Padma was humiliated, trapped, rolled inside a tapestry like a human spring roll.

White Crane, whom Padma had come to assassinate, stood stern and tall, with the presence of age but none of its frailty. She had cut the heavy cloth down on Padma’s head seconds before, deftly entangling her in a way that completely nullified her unique martial capabilities.

“We find ourselves repeating history,” White Crane said. She referred to the broad outlines of their situation. This was not the first time that Padma, having failed to kill the enigmatic elder of the Order of the Celestial Dawn, found herself bound and impotent for her trouble.

Although young, Padma was not accustomed to being rendered ineffectual. She had killed dozens, if not hundreds, at the behest of those who paid her family to carry out its black deeds. Prior to White Crane, none had ever survived her exquisite attentions, much less survived them several times running.

White Crane continued. “Happily, our past experience suggests a way we might resolve a situation such as this one, and to our mutual benefit.” She referred, now, to the way Padma would accept a different mission of death, this one on behalf of White Crane and the Order, as a condition of Padma’s own continued life.

White Crane certainly knew that letting Padma live in exchange for such service would result in another attempt on her life days, weeks, or months from today. Padma burned to think that White Crane felt Padma posed little enough danger that she was willing to risk those future attempts. An alternate explanation – and more comforting, so Padma chose to believe it, instead – was that Padma’s missions on the Order’s behalf were of such great value that White Crane was willing to risk future attempts on her life in order to seize the opportunity they represented.

Padma didn’t object to killing on the Order’s behalf, but was humiliated to have failed to execute White Crane in…how many attempts had it been, now? She resolved now that she would succeed in killing White Crane next time. In admitting to herself that there would be a next time, she realized she had again convinced herself to accept the mission White Crane had already begun to outline.

“…of the Fan Prefecture, in the plateaus. Its governor, Nyima Tsenpo, will be the object of your intention.”

Padma’s attention had lapsed. She silently rebuked herself.

“Its governor? His people claim him as their king. He is known to be right and virtuous. Does your Order not–”

“What is less known,” White Crane cut her off, “is that he has made a secret alliance with the Covenant of Twilight to betray his people to his neighbors for a ransom of silver. Although it has not yet come to pass, he will betray his virtue.”

This neither surprised Padma nor confirmed any cherished worldview. Human nature was what it was; people acted as they would. Some were virtuous, others less so, and the barrier in between was as thin as paper, where there was a barrier at all. She made no response.

“Do you accept this undertaking, in return for your freedom, and do you vow that you will not make another attempt on my life until Tsenpo lies dead?”

“Yes,” replied Padma. “Not until he lies dead.”

*

Nyima Tsenpo’s hall of audience bustled, as always. His dinner had just begun, but the throng of petitioners had not begun to abate. They had been wronged by their neighbors, bore grievances against his administrators, sought forgiveness and donations and blessings. If he did not eat while seeing to his peoples’ affairs, he would not eat, ever. It made him weary.

Tsenpo raised his first bite of heavy brown rice, but froze with his hand slim inches from his parted lips.

One of his servants – one of a dozen dressed in similar simple robes, the one who had submissively handed him the bowl just seconds before and had been rapidly making her way away from him – also froze at this interruption. She breathed in sync with her master, eyes focused on the bite of food he had been about to ingest.

“It is out of the question,” said Tsenpo with neither rebuke nor kindness, lowering the rice back to its bowl. He wiped his hand on his garment as he addressed the minor functionary who sought his intervention. The man bowed and retreated.

The line of those who had come to beseech Nyima Tsenpo shuffled forward, coiling around the wall of the chamber, each of them now one moment closer to his own audience.

Tsenpo sighed wearily and set his still-full bowl aside, waving his hand to have it taken away.

The servant who had watched him so closely stepped back toward him. Her skin was a darker color than the others attending him, darker than nearly all those who claimed Nyima Tsenpo as their liege.

It was Padma.

As one hand emerged from her robe’s sleeve to take the bowl, the other emerged from its own sleeve wrapped with a serpentine shadow, and–

Suddenly, a shape leapt from among the petitioners, a peasant in ragged clothing and a wide hat, flying through the air with impossible speed, arms outstretched and tatters flapping behind him.

From Padma’s hand shot a mottled black and green snake, flying toward Nyima Tsenpo’s bare face and neck.

