If the meal served for them by Fat was typical of how Piandao ate, then his diet had a great deal in common with his tastes in architecture: the food was of excellent quality but rather simple fare overall. Rice, with boiled vegetables and fried beef made up the main course after a thin and heavily spiced soup starter that Toph found rather hotter than she had realised, cooling her mouth with iced tea provided by Fat, who diplomatically refrained from smirking at the girl's expression.
"Not to your taste?" Piandao asked from where he was kneeling at one end of the low table.
Toph shrugged. "I didn't each much soup when I was younger, it took a while to learn how to eat it. I didn't realise this one was quite so spicy." She took another spoonful and washed it down with more tea. "It is good though," the young earth bender admitted, nodding in acknowledgement to Fat.
Piandao chuckled. "Indeed. Cooking is one of the arts where I humbly recognise Fat as being the true master in this household. Are either of you inclined towards that particular art."
Mai's lips twitched. "I'm not particularly domestic," she admitted. "Toph seems to follow my example in that as well."
"Nor am I," the sword master admitted. "I'd been living of army slop for years, so eating my own cooking didn't seem like much of a sacrifice when I first moved here. But then Fat offered me his home-cooking if I'd take him on as a student. I was convinced after the first bite."
"I take it that you negotiate more forcibly over your swords," Mai observed. "Considering the prices you charge."
"Oh well," he said, giving the impression he would be waving dismissively, if he wasn't holding a bowl of rice in one hand and chopsticks in the other. "I only charge so much to try to discourage so many people from asking me for swords. It's all very well to make them, but there is only so much time in the day and after I started selling swords to pay for all this, well, I barely had time to do any of this until I set the prices to where they are." His lips quirked. "Of course, now most of my customers buy the swords as decoration or as talking points, rather than using them as weapons."
"Is that some reference to some sort of philosophy?" Toph asked.
Piandao swallowed a mouthful of rice. "I suppose it is," he said thoughtfully. "A sword is a weapon, the most versatile of weapons. Any fool could make a sword-shaped piece of metal to hang on a wall. I like to think that my swords are more than that."
Toph used her own chopsticks to feed herself some beef. "Bloodthirsty," she observed before she'd finished chewing on it. It was hard to tell, with her mouth full, but Mai suspected that there some ambivalence on her part as to whether she approved or not.
"I would rather that they were treated as weapons of war," Piandao said drily. "That is not quite the same as desiring that weapons of war be made use of. Then again, my customers are paying dearly for the privilege of not following my wishes on the matter, so I suppose that it not in my hands." He signalled for Fat, who was sitting at the bottom of the table, to refill their tea cups, the level of which was below the median point. "So, what brought the two of you to Shu Jing?"
"Trying to avoid Toph being drafted into the army," Mai lied smoothly. Since Piandao had departed the Fire Nation's army on his own terms, it didn't seem likely that he would be particularly offended by the notion of a family not wanting their younger and blind daughter to be compelled to serve the Nation, as all fire benders were unless they could obtain an exemption. Such exemptions were typically granted only to noble families concerned about keeping a line of blood descent safe from combat and almost invariably required bribes almost as great as the cost of purchasing one of Piandao's swords.
"I'm still not convinced that they'd bother," Toph objected half-heartedly. "What would the army want with a blind fire bender?"
"In my experience it would be less a matter of wanting you to be in the army than it would be a matter of not wanting to set a precedent of rejecting a fire bender due to a disability," Piandao explained. "Bureaucrats are generally reluctant to innovate without a significant financial incentive, in my experienced. You realise that refusing a summons to serve is a criminal offense?"
"Failure to receive a summons is not," Mai explained. "If we cannot be located, we cannot receive notice that Toph has been called to serve and therefore cannot be held to be in refusal of a summons."
Piandao nodded thoughtfully. "But no one can run forever, young ladies."
"And if no one knows where we are headed, no one can share that information with bureaucrats," answered Mai.
To his credit Piandao did not seem offended by the implied lack of trust. "It is a sad day when such caution is required between countrymen," he said simply. "But it must also be admitted that there have been many sad days of late." Before the mood could become gloomier, he proved his bona fides as a host and changed the subject. "So, do either of you play Pai Sho?"
