It wasn’t long before they couldn’t hear the tracker shouting anymore. Fortunately, no one seemed to be chasing after them either. As students of Iron Core, they were accustomed to running an hour every day as part of their regular conditioning routine; now they barely covered a couple of li before they had to slow to a walk.
As much as they needed to, they simply couldn’t keep up the pace of travel. There was a limit to how far a person could push their body even under the most dire necessity. No one was designed to fight for days on end and then travel, injured, on little food and sleep. Jun thought he’d been tired the day before, but now all he wanted to do was lie down and pass out. Every step on flat ground felt as if it required the effort of mountain climbing. He was still better off than Yin Yue, who looked sweaty with fever as he plodded on doggedly with glassy eyes.
What kept Jun going was the sight of the Snake Wall, looming larger and closer than it had the day before, a forbidding obstacle that had become a beacon. The wall looked different here than it did at its southern end near Cheon, where Jun was accustomed to seeing it as an ever-present silhouette in the distance. Now that he was closer, he could see that the border was not as secure as the rulers of the East and West would like their citizens to believe. It had been built in an unprecedented hurry, both sides eager to hang on to the one Scroll they possessed and to keep their enemies away. Conscripted laborers and convicts had been used to finish construction in only twenty years. Although it stretched from the foothills of the Black Turtle Mountains all the way to the southern sea, it was not as tall as the ancient walls of Xicheng, and there were parts that had obviously been damaged and repaired. It wouldn’t be impossible, Jun thought, for a person with equipment and determination to scale it.
What kept people from attempting to do so were the patrolling soldiers on both sides who would shoot down those who tried to cross. There were exceptions—everyone knew that guards and officials could be bribed, and there were smugglers who did good business transporting goods or people through the waypoints that weren’t officially talked about. The problem was that Jun didn’t know any such methods. He wondered if he could claim asylum in the East, on account of General Cobu wanting him dead, but he doubted he would get a chance to explain himself before one of the patrolmen put an arrow through him.
At dusk, they sheltered in a ravine and ate all the food in the tracker’s bag—two wrapped rice balls, a tin of pickled vegetables, and a flask of wine—and went to sleep cold and hungry, taking turns sleeping huddled in the tracker’s one wool blanket while the other kept watch, not daring to light a fire that might be seen by pursuers. Jun looked for the Red Star, but it was low in the sky and barely visible, a pinprick flame instead of the blaze he’d been born under and that had accompanied him to Xicheng. As if Heaven itself had abandoned him.
The night was unrestful and uncomfortable, but at least it passed uneventfully. At dawn, they were moving again, spurred on by the nearness of the wall and the knowledge that the tracker had by now no doubt alerted his employers.
By midmorning, the growing sound of rushing water quickened their weary steps. They were near the Dengu River, which flowed south here, nearly parallel to the Snake Wall, before cutting west. A winding hillside footpath brought them to a long wooden bridge that spanned the water.
Through a gap in the trees ahead, Jun glimpsed movement. “Get down,” he hissed, pulling Yin off the path. Crawling forward through the shrubbery on their elbows and knees, they spied two men standing guard at the front of the bridge.
“They don’t look like soldiers or bounty hunters,” Yin whispered.
The young men were wearing simple leather breastplates tied over farmer’s clothes. Their feet were sandaled and their heads bare. One of them carried a bow, the other a spear with a rusted head. They paced back and forth, watching for any approach, but they looked bored and not particularly alert.
They weren’t soldiers at all, Jun surmised, but local militia, mobilized from nearby farming villages. As much as General Cobu wanted Jun found, captured, and made an example of, he couldn’t spare his own troops on a manhunt in the countryside when he had a war to prepare for. These peasants didn’t have the quality armor, weapons, or training of the military, but they knew the area and where Jun had to go if he wanted to pass. The reward, if they caught him, would be more money than anyone in their village had ever seen at one time.
Jun chewed his lip as he studied the scene. If they crossed the river here, they could make it to the border by nightfall of the following day. The Dengu River wasn’t as vast as it had been long ago, but glutted with recent rainfall, it was still too cold and fast-moving for them to swim across. The only other option was to follow the river upstream to where the Snake Wall spanned the waterway in five great arches at Honsho Bridge, but that would require another three days of traveling north without food and provisions, during which they might be hunted down by the Moon Righteous Sabers.
“You take the one on the right,” he said to Yin.
They snuck up on the two amateur guardsmen without too much difficulty, their approach aided by the background roar of the river and the inattention of their targets. Jun slipped the nunchaku from his waistband and gave it an experimental spin, then burst out of the foliage behind the guard on the left with a piercing animal cry that made the man jump straight up into the air and nearly drop his rusty spear. The farmer whirled around and made one fearful lunging thrust with his spear that Jun easily evaded before whipping his weapon into the man’s temple with a crack, dropping him unconscious to the ground, a vivid purple lump rising across his forehead.
His quicker-witted companion fitted an arrow to his bow and drew, aiming straight for Jun’s chest at an unmissable distance. Yin flung an arm around the man’s neck from behind and dragged him to the ground. Hooking his legs around the archer’s waist, he locked the choke in place and squeezed, cutting blood flow to the man’s brain and his wildly struggling limbs. The guard’s face turned red, his eyes rolled back, and he went limp.
