Chapter 1013 — Two Ends

CHAPTER 1013

Two Ends

Shi Feng pulled.

The grey Sword came back out of the iron arm slowly, dragging, and the hand’s length that had gone in came out white with frost. There was no mark on the iron where it had entered. There was no hole at all.

Zhuang Yuhe laughed softly behind his veil.

“You can’t cut it,” Zhuang Yuhe said. “You can only feed it.”

He punched.

The iron fist stopped a full arm’s length short of Shi Feng’s chest, and a small grey pocket flew off the knuckles at his face. It was the Ash-Tide Rift again, a pocket the size of a man’s head, thrown hard. Shi Feng turned his head and let the Snowfold Screen take it. The pocket hit the fold, slid along it and burst against the wall of the house behind him, and a square of plaster went silent and crumbled.

Zhuang Yuhe punched again, and this time nothing flew off the fist.

Behind Shi Feng’s left shoulder, the air split.

A cut came out of it. It was his own cut, the one he’d aimed at the Seventeenth’s throat, with the full force of Sunset-Splitting Sword still in it. He felt the shape of it and knew it the instant before it landed, and twisted, and it opened his left shoulder instead of his neck.

Blood ran down his arm. He stepped back across the yard, coughing.

His lungs were burning. He’d carried one breath through the dead air, and at the end of the house the screen had let a little of the dead air in with it. Every breath since then had come in hot and short, and he knew they’d burn for two days.

“You see?” Zhuang Yuhe said mildly. “Everything you give it, I give back.”

Shi Feng ignored the taunt and examined the arm. He was hurt, but the returning sword cut had shown him how the weapon worked.

It wasn’t iron. Iron didn’t swallow a sword without a mark. It was a rift, a tear in space sealed inside an iron shell and shaped like the arm Zhuang Yuhe had lost on Thunder-Gazing Ridge. Whatever went into it went somewhere else, and came out wherever he chose to open the other side.

There had to be another opening. Shi Feng thought carefully: where had Zhuang Yuhe fixed it?

One end was in the forearm, where the sword had gone in. The other end had to be tied to something. A rift that wasn’t tied to a living body would drift, and this one obeyed him too well to be drifting. It was tied to him, at the place where the iron joined his flesh.

At the shoulder.

Shi Feng wiped the blood off his hand onto his robe and took a slow, burning breath.

“Your arm,” Shi Feng said. “It goes into your shoulder.”

Zhuang Yuhe’s mild eyes didn’t change. But he raised the iron arm a little higher in front of his chest, and that was answer enough.

The pockets were gone now. Space over the lane was open again, and Void-Crossing Step had somewhere to land.

Shi Feng stepped through the void.

He came out three paces above the roof of the house behind Zhuang Yuhe, high in the dark air, with the grey Sword already raised above his head.

Zhuang Yuhe turned and looked up. He panicked at the raised sword and repeated his earlier defence. Since the ridge, he’d trusted the iron arm to stop attacks. He lifted the iron arm across his face to catch it.

The Falling Star Sword fell.

At Major Success it no longer just dropped. It chose where it landed. It came straight down out of the night onto the raised forearm and went into the rift inside it, the whole blade and all the force of the fall behind it.

Zhuang Yuhe hadn’t opened the other side anywhere else. He’d had no time.