Chapter 10

Ying sat cross-legged on the hard platform, rubbing her bleary eyes. Her head was protesting against the shortage of restful sleep, a result of tossing and turning for most of the night with a confusing mosaic of her father, Ye-yang, and cannons cycling through her mind. The frenzy taking place in front of her didn't help.

"What's going on?" she mumbled. "It's not even daybreak yet."

The other apprentice hopefuls were scrambling around the room as if they were imbued with the energy of a dozen suns. A couple of socks and shoes flew overhead. Undergarments too.

"Wake up!" Chang-en grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a hard shake. "We have to report for the first test."

"The first test?"

Of course, the guild's first apprenticeship test was today. By tomorrow, perhaps half—or maybe all—of the candidates she was sharing a dormitory with would be sent packing on a one-way ticket home. If Gerel had anything to say about it, she would be one of those tragic failures.

Ying immediately leapt up as reality struck her like a sledgehammer. Most of their roommates were already awake (some might not have even slept), clutching books and scrolls in their hands. One of them was staring at his copy of the Annals so hard he would probably start ripping pages off and gobbling them soon. Ying herself had contemplated burning all her books into ash and then swallowing it together with her tea—an old wives' tale that was supposed to help one ace any examination.

"Why would he need to do that?" Ye-kan's voice appeared on her other side. He had put on his straw hat and was calmly adjusting its veil. "He's not going to make the cut anyway."

"Neither are you, if I rip this ridiculous hat off later." Ying reached out and yanked the offensive hat off Ye-kan's head. She was too anxious to be in a mood to entertain the kid's snide remarks.

Everyone gaped.

"What in Abka Han's name happened to you?" Chang-en exclaimed.

Bulging blisters littered Ye-kan's baby-smooth skin, and a few were even oozing a grotesque mix of blood and yellowish pus. It reminded Ying of the victim of ming-roen ore that she had seen on Muci, and her stomach did a backflip.

"Allergic reaction," Ye-kan answered. "Now, if you don't mind." He snatched his hat back from Ying and replaced it on his head, much to everyone else's relief.

"That is some allergy you've got," Chang-en said. "Keep that on." He rubbed his own chest ruefully. "Good thing I haven't had breakfast yet." A large plate of steamed buns sat on the table by the doorway, but no one had any appetite this morning.

Ying leaned over and hissed into Ye-kan's ear, "Allergic reaction? Really?"

"I had to take precautions."

The four beiles would be attending today's test, but with Ye-kan's face looking like a festering minefield, no one would focus their attentions on him long enough to recognize the fourteenth prince under that carnage. Ying twisted her lips together and shook her head. The kid was determined to stay in the guild, that much she was convinced of. She couldn't confess to understanding why.

Ye-kan was the only son of Lady Odval, the High Commander's principal wife, and had been brought up in the lap of absolute luxury. For someone like him, who could get anything he wanted at the snap of his fingers, it was perplexing to imagine why he would put himself through the suffering of the guild's apprenticeship trial when he could probably order them to take him in. Maybe it was pride, maybe it was sheer folly.

The shock from Ye-kan's horrific reveal quickly passed. When the first rays of dawn streamed in, the nervous candidates filed out of the room and headed for the main hall, where the guild masters would be waiting.

"What do you think the question for today's test will be?" Chang-en asked as they wound their way down the corridors.

"Don't know." Ying shrugged.

"Last year, the test question was about the history of the wheel. That's at least three thousand years' worth!"

That definitely qualified as a test of patience and diligence, Ying thought. Also, a test question that she would have no means of completing. Gerel's history lessons were the dreariest of the bunch, and his obvious dislike for her made his classes even more torturous.

The hopefuls spilled into the main hall, where rows of small, low tables had been set up, each carrying sheets of blank parchment, an ink slab, and a few brushes. Everyone slid into their assigned seats wordlessly. At the front of the hall, four of the five chairs were filled, the masters all wearing stern, dour expressions on their faces. Master Lianshu was still missing in action, as he had been from day one.

Ying stared at the empty chair. One incentive of surviving the first test was being able to start on Strategy lessons, and the thought of that made her heart clench. Her father had been obsessed with governance and strategy. He once told her, "Without a proper understanding of the big picture, you'll never be able to fulfill your true potential. We shouldn't build for ourselves—build for the people. Build to make a difference."

