Ancestors, I've just killed a demon! The thought intoxicated him all through the night, putting sleep out of his reach. Just before dawn, Xi dislodged the warm, drooling child, and picked his way out of the hut, between the sleepers. They snored now because he killed the demon!

Sore and thirsty, Xi resigned himself to the throbbing pain. He chewed on some snow and stretched fatigue out of his limbs in the fresh morning air. The light of the still invisible sun cut jagged swathes into shadows shaped like the peaks behind his back.

It became much warmer by the time he descended to the floor of the valley, so going through the city gates, he shrugged out of his overcoat. It did not improve his appearance or stench, but he blended well with the merchants crowding the thoroughfare to the markets. He trailed after them and their donkeys loaded with dry apricots, chickens, and late-season green through the maze of the streets to the warrens of the market. In the overwhelming clash of colours and sounds, his eyes glued to a donkey's tail swatting the flies. Maybe the beast was penning a searing critique of his owners with that brush in the air, using the unmentionable for ink.

Still grinning at this imbecile thought, a product of the sleepless night, Xi lifted his head up.

Ancestors!

The locals used to Tarkan's skyline had to yell at him before he snapped his gaping mouth shut and stopped obstructing the traffic.

He'd never seen anything as blue as the domes of Tarkan before.

Bluer than blue. Zijun would have called it azure. But Zijun was not here, because he did not take her with him. Guilt sank its teeth deep into his chest, but he did not let it tear a strip out of his hsin.

He found a quieter corner where he could stand unharassed to enjoy the view. The blue helmet-shaped dome rested in the middle with four soaring towers each crowned by the smaller domes surrounding it. The three identical walls completed the complex, one in front of the domed temple, the other two - running perpendicular to it, bordered by those slim towers, the fingers pointing to Heavens. The walled-off space was full of young men, deep in contemplation or reading.

No women-scholars here either, he thought, missing Zijun. She would have loved to have a place in this square, among the scholars. Not him though. He spent years bending over books, now he wanted to gawk, and gloat a little, flaunt the freedom he'd earned. The freedom of not looking up and quoting what ten thousand men had thought before him.

Every surface in the plaza was covered in a pattern so intricate, and yet so symmetrical, and so blue that Xi's eyes watered. The scarlets of the dragons' scales, the gold of fenghuang's feathers, the black of lacquers, the white of jade, the green of moss... he had an experience of it. But the pricey lapis lazuli that coloured the domes, and every tiny bit used to embroider over the limestone, the colour that dared to overshadow the larger dome of sky above it, it took his breath away.

Once, a long time ago, his mother had dressed up as he had never seen her dress before, silks embroidered with silver, white jade at her ears and in her hair, her face painted over to make it beautiful but alien to him. She had taken him from their small sanctuary in the provinces to Sutao. And Sutao had stolen his breath away too, but at least he had known back then that he was about to behold the greatest city in Tiandi, the jewel under Heavens.

Tarkan was not supposed to impact him like this, for the barbarians could not have comprehended the beauty of the lines, could not have achieved the understanding of symmetry to create the sublime... It made no more sense than the white-clad students bending over the books being of the same stock as the merchants that hacked into dirt and filled the air with pungent curses.

They did understand, and he was smitten.

If Tarkan challenged the blue of the sky, the blue he until now beheld in the ponds rather than set in stone, then anything could lay farther down the Sunset Road.

Anything could be beyond the reach of his hsin - and his mother had seen it.

His knees shook.

And to think he was so proud of being a demon-slayer at the dawn of this very day...

Before he could think of nothing else but to face his mother, to ask where she had been all these years, why she was tarrying in Tarkan. Now he knew he could not do this in a tunic stained with blood and dust, wiping his nose on the sleeve like he was still four.

She wanted him to be a mage, and that's what he was, someone who could squeeze a breath out of a man and lay waste with magic. No, I've slain a demon... she will see someone who could kill a demon.

Xi could not stand being dirty for another moment.

The city's layout was imprinted in his memory, from when he had peered at the magic map. He found a bathhouse, not much of a feat since every neighbourhood seemed to have at least one.

The rotund owner took one look at the state of his clothes and asked for money upfront. The sight of Xi's silver promoted him to a 'master', and his clothes disappeared to be washed and dried, while he was drawn into the steamy cavern, wrapped in a sheet.

Something in their smiles made Xi uneasy, but it was too late. In Tarkan, they took cleanliness seriously. In Tarkan, there was no rinsing. In Tarkan, they beat the dirt out of a man, boiled it off, and sealed the deal with the waters of the streams chilled by snowmelt runoff.

Once Xi finished yelping after that last revelation, the attendant who likely moonlighted as the Tarkan's head torturer, inserted a clay bowl of tea in his hands. Xi sipped obediently, mellow and heavy-lidded after his ordeal. By now his ear got used to the western accent, and he picked familiar words from the endless stream of lilting, gurgling dialect. "Healing paste, no scars, ah, as smooth as new. For the girls, ah? The most beautiful girls live in Tarkan, you'll see."

"Ah, yes?" Xi managed in response, before the globe of ointment smelling of tarragon got smeared over his cheek, adding the stinging on top of the throbbing.

"Aha, aha." The man stepped back to eye his handiwork with pride, then added delicately, "If Master wants, we sell a very potent potion for virility."

Xi held his oily gaze for a long moment to shut off the word-flow. "Potions don't work on mages, friend."

"Oh, a mage, of course, of course, we have served mages! Mages, beis, generals, you name it, Master, they've all liked our bathhouse, and the potion, aha, aha, very strong..."

He sighed, closed his eyes, and extended his half-empty tea bowl to the man. By the time the attendant took it, the remaining tea was a solid block of dark ice, and its rim was frosted over.

The attendant stared into the bowl, turned it around, shook it, until the ice fell out. "A mage, aha, aha..."

Showing off felt quite satisfactory, if stupid. Particularly when he caught a reflection of a pitying look in the mirror while being helped into his cleaned tunic. "No potion, then..."

Xi still tipped him. The infatuation with virility and misplaced pity was nothing new to him.

The attendant was right about one thing though: the girls of the Azure City were beautiful. Or at least the ones on display by the curtained doors of the lane he took to shortcut to the city's western wards, were. He noticed braids as long as the girls were tall and curls so tight they looked like metalwork; he gleaned seductresses paler than the moon right next to the ones of the deep-violet dusk. The unfamiliar music spilling from the doors abandoned all caution, talking up the beauty of right now, the value of passion, and the need to enjoy both before it's too late.

The barbaric plucking of strings made Xi miss Zijun's measured qin. He had never felt more alone than in this quarter that offered the companionship in every price range. He had never been a foreigner with his pockets lined with silver before, and he suddenly missed being dirty and indistinguishable in the tired morning crowd.

Luckily, his mother's house was away from the busy streets, of moderate size, and tidy. A large tree, every branch dotted with myriad orange berries, overshadowed the courtyard. The door was locked.

Xi straightened his tunic, touched the bristle cropping up from his skull, took a deep breath in and froze.

To be here, he gambled his sanity, he gave up his place, he crossed the land on the back of a magic bird, and he killed a demon.

Ancestors, I don't have to meditate to knock on the door!

He made a fist to knock, lifted it...

... and he had to meditate first.