So this was what it felt like to be in a battle, thought Lu Da.
As yet it hadn’t been very exciting. A lot of waiting. And itching. Lu Da adjusted her position for the thousandth time, the brush squashed flat in a small circle around her.
“Stop fidgeting,” hissed Shi Qian, she of the sticky fingers, the thief of the Three Fleas. Doubtless Shi Qian was used to hanging upside down from rafters until a family was asleep and then prancing away with all of their valuables. She wouldn’t be bothered by squatting in the undergrowth for half the night.
“’S not like they can see us up here,” grunted Lu Da. “There’s no need for stealth.”
“Let’s hurry this up!” groused Li Kui. “I want to get down to where I can start upping my kill count. Not letting those prissy-foots beat me just because they get to start sooner.”
Another one of the Three Fleas snickered—Yang Xiong, it sounded like. “You could always add an extra thousand for everything we drop on Cai Jing’s army now.”
“Nah, wouldn’t feel right. Gotta get the bite of my axe in flesh,” Li Kui said.
“Hush,” snapped Commander Yang. Not for the first time. The bandits quieted.
They crouched high up on the mountainside, just at the edge of the fissure that led straight down to the shoreline where the army was sure to land. Long before Cai Jing had decided to pick this fight, they’d built sensible defenses here, ones that would protect the mountain from any enemy that dared cross the marsh. Barriers held back immense stacks of logs and boulders that, once released, would thunder down to bury whoever set foot on the shore. Even farther up, several seasons had been spent gradually damming the waterfall that had helped carve this gully, and all that water was now packed into a large crater about three-quarters of the way up the mountain.
Releasing it would not go well on whoever was below.
Lu Da would have thought that sufficient, but Sister Lin and Commander Yang and the Professor and everyone who knew better, they said it would take out a bunch but then even more would swarm over the corpses like roaches. That’s why they’d have a third line, led by Chao Gai, where Sister Hu and Sister Song and Sister Sun and all the rest would be waiting. They’d dug a bunch of pits and other traps and would hold the mountain against any who survived those. Lu Da and the rest of Commander Yang’s group would rush down to join them, and Sister Lin’s group would be making their way around from the water to back them all up too.
That was probably where things would get more battle-like, Lu Da expected.
A sharp whistle echoed across the mountain. Commander Yang sat up swiftly, gazing out in the direction of Chao Gai’s group.
“It begins,” she said. “To your positions.”
Commander Yang didn’t make extra words when she meant business.
Glad to be moving, Lu Da lurched up on tingly legs from sitting too long and hiked up to the position she shared with Shi Qian the master thief. The next post above them was the Xie twins, their outlines tall in the dark, made more towering by the ferocious tiger skins they wore as cloaks and the gleam of their iron hunting tridents. Lu Da couldn’t see anyone else, but at the next post up would be Li Kui and Yang Xiong, with Du Qian and Song Wan across the way, and so on and so on, all the way up until the dam. That bit wasn’t manned yet—once they let loose their avalanche, Commander Yang said they’d have time to reset at the dam to pour down on the next swarm of newcomers.
All very impressive, in Lu Da’s opinion.
She craned her neck to try to see out on the water. Was that a gout of flame she glimpsed? Or were they too far? But it seemed very fast before more whistles rang out and Commander Yang was telling them to stand ready, won’t be long now, vigilance!
Lu Da laid her staff aside and gripped the heavy wooden pins keeping the barrier in place. Across from her, Shi Qian did the same. Shi Qian was all lightfooted and wiry, but strong, as thieves who hung from building rafters probably had to be. Still, if she couldn’t pull her side, Lu Da had once uprooted a willow tree with her bare hands, so they would be all right together.
The mountainside seemed to hold its breath.
Then, so suddenly it seemed surreal, Commander Yang yelled, “Heave!”
Lu Da wrenched the first heavy pins free. The barrier began cracking outward with a terrific groan. Shi Qian struggled a moment longer, but within a single turn they were kicking out the support struts, one then two then three, the monstrous load stacked behind chewing to get free. Lu Da reached for the last one, only for it to crack with the clap of one of those exploding rockets.
The first mighty rock barreled straight at Lu Da’s head. She dove to the side and it clipped her shoulder instead. The load roared from its prison, gargantuan logs too huge to fit one’s arms around, boulders and chunks of mountain even larger than Lu Da, all emerging in a storm of chaos like a dragon disturbed from the deep.
With Shi Qian still right in its path. Too far away for Lu Da to reach.
Lu Da groped for the power of her god’s tooth, knowing she’d be too late, but the thief yelled “Ai!” and leapt straight up, kicking off one of the emerging boulders to make it to the lower branch of an enormous pine, one that leaned out of the slope above them. She dangled there, the rush of rock and stone and wood crashing by not a pace below and thundering into the fissure and down the mountainside.
