Chapter 206: Heart of the Dragon
Cloud Step cost five percent again.
He’d been paying double for it all afternoon, hoarding it like a miser counting coppers, and now it was cheap, and he threw it around like a rich man spending money he intends to make back. He crossed forty feet of road without touching most of it, and the man waiting at the end of that step got Awakening Dragon coming up the diagonal, and it opened him from hip to collarbone and put him on his back in three pieces of shirt and one of person.
Storm Dragon cost thirty this time, and he had thirty to burn. Six cuts through a rank of eight, and the gorge filled with a noise like a cartload of wet meat going off a roof. One of them ran, and Xuan took his legs at the knee and left him there to think about it. Somewhere in the middle of that they stopped being an ambush and became a problem of arithmetic, and Xuan had always been very good at arithmetic.
One of them scrambled for the cliff, going up hand over hand for the ledge, which was clever, and Soaring Dragon came up under him with the whole weight of Xuan’s legs behind it. The cut caught him beneath the jaw at the top of its arc and took the crown of his head off, and what came down off that wall was not a man anymore.
Above them, the crossbows kept working.
Qingyue walked out into the open where they could see her, which stopped Xuan’s heart, and planted her feet.
She went absolutely quiet. Frost bloomed under her boots in a widening ring, and the cold came down so hard that the blood on the stones seized in mid-run. Snow fell around her with no wind anywhere to carry it, straight down, slow, and the bolts coming at her cracked and shattered before they arrived.
Two seconds. She held them, and the whole world held them with her.
She brought her sword down from above her head to the ground in one vertical cut, and the moon fell on the eastern ledge.
That was what it looked like. A column of pale blue-white light with a midnight core, in the perfect silhouette of a blade a hundred feet long, coming down out of nowhere onto the crossbow nest. It struck, and the flower opened, six points of ice unfolding across the whole ledge, and eleven men stopped being men and became furniture.
They came off the cliff like fruit off a shaken branch and burst on the road below.
Qingyue’s knee hit the stone. She got her sword point down and stayed upright by leaning on it, and her breath came out of her in white rags.
[ She’s empty, ] Mira said. [ Completely. That was everything she had and she spent it on your crossbow problem. ]
Something landed in the road between Xuan and the clerk, and the stone cracked under it.
He came up slowly, and he was a big man in grey scale with a straight sword as long as Xuan was tall, and the qi rolling off him was thick and deep and quiet.
Foundation Establishment.
[ There it is. ] Mira sounded almost relieved, as people do when the worst thing finally shows its face. [ That’s what the clerk had standing behind him all along. He never needed a weapon. He owned one. ]
The big man came in without a word, and Xuan learned three things in four exchanges. He was faster. Coiling Dragon barely bit on him, because his tempo neither rushed nor gapped, and stealing initiative off him was like pickpocketing a wall. And being clever was going to get Xuan killed here, which he discovered when the fourth exchange put a foot of steel through his left forearm and out the other side, and the arm went cold and useless from the elbow down.
Cloud Step. Cloud Step. Cloud Step. He bled off distance and paid in qi and bought seconds nobody would ever thank him for.
’Mira.’
[ You can’t out-trade him. He’s a realm above and he’s spent his whole life on the craft. ]
’Give me something.’
[ You’ve got one thing he hasn’t got, and it’s this: he’s about to believe he’s won. ]
Xuan stopped moving.
He let Marrow Dragon’s point drop toward the dirt. He let his shoulders come down. He let his ruined arm hang, and he breathed out, and he stood in the middle of that butcher’s yard with his eyes closed, entirely open, entirely finished, an easy thing to kill.
Every drop of qi he had went into the core of the blade.
The big man came in to end it, and he was right to, and it was the last correct decision he ever made.
One second. That was all Heart of the Dragon ever asked for, and Xuan gave it, and inside that second the qi went down out of his dantian and along his arm and into the steel until Marrow Dragon was too heavy to be a sword anymore.
He moved once.
The cut was straight. It was simple. It was the plainest thing he had done all day, one horizontal line drawn through the world at the height of a man’s chest, and what came off the blade was no longer light and no longer qi. For one heartbeat, the gorge held a dragon.
It took the big man at the collarbone and came out above the opposite hip. It took the two men behind him. It took forty feet of road, and the red wall behind that, and a wedge of rock the size of a granary came grinding down into the gorge and buried the far end of it.
The big man’s top half hit the ground before his legs understood.
The rest of them ran.
Xuan stood swaying with his arm hanging and his lungs full of broken glass and roughly five percent of himself left, and watched the clerk turn to run with them.
Five percent. As it happened, the exact price of a single step.
Cloud Step put him in the road in front of the man, and the clerk pulled up so hard he went over on his back. His hand flew to his collar, to whatever waited under it, and Qingyue, on one knee forty feet away with nothing left in her at all, dragged up the last thread of frost in her body and sent it whispering across the stones, and it welded the man’s fingers to his own throat before they could close on anything.
Xuan walked over and knelt on his chest.
The gorge had gone very quiet. Six grey riders lay on the road, and Elder Shen lay with his eyes open and the snow unmelting on his face, and around them the Second Prince’s dead lay in every arrangement a body can be put in.
"You told me your prince said what to do if I refused." Xuan wiped his mouth with his good hand. "Now I’ll tell you what I do."
[ Careful. We want him talking, not brave. ]
’He’ll talk.’
Xuan set the point of Marrow Dragon under the man’s jaw, and the clerk’s dry composure finally cracked all the way through.
"You’ve been dug into this gorge for days," Xuan said. "Which means somebody told you I was up on that mountain, and somebody told you which road I’d come down it by, and only four men alive knew that."
He leaned on the blade until it drew a bead.
"So let’s start there. Who?"