Chapter 213 Interlude 30 (Patreon)

This is probably the chapter I've had the hardest time writing so far.

I hope you like it.

The bandits’ boat is still tied to the dock post, beside the house’s boat, and Lianhua doesn’t hesitate in choosing, so she casts off the bandits’ boat, climbs in and pushes away from the island with a single shove of the oar against the stone.

The moon is almost full and the Rong gives it back broken into a thousand pieces, although Lianhua has no need of the moonlight. Ever since her Vision of Horus reached Adept, the darkness of night has meant nothing to her, and she sees the rock shoals, the branches the current drags along and the boats moored at the surrounding islands as if it were midday.

She rows slowly, since the wound on her left arm answers her with a dull tug, the tug of flesh that is closing and would rather be left in peace. The pill has done its work and the Nature Gate is doing the rest. She isn’t healed, but she is no longer bleeding, and for tonight that is enough.

And as she rows, she goes over the resources she has for the task.

First, the talismans.

Lianhua feels them without touching them, distributed inside her clothes in the places she chose when she left Xiaojie’s study. The Advanced Privacy ones on her right side, where her hand finds them without searching. The Spiritual Shield and Cutting Wind ones over her chest. And the Minor Explosion ones at her back, at waist height, separated from all the others so that she can never mistake them for anything else.

“All of them, the ones meant for sale and the ones that weren’t”, Xiaojie told her.

And then she told her not to be afraid of burning money, as if Lianhua would ever be, with what is at stake on the island.

Second, the threads.

She carries them among her clothes, as always, in a reserve she keeps renewing as the oldest ones come undone, because a thread of the Invisible Loom lasts no more than half a period and she still doesn’t know how to weave more than one at a time. So, as she rows, she weaves one and puts it away, and weaves the next and puts that away too, until the ones she used up during the fight have been replaced.

And last, what Lin Quingyu told her this afternoon.

A small gang, of about twenty people, that lives off small jobs and easy targets, with no one behind it to protect it. And a warehouse on the Rong docks where they gather.

Eight of those twenty have stayed behind tonight in Xiaojie’s courtyard, and the rest will be waiting for them to return.

She rows between the islands without getting close to any of them, pushing aside now and then a branch that the current brings toward the hull.

The docks appear when the moon has already traveled a good stretch of the sky.

They are a long row of wooden piers on stone pilings, and behind them, another equally long row of warehouses with their doors closed and their roofs black against the sky. At this hour no one is unloading, and there isn’t a single lantern lit on any pier, except on one.

Lianhua doesn’t row toward that one; instead, she ties up the boat two piers farther along, between an empty barge and a piling covered in algae, where the shadow is thickest.

Then she closes her eyes and activates the Vision of Horus.

From above, the docks are a game board. The piers, the black water between them, the packed-earth street that runs behind the warehouses and, two buildings away, the one she has come looking for.

It is made of stone, with a tiled roof and a loading gate that opens onto the pier with the lantern. On the side facing the river, at the height of a second floor, there is a smaller loading door closed with a shutter.

Lianhua circles the warehouse, keeping it within range of the Vision of Horus, and notices that there are five guards around it.

Lianhua looks at them one by one, and from above it costs her no effort at all, because none of them is where someone keeping watch should be.

The first is at the end of the pier, with his back to the warehouse, pissing into the river. The second is sitting on a barrel beside the gate, his back against the stone and his chin on his chest. The third is making rounds at the back with a lamp in his hand, which is the worst thing someone who intends to see anything at night can carry, because the lamp shows him a small circle of street and keeps everything else in darkness.

And the other two are together, at the corner facing the street, sitting on some sacks and passing a bottle back and forth.

After seeing that, Lianhua allows herself a faint smile, since the only thing the five of them are going to manage is to save her time.

For the first one, she opens her eyes and deactivates the Vision of Horus, since between where she is and the pier with the lantern there are several Chi of old planks, and old planks creak, so Lianhua doesn’t go over them.

She goes beneath them, from piling to piling, clinging with her hands and feet to the beams of the structure and with the water a handspan from her back, the way a spider crosses the underside of a table.

It takes her longer than it would on top, but this way she avoids the creaking of the planks.

She peers over the edge of the pier, ten Chi from the man pissing into the river, and waits.

That one has to be the first, because he is the only one of the five facing the water and the one farthest away, so Lianhua brings her hand to her right side and takes out an Advanced Privacy Talisman.

