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life, to be.
    Like a jackal he waited until the monk was fighting with the strongest and largest soldier in his command. With the monk engaged face to face with the massive soldier, horse and rider moved in quietly from behind. For the task at hand, timing was everything.
    The monk continued to fight with a strength that verged on legendary. The general paused while his archers took their positions, and then he shouted the order to fire. Horse and general charged forward and upward to take the head. He moved quickly now to silence the voice of inner demons as he charged toward glory.
    To the eye all three things happened at the same time. Ten arrows hit their mark, the last sweep of the falling monk’s blade cut through the huge soldier’s weapon and found the heart, and the blade of the general was launched upon its deadly journey to an unprotected neck. But at the edge of life and death, time slows and events that seem simultaneous unfold in separate clarity.
    Mah Lin did not see the severed tip of the giant’s saber flying past his shoulder for the arrows landed and his body dropped. He did not sense the impending blow to his neck, nor hear the aspiring assassin behind him scream and fall backwards as that forged steel tip sliced through his face, cleaving bone from sinew. He did not feel the hulking weight of adversary crush out his last breath, whispering through arrow holes as it crashed down and buried him.
    The lower jaw clung precariously by shredded flesh to its place upon the general’s features. It tried to form the order to find and remove the library, but it could not. Through the pain and the fog of seething hatred, the general looked back to where the last monk had stood. The giant lay dead and fallen, and the monk as if by magic had vanished into the thin morning air.
    The general surrendered to the darkness.

In The Eyes Of An Emperor
    In the aftermath of battle the monk was nowhere to be found. This ruined monastery was now a place of fear and phantom. In great haste what remained of the battalion left the mountaintop. The dead, even their own, were left where they had fallen, and the living were gone before the sun had set. They tied their wounded general securely to his horse, and for the next three days and nights he slipped fitfully in and out of consciousness. The image of the fearless monk never left his mind. It haunted him in his delirium—the specter of his own inadequacy.
    While this young general lay recovering from his open wound, the emperor’s own men had reported that the scrolls had not been found. There may have once been a library, but a pile of bodies and barren shelves were all that remained. The empty structure was carefully combed from floor to ceiling for any clue, but the timeless collection of sacred knowledge had vanished as though it had never been. The black feather of a nameless bird went unnoticed by the men who searched unsuccessfully for scroll, silk, and parchment.
    The vision of the Son of Heaven does not compare to the sight of an ordinary man. For the sake of a people, it must be clear from western desert to eastern ocean and from icebound northland to wild and humid southern jungles. The emperor stared through the wounded soldier that lay before him. He assessed the condition of the butchered general, and with his mind’s acumen he surveyed the success and failure of the mission.
    The monks were dead. The threat of their great metal was now removed. The method of its making destroyed beyond any skill of resurrection. The loss of this art was a regrettable casualty of war, but the security that it afforded balanced well against the deficit. The mind of the emperor did not stop there. It browsed within the missing library, and it hungered.
    Throughout the ages its secrets had been guarded by the cloistered hands that held it, its reputation grown freely in rumor. This was not just the usual collection of monastic sutras and scripture. It was so