Lu Da grinned. The chicken stealer did have skills, didn’t she!
One of the bandits upslope was not so lucky.
Lu Da was barely aware of Commander Yang’s orders anymore over the chaos and noise—“Heave, weaklings!” and “Prove your sorry worth!” and the like directed at some of the haojie who still worked to release their traps. The mountain began to shake, the manufactured tumble becoming an avalanche, and somehow Lu Da still heard one of the Xie twins shout.
A shout of wrongness. Of anguish.
Still clutching her god’s tooth, Lu Da snapped her gaze up. The Xie twins were both upright, dancing upon an outcropping above the fray, leaning out with their massive tridents to reach for …
Yang Xiong. Caught in the avalanche, clutching onto a huge log that plummeted right in the center of the crush, at any moment to be smashed flat by the rest.
Lu Da wasn’t going to let that happen to a Liangshan sister. Not in a thousand years.
Despite any recent practice, her god’s tooth was still far more of a hammer than a delicate needle. But she grabbed that hammer anyway, ready to slam it right in the middle of anywhere she could. She ran for the lip of the fissure that had become a demon-choked waterfall—and jumped straight off its edge.
She landed in the avalanche, fell with the avalanche. Armored by the god’s tooth, she punched her way clear of everything that struck at her, a melee fight that was Lu Da the Flower Monk versus eight hundred and eight roaring objects instead of people. She tried to claw her way toward Yang Xiong, but everything was moving too fast, and she could only get her fingernails into the edge of the giant log the other woman clung to.
Without any plan, Lu Da dug in and hauled, letting the full power of her god’s tooth howl behind.
Her feet kicked out against falling boulders that gave no solid foundation, but she shoved off them nonetheless and swung the great tree upright, in a wild circle, Yang Xiong still clinging to it like a beetle, and let fly.
The rush of the god’s tooth fluctuated through her consciousness. She was starting to lose control, she knew it, she could tell. The power went slippery in her senses, like oil-soaked fish scales. With one panting, final effort, Lu Da screwed up every bit she had left and did as Commander Yang had ordered.
She heaved.
She burst out of the avalanche in a high arc above the slope. Pine branches whipped at her and twigs left bloody smacks on her face. She wasn’t ready for the ground when it slapped up against her, either.
When a very bruised Lu Da finally rolled to a stop in a clearing not too far from where she’d left, it was to see Yang Xiong dragging herself up in an injured—but living—floppiness.
Lu Da sat back and gave a very pleased grunt. She’d done it.
Footsteps hurried from above. Commander Yang, along with the Xie twins and Shi Qian, who must have dropped down from the branch once the full load had rushed by below. Shi Qian ran to duck under the arm of her fellow Flea and support her up.
“We’ve got a problem,” Commander Yang said loudly. The thunder they’d released was beginning to recede down the mountain slope, but it still dominated the air, enough that it needed shouting over. “One of the high posts didn’t fall right. Blocked the path. We can’t get up to the dam.”
Lu Da shoved herself to her feet. “We’ll just get it unblocked, then!”
Her legs went all to wobbles. She had to sit down very suddenly on the log Yang Xiong had ridden.
“In just a heartbeat or two, we’ll get it unblocked,” she amended, shamefaced.
“Iron Whirlwind’s trying. I’ve got some of the others looking for another way around, but it’s all sheer stone above. Thing is, we can’t wait. The timing’s gotta go right or the haojie down at the bottom, they’ll get overrun. Reverend Monk, how long before you can give us some of that god’s tooth action again?”
Everything in Lu Da wanted to leap up and cry, “Right now!” but she didn’t even know if she could do the leaping up part, let alone the rest of it. “A few breaths’ rest before I can heave more boulders, Commander.”
She cringed inside as she said it. What if Cai Jing descended on them now with his fancy new unnaturally made god’s teeth? She should have thought things through better. Impatient, reckless Flower Monk … you’re always too impulsive …
Yang Xiong moved her drooping head to tilt up at Shi Qian, and her expression went all shifty-smiled, probably the same way it did before she stabbed someone. “How many does it take to free the dam?”
“Ha!” Shi Qian cried. “You’re right, just one of us vixens could do it with a little grit. Commander, sheer stone’s nothing to me. Same as prancing down the street for you lot.”
“Even you would need more time than we’ve got, little Flea,” Commander Yang said. “You’d have to snake all the way round—”
“Then have the good monk throw me!” Shi Qian flung one arm so wide that Yang Xiong winced and staggered against her. “Sister Lu, hurling a little light flea up the mountain has gotta be easier than moving bits of that mountain, right?”