"A little," Mai conceded.
Toph visibly weighed her options before admitting: "As long as you don't mind me touching the board to keep track of the tiles." Unsaid was the fact that most players would reasonably fear that Toph would - intentionally or otherwise - move tiles while doing so. There was a degree to which her earth sense could guide her - most tiles and boards were stone - but she would hardly admit that under these circumstances.
"Then perhaps, after we are done eating, we can play a game or two," Piandao offered hospitably. "I am sure that a warrior so skilled with a war fan will make no careless mistakes upon a mere Pai Sho table."
.oOo.
"An interesting man," Mai threw back over her shoulder as M Bison flew through the barely pre-dawn sky. They would be out of sight of land before the sun was high enough to give a good chance of spotting them, and this leg of the journey would keep them out of that sight for longer than she was entirely comfortable with. The charts that she had were either from the water tribe, relating largely to currents that she couldn't track from the air, or copies of Air Nomad charts that were a hundred years old and based on air currents that she was barely aware of when she was in them.
"Does Spiky have a crush?" asked Toph sleepily from under a blanket where she was curled up inside the arc of the saddle. She had seemed distracted during and after the walk from Piandao's castle to their campsite - while accepting the sword master's hospitality would have allowed them to sleep in actual beds for once, no properly brought up fire maidens would have done so - and as she had been awake when Mai roused herself, it was possible that she had yet to actually sleep. Oh well, it wasn't as if daylight was liable to keep her awake.
"I'm not the one who monopolised him all evening," Mai replied. While she had accepted defeat after two drubbings on the Pai Sho table - humblingly while Piandao was playing Toph on a second board - and accepted the offer of some light reading from Fat (who appeared to be addicted to an seemingly endless series of clichéd romance scrolls that had entertained the marginally literate of the Fire Nation since Mai's mother was a girl); the younger girl had played against the sword master well into the evening, apparently undeterred by his unbroken string of victories against her.
Toph grumbled something unintelligible and rolled herself over to find the edge of the blanket. Upon success, she extended one hand directly upwards, holding something small for Mai to see it. "He gave me this when we left."
With the rising sun coming from behind them, Mai had to squint a little to make it out. "A white lotus tile?" A chill went down her spine and for a moment her mind took her back to a tower cell in Omashu. "Little sister, for the first time I really wish Zuko was here."
"I don't think he knows anything more than we do really," Toph told her. "When he talked to Bumi he was fishing for information and I don't think he got anything significant."
"That doesn't mean that he didn't know anything specific." Mai rubbed at her face. "His uncle had a white lotus tile, Piandao gave you a white lotus tile and both Zuko and Mad King Bumi seem to consider white lotus tiles to have some significance. What, you think there's a secret society of Fire Nation Pai Sho players?"
Toph wrapped the blanket closer around her. "Maybe not just the Fire Nation." A moment later, when Mai didn't reply, the twelve year old began to snore softly.
Mai watched the sky, the sea and the compass she'd bought in a Fire Nation port as soon as they'd reached civilisation. The water tribe and the air nomads could follow currents as much as they wanted, she wanted something that reliably pointed the same direction at all times.
Half a year or so ago, she'd turned her back on her birth family and boredom in favour of an adopted sister and what promised to being interesting and possibly an adventure. She'd certainly not envisaged trying to navigate over the trackless ocean via flying bison after spending an evening sparring with and then getting trounced at Pai Sho by a famous sword master, but Mai had to admit: it wasn't boring.
She looked back at Toph, a surprisingly small bundle of blankets and child, long black hair spilling from one end and then thought back to the last time she seen the Fire Lord Ozai, on one of his rare public appearances. The Fire Lord had cut an imposing figure in long, heavy crimson robes and a gold-trimmed black breastplate and while his mastery of fire was known more by legend than by public demonstration, it was beyond doubt that he had years of experience wielding it.