The ragged peasant plucked the snake from the air as he passed over its trajectory, grasping it behind its head, landing in a crouch behind the governor. The snake thrashed furiously.

For all the bustle the hall had seen a split second before, this unexpected eruption of nigh-unbelievable action rendered its multitude suddenly silent and motionless…save Padma, and the one who had just saved Nyima Tsenpo’s life.

The governor’s flying defender cocked back his arm to heave the snake toward a high window, but did a double-take as he noticed that the serpent had been transformed, while in his hand, into a strange bracelet. It was a snake, to be sure – but one made of some black metal, turning back upon itself to eat its own tail.

He threw it out the window anyway.

Padma was already moving on the governor again, and by this time, the multitude was in frantic motion, backing away from Tsenpo, assassin, and intercessor.

The strange peasant-champion swept his hat from his head and leapt into a position between Padma and her target.

In a fluid arc, he continued swinging his hat to intercept a second snake, which Padma still held by its tail. It closed wicked fangs around his hat’s brim before releasing its jaw to coil once more within Padma’s robe.

The old man – for the removal of his hat had revealed his long, white hair and deeply wrinkled face – fell into a defensive stance. “Leave this place,” he said to Padma.

Without hesitation, Padma erupted into a fountain of blows, now aimed at the old man rather than the one she had come to kill.

The old man ducked and dodged each cut and kick of her hands and feet, parrying lunging snakes with his hat. Trails of his wispy hair followed the movements of his head like delicate willow strands blown by an insane wind.

“Return…home…to kill no more,” he advised Padma, judiciously doling out his words between her blows.

Ignoring him, she launched a knife-fingered strike at his eyes. He dodged to the side and grasped Padma’s wrist, striking her neck with a single finger. The apparently delicate touch made both of her arms fall uselessly to her sides.

Her eyes widened; she backed away. Then, looking down briefly at each shoulder, she focused her will, set her face rigidly in some unseen exertion, and flexed her arms to life once more.

Padma renewed her attack, spinning through the air, toes lighting only briefly on the ground between her spinning arcs of fist and foot.

The old man waited patiently for the correct moment, dodging the attacks as they came, then simply reached out to stop her whirling orbits with a single action of both hands. He wrenched one of her feet from the air and threw it violently to the ground, then ducked the striking bite of a hooded snake that erupted from the back of Padma’s collar as she crashed down.

Through it all, the old man kept his body between Padma and Nyima Tsenpo.

Padma leapt back to her feet and intensified her attack; the old man countered each swing and turned aside every serpent as quickly as it lashed out.

Padma’s robes were now cast aside. Although few remained in the hall, all could see her exotic foreign dress and the abundance of jewelry she wore: bracelets, armlets, pendants, earrings, belts, charms, and rings. All were worked with the patterns of snakes, and each was apparently capable of taking on a life of its own at any moment.

The governor had retreated into a corner as Padma and the old man fought, drawing the combatants behind him as Padma advanced and his defender intervened.

The members of the governor’s guard had been caught utterly unawares when the battle had erupted in their midst seconds before, but now they formed a half-ring around the three, slowly closing in to pin them against the wall.

The governor was too well defended by his aged and unasked-for protector, and the noose was closing behind her. Padma snarled frustrated hatred at the old man and then leapt upward and sideways, defying gravity, flying in an arc that took her to a high, upper window.

Like that, she was gone.

*

It was dark and wet on the roof of the manor hall, rain pounding on slick tiles as Padma fled across the lower of the sloped roof’s two tiers.

A dark shape – the old man – flew up over the edge of the roof behind her.

She leapt to the roof’s higher tier and continued running.

“Do you intend to return?” he shouted after her into the wind and rain. He leapt after her to the second tier. “I suspect you consider your work unfinished.”

He pursued her lightly, feet barely touching the slick tiles even as Padma missed a step, slipping briefly before catching herself.

Padma stopped suddenly and turned back to him.

“What business of is it of yours?” she shouted in frustration.

“I tend the Divine Spark,” he replied, ceasing his pursuit out of her arms’ reach. “My purposes are those of the Order of the Celestial Dawn.”

“Fool!” Padma shrieked at him. “My task was set by White Crane, an elder of that Order!”

“Yes,” he replied.

Padma stared at him dumbly, uncomprehending.