She'd never taken his words to heart before. For her, engineering had always been about creating for herself. Her flight devices, her dart-shooting fan, all of them were petty vanity projects that served no purpose but to curb her own boredom.

The model airship hanging above was different. That was engineering at its finest. That was the kind of invention that had far-reaching impact, that changed the face of society and ushered in a new era. Everything that she had learned since coming to the guild—of transportation systems, irrigation tools, household and commercial mechanical constructs, even the design of artificial limbs and the intricate chimeras—all of it felt so big and important. So meaningful.

Her father had worked on glorious things like that.

She stared at the airship model for a long while, until Grand Master Quorin's grating voice cut through the air. The snowy-haired master had stepped up onto the platform.

"Good morning, candidates, it has been a while since I last addressed you," he said. "The masters have been giving me regular updates about your progress."

Ying caught Gerel's eye and swore that she saw his lips twitch into a barely noticeable smirk.

"Most of you seem to be coping well, but we will only know what that means after reviewing the outcome of your test. There is no fixed number of candidates who will be allowed to progress to the next stage of the trial. Out of the hundred-odd candidates here, we will cull as many as required to maintain guild standards."

There was an audible sucking in of breath from the candidates. Ying took a quick look around the hall. Chang-en had his eyes closed, his lips making small, rapid movements—probably reciting lines from the Annals that he had been cramming in the morning. An-xi was pretending to be calm, but his left cheek was twitching every now and then, betraying his nerves. Arban had his head bowed, looking more subdued than usual. There were others who had gone white in the face, and a rare few who looked on the verge of retching.

Ying repeatedly clenched her fists, her palms getting clammy. She had tried her best to prepare herself for this day, but she wasn't sure it would be enough. After all, she never had the orthodox training that the other boys had. When she turned back toward the front of the hall, her gaze suddenly met a pair of cool gray eyes.

Ye-yang had just entered the hall together with the other beiles, and they were moving toward the seats that had been arranged for them.

Ying felt her cheeks warming. Did he remember what happened last night? Did he know what she had done?

Probably not, she thought, trying to convince herself of that fact. He had been drunk, and asleep.

"Without further ado, we will reveal the question for the first test," Quorin announced. He walked over to the wooden frame that was standing on the platform, upon which a rolled-up scroll had been hung. Quorin reached for the string that was binding the scroll, undoing the knot with his wrinkled fingers.

All the candidates were staring at those hands, willing him to move a little faster.

The scroll dropped, unfurling with a flourish to reveal a simple line of characters from top to bottom.

Discuss the introduction and evolution of the airship within the nine isles.

It was not an easy topic.

The concept of an airship was born from beyond the borders of the nine isles and even the Great Jade Empire, brought to their shores by traveling green-eyed merchants from lands so far removed that Ying sometimes wondered if they really existed. Unlike the Empire, the Antarans didn't have the filled coffers needed to pay the mercenaries for their awe-inspiring vessels, so the masters of the Engineers Guild had had to design and build the airships from scratch, based on what little they had seen from the Empire's displays of military might.

One might go so far as to call them thieves, pilfering the ideas of others. But for the nine isles, the birth of the first Antaran airship was a turning point in history that they would never regret.

"You have until the sun sets to complete your essays," Quorin said. "You may begin." A senior apprentice struck a bronze gong, its loud toll echoing and reverberating across the hall.

There was a flurry of activity as the young hopefuls picked up their brushes and began frantically grinding their ink slabs. Some began writing immediately, as if ten hours wouldn't be enough for them to vomit everything they knew onto parchment. The masters got up from their chairs and began patrolling the aisles, peering down at the words that were quickly appearing on sheets of rice paper. When Gerel walked past Ying and her blank sheets, he let out one of his regular harrumphs and hurried on.

Ying sat there staring at her empty sheet for a long time. Her brushes lay untouched by the side, her fingers choosing to fold and unfold the edges of the rice paper repeatedly instead.

She knew what she should be putting down—each of the masters had spent several lessons discussing airship history and construction in extensive detail—but there was that niggling uncertainty at the back of her mind that she needed to untangle before she could pick up the brush.

She looked up at the dusty keel dangling overhead, the voice of her father echoing in her mind from a distant past.