And then there were the almost endless numbers of the Fire Nation's army, raised from it's teeming population, and the weapons of war designed by its traditional artificers before being copied in hundreds of factories.
Well, if dramatic convention required adventurers to face a seemingly unstoppable enemy, the spirits would appear to have provided such to Toph.
.oOo.
Hundreds of miles away, the Fire Lord had risen with the sun and was now breaking his fast over reports that had arrived over night from his spies within the capital.
Ozai ate alone. His wife, Ursa, had not shared his bed in over a decade and had departed the palace entirely to enter seclusion in one of the royal family's many small lodges upon the first news that her eldest child had vanished. Her husband could not recall off-hand where she had even gone, although it would appear in reports from further afield than the capital if she had left, or done anything else of note.
Those reports would wait until later. Only events within the city that sprawled around the palace of the Fire Lord could be reported swiftly enough for him consider them in any sense urgent. All else he would either need to react to with orders that would again be delayed in transit, or anticipated and therefore covered already by the existing instructions he had given.
Ozai's orders upon the reports of Zuko's reappearance had merely been assign responsibility. The outcomes - if Zhao was reporting truly or if he was not - were equally predetermined and the notion of mitigating the death sentence of Zuko, were he a traitor, or of Zhao, were he maligning a member of the Royal Family simply did not occur to Zuko's father.
Zhao had returned to the capital the previous day and was currently sulking in his family home, being treated for his frost burn. The prognosis was that while he was in no real risk of dying at this point, it would be most of a year before the Admiral was restored to fighting form. Ozai made a note to see if there was some tedious bureaucratic task to foist off on the man. Something to divert at least some of his attention away from politicking.
There was a discreet knock at the door and a servant entered on silent feet, carrying a tray stacked with more scrolls. Ozai didn't look up - the knock was not a request for permission to enter, it was a confirmation from one of the guards outside that the servant was recognised and not a possible assassin. Such signals were part and parcel of the Fire Lord's life.
The servant sorted the scrolls neatly into the space left by those that Ozai had already examined and collected those that had been discarded. Ozai picked up the first scroll she had brought and cracked the seal, noting that it was his daughter's. The servant flinched at the harsh chuckle behind her as she left the room.
Ozai set his dishes aside for a moment and examined the letter again, reading between the lines. So Lu Ten had shuffled more of the fleet under his own control and Azula was feeling the pressure. Good. His family did their best work when there was a threat to motivate them and it wouldn't do for his daughter to succeed in Ba Sing Se too quickly or easily. She still had much to learn and a canny opponent such as this Long Feng, would be an excellent way for her to learn.
The Fire Lord was hardly unaware of the conflict raging between his daughter and his nephew over the succession. Indeed, he approved wholeheartedly when that same contest could be turned to his own benefit. In this case, Azula would be desperate to secure Ba Sing Se and the attendant glory in order not to be overshadowed should Lu Ten succeed in capturing her traitor brother or the young Avatar.
Either one of the pair would be a notable victory for the young admiral. Not that either or even both would be enough to persuade Ozai to name Lu Ten as the heir apparent: it was bad enough that the presumption that Zuko, as his eldest child, was the heir had ruined the boy. No, as far as Fire Lord Ozai saw, there was no reason at all to make any such declaration. The two contenders could fight that out until one eliminated the other and whether they did so before or after his own eventual demise was a matter of indifference to him. For that matter, he was not an old man and if it was ever convenient to do so, some additional heirs might very well make their appearances. Twenty or thirty years from now, who could say what offspring he might have.
Not via Ursa though, Ozai thought, setting the letter aside at last. Azula was promising, but Zuko was clear evidence that Roku's bloodline could not be relied upon for strength or for loyalty. Still, there was no lack for other noble families who would be happy to receive his favour through a marriage. For that matter, maybe it was time to think about Azula's suitors... or rather, the abysmal lack thereof.
Honestly, the way that she had been pouting about Lu Ten's choice of bride, Ozai was beginning to think that his daughter batted for the other side.
.oOo.