She activates it with the paper pressed to her chest, where her body hides the glow of the runes, and lets go of it so that a hand of the Myriad can carry it, skimming the planks, to the man’s feet, where the talisman sticks to the wood and opens around him like a bubble, and the lapping of the water against the pilings vanishes all at once.

And the man notices, although at first he doesn’t know what it is he has noticed, but after a moment he seems to realize and raises his head like a dog scenting danger.

But it is too late, since by then Lianhua has crossed the ten Chi and is behind him.

Her left hand covers his mouth and pulls his head back, and her right, holding the Shuang Bi Shou, drives upward under his jaw with surgical precision.

The man jerks against her twice, and then goes limp.

Lianhua lowers him slowly onto the planks and drags him to the edge, where she lets him down between two pilings, into the darkest part beneath the pier, holds him by the collar until the current catches him and lets go so that it carries him away.

At her feet, the runes of the talisman go out, the paper crumbles into ash and the river sounds again.

One, and she closes her eyes again.

The one on the barrel is still asleep, so Lianhua reaches him pressed against the warehouse wall, along the strip of shadow that the light of the lantern doesn’t reach.

The second Advanced Privacy Talisman sticks to the stone, behind the barrel, without that worrying Lianhua, since the talisman’s area can’t pass through the warehouse wall.

The man doesn’t wake up, and now he never will, because the blade goes in at the same spot as with the first man, and the only difference is that this one doesn’t even jerk.

Beside the gate there is a pile of crates covered with a tarp, which Lianhua takes advantage of to put the man into the gap between the crates and the wall, cover him with the tarp and smooth it with her hand until there isn’t a single wrinkle that wasn’t there before.

Then she sets the barrel upright, in the same spot where it was.

Two.

The one with the lamp is the third, and she quickly locates him at the back thanks to the Vision of Horus, where the street narrows between the warehouse wall and a boundary wall, wearing the face of someone bored with the routine he is carrying out.

And along that stretch, the ground is flagstones, so Lianhua creates a thread then and there so as not to use up her reserve.

Two hands of the Myriad take it, one at each end, and stretch it from the warehouse wall to the boundary wall, at ankle height. A thread no one can see, in an alley where the only light is that of the man who is going to trip over it.

She leaves the third talisman stuck to the boundary wall, right behind the corner where she waits.

The man arrives, and trips.

The lamp slips from his hand and rolls across the flagstones without going out, and before he finishes falling, a gray spike shoots up from the flagstones and pierces his shoulder, pinning him to the ground for just long enough for the Shuang Bi Shou to sink into the back of his neck.

A few heartbeats later, the spike crumbles like a dry clod of earth.

Lianhua puts out the lamp, because a lamp lying in the middle of an alley is a question she doesn’t want anyone to ask, and stuffs the man under a pile of rotten nets that, judging by the smell, no one is going to come looking for in a long time.

Three.

At the corner, the two with the bottle carry on with what they are doing while she studies them.

Lianhua stays in the shadow of the wall, a few Chi from them, and from above she sees one of the two turn his head toward the back of the warehouse, toward the spot where a moment ago there was a light and now there is only darkness.

“What happened to Wei’s lamp?” he asks the other.

“It must’ve gone out”, the other replies, and takes the bottle from him. “Or he’s taking a piss.”

“He’s been taking a piss all night”, says the first.

“Then let him piss”, the other tells him. “Let’s hope the others come back already so we can go get some sleep.”

Up to now it has been easy, but two together raises the difficulty, since one can fall without making a sound, but the second always has half a heartbeat to shout, to draw a weapon or to run, and none of the three suits her, despite the Advanced Privacy Talisman.

That is why she doesn’t leave the fourth talisman on any wall; instead, she activates it, and a hand of the Myriad carries it through the air to the ground between the sacks, where the bubble closes over the two men just as Lianhua steps out of the shadow and into it.

The one with the bottle is the first to see her, and he is the luckiest, because he is the one who takes the least time to die, since her left blade reaches his throat before the scream can leave it.

The other does have time to react, and he uses it better than Lianhua expected. He rolls backward over the sacks, gets to his feet with a long knife pulled from his boot, and shouts.

He shouts an alarm with all his strength, but no one outside the privacy bubble created by the talisman hears him.

The man realizes that something strange is going on at the second shout, when no one answers him, but Lianhua doesn’t give him time to fully understand it, since she hurls herself at him while he tries to defend himself with his knife.