“It’s not hard, I could do it right now,” Lu Da scoffed. “But I’d splat your face on the rocks for sure. My god’s tooth is like me, all the way down. We punch through skulls, we don’t pick up rice by the grain.”
“You couldn’t splat me if you tried,” Shi Qian said. “The day I don’t land on my feet is the day I want death to catch me! Send me up, Flower Monk. Right now!”
“But—” Lu Da looked to Commander Yang, because—because Lu Da would cheerfully risk her own life, but she wouldn’t be responsible for splatting one of her sisters, she wouldn’t.
Except Commander Yang went all grave and said, “Heavenly King and the others need us,” and that was that.
Lu Da tottered to her feet and dubiously called up the rushing power of the god’s tooth. Shi Qian helped Yang Xiong sit down and then danced forward.
Lu Da looked to Commander Yang one more time.
Then she let go.
The push was bigger and faster and harder than she’d meant—of course it was, it always was, and she’d warned them, too! The wiry little thief soared up and away, high over their heads, speeding toward the mountain plateau where their last main trap waited to be sprung.
Or—approximately that way. As much as Lu Da screwed up her face and concentrated on shoving in the right direction, her whole body tensing from crown to bowels, she wasn’t sure she hadn’t missed the mountain entirely.
Maybe she’d thrown too far, and Shi Qian would wing through the stars forever.
She slumped down on the log in the dark, now truly wrung dry.
“Up you get, knaves,” Commander Yang ordered. “If Shi Qian has taken the dam, it’s time for the rest of us to have the others’ backs down at the shoreline. They’ll need all the help if she can’t move fast enough.”
Lu Da rolled back up, weaving slightly, and cast about to find where she’d dropped her staff.
“They’re late!” In one hand Wu Yong’s chain snapped out, in the other a blade slashed forth. Two more enemy soldiers fell. “There must be a problem. We have to fall back!”
Chao Gai dispatched another Guardsman of her own, then backed toward Wu Yong in temporary reprieve. “A little more time. We can hold them!”
Wu Yong was not certain that was true. Once pieces of the Imperial army had begun making it through to the shore, the next of Liangshan’s defenses had worked perfectly, a sweeping avalanche that buried at least a battalion or so. The men had sobbed out in fear when they realized the trap, loud enough to hear over the mountain shaking itself apart.
Not that anyone heard them for long. Not for long at all.
The next group had swarmed ashore more cautiously, climbing over the graves of their fellows, bearing an inferno’s worth of torches since the only result of their stealth had been for so many of them to be murdered in the dark. The rush of released floods from above should have buried them in the same grave as their predecessors, but it had failed to come, and they began crawling up the ridge in a rapidly multiplying horde toward where the haojie waited. The terrain delayed them still further—alternately sinking them in mud and forcing them to push through dense undergrowth or over rough boulders—but inexorably they advanced, up from the shore, slithering toward the first fold of high ground where the haojie had staked out their defensive line.
Meanwhile, Yang Zhi’s sharp whistles came down the mountainside, always the same one, working—working—they were working on it—
Something’s gone wrong.
The government soldiers climbed up the slope in handfuls and then packs and then mobs, swollen with fury and with bloodlust in their eyes and hands. Chao Gai gave the signal and the haojie burst from the brush to defend their home. The battle was joined in a fever of speed and blood and silhouettes in the night, as Wu Yong and the others, everyone who was not on the water or far upslope, they slashed and stabbed and hit—keep them back keep them back keep them back, corral them below, just a little more time for those above to finish, keep them back to where death can rush down from above—but something had gone wrong.
Song Jiang appeared beside Wu Yong and Chao Gai, a two-edged sword in one hand, blood sheeting down one full side of her face. She didn’t seem aware of it.
“We have one more pit,” she reported in a pant. “Sister Hu’s taking it.”
Wu Yong turned just in time to catch hurrying torches and shouts, and a flitting shadow that must be Sister Hu, racing a winding dance through the forest as bait. The men who tried to follow had their thirsty yells of pursuit turn to shocked terror as the ground gave way beneath their feet and swallowed them.
That was the last prepared ambush they had set. Down to their hands and steel now … and if they let the army become uncontained …
If they yielded, it would be over. If they yielded, Yang Zhi’s haojie up on the mountain would have no chance of stopping this wave of the incursion with the release of the dam. The bandits would be pushed up the slope in retreat, their base raided and torched. The heroes of Liangshan would become no more than a small guerilla force in hiding, reduced to attacking from pockets of the forest until either full defeat or unlikely escape.