"The airship isn't just any ship, my precious lamb," he used to say while they lay with their backs against the grassy plain, staring up at the black orbs floating across the azure skies. "It represents the Antaran dream—and the Antaran future. No one thought we were capable of such wonder, but we showed them. We sent our people to the skies, on a craft built solely with Antaran hands, and now we can cross oceans in less than half the time. The world has shrunk because we can fly."

"But, A-ma, we didn't come up with the idea," she had replied, rubbing her nose snootily. "We copied it off someone else."

Her father had laughed, and then he ruffled her hair affectionately, like always. "No, we didn't. But no one has a monopoly on ideas, lamb, and that is the beauty of it. The same idea, in the heads of two different people"—he tapped her lightly on the forehead—"can take on wildly different forms, spinning vastly different magic. Antarans didn't invent the idea of an airship, but the airships that patrol our skies are not the same as the ones that hover over the Empire, or the ones owned by the green-eyed strangers from beyond."

She remembered that exact moment when he had whipped out a miniature model of an airship, bent from reeds and bamboo strips, and placed it in her little hands. She pulled the string hanging from its rear, and her heart sang when she saw how the tiny wooden propellers rotated.

"This is only the beginning, not the end. Our airships will continue to evolve, to change into forms that we may no longer recognize. But they will only get better, won't they? Because that is what it means to progress, and progress will never cease."

She had nodded confidently then, the gears in her little mind rotating in unison with the propellers, imagining what magic she could infuse into her very own airship one day.

Only the beginning, not the end.

Something clicked in Ying's mind.

The introduction and evolution of the airship within the nine isles, she read, letting each character on the scroll slowly sink in. At first glance it sounded like a question about the past, but what value was the past if it couldn't inform the future?

She finally picked up her brush.

The hall was steeped in nervous silence for the rest of the day, disrupted only by the occasional rustling of paper and tapping of brush ends against tables. Midway, a minor commotion broke out a few rows behind Ying, when one of the masters tried to make Ye-kan remove his hat, only to retract his instruction when the boy briefly lifted his veil. The fourteenth prince's strategy worked beautifully—no such interruption happened again for the remainder of the test. Outside, the sun moved across the sky toward the end of its daily trajectory, until it began to set against the backdrop of Fei's ostentatious pagodas. As the light streaming in from the hall's open doors started to wane, there was a palpable increase in the tension and anxiety within the four walls.

Only a handful of candidates had finished. Everyone else was writing with such ferocity that their wrists were in real danger of fracture.

Ying put down her last string of characters onto the sheet, then set down her brush with a flourish. She rotated her aching neck as she carefully skimmed through the stack of pages she had filled. There were only five sheets, far less than what she could see in the hands of her fellow candidates, but she had given it her all and that would have to be enough. Just when she had finished stacking her sheets in the correct order, the gong rang out once more, signaling the end of the first test.

"Time's up!" Quorin's voice boomed across the hall.

Some heads immediately went collapsing down onto their tables in sheer exhaustion, while others struggled to get another few characters in. Ying took a quick glance at her peers. Chang-en, An-xi, and Arban all looked composed and confident, as was expected of the beiles' nominated candidates and front-runners in the competition. Compared to them, Ying felt like a weed.

"Check that your candidate number has been written at the top right corner of every page. The masters will be coming around to collect your submissions now."

When Gerel stopped beside her table to pick up her script, he flicked through the stack and scoffed, "Only five pages? I wonder where you inherited that overconfidence from. Typical." He shoved it to the bottom of his pile and continued moving down the row.

Once all the scripts had been accounted for, Quorin turned his attention back to the candidates. "Your responses will be assessed by the guild masters, and the list of candidates who qualify for the next stage of the trial will be released tomorrow morning. Those who fail will have to pack your belongings and leave the guild immediately," he said. "If there's nothing else, you're dismissed."

The candidates leapt up from their seats and the hall descended into chaos. Chang-en came running up to Ying, gangly limbs flailing with excitement.

"Can you believe it? That was such an easy question!" he exclaimed, clapping Ying on the shoulder so hard that it hurt. "Classic Antaran engineering piece. I memorized the entire history of airship development when I was six." Pride exuded from his voice.

An-xi, who had been sitting just one row in front of Ying, overheard Chang-en's remark and said, "I finished that at five."

"Right." Ying scooped up her things and smiled stiffly, the little confidence she had in her own work slowly ebbing away.

