Avatar, The Last Airbender: The Shadow of Kyoshi (The Kyoshi Novels #2)(5)
The Triad members glanced at each other. Mok’s face swelled with rage, reddening like a berry in the sun.
It wasn’t insolence so much as pragmatism, her instinct for tidiness and efficiency rising to the surface. “If not, I can wait until everyone arrives,” Kyoshi said. “I don’t want to have to go back and check each floor.”
“Tear her apart!” Mok screamed.
The hatchet men charged from all directions. Kyoshi drew one of her fans. Two would have been a bit much.
Kyoshi stepped over the groaning bodies. When one of the Triad members was too still, she nudged him with her boot until she saw signs of breathing.
Mok’s robe had blown off in the scuffle. He managed to budge the chair he was sitting on a few inches in flight before Kyoshi put her hand on his shoulder, pressing him back into his seat.
“No need to get up yet, Uncle,” she said. Past enmity or not, he was still older than her.
Mok roiled with an anger and fear that Kyoshi could feel through her grip. “So, you’re going to murder me in cold blood like you did Xu. May you be ripped apart by thunderbolts and many knives for slaying your sworn brothers.”
Kyoshi found herself bothered, more than she should have been, by Mok calling her a murderer. She and Xu Ping An had agreed to a duel, and the man immediately tried to kill her. Once she’d gained the upper hand, she’d given him a chance to yield. The former leader of the Yellow Necks had amply demonstrated he was beyond saving.
And yet, during sleepless nights, she thought about Xu. The vile man infected her thoughts when she could have been dreaming of those she loved. She thought about Xu a great deal, his weight in her hands, and how, at the end of their fight, she’d decided.
Kyoshi cleared her head. “Anything goes on the lei tai,” she said. Justifying the act out loud was bitter, ineffective medicine that she forced herself to swallow anyway. “I’m not going to kill you. You and your men got a foothold inside the walls rather quickly for a gang of countryside bandits who spent most of their history bullying farmers. You have a contact in Ba Sing Se helping you, and I want to know who it is.”
Mok stiffened with purpose. True daofei never surrendered information to the authorities, even if it would benefit them. “The day I squeal to you, girl, is the day I—aieee!”
Kyoshi reminded him that times had changed since they first met with a crushing squeeze of her fingers. She dented the nerves of his arm until the terms of their new relationship sunk in.
“It was someone from the Middle Ring!” Mok said, once he stopped squealing in pain. “We used go-betweens; I don’t know their name!”
Kyoshi let go and took a step back. She’d been expecting him to name a Lower Ring criminal, a local who’d maybe sworn brotherhood to him in the past. The Middle Ring was the domain of merchants and academics. Something didn’t add up here.
Mok clutched his shoulder and scrambled away from the desk. “Wai!” he shouted at a door behind him. “Now!”
In her distraction, Kyoshi had forgotten the third leading brother of the former Yellow Necks. The door burst open in an ambush before Kyoshi could react.
Brother Wai sprung out, knife raised, a snarl on his lips. He wasn’t wearing the leather strap that covered his severed nose, and without it his gaunt face had a skull-like appearance. Wai had been a fast, vicious man back in his Yellow Neck days, and he still was.
But when he saw the intruder was Kyoshi, dressed in her full makeup and regalia, he gasped and nearly halted in midair. Wai was one of the few witnesses who’d seen her in the Avatar State, and the experience had overawed the spiritual man. He stepped back to give her space, nearly knocking his brother over in his haste, and dropped to his knees. The knife that had been aimed at Kyoshi a second before, he placed at her feet like an offering.
“Oh come on!” Mok screamed as Wai bowed his head to the ground and prostrated himself before the Avatar.
Kyoshi stepped out of the City Block into the street. The day had gotten brighter and hotter. A squad of peace officers, uniformed guardsmen of Ba Sing Se, waited for her, lining in wings to the left and right of the exit. The junior men who’d never seen the Avatar before stared at Kyoshi as she emerged from the darkness. One of them dropped his truncheon and fumbled to pick it up.
Kyoshi walked past the rank-and-file guardsmen, ignoring the whispers and barely acknowledging the bows, until she reached Captain Li by the door. He was a sallow-faced man who’d been on the job too long, his retirement delayed by gambling debts. “The cordon is set,” he said to Kyoshi in a pipe-smoker’s wheeze. “No trouble out here so far.”
Most of the Lower Ring citizens went about their business, ignoring the presence of the law, but Kyoshi noticed a few people watching with fake disinterest, probably spotters for other unsavory organizations. Working with Captain Li meant flirting with a violation of Kyoshi’s daofei oaths. She’d sworn to her elder sister Kirima under a blade held by her elder brother Wong never to become a lackey of the law.
But Li had been her tool, her informant, not the other way around. He’d provided her the intelligence she needed to close her unfinished business with Mok, and numbers for cleanup once she was done. “Is the building safe?” Li asked, tilting his cap to dab at his forehead with his cuff.
“The Triad members are down and ready to be extricated,” Kyoshi said. “You should summon a doctor.”