“… And then the monk said, ‘So that’s where my staff went.’”
Wu Yong waited for a dutiful chuckle. Chao Gai unfortunately had very poor taste—she was not the most appreciative audience for raunchy jokes, however well-crafted.
But Sister Chao wasn’t paying any attention at all. Instead she sat her horse abstractly, staring into the setting sun as if the flat and deserted road before them were about to reveal a secret.
Abruptly more alert, Wu Yong twisted around in the saddle, absentmindedly correcting the horse when he gave an unappreciative skip at the shift in weight. The road behind them stretched empty, too. Rutted dirt with the hardened tracks of boots and hooves and wheels, bracketed by grassland and dotted groves. Their own three packhorses were strung out in single file, piled high with the provisions Chao Gai was bringing back to grant her villagers. But the animals’ heads were down and their ears relaxed, with the lead mare’s rope looping tensionless to Chao Gai’s hand. The animals heard nothing, either.
Even Wu Yong’s horse, a spirited gelding they called Dancing Leaf who spooked at dragonflies, was showing no skittishness.
They couldn’t be very long from Dongxi. Chao Gai had said they would arrive by nightfall or not long after, and they only had about one watch of the day left before they’d begin to lose the summer light. No ill had befallen them on the journey today, no sign any evil dogged their steps—in fact the ride had been downright boring, save for Wu Yong’s excellent repertoire of jokes.
Now Wu Yong imagined the air pricking with some unseen tension, something only Chao Gai could sense …
“Heavenly King! What do you see?”
“I don’t know.” Chao Gai’s horse began sensing his rider’s distraction and slowed, the packhorses slowing in turn behind. Wu Yong pulled up to match. The horses had begun to pick up on the mood and tossed their heads with disquiet.
Chao Gai’s posture tightened suddenly, and her mount danced to a stop in response. “There. Someone comes.”
Wu Yong whipped around to follow Chao Gai’s pointing hand. This time the landscape was not so empty. A small figure, racing toward them from far across the grasslands, but approaching fast.
“Ally or enemy?” One of Wu Yong’s gloved hands tightened on the reins, the other reaching for the whip-chain. They were only two out here, but the figure was alone, so should not pose too much threat …
“Ally,” Chao Gai said. “It’s Sister Chai.”
Foreboding crept up Wu Yong’s spine like the hand of a too-dangerous lover.
Noblewoman Chai? Why here? Galloping at them, alone, without the multitudinous retinue that much more often accompanied her … and across the grasses no less, shortcutting the road from her estate. A dangerous proposition if her horse’s thundering gait hit an animal burrow or partially buried tree root, and not a move that would have saved her very much time at all … not much time at all …
Wu Yong knew the instant Sister Chai saw them, because her horse wheeled in its pounding pace, and she centered arrow-straight on where they waited in the middle of the road. Rider and mount drove faster and faster, heads lowered, an oncoming storm.
She hadn’t been riding at them initially, Wu Yong realized. She had been riding for Dongxi.
“Sister!” Chao Gai called. Noblewoman Chai’s horse barreled into the road, its hindquarters dragging hard into a stop and kicking up a whirlwind of dust from the hard-packed track in a small version of Sister Chai’s cyclone namesake. She pulled her recovering mount into a turn so she could face them. Both she and her horse were blowing mightily, the beast’s nostrils flaring with froth as its sides heaved, dark with the pouring sweat of a panicked ride.
The Cyclone couldn’t get her own breath for a moment. She tried to speak only to choke on wild gasps.
“Haojie—breathe!” Chao Gai cried. “What ill wind brings you here?”
“Dongxi,” gasped the Cyclone, leaning hard on her horse’s neck. “You have to get to Dongxi—warn them—it’s Cai Jing, he knows. He knows the person who stole from him is of Dongxi, he will raze the village—”
Chao Gai did not wait. With a shout, she spurred her horse into a leap forward, galloping away down the road toward her village and her people. She’d dropped the packhorses’ lead. A moment of panicked milling ensued as the horses tried to follow until Wu Yong spurred in and managed to grab ahold of the lead mare’s bridle to bring them around. The poor beasts pulled and stamped, sending anxious whinnies into the evening.
“I have to go help her,” Wu Yong called to Sister Chai. “Rest here. Stay with the horses!”
Noblewoman Chai nodded rapidly, clumsily catching the lead rope that Wu Yong threw.
“Speak quickly, is there anything else you can tell me?”
“It will be bad—go! Go now, get the villagers out. My estate, they will be safe—go!”
Wu Yong nodded and leaned low, heels squeezing against Dancing Leaf’s flanks. Even after a long day’s ride, the gelding reacted with the friskiness of a foal, leaping to obey and run, run, running for the edge of the world.
Wu Yong’s body moved with the gallop, flying into the sunset as if they were one beast. This was good luck, wasn’t it? With fresher mounts, they would reach Dongxi a hair faster than the Cyclone would have. Noblewoman Chai had half killed herself and her horse on their breakneck ride, and it was a good trade for Chao Gai and Wu Yong to continue on in her stead, as she could have warned but they could also fight—the Cyclone was not helpless in her martial skills, but her training was more art than brutality, so it was lucky she had met them, very lucky, because if they didn’t make it to Dongxi before Cai Jing’s forces …
Lucky, lucky, lucky, beat out the hooves of Dancing Leaf.