But the arm with which he wields the knife seems to bump into something in the air, something that gives way but delays his movement just enough to leave his guard completely open, which Lianhua takes advantage of to drive one of her weapons straight into his chest, dealing him a mortal blow.

After the brief fight, she drags them to the river along the side of the pier the light doesn’t reach, then puts the sacks back as they were and leaves the bottle standing beside them, the way someone who intends to come right back for it would leave it.

Five.

After that, Lianhua takes a closer look at the warehouse.

Light comes out through the cracks of the gate, and voices, and every now and then a burst of laughter that doesn’t bother to be discreet. Lianhua doesn’t approach the gate; instead, she circles the warehouse along the river side until she is right beneath the loading door of the second floor, and climbs.

The stone is old, and the damp of the river has eaten away the joints between the blocks, so there is plenty of room for her fingers and the tips of her feet.

She climbs unhurriedly, with her body pressed to the wall, and only on the last pull, when she hangs from a crack by the door, does her left arm remind her that a while ago someone opened her sleeve with a sword.

The shutter on the door isn’t latched, and it gives just enough for Lianhua to slip inside without the hinges making a sound.

Inside, the second floor is a plank loft that only covers half the warehouse, full of sacks and crates, and from its edge the first floor can be seen perfectly, so Lianhua lies face down between two sacks and watches.

What she sees is five men.

Four of them are sitting on stools around a table, almost directly beneath her, in the center of the warehouse. They are playing cards with an oil lamp in the middle, with bottles everywhere, some empty and some not, and none of them has a weapon in hand, although there are two leaning against the legs of the table.

The fifth is at the back, by the wall, sitting in a real chair and not on a stool, with his boots up on a crate and a sheathed sword across his knees. He doesn’t play and he doesn’t drink, or not as much as the others. He glances toward the gate now and then, and every time he does, the talk at the table gets a little quieter.

Seeing him, Lianhua realizes that if anyone is in charge in this warehouse, it is him.

Beyond the table, near the gate, a lantern hangs from a beam. Between the lantern and the lamp, there isn’t a single shadowy corner left in the whole warehouse, and the floor, beneath the chairs and the bottles, is stone.

Five outside and five inside. Eight in Xiaojie’s courtyard and ten here make eighteen, which is what the Tower calls about twenty, so Lianhua imagines these must be all that are left.

The problem she faces is that if she goes down after one of those at the table, the other three and the one at the back will have time to get up, and if she goes down after the one at the back, she will have the four at the table at her back, so there is no discreet way to do it.

And if there isn’t, the only thing left is to do it fast, so she reaches behind her and takes out a Minor Explosion Talisman.

She activates it, and immediately lets it drop over the edge of the loft so that a hand of the Myriad catches it in midair and carries it toward the center of the table while Lianhua leaps, not toward the table, but toward the back.

The man in the chair looks up even before she leaps, and Lianhua doesn’t know whether it was the glow of the paper or the Qi that accompanies it, but he has noticed it before the talisman reaches the table and before any of the four has it in front of them.

“Get away from the table!” he shouts.

And then he sees her, as she lands on the flagstones, rolls to break her fall and runs at him.

The sword leaves its sheath as he rises, the chair goes flying backward, and when Lianhua arrives with both blades forward, the steel is already there, waiting for them.

Behind her, the talisman explodes.

The blast of air shoves her in the back like an enormous hand while the warehouse fills with a noise that crushes her ears, with splinters, with broken glass and with a smell of burned hair.

The lamp on the table also vanishes in the explosion, and the only thing left lit is the lantern, which swings on its beam and makes every shadow in the warehouse swing with it.

But Lianhua doesn’t care, since she sees everything just the same.

She sees three of the four from the table on the floor, in positions no living body could hold, and she sees the fourth, who threw himself back in time for the explosion to hit him only on one side. His right sleeve is on fire, his face is covered in blood from a shard of glass that has lodged in his forehead, and he is beating out the flames on his sleeve.

The leader isn’t like the others, and Lianhua notices it as soon as she has him within her sphere of influence, because it is enough for her to focus on him for an instant with Sensing the Qi to feel that, like her, he is in the Condensation of the Elemental Cores and has a formed core.

A Yin one.

And she also notices, in the way he handles his sword, that he is someone who knows how to really fight.

But his sword is of ordinary steel, and Lianhua’s Shuang Bi Shou are not.

