The Broken Lands (35 page)

Jin paused in her reading and turned to Sam. “If I can find the right formula, will you help me do this, Sam? Please. This is your home. Let me help protect it.”

He opened his mouth, about to protest further. Jin shook her head and cut him off.

“If I don't know this place is safe,” she began hesitantly, “how will I know you're safe?”

Sam's chest ached. “If it's what you want,” he said at last.

She smiled, and the ache twisted into knots. “That's decided, then. Now leave me alone for a while so I can read.”

Mr. Burns stood and patted her shoulder. “Your uncle will be proud.”

“My uncle's going to kill us both if he ever finds out what we're up to,” Jin retorted. “This is insane
yang guizi
behavior for sure.”

“I'll bring you some coffee,” Sam said, getting to his feet.

Jin nodded absently, already absorbed in the text. He paused in front of her, then bent and kissed her cheek.

Jin turned so they were almost nose-to-nose. “It's going to be okay,” she whispered. “I'm sorry for what I'm asking you to do.”

“Well,” Sam said awkwardly, “I guess if all it takes is not losing, it's not such a big deal.”

Jin burst into nervous laughter, and the moment was broken. Sam smiled and forced himself toward the parlor for the promised coffee.

Don't lose.

Walker's terrifying, scarlet-streaked face materialized in Sam's memory, grinning and baring two sets of teeth. Evil, deadly, uncanny—and evidently also some kind of genius gambler. Sam willed the image out of his head as he made his way through the parlor-turned-explosives-factory.

Whether by character, chance, or cheating, there was a way to beat everyone. Sam believed that. There was a way to beat Walker. There had to be.

Don't lose,
Jin's voice whispered.
Don't lose. The solution's easy.

But how on earth could you possibly plan a win over a creature like that?

J
IN TURNED
the heavy pages of the
Port-fire Book
slowly, still not sure what she was looking for. She'd flipped through it often enough for most of the recipes to look familiar, even if she had no idea what they meant.

This time, though, something was different as she scanned the formulas.

Mr. Burns had suggested that reading
The Conflagrationeer's Port-fire Book
was not so much about a single right way of understanding the bizarre writings, but figuring out how to read it so that it made sense for
you,
whoever you were. So even if Mr. Burns was a proper artificier, he might read a recipe and come away with a completely different understanding than Jin would. And somehow, even if they interpreted the same passage in two different ways, they could both be right.

At first, she had a hard time keeping that in mind. She turned to a page that bore the heading
A Work of the Deep Yellow Earth
and read the beginning of the recipe out loud.
“Take for the crucible a work of the mysterious and lute it throughout with red clay mixed with the essence of the sincere heart. Compound a paste of the bitter and the quick with salt and sand. Combine and refine the workings through nine revolutions over heat ankle-deep.”

The sincere heart
. A memory sprang to Jin's mind: Uncle Liao, consoling her through one of the occasional bouts of self-hating that overtook her when she thought too much about her past. “You are not what was done to you,” he had said. “You survived what was done to you because of who you are. You have a cinnabar heart.”

By cinnabar heart, she'd come to understand, Uncle Liao had meant some combination of strength and goodness and sincerity. He'd actually used all three words at various times in her life to define the phrase.

So perhaps what the recipe was really saying was to lute a crucible with a mixture of red clay and cinnabar. That made a certain amount of sense.

And the bitter . . . well, salt immediately sprang to mind, although it wasn't precisely bitter, but since salt was referred to directly, that didn't seem to be the bitter element in question. Sulfur? Sulfur was also a deep yellow mineral . . . and that would account for the “deep yellow earth” of the title.

Jin's mind was racing now. Things were falling into place, just like they had two days before when she'd figured out the formulas for the Atlantis display.
The quick
. . . quicksilver, perhaps? And sand . . . yes, sand was sometimes used in fireworking, but almost immediately Jin thought of the way fine-ground sugar was used, as a propellant. Sugar certainly
looked
like sand. And if the salt in question was not plain table salt, but saltpeter . . . or copper salts . . . or any kind of detonating salts . . .

Abruptly she saw it, a way that this strange language could produce a formula for an explosive charge. And she realized that, by varying certain ingredients, she could produce not one but several different types and colors of fireworks.

“But how could this be?” she protested as Sam set a cup and saucer quietly on the bedside table. “Cinnabar is just a thing Uncle Liao says, something from old China. How on earth could that really be the right way to read a
sincere heart
?”

Sam shrugged. “It could be the right way for
you
to read it.”

But there, of course, was the problem. If the right way to read it was something only Jin could know, then she was completely alone. No one else could tell her if she was right or wrong. There was no way to test it until she actually tried to compound one of the formulas.

She flipped back to the beginning. “Sam, could you find me paper and a pencil?” By the time he returned, she had four pages marked with her fingers. She took the pencil and started making notes.

The more she read, the more she discovered that she was drawing on what she'd learned from Uncle Liao. Ingredients that he favored, sayings he'd repeated, ways that he liked to work. She was also beginning to suspect that some of the instructions didn't refer to things the conflagrationeer was supposed to do to the ingredients, but what the conflagrationeer was expected to do
herself
. She thought maybe a reference to circulating air through the bellows for a certain length of time might be about breathing—meditative breathing, like Uncle Liao practiced, not moving air over the compound being made. Just like with the sincere heart, Jin worried that this was so specific to her life with Uncle Liao that it couldn't be right. But it
felt
right.

Then there were the results the formulas claimed to deliver. She had always assumed that ascending to the heavens and other references to flight had been about the trajectory of rockets, but now, as Jin began to make sense of the recipes, she wondered if maybe there was more to it. There were other examples, too—references to longevity that didn't seem to be about how long the shower of sparks would linger in the sky or how far a rocket would go before exploding.