“Tell her that Lu Chen bade you kill no more.”

“You are Lu Chen?”

“I am.”

She stood still, in a half-crouch, considering this and him, as the rain pelted them. In the storm, no one below noticed them on the roofs of Nyima Tsenpo’s palace compound.

“Very well,” she told him. “I depart this place.”

She turned and walked away, squaring her back to him.

Lu Chen watched her. His eyes narrowed. “Your voice and heart are out of accord,” he called after her. “You have no intention of withdrawing.”

She turned back, fire in her eyes. “You ask the impossible!” She took three running steps and leapt at him.

Lu Chen dropped and slid down the wet slope of the roof on his hip and thigh, planting a foot upon a dragon ornament at the roof’s edge and then bounding back to his feet some distance from Padma.

“Studied inaction is often more difficult than the ill-considered deed,” he said, his calm voice carrying impossibly well in the noise of the storm. “But it is far from impossible.”

“You misunderstand.” She looked beyond Lu Chen to the ground, where guards were running in the courtyards. Still, they remained unnoticed. “The calling of assassin is the destiny and curse of my house. No other way is open to us.”

“Else?”

“Else we are crushed by the wheels and gears of ill karma.”

“How do you know?”

“I left it behind once, and it came to worse than naught.” Padma’s face twisted at harrowing memories.

Lu Chen took a half-step and flew the rest of the way back to the roof’s apex. “Better to endure one’s own ill-fortune than extinguish the Spark of another.”

Padma looked down again. The courtyard swarmed. She looked back to Lu Chen. “You are greatly concerned with the well-being of others. Are you a healer?”

“It is the most virtuous calling,” he nodded.

Padma nodded too, and then suddenly leapt down the slope of the roof, running toward its lip.

Lu Chen did the same, following her in parallel.

In a flash of lightning, those below saw the pair of them as they reached the edge of the roof and arced through the air, falling toward the ground.

Padma landed on her feet in the midst of guards, peasants, and functionaries. Her arms were a blaze among them. Where she reached, her nails were talons. The serpents about her body sprang to life, thrashing and striking.

“Madness!” cried Lu Chen, but the circle of bystanders around Padma’s whirlwind were already falling to the ground. Some collapsed from the force of her punches and kicks, others woozily toppling as her serpents’ venom acted as quickly as their hearts’ beating.

“Save these then, healer, and follow me not!” she cried to Lu Chen, and bounded into the crowd.

One bystander vomited a fountain of frothing blood onto the wet paving stones at Lu Chen’s feet.

He looked after the fleeing Padma, anguished, but knelt immediately beside this innocent and placed a hand on his chest. Closing his eyes, he focused the healing power of his chi, while Padma escaped into the storm.

*

The first rays of sun suggested themselves, before they pierced the sky’s dark veil, as a mist of light in the east. But the shadows among the homes and hovels near the entrance to Nyima Tsenpo’s compound were still dark, and would remain impenetrable for a few minutes more.

The guard at the gate came alert as a figure weary from travel approached, seeking entrance.

“I would enter our lordship’s precincts, to bring word of things near and far, as he himself has commanded.” This formal sentence was spoken a hundred times a day at this gate as the apparatus of the administration carried forth information from the governor’s mouth and returned to pour it into his ears.

But whereas the guard would normally recite an equally formal reply and stand aside for the functionary before him, instead he replied, “Our lord has retreated to his summer palace. Return home, until the word goes out that he has returned.”

The functionary blinked in surprise. He stood still for a moment, then turned in confusion and began to walk away from the gate. The guard resumed his station.

Past them both, in the concealing shadows within their earshot but outside their attention, a shadowy figure had overheard what she had sought to learn.

*

Padma passed among the trees and shrubs of the woodland without noise. Though she trod upon dried leaves and delicate twigs, they did not break beneath her steps.

She placed her hand on a slender tree trunk, and without evidence of exertion, scampered up it.

Up within its leafy crown, shielding her eyes from the sun – it was a placid and beautiful day – she looked through the foliage to Nyima Tsenpo’s summer palace. It was an elegant series of structures blending harmoniously with its surroundings and gathered in the usual style around a central courtyard.

She saw little activity. The honor guard at the gate stood ready, and minor bustle inside the compound suggested that the governor was, as she had overheard, in residence here.