They must have some luck here; it was an indisputable law of the game. After all, how had Cai Jing made this sort of connection? It must have been through extraordinary luck of his own, scavenging the countryside without rest. Their plan had left no easy stepping stone, Wu Yong was sure of it, but luck was always what could turn the game—luck—and Cai Jing had stumbled on more of his share. So it was only right for Wu Yong to come up lucky next, just a touch, the smallest touch, to make up the balance. Noblewoman Chai finding them before they’d reached the village, spurring them faster, it was lucky …
Sister Jiang the Mathematic joined Wu Yong in number games sometimes. She always laughed and mocked if Wu Yong claimed a balance of destiny would come. “Nature scorns your balance,” she would say, in that gravelly voice of hers. “The future cares not for the past, only for its own randomness. You lost six times to me because nature laughs at your idea of balance.”
Wu Yong was firmly of the opinion that Sister Jiang cheated. Of course, Wu Yong cheated, too, and had gained the title of the only one in the encampment who sometimes beat Sister Jiang’s numerical riddles. The better title was that aside from the number games, Wu Yong beat everyone else in games of strategy every time.
Even with the element of luck in play. Tactics just had to put you far enough ahead that bad luck could never catch you …
Cai Jing’s luck can’t catch me. Can’t catch us. I will not allow it.
Wu Yong leaned lower, urging the horse faster, as if together they raced the Chancellor himself along this lonely road. Out ahead, the sun dipped below the horizon, the sky becoming a husky gray speckled with the early dimness of stars.
Wu Yong had only been to Dongxi a handful of times before, always to visit Chao Gai during the latter’s tenure as village chief. It was a night not unlike this one when Wu Yong had first raised a whiff of the Liangshan bandits in conversation with the chief, a seemingly careless testing of waters that Chao Gai had jumped to eagerly. The two had stayed late with their heads together, refilling their cups and plotting ways they could better the world. The very next week Wu Yong had brought Chao Gai to the mountain.
During that Dongxi meeting, a drunken beggar had come pounding at the gate, and Chao Gai had sent out five jin of rice for the man without a second thought. Such was the magnanimity of Dongxi’s village chief, as all its people knew.
Luck. We had luck tonight. It won’t be too late.
How many people lived in Dongxi? The village was not small—perhaps two hundred lives, by Wu Yong’s estimate. Upward of fifty households, surely. Families. Children … Most eking out a living on the land, or through livestock. Chao Gai tried to shelter them from the never-ending grind of tax extortion by the local military governor, or rackets by the county and provincial magistrates, and had largely figured out how to finesse such a feat. More than that, Chao Gai had fostered good feeling between the residents, a neighborliness. Forever setting an example by giving to any who struggled, with no expectation of return, and forgiving just as generously. Over the years such leadership had brought the villagers to a state of … perhaps not outright prosperity, but comfort. Safety.
Wu Yong was fairly sure Sister Chao knew every one of the damn residents’ names.
How long has it been, since she landed here originally and they called her chief? Fifteen, twenty years at least—an age had passed while neither of them noticed. Back then, Chao Gai had been a young and headstrong ghost hunter, fresh from studies at the monastery, eager to prove hero. The odd haunting had so far ranked as no challenge to her and had only tempted her appetite for more.
Dongxi had defeated far more experienced exorcists. The land under the village was plagued with spirits, ravaged by the restless dead. The people soldiered on, exhausted, hateful, as they woke to mutilated livestock or had their children fall to frightful accidents. Some tried to relocate elsewhere, but where could they go? No one would buy the land their fortunes were staked on; even traveling peddlers avoided the festering boil that was Dongxi, leaving its people scraping in poverty.
Only the tax collectors were undeterred. They could not be forestalled by ghosts.
No benevolent spirit had ever visited. Somehow the land had been poisoned into a cesspit of ancient villainy, every one of its phantoms so far from any humanity that they were no more than manifested evil made real. All collecting at the bend in a stream where the village called Dongxi withered but failed to die.
Until Chao Gai had come.
Wu Yong had not been witness, but the way Chao Gai told it, the battle had been one of legend. One by one, Chao Gai trapped each of those spirits beyond the physical plane, walling them away as if behind seamless stone and inscribing their own names and natures against them, until every single beastly emergence was bound thrashing and furious—forever. The feat had minted her a new and indisputable hero. The shocking side effect was that after Chao Gai had emerged victorious, it was to find the people begging their savior to become chief.
She’d proven even better at that than as a wandering champion. Heavenly King, they’d called her.
Two hundred lives. Children and families.
Noblewoman Chai’s offered sanctuary at her estate would host them easily. They would be inconvenienced, greatly inconvenienced, but saved. The sprawling lands belonging to the Cyclone had more than enough space and rooms to house them temporarily, and Liangshan could offer a helpful expansion of that hospitality with a little lead time for construction and logistics. Noblewoman Chai was well-known for the safe haven her family lands offered, and her own lifelong amnesty meant she could walk very close to every law—even cross them now and again—and the Emperor could neither condemn nor even pursue her without abdicating his family’s own honor. Noblewoman Chai would shelter all of Dongxi until …
Until Wu Yong found the next move against Cai Jing. There was always a next move.
