Chapter 203: Riding Blind
By morning the Pavilion had given up pretending to be a school. Xuan drank his tea on the guest terrace and watched a great sect arm itself with impeccable manners: supply carts grinding up the switchbacks, racks stripped to bare wood, formation nodes burning in broad daylight.
Neutrality, it turned out, was a stance you had to bristle with steel to hold. Six weeks in the saddle and a fortnight annexing a river city had bought him exactly one sentence out of the greatest forge in the East: we will not kill you, and we will not help you.
Yesterday that had been worth the ride. Today there was an Emperor cooling on a slab in Tianzhao and three imperial siblings deciding whether to obey a summons from a brother who had never lifted a sword.
Yan Wuji came up to the terrace with the bad news already on his face.
"Say it," Xuan told him. "You’ve been rehearsing the whole way up the stairs."
"I can’t ride with you." He dropped onto the bench and helped himself to the pot without asking, which Xuan chose to read as friendship. "Sect Master’s order. No Foundation disciple leaves this mountain while the elders are busy shouting at one another. I argued. I lost. I’ve been losing arguments in that hall since I was nine."
"You’d have been one more sword. I’d rather have you up here, telling me what your elders decide before they decide it."
"That’s the ugliest compliment I’ve been paid all year." He scratched a thumbnail across a chip in the cup rim. "The convoy’s saddled and waiting at the lower gate. Elder Shen has the lead, and he was cutting men down before your father could hold a blade. He’ll put you inside Skyedge’s walls or he won’t come home at all."
"A lot of blood for a houseguest."
"You beat me in front of my whole sect and let me keep my head. I’ve decided that makes you a friend."
"One last thing, then." Xuan put his cup down. "If your elders wake up and decide neutral is a luxury they can’t afford, which way do you fall?"
Yan Wuji looked out over the cloud and took his time about it. "Ask me in a month." No apology came with it, which was the closest thing to honesty anyone on this mountain had handed him. "When you open that door of yours, send word. I want to be standing somewhere I can watch what walks out."
"You might not enjoy the view."
"That’s rather the point."
Qingyue waited at the head of the stairs, cloak pinned, her horse’s tack checked twice by her own hands rather than a disciple’s. She’d slept badly. He read it off the flat set of her mouth, since Su Qingyue would freeze her own exhaustion out of her face before she let a stranger see it.
"They’ll know by nightfall," she said as they started down. "The palace, I mean. Whether her brothers knelt. Whether she did."
"And we’ll be four days down a road with no relay towers on it, learning nothing. The empire finishes deciding itself while we eat dust." Xuan dragged his gloves on. "I’ve made peace with that. Loudly. To myself. Several times."
"My father committed Frostmoon because I told him she was worth committing to." She filed her voice down to nothing, which was how he’d learned to hear her flinch. "If she knelt, she’s a hostage. If she ran, she’s a traitor. And if she’s dead, my father bound hundreds of disciples to a corpse because his daughter advised him to."
"Or she’s three moves ahead of a man who spent yesterday working out which end of the seal goes down." He held her eye. "Sunset happened, or it didn’t, and it managed the whole business without consulting us. The only lever we own is how fast we’re standing in our own halls when the news catches up. We take the gorge road. A week quicker, and it runs through the river city."
Her glance came sideways, dry as old paper. "You’re collecting your boy."
"I’m collecting my investment. Hao has a courier network I paid for and a city stuffed with grain that a hungry army is going to want very badly, very soon."
"The empire is coming apart and you intend to go shopping."
"I intend to shop efficiently."
At the lower gate, Mira stirred like a woman shifting in a chair she’d been dozing in.
[ Two weeks of hard road, an empire catching fire behind us, and a fiancée holding herself together with spite and good posture, ] she said. [ Try to keep the clever down to a survivable dose, yeah? ]
’When have I ever done otherwise.’
[ That is the exact sentence I’m objecting to. ]
The gate parted the width of two horses and sealed behind them before the dust could follow. Elder Shen took the point without ceremony, a spare, weathered man who had greeted Xuan with four words and spent none since, twelve grey riders strung out at their backs. Yan Wuji watched from the white bridge until the road bent away, and Xuan raised a hand without turning around, and that was the Heavenly Sword Pavilion, finished.
By noon the world had gone wrong in a manner nobody had reported yet.
The gorge road was the trade artery of the East, and it should have been a slow river of ore wagons and grain trains and pilgrims, and above all merchants, because a war beginning is the greatest sale in human history and every trader from here to the sea knew it.
There was nobody on it. Not a cart, not a peddler, not a farmer’s mule. They passed three waystations with the hearths gone cold, and at the last, a bowl of half-eaten rice waited on the step with the ants already moving in.
Elder Shen reined up hard enough to make his horse object. Ahead, the country squeezed shut, red rock climbing to either side until the sky narrowed to a blue ribbon over a throat of stone.
"This road is never empty," he said.
[ Xuan. ] Every joke Mira owned had drained out of her voice. [ Merchants don’t hide from a war, they sprint at the profit. Somebody swept this road bare, and they finished the job before we ever came down that mountain. ]
Xuan’s hand found Marrow Dragon’s hilt, and the old itch behind his ribs woke up cold for the first time in his life.
"They didn’t clear it so we could ride through," he said quietly. "They cleared it so nobody would see what happens to us in there."