Despite being hairier than anything Mai had ever come across before, M Bison did not appear to be particularly bothered about the tropical heat of the island that - as best she could tell - was the one Zuko had marked on the map. The sky bison had shed an astonishing amount of hair as they flew through the equatorial regions, but had made not the least complaint more than he had done at the south pole. Then again, sky bison had apparently travelled the world routinely with Air Nomads back in the day, so perhaps that indifference came naturally to his kind.
"This place reminds me of the swamp," Toph said as they set up camp on the beach. "Something about the trees..."
Mai glanced around and then nodded. There were some similarities between these trees and the mangroves of the Foggy Swamp. Fortunately, the ground seemed to be considerably more reliable. "If you get the chance, perhaps you can figure out Huu's trick of bending plants," she suggested. "It could be useful if the buildings I saw from the air are this overgrown."
"That bad?" the younger girl asked. She could trace the roots of the trees through the soil inshore of the sands, but the leaves and branches were far harder to make out at this distance.
"Bad enough." Mai finished entrapping the saddle and stepped back to let M Bison work his way out of the heavy leather assembly. Normally he would sleep while saddled allowing for a swift departure at need, but where possible Mai had been encouraged to give him the chance to rest or even graze without it. Whatever they wound up doing on this island, the lack of population made it unlikely that they would need to depart in any sort of haste. "I'm astonished the buildings were even visible, now that I get a closer look at these trees."
Toph used her earth bending to steepen the dunes around their campsite, sheltering them more from any winds. Between that and the mass of M Bison, the only real risk was that of rain and Mai had brought canvas for that very reason, along with bamboo poles that could be used to suspend it above them, warding that away from where they would sleep.
"What do you think you'll find here?" Mai asked as she laid out a fire pit. Tonight's supper would not be as fine as that Fat was no doubt serving to Piandao at this hour, but it would be warm and probably more edible than military rations in the armies of the Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation.
"I'm not sure," admitted her sister. "Scrolls would probably have rotted away long ago, or simply be taken. But there will be something here that will help with my fire bending."
Mai nodded, not voicing further doubts. "And then?"
Toph sat quietly for a moment. "Then I make war. It's summer now, not much more than two months before Sozin's Comet is in the sky. When that happens, I need to have the Fire Lord and his soldiers focused entirely on something other that obliterating another nation. And the only thing more pressing than that will be the Avatar."
"You've been thinking about it then?"
"Ever since I was playing Piandao at Pai Sho. Strategy, tactics, call it what you will. I need a plan that beats the Fire Lord's plan and all the timing rests on -" and here Toph's voice grew amused "- something I'll be hard-pressed to notice without someone to tell me it's in the sky."
"Do you have any candidates for that someone, little sister?" drawled Mai. She stepped back from the fire pit and Toph blew a plume of fire over the driftwood that they had gathered. It lit up almost immediately and Mai placed the pot, already half filled with clean water from their water bags, on the fire to heat.
Toph grinned. "Let's keep it in the family," she proposed. "Older sister."
"What did you call me?" Mai asked, raising the ladle menacingly.
"The hearing is often the first thing to go. Have any of your hairs turned grey yet?"
.oOo.
It wasn't hard to believe that the city was thousands of years old, Mai thought as she and Toph entered its streets. Paving was cracked and worn more by the elements than by human feet. The buildings, built to a somewhat truncated pattern, the walls angling in towards each other, wider at the ground than the ceilings, suggested ancient building practises, as did the lack of any mortar holding them together. Nothing more than stones piled upon each other. Mai suspected that any sun warriors not killed in the wars as they expanded their empire had migrated to more civilised settlements the first chance they got, leaving nothing more than an empty capital when uprisings tore that nation apart.
Toph liked it, of course.
Rather than risk flying over something important, the two of them had elected to walk through the overgrown streets of the ruined city. Toph had experimented with the trees as Mai hacked her way through the outer layers of the jungle, finding that under the canopy layer of the trees, there was much less undergrowth. By the time they crossed the nebulous boundary between city and jungle, she was able to move aside at least the lighter growth, although they still had to work around the heavier, more established trees.
"This place is a wreck," Mai observed.
