Ever since Amon left, disaster had begun to fall on Duke Town. On the third day after his departure, the town saw its first boy die before his time—the son of Ma Qi, the warrior who had gone missing; he was only fourteen, the same age as Amon. Then within a single month three more children died in succession, the youngest just twelve, the eldest no more than fifteen, and every one of them a boy.
Xiaogu, the town's priest and physician, was helpless against it, for each of those children had died of a sudden illness, and when he examined them afterward with the healing art, all he could find was that their blood and channels seemed to have taken an impact of power far beyond anything they could bear. Xiaogu privately guessed that they must have secretly learned Duke Town's miners' craft before they came of age.
The miners' craft of Duke Town looked simple, as though anyone could take it up, but the drain it worked unnoticed was more than an underage child could bear; once enough of it accumulated, the hidden danger would erupt all at once—and by the time it struck, it was already too late. Aristotle had once explained to Amon the spiritual origin of that ancient divine decree: it truly was protecting the people here. Yet Aristotle himself had never understood the secret workings of the miners' craft.
But Xiaogu and Dasti had no way to punish the townsfolk. For one thing, the children were already dead, and it meant nothing now to press the question of whether they had obtained the guardian god's sanction; for another, the families struck by tragedy would never admit it themselves, and no one had any proof. And of course it was not only those few households that had let their children privately learn the miners' craft—everyone seemed to know, and no one would say so.
To understand how it had come to this, one had to start with Amon.
Amon was only fourteen, yet he had not only completely mastered the miners' craft handed down for generations and could successfully mine godstone, he had also been lucky enough to obtain so many godstones—among them a blue godstone that even Master Xiaogu envied beyond measure. If Amon can do it, why can't our own children?
The boys of Duke Town had helped their elders work the bellows and haul ore since early childhood, and they were far stronger than ordinary children of the same age elsewhere. Amon did not look like the sturdiest of them; he was nothing but the son of the old drunkard, driven by hard living to shoulder a grown man's load ahead of time. But nobody knew that the Old Madman had put Amon through more than two years of that strange cold-spring bathing.
There were the unlucky, and of course there were the lucky; not every child died before his time. Some simply could not learn it, and a lucky few mastered Duke Town's miners' craft ahead of schedule. Such families naturally said nothing—they would never openly tell anyone that a child had mined their godstone.
Honest simplicity and benighted ignorance are often no more than a hair apart. Many people even waited in some nameless hope that their own child might mine a special-grade godstone like Amon. The townsfolk were still whispering among themselves that Amon might also have mined a godstone called the Tears of the Gods, a stone beyond all price.
That lord from the royal capital had once announced in public that the miner who brought up the Tears of the Gods would receive a rich reward from the kingdom—but that anyone who disposed of it privately would suffer the harshest punishment.
Among the present townsfolk of Duke Town, only the Old Madman, Dasti and Xiaogu had ever heard of the Tears of the Gods, and the rest did not even know what sort of godstone it was. No one knew who first secretly suspected that such a stone could be mined only by a child—otherwise, after all these years, with so many people mining so many godstones, why had only Amon gotten one?
That suspicion gradually became a rumor like a plague in Duke Town. People discussed it in private and never said it openly, and in the end it produced one tragedy after another.
The divine decree of the goddess Muyun, guardian god of this place, had become an empty formality—yet outwardly the people showed the gods even more reverence, and the priest Xiaogu an honor never seen before; in his presence they scarcely dared lift their eyes to speak.
The Old Madman grew madder than ever. He was often to be seen before Muyun Temple, brandishing his staff and shouting to himself, "This is a land the gods have cast off, and the gods' punishment is coming… That god is so cruel! But you people here—what are you doing?"
No one paid the Old Madman's ravings any mind; when people saw him coming they went around by another road. Dasti and Xiaogu had no good way to discipline him either—everyone took him for a madman anyway. But Duke Town's tragedies went on, and one boy after another died of sudden illness without the slightest warning.
Did people truly fail to understand that the miners' craft might not suit the underage? Everyone knew it well enough—but other children had succeeded too, not only Amon, and so the tragedies of others were written off as plain bad luck. Cautious households reminded their children to be careful, to watch how their bodies felt and not push themselves too hard, but no one gave up the idea of having a child learn the craft.
How many children in Duke Town had secretly learned the miners' craft before coming of age? The answer was: every boy over ten! Everyone did it, and no one had any reason not to. It was already a half-open secret; people merely took care that no one catch them with proof, and above all that Town Chief Dasti and Master Xiaogu never find out.
It was already very hard to stop this disaster from spreading. Duke Town was not small, but it held only a little over two thousand souls, and its miners' craft had been handed down generation to generation in a closed world.
The hot summer arrived, and this summer was unusually muggy. At night many people did not sleep indoors but cooled off in their courtyards or on the square, spreading out a straw mat or a plank and sleeping until dawn. Then one night those sleeping outdoors suddenly felt a faint chill; they opened their eyes and felt their bodies, and discovered to their astonishment that a fine drizzle was drifting through the air.
Duke Town did not get even a few rains in a whole year, and summer especially was the dry season year after year, when it practically never rained; everyone cheered with delight.
After daybreak the rain had still not stopped, and it gradually grew heavier, the drops falling like a curtain of water onto the parched ground. The clouds overhead stretched as far as the eye could see, covering the Black Fire Thicket to the west and the Xuya Desert to the south. The people grew more and more excited and crowded into Muyun Temple to give thanks to the gods; cheers could be heard at any moment, for the rain was falling hard and had not stopped in a day and a night.
A rain like this could soak through the barren land and desert all around; once the rain passed and the sky cleared, a sea of grass would sprout in the desert, and this year would suit the grazing of great flocks of sheep. Such a thing had happened before, but a downpour this heavy came only once in many years here, and it had always been regarded as a gift of the gods.
It was as though the gods had heard the townsfolk's prayers: the downpour went three days and three nights without a pause. Yet some people were gradually growing uneasy, for no one could remember anything like it.
The gullies and ravines in the Black Fire Thicket were already brimming with water; the low spots of the post road were all drowned, and more mountain floods came pouring down from the Assyria Plateau to the north, spilling across the Black Fire Thicket and closing in on Duke Town. The whole town was surrounded by muddy desert, swamp-ridden thicket, and a plateau pouring out its water.
When people finally realized that something was wrong, they suddenly heard rolling thunder across the sky. Gazing far off at the towering mountains of the Xuya Plateau, they saw them already wrapped in thick cloud, and lightning flashed amid the churning black masses. The people here had almost never heard thunder in their lives, and a fear beyond describing came over them for no reason they could name.
No one in Duke Town cheered anymore. Everyone hid in their leaky houses and prayed to the gods again, hoping this downpour would end at once. But the rain did not stop as they hoped; once the thunder began, the downpour that had already lasted three days and three nights suddenly turned into a torrential deluge, as though the firmament had been torn open in one great gash.
When the thunder began, Gelie, chief priest of Xuya Temple and an eighth-rank grand divine artist, stood on the high city wall, gazing toward the quarter shrouded in low-hanging black cloud and raging lightning, and murmured to himself, "Nietzsche, is this the great disaster you foretold? Has it really come? But then why are you still here in Duke Town?"