She is cold in manner, and solitary. Beyond what ordinary talk requires, she will not spend a single extra word.
She seems to be nothing more than an ordinary woman, and who she is remains unknown. The story goes that she joined Mirage a few years ago and at once found favour with the Lord of Mirage, and that she commands the huge dragon-boat, the Silver Dragon, ranging over the waters of the Southern Wulin.
And yet, for some reason, whenever she faced Soul and Zuo Shang, sent by The Order to look into the Southern Wulin, there was always something in her expression worth thinking about. What, in the end, can she do inside this tangled game? Time… will give the answer.
Her footwork is quick and sure. When she twists and turns she is, to ordinary eyes, no more than a silver line drawn through the air, and before an opponent has understood what is happening, her dagger is already in their flesh.
What she is best at is her archery. With that footwork under her and the Sha-Chi in her own body behind it, she can loose several arrows of startling force in the space of a breath, and the moment each one touches an enemy she sets off the Sha-Chi stored in the arrowhead — an explosion that does heavy damage, and that an ordinary enemy has nowhere to hide from.
Her strongest killing move comes when she lets her own power out entirely. Her footwork turns several times quicker than in her first phase, she is in front of the enemy in an instant, and a bewildering run of attacks knocks them into the air. The moment they are off the ground she springs back, looses several arrows at once, and then sets off the Sha-Chi in the arrows that struck — and the enemy is dead in the space of a breath.
Early Life
Five years before The Order, on the Falling Star Plain in the north of the Phantom World, a girl was born to a herding family. Her name was Yinling.
Perhaps because she rode the grassland herding with her parents from childhood, she was a superb archer from the first: even a wild goose on the wing, she could raise her bow and bring it down.
And all of it stopped dead in the fifteenth year of The Order.
In the fifteenth year of The Order, a bitter quarrel broke out among the peoples of the north and turned into a blood feud that swept the whole grassland. In that war Yinling and her younger sister, Red Moon, lost their parents, and lost the tribe they had always lived in.
The knives of the other people were about to take their lives when a man in blue-green robes appeared. He raised a hand only, and the tribesmen who had them surrounded fell where they stood.
From that day there was one fewer girl named Yinling on the grassland, and in her place The Order gained a Living Envoy of exceptional quality.
After she joined The Order, Yinling went on training her archery without ever letting up, and when there were tasks the other Living Envoys would not take, she took them without a second thought. There was no other reason: she was repaying the man in blue-green robes — the Nether Lord — for saving her life.
And so Yinling spent ten busy, full years in The Order. What she never imagined was that, even as she had begun to believe she and her sister could live on here in peace for the rest of their lives, one task would come out of nowhere and turn her life over entirely.
Sent South
In the twenty-fifth year of The Order the Nether Lord gave her a task of the deepest secrecy: go to the Southern Wulin, look into the “demon king’s great ship” said to drift forever above it, find a way aboard, and clear the ground for the day The Order would sweep the Southern Wulin clean.
Yinling took it without hesitating. That night she looked once more at her sister, asleep, then took up her goose-feather bow and went south without looking back, alone, and slipped into the Southern Wulin.
Over the month that followed, her tracks covered every corner of the Southern Wulin. She kept to the dark and moved when the moment came, and with archery of unmatched skill she put paid to countless Ghost-Faced Killers. Those killers never saw her, and some never worked out where the arrow had come from before they lost their lives.
She also tried to look into things quietly as she went, but she was only one person, and in the end all she could establish was that these killers had certainly been through some kind of modification, and that their bodies were nothing like those of ordinary martial artists.
What she never imagined then was that one day the same art of modification would be worked on her.
As she went on tearing up the demon king’s ship’s arrangements in the Southern Wulin, she finally drew the “interest” of that secret body, and in the end, to catch a woman who came and went like a ghost, its best men turned out together — the Ghost-Faced Gentleman, the Water Ghost, Daosha — for no other purpose than to take her. Ringed by countless Ghost-Faced Killers and strong enemies, Yinling was at last overwhelmed by numbers and taken alive.
