Chapter 315: The Blade Falls Behind

Qingluo cleared him on the fourth morning, with conditions and an expression that said she expected to be ignored.

"Nothing sustained. Nothing at full, and if you taste iron you stop that minute and you come and find me." She was already walking away. "You’ll do about half of that, so I’ll be on the second terrace."

He took Marrow Dragon down to the empty yard on the fifth terrace, where the disciples had left a row of practice posts standing in the ground, and started at the bottom of what he could do. The first cut was nothing at all. A single horizontal at a post, at about the strength he would have used at Foundation, and the blade went through the wood and out the other side and came back up into the guard without complaint.

He put his qi properly into the second one. The post came apart at the waist and the top half went end over end across the yard, and while it was still in the air the hilt kicked in his hand. It was not a vibration and it was not a sound. Something went back up his arm against the direction it was supposed to travel, and his wrist took it, and he stood there for a moment opening and closing that hand.

The crack on the spine had run. It had been two fingers long when they came off the slope and it was the width of a palm now, and there was a second one starting under it that had no business being there after one cut.

’Tell me I’m imagining it.’

[ You are not imagining it. Do the next one and I’ll have the rest of the answer.]

He set his feet, drew the intent along the edge and threw Severing Dragon Roar down the length of the yard. The crescent came off the blade thin and wrong. It should have crossed the whole yard as wide as he was tall and it made it two thirds of the way, and it went narrow at the trailing edge, and the last of it came apart in the air before it reached the far wall. The blade in his hand went hot and then cold, and the sound it made was the one from the shelf.

[ Now I have it.] Mira had gone flat and businesslike. [ Marrow Dragon is Black rank. That’s what it was when you got it and that’s what it still is, and the next grade up is Earth.]

’I know what it is.’

[ You know the word. Here’s what the word is doing to you today. Black rank holds a Foundation cultivator’s output without noticing. It holds Golden Core the way a bucket holds a river, which is to say for as long as you keep the river small.] A beat. [ Everything you throw at that thing now goes in and about two thirds of it comes out the other side. You saw the rest of it leave through the crack.]

He looked down the yard at the ruined post and the mark on the wall where the crescent should have hit and had not.

’Then I feed it. Weapons grow.’

[ Earth rank and above grow. That’s the line, and it isn’t a suggestion, it’s how the thing is built.] She did not soften it. [ Feed an Earth blade and it takes what you give it and becomes more of itself. Feed a Black one and you are pouring water into a cup that is already full, and the cup goes.]

He tried the third one anyway, because he wanted to see the ceiling with his own eyes rather than be told about it. Heart of the Dragon needs a second of complete stillness while everything goes into the core of the sword. He stood, and he gave it about half of what he had, and the blade took maybe a third of that and let the rest of it go out through the flat in a wash of heat that he felt on his face.

The cut that came off it would have finished a man. It should have finished a wall.

When he lowered the sword there were three cracks in it, and the longest of them ran from a hand above the guard almost to the middle of the blade, and the whole thing had a note in it now, low and thin, that went on for a long time after he stopped moving.

Kang came into the yard while he was standing there with it. "I heard the second one from the bench," the elder said. "Half the terrace heard the third. Give it here."

Xuan handed it over, which surprised both of them.

Kang did not swing it. He took it across both palms, turned it to the light, ran a thumbnail down the length of the crack without touching the edge, and then held it at arm’s length and looked along it the way a man looks down a plank.

"Who made this?"

"I don’t know. It was in a vault under my sect and nobody alive remembers it going in."

"Then nobody alive made it, because I’ve been buying steel on this coast for thirty years and I have never held a blade that was two things." Kang turned it over. "The steel is good. It’s better than good, and it’s Black rank the way a well is a well. That’s not what’s wrong with it."

"Say what is."

"The core." He tapped the flat, a hand above the guard, exactly where the first crack had opened. "There’s something set in the spine here and it doesn’t belong to the rest of the blade. Different age, different make, and it’s doing work the steel around it can’t keep up with." He handed it back. "You’ve got a Black rank sword wrapped round something that isn’t Black rank. That’s why it splits at the shoulder every time you ask it for everything. It isn’t the blade failing, it’s the blade being asked to hold its own core."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Out on the terrace the water went on running in the channels.

"How much of the sword is the core?" Xuan said.

"A finger’s width and about a hand long, and I’d put my own hands in a fire before I’d try to take it out. Whatever that is, it was set in there by somebody who knew a great deal more about it than I do." Kang wiped his palms down his front. "And I’d stop testing it. You’ve another two or three of those in it, and then you’ll be holding half a sword in a fight you didn’t choose." He went back up to his bench without waiting to be thanked.

[ Xuan.] Mira was quiet. [ The Fourth called that sword a piece of something. He said it in the middle of a sentence, like a man mentioning the weather, and neither of us has ever known what to do with it.]

’I remember.’

[ Kang just told you the sword has a piece in it that doesn’t match. I’m not going to join those two things up, because I’d be guessing, and I’ve promised you I don’t guess at you.] A pause. [ I’d like it on the record that I badly want to.]

Hao found him that evening with a list, because Hao’s answer to everything was a list. "Three Earth-rank weapons on this continent that the guilds will confirm exist," he said. "One belongs to a sect that hasn’t opened its gates in sixty years. One is a hereditary blade in a family that would go to war over it. The third is a spear, and you don’t want a spear, and its owner is Nascent Soul."

"So none of them are for sale."

"There is no price. That’s the part I want you to understand, because I’ve spent my life believing there’s always a price." He put the list down. "An Earth weapon is not a thing that moves. It gets inherited, or it gets taken off a body, or somebody goes into a hole in the ground and comes out with one that was left there."

"There’s a great deal of old stone in this country."

"There is, and everybody who has ever dug in it has died of something, and I’d like it noted that I said so first." Hao’s mouth twisted. "But yes. That’s the shape of the thing. If you want a blade that can hold you, you’ll be taking it out of somewhere nobody sensible goes."

Xuan laid Marrow Dragon on the table between them and looked at it for a while. Two things, then. A man in a white robe with red at the cuffs, and a sword that could carry him. He had never had a list with only two items on it and found it worse than a long one.

The blade rang faintly against the wood, on its own, with nobody touching it. It did it twice more before it stopped.

[ There’s one more thing and then I’ll leave you alone with it.] Mira had lost the last of her edge. [ That sword is not sitting there quietly. It has been asking for something since the shelf, and I don’t know what, and you’ve been calling it damage.] She let a breath of silence go by. [ What do you think happens if you feed a blade that’s already hungry?]