Chapter 43

Chapter 43: Chapter 43

The causeway to the Heart Pavilion was the longest bridge on the lake.

It ran straight out from the northern edge of the island, a narrow spine of old white granite worn smooth by ten thousand years of mist, no wider than an ox cart and without a single railing. On either side the black water lay flat as lacquer. Far ahead, where the bridge vanished into the fog, a faint gold glow hung in the white like a lamp behind a paper screen. That was the Heart Pavilion. The collector was waiting inside it, with Lanying.

Yan Shuo walked toward it alone.

He had left the island an hour after the collector took her. He’d waited that long for his right arm to come back, flexing the fingers over and over until the dead numbness turned to pins and needles and then to an ache he could use. Bai Rou had strapped his ribs without a word. Ruan Tie had been asleep under the moonleaf smoke, breathing slow and shallow, the black lines on his chest curled up tight around the seal.

"Bring her back," Bai Rou had said as he stepped onto the causeway. That was all. Then she’d turned back to the censer.

Now the island was gone behind him, swallowed by the fog, and there was nothing in the world but wet white stone and black water and the gold glow ahead.

’You can’t win this by fighting him,’ Qin said quietly. ’You know that.’

’I know that, Senior.’

’He’s at Foundation Peak. He’s got that brush, and he’s been doing this for thirty years. Even if you opened every layer you’ve got, you may last about four breaths.’

’Then I’ll need to last five.’

She was silent for a moment. ’The pill,’ she said at last.

’If I swallow it out here, I’ll be sitting in the middle of a bridge with my eyes shut while it works,’ he thought. ’He’ll feel it from the pavilion and stroll over and finish me.’

’Then you’ll have to swallow it right under his nose and pray he gives you the time,’ Qin said. She sniffed. ’It’s a terrible plan, brat. I just haven’t got a better one.’

He was perhaps halfway across when he heard the chain.

It came out of the fog ahead of him, a soft metallic slither like a snake moving through dry leaves, and then a heavier sound, iron links dragging across wet stone. He stopped. The mist in front of him thickened, and darkened, and a big shape walked out of it and planted its boots in the middle of the causeway.

Zhao Kun had a chain wrapped around his right forearm, black iron, with a weight the size of a fist on the loose end. It swung gently from his hand, back and forth.

"He said you’d come," Zhao Kun said. "He said you’d come alone, because you’d be too stupid to do anything else." He grinned. In the gold glow from the pavilion, his teeth looked yellow. "He’s very good at people, that one."

"Let me past, Senior Brother."

"Senior Brother." Zhao Kun laughed. "Still. After everything." He let another arm’s length of chain unwind from his forearm. "No. I’m meant to take the pill off you first. He says you found one in the fourth pavilion. He felt it on you when he took the girl." The chain swung. "And after that, I’m meant to walk you the rest of the way. He didn’t say anything about how many of your bones you’d still have when we got there."

Yan Shuo looked at him. He looked at the chain, and the weight on the end of it, and the fingers wrapped around the links. He felt the qi rolling off the man, heavier than it had any right to be.

’Ninth layer,’ Qin muttered. ’They’ve been feeding him pills. Look at his eyes, they’re bloodshot right to the edges. He’s been pushed up too fast, and it’s rotting him from the inside. But that doesn’t make him any less dangerous tonight.’

If he opened the riverbed here, the collector would feel it from the pavilion and know exactly how much he was carrying. If he didn’t, he was a sixth-layer disciple facing a ninth-layer man with an iron chain on a bridge with no railings.

Zhao Kun swung the weight at his head.

Yan Shuo dropped flat. The iron ball whistled over him close enough to stir his hair and cracked into the granite behind him, throwing chips of stone into the mist. He rolled, came up on one knee, and threw himself forward under the backswing.

He got a hand on Zhao Kun’s wrist and put the Silent River Palm into it, a sixth layer’s worth, all he dared. Zhao Kun’s fingers twitched. The chain didn’t drop. The man’s other fist came around and caught Yan Shuo across the ear, and white light burst behind his eyes, and he was lying on his side on the wet stone with the lake an arm’s length from his face.

"That trick," Zhao Kun said, above him, sounding almost pleased. "The slap. You did that in the mines. Broke my wrist with it." A boot came down hard on Yan Shuo’s left hand, and he heard himself make a noise. "I’ve thought about that slap every day since that day. You know that? Lying on that straw in Willow Ford with my legs in splints, thinking about it."

The chain clinked.

"The pill," Zhao Kun said. "Now. Or I start breaking the fingers."

Yan Shuo lay with his cheek on the cold granite and looked at the black water. It was very close. He could see his own breath stirring the surface.

He did not have to open the riverbed to do this. He had Lanying’s frost in his fingers already, sitting in his meridians where the bond had left it, and it didn’t show on any jade.

He laid his free palm flat on the surface of the lake, and let the cold go.

The water froze. It froze outward from his hand in a long white crackling sheet, under the edge of the causeway and up the side of the old granite, and over the toes of Zhao Kun’s boot. Yan Shuo dragged his crushed hand free while the man stared down at his own feet, locked to the bridge in a skin of ice, and rolled away and came up swaying.