By the third exchange, the edge of the sword already has a notch. By the fifth, it has two, and the man notices, because at that moment he opens his left hand while threads begin to come out of his fingertips.

They are fine, almost as fine as Lianhua’s, but they aren’t invisible. They are a very dark gray, almost black, and they shine very faintly, like candle smoke when the light catches it at an angle, and they cross the air toward her so fast that they look like the lashes of a whip.

Lianhua moves away from the first one as the thread passes a handspan from her face and reaches one of the crates behind her, and the crate splits open from top to bottom as if a very sharp knife had cut it, while the edges of the cut turn black.

The second goes for her knees, the third comes diagonally, seeking her neck, and at that moment Lianhua understands what this fight is going to be like, so the five hands of the Myriad slip into her clothes and come out with the threads she has stored, and at the spot where the next gray thread is going to pass, one of hers is already waiting for it, laid across its path by a hand no one sees.

One of the gray threads catches on it, tangles and loses its line, so instead of opening her knee, it ends up slicing the air a handspan from her leg while she dodges the one aimed at her neck.

One less in the reserve.

The man frowns, since he doesn’t know what his thread has run into, and Lianhua sees the exact moment he decides he doesn’t care and casts three more.

And with that, Lianhua runs out of hands.

All five are busy pulling threads from the reserve and laying them across the path of the gray ones before the previous one breaks, and she has none left free for anything else, including holding one of her weapons so that she can free a hand to use a talisman.

That means that all she has left are her blades, the spike and what she learned to do with her own body long before she knew how to use techniques, so she throws herself into close combat with the leader.

And at that moment, from her left, the thug with the burned sleeve comes at her without her noticing, since she is too distracted by the threads of yin Qi.

He carries no weapon, but he doesn’t need one, since he is big and furious, and the first punch he throws at her ribs, which Lianhua doesn’t quite manage to dodge because at that very instant she has to move away from the leader’s sword, knocks the air out of her lungs all at once.

But Lianhua doesn’t let it show; she simply moves away again, and from the flagstones, beneath the thug’s foot, a spike shoots up.

But the big man lifts his foot just in time, by instinct or by luck, so the spike only tears off a piece of his boot, and he uses that same momentum to lunge at her with his arms spread wide, to hold her long enough for his boss to do the rest.

And he almost manages it.

He catches her around the waist from one side and squeezes, and over his shoulder Lianhua sees the leader’s sword already swinging toward her, so she drops all her weight toward the thug.

The thug moves with her, and the sword, which was going for her side, opens a gash there anyway, although not as deep as its owner intended, but right afterward her elbow has found the forehead of the thug holding her, exactly where the shard of glass is lodged, and he lets go of her with a howl.

The second spike, the one that comes up beneath him as he brings his hands to his face, doesn’t miss this time and pierces him through the groin, which raises the pitch of his howl while it pins him to the flagstones, and Lianhua’s right blade does the rest before the spike finishes crumbling and lets the thug’s body fall.

Meanwhile, the leader has stepped back two paces. He has his sword raised, with the two notches gleaming in the light of the lantern, and his left hand open in front of his body, with a gray thread hanging from each finger as if they were the claws of some animal.

And for the first time since the fight began, he seems to really take notice of Lianhua.

“And my men?” he asks her.

“They are not coming back”, Lianhua replies, unmoved.

The man doesn’t answer her, but the five threads leave his hand at once.

Lianhua stops them, and when the gray threads finish dissolving in the air, she realizes that she has only two left in her reserve.

Lianhua notices that he takes a little longer each time to use his technique, since in the Condensation of the Elemental Cores, the Qi of an element available for a technique depends on how much there is in the surroundings, and clearly the yin Qi around them is almost exhausted.

But she can’t wait for it to run out, since she is too badly hurt, so she does the only thing she can do, which is trade another wound for a chance.

When the next ones come, she stops only one, with one of the two threads she has left, and dodges the ones she can while a pair of the Myriad’s hands take out the other thread and carry it, skimming the flagstones, to the leader’s forward foot, while the gray thread she hasn’t stopped crosses her right shoulder, opening her clothes and the skin beneath her clothes with a cold unlike any other.

But her thread is already where it needs to be, so when the leader takes the step he has been taking all fight long, the short step back that is always part of his pattern of movement, this time his ankle catches on something he can’t see.

He doesn’t fall, since he is too good to fall because of that, but he staggers, and the spike that comes out of the flagstones beneath his other foot forces him to choose between putting it down and having it pierced, or not putting it down and falling.