Yin disentangled himself. “Let’s go. He’s not going to be out for long, and there might be more of them nearby.”
They left the two guards lying where they were and sprinted across the bridge, Jun in the lead, Yin behind, the wooden boards creaking beneath their pounding feet. At one time, when the Dengu River joined rather than separated the halves of Longhan, this bridge must’ve been a busy pedestrian crossing. Over the years, it had fallen into disrepair—Jun leapt over loose and rotted boards, trying not to glance down at the swiftly moving water below. If he put a foot through a hole and tumbled into the river, it would be nothing like swimming across the still waters surrounding the Island or the placid river of his childhood. Who knew how far he would be carried by the Dengu before he froze or drowned and washed up on the bank.
They were two-thirds of the way across the bridge when half a dozen figures detached themselves from the trees on the opposite bank. Jun came to a hard stop; Yin nearly barreled into him. The six fighters who’d been waiting in ambush approached with far more purposeful menace than the two hapless guards on the other side. No member of the crew was like the other; they were dressed in a motley assortment of clothes of different styles and colors. One man was garbed in black robes, another muscled fighter was shirtless and barefoot, and a third wore rags and a peasant’s broad straw hat. They carried a variety of weapons—chain whips and staves, swords and axes, clubs and knives—and from the way they moved and held their weapons, it was clear they were no strangers to violence.
The Moon Righteous Sabers.
Jun’s eyes fell upon the leader with an unpleasant jolt of recognition as the man strode forward, favoring his bad leg and inclining his smooth, shaved head toward Jun. Faint surprise joined the man’s usual expression of scornful indulgence.
“Shit,” Jun said. “Old Man Zhang.”
“So you did win the Guardian’s Tournament, as you said you would.” The gang leader sounded as mildly impressed as he had when Jun had punched through his table. He waved his cane toward the bridge. “Looks like it turned out even worse for you than it did for me.”
Yin had dropped into a fighting stance. “You know this man?”
“I ran into him once. I didn’t know who he was.” Jun raised his voice. “We can talk this through and solve it without fighting, like we did before. What do you say, Old Man?”
“He’s not even old,” Yin noted with bafflement.
“Yeah, there’s a whole story.”
“That’s not going to be an option this time.” Zhang sounded a touch regretful but not in the least willing to reconsider. “You’re not a Guardian candidate. You’re not the Guardian. You’re a fugitive, and you and your friend have very large bounties on your heads.”
Behind them, on the other side of the bridge, six more fighters emerged, stepping over the prone and weakly stirring guards. Jun wondered, stupidly, how he and Yin had managed to get past those Sabers in the first place before realizing that, of course, they hadn’t snuck past the bounty hunters at all. The two peasants had been hired to stand guard, positioned as mere bait, meant to lure Jun and Yin into thinking their path of escape was easy.
Maybe if they’d been less exhausted and hungry, healthier and more alert, they would’ve noticed the trap and wondered why they hadn’t seen or heard any sign of pursuit since they’d encountered the tracker yesterday. Now they were trapped—the river below, the Moon Righteous Sabers ahead of them and behind, blocking off both progress and retreat.
“It’ll go easier for you if you surrender and come along quietly,” Zhang suggested.
“The Moon Righteous Sabers are supposed to be an honorable brotherhood, the bane of the rich and corrupt,” Jun shouted across the bridge, grasping for any leverage. “We’re not traitors. We’ve been unjustly accused by General Cobu, and our only crime is opposing him.”
“Under other circumstances, we would be delighted to hijack General Cobu’s carriage and relieve him of his money,” Zhang said sincerely, “but in addition to the bounty, the general has promised us all pardons from the emperor himself.” He shrugged, indicating that there was nothing Jun could possibly offer, no amusing stunt he could perform, that would come close to matching the reward for killing him. “You’re going to be a great help after all. Some of us, you understand, have quite a few unlawful deeds that we’d like cleared from our names.”
Old Man Zhang twisted his wooden cane. The outer, hollow sheath slid free, revealing a long, metal, dagger-tipped spike hidden within. The effortless way he brandished the unusual but wickedly pointed weapon convinced Jun that despite the gangster’s moniker and his old injury, he was as dangerous a fighter as he’d been in the arena six years ago. And he was far from alone.
Jun kept his eyes on Zhang as he backed up, nunchaku spinning in an anticipatory arc. Yin faced the other direction. “Keep moving forward,” he said to Jun over his shoulder, voice raised above the sound of the water. “I’ll hold off the ones behind us.”
Jun breathed in and then out, filling his lungs with the smell of wet earth and water, his ears with the rush of the river, and his heart with the calm resolve he’d taken into the arena. He’d fought so much over the past week that the fights blurred into one another, but even now, near his limit, his blood rose and sang, his body settled into the familiarity of what it was meant to do. He found his Breath. No spectators were here to cheer him; there was no acclaim or prestige to be won. All his training, in the end, was meant for this, just as Leopard had said. Survival.
This wasn’t such a bad place to make a last stand.
“Come on, then!” Jun ran forward, nunchaku a blur.