Chapter 294: The Green Country

The ridge dropped them into the green on the second morning, and inside an hour Xuan understood that the north had never taught him what heat was.

It came up out of the ground. The track ran wet under the mules, the air sat on his chest like a hand, and by mid-morning nobody was talking, because talking meant breathing more than you had to. Wen Bao walked in front with his sleeves rolled and his shirt tied off at the waist, dry as a stick, whistling.

Lian was the only one enjoying herself.

She had been off her mule four times before noon, crouched at the track’s edge with her knife out, holding stems up to the light like a woman going through a jeweller’s tray.

"It’s in no book on my continent," she said, holding up something with a purple underside, "and it grows in the ditch. The ditch, Young Master."

"Try not to eat any of it."

"I’m not an idiot, I’m a professional." She wrapped it, labelled it, and went back for more.

The ruins started before the sun was high.

Xuan noticed the first one because it was a straight line, and nothing else in that whole country was straight. Grey stone with a carved edge, half swallowed by a root as thick as a horse, and past it a wall standing three courses high with a tree growing out of the middle of it.

Carvings ran along the face of the stone, worn soft. He couldn’t read a stroke of it.

"Old people," Wen Bao said, without slowing. "Older than anything with a name on this coast, and nobody digs them out. Clear it and it’s back under in two seasons." He pointed his chin at the green wall on either side of them. "Down here you don’t own anything you’re not standing on."

’Mira, can you read that?’

[ No, and it annoys me more than I intend to show. Whoever cut those stones built for a long time, and then stopped all at once.]

Tianming had gone quiet, and Xuan left him to it. The boy had grown up on a mountain where the oldest thing standing was a hall his own sect had put there.

By afternoon the insects were making that saw-noise from every direction at once.

Then they stopped.

Wen Bao halted the lead mule with one hand and stood very still, and the whole line came to a stop behind him without anyone giving an order.

"Off the track," the guide said. "Slowly."

The green on their left came apart, and the thing that stepped out of it moved like a bird more than a lizard, tall as a man at the shoulder, mottled the exact colour of everything around it, with a jaw that hooked up at the end like a bill hook left in the sun to warp.

It didn’t charge. It came out on a slant, unhurried, cutting them off from the downhill side of the track.

[ Sicklejaw.] The panel came up in the corner of his sight, and Mira read it flat. [ Rank E. Ambush hunter, hooks and drags, waits for whatever falls behind at the back of a line. They pair for the season, so there’s a second one out there and you’re standing between them.]

’Wonderful.’

Behind him Pei Song made a noise like a kettle, and Cao Zhen took a fistful of his collar and hauled him back into the mules without a word.

The Sicklejaw came off its slant and covered the track in three strides.

Xuan stepped out to meet it and put the blade low, point at the mud, weight on his back foot, and let it commit.

Awakening Dragon, the first form, the one they hand every child on the mountain because it teaches you not to swing early.

The jaw came in at his hip, and the blade came up through the arc it had been waiting to make, and the whole animal went past him and folded into the ferns on the far side of the track with its throat opened from collar to ear. It thrashed twice in the leaf litter and stopped.

Xuan flicked the blade clean. "Nobody move off the track. There’s another one."

He heard it coming fast on the uphill side, where the ground was bad, and he was turning to take that one too when Qingyue spoke from the saddle.

"Let the boy have it."

Tianming’s head came around fast.

She hadn’t taken her hands off her sheath, and she wasn’t looking at Xuan when she said it. "He’s had nine months of forms on a training floor and a deck. If his first real one happens at that gate, he’ll die at it."

Xuan wanted, very badly, to say no.

[ She’s right, and if you take this off him now you’ll take it off him at the gate too.]

"Tianming." He stepped back off the track and made himself keep stepping. "It’s yours. I’m right here and I’m not touching it unless it’s finished."

The boy got down off the mule with his sword already out, which was the first mistake, because his hands were shaking and everything he owned was up high where the animal could read it.

The second Sicklejaw came out of the green and did not slant. It went straight at him.

Tianming led with Piercing Dragon.

It was a beautiful thing to watch and completely wrong. He wanted it over, so he threw the third form before the animal had committed to anything, a straight stab with all his weight behind it, and the Sicklejaw slid its head off the line the way a fish slides off a hook. His blade went through empty air, and the jaw came back and opened his shoulder to the bone.

He screamed. He kept hold of the sword, which Xuan would tell him about later, and reeled off the track into the mud.

Twin Dragon Strike came next, and it was worse. The first cut skidded off hide, the wrist turn that was supposed to be invisible caught in the wet and arrived late, and the animal walked into the gap between his two cuts like it had been invited.

He got the flat of the blade up in time to keep the jaw off his neck and went down flat on his back with the whole weight of it on him.

Behind Xuan, Lian said something short and vicious and started forward, and Xuan put an arm across her without turning around.

Tianming kicked, got a boot into its chest and threw it off him, and came up on one knee in the mud with his shoulder pouring and his breath going like a bellows with a hole in it. He tried to get height for Soaring Dragon, because it was the newest thing he owned and he wanted the biggest hammer he had.

His back foot skated on a root.

"Low," Xuan said, from the side of the track, in the exact voice he used on a training floor. "Let it come to you."

The boy dropped. Blade down, point at the mud, weight back.

Awakening Dragon.

The Sicklejaw came in and the blade came up and this time it caught, not clean, not through the throat, across the jaw and up into the eye socket, and the animal spun off him shrieking with half its face wrong.

What came after that was no form and nobody would ever call it one. It took four more cuts, all of them ugly, and the thing was still moving after two. He finished it with both hands on the hilt and his knee in the mud, hacking, until it stopped.

Then he sat down where he was and was sick into the ferns.

Lian got to him first, cut the sleeve off at the shoulder, and swore at the wound in a way that suggested relief. "It’s clean, which on this coast is worth celebrating. Nothing on the jaw, nothing in the claw." She had a case open already. "Hold still, and stop apologising."

"I did it wrong."

"You did it alive," Qingyue said. She’d come down off the mule and crouched at the edge of the ferns with her forearms on her knees, at eye level with him. "Mine took eleven cuts, and afterward I sat behind a rock and cried where my father couldn’t see. Nobody’s first one is clean. That’s what a first one is."

Tianming’s hands were still going. He looked up the track at where the other animal lay in the leaves with one cut in it.

"You did it with the first form," he said. "You didn’t even breathe hard."

Xuan crouched beside him and gave him the truth, since he’d earned better than comfort.

"It wasn’t a fight for me, and that’s the part nobody tells you." He nodded at the dead thing. "Nine months ago that would have killed me and taken its time. Now it’s a chore, and there’s nothing clever in it. Somewhere above me there’s a man who’d say the same about whatever kills me one day. A realm isn’t skill, it’s a wall, and you don’t climb it by being brave in front of it."

"So what do I do?"

"What you just did, as many times as it takes, until the wall moves." He got a hand under the boy’s good arm and hauled him up. "And open low next time. You had the answer nine months ago and you threw it away because you were frightened and wanted it over fast."

They camped early, because Lian wanted light to work by.

Wen Bao ate with his back against a stone that had been somebody’s doorway a thousand years ago, and watched the boy sleep propped up on the cases with his bandaged arm in his lap.

"Tomorrow we’re down at the first village," he said. "You’ll want to buy your food and not much else."

"Why’s that?"

The guide picked something out of his teeth and looked at the fire.

"Ask them about the House," he said. "Go on. Ask, and count how long the answer takes."