But at that moment Lianhua, who has let go of one of her weapons to leave it floating in front of her, has taken out a Cutting Wind Talisman and throws it at the leader, who, already off balance, tries to block it with his sword and a couple of the yin Qi threads that spring from his other hand.

But he barely manages to stop the blades of air, so some of them strike him, opening several bleeding wounds and making him lose his balance for good and fall to the floor.

And Lianhua is already there, since after throwing the talisman she has grabbed the floating weapon and hurled herself at the leader without waiting for the result of her maneuver, so when the leader falls, he raises his notched sword again to block her left blade, and he blocks it. But the right one slips in under his guard and sinks into one of his eyes.

Lianhua stays still, with one blade in her hand and the other buried in the leader’s eye, until the lantern stops swinging.

Then she straightens up, takes from inside her clothes another of the healing pills they bought for emergencies and chews it without waiting. Her mouth fills with that bitter taste with a mineral undertone that all of them have, and almost immediately she feels the warmth spreading out from her stomach.

The cut on her side stops bleeding first, although the one on her shoulder takes a little longer.

And then, pragmatic as always, after pulling her weapon out of the corpse, she sets about going through the warehouse.

She goes through the entire warehouse with Sensing the Qi, slowly, letting her sphere of influence pass over everything inside and tell her what has some Qi and what doesn’t.

Almost nothing does.

In the crate where the leader rested his boots, there is a leather pouch with a handful of spirit stones, along with another one full of Fen. It isn’t much, but Lianhua takes them and puts them away.

On a shelf there are two jars full of pills. They have Qi, she can feel that, but neither has a label saying what they do, and Lianhua remembers the man in the flea market square who sold pills of a color no pill should have, so she leaves them where they are.

Against the back wall there is a weapons rack with two swords, a few long knives and three iron oars like the one carried by the man she faced in the courtyard. None of them has a speck of Qi, and she leaves them where they are too.

And when she finishes, she stands looking at the lantern.

The oil in the lantern, the sacks in the loft, the crates, the wooden framework of the roof. If she smashed it against the sacks, the whole warehouse would burn before anyone on the docks finished waking up, and everything inside would burn with it.

She considers it for a moment, but what starts as a warehouse can end up as half the bank of the Rong. And the three sects aren’t going to let half a burned riverbank go by without asking who did it.

Ten corpses, on the other hand, are something else, because Lianhua has seen them before.

Not tonight, but before, in her comings and goings around the city, when she uses the Vision of Horus at intersections to see where the streets lead. More than once, from above, she has seen bodies lying in an alley, at the back of an abandoned courtyard or in some dark corner near the water, and around them, people walking past without turning their heads.

She has never told Xiaojie, since Xiaojie already has enough worries, but their presence means that a few more corpses in a warehouse on the docks aren’t going to cost anyone who matters any sleep, and that a fire would.

In the end, she decides to take down the lantern, but only to put it out.

The warehouse goes dark, although for her nothing changes, and Lianhua goes out through the gate and closes it behind her.

She doesn’t go back for the boat, since it would draw too much attention if anyone recognized it, so she walks along the street behind the warehouses, following the bank, to where the boatmen who ferry travelers from one side of the river to the other tie up their boats.

At this hour only one is left, asleep in the bottom of his boat, with a small lantern lit at his feet and a blanket over him. He wakes when Lianhua calls him and sits up, blinking.

He looks her up and down, but the boatman knows that asking too many questions is never a good thing.

“Where to?” he asks her.

Lianhua tells him the address.

The boatman names a price, and Lianhua doesn’t argue; she simply takes a few Fen from the little pouch she took from the Iron Oar Gang’s hideout, puts them in his hand and sits down on the bench at the bow.

The boat pulls away from the dock, and the warehouses grow smaller behind her until they become a black line against the bank, just like all the others.

Lianhua stays looking at the water.

She thinks of the eight bundles on the stones of the courtyard, and of Xia, standing beside the chair with her arms wrapped around herself, staring at the open gate as if she were seeing the gate of another mansion.

She thinks of Xiaojie, whose hands were trembling on the rims a few hours ago, and who a while later gave her permission for this in a voice Lianhua had never heard from her before.

She told her she would come back, and Lianhua has never promised Xiaojie anything she didn’t intend to keep.

And while she is lost in her thoughts, ahead of the boat, between two islands, the crown of a white magnolia begins to come into view.