Zhao Kun roared and tore one boot loose. The ice shattered.

It bought Yan Shuo three heartbeats, and three heartbeats wasn’t enough. The chain came around again, low this time, and wrapped twice around his ankle and yanked, and he went down hard on his back on the stone. Zhao Kun was on him before he could breathe, one knee in his chest, the iron weight raised in his fist above Yan Shuo’s face.

"Ice," Zhao Kun said hoarsely. His bloodshot eyes were wide. "Where did a mine rat get ice? He was right about you. He was right about all of it." The weight went up higher. "Doesn’t matter. He only needs you breathing. He never said anything about your face."

Then he stopped.

Zhao Kun didn’t lower the weight. He knelt there on Yan Shuo’s chest with the iron ball raised over his head, and his mouth opened slightly, as though he’d forgotten what he’d been about to say.

A single thin needle stood out of the side of his neck, just under the hinge of his jaw. It was so fine that Yan Shuo only saw it because the gold light caught it.

Zhao Kun’s eyes rolled back. He toppled sideways off the causeway, chain and all, and hit the black water with a heavy splash, and sank, and the lake closed over him and went still again.

Yan Shuo lay on the granite and breathed.

There was someone standing over him. He hadn’t heard her come. She was simply there, at the edge of the bridge where Zhao Kun had been kneeling a moment ago, slender and black-clad, with her long braid over one shoulder and the red fox mask turned down toward him.

She was holding the curved blade loosely in one hand, point down.

"Well, that was embarrassing," said Mei Qiao. "For him, I mean. You were doing quite well. Right up until the bit where you weren’t."

Yan Shuo tried to sit up. His chest refused. He managed to get onto one elbow.

"You killed him."

"I did." She sounded unbothered. "Somebody was going to, sooner or later. He’d been pill-fed so hard his heart was going to give out. I just took him off the board a bit early." She crouched down, balanced on her heels, the blade resting across her knees again. The fox mask tilted. "You’re welcome, by the way."

"Then why bother saving me?"

"I’ve told you. I haven’t worked that out yet." She studied him for a long moment. He couldn’t see her face, but he could feel her looking, the same curious, measuring look he’d felt from the willow. "Ice," she said thoughtfully. "That wasn’t in the reports."

Yan Shuo said nothing.

The curved blade turned slowly on her knees. The edge caught the gold light from the pavilion. He was lying on his back on a bridge with no railings, with his ribs cracked and one hand crushed and nothing left in his upper meridians, and she was crouched close enough to cut his throat before he finished a breath. They both knew it.

She looked at him for a long time.

"My sect would very much like to know why they wants you this badly," she said at last, quietly. "And I’m told the simplest way to make sure they never gets something is to put it at the bottom of a lake."

The blade lifted, a finger’s width.

Then it went back down again.

Mei Qiao sighed. It was a surprisingly human sound, exasperated, as if she’d lost an argument with herself.

"No," she said. "Not tonight. I’d only spend the rest of my life wondering what you were." She stood up in one smooth motion and sheathed the blade at her hip. "Your friend in the pavilion, by the way. The one with the brush."

"What about him?"

"He keeps a little ink-box in his left sleeve. Very fine ink. Very old. He’s been writing with it all afternoon." Behind the fox mask, he could have sworn she was smiling. "Somebody got into it about an hour ago and stirred in a pinch of something from the southern marshes. Every stroke he writes tonight, he’ll be breathing a little of it in." She shrugged. "He’ll be slow. Not slow enough to save your life, probably. But slow."

Yan Shuo stared up at her.

"You poisoned him."

"I poison lots of people. It’s most of the job." She turned toward the edge of the causeway, toward the fog. Then she paused, and glanced back over her shoulder, and the fox mask caught the gold light.

"Remember this, though," said Mei Qiao. "I had you on your back with my blade on my knees, and I let you get up."

She stepped off the edge of the bridge into the mist, and was gone, and her voice drifted back to him out of the white, low and amused.

"You owe me, little rabbit."

He lay there for a long time, looking up at the fog.

’Well,’ Qin said eventually. ’Three thousand years, and I still didn’t see that coming.’

’She knows about the ice.’

’She knows you’ve got ice and they wants you, and frankly that’s already more than I’d like.’ Qin was quiet for a moment. ’She’s also just drowned the one man who could have run ahead and warned the collector, and she’s been at his ink. So she’s helping you, for now. Don’t ask me why, and don’t go trusting her past tonight.’

Yan Shuo rolled onto his knees. His left hand was swelling badly, two fingers bent the wrong way. He set them back against his thigh with a sharp, sick crack and bit down on his sleeve until the white spots stopped dancing in front of his eyes.

Then he got to his feet and looked ahead along the causeway.

The fog had begun to thin. Far ahead, where the bridge ended, he could see the Heart Pavilion now: a round tower of white stone rising out of the lake on a ring of slender pillars, every window glowing gold. Above it, through the last of the mist, the sky had turned a deep, bruised violet.

And low on the eastern horizon, pale and enormous, the edge of the moon was just beginning to rise.