Padma leapt gracefully to a closer tree, and then another. The bending of their trunks as she passed was no more noticeable than the motions of other trees swaying in the breeze.

When she achieved the ring of trees closest to the compound, she glanced at the gate guards once more. She delayed until their attentions were naturally fixed on some other point, and fell lightly to the ground at a run.

She crossed the open space in a heartbeat, leapt, and bounced lightly off the compound’s outside wall – which was also the back wall of some inward-facing building – and was up onto its roof in the blink of an eye, silent and unseen.

Running lightly across the roof, she shed the light, brown-mottled cloak she had been wearing, letting it fall behind her as a serpent sheds its skin. She drew a dagger from her belt, and the snakes across her body rippled in preparation of the task before them.

Padma slowed for a moment at the edge of the roof, looking down into the courtyard.

It was empty, now. She frowned; less busy than she would have expected.

She took a step off the edge of the roof, landing in a shadow.

Across the courtyard stood the manor. There, no doubt, the governor’s chambers would be found.

She watched once more, for a moment, and then she disappeared to some other shadow.

*

Inside the governor’s chambers, silk curtains cordoned off a small area where the governor’s silhouette sat in repose, meditative, atop cushions. An attendant stood at the edge of the room by a structural pillar, writing implements at hand atop a small wooden table, should they be needed. A pair of guards flanked the open main doorway, facing outward into to the hall’s outer antechamber.

The attendant suddenly wobbled and fell to the ground. He landed silently, the guards and governor unaware.

A shadow moved from behind the pillar toward the silk curtains.

Gracefully, the shadow stooped; a serpent slithered from her gentle hands onto the floor. A second later, it disappeared between two of the silk curtains…

…and in that split second, the figure within jumped into action. His arms were a blur, holding a silk bolt that swooped and then scooped. In a blink, the snake was imprisoned within an impromptu pouch, held at arm’s length and dropped to the ground where it thrashed impotently, spewing venom uselessly into the gauzy fabric.

Lu Chen pulled aside a curtain and emerged.

“Go,” he directed the pair of guards, who had only just noticed the all-but-silent breach of peace behind them and begun to turn around.

Shocked at Padma’s wraith-like appearance but nevertheless professionally composed, they nodded respectfully in assent and retreated from the room, closing the door behind them.

Padma raised an eyebrow at this, but kept her focus on Lu Chen. “You are in direct alliance with Nyima Tsenpo, now, then? Even as you must surely be aware that be plots – even now – to betray his people to the agents of your enemy?”

“I am allied with him in that I will not allow you to extinguish the Divine Spark placed within him by the will of the heavens.”

Padma grunted.

“Return home,” Lu Chen said. The gently issued command had the force of a mighty general’s order to his legions, but Padma was unmoved.

“Only when he lies dead,” she responded.

“That is truly your wish?”

“That is my vow.”

Lu Chen nodded, disappointed. “An invitation that you leave in peace would be issued without benefit. Your amicable departure would only presage a murderous return.”

“You shall not have my peaceful departure in any case, Lu Chen. Clearly, only by your death will I be permitted to discharge my obligation.” She laughed then, short and derisive. “My obligation to your Order , to carry out an act that would benefit hundreds, if not thousands.”

She suddenly lunged forward, her wicked dagger the leading point of her attack, serpents springing to life across her body from circlets, bracelets, belts, and clasps.

Lu Chen also leapt, toward rather than away from her, and knocked her dagger aside with a blow to her wrist. He then contorted to avoid lightning-strikes from a scattered bouquet of lashing vipers.

He extended a fist toward her throat. Predicting her block, his counter-strike was already in motion, sweeping his leg underneath her own to knock her to the ground.

Horizontal in mid-air, Padma rolled to grab Lu Chen’s trailing leg as it passed underneath her. Catching it, she stole its momentum to pitch herself back to her feet, throwing Lu Chen off balance.

Lu Chen responded by simply collapsing backward, rolling along his spine, throwing his feet up and over, somersaulting through the air to land lightly on his feet just outside the reach of a lunge and kick.

“Why protect one whom you know has betrayed your allies?” Padma asked.

“We have not yet been betrayed. Who knows what this one, or that one, will do in the future? Within each of us lies the limitless potential of the celestial gods.”

“Some have more potential than others.”

