Chapter 233: A Debt in the Dark
Xuan didn’t drop the blade.
"That’s a lot of confidence for a man I can’t see," he said into the dark, keeping Marrow Dragon low and his voice easy. "Six through me before she draws breath. You’ve counted your people. Have you counted mine?"
A pause. Then the voice again, closer, and something shifted in it, a note of arrest, of recognition arriving a half-beat late.
"...Say that again."
"I said count mine before you start threatening the woman who’s about to be your empress." Xuan tilted his head. "You’ve got a Frostmoon blade on your flank who took the northern circuit apart, a princess who just gutted a Golden Core general in his own fortress, and me. I’d think hard about your six."
The dark went very quiet.
Then a figure stepped out of it into the faint light, tall and motionless, holding a straight blade Xuan had watched cut a column of azure light three men high in front of fifteen thousand people, and the wariness on his face had cracked into something close to disbelief.
"Lin Xuan."
"Yan Wuji." Xuan let Marrow Dragon drift down, and the tension went out of his shoulders. "You have a truly terrible way of saying hello."
Around them, blades lowered by degrees, the ring of Pavilion sword-brothers reading their young master’s face and standing down off it. Yan Wuji didn’t sheathe his own. He studied Xuan as he studied everything, like a problem he intended to solve completely, and let out a slow breath.
"I nearly killed you in an alley outside the capital," he said. "That would have been an unfortunate footnote."
"For me, mostly." Xuan almost smiled, and let it fade, because there was a thing that had to be said and he wasn’t going to dance around it. "I didn’t know the Pavilion had picked a side. Last we spoke, you were very clear that you stood neutral. Careful about it, even."
Something passed across Yan Wuji’s face, and for the first time Xuan had ever seen, the invited disciple of the Heavenly Sword Pavilion looked tired.
"It’s good to see you too, Xuan," he said, and meant it, in his stiff and formal way. "But it’s simple. One of ours is dead. We sent Elder Shen with your escort off the mountain, as a courtesy, because I judged you worth a courtesy. He didn’t come back from that road." He held Xuan’s eyes without flinching from it. "I don’t blame you for it. The blame sits with whoever set that trap, and I intend to hand them the bill in person. But a man of ours went into the ground on your account, Xuan, and that’s a debt the Pavilion pays."
He turned to the woman at Xuan’s side, and inclined his head, formal as a man at court.
"Which is why we stand with you, Your Highness. As I imagine your people already told you we would, once the neutral road stopped being one we could walk."
Xinhua studied him with the frank, weighing attention she gave anything she planned to rely on, and Xuan watched two forces take each other’s measure in the dark.
"They told me," she said. "I confess I didn’t expect the Pavilion’s young master himself, in the field, cutting my brother’s monsters open in the streets. Most great sects send a company and keep their prodigy at home."
"Most great sects didn’t lose the elder they sent to keep a promise." Yan Wuji finally slid his blade home. "I keep my own debts, Your Highness. I don’t post them to underlings."
"Then we understand each other." Something in Xinhua eased. "I’ll take a man who pays his debts over a man who counts his coin every day of this war."
That was as close to warmth as either of them was going to reach on a first meeting, and it was enough.
They pulled back off the wall into the black of a collapsed warehouse, and the two groups became one, and the picture got worse the moment they pooled it.
"We’ve been inside the perimeter since the city sealed," Yan Wuji said, crouched over a scratch-map his people had made in the dust. "Hunting the things that come down off the hill. They’re not endless, and they’re not fast, and one of us can put one down with a proper cut. Your man’s sword did the same, I’d guess, or you wouldn’t be standing here." He glanced at Marrow Dragon and didn’t comment, which from Yan Wuji was a paragraph. "But we can’t get up the hill. Every route to the palace runs uphill through open ground, and the closer you climb the thicker they get, and the wrongness up there -" He stopped, and chose the next words with visible care. "There’s a weight on that hill none of us can push through. Something’s at the center of it. I don’t know what your brother let out, Highness, but he’s still up there with it, and it’s growing."
"You’ve seen him?" Xinhua leaned in. "The Fourth?"
"No. But things obey up there. They don’t wander. They patrol." Yan Wuji’s jaw tightened. "Loose beasts drift. These hold a line. Something’s giving them one."
The little group absorbed that, and Xuan felt the last comfortable lie drain out of the plan. They hadn’t come to loot an empty city. They’d come to walk uphill into a shrinking circle around a thing that organized monsters, and every gate that could let them in could just as easily seal them inside with it.
"So the front doors are out," Xuan said slowly. "The walls are sealed from within, the wards face in, and the hill’s a meat grinder that gets worse the higher you climb. We can’t go over, we can’t go through, and going uphill in the open is a good way to donate our bodies to your brother’s collection." He looked around the ring of grim faces. "Anybody holding a fourth option, now would be the time."
For a moment nobody spoke.
Then Xinhua straightened, and there was something new in her face, a memory surfacing, half reluctance and half the thin edge of a plan.
"There’s a way in that isn’t a gate," she said. "It isn’t on any map, and it hasn’t been opened in my lifetime, and I swore an oath as a girl never to speak of it to anyone outside the blood." She looked up at Xuan, and after, with care, at Yan Wuji, at the Frostmoon blade, at the Pavilion swords ringed around them in the dark. "But my family built this city to survive a siege from the outside. Nobody ever planned for the day the throne itself became the thing you had to sneak past."
"Xinhua." Xuan kept his voice low. "What are you telling me?"
"I’m telling you the first Emperor dug a road out of his own palace, in case he ever had to run from it." Her eyes came back to his, and there was fear in them, and resolve underneath the fear. "I know how to get us under the wall and up inside the hill without touching a single street. But the mouth of it comes out in the one place in this city I least want to stand."
"Which is?"
"Directly beneath the palace." She swallowed. "We wouldn’t be sneaking toward whatever my brother woke. We’d be climbing up underneath it, in the dark, with all of it sitting on our heads."