Before he tuned in to a single word of it, Xuan reached down the thread that bound the elder to the centipede and switched the man off. Han Ying wasn’t dead, only wiped out of the room — eyes gone to glass, ears unplugged, whatever scrap of him rattled around inside that skull shoved sowhere it couldn’t listen in. The order Xuan fed the parasite next was short and gloriously dumb: keep being a chair. Literally. Hold like a chair and don’t twitch.
Which left him free to run a war council from the small of a man’s back like it was the most reasonable seat in the province. He got comfortable on the elder’s spine and let Mira lay out her plan.
[ Okay. Since you don’t want him near you, and you really don’t want him anywhere near the sect, ] she began, [ the most logical move I can see is sending him ho. Back to his own people. Trouble is there aren’t any left — nobody walked out of that mine breathing — so he becos the guy who strolls into Blood Fang and announces that Skyedge Sword Sect just took both mines off them. And the good part: we’ve got our hand wrapped around him the entire way. Every word out of his mouth, we hear it. Plus a whole lot more. ]
’And everything he gets to see.’
[ Exactly that. ]
’Which ans we can crack open a whole stack of things we’re completely blind on right now.’ He was already sprinting ahead of her, the gears biting. ’The Second Prince and where he’s moving. What he actually wants out of this war. Whether he’s got any intention of coming for us specifically. We pull all of it early, way ahead of the curve, and we’re braced long before anything ever reaches the gate.’ He dragged a palm down his face and groaned. ’Argh. That was the obvious answer. The painfully obvious one. And it went sailing right past because my head was busy chewing on six other things at once.’
He let the annoyance ride him, because it had earned the right — the whole solution had been parked under his nose, fat and grinning, and he’d walked over it like an idiot patting his robes for keys already in his fist.
[ That’s the entire reason I’m here, Xuan. ] Her voice ward a few degrees. [ To point you, to keep you company in the big calls, to carry the load with you. So quit kicking yourself. Sure, it was right in front of both of us — but that’s the whole point of having two heads. Whatever one of us strolls past, the other one snatches up. ]
’Yeah. Thanks, Mira.’ He ant it, in the offhand way he ant the things he actually ant. ’And here’s the other piece — that mine went down to the last body. There’s nobody left who knows a single thing about any of it. Which is perfect for us. No one alive to catch the sll of a betrayal.’
[ Good. So — green light? Say the word and I hand the centipede its marching orders. It carries Han Ying down to the Blood Fang sect. By his own mories the place is tucked away in the far southwest of the continent, and it is a haul. Pushing two weeks. And that’s with him flying, sa as last ti. ]
’Distance is distance, nothing to be done about it.’ He weighed it, jaw shifting. ’My bet is Su Qingyue’s already here by the ti he turns up over there. If the timing shakes out that way, I’ll have to peel off and excuse myself for a minute when it lands on . All hangs on when Han Ying rolls up to his own front door.’
[ Then it’s a go. ] A small, audible swell of pride. [ Operation Spy On The Blood Fang Sect — With Its Own Blood. ]
’...You called it that because it’s his actual blood, and the sect is literally nad Blood.’
[ Yes. ] She said it like she’d won an award.
’Right. Genius.’ He shoved up onto his feet, lifting his weight off the elder’s spine, and the freeze cut out all at once. Han Ying scrambled up off the floorboards and bolted — out of the Silent Peak, through the sect grounds, gone into the dark and aid southwest toward a mission no part of him had agreed to.
For a little while, Xuan only listened to the sect settling around the absence Han Ying left behind. Night insects scraped at the edges of Silent Peak. Sowhere below, a patrol changed posts, boots soft on stone, none of them aware that a Blood Fang elder had just walked through their ho like a ghost wearing another man’s orders. That was the useful part and the ugly part, both sitting in the sa bowl. Xuan had made peace with ugly so ti ago, but it still helped to know where he had placed it.
’So we’re officially treating a grown man like a stick of furniture now.’ Xuan studied the doorway he’d vanished through, unbothered. ’Eh. Hard to argue he’s owed much better.’ He rolled his neck and swung the subject around without warning. ’Anyway. The shop. Mira, I’ve got Origin Points, yeah? I know I’ve got so. RIGHT!? Please tell I can buy sothing.’
[ You can buy sothing. ] She let it dangle a beat. [ Grand total: two thousand three hundred and twenty Origin Points. ]
’...Huh.’ His face dropped a notch. ’That’s a fair bit less than I had in my head.’ He turned the number over and shrugged off the sting fast. ’Makes sense, I guess. The two kills that were actually worth real points, plus the bestiary stuff. Yeah. Adds up.’
[ Ah, but — I co bearing excellent news. ] Her voice tipped up at the corners, thrilled with itself. [ You haven’t claid today’s daily reward yet. And I’ve got a very, very good feeling about this one. ]
’Oh yeah?’ The grin was already crawling across his face. ’Then quit dangling it and show — right now, before we do anything else!’
User Comments
0 comments from readers