As the dust settled, Chih blinked to find themself outside, sheltered under a pavilion that was all that was left of the hall. Everything behind the flower line was as it had been; everything beyond it was sinking into the water.

Horrified and fascinated, Chih went to the edge to look, and in the mess of logs and tile, they could see the wreckage of what had been the Hollow Hand, crushed, mangled, and now with the river rushing over all.

The baby wailed, and Chih pulled their swaddling over their face to shield them from the dust as they looked up wildly.

“Almost Brilliant? Almost Brilliant!”

For a terrible moment, there was nothing, and then Almost Brilliant came down to their shoulder again, her nails piercing the fabric of Chih’s robe entirely.

“What in all the world?” gasped Almost Brilliant, and Chih didn’t have anything to tell her.

Master Nie had fallen back to sit on the ground, still laughing with his legs stretched in front of him. Now they could see that one foot was swollen visibly larger than the other one and wrapped in bandages, and one of the women brought him his cane again. When he turned to Chih, his eyes were bright as desert stars.

“A cleric who shows up with a talking bird in times of trouble—you must be from Singing Hills.”

Chih bowed as best they could while holding a crying baby. They thought their arms were going to cramp in that position, and then they would never be able to put the baby down.

“Master Nie, I am,” they said, and he laughed again, a normal one this time.

He climbed to his feet with an impressive economy of motion, leaning heavily on his cane and shaking his head.

“You must tell the world of my cleverness,” he said. “You must tell them how I defeated a full twenty enemies with a single fell blow, how the Hollow Hand was destroyed again.”

He coughed, and it was that doubled vision again, both a mad architect who had designed a community pavilion as a deadfall trap and the man who had carefully overseen the wounded, the young, and the old.

“And of course,” he said with a real vanity that was pretending to be a false vanity, “and of course I would not mind it if you told them how handsome I was while I did it.”

Chih suddenly found themself remembering Sang’s comment on the road, about ugly women and beautiful women. People were beautiful or ugly because other people said they were, and apparently Master Nie, who had been the Shaking Earth Master and Master See, had decided he liked being Beautiful Nie the best of all.

Their thoughts were interrupted by a thin high whistle drilling straight into their ear.

“Pah! Old man, you left handsome behind with your thirties, and I do not even like to think how long ago that was!”