Chapter 2
The Hierarchy of Things
The dormitory of Tianlong's East Wing was built for twelve students. It housed twenty-three.
Rank determined space: first-tier students shared rooms of two; second-tier rooms of four; third-tier — where Wei Liang had been placed on the basis of his unclassified awakening — rooms of eight. He had been given the corner bunk, nearest the window, which was the worst position in winter and only marginally acceptable otherwise.
He arrived back from the ceremony to find four of his seven roommates already present, and all four of them watching the door.
Watching, specifically, the figure who stepped through it behind Wei Liang.
Achilles crossed the threshold and stopped. He looked at the room — the low cots, the shared table, the cracked plaster above the window — with the expression of a man trying to determine whether he had been insulted.
"This is where you sleep," he said.
"Yes."
A pause. Then, with something that might have been pragmatism or might have been stoic suffering: "I have slept in worse. The siege camps of Troy had no roofs."
One of the roommates — a stout boy named Peng with a jaw like a river-smoothed stone — found his voice first.
"Is it going to sleep here? It is going to sleep here?"
"He," Wei Liang said.
"He—" Peng pointed — "he is a summon. Summons live in the soul-space. They don't eat, they don't sleep, they don't take up a bed in the dormitory."
Wei Liang looked at Achilles. He had, in fact, not considered this. He had not had time to ask.
Achilles answered the unspoken question. "When you release me into the physical world I remain until recalled. I do not require sleep as you understand it. But I do not sit idle well." He cast an eye around the room. "Is there training? Combat practice?"
"At dawn," Wei Liang said.
"Then I will wait until dawn." He moved to the wall beside Wei Liang's bunk, sat down with his back against the plaster, and rested his sword across his knees.
The roommates exchanged looks.
No one slept particularly soundly that night.
✦ ✦ ✦
Morning brought combat forms and the studied cruelty of peers.
Tianlong Academy operated on a hierarchy as rigid as its stone walls. Beast-summoners of the higher tiers occupied the elevated sparring platforms; lower ranks worked the dust-packed ground of the outer courts. The arrangement was not official — no instructor had decreed it — but it had persisted for two hundred years with the casual permanence of things that benefit those who enforce them.
The sparring platform of the inner court was the domain of one person above all others.
Song Baiyu.
The name moved through the student body the way wind moves through grass — not forcefully, but inevitably, bending everything in its path. Song Baiyu was seventeen, a senior second-year, heir to the Song Dynasty's most celebrated summoner lineage. She stood at the center of the inner platform now in her white training robes, her black hair pinned with a single jade needle, her beast coiled in the air above her.
The Celestial Crane. Pure white. Seven feet from beak to tail. Its call, when it sounded, produced a resonance that disrupted the binding of lesser summons, scattering them back to the soul-space involuntarily. Current tier: 7.2. Potential: 9.1. In a world where most summoners reached a peak of tier 5 and called it a career, Song Baiyu at seventeen was already composing the next chapter of her legend.
Wei Liang watched from the outer court as the Crane performed its morning resonance, its cry cutting across the yard like a scythe.
Several lower-ranked students' summons flickered and vanished.
From beside him, Achilles observed this with mild interest. "The bird destroys summons with sound?"
"The resonance disrupts the binding," Wei Liang said quietly. "Think of it as — the frequency of its call is incompatible with lower-tier bonds. Like a string snapping when the note is too high."
"A useful ability." Achilles was quiet for a moment. "Though I am not a string."
Wei Liang looked at him. There was no arrogance in the statement. It was simply information.
"No," Wei Liang agreed. "I don't think you are."
✦ ✦ ✦
The provocation, when it came, arrived through Fen Zhu, which was how provocations usually arrived — through someone with enough status to take the action but not enough to face consequences for it.
It came during the afternoon combat assessment, when students paired off to test their beasts in measured exchanges. Wei Liang had been assigned — by instructor arrangement, which was no accident — to face Fen Zhu.
Fen Zhu's Thunder Leopard was everything a third-tier beast was supposed to be: fast, aggressive, its coat crackling with stored electrical discharge, its eyes the yellow-white of lightning at close range. It had been with Fen Zhu for nine years. They moved together with the ease of long partnership.
Wei Liang summoned Achilles.
The reaction from the surrounding students was predictable. Laughter — some open, some politely concealed. Whispers about humanoid summons. The received wisdom of two centuries of summoner tradition said that beasts outclassed humans in every category that mattered: raw power, instinctual combat ability, elemental affinity, endurance. The only humanoid summons on record were classified at tier 2 or below, useful only as scouts or messengers.
Fen Zhu smiled the smile of a boy whose victory has already been written.
"Come then, orphan. Let's see what a dead general's child has to offer."
The Thunder Leopard launched itself forward. It moved the way lightning moves — not fast so much as suddenly present at a different location — its forepaws leading, electricity spiking from its claws in white arcs.
Achilles stepped to the side.
Not back. Not away. He stepped to the side with the unhurried economy of a man who has been doing this for longer than his opponent has been alive, and the Leopard's claws found empty air where his torso had been.
The beast corrected instantly — it was well-trained — and swung with its back paw, a strike that carried enough force to crack stone.
Achilles caught it.
Not blocked. Caught — his right hand closing around the beast's ankle in mid-swing, the electric discharge crackling across his bronze armor and dissipating. He held the Leopard suspended for one full second, long enough for every watching student to register what they were seeing, then set it down.
Gently. As if it were someone's pet.
The Thunder Leopard scrambled back to Fen Zhu's side, making a sound it had apparently never made before — something between a snarl and a question.
Fen Zhu stared.
The watching students said nothing. The laughter was gone.
"Again," the combat instructor said, after a pause. His voice was very carefully neutral.
But Fen Zhu did not send his Leopard again. He was looking at Achilles the way people look at things they have revised their estimate of — with the particular humiliation of a man who realizes the story he told himself was wrong.
"Acceptable performance," the instructor noted in his record, which was the most enthusiasm he was known to show.
Wei Liang released Achilles back to the soul-space.
As he turned toward the barracks, Song Baiyu was watching him from the elevated platform. He could not read her expression at this distance. She looked at him for three seconds, then returned her attention to her Crane.
Three seconds was the longest Song Baiyu had looked at anyone outside her own circle in two years.
Fen Zhu noticed. His jaw set like a man swallowing something bitter.