“You must lead them now.” Wu Yong was the one to say it.
The Tactician stood with head still bowed, showing no emotion, not meeting anyone else’s eyes. But Wu Yong had been the one to pry Song Jiang from Chao Gai’s side, finally, and bring her back here to a conference with only the three of them: Lin Chong, Wu Yong, and Song Jiang.
Song Jiang. Who must become the new leader of Liangshan.
“What? No!” the poet cried. She backed away from them, her eyes large and filled with grief and now panic. Those eyes found Lin Chong. “Sister Lin—we’re in the middle of a military crisis. You or Commander Yang—”
“We’re both relatively new to the mountain.” Lin Chong felt as if someone else said the words through her. For her, full grief could come later, and would. “The haojie don’t need a fighter. They need a leader—someone to follow. They need you.”
Song Jiang’s jerking, stricken movements arrested themselves, her eyes tracking over Lin Chong’s face. “Before. You never wanted me to be…”
“That was before.” Lin Chong swallowed. “You’re what the mountain needs. You can carry forth Chao Gai’s legacy.”
To lead them into a last, glorious sacrifice.
“Sister Chao said—” Song Jiang had to clamp down over her heaving breath before continuing. “The one who avenges her is the next one who will lead us. She said. We have to honor that.”
Liangshan would not have a next leader, only a last leader. Lin Chong did not say it aloud. Song Jiang might not have the same experience with war or tactics, but they both must know.
Wu Yong had become very still ever since bringing Chao Gai in, after that reckless, tragic hurry with Lin Chong, bearing Chao Gai’s weight and covered in her blood. The Tactician had sat by her bedside as if carved from rock, not speaking, not moving, not weeping. And now standing as if under the weight of centuries.
“You know what Sister Chao would have wanted,” Wu Yong said to Song Jiang, quietly. “You can lead in her same spirit … You’re the only one, Spring Rain.”
The slight lean on Song Jiang’s nickname must have been intentional. The Spring Rain—always there when needed, somehow; generous to a level that left recipients in shock; healing and prosperity left in her wake.
Wu Yong was right. The bandits would follow the Spring Rain.
Song Jiang’s hands came up to her face. “No. I cannot—Sister Chao’s last wishes—if I play this role, it can only be temporary, you understand? You know I will always help, and whatever you say we need tonight I shall do—but when our next leader proves themselves…”
“Until then,” Wu Yong agreed, face giving nothing away.
Song Jiang leaned up against the wall, her palms still pressing against her eyes, as if she had to hold herself in place lest she break apart at any moment. “They might be willing to follow, but I don’t know what to do,” she confessed to them. “I don’t know what we can do … Chancellor Cai still has thousands more troops across the marsh. We have nothing left but ourselves…”
“He hasn’t used his new god’s teeth yet,” Lin Chong added, grim. “We’ll have angered him now. That may spur him, if he was reluctant before.”
“Then we die two ways instead of one?” Song Jiang’s despair was obvious. “Friends, I—I will lead the haojie where you tell me, if I must, but…”
“We have one chance,” Wu Yong said.
Lin Chong looked over sharply.
Face drawn in deep lines, shoulders stooped, Wu Yong might have aged eight hundred years in a night. “There is the saying,” the Tactician said. “‘A snake with no head cannot move.’ What foot soldier would wish to march where half of his fellows have already died? Only one ordered to.”
“You intend us to go after Cai Jing,” Lin Chong said.
“We must behead the snake and either loot or destroy his new weapons. Recall—the rumors said even the Imperial Court did not stand by his meddling with the powers of god’s teeth. Even if we die, we shall take this oppressive new power of his with us, along with one of the most corrupt men in all the Empire. We must try.”
“How?” Lin Chong demanded. If it were as easy as that, we would have done it to start, and Seventh Brother and Du Qian and Chao Gai, none of them would have been lost. “You know as well as I do, Tactician—if any of us dare cross the marsh, we’d be picked off before the boat reaches shore.”
“Before last night that may have been true.” Wu Yong at last looked up and met Lin Chong’s eyes. “The answer is—we don’t go by boat. Zhang Shun told of what you did out on the water.”