Toph pushed another tree branch around so that they could progress further down an alleyway between two small buildings that were almost certainly houses. "Let's be fair. Your room back in Omashu probably looks this bad and we've not even been gone a year."
The thought of her room in Omashu - a room that she'd hated the whole time she was there - sent an entirely unexpected pang of guilt through Mai. Her mother had kept putting potted flowers there as id they would make it better. Of course, for all her supposedly love of plants, Lady Seung didn't exactly have a green thumb. It wouldn't be at all unlike her to have forgotten all about them, leaving a maid to water them while they grew until the entire room was consumed by green.
They crossed into a wider street and Toph turned towards the centre of the city. "There's something larger down that way."
Mai squinted, trying to see past the trees. The buildings did seem higher there, although it might simply be a hill. "That would be fairly near the centre of the city. I suppose important buildings would be there, and probably larger than these ones."
They turned and started walking down the street. For whatever reason, it seemed to be less cluttered. While trees still occupied parts of the road, having forced their way through the paving, but unlike the narrower routes, there was almost always enough space for the two of them to go past without Toph having to force the branches away or - as she had twice so far today - level a building to create a path.
"Stop." Toph held out an arm to block Mai from continuing.
The older girl looked down at her. "What's the matter?"
"I wondered what these were," Toph murmured, kneeling and pulling on a section of vine that crossed the road. Now that Mai saw it, the way it hung was suspicious - just off the ground, around ankle height. A tripwire?
Toph yanked on it sharply and a sizeable section of paving immediately in front of her bare toes sank promptly, by about six inches. The metal spikes that had been hidden between the paving didn't sink though. Mai could envisage someone tripping on the vine and tumbling face first into the spikes. It wasn't a pleasant vision.
"That worked rather smoothly for something centuries old," she observed.
Toph exhaled slowly and made a pushing gesture before standing. "It's been maintained," she guessed. "Someone else is here. Or has been, in the last few years." She stepped down, carefully placing her feet between the spokes as she crossed the depression. "I've blocked this one, it's safe. But keep your eyes peeled. Where there's one trap -"
"- there are bound to be more."
.oOo.
The building at the centre of the city was further away than it had looked. It was also larger than Mai had realised at first, rearing up over the city. Rather than a smooth, or at least regularly stepped exterior, it was a profusion of terraces and stairways. Every vertical surface was carved and ornamental dragons were everywhere, interspersed in some depictions with fire benders but predominantly alone.
"Impressive," Toph conceded. "This must have taken forever to do."
"The great earth bender is impressed? Now I have seen everything."
Toph shook her head. "Sure, I could build something like this. But this isn't the work of an earth bender. Not even of an army of earth benders. This was done by hand. That's quite a project. This must have been a palace or a temple of some kind."
Mai nodded. That made sense. She couldn't think of anything else that would occupy such a central and clearly important location. "Let me guess. Anything important will be right at the top?"
"Either that or underneath it," Toph agreed. "And I can't feel any catacombs down there." She stamped her feet and frowned.
"What's wrong?" A knife dropped into Mai's hand from sheer reflex.
"Something - maybe someone, maybe just an animal - moving in the distance." Toph sighed. "It's the right size for a human... of course, I wouldn't be surprised if a place like this had giant monkeys wandering around."
"Apes."
"What?"
"Not giant monkeys, apes."
"Whatever." Toph set off up the steps and then paused as she felt another vibration through the stone. "That was human feet. Lots of human feet. Up near the top of this thing!"
She set off running. Up the stairs, of course.
Mai smiled thinly and followed. She didn't let go of the knife though. Humans here might represent a link to the long dead sun warriors, to whatever secrets of fire bending lore Toph had been directed here to find... but they were far more likely to represent a threat to her little sister. Or, the world being what it was, both.
Toph's pace slowed as she came closer to the top. Not from exhaustion, although the climb - carried out under the sweltering heat - would be wearisome for someone less energetic. Her concern - and that of Mai, whose longer legs made up for the fact that being post-pubescent she no longer had limitless energy to work with - was of stealth.
