Chapter 42

Chapter 42: Chapter 42

The woman in the fox mask did not move for a long time.

Yan Shuo knelt in the wet moss with his palms still pressed over Ruan Tie’s chest and looked up at her. He didn’t reach for a weapon since he didn’t have one. He had nine layers of qi buried in the riverbed, a dying brother under his hands, and no strength left to raise either against a stranger who had crept within ten paces of him without stirring a single willow leaf.

The curved blade on her knees caught the pale light and held it.

’Crimson Lotus,’ Qin murmured. ’See the stitching on her cuff? Five red petals. They’re a demonic sect down in the southern marshes, and they train the best killers in the province. Brat, if she wanted you dead, you’d be face down in that moss already.’

The fox mask tilted.

"Ledger ink," the woman said. Her voice was low and husky, with a lazy amusement in it, and it carried through the fog as clearly as a struck bell. "Right over the heart, too. Nasty." She considered Ruan Tie’s chest with her head cocked to one side, like a cook eyeing a fish on a slab. "Your big friend’s got until moonrise. Maybe."

Yan Shuo’s hands tightened on the torn tunic.

"Can you do anything for him?"

"Me?" She laughed softly. "Little rabbit, people pay me to make other people stop breathing. Keeping them going isn’t my trade." The mask turned toward him, and he had the distinct impression she was smiling behind the red lacquer. "That round-faced physician of yours, though, the one with the basket. Tell her to burn moonleaf over the mark. Ledger ink can’t stand the smoke. It curls up and goes quiet, like a dog that’s been kicked." She rose on the narrow branch, balanced on the balls of her feet as easily as a cat on a fence. "That’s if you live long enough to find her."

"Why would you help me?"

She paused on the limb, and for a moment the fox mask seemed honestly uncertain.

"Good question," she said. "I’ll tell you when I’ve worked it out."

Then she stepped backward off the branch into the mist and was gone, without so much as a rustle.

’Little rabbit,’ Qin repeated dryly. ’She watched him chase you across that lake, brat. She hasn’t the faintest idea why he wants you, and I’d wager that’s the only reason she’s still hanging around.’

He heard the ice before he saw it.

It came across the lake from the east, a long, crackling hiss like fat on a hot griddle, growing louder with every breath. He lifted his head and saw a pale line racing toward the island through the fog, skimming low over the water. Behind it, the black lake had frozen solid into a white road three paces wide.

Two figures came pounding along it.

The first was Lanying, sword drawn and silver hair streaming behind her, frost boiling off her in great white plumes as she froze the water ahead of her with every stride. The second was Bai Rou, her skirts hiked up in one fist and her medicine basket banging against her hip, running flat out to keep pace with a Foundation Late cultivator and somehow managing it.

Lanying reached the island and leaped onto the bank, and her eyes found him at once: kneeling in the moss, soaked to the elbows in blood that wasn’t his own, with his brother lying still beneath his hands.

She stopped dead.

"I felt you," she said, and her voice wasn’t steady. "All the way from the shore. You were so scared it hit me like a slap, and I couldn’t work out where you were, so I just ran at it."

"It’s Tie," Yan Shuo said hoarsely. "That man from the Ledger put something on his chest with a brush. It’s spreading."

Bai Rou was already on her knees in the moss beside him. She took one look at the black stroke and the creeping lines around it, and her soft round face went perfectly blank.

"That’s a Ledger binding," she said, half to herself, already reaching for her basket. "Right over the heart. Of course it is."

"There was a woman," Yan Shuo said. "Up in that willow, wearing a fox mask. She told me to have you burn moonleaf over it. Said the ink can’t stand the smoke."

Bai Rou’s hands froze for one heartbeat. Then she was tearing open her basket, dragging out bundles of dried pale-green leaves and a flint, packing them into a little bronze censer with steady, swift fingers.

"She’s right," Bai Rou said, without looking up. "My mother used to do exactly that. I’ve never met anyone here who knew it." She struck the flint. Pale smoke curled up from the censer, sharp and sweet, smelling of cut grass after rain. She held it low over Ruan Tie’s chest, and the black lines creeping from the seal faltered, slowed, and then drew back sullenly into the stroke, like a cat shrinking from a cookfire.

