A group of students had gathered, and approached us at the bottom of the stairs. They fell to one knee and saluted us.
‘Up you get,’ I said. ‘Say hello to the boss man.’
They grinned shyly, some of them obviously intimidated.
‘Lucy,’ John said, and waved Miss Chen towards us.
She came and fell to one knee as well.
‘Spread out and face True Way, everybody,’ John said. He spread his arms and turned to face Yuzhengong, the Hall of the True Way, and we all moved as he directed. ‘Now. Eighty-eight form Yang-style Tai Chi Chuan.’
‘We have to move into ranks,’ one of the students said urgently. ‘We can’t just be scattered like this.’
A few students were still arriving and trotted to join the group.
John turned back to face them. ‘Scattered is what you want. Order is good, but chaos is the force that rules the universe, and you must learn to accept it and embrace it, and bend rather than break when it strikes. Yes, when your Masters say to be in ordered ranks, there is purpose. But right here, right now, there will be power in the chaos.’ He waved a few straggling students closer. ‘Not too close to the Western edge, give yourselves room to complete the set.’
He looked around, then spoke silently. Anyone arriving late join the back of the group. He turned and shifted his feet so that he was in position, and we fell into silence as we joined him.
‘Touch the Earth. Touch the sky. Breathe the purity of the chi. Commence,’ John said.
As we performed the first twenty moves of the set, more students arrived, quietly joining the group and catching up with us. They stopped arriving at about the twenty-fifth move, but I didn’t notice; I lost my awareness into the graceful beauty of the set and the joy of completing it with John and Simone together.
Shortly after my awareness disconnected from reality and I lost myself into the set, the air around us began to vibrate with each move we made. The Immortals had generated shen energy and were carrying it on their hands. I kept my chi inside, holding it close to preserve my strength. With each move we made, the air sang: a musical note that rose and fell with our movements, clear and full of the warmth of the chi and shen.
Some exclamations of astonishment came from the students behind us, but as more of them joined the trance state, the singing became louder, filling the court with musical tones that turned the moving meditation of the Tai Chi into a symphony of perfect sounds.
As we completed the set and released the energy, the sounds faded and the air seemed to have become even clearer. John turned, grabbed Simone and me and pulled us into a hug so fierce I thought he would kill us.
The Masters who had joined the set quietly shepherded the students back to their classes, leaving the three of us alone in the forecourt that still resonated with energy.
‘Did that happen because you’re here, Daddy?’ Simone said.
‘Many things will happen when I am fully returned,’ he said. ‘I don’t have much longer.’ He bent to kiss me, then pulled back and gazed into my eyes. ‘My Emma.’ He turned and embraced Simone again, and kissed the top of her head. ‘My little girl, my Simone.’
‘Daddy,’ she said, crushed into his chest, and then he was gone.
Simone wiped her eyes and sighed. ‘I always thought Tai Chi was kind of boring. I think I’ll do it more often now.’
‘Don’t let him hear you say that,’ I said. ‘He’ll say he’s failed as a Master.’
She leaned into me and smiled. ‘He’s back at the bottom of the lake. It won’t be long now, Emma. And then we have to arrange a big fancy wedding.’ She ran away giggling.
I rested on a bench next to a bridge over one of the gorges on the way back to the administrative complex. I was still too weak to handle long distances. The mists had cleared, but the bottom of the gorge wasn’t visible; the Masters often teased the students by claiming, while they were floating over them, that the gorges were bottomless. Chanting from one of the temples, accompanied by a wooden drum, drifted in and out of earshot, adding to the warm buzz of sound that was the Mountain.
I wished I could conjure some tea and retire to one of the pagodas sitting high on the cliffs. Instead, I clumsily pulled myself to my feet and headed towards the offices.
The administrative buildings were terraced into the hillside on the eastern side of the complex, and small by necessity because of the steepness. The larger residential and training buildings were closer to the centre, where there was more available flat land. The buildings were joined together with breezeways that meandered through them, containing stairs that joined the levels. Each breezeway had red columns holding up the traditional bracketed roof, which had scenes of birds and flowers painted on the panels just below it. My office stood on the southern side of the cluster, hard against the side of the mountain. It had been designed as the office for John’s second-in-command and I’d appropriated it as the most suitable place for me — right next to him when he came back.
An ancient cypress tree, twisted with age, stood guard in front of the doorway. I touched its trunk as I passed and it shifted its branches slightly in response. It wasn’t a Shen or sentient as such, but it was aware of the comings and goings around it and seemed to enjoy the times when I performed a Tai Chi set in the small clearing beneath it.
Yi Hao nodded to me as I went past her desk. I stopped when I saw who was in my waiting room.
One of the Tiger’s Horsemen stood against the wall, guarding two of my young nephews. Mark, slender, dark-haired and dark-eyed, was Amanda’s son. Jennifer’s son, Andrew, had an unruly thatch of sandy hair and bright blue eyes similar to my own. They were both fourteen years old, but Andrew was ten centimetres taller than Mark. His father, Leonard, was tall. They both rose as I came in and gave me quick hugs.
‘Both of you here for a visit at the same time? What’s the occasion?’ I said.
They shared a quick look, then Mark said, ‘Can we talk to you, Aunty Emma?’
‘Sure,’ I said, gesturing towards the office. ‘Come on in.’ I nodded again to Yi Hao. ‘Anything urgent?’
‘Nothing urgent, ma’am,’ she said.
‘Good.’ I took the boys into my office, closed the door and leaned on the desk. ‘Is there a problem, guys? It’s not like you to be up here on the Celestial Plane, Mark. You know your mother prefers you to stay on the Earthly.’
Both of them fell to one knee and saluted me Chinese-style.
I jumped up. ‘None of that, you’re family, get up off your knees right now.’
They didn’t rise. ‘Please permit us to join the Dark Disciples, ma’am,’ Mark said. ‘We want to learn the Arts.’
‘I’m not listening to anything you have to say until you’re back on your feet where you belong,’ I said. ‘There’s absolutely no need to kowtow to me.’
‘We want to,’ Andrew said, but they rose anyway. ‘We want to acknowledge you as Master, learn the Arts, and do some of the stuff your Disciples can do.’
I went around the desk and flopped into my chair, then waved for them to sit. ‘They’re not my Disciples, they’re Xuan Wu’s. And I don’t think this is a good idea.’
‘We want to learn,’ Andrew said, stubborn. He glanced at Mark. ‘Both of us.’
‘Your mothers would kill me. They’d chop me into very small pieces with my own sword.’
‘We want different names,’ Mark said. ‘Our names are so boring