"Min probably learned it all before he could even talk," Chang-en retorted, as if Ying's achievements could be used for his own bragging rights just because they were considered good friends. He tapped Ying's shoulder. "I wrote all about your father's creation of the air cannons, right down to every minute detail. If he were still alive, I'd be begging him to take me as his disciple."

Ying fought to avoid stopping short as the chatter continued.

"As if he'd want to take in a wreck like you," An-xi remarked. His delicate nose wrinkled up in his usual snooty manner, which, when framed by his considerably large ears, reminded Ying of a mouse sniffing for food. "It's not fair. I'm going to lodge an official complaint with the guild masters about the choice of test question. Aihui Min has an advantage over the rest of us because his father created the cannons. He'd have access to more information than we would."

"Stop being sour, Niohuru. You're just jealous that Min has a better engineering pedigree than the rest of us. Your complaint won't make any difference. The first beile told me that we're pretty much guaranteed a pass in at least the first round. The guild has to grant the beiles that much allowance, as a mark of respect for the High Command."

"I know. Not that I need that free pass. I would have qualified even if we were competing fair and square."

Ying had stopped registering the argument that was still taking place between Chang-en and An-xi, and the rest of their discussion in the background faded away.

Her father's creation of the air cannons? How did she not know something as important as that? She had been standing right next to those cannons; she had touched the cold metal surface of their barrels and shuddered at the thought of their destructive power, but she hadn't known that those weapons came out of her own father's hands. She recalled the pages in his secret journal, filled with intricate details about cannon design. He hadn't just been studying someone else's work and improving on it—he had been iterating his own creation.

What else did she not know about him?

Ying felt her chest clenching. She couldn't breathe. She needed to get out of here.

She turned and ran for the doors.

"Hey, Min, where're you going?" Chang-en was calling out to her.

She was going to find answers—now.

Ying ran all the way to the guild archives, housed in a stoic three-story octagonal pagoda on the eastern perimeter of the guild compound. It was built entirely from gray stone, but had a web of vibrant red ivy creeping around the doorframe and along its walls that felt like a brazen protest against the guild's insistence at solemnity. Despite its proximity to the apprentice classrooms and workshops, hardly anyone found time to frequent its many shelves. Everyone wanted to create guild history, not read about it.

She pushed open the heavy lacquered doors, and the first thing that struck her was the clean fragrance wafting through the air that smelled like freshly brewed jasmine tea. The interior of the archives was entirely different from what she had expected. Instead of musty hallways and dusty shelves left crumbling from disuse, everything was spick-and-span, and the books and scrolls were arranged even more neatly than those in the classrooms.

Soft humming came drifting from the upper floors.

An archive keeper?she wondered. It wouldn't be surprising, given how tidy the place was.

The humming stopped.

"Who's that!" a sharp voice called out.

A woman's voice.

Ying instinctively gravitated toward the stairs, eager to find out who it belonged to. Since entering the guild, she had not seen a single woman on the premises. Who was up there?

But the moment she lifted her foot and stepped forward, she knew that something was wrong. Her ankle caught on something—a fine string—and the loud whirring of cogs started up.

Hiss.Panels slid open from the walls.

She threw herself flat against the floor, narrowly missing the wooden darts that had come flying out from all sides. Her breath caught in her throat, heart thumping inside her chest. Had she been a moment slower, she would have been impaled by the sharp tips of those darts.

When she was certain that there were no more projectiles zipping overhead, Ying flipped herself onto her back, studying her surroundings warily. The thin, spider silk–like thread that she had tripped over glistened beside her. She reached out and plucked it.

More cogs whirred.

More hidden panels revealed themselves. This time, they exposed narrow bamboo tubes that began issuing ominous gray smoke.

Damn.

She had thought that triggering the mechanism once more might expel another round of darts, but this was far more insidious and difficult to escape. Ying quickly pressed her sleeve over her nose and mouth, hoping that she hadn't unwittingly released some poisonous gas that would leave her bleeding from all orifices. The front doors had already locked shut and there were no visible windows in this place. Even the way up to the second floor of the pagoda had been blocked by a sliding panel when the booby trap was activated.

Whoever designed this had covered all bases.

Think, Ying, think.

Her eyes swept across the octagonal room, searching for an alternative exit. When she found none, she picked herself up and followed the trail of the translucent thread to one of its ends attached to the wall. As expected, a panel lay camouflaged in the stone.