Wu Yong’s horse caught the scent first.
The gelding’s rhythm skipped and bucked, and Wu Yong was barely able to keep a seat in the saddle, thighs clamped hard, hand and booted heels forcing the little horse to firmness. Go, go, keep on, we had luck and we can’t be too late—
Then Wu Yong smelled it too.
The acrid sharpness of a camp’s cooking fuel. A neighboring house’s stove when standing out on the street some cold night.
Fire.
Dancing Leaf shied and balked. Wu Yong fought his jerking and drove them faster, faster; they had to help, had to warn … Darkness had begun gloving the sky, but the night was not full. Yet somehow Wu Yong could still not see ahead, as if the world were shrouded in a veil of fog.
A fog that burned and blurred. Gradually joined by a muted, monstrous glow.
Wu Yong lifted a glove to wipe away the tearing. Tears had no meaning, spur the horse on, force them both forward, even as every instinct in both horse and rider shrieked to flee. The rolling miasma clouded everything before them, a towering and too-final claim.
The first buildings rose up suddenly out of the smoke, shadowy charred spikes of the reeking and ruined. Glowing embers helped outline the destruction against the dusk and clogged air. Other shapes moved—ran—screamed—until still others followed, men on horseback in a cavalry of death, who cut down the screamers into silence.
No.
Wu Yong made no coherent decision. Horse and rider plunged after one of those deadly shapes, and Wu Yong’s copper chain whipped out.
Now one of the Imperial Guardsmen screamed.
The blow smacked him from the saddle to plunge off his horse’s back. The riderless horse reared, eyes rolling, and thundered away. Wu Yong’s horse, driven by heels of stone in his flanks, kept plunging on, his hooves churning over the injured man who had fallen stunned to the ground. An iron-shod beast weighing a thousand jin was as good as a weapon, anvils that crushed throat or groin or sternum before Wu Yong rode hard after the next.
Chain met skull—another soldier fell. Chase down the next—he galloped away, but metal cracked out and smacked the hindquarters of his horse, who bucked and bolted. The rider grasped at air and found nothing, his mount racing out from beneath him.
No decision. Trample forward and finish it.
The soldiers were becoming harder to see. Darkness and smoke and streaming tears that Wu Yong tried to ignore even while coughing out of lungs filled with tar.
More screams, muffled and swallowed by the smoke. From where? Where?
A farm was ablaze off to the right, a full inferno, the flames licking up to the night sky. As Wu Yong rode toward it, a girl who looked about twelve or thirteen crashed from the collapse in a disintegrating wall. She fled, bawling, nightdress still aflame, her hair blackened and charred away.
Another one of the soldiers pounded in. Before Wu Yong could close the distance, he’d struck from the saddle, sword cutting the girl down the way a man might chop at troublesome brush.
Wu Yong still wasn’t close enough. But someone else was.
Chao Gai galloped in at right angles, straight at the soldier, letting loose a shout of pure pain.
Her sword flew. The man’s head separated clean off his shoulders and bounced to the ground in his wake. His headless body rode on for several paces more before creaking slowly out of the saddle, but its foot tangled in the stirrup. The panicked horse dragged the corpse away into the night, bucking and kicking against this burden it didn’t understand.
Chao Gai wailed another bloody, grief-stricken cry at the soot and sky, but two more riders appeared out of the smoke, upon her at once. They met their ends just as fast. Chao Gai’s staff and sword slashed brutal, no finesse, only death.
This time Wu Yong had drawn close enough to help. The soldiers fell lifeless in moments.
“Where to?” Wu Yong tried to ask, but the words became nothing more than a hacking choke.
Chao Gai didn’t answer anyway. She screamed again, wordless, coughing, broken, vicious and fury-filled. Then she thrust her weapons back into the saddle and twisted abruptly to slide from her horse. Wu Yong spurred closer and barely caught hold of the bridle in time—both horses wanted to bolt, flipping themselves against the reins and twitching their heads as if to shake off this nightmare. Juggling a grip on both sets of reins, Wu Yong managed a clumsy dismount as well.
Chao Gai had swept the dead girl into her arms, pressing their foreheads together—and heedless of the way the girl’s body fell nearly in halves. Her small frame had been cleaved so deeply that it folded open, blood and bone and a warm mess of organs ballooning into the night.
All backlit by her family home in flames. The house she hadn’t been permitted to escape from.
Wu Yong looped the horses’ reins forward over their heads, one hand reaching above and behind to keep a grip, and went to one knee next to Chao Gai. The smoke scoured their faces and throats. The heat from the house fire scorched through their tunics even at this distance.
Chao Gai’s eyes were wild, streaming from smoke or emotion or both, her face smudged dark with soot. She raised her head from the girl’s, her anguished gaze going to the abstract distance.