The front of the pyramid projected forwards, creating a separate building linked to the main structure by a bridge. The bridge was guarded. The main structure - specifically the area at the other end of the bridge, previously shielded from their view - was occupied by fire benders. Quite a number of fire benders, evenly divided between male and female. The latter was easy to tell, even at this distance, because -
"Does every hidden tribe in the world abhor clothing?" Mai asked under her breath, knowing that Toph would hear the words easily. "First those swamp rats and now this lot."
"Well at least Yue's people wear clothes. I don't care how warm my island makes their city, they'd freeze without them."
Mai chuckled, taking the measure of the two warriors at the near end of the bridge. Young and to judge by the spears, probably not fire benders. Most benders didn't see the need for weapons other than their elements. "I imagine Zuko would be very happy if Yue did adopt the practise." And that possibility didn't hurt any more, how about that?
"Why?" Toph asked with feigned innocence. Then again, nudity probably meant very little to her, Mai admitted privately.
Instead of answering, Mai looked at the benders. They were standing in a circle, passing flames - each in a stylised shape - around it. There was presumably some significance in their eyes and Mai wondered who they were. Some long lost remnant of the sun warriors or a more modern cult who merely imagined that they were? "What are they doing?"
"I'm not sure." Toph placed one hand against the stones, fingers spread. "I think we can get closer it we approach from below the bridge."
Mai looked at the guards, neither of whom could possibly see anything that was directly beneath the bridge that they were standing upon, and the fire benders, who seemed entirely absorbed in their ritual. "Alright. I take it that you have a route down to the base of the bridge?"
Toph smirked and placed her hands together before drawing them apart sharply. A pit opened directly beneath her and the girl dropped silently through it. Mai sighed and hopped into it, what she hoped was a safe distance behind, discovering that the pit was actually the entry to a chute that seemed to spiral around the inside of the pyramid. It was also very fast, reminding Mai entirely too much of Omashu's mail system, and pitch black. By the time she reached the bottom, which thankfully levelled out a bit slowing her to the point that the landing at the bottom - on the paving beneath the bridge - wasn't too noisy. Which wasn't the same as it being painless. Mai shot an irritated look at the back of Toph's head as the other girl opened a hole in the first pillar supporting the bridge for them to walk through.
It only took a few moments to cross the divide, with Toph neatly closing up the holes behind them as leaving evidence of their presence would be almost as bad as being spotted themselves. The murmur of voices above them was clearer but Mai still couldn't make out any words.
"Do you think we should introduce ourselves?" Toph asked.
The corners of Mai's lips curved upwards. "I don't think they'd appreciate the interruption," she said. "And if we do approach them, it might be best to be above them."
Toph nodded, a grin appearing her face. "Let's take the stairs," she suggested, slapping the wall in front of them. "They're right here." The wall opened smoothly, revealing stairs that led a few yards up and inside the pyramid to bare earth. Once they were inside, the wall closed up behind them and Mai followed her sister up the stairs, not concerned when they didn't walk into the earth she'd seen at the head of the stairs as Toph extended the stair upwards ahead of them, closing it behind them as they ascended.
"Earth bending has it's uses," the knife-wielding fire maiden noted.
"It does," Toph agreed. "It's definitely the greatest of all four bending arts."
"Isn't the Avatar supposed to be about balance, and fairness between all four elements?" Mai asked.
"And that's why you know I'm being fair and unbiased."
Mai rolled her eyes in the darkness. "Of course you are. Well, sneaking around like this and avoiding a fight probably counts as helping you with air bending philosophy at any rate. Now if you can figure out how to sense vibrations in the air, you'll be all set."
Toph chuckled from a step ahead of her. "Not really practical. Air's just too unstable for that to work."
"That's a shame," Mai conceded.
"It isn't totally useless," admitted Toph, "It's just too easily distorted to be relied on for anything more than generalities." She stopped walking and Mai, unwarned, took another step upwards before she halted. Two steps ahead of them, the stairs halted, this time against a stone wall she discovered, reaching forward to touch it with one hand. "Someone's sneaky."
Mai frowned. "What's on the other side of this?"
