Chapter 118: You are badly injured

I felt something in the hide tear. Then something deeper. Then the knee gave a long, wet crunch and bent the wrong way.

The Breaker fell. It took a long time to land. When it did, the road bucked like a rug, and the demon infantry behind it went down in rows. I hit the ground rolling and came up on one knee in a cloud of dust, coughing and bleeding from a dozen places. And that was when I smelled it.

Blood, it was Everywhere. The Breaker’s blood was running down the cracks in the road in black ropes, and the torn-open bodies of hounds lay in heaps around my feet. I knew I wasn’t hungry. I had eaten well that night.

But something behind my body lifted its head.

It wasn’t a voice. My scales prickled. My tongue felt heavy against my teeth, and my teeth felt like they belonged to someone else, and for the span of one slow breath the smell of the road was the best thing I had ever known.

’Stop,’ I thought.

It was a very quiet thought. It was the sort of thing you say to yourself before you do something stupid. It didn’t need to be loud.

The feeling went back down. I stood up. My scales melted into my skin, wrist and chest and shoulders, leaving me in a torn shirt with blood running down my left arm. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and looked at the red smear on my knuckles.

’Mine,’ I told myself. ’That’s mine. I bit my own lip. That’s all that is.’

I almost believed it.

"Barry." Qing Yan had reached me. She had dropped her fans in her belt and caught my face between her hands, turning it to the light. Her fingers were trembling. There was soot on her cheek and a burn on her forearm, and she looked at me with a fear she hadn’t shown the whole fight.

"You are bleeding, you are badly injured" she said.

"Mostly other people’s."

"Barry."

"I’m fine," I said, and then, because she wasn’t buying it, "I mean it. The ribs are cracked. It happens."

"And the rest?"

I didn’t answer. She read it in my face anyway. Her thumb moved once along my jaw, hard and quick, as though marking a place.

"Later," she said. "We will speak about this later."

"You have a lot of later conversations stacked up."

"I do." She almost smiled. "I will get to them all."

Behind us, the cheering had begun. Captain Ru’s archers were on their feet, shouting. Someone was banging a pot. The demon infantry had stopped dead behind the carcass of the Breaker, their shields drooping, staring at the fallen thing as if they couldn’t work out what had happened to it. The torches along the ridge were wavering. For the first time that night, nothing was coming down the road.

I looked for Han Shuo. He hadn’t moved from where he had been standing, and I realized with a small shock that his sleeves were stained black along the edges, as if they had been dipped in ink. His face was gray. He met my eye and gave the smallest of nods.

’One hour,’ I thought. How much of it is left?’

Then every torch on the north ridge went out at once.

...

It was so sudden and so complete that for a second I thought I had gone blind. The red glare in the sky vanished. The torches, the fires, the glow behind the veil, all gone, and in their place a darkness that seemed to press against the skin.

And with the dark came somthing else . It started at the back of my neck and spread down through my shoulders. I had felt the pressure of strong cultivators before. I had stood in the same room as the Vanguard Leader and the lieutenant and the Shadow Watchers and mores. This was something else. It wasn’t an aura trying to push me down. It was a presence, calm and unhurried, that simply was, and everything near it bent.

Around me, the villagers went to their knees.

Captain Ru was the last to fall. She had her bow in both hands, and her arms were shaking, and she managed to stay on one knee for three heartbeats before it took her. I heard Qing Yan drag in a short breath. Her fans dropped from her fingers. Her legs buckled, and I caught her under the arms.

"I... cannot..." She said while shaking.

"I’ve got you," I said. "Breathe."

I was standing. I don’t know why. My legs felt like lead and my ribs felt like wire, but I stood, and I think it was only because I was too stubborn to do anything else.

A figure walked out of the dark onto the road.

It was a tall one, and it wore armor the color of dried blood, a long cloak of black fur, and a helm shaped like a ram’s skull. In its left hand it dragged something long and heavy that rang against the stones as it walked. It did not hurry. It did not look at the dead Breaker. It looked at me, and I saw two points of white light behind the skull’s eye sockets, cool and steady, like stars seen through water.

"So," the figure said while looking at me . His voice was almost gentle.

"You are the one who broke my patrol."

I settled Qing Yan against the nearest boulder, and then I turned around and put my hands in my pockets, because it was the only thing I could think of that would look like I wasn’t afraid.

"There were three of them," I said. "They weren’t very good."

The white lights narrowed. I thought, for one cold second, that the thing was smiling.

"No," Asmodeus said, Third of the Seven. "They were not."

He raised the long thing in his hand, and the starlight in his eyes burned a little brighter.

"But you may be."