What she had done out on the water …
“We don’t go by boat,” Wu Yong said. “We send you.”
When Seventh Brother Ruan had died. She had walked, run, and not even stopped to ask how.
Wu Yong reached out and gripped Lin Chong’s arm hard enough to be painful. “You must save Liangshan, Sister Lin.”
“How many troops?”
General Guan stayed kneeling before Cai Jing, bowed almost to the ground, not leaving the humble posture but not flinching in his report either. “We are still accounting for everyone, Grand Chancellor, but initial estimates are that almost two thousand men have not returned.”
Two thousand men.
Two thousand men.
You should feel vindication, Cai Jing told himself, bitterness dripping in the realization. You informed the other chancellors it would take this many. They scoffed, but you knew better.
He hadn’t truly believed it, though.
This was supposed to be an overwhelming victory. The Court would happily forget who was right and wrong about a deployment size if the leader of those companies came back in full celebration. If they did not, nobody would care that Cai Jing had warned, only that he had failed.
“I do bring some good news, Honorable Grand Chancellor,” General Guan said.
No good news could make up for this. The bandits had defeated him. Worse—they had embarrassed him.
Twice.
“Speak, then. Quickly,” Cai Jing commanded.
“We have found and marked the way through the marsh,” the general answered. “If the bandits come at us again, on the water, we should now be able to overrun them, especially in the daylight. The defenses that have been reported on the shore are not any from untold dark powers, but opportunities of the terrain they will not be able to reuse. They must be close to running out of such moves, and once they are, we can take them easily.”
“I shall consider that your sworn word, General. You will attack at first light.”
“I’ll lead the vanguard myself, Grand Chancellor.”
Satisfactory. As long as they brought victory. Victory would excuse anything else.
Erase everything else.
“You will have more than men this time,” Cai Jing promised.
Time to bring out every weapon at once. Gao Qiu would get to show his prowess with a god’s fang after all.
If the bonding failed, or if Gao Qiu failed …
If that happened, Cai Jing would have thrown and lost. The walls would be on three sides, the only avenue remaining Bianliang and execution. A deserved fate for defying a direct decree of the Emperor and—worse—not achieving success in doing so. Cai Jing would meet his end, and if the omens held true—and Cai Jing knew in his bones they would, without him and all his efforts to defy them, they would hold—then within a handful of years, the Empire would fall as well.
All was being torn from his hands, a future he had fought so hard for but now might not even live to see. Before his own death, however, he could do one last thing for his lord and Emperor.
He could wipe out these bandits who destroyed everything they touched.
That traitorous old scholar Ling Zhen had shown him the way. If their last try with Lady Lu’s elixir did not work, if Gao Qiu died or lost control, Cai Jing would take up two more of the god’s fangs himself.
He would take them in his hands, and he would draw in the purity of his cause, his loyalty to the future of his Empire. He would focus the rage at his disgrace on these swamp bandits who had caused it, these weeping sores in the Empire’s heart who would rot it from within.
If Lady Lu was to be believed, he would be able to remove their putrefaction fully, along with their base, their mountain, and the little swamp they hid behind. They would be cleansed from the Empire with no trace left.
So might a wide swathe of other citizens in the surrounding county. But if they knew, they should be proud to die for their Empire. As Cai Jing would be proud.
Together, those citizens and Cai Jing himself would all soar into the next life with the highest of virtue, dutiful servants who had done everything in their power to make the land whole.
Lu Da hiked down to the shoreline, most of her strength recovered but her heart stretched and hurting like it never had before.
Dawn did not quite touch the water yet. The sky had tinted itself gray enough to wash out the stars, but the marsh still lay shrouded in shadow. Shapes bobbed in its darkness—a boot here, a corpse there, an empty, capsized boat that drifted forlorn and alone.
They deserved it, every one of them. Sister Chao’s murderers.
Lin Chong was waiting, staring out over the water as if she measured it with her eyes. “Here,” she called. “Are you ready?”
