Chapter 205: When the Air Gets Light
The hand came down, and every crossbow on both ridges moved at once, and not one of them moved toward Xuan.
They swung as a single machine and they found Elder Shen. In that heartbeat Xuan understood the whole architecture of the thing. The emptied road, the boulders hauled up a cliff face, sixty miles of nobody: none of it had been built for him. All of it had been built to kill the one man on this road who could break it.
The bolts were different this time. Barbed heads, black cable trailing behind them off drums bolted into the ledges, and they came down in a wall.
The first went through Shen’s shoulder and out the back, and the barbs opened behind it like a fist. The second took him low under the ribs. The third caught his thigh, and the drum crews above hauled, and the cable came taut and jerked him half off his feet, and he roared and got his boot back under himself and stood.
They weren’t killing him. They were fishing.
Sixteen of them came in between, cutting Xuan and Qingyue off from the elder with the flat competence of men who’d been told exactly where to stand. Xuan hit the wall of them at a dead run.
Twin Dragon Strike. Marrow Dragon went out flat to the right, and the man there lifted his guard against it, and the wrist rolled and the second cut came back the other way before his brain had finished reading the first. It took his arm off above the elbow and opened the face of the man behind him from jaw to eyebrow. Cloud Step, and the pikeshaft that would have gone through Xuan’s back travelled through empty air instead. Cloud Step again, in behind the pikeman, Piercing Dragon up under the shoulder blade and out through the chest, and Xuan put a boot on his spine to drag the sword free.
Every technique cost double under the grid. He could feel his reserves running out of him like sand out of a fist.
"Storm Dragon," he said aloud, less a technique than a promise, and went into the sequence with his breath locked in his throat. Four cuts, five, six, spinning through angles nobody had a guard for, and the front rank came apart at six different heights. One man’s belly opened and he stood there holding himself together with both hands and an expression of enormous surprise.
[ That was sixty percent, ] Mira said flatly. [ Under the grid. You do not have another one in you. ]
The gorge went white.
Qingyue had turned her blade through one full breath and Snowstorm Veil boiled out of her, five paces of screaming white that cut the ridge crossbows off from everything they wanted to shoot. Her silhouette smeared inside her own storm. The men who blundered in came out again cut in a hundred small places by ice they never saw coming.
"Get to him," she said, and her voice arrived from three directions at once.
Elder Shen got his hand around the cable at his shoulder and hauled.
The barb came back out through the hole it had gone in by, and it brought a fistful of him with it, and he threw the ruined thing down without looking at it. He tore the second free. He hooked two fingers under the third and ripped, and the meat of his thigh went with it, and he stood in a widening puddle of himself with four crossbow lines hanging off his body like the trailing rigging of a wrecked ship.
He found Xuan across the road, through Qingyue’s snow.
"Boy." He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. "When the air gets light, don’t waste it."
He turned and went up the left wall.
[ Xuan. ] Mira had gone very quiet. [ He isn’t cutting his way out. Third stack of boulders, forty feet up, that’s the anchor node. Break it and the whole grid dies. ] A beat. [ He worked that out about ten seconds ago. He knows exactly what it costs, and he’s going anyway. ]
Xuan tried to follow him, and killed two men trying, and the black lacquer closed in front of him again like a door.
Shen climbed that cliff with a chain swinging out of his hip. They shot him on the way up. He took one through the calf and kept climbing. He took one through the back of the shoulder and kept climbing. The crew at the anchor stack saw what was coming for them and did the sensible thing, which was to run, and he killed them anyway, because he’d run out of the leisure a man needs for mercy.
He got both arms around the anchor stone.
It was the size of an ox, and it was carved to its heart with a lattice of burning script, and Elder Shen of the Heavenly Sword Pavilion, who had greeted Xuan with four words and spent none since, hoisted it off the ledge and brought it down across his own knee.
The stone broke. The lattice went out.
The air changed. It came off Xuan’s chest like a door swinging open in a shut room, and the thing he’d been fighting through all afternoon, the wet-rope drag, the closed pipe, the sense of hauling every drop of his own power up through a keyhole, ended between one breath and the next.
[ It wasn’t draining you, ] Mira breathed. [ It was choking you. Everything you thought you’d spent has been locked in your dantian this whole time, and it just got its throat back. ]
Elder Shen came off the cliff.
He fell forty feet with the light dying on him, hit the road, rolled, and stopped. He landed near enough that Xuan could see his eyes were open, and the last of the snow came down on his face and didn’t melt.
The clerk’s expression finally moved. He looked up at the shattered stack on the left wall, and the arithmetic went across his features, and for the first time since he’d strolled up this road he took a step backward.
Xuan dragged his wrist across his mouth, and this time the blood he spread there wasn’t his own.
His qi came up out of his dantian like a tide climbing a wall. Everything he might have said about it went out of his head, because there was nothing witty left in him, nothing to sell, and no deal on this road worth making.
"Qingyue." He didn’t look at her. He was looking at the clerk. "Leave that one breathing."
He raised Marrow Dragon.
"Kill everything else."