Chapter 1012 — Dead Air

CHAPTER 1012

Dead Air

The Serene Jade patrol reached Eastreed at dusk. The next village downriver had fifty-three houses and a well.

They couldn’t move two hundred people across open reed land in the dark. The outer elder posted ten riders around the village and kept ten at the well in the square, and Shen Yaoqing took the well herself. The villagers went to bed behind barred doors. Most of them didn’t sleep.

Shi Feng sat on the edge of the well with the white jar of salve in his sleeve. Qin Wuyan stood on the gatehouse roof.

At midnight the frogs stopped calling.

Shi Feng stood up.

Above the lane east of the square, the air tore open. A rift as long as a man stood up in the dark, and a thin man stepped out of it onto the roof ridge of the middle house. He had mild eyes and a grey veil across the lower half of his face. His right arm, from the shoulder down, was black iron.

Shi Feng knew him at once. He’d last seen that man on Thunder-Gazing Ridge, holding a broken forearm against his chest.

“The Seventeenth Elder of the Heavenly Sect, Zhuang Yuhe,” the thin man said politely. “We’ve met, Master Shi. You took my arm.”

“You took it yourself,” Shi Feng said. “You built the pocket. I only broke it.”

Zhuang Yuhe smiled behind his veil and closed his iron fist.

Three grey domes dropped over three houses at once: the one under his feet and the two on either side of it. Each dome was a pocket of dead space as big as a house, and inside each one the air stopped.

At the same moment, four men in grey came over the south wall and ran for the well.

“Patrol, to the well!” Shen Yaoqing ordered, drawing her sword.

Pale light spread along her blade as she used the Moonlit Jade Sword. Her first cut went across the square in front of the well and left a line of pale light hanging in the air. Her second cut left another. In four strokes she’d built a fence of hanging moonlight between the takers and the villagers, and the first grey man who ran into it was cut again by every line he crossed. He fell back screaming with his chest opened in four places.

“Shattering Void!” a patrol disciple shouted. “All four of them!”

“Hold the line!” Shen Yaoqing said coldly. “Don’t step past the light.”

Shi Feng left the well to her and went for the houses.

He stopped thirty paces short of them. The three grey domes stood shoulder to shoulder and made a wall across the lane, and Zhuang Yuhe stood behind the middle one, on the far side of it, in the alley at the back.

A cut against that wall would curve back and strike him. Shi Feng remembered Thunder-Gazing Ridge and kept his sword sheathed.

He tried Void-Crossing Step instead.

The step didn’t take. He reached through the void for the ground behind the middle house, and the step slid off the folded space and dropped him back where he started. Space inside the pockets was already folded. There was nowhere in it for a step to land.

“You’ve grown,” Zhuang Yuhe said through the dome. His voice came out thin and flat, the way voices did through folded air. “But you can’t come through, and you can’t go round. My pockets are wide tonight.”

“There are people in those houses,” Shi Feng said.

“Yes,” Zhuang Yuhe agreed. “A man awake lasts twenty breaths in dead air. A sleeper takes a little longer. Children, a little less.” He tilted his head. “You broke my pocket from the inside last time, with a falling sword. Do it again. Drop your sword on the floor of the house, and cut the family lying on it.”

Behind Shi Feng, the fighting at the well went on: steel, shouts, Shen Yaoqing’s voice giving orders without rising.

Shi Feng didn’t look back. He didn’t draw the grey Sword.

He walked toward the middle house.

“What’s he doing?” someone shouted from a doorway.

“He’s walking into it! He’ll suffocate!”

Shi Feng raised the Snowfold Screen in front of him.

He’d learned it from the Chunyu house at the Lotus Gate. It was a Shattering Void-grade defence that folded a thin sheet of space in front of him, so that anything coming at him met the fold first and slid along it. A strike couldn’t fold a fold. Neither could dead air.

He breathed in once, as deep as he could, and stepped through the wall of the dome.

The silence was total. The screen hung a finger’s width in front of his face, a faint shimmer, and between it and his mouth it held a single breath of live air. Everywhere else the space was dead. His robe stopped moving. His qi slowed in his meridians at once.

He walked on.

The door of the house was barred. He pushed it, and the bar snapped without a sound. Inside, a man and a woman lay on the kang with two small children between them. Their chests were still. Their faces were already darkening.

Shi Feng wanted to lift the children, but forced himself past them. He had to reach Zhuang Yuhe before they could breathe again.

Five paces. Six. The screen began to shiver in front of his face. At Minor Success it could hold a fold for about ten paces against an art this strong, and the house was twelve paces deep, with a yard behind it. He’d known that before he stepped in.

Eight paces. The edge of the screen frayed. Dead air touched his cheek, cold and heavy. The breath he carried was almost gone.

Forcing more qi into it would only shake the fold further.

Shi Feng thought of the conflicting folds inside his cauldron. He relaxed his control and let the screen follow the dead air instead of resisting it. The shivering stopped. The screen settled in front of his face, flat and still.

Ten paces. Eleven. It held.

Snowfold Screen, Major Success.

He walked out through the back door, across the yard, and through the far wall of the dome, and the screen held all the way.

Zhuang Yuhe was two paces in front of him.

The mild eyes above the veil went wide. The Seventeenth had been watching the front of the dome, waiting to see what Shi Feng would do from outside. He hadn’t watched the back.

He had to open his fist to fight.

Zhuang Yuhe opened his iron fingers. All three domes collapsed, and air rushed into the lane. Inside the house behind Shi Feng, a child began to cough, then another, and then a woman screamed and kept screaming.

Shi Feng drew the grey Sword and cut, straight at the Seventeenth’s throat.

Zhuang Yuhe raised the black iron arm and caught the cut on his forearm.

The grey Sword didn’t ring on the iron. It didn’t bite either. It went into the arm, a full hand’s length of blade, and it didn’t come out the other side.