“None of them,” she rasped, barely audible. “None…”
Even lacking Chao Gai’s further senses, Wu Yong had seen enough to take her meaning. The villagers burned in their homes, anyone fleeing becoming victim of the sword instead.
“Trapped…” Chao Gai whispered. “Tortured and then trapped them … to die alone … the pain, I can feel—so much pain—too late. Too late. Only the dying left…”
Her voice scratched like rusted metal. Wu Yong reached out and gripped her arm.
Chao Gai … she was feeling her own people massacred.
A startling darkness seemed to overtake her eyes. As if liquid ink replaced her tears, her eyes becoming black diamonds in an inhuman face.
She whipped to face Wu Yong. “Run.”
“I’ll stay—”
“I can do one thing for them. I can end it. Run.”
Clarity began to dawn, but still Wu Yong hesitated for one fragile extra instant. Chao Gai’s expression went closed and altered, drawing into something unnatural. Otherworldly.
“Now,” she hissed, and Wu Yong ran.
In the moment it took for boot to hit stirrup and for Wu Yong to land hard against Dancing Leaf’s saddle, the ground began to shake.
No. Not the ground. The air. Vibrating in every direction, overwhelming every sense. Jarring Wu Yong’s body apart from the inside.
This time the horses screamed. Dancing Leaf reared at the same time Chao Gai’s mount bolted. The second set of reins tore out of Wu Yong’s hand and was gone, and it was all Wu Yong could do to stay in the saddle, hold on, hold on, hold on and run—
On the ground, Chao Gai had her fingers spread, palm up. She stood very straight, no longer reacting to the smoke, the dead girl at her feet. Her robes were soaked dark with other people’s blood.
Wu Yong did not wait to see what she did next. The instant Dancing Leaf’s hooves hit ground again, they shot away through the trembling air like a bolt from a crossbow, running, running anywhere but here, out of this village that was about to become nothing but death. The smoke had cloaked all sense of direction, but Wu Yong bent low and let the horse run straight, straight in any direction that would take them out and away—
The world seemed to cleave against itself. Not the earth, but reality itself, everywhere, shuddering through every nerve and joint and limb. Wu Yong knew, suddenly with a terrible certainty, what this village’s chief was doing to save it, one last time.
Chao Gai was releasing the ghosts.
This place. This place that had been plagued by spirits that Chao Gai herself had trapped somewhere just beyond. She was cracking apart her own impenetrable seal, breaking them loose, all of them and more, calling on everything ancient and evil.
And they were hungry.
Shapes burst forth, out of the ground, out of the air, from cracks in the sky. Visible darkness, rupturing through into the world with only a mind to devour.
Wu Yong yanked hard on the reins, forcing Dancing Leaf to spin away and avoid, to wheel in the sharpest of turns, leaning so hard they both should have driven into the dirt. He tried to buck against the bit, to throw the vise of pressure off his flanks—but Wu Yong forced his head, forced with the certainty of life and death, because that’s what these shapes were, death—
Several of the soldiers rode by at a distance, shouting to each other in panic, slashing swords at the empty air and finding nothing. One of the shadows rose behind them, for a single heartbeat billowing up ever taller and darker and more vicious.
It plunged with all the speed of a raptor. A raptor the size of a house.
The soldiers tried to flee. The shadow tore into them, through them, bone bursting as if their flesh inverted from the inside out, human faces exploding into skulls and then into nothing. Slivers of meat and skeleton whipped like daggers to smack Wu Yong across the cheek from fifty paces away.
Where men and horses had ridden only a moment ago drifted fine mists of blood and the echo of agony.
Don’t stop. Head down, ride harder, get out, get out, don’t touch them—don’t get close—
Reality shook again, harder, juddering against itself in fault lines, evil seeping through from every crack.
Could Chao Gai control this? Did she even want to?
No time to think about it. Run. Twist away. Rear back from the yawning cracks where this world collapsed into darkness, force Dancing Leaf through a wildness he didn’t understand to save them both, zig and zag and bite hard down on any possible scrap of luck because if one of those burst through in the path ahead—or if one were to burst through on them, in them, devouring animal or human with no quarter …
If that happened, all would be done. Ended.
Wu Yong could not feel the dying and dead as Chao Gai did. Yet somehow, in this fracturing world, for a handful of moments everything seemed to be as one. The devourers pouring from their prison, called forth by Chao Gai to this fertile ground, multiplied a thousandfold in number and hunger in their decades of imprisonment. The soldiers, crying out in fear now, for mercy, for forgiveness, for their mothers and grandmothers, and disintegrating before they could flee.
And the people—the villagers—barred or bound in their homes, pleading for death as they burned …
Death heard their pleas, and came.
Their screams stopped, too.
Wu Yong rode and rode and didn’t look back, far past where the world stopped cracking and the unnatural shadows grew sparse and sparser and then were left behind. Far out under the stars, with the air clear and the earth still and reality knit together again.
Dancing Leaf stumbled to a stop. Wu Yong sat in the saddle for a long moment. Then another, and another, unmoving.
They were on a road, but not the one they’d come in on—this one stretched in a narrow dirt track that formed a trough between banks of tall grasses. Wu Yong kicked the stirrup off on one side and slid down, ankles almost folding against the ground. Every bone felt shredded, every breath a knife.