Another group of soldiers struggled up to gain the top of the ridge. Wu Yong moved as one with Chao Gai and Song Jiang, together a bristling crab of six legs and hands, sword and chain and sword again, fists and feet and no mercy.
Song Jiang was the weakest fighter of the three, and she slaughtered seven of them. She had learned, since coming to Liangshan.
“We have to hold,” Chao Gai said. In the night, her eyes were dark diamonds in her still-bruised face, unreadable. “We must hold. Commander Yang will succeed.”
And then what? Wu Yong didn’t say. Cai Jing could keep sending troops until their bodies filled the swamp and made it solid enough for more attackers to walk across. Did it matter if the bandits lost the mountain now or on the next assault?
Of course it matters.
It mattered to who they were. Because if they crushed another thousand troops here when they themselves numbered less than forty, that would become the stuff of songs. It would upend history, prove everything that needed proving, to themselves and to the people and to the Empire and its overreaching oppression of ordinary citizens.
It mattered because of the legacy they left.
Wu Yong whipped the copper chain back in readiness, gripped the sword with knuckles already split to mingle with other people’s blood. A commotion came from below, shouted orders that were hastily muffled.
“They come,” Song Jiang said.
Chao Gai’s back was up against Wu Yong’s. The Heavenly King stood straight as a blade, straight as her moral souls that would stab these Imperial worms through the heart, whether or not it would be enough to save anyone, in the end.
“Does Liangshan have any ghosts beneath it, by any chance?” Wu Yong murmured.
Chao Gai tilted her face away, her expression disappearing in the darkness. “If it did … you would not want to meet them.”
They might add some here today. Wu Yong found appeal in the idea of haunting Liangshan forever. Such that even in death, the Empire might not succeed in removing them.
Sounds of movement, armor, feet tromping in unison, wetland mud slapping and sucking and plants crushed under too many booted feet. Wu Yong raised weapons, ready to die.
With a great unearthly yell, someone barreled from behind them straight down into the approaching mass of soldiers.
Wu Yong stumbled slightly. New shapes charged by on all sides. Wu Yong heard, “Take that! And there! The Iron Whirlwind comes for your heads!” and then the Xie twins had appeared too, racing in with their massive hunting tridents, and Lu Da with her iron staff and Commander Yang Zhi with that shining sword of legend—
“Hold the line,” the Blue Beast commander shouted to them. “The water is coming. Faith! Hold them!”
“Hold. Hold!” Other haojie took up the cry, so many voices, and when Wu Yong turned, Lin Chong and Second Brother and Zhang Shun were all racing up too, leading an onslaught from those who had been out on the water. “We hold! We hold!”
With new energy, the haojie rushed the line, all united, with nothing in the world to lose.
Only a few turns later—enough for Li Kui to take twenty or fifty heads, enough for Wu Yong’s battle dress to become soaked with enemy blood, enough for several ranks of the enemy to begin to break and scatter—the mountain began to shake one more time.
Chao Gai brought the carved wooden whistle to her lips and blew.
As one, the bandits retreated, slashing their way back. Their shocked enemy took a moment to react, failing to press the apparent advantage. Only Li Kui, in a haze of blood and decapitation, needed to be called again.
They ran together, scrambling back up the ridge, each giving a hand to the other, dragging up any who lagged or stumbled so that no haojie fell behind. The last bandits’ boots barely skimmed over the top of the ridge when the water hit.
More overwhelming even than the logs and boulders, the pent-up springs and snowmelt from years of the ancient mountain poured down in a flood that smashed flat any in its path. The government soldiers flailed and were tossed like toys before being gobbled by its ravenous hunger. The troops had packed onto the shore with the density of an insect swarm, and now they were swept away just as insects would be.
Up on the ridge, the row of bandits cheered with lusty victory.
Spray misted their faces and it cleansed like the blood of their enemies. Hu Sanniang and Xie Bao thrust their weapons in the air repeatedly. Zhu Gui the Crocodile grabbed Sun Erniang the Witch in delirious embrace. Sister Mu the Slightly Restrained scooped up rocks from the ground and flung them into the maelstrom flood, yelling, “That’s what you get, government curs! Just try taking the haojie of Liangshan!”
Wu Yong felt a wide grin forming, the peaceful satisfaction of singular accomplishment.
Maybe they would not win tomorrow. But they had won tonight.
From somewhere out in the still-rushing whitewater, a single unseen crossbow bolt speared out of the night and flew like a demon’s hand guided it, straight and straighter, blown by some evil wind.
Wu Yong saw it too late, spinning in horror to block or tackle or move or do anything else at all. Across, Lin Chong moved faster than any human, and it still was not fast enough.
She was only in time to catch Chao Gai’s falling body when the crossbow bolt winged in and shattered the Heavenly King’s left cheek.