Even then she gave them not a word about where she came from or what she was there for, and in the end all they could find out was her past before she joined The Order.
And so it was that this woman with a clean background and archery and footwork beyond compare drew the attention of the master of that secret body.
That day Yinling woke out of a faint into waves of throbbing pain. When she opened her eyes she found herself lying on a bed with a ring of strange people around her — people, loosely speaking, though some of them no longer had the shape of people.
Among them one man stood out: long-haired, seated in a four-wheeled chair, with an eerie smile on his face. He grinned and told her, in an accent she had never heard before, what he wanted.
“Heh heh heh. Interesting. You actually passed the test. Welcome — from now on you are one of us, properly.”
For some reason Yinling felt a strange power moving in her blood. She knew she was no longer the person she had been. The heart in her chest was hammering away, and she could not control it.
The others around the long-haired man laughed too, an ugly laugh.
“A little welcome gift, heh heh. Feel that power?”
“Since you care so much about this broken place, the master says it is yours. Take it.”
“The fellows in the city — you have crossed blades with them, Daosha, the Water Ghost and the rest — they will answer to you too, of course.”
“Mind you, that thing in your chest is still on trial. Step half a pace out of the Southern Wulin and something goes wrong, there is nothing we can do for you. Heh heh heh heh.”
That day Yinling learned the name Mirage for the first time, and swore her loyalty to the long-haired man — the Lord of Mirage.
After that her standing in Mirage rose with her performance, until she was the only favourite at the Lord of Mirage’s side, charged with command of every soldier Mirage kept in the Southern Wulin.
From that height she knew that in a few years The Order would swallow the Southern Wulin, and that she had to hold still and play the agent inside. That was the task.
In that time she also came to understand that behind the Lord of Mirage stood a power called the Council of Eleven, holding Mirage in the dark. The Mirage of the Southern Wulin was a front; the real Mirage was far larger than she had imagined.
Ringed by unending surveillance, suspicion and envy, she wanted nothing so much as to go back to The Order — but her heart had been modified. The change gave her greater strength, and with it they had planted the Heart-Piercing Art: step out of Mirage and her heart’s vessels would burst. She was a bird locked in a cage of thorns, with no way out left.
So she could only wait. The waiting ran five years — five lonely years.
The Battle of Mirage
In the twenty-ninth year of The Order a man named Xuanyu joined Mirage. He said he had been a Living Envoy of The Order, and that he would lay out everything The Order had arranged in the Southern Wulin in exchange for a place in Mirage.
Yinling had her doubts. Xuanyu was mild as jade and courteous to a fault, and at a glance he was the sort a thousand girls would dream of; but something at the back of her mind told her this man was nowhere near as simple as he looked.
She tried asking him roundabout, and asked him straight out why a man with a solid footing in The Order would ruin his own prospects to join Mirage. Xuanyu only smiled a little and said something odd:
“Perhaps only a clever person can see what I am doing. Of course, I do not know what the young lady is hoping for — but the result may disappoint her.”
She never saw Xuanyu again, until word came that the Ghost-Faced Gentleman had killed him.
Several months after that, when Yinling had begun to think herself entirely forgotten and her life to be wasting away here, The Order finally sent its people to attack Mirage.
She had not forgotten what she was for. To draw them deep into it, and to keep the Lord of Mirage guessing, she began to lay false trails.
On the tenth day of the seventh month in the thirtieth year of The Order, Yinling went alone in a small boat, past the long bridge, into the endless black woods, looking for The Order’s tracks.
The black woods were heavy with the shadows of cocoons, and blind trees stood to the sky. Light and quick, she climbed a blind tree and slipped past Mirage’s eyes and ears. She did not need to hide, in truth; she did not want to be disturbed.
At the mao hour Yinling lay hidden among a tangle of dead branches, from which she could see, deep in the black woods, the king in his cocoon who had been dealing with the Lord of Mirage, each taking what he wanted of the other — the King of Ten Thousand Evils.