I’m alive, though. Alive.
Wu Yong’s mind leapt to the rest of it, to Cai Jing, to Chao Gai, to whatever Noblewoman Chai had learned that had sent them racing into this bloodbath. Had Cai Jing discovered—? Was Sister Chao still—? Leave it. Not yet. Leave it!
With difficulty, Wu Yong tamped down the chaos of questions and the reflexive grasp for strategy and reaction. It was like swinging a bat against one’s own self.
Dancing Leaf’s head hung low in clear exhaustion, his eyes lidding closed, sides fluttering shallowly. Wu Yong sank down against the bank of grass, head fallen back, gazing up at the stars and letting them both rest.
Breathing was difficult, but possible. Wu Yong’s focus came and went in shards that cut and bled.
Direction. Find a direction, use the stars …
Don’t think yet. Don’t think about Chao Gai.
There. The pole star, the North Celestial, glittering calmly as if it oversaw an ordinary night. This track was leading southwest, then. And they’d come in roughly from the east.
When Wu Yong rose again, unknotting joints and straightening in pops of dull pain, a nervous Dancing Leaf twitched away from being touched. With leaden arms, Wu Yong lifted the water skin from its thong on the saddle and drank against a throat that stabbed with every sip.
Half only, the rest went to the horse. He shied away, again, but Wu Yong caught at the bridle, steadying him and turning the waterskin to let it dribble against his tongue.
“Drink. A bit longer, and then we can both rest. Drink.”
At least the horse let himself be mounted. Though swinging up into the stirrups was almost too much to ask of Wu Yong.
Sit. Breathe. Vomit if you need to. Nobody here to see.
Don’t think about Chao Gai, or what Cai Jing knows. Not yet.
The right direction. That was all.
Wu Yong managed to rouse and coax the horse to slow action. Up into the grass, even as he balked, hooves pawing against the uneven ground.
“No, we’re not going back by the road. That way lies…”
Something. Would Chao Gai lock away the spirits again, after everything was done? Or leave them to roam, devouring Dongxi off the map forever, a no man’s land where no one ever dared step foot again?
Would Chao Gai even be able to re-imprison them, if she wished to?
Had Chao Gai even planned to save herself?
Wu Yong guided the horse in a wide berth of where the village had been. They kept farther than they needed to, plodding slowly over the rough grasses in a distant arc. But they’d galloped in and were meandering out, and an estimation of the distances was difficult … better to overshoot for safety than to happen back across the fringes of Dongxi.
Wu Yong shuddered.
Dancing Leaf’s hooves dragged, tripping on the earth. Wu Yong let the poor animal set his own pace. A slow walk was more than enough to handle from the saddle right now anyway. The smoke had been its own poison even before the fighting and the horrors and the breakneck ride, and Wu Yong’s mind slid in oily circles, tinged with sick.
The landscape rolled on beneath them, step by exhausted step. Mostly grasses, but some thickets of forest, here and there another farm track or a stream. Wu Yong let the horse drink his fill, and dismounted to do the same, rinsing and spitting. The taste of the fire still lingered.
It must have been half the night when Dancing Leaf’s hooves stumbled out onto a wide dirt road again. Wu Yong’s head tilted back, taking in the stars. Was this the right road? The one they had ridden in on? Impossible to say for sure, until they hit an inn or a post marker. It seemed right …
East, it was going east, roughly. That had to be right.
The horse stumbled again and listed to the side. Too tired. Too much. Wu Yong shook one foot loose, body barely responding, and slid into an even more graceless dismount than before. Dancing Leaf tossed his head and nosed a question.
“You got me to the road. Let’s see if I can stay upright for a while. Mind you, you might still have to carry me if I can’t.”
Wu Yong took hold of the reins in one hand and turned eastward.
One foot in front of the other. One at a time. If this is the wrong road … at first light I can find an inn, surely. Or, failing that, a farmhouse. Ask them where I am. They can tell me in relation to Dongxi.
Warn them, too. Warn them never to go near Dongxi again.
Wu Yong couldn’t have said how long they walked that way, horse and rider a reflection of each other, feet dragging in a rough staccato, heads lolling downward as if their necks could not hold up the weight.
“Wu Yong! Professor!”
The shout had to be repeated three times. You’re lucky no villainous attacker has found you here, Wu Yong thought. This is no good state of alertness. And then: At least it’s the right road.
Wu Yong tried to turn toward Sister Chai’s voice, but ended up folding to sit on the ground instead. The horse wandered a few steps to the side and then stopped and blew out a breath, head hanging low.
The Cyclone’s hands. Grasping at Wu Yong’s head, wiping at the soot and sweat and heedless of how it stained her silken sleeves. “Professor. What happened? Where is Sister Chao?”
Wu Yong couldn’t speak.
“Is she in trouble? Should we ride to aid her?”
“No! No. No riding. Dongxi is—” What? Dead, blackened, a pit that would devour any souls that wandered through and add them to its ghostly number. “It’s over.”
“Is Sister Chao—” Noblewoman Chai stopped, clamped her lips together.
