"They’re back." Kai’s words hung in the air, his mother’s blade already in his fist, Wei crowding the doorway at his shoulder and breathing like he’d run the whole tunnel up.
Xuan was off the edge of the desk and thinking before either of them could ask what ca next. "We’re holding this mine and they’ve no notion we’re sitting inside it," he said. "That’s a gift, and we don’t waste thoose. We need to hit them before they ever know there’s a fight to be had." His eyes cut to the elder. "Sa play as the gate. Han Ying goes out as the bait."
"Fine. I’ll do that." Han Ying dipped his head, the cooperation riding easy on him now. "I’ll go out and have them set their weapons down before they sll a thing."
Wei looked between the two of them, the unease he’d carried since the office never far behind his eyes, but he held his tongue. Whatever bargain had bought a Blood Fang elder onto their side, the young master swore it was sound, and that had carried them this far.
Han Ying went out to et them as the commander they answered to. He ca without the spear and in no hurry, one hand lifted and his voice pitched to carry warmth down the slope as the column crested the last of the western track. Ten weary shapes against the starlight, footsore, loose in the shoulders, walking the slack walk of n with the dangerous part of a job already behind them.
"Back already?" he called. "How did the north treat you?"
A scatter of tired grunts answered him, the job done, the little sect up that way dealt with and put behind them. The n eased as they reached him, sliding out of march into the easy slump of ho ground.
"Good. Good work, the lot of you." Han Ying waved them on toward the entrance and clapped the nearest across the arm as he passed. "Stack your gear by the wall and get inside. There’s no count tonight that won’t keep till morning, and you’ve earned a fire and sothing hot in your bellies. Go on, move."
Tired n asked for nothing sweeter than an order to put their weapons down. Spears and sabers rang against the stone wall. The column packed into the throat of the tunnel, unard, easy, crowding toward a warmth that was never coming for them.
That was where it ended.
Xuan ca out of the black with Marrow Dragon already swinging, and the first head quit its shoulders before any of them grasped that the shape in the lamplight wore the wrong colors. Kai took the flank, his blade laying a throat open to the bone in a single pass. Wei drove in low and graceless, sinking steel into a gut and tearing it sideways until the man crumpled around the wound with a wet, climbing scream.
And Han Ying turned on them from inside their own huddle.
The blood-spear leapt back into his fist and woke up starving. He punched it through a disciple’s spine and out the breastbone in a fan of red, wrenched it loose, and took the next across the face so the skull caved in a wet burst. He killed quick, without a tremor, an old wolf savaging the pack it had run beside that very dawn, and the cramped tunnel turned slick underfoot as n who had lived through a march died in the dark with their blades heaped a body’s length out of reach. Not a single one of them got steel clear.
It ran out inside the span of one held breath.
[ That’s the whole lot, Xuan. ] Mira’s voice rang bright in the hush after. [ Nobody left with a pulse in this entire mountain but the four of you. Both mines are back in Skyedge’s hands. Congratulations, you’re one step off finishing what you marched out here to do, putting the sect back on its feet. There’s a fair road left before that’s truly done, and longer yet before anyone hands you the rewards for it. But this? This is a good step. ]
Xuan stood in the reek of it and let it sink in. Both mines. He turned the weight of that over in the dark. The pit that had been torn out of Skyedge’s grip, and his own family’s mine stacked on top of it, both clawed back inside a single moon, all of it riding on a move he had chosen and a plan he’d pushed his father into swallowing. Not a bad night’s work for a dead man wearing a cripple’s secondhand body.
Han Ying lowered the dripping spear and stood among the bodies of the n who had called him master at dawn. He went over them one by one, and sowhere behind that beaten face a decision set like cooling iron.
’If I an to keep my head on my shoulders, I follow this one. There’s no road around it.’ His eyes drifted to the young master wiping his blade in the lamplight. ’And the choice he made, marching on these mines and pulling it off, getting his hands on a creature like the thing nested in my skull, none of that is the work of so ordinary boy. I heard the rumors on the road. They call him the Crown of Yuncheng. No common young master carries a na like that. A freakish talent, and talent is the one coin worth a damn in the war the whole continent can feel rolling in. He doesn’t trust yet. I’d be a fool to pretend otherwise. So I earn his favor. I make myself worth keeping.’
With that, the old man made his peace. If he wanted to go on breathing, he’d make this life his own, and the first thing he did, without a soul telling him to, was take a corpse by the collar and start dragging his own dead clear of the mine.
Xuan caught the sight of it, and his brow climbed. "What are you doing?"
"Cleaning up." Han Ying never broke from the work, hauling the body toward the mouth. "We can’t leave the place looking like a slaughter yard."
Xuan arched an eyebrow and let it go.
Now ca the part no one had any love for. The holding, and the waiting. There was nothing left breathing in the mountain to put down, only the long stretch until his father and Elder Ren brought the column up, and a full day of hard road lay between this mine and the first, the distance Han Ying had swallowed at a pace none of the rest of them could have co near on their own legs. So they kept the mouth and they waited.
The hours dragged and pooled into one another. Out past the entrance, shapes drifted in and out of the dark, lost travelers who’d strayed too far off any road, a prowling beast or two pulled in by the stink of so much fresh blood, padding the tree line and nosing at the edges of the lamplight. Xuan didn’t shut his eyes once across the whole of it. He kept a post near the mouth with Mira riding his senses, marking every shape that drifted close, coiled to haul the others to their feet the instant anything turned toward the mine with its teeth out. Their luck held. Nothing crossed the threshold. The wanderers wandered off, the beasts thought better of the sll, and the dark gave them a raw, grinding quiet in place of a fight.
It was deep into that long vigil when Mira stirred against his thoughts, her tone tilting.
[ Hold on. I’ve got presences coming up the western track, and these ones I know. ]
Xuan was already moving for the mouth. He climbed out under a greying sky, and there, toiling up the western approach, ca the sight he’d waited a day and more for. Skyedge grey and Skyedge steel, a whole river of it. His father rode at the head, leg braced but a patriarch on his feet once more, Elder Ren a half-length off his shoulder, and at their backs a column of better than a hundred and fifty disciples filing up the slope, carts and tools and stores strung out down the line, everything a sect hauls along to take a gutted mine and make it sing again.
They had ridden up bracing to find their young masters bled white against an enemy stronghold, or worse, to find no trace of them at all.
What climbed into Lin Zhen’s view instead was the second mine taken and quiet and wholly theirs, the ground before its mouth heaped with fresh Blood Fang dead, and one captured enemy elder moving among the corpses, stacking them into a tidy row like a servant tidying the house before the master walks back through the door.
The patriarch drew rein at the crest. Behind him the entire column slowed, every last eye climbing the slope to the impossible thing their two young masters had left standing there, waiting for them.
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