Ruan Tie’s chest rose a little higher.

Bai Rou let out a long, unsteady breath through her nose.

"That’ll hold it for now," she said. "Only for now, mind. I’ll have to burn fresh leaves on it every hour until we’re out of this realm and I can deal with the thing properly." She looked up at Yan Shuo, and there was a hard edge in her gentle face that he had never seen before. "This woman in the fox mask. Who was she?"

"I’ve no idea. She didn’t give a name, and I didn’t think to ask for one."

"My mother taught me that cure with the shutters closed," Bai Rou said slowly. "She made me swear never to use it where anyone could see." She turned back to Ruan Tie and fed another leaf to the censer. "So I’d quite like a word with your fox."

The mist on the far side of the island began to glow.

It was a faint black radiance, if light could be black, a soft dark shimmer hanging in the fog between the willow trunks. Then it sharpened into lines: strokes of glowing ink, hanging in the air one after another, forming characters too large and too old to read, unrolling slowly through the trees toward the bank where they knelt.

At the end of the ink, the collector walked out of the mist.

He was alone. He moved with a faint limp on his left leg where Yan Shuo’s palm had struck the knee, and the wolf-hair brush hung loose between two fingers. He stopped at the edge of the willows and looked at the four of them on the bank with his mild, colorless eyes.

"You froze a road straight across the lake to this island," he said. "Thank you, Senior Sister Su. You saved me a great deal of searching."

Lanying stepped in front of the others with her sword raised and frost crawling up its blade.

"So you’re the escort," she said coldly. "The one with no name on the roster."

"Oh, I have a name." The collector inclined his head politely. "Your sect just isn’t allowed to write it down." His gaze slid past her to Yan Shuo. "Here’s what I’m offering, boy. You walk over to me on your own, and your friends get to sit on this island until the lotus closes. If I have to come and fetch you, I’ll take whoever gets in my way as well. Your choice."

Yan Shuo rose slowly to his feet, moss and blood dripping from his knees.

He looked at Ruan Tie, breathing shallowly under the pale smoke. He looked at Bai Rou, crouched over the big man with the censer cupped in both hands, her face white to the lips. He looked at Lanying, standing between him and the man who had taken his mother, with frost pouring off her sword in long white ribbons.

He opened the riverbed.

All nine layers rose at once through his six open meridians, hot and bright. Behind him, he heard Bai Rou draw a sharp, soft breath. He didn’t turn around.

"Lanying," he said quietly, "I can’t take him alone."

She didn’t look back at him. She gave one short nod.

They had never fought side by side.

They had sparred in the pine clearing until his ribs ached. They had faced Chi Yao in the root cave, one after the other, and lost. But they had never once stood shoulder to shoulder against a single enemy, and in the first few exchanges, the gap showed.

Lanying went in high, her sword a blur of frost, driving at the collector’s head and shoulders. Yan Shuo went in low at the damaged knee, the Silent River Palm ready in his hand. It was a good plan. The collector answered it with three strokes of his brush. The first wrote a character that hung in the air like a bronze shield and turned Lanying’s blade aside in a spray of blue sparks. The second traced a line across the moss that turned to black ice under Yan Shuo’s boots, and his feet went out from under him. The third caught Lanying across the forearm, and she cried out and fell back with a black mark smoking through her torn sleeve.

They regrouped at the water’s edge, both of them breathing hard.

"He keeps getting there first," Lanying hissed through her teeth. "Every gap I open, he’s shut it before you’re halfway in."

’Of course he does. You’re fighting him as two people,’ Qin snapped. ’Two he can read. Use the bond, brat. You’ve felt each other through it a dozen times. Push her frost down through your strike and hit him with both of you at once.’

"The bond," Yan Shuo said aloud, catching Lanying’s eye. "Give me your frost. I’ll put it through my palm, and we hit him with both."