"A mechanism of some kind," Toph told her. "Pressure balanced stones, very complicated. I'm not sure what all of it does but if I try to go through that I could set something off without meaning to."
"Such as?"
"Well," and Mai could have sworn she could hear Toph grinning, "There's a vat of some kind of gluey liquid. Enough to fill a good-sized room. If that starts flooding into a confined space like this..."
Mai shuddered. "I take your point. So, do you think we can work around it?"
Toph started walking again and Mia followed up the last two stairs and then into a tunnel that led off to the right. "Probably the simplest way is just to go around it," the earth bender decided. "There isn't anyone around the back of the pyramid right now, so we can just go up onto the back terrace and climb up that side."
"It sounds like more traps like the one you found earlier," Mai observed. "Which raises the question of what's behind them. Does this fill up all of the top of the pyramid?"
"No, there's a room up above," Toph told her. "Sealed up tight, stone doors and everything."
Mai considered. "Let's see what's up there," she suggested. "It could be important."
A few moments later Toph opened up the ceiling of their route, leaving Mai blinking at the sudden sunlight pouring through the opening. Toph closed up the hole by simply raising the ground beneath them until they were standing on the terrace behind the upper levels of the pyramid. True to Toph's words, there was no one in sight, which seemed odd to Mai, given the guards on the bridge leading to the Pyramid.
"The stairs are all on the other side," Toph told her when the older girl voiced her concerns. "They probably haven't seen an earth bender in generations, as far away from everywhere as you told me this island is, and anyone else would find the sides of the pyramid almost impassable." She raised steps leading up to the next terrace for the two of them, careful to use stone from the floor, not from the walls which might suffer damage to their intricate carvings.
There were similar carvings upon the uppermost level of the pyramid. The apex was as large as a good sized house and capped by a dome, the rear wall marked by two huge dragons carved in relief, breathing fire towards the centre of wall where the shape of a human had been carved, engulfed in the fiery wrath of both.
"How are you going to avoid damaging that?" Mai asked wryly.
Toph smirked and set her feet, taking a deep breath. A moment later and she swung the entire rear wall open like a huge door. "After you, Spiky."
"Show off," Mai murmured and obediently walked inside, with Toph closing the wall behind them. The room within was lit via an opening at the top of the dome that was covered only by a metal grid and while it was dimmer than the light outside, Mai found that a relief, her eyes still adjusting from the darkness inside the pyramid. As it was, she almost gasped at the menacing shapes positioned around the room before realising that they were merely statues and restrained herself from open reaction. "I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this isn't it," she admitted.
Toph stalked around the room's floor of interlocking red marble stones until she reached the opening in the circle of statues, by the door. "The stones that move as part of the mechanism are all inside the circle," she told Mai as she entered the area, making it obvious that she was avoiding certain slabs.
Mai looked at the statues. Each was of a man, face obscured by an gruesome mask, wearing the garb of an ancient Sun Warrior and probably one of high stature to judge by the elaborate nature of the clothes and mask that had been sculpted. The two sides more or less mirrored each other, as far as she could tell, each statue positioned in unstable looking poses that were either intended to look as foolish as possible or... well, it could be something to do with bending perhaps. That looked fairly silly when there wasn't fire involved, and sometimes when it was.
"What do you think these are for?"
Toph looked up. "Some sort of fire bending form perhaps. It's also a key."
"A key?"
"The pressure plates are all aligned with where the statues stand. I'm pretty sure that it's activated by having two people execute out the form at once, standing on each pressure plate in turn." Toph frowned and then pointed to the centre of the chamber. "Opening a compartment there although I think there's more to it than that. Whoever came up with this was a mad genius."
Mai shrugged. "Well, are you going to open it up or do you want to approach the celebrants of that little festival outside?"
"They're heading up the pyramid now," reported Toph before answering: "Let's wait for them. I wouldn't like someone going through my super secret hiding places if I had any and we might be asking them for favours."
"Are you learning diplomacy, little sister?" asked Mai.
"I can be diplomatic when I want to. I just don't bother much," Toph said and shrugged.