“I don’t know.”
The Cyclone sank down to the road also, their shoulders touching. They sat that way for a time before Wu Yong roused to ask her to see to Dancing Leaf. Sister Chai brought him over to hobble with the others and took down the saddle and tack, giving him a careful rubdown and another skin of water.
It surprised Wu Yong slightly that she knew how to do all that. Her estate was not lacking in well-gilded servants. But Sister Chai was independent, and a fighter herself, and perhaps she had learned for just such a situation as this.
She came back and resumed sitting next to Wu Yong, offering another waterskin. She didn’t appear to have changed for the frantic ride out—her clothes were of their usual fine quality, lavender silk trimmed with midnight, though torn and dirty now. But she did not pay the damage any heed.
It was far too long before Wu Yong’s mind began to work well enough—or at all—to ask the important questions, the obvious questions. “How did you know? Wait—Liangshan, are they—”
“I sent a trusted runner to Zhu Gui at her inn. I did not have time to find another to ride for Dongxi, so came myself, as fast as I could.”
“What does Cai Jing know?”
“I’m not certain I discovered everything. But I was told the greatest threat was to Dongxi. I don’t think he is aimed at the mountain yet, but … it’s surely only a matter of time.”
Wu Yong nodded. Tortured, Chao Gai had said of the villagers. Doubtless the soldiers had squeezed all the information they could from Dongxi before laying it to waste.
“He had his investigators scour the countryside day after day for any clue. Professor…” Sister Chai hesitated, then drove on. “He found Sister Chao’s friend. Bai Sheng.”
“She’s dead?”
“So I’m told.”
I failed her, Wu Yong realized. I should have, could have anticipated an eventuality such as this. Even the most rudimentary caution of bringing her back to the mountain …
Sacrifices sometimes readied the whole board for victory. But unnecessary sacrifices, senseless ones, sacrifices that happened because Wu Yong had not properly prepared, had left something to chance—sacrifices that gave the enemy an advantage—
Two hundred people in Dongxi. And one wine merchant who had been a sister to the Liangshan bandits. Cai Jing had killed one of their own.
Maybe two.
“You’re swaying.” Noblewoman Chai’s hand stretched supportive against Wu Yong’s back. “There’s more for me to tell, but it can wait for—when should we—? We can get you to an inn. There must be one not far from here.”
“No,” Wu Yong said.
Sister Chai nodded. They sat. Waited.
When hoofbeats came, however, they were not from Dongxi, but from the east.
Sister Chai drew a dagger. “Quick. Back by the horses.”
Wu Yong’s copper chain was out, swinging from one gloved hand, but this night had already wrung out everything possible and left nothing behind. How effective can I be, now? Will I fail again here?
They retreated off the road, back by the packs and the hobbled, sleeping horses. Noblewoman Chai was gripping Wu Yong’s arm.
She was the one who saw the truth first.
“Oh, grace be to the Emperor!” She let go and dashed forward, shouting out into the night. “Sister Song! Haojie! Stop!”
Sister Song? Sister Song was—here?
And she was riding for Dongxi—the galloping hooves hadn’t paused, they hadn’t heard Sister Chai—
Wu Yong’s body lurched into stumbled action without any conscious direction. Down into the road, in front of the sprinting horses like a drunkard, they can’t go toward Dongxi, stop stop stop stop stop—
One of the horses whinnied loud at the sky, front hooves coming off the ground close enough for Wu Yong to feel the wind of it.
“Mother of a cunt!” bellowed a familiar voice from the rearing horse. “What in a stinking demon’s foreskin—”
“Professor!” Song Jiang made it sound as harsh as one of Li Kui’s curses.
Wu Yong couldn’t draw a breath. The world spun, narrowing to a point. Hands on knees. Try to breathe. Don’t fall …
That dictate failed. When Wu Yong was next sensible, the stars wheeled above again, the hard-packed dirt of the road below.
Breathe …
“Professor. Speak, please. Are you all right? Where’s Sister Chao?” Song Jiang crouched down, her face eclipsing the sky, her hand pressing Wu Yong’s. The figures of Li Kui and Lu Da clustered behind her, bulky shadows in the night.
“Sister Chao,” Wu Yong tried. “She…”
“We knew trouble had found you—we rode to help,” Song Jiang explained. She gestured behind her. “Or—Sister Lu knew. What befell you? Where is Chao Gai?”
“You can’t go after her.” Wu Yong’s elbows pushed against the ground, aiming for something close to a sitting position. “You can’t go. Nobody can.”
“I don’t understand. Is she still in Dongxi?”
Wu Yong’s mind tried to answer that, and failed. “She … we need to wait for her. Here. You can’t go … it’s over.”
“Oh, that makes perfect sense,” Li Kui said sarcastically. “’S why we call you the Professor, sure. Sister Song, our Tactician is addled in the headmeat. Let me go to the village. I’ll bring Sister Chao back if I have to knock her out, truss her up, and throw her across my saddle, see if I don’t.”
“No.” Wu Yong groped to physically stop her but found only air. “No. Nobody can go. Chao Gai sent me—sent me away. I said I would stay, I said—But she sent me—It’s finished.”