Some of the formulas called for specific tools, made of spe­cific materials. From one:
grind the mysterious and the earthly in a mortar cast from the heavens.
From another:
form the grains into a pill the size of hesitation and put forth on a transfigured platter after allowing to rest for the nine revolutions
. Actually, there were a lot of references to transfigured items, and most of them sounded more like serving pieces than pyrotechnicians' tools—platters, cups, saucers, plates, utensils. It was as if those formulas were intended to be eaten rather than blown up.

And then, she found it. The second she read it, she knew it was the perfect formula, the one she was supposed to use. And she knew exactly how to make it. And everything suddenly made perfect sense and got a hundred percent stranger.

Sam came in again with a pot of coffee to refill her cup. She looked up at him. “I need you to make the bet, Sam. I figured it out.”

He nodded without returning her gaze. “I told you I would, Jin.”

“There's something else.” She tapped the formula she'd chosen with a trembling finger. “If I'm reading this right, if I do it correctly, Walker won't be able to touch me. And I'm fairly certain now that he couldn't touch Uncle Liao. I think Uncle Liao only let Walker fight as long as he did so that you and I could get away.”

Sam's brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I've been reading this as a pyrotechnics formulary because that's what we need. But I think Uncle Liao's been reading it as . . .” She hesitated, but she knew she was right. “I think he read it as a
waidan
scripture. There are formulas in here that could be compounded into an explosive or, just as easily . . . I think . . . into a
dan,
one of the elixirs of
taiqing,
the Great Clarity.”

Sam looked blankly at her. “That's a . . . a Chinese thing, I guess?”

“Well,
waidan
is, yes—it's part of the philosophy of the
Tao
. But I think there is a word in English that means something similar. Alchemy?”

Sam shook his head. “Doesn't mean anything to me.”

“Doesn't matter.” She smoothed her hand over the page, frowning. “It sounds outrageous, even to me, but . . .” She thought of Liao's burnished gold instruments, the ones he used in his laboratory tent and the hammered yellow-metal cups he drank from. She thought of the elaborate process of setting up the furnace he dragged from place to place, even though precious little in an artificier's work actually required a furnace. She thought of the talismans hung in the corners of the tent, the jars of mud and clay in the chest that were of no use in making fireworks but would be perfect for lining and sealing a crucible the way the formulas in the book described.

Then she remembered the word he used for himself. Not artificier, not fireworker, but
fangshi
. Master of methods. And he had always called Jin his
daoyao ren,
the assistant who grinds the ingredients.
They are terms from
waidan, he had explained long ago,
but they will serve just as well for what we do.

“He might as well have told me,” she said, shaking her head. “No wonder he was so surprised when I read the book and came up with spur-fires.”

“I don't understand.”

Jin laughed hoarsely. “Well, the
fangshi
of the old days claimed that through
waidan
one could fly, walk on water, call forth gods, repel demons and danger of all kinds, and live for hundreds of years, even ascend to join the immortals. When Uncle Liao read the
Port-fire Book
, he found this type of knowledge there. But when
I
read it, I found recipes for explosives.” She closed the book. “It doesn't matter. I have a formula that I think will work for the cinefaction, so the bet is on. But if I'm right about the
waidan,
the compound will also protect me from creatures like this Walker. I thought knowing that might make you feel better about it.”

His face twisted into a wry smile. “I'm supposed to feel better about using you as a gambling chip because you've discovered that your uncle is some kind of . . . of wizard or something? And you think you can do the same stuff?”

Jin felt her cheeks heat up. “It does sound crazy, doesn't it?”

“It sounds absolutely insane. But in the last few days I've been told that a story about a man trying to build his own hell is true; I've learned that the survival of New York and Brooklyn depends upon five people who magically speak for those cities; I've overheard a conversation that implied that fellows can find people from afar if they speak certain words; and I was assured that we can save the cities by setting some kind of miraculous fire on the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. Oh, and that I can help with the fire by winning special tinder from a man with two sets of teeth.” Sam gave her a sharp look. “He has two sets of teeth, Jin. Two sets. I saw them. So I'm not judging anything based on whether it sounds sane or not.”

He poured more coffee into her cup. “Ilana says the fuse-work is done, and Constantine and Mike are out of powder for the lances. They need instructions.”

“All right.” Jin stood up, then hesitated. “We should tell Susannah. She needs to be involved. It's only right that she has the final say on whether I go ahead with this or not.”

“I'll get her.”

He left and returned with the single surviving steward of New York and Brooklyn. Susannah sat beside Jin and looked from her to Sam. “Tell me.”

Jin sketched out her ideas as quickly as she could. She kept her eyes on Susannah's face, hoping it would make her seem con­fident, and she tried not to consider whether Susannah thought it all sounded as impossible to believe as Jin did herself.

The fifth steward listened in silence. Only once did she look away, when Jin got to the part about Sam making a wager with Walker. Her dark gray eyes flicked sideways to him, then back to Jin. Her expression did not change.

“What can I do to help?” she asked when Jin had finished.

Jin hesitated. “Say yes, and give us your blessing.”

Susannah smiled. “It's the only plan we have, but it's a good one. I wish I could be of greater help to you. You have my blessing and my thanks.”

“You're welcome,” Jin whispered. “I'll do everything I can.”

The three returned to the parlor. Jin examined Ilana's fuses, which ran along the rows of spikes on the letters, curling around each one before it moved on to the next. “These are beautiful,” she exclaimed, making the younger girl blush with pride. “They really are. I'm not sure I could've done better myself.” She turned and sifted through the crate of lances. “And I admit I was a little leery of letting you lot finish these without me, but they look like they just might work.”