao Ge was completely aware of what had transpired.
The old man gave him a pitying look. “Fighting a shirshu? That’s just a bad investment of effort. I left as soon as I felt it coming.”
“You knew what that abomination was?” Kirima said.
“It’s a legendary subterranean beast that hunts by scent,” he explained dismissively, like they would have known this if they’d paid better attention to his ramblings. “Supposedly it can track its quarry across stone, water, dirt, thin air. In the old days, Earth Kings would use them to execute their political enemies. For the traitor, let them be hounded by shirshu until they drop where they stand, far from their homes and the bones of their ancestors.”
Lao Ge fed Pengpeng another cabbage. “Or at least that’s how the saying went. Shirshu haven’t been seen in the wild for at least a generation, so I assume this one was being used to hunt a fugitive too. Same as in the days of yore.”
Kyoshi felt Lek’s gaze boring into her. “It was going for you,” he said. “I could see it from the roof of the inn. It was sniffing out your scent. You brought it here.”
She hesitated. Had she been as smooth as Yun, she could have come up with a convincing denial on the spot.
Before she could say anything, she was preempted by the metallic clanking of blades rattling in their scabbards. They leaned over the cave ledge to see a party of swordsmen down below. At the back of the group, exhorting them onward, was Brother Wai. Mok’s inquisitor looked like he wished to speak with whomever he was searching for, very much.
“I can explain,” Kyoshi said quickly. “But maybe once we’re in the air?”
There was silent and unanimous agreement as they scrambled onto Pengpeng. The truth took a back seat to survival.