Chapter 204: A Courtesy Refused
"Is there another road?" Qingyue asked.
"Sixty miles back, and four days lost." Elder Shen weighed the gorge mouth with the flat attention of a butcher pricing a carcass. "Whoever swept this road did it to put us somewhere. Turn around and they take us on open ground with our backs to them. We go through fast, tight, and we don’t stop for anything that isn’t breathing."
They went in a wedge, Shen at the point, twelve grey riders drawn close around Xuan and Qingyue, which Xuan hated on principle and accepted on arithmetic. The gorge ate sound. Hooves came back off the red walls doubled and wrong, and the strip of sky above ran thin and blue and empty. Nothing with wings had wanted to be here today.
’Mira.’
[ Working on it. ] Her attention crawled up the cliffs. [ Xuan, the scree on the left wall, forty feet up. Those boulders are wrong. Somebody carried them up there and set them down in a - ]
She never finished.
Light bled out of the stone on both sides, hairline veins climbing the rock in a lattice far more even than anything nature draws. The air thickened to broth. Xuan grabbed for his qi out of reflex and it came slow and dragging, like hauling wet rope through a keyhole.
[ Suppression grid. Twelve nodes. MOVE. ]
The first volley came down like weather.
Not arrows. Bolts thick as a thumb, black-headed, dropping out of that blue ribbon with a noise like cloth tearing.
The disciple on Xuan’s right took one under the jaw, and it came out through the crown of his helm, and he rode on upright for three whole strides before he tipped from the saddle. A horse screamed and kept screaming. Something hot slapped across Xuan’s mouth, copper and salt, and it wasn’t his.
Cloud Step.
The ground turned into a suggestion. He stepped and the step became air, and the air put him nine feet left of the man he’d been, and three bolts punched into his horse instead of him, one through the ribs and two through the neck. The animal folded with a wet grunt and didn’t get up.
"Overhang! Blades out!" Shen was off his mount and moving before the words finished.
They came down the walls on ropes and in at both ends of the gorge on foot, black lacquer, no crests, faces wrapped. Thirty at least. They didn’t shout, and Xuan’s body understood what that meant before his head did, because men who shout are men working themselves up to killing, and this lot had done their working up somewhere else, long ago.
Awakening Dragon. Blade low, point at the dirt, weight on the back leg. The first man committed to a downward cut, and Marrow Dragon came up the diagonal and opened him from hipbone to collar. He ran two more steps with everything inside him trying to get out, and went down in the road spilling.
Coiling Dragon on the spearman behind him, small tight circles, catch and wind and shove the shaft out of line, and the man’s whole chest hung there open and startled. Piercing Dragon put the point in under his chin and out the nape of his neck. Xuan wrenched it free and was gone in the same breath, Cloud Step, and the space he’d left filled with a bolt that would have taken him through the spine.
The suppression grid made every step cost double. His qi drained like water out of a cracked jar. He’d spent Cloud Step nine times in eleven seconds, and he’d have spent it ninety if it kept him ahead of the crossbows.
Frost cracked across the stone to his left. A six-pointed flower of white bloomed two paces around Qingyue’s boots, and the air above it went pale with the breath of men who hadn’t been cold a heartbeat earlier. Two came at her together. She let the first commit, took his blade on hers, and the frost climbed his steel like a disease and welded his wrist to the hilt. He was busy trying to understand his own arm when Crystal Edge opened his throat, and the cut sprayed and froze and sprayed again.
Elder Shen went through them like a scythe through standing wheat, choked to half his strength by the grid and worth six of them anyway, and the road behind him filled with pieces.
It lasted a hundred heartbeats. It killed six of the twelve.
A horn sounded, one long low note, and the attackers pulled back to the walls and waited with their weapons up, which frightened Xuan considerably more than the charge had. He crouched over a corpse with his ribs heaving and blood running warm inside his collar, and looked at the crossbow under the dead man’s hand.
"Siege-weight," Shen said at his shoulder. "Spirit-steel heads. Army stamp filed off the stock, and filed badly." He toed the body over. "No sect fields these."
[ Grid’s army as well, ] Mira said. [ Legion suppression array. They plant them round siege camps to stop cultivators jumping the walls. Cheap, ugly, works beautifully. Somebody walked into an imperial depot and signed these out on a chit. ]
’And who signs out a legion’s toys and hands them to men with no colours?’
[ Two men in this empire could. One of them’s on a slab in Tianzhao. ] A beat. [ Yeah. The Second Prince. ]
"These are the Second Prince’s," Shen said aloud, at the same instant, wiping his blade on a dead man’s shoulder.
[ And here’s the ugly part. They didn’t chase us down this road. Look at the ropes, the rations, the fire scars on that ledge. They’ve been dug in for days. The order to put you in the ground went out before we ever heard the old man had stopped breathing. ]
Boots came up the road from the far end of the gorge, unhurried, and Xuan straightened to meet them. The man was a head shorter than his own killers and carried no weapon anyone could see. He stopped at a courteous distance, glanced over the six grey corpses without any particular feeling, and inclined his head as though they’d met at a wedding.
"Lin Xuan of Skyedge. Su Qingyue of Frostmoon." He had a clerk’s voice, dry and clear. "His Highness the Second Prince instructed me to offer a courtesy he won’t offer twice. Renounce the Third Princess. Say the words here, over your dead, and ride home with your bride. Skyedge keeps its mines, Frostmoon keeps its peak. His Highness has no interest in mountains."
Xuan dragged his wrist across his mouth and only spread the blood further. "And if I don’t?"
"You find your judgement in this gorge." His tone never shifted. "And His Highness collects your river city on his march south. He asked me to thank you for that, incidentally. Very obliging of you, gathering so much grain into one place for him."
The road went quiet enough to hear the frost tick on Qingyue’s sword.
"Here’s my answer." Xuan lifted Marrow Dragon and pointed it at the man’s chest, and his hand was steady, and his voice came out lighter than he had any right to. "Your prince emptied sixty miles of the busiest road in the East so nobody would have to watch him do this. That’s not a man who’s certain. That’s a man who’s terrified of what people will say about him afterward. Tell him I’ll think about his offer on the day he stops needing to hide."
The clerk’s mouth curved, and he raised one hand, and left it up.
"His Highness said you would say that," he said. "He told me what to do if you did."