She looked at him. She didn’t ask how. She reached out and clamped her free hand around his wrist, and he felt the thread of resonance leap up between them, warm and familiar, and felt her cold come pouring down it into his arm like snowmelt down a gully.

They went at the collector together, her fingers locked around his wrist, and he drove his palm at the man’s chest with her frost and his own qi surging through it at once.

It was the most powerful blow he had ever thrown.

It came apart in his hand.

The frost and the Silent River Palm met in his meridian and knotted together instead of joining. They pulled in opposite directions. Her cold wanted to spread wide and freeze everything it touched. His qi wanted to run in one unbroken line. Halfway through the strike, the two forces ripped apart in a burst of white light, and the backlash tore through both their arms like a lightning strike through a tree. Lanying was flung sideways into the shallows with a splash. He went down on one knee in the moss with his whole right arm numb to the shoulder.

The collector hadn’t even needed to step aside.

’You two aren’t deep enough yet,’ Qin whispered, and she sounded stricken. ’I’m sorry, brat. Harmony lets you feel each other. Fusing two techniques into one takes Unison, and you’re not there. I should have seen that coming.’

The collector looked down at the two of them with an air of mild disappointment.

"A resonance strike," he said softly. "There are a few lines about them in the archive. I’ve always been curious what one would look like." He shook his head. "Pity. That wasn’t it."

He lifted his brush.

Lanying was rising out of the shallows with lake water streaming from her hair and her sword already swinging. He wrote one character in the air before her blade could reach him, a single bold, sweeping stroke, and it dropped over her like a weighted net. She went rigid mid-swing. Her sword slipped from her fingers and splashed into the water. Black lines of ink crawled across her skin, coiling around her arms and her throat, and she made a strangled sound and could not move at all.

Yan Shuo shouted her name and lunged for her. The collector wrote another stroke without even glancing at him, and the moss erupted into black ice under his feet and threw him flat on his back, all the breath driven out of his lungs.

The collector stepped calmly into the shallows and took Lanying by the arm.

She hung frozen in his grip, unable to move or speak, her pale eyes blazing with fury above the black ink wrapped around her throat. He studied her for a moment with the detached interest of a merchant appraising a bolt of silk.

"Foundation Late, and only twenty-two," he said. "And your meridians feel strange to me." He glanced toward Yan Shuo, sprawled in the moss. "You’ve been close to this boy, haven’t you? Very close. Now that is interesting."

He turned back toward the mist, holding Lanying upright at his side like a lantern on a pole.

"Heart Pavilion, in the middle of the lake," he said over his shoulder. "I’ll wait there until moonrise. Come by yourself, come quietly, and you can have her back without a mark on her. Bring company, or come late, and she goes north with me." He paused at the edge of the fog. "Girls like her fetch a very good price up there."

The ink hanging in the air folded around them both like a closing curtain, and the mist swallowed them, and they were gone.

Yan Shuo lay on his back in the moss and stared up through the willow branches at the blank white sky.

His right arm was dead weight. His lungs refused to fill. Somewhere behind him, he could hear Bai Rou working over Ruan Tie, the scrape of her flint and the soft whisper of moonleaf smoke.

’Breathe, brat,’ Qin Wuyue said quietly. ’In, then out. Start there.’

He dragged in a breath, then another.

Then he rolled over and pushed himself up onto his knees, and found Bai Rou watching him across Ruan Tie’s chest. Her soft brown eyes were perfectly steady. She had seen him open the riverbed. She had watched nine layers of qi pour out of a disciple the whole sect called a late bloomer at the sixth. She had seen the bond, and the failed strike, and the frost.

She didn’t ask a single question.

"Moonrise is about four hours off," she said instead, tipping a fresh bundle of moonleaf into the censer as if they were discussing the weather. "I’ll keep him breathing till then. Go and get her back."

Yan Shuo reached into his robe and closed his fingers around the little box of green jade that held the Lotus Heart Foundation Pill.

It was warm against his palm, and very faintly, through the jade, it was pulsing like a second heartbeat.