“Each Spark reflects the whole potential of the universe. All are equally limitless.”

Padma stared at him blankly, the subtlety of his point beyond her. “Why fight me? Turn your attention to more fruitful pursuits.”

“I am here, now, where there are two souls to save.”

“Two...?”

“Which is to leave uncounted,” Lu Chen continued, “the souls those two might touch, or be dissuaded from ending, in the lifetimes before each of them.”

Padma suddenly relaxed her defensive posture and stood up at ease, the various serpents coiling about her returning to inactivity and fading into her adornments. “How many souls could one person touch, I wonder?” She tugged her ear in thought.

Lu Chen also relaxed. “One Spark might touch one thousand thous—”

Lu Chen suddenly threw himself into the air, dodging by only a split second a three-inch serpent Padma had flung at him, transformed from the hoop that had dangled from her ear.

She followed this surprising attack with long steps, advancing on Lu Chen as a windstorm of punches, cuts, jabs, kicks. Lu Chen gave way purposefully, blocking each thrust, parrying every attack, stepping aside as her whirlwind bore down.

As he sidestepped out of a corner into which Padma had nearly maneuvered him, she coughed violently from deep within her chest; he ducked a sticky globule of flying spittle, which sputtered and smoked where it landed on the wooden wall behind him.

Padma fell back, into a defensive crouch. She breathed hard; he, no less so.

Again, impasse.

“You are a madman!” she cried at last.

“You have much to learn,” he replied.

“Then let one of us die now,” she said. She began sinking slowly once more into her favored posture of attack.

Then, suddenly, in the silence marked only by their deep breaths, there was a commotion outside.

They heard a voice shout out, “Tsenpo’s steward comes! He comes! Open the gate!”

Brief moments passed as Padma and Lu Chen searched each others’ faces for a forecast of any attack, while each strained their ears to hear more.

Their attentiveness was rewarded moments later with the sounds of the gate being opened, terse words being spoken, and then a wail of despair.

Padma dropped her stance of attack and backed away from Lu Chen.

Lu Chen began to move toward the hall’s door.

Each kept watchful eyes on the other as Padma scurried up the pillar by which she had entered the room and Lu Chen made his way toward the door.

Each departed the room simultaneously.

*

In the courtyard, Tsenpo’s steward stood before the woman charged with maintaing the household at the summer palace as she knelt on the ground, weeping. The household guardsmen – less than a dozen, a skeleton crew assembled for show to safeguard the impostor-governor Lu Chen – stood dumbfounded.

Lu Chen emerged from the manor house. He looked at the scene and deduced the news the steward must have brought instantly.

“The governor is dead,” he surmised flatly.

“It is so,” the steward confirmed. “It appears there is more than one assassin in this world against whom our vigilance must be raised.”

Across the courtyard, atop the storehouse by which she had gained access, Padma also heard these words. Without hesitation, she turned and leaped down outside the compound, taking no care to hide her departure.

Some of the guard turned at this motion and made ready to give chase, but they looked to the steward first, who looked in turn to Lu Chen.

Lu Chen shook his head. “Her vow is fulfilled, even if by the hand of another. She will trouble this household no further.”

*

White Crane dismounted her horse and crossed a small field of perfectly raked gravel to the doorway of a modest wooden house, leaving a trail of her footprints behind.

She opened the door and waited for her eyes to adjust; there was no light inside.

“White Crane,” Lu Chen’s voice came from the darkness. He sat motionless, meditative, facing away from the door, his eyes closed.

“Lu Chen, you are a fool.”

“We are all fools.”

“While you delayed our virtuous action, the Covenant of Twilight assassinated their own man while making our involvement known to all.”

“A perverse course of action,” Lu Chen responded.

“This will make the attempt to recruit others like Nyima Tsenpo to our side, away from Twilight, the more difficult!” she raged. “It is as though you care nothing for our cause!”

“To the contrary,” he said. “If we do not walk unerringly down the path of our conviction, whatever victories we gain in our cause’s name will be for naught.”

“You would win the war, then, by losing each of its battles?” she asked contemptuously.

He did not respond, and after several silent moments, White Crane turned on her heel and departed, faced fixed in anger.

After she had gone and the air was still once more, Lu Chen spoke:

“I would concede the entire war, if by such surrender it could be won.”