“I’m afraid the Iron Whirlwind speaks the truth tonight, Professor,” said Song Jiang. “You’re not making sense. You know we won’t leave Sister Chao behind—what happened? Where is she? Professor. Concentrate.”
“Yeah, concentrate!” Li Kui roared, and reached forward to smack Wu Yong across the face. “Where’s Sister Chao? Did you kill her?”
“Shush,” Song Jiang hissed over her shoulder, before turning back to add, “but you must speak, and quickly. Where is Sister Chao?”
“Here.”
Everyone but Wu Yong stood or turned suddenly. Wu Yong managed to twist around, too, only more slowly.
Chao Gai stood on the western tract of road, on foot. Her robes were torn and black with smoke and blood, her eyes spiderwebbed with red, the veins of her face blown into indigo bruises.
“Sister Chao!” Lu Da and Noblewoman Chai cried her name at once, both hurrying to support her. But Chao Gai shook them off.
Song Jiang stepped forward. Met her eyes. “Dongxi?”
“Gone.” Chao Gai said it without emotion.
“Cai Jing’s doing?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Sister Chai said he killed Bai Sheng.” With the help of some elbow work, Wu Yong managed to push up to stand with the rest of them. “That’s how he knew…”
“It was her husband, Huang Wenbing,” Noblewoman Chai added quietly. “I’m told he was the one who talked. Bai Sheng protected you to the end.”
Li Kui drew one of her battleaxes and roared, slashing the weapon down to thump into the dirt of the road, with such force the axe head buried half its blade in the hard-packed clay. “He talked? He dies! No one crosses Liangshan!”
“She’s right,” Chao Gai said. Soft. Deadly. She turned to Noblewoman Chai. “Do they still hold him?”
“No,” she answered. “Once he gave the Chancellor the information, he was granted clemency.”
“Then Bai Sheng must be avenged. Tonight.”
Silence, with nods from some of the others. Everyone understood how this night must end.
Wu Yong surely did. The certainty had been waiting all along, behind smoke-riddled wits and the breath-stealing scent of their own failure. Before anything else, before the next move of the game could be conceived—the move that would lead to the crushing destruction of Cai Jing and everything he touched—this part must be finished.
It was only right.
“I have more,” Noblewoman Chai put in quietly. “Rumors, mostly, but I believe them to be important ones. This merits a longer conversation—we should get off the road.”
Song Jiang reached over and touched Wu Yong’s shoulder. “You’re not well. You need to get back to the mountain. Sister Chai can accompany you and await us there.”
“No.” Wu Yong pushed her hand away. “It was only some smoke. I ride with you.”
“Sister An would have our heads,” Song Jiang said gently. “You weren’t at full strength before tonight. Let the Cyclone take you back. Tell everyone else what’s transpiring here, and make sure they’re on highest alert.”
“Spring Rain.” Wu Yong said her nickname so coldly that Song Jiang drew back slightly. “You mean to help me yet you would castrate my dignity forever. The only way to stop me from coming is to run me through on the side of this road. Do it, if you dare.”
Song Jiang stared for a moment, then turned helplessly to Chao Gai. “Sister Chao. Make the Professor listen to reason. As Liangshan’s leader—”
“Our Tactician has the choice to come,” Chao Gai interrupted. She wasn’t looking at Song Jiang, but at Wu Yong, eyes hooded and red. “Every hero of Liangshan has the right to sacrifice for vengeance. I honor that right.”
Wu Yong nodded at her.
Song Jiang made a frustrated sound, but she didn’t argue further. “As a practical matter, Liangshan must still be updated as quickly as possible,” she said instead. “If something should happen to our party…”
“Sister Chai. May I ask you to ride for the mountain?” Chao Gai said. “We’ll leave some of the rice and you can return with two of the packhorses—I won’t deprive Liangshan of those resources. I’ll take the third to ride. Don’t rush or overspend the horses—take every precaution and you should still arrive by early tomorrow. You know the road from here?”
“Yes, Heavenly King.”
“Thank you for riding to warn us. I owe you a great debt.”
Noblewoman Chai lowered her head in a regretful bow. “I’m afraid I was not fast enough.”
Not for us to save them, Wu Yong thought. But fast enough for Chao Gai to avenge them.
None of the crimes tonight would go unanswered. Liangshan’s fury would be known. Cai Jing had made this a mortal battle, and Liangshan would return with no quarter.
Blood and death would be answered in kind.
Lu Da was not sure she understood what had happened to Sister Chao’s village. Something bad. Something so unspeakably awful that nobody was talking about it straight out.
Lu Da was normally one to make a blunt demand for straight talking, but even a tongue like hers felt bound by the tension. Or, not so much the tension as Sister Chao’s face, which looked like it had repeatedly been pummeled by a goat’s horns, or a whole herd of goats, and their hooves too, but which still wasn’t as bad as her expression, which put Lu Da in mind of when Abbot Zhi had caught Lu Da smuggling in meat, except a thousandfold worse.
Lu Da hadn’t known Bai Sheng. Bai Sheng, the Sunmouse, friend to Chao Gai and a key part of the birthday present heist. But Chao Gai spoke of her like a sister. Like one of them.