By now the King of Ten Thousand Evils was barely breathing. Many of The Order’s people stood around him, and the two with swords at his vitals were a youth in black and a youth in purple. The one in black pressed hard, and the red blade in his hand gave off a faint steaming blood. The one in purple was easy in his manner, sword sheathed, as though he had not been in the fight at all. The two of them cut fine figures; ten years earlier Yinling’s heart would have stirred, but she was long past the age for that.
Only Xuanyu’s bequest could have guided them here. And that bequest was the tool of a complicated plot: poison ran steadily out of the King of Ten Thousand Evils, as though he meant to take every one of The Order’s people present down with him.
Xuanyu was not dead after all. He meant to set The Order and Mirage at each other without end, leave both broken, and take the profit for himself. But anyone who turns traitor to The Order is bound to fail, whoever he is.
Yinling drew her bow, breathed deep, and loosed one steady arrow that took the King of Ten Thousand Evils through the heart.
His time was up; the body hanging in the blind tree left a faint last word: “Why is it you?”
She put on coldness and parted her red lips: “Hmph. A piece already discarded.”
Yinling paid no heed to the two youths’ questions and was soon gone into the dark. A letter was tied to the arrow, telling them to go to Luocheng: she meant to lead The Order’s people step by step to Mirage’s destruction. She was putting her hope in them, believing they would beat Mirage and then beat Xuanyu — only she would never see that day.
Yinling knew she was a piece on the board as well. But a piece has some power over the game too, even if only over part of it.
On the eleventh she stood at the bow of Mirage’s Silver Dragon, lying on the inner river at Luocheng, with more Mirage killers aboard than could be counted and heavy cannon and crossbow in abundance. Here she meant to put on a performance, alone, for the youngsters come from The Order.
In the afternoon the dragon-boat arranged in advance came into view in the distance, and she knew the two youths were aboard and coming.
Facing them she kept up the pretence of wanting the Eye of Xuanyu the two of them carried. When the talk broke down she took the Silver Dragon out and fought them on the great river, a battle that ran on until the strength was out of both sides.
In the end the Silver Dragon was struck by the shot the two youths kept turning back on it, and Yinling, satisfied, took the boat out of sight over the river and went to ground again in Mirage’s drug works, deep in the sewers of Luocheng.
On the evening of the twelfth she watched from the dark as The Order’s people found the Water Ghost holding the sewers and beat him. When he gathered himself to leap up and plunge into the water and away, she loosed a killing arrow at once and dropped him where he stood, then fell back again, meaning to draw The Order’s people on to Guze Bastion.
On the thirteenth she watched from a distance as The Order’s people broke Ci’er’s contraptions, the “Annihilation” and the “Yanshi”, and when Ci’er began to insist on fighting them to the death, Yinling came out at once and told her the thing that mattered was to take the “Annihilation” away. Then she vanished again.
Gone, Yinling went back aboard Mirage’s airship. She knew The Order was one step from tearing it apart, and that she had to finish her own “task” at the last.
On the fifteenth, waiting deep inside the airship, she finally had The Order’s people come to her — and, to her shock, her own sister was among them: Red Moon.
At her sister’s call Yinling wished with all her heart that she could lay everything out before them. But she knew she could not yet, could not yet admit who she was; before that she had to fight them to the last.
That day she fought them a battle such as is rarely seen, arrows falling from the sky like a flight of bright plumes, like the last, gorgeous movement of a piece of music.
After blade-light and sword-shadow a dozen times over she lost to The Order’s people, and was glad to lose. At the last she told her sister and the rest who she was and everything she knew, and asked Red Moon to carry word to the Nether Lord for her: “Yinling’s task is done. The debt from that year is repaid.” Then she was gone, at the age of thirty-five, and the intelligence she gave up before she died would be one of the keys to The Order’s destruction of Mirage.
She had carried the shame and the weight, and died in a land not her own; from the day she took the task she had known how it would end.
She did not regret it. She felt only calm, and release.
At least the task was done, and the debt of that year repaid at last. As her eyes closed there was a smile on her face, and her heart was a plume high in the ninth heaven, free, and soaring.