Ying frantically tapped all around the panel, then moved to search the nearby shelves for any sign of the lever that would open the hatch. Her lungs strained to cling on to that single breath she was holding. Then she found it—a heavy book sitting on a top shelf that couldn't be swept off. She grabbed the book by the spine and gave it a hard tug.

Something clicked, and the panel swung open to reveal a medley of wooden gears.

There was no time to figure out how the mechanism worked. Already the smoke filled half the room and a pungent, acrid smell stung her nose. Ying grabbed a stone paperweight off a shelf and smashed it into the entire set of cogs. She looked down to the pipe—the smoke was dissipating.

"Stop! What do you think you're doing!"

The door that had sealed the way to the upstairs levels opened once again, and a petite figure came pounding down the stairs, rushing over toward Ying. She wore similar robes to a guild master, but in a shade of flamboyant vermilion instead of somber maroon. Covering her face entirely was a copper gas mask with two circular eyeholes covered with frosted yun-mu glass that magnified her eyes in a frog-like manner. A mop of long, frizzy hair hung from the back of her head in a messy plait.

"Aieee!" The woman shoved Ying aside and picked up the broken pieces of splintered wood lying on the floor. "You've destroyed everything. How could you!"

"If I didn't, I'd have choked to death," Ying replied with a cough, though the air was clearing up through the now-open stairway.

"Nonsense. No one dies that easily," the woman snapped. She whirled around and glared angrily at Ying, making her bulging eyes look even more comical. In her hands she held a strange-looking contraption that looked like a small metal pitchfork, barely the length of one's forearm. Tiny sparks flitted from one prong to the next, threatening to burst out into a larger ball of flames. Ying did not want to imagine what would happen if any of it came into contact with her clothes or skin. "Who are you? Are you here to steal something?"

"No!" Ying pulled her wooden pendant off its cord and held it up. "I'm a member of the guild. Aren't all guild members supposed to be able to access the material in the archives?" She remembered Gerel mentioning this in passing during his first History class, though no one really paid any attention.

The woman took a glance at her pendant and scoffed, lowering her weapon. "You're only a trial candidate. Candidates aren't considered official members of the guild until you've passed the apprenticeship trial. Don't think I don't know that. Since you're new, I'll let this slide. Now shoo while I'm still talking to you nicely."

Ying hardly considered it a "nice" welcome, not when she had nearly died within these walls.

"Please," she pleaded, "there's something important I need to find out. I just need a short while. Half an hour—no, a quarter of that. My father was once a member of the guild. I want to take a look at his old record books. It would mean the world to me."

"Well, ask your father, then, you foolish child! Get out, get out."

"I can't," Ying cried. "If I could, then I would, but I can't. He's not around anymore." She wished so hard that she could get one more day with her father so that she could ask him all the questions she had, so that she could find out about the part of his life that he had kept such a closely guarded secret, even from his own family. She loved him so much, yet there was so much to him that was a mystery to her.

The woman folded her arms across her chest, pursing her lips together in a pout as she gave Ying's plea some thought. "What is your father's name?" she finally asked.

"Aihui Shan-jin."

The pause seemed to drag on forever as Ying waited for the archive keeper to respond. Her father's name always seemed to trigger some reaction in the guild members, for better or worse, so she hoped it would serve the intended effect here.

Unfortunately, it didn't.

"Do you think you can lie to me like that?" the woman suddenly shouted, her voice rising to a painfully shrill pitch that rattled Ying's eardrums. "Get out. I don't want to see you step foot in here ever again. Get out!"

She grabbed Ying by the collar and lifted her up with surprising strength for her small frame, hauling the younger girl over to the doors. With one forceful shove, Ying was thrown out onto the grass. The doors slammed shut with a resounding bang.

Ying scrambled back to her feet and pushed at the doors. They were locked.

"I'm not lying. Please let me take a look at my father's record books, I'm begging you!"

"Bullshit! I'm not gullible enough to fall for your tricks," the woman's voice came yelling from the other side. "You're one of those cunning liars trying to prey on my good nature to trick me into letting you steal Shan-jin's work. Let me teach you a lesson, kid—no amount of plagiarism will help you become a great engineer. Not everyone can be like Aihui Shan-jin."

The doors remained firmly shut.