She had died for them.
That was enough for Lu Da. Bai Sheng would be avenged. Simple. A law of nature.
The idea that the haojie of Liangshan would work any other way—could work any other way—would have shocked her to the cores of her souls.
They parted with Sister Chai and turned to ride for Bai Sheng’s village—not quickly, but steadily. Lu Da’s hand stayed clenched against her heavy metal staff. Nobody spoke, except for Li Kui’s occasional muttered curse if her horse skipped or shied.
In the quietest part of the night—long after midnight had been struck but still well before the east began to fade to gray—Chao Gai led them up a path off the main road and to a cottage that seemed just like every other. They dismounted in silence and tied the horses. Then Chao Gai nodded to Lu Da and Li Kui.
The crash of a battleaxe and the slam of Lu Da’s staff, and the front door splintered and fell inward. The bandits marched over the shards.
The man Huang Wenbing was only just waking startled from slumber, his face drawn and bruised and his eyes haunted even before he focused on their presence.
Fitting, Lu Da thought.
He had killed one of their sisters. He had killed Chao Gai’s village.
Everything to follow was only an expected result.
Lu Da began to march on him, but Chao Gai was faster. She swept forward, flying at the man, twisting in the air, her slight frame coming down in an arc that focused all its energy directly at his throat.
Bai Sheng’s husband ricocheted from the bed. His body crashed into the cottage’s living space, snapping against the edges of table and chairs.
Lu Da strode over and grabbed him by the shirt. He still breathed. She slammed him up against the wall, staff across his chest and neck.
He made a small sound, like a dying bird.
Now in no hurry, the other haojie drifted to form a semicircle around him. Shadows, gathering in the night, as if they meant to perform some dark ritual.
Wu Yong moved to the fireplace to start a low blaze, which threw the tiny cottage into dancing shadows.
“Bai Sheng deserved better than to be shackled to a worm like you.” The voice was Chao Gai’s. The firelight cast her bruised face into terrible red planes. “You are responsible for her murder.”
“I … I tried…” the man wheezed against Lu Da’s staff. “I tried to protect her. I did all I could…”
“Coward,” spat Chao Gai.
“You’re right.” Tears had begun seeping from between his swollen eyelids, his chest heaving and hitching against Lu Da’s hold. “You’re right, I’m to blame. Kill me quickly, please…”
Somehow, his wretchedness only lit Lu Da’s anger.
How dare he. How dare he beg. Her staff tightened against his throat until he gurgled and choked.
“Easy,” murmured Song Jiang, and Lu Da made herself, forced herself, to draw back a hair.
“You will not die quickly,” Chao Gai announced, in that same dead fury. “My only mercy tonight is not burning your entire village as was done to mine, nor bringing slaughter to everyone you have ever cast your eyes upon. You alone will suffer—you will suffer for each life in Dongxi. Only then will you be allowed to die.”
Li Kui threw her battleaxes to the cottage floor and drew a dagger, one so sharp its point disappeared to nothing in the dancing light. She tossed it from hand to hand and barked a laugh. “I know just the thing. Professor, find us some wine. I’ll slice a piece of this bastard off for every bit of vengeance you want to taste, Sister. We’ll feast well tonight!”
Lu Da jerked around to find Sister Chao with her eyes. Killing a man was one thing, killing this man was right and proper, but could this be the way? Could this be righteous?
“Sister…” Song Jiang murmured, stepping toward Chao Gai, but Wu Yong held up an arm to stop her.
“Not tonight,” the Tactician said in a low voice.
Chao Gai waited a long, long moment before speaking, a moment that stretched as wide as the heavens. Then she said, “Let it be done.”
Later Lu Da would feel what they did that night like a fulcrum in her mind, a balance point of before and after. Like the first time she had killed a man. Only this time, she was with others, her kindred, and she would sense the finality of being sealed to them after this, as one, forever.
For Lu Da learned several things that night—
She learned that every idea she’d had about how loyal the Liangshan bandits were, their fury if one crossed them, had been a droplet of nothing compared to what was real. She learned they would do the same for her—and that she would, unequivocally, do the same for them, again and again, forever, as many times as she was called to.
She’d known they were willing to die for each other. As it turned out, dying for each other was nothing.
She also learned that Li Kui was right: human flesh, roasted over a fire and consumed with wine, tasted very much like pork or dog. Only seasoned with vengeance.
And she learned that a man could live an awful long time with piece after piece of him carved out, until one of those pieces was his heart, which Wu Yong boiled into a soup as the sun rose.
It restored them all for the journey back.
They rode into the rising sun without much speech among them. If Chao Gai’s eyes still had a deadness to them, at least they had calmed from a rage that threatened to burn anyone nearby. It ground at Lu Da’s heart that she could do no more to banish the exhaustion and grief from Sister Chao, nothing to unmake what had happened tonight. Nothing beyond what they had done already, and what they would still do. For this would not be the end of Liangshan’s vengeance—Lu Da knew it without asking. This was only enough to start.
Lu Da would stand by every one of her Liangshan family, for however long it took.