Lu Da was decidedly not ready to try running across a deadly moat of a swamp that was many li wide and could suck you right down into its maw if you fell in it. Her souls had nearly jumped out of her skin when the Tactician had told her to go meet Lin Chong, and what they planned and that Lu Da was to go too, at Sister Lin’s especial request. They were to hare off toward the western reach of the marsh, where dense stands of wetland trees and clumpy muddy isles collected into a gloomy jungle no boat could cut through … the enemy would not be watching for anyone emerging from such a place, so Wu Yong said, and the vegetation would hide them from stray eyes until nearly on shore.
Running across water! Lu Da had no fear of being on a boat, if someone like the Ruans or the Tongs were captaining it, but a boat had a solid thickness of planks between her bum and drowning. No, she was not ready at all.
But Sister Chao had not been ready to die.
Sister Du and Seventh Brother Ruan hadn’t been, either.
Lu Da was not ready, but she would do this. For them.
She came abreast of her elder sister, down on the muddy bank, and hefted her heavy staff. She wondered if she should leave it behind. It wouldn’t make them more likely to sink, would it?
“I don’t know how to do this,” she confessed to Sister Lin.
Lin Chong turned to face her. “You can follow me. I trust you.”
The statement was open, unvarnished, without hesitation or caveat. Despite everything, a warmth swelled in Lu Da’s chest.
“We must hurry,” Sister Lin said. “Take my hand. And open your god’s tooth.”
Lu Da did as her sister asked.
Just as when they’d sat together before, Lu Da felt—not only the rush of her own god’s tooth’s familiar power—but another strength here, intertwining with it, winding through each other until they could support more than twice what they might alone. Lin Chong’s strength, from somewhere beyond, that she somehow drew into herself with no artifact to help. This time, instead of jealousy, Lu Da felt only a quiet awe.
“Are you sure this will work, us doing this together?” she asked. Her voice felt strange and far away. She had to raise it to be sure of being heard.
“I don’t know,” Lin Chong answered. “But we have no more time. Now run!”
They pounded forward together. Lu Da’s hand clutched Lin Chong’s, their souls embracing until they moved as one. They ran and ran and didn’t look when they ran straight off the shore, when their boots began smacking the water’s surface in beautiful ripples like a stone skipping across forever.
In the same gray predawn, Song Jiang gathered Liangshan’s remaining haojie for a last stand.
Wu Yong had helped her, positioning each of their members in the strongest tactical location for the best possible defense. It might mean nothing, in the end, but neither of them would have brooked the thought of anything less than striving to their utmost for Liangshan.
At least Wu Yong had been right and the others followed Song Jiang’s command, without question or challenge. Some of them may have already seen her as Chao Gai’s second and assumed this would be the way of things. To others, following the Spring Rain was akin to the natural order. Li Kui and Hu Sanniang and the Xie twins, the grieving Ruan brothers and the Tongs and the Three Fleas, even the surly Sun Erniang and Wang Lun’s old lieutenant Song Wan … they looked at Song Jiang and they saw Liangshan’s leader stepping into place.
She fit that place perfectly. Poised and composed. Evincing confidence, even if she did not feel it. Inspiring every one of them through example.
“I should say something to them,” she murmured to Wu Yong, as they moved to take up their own posts. “Something that gives them courage. That makes them feel—that they are part of this, something greater than themselves, a family and a mission of justice. I don’t…”
“What is it?” Wu Yong asked.
“I’ve always had words. Always.” She brushed a hand over her face and tilted back her head to take in the graying sky. “I have no right words tonight, Professor. I have no poetry for our kindred.”
“Whatever you say will be right,” Wu Yong said softly.
It was.
Song Jiang climbed to the top of a boulder on this wooded and rocky slope they’d chosen to defend with their lives. She stood straight, with the silhouette of a hero from legend, and she called for all the haojie to listen, one last time.
“Today, we fight for Chao Gai. We fight for everything she wanted us to be, everything she believed we could be, to better the Empire. We fight for Sister Du and Seventh Brother Ruan, and we avenge them—our battle is a righteous one, and our souls are clean. For our Heavenly King.”
She raised her two-edged sword in the air, not with a punch or a yell, but as if it were fact.
All across the slope, the other haojie raised sword and spear and staff and trident, and in one voice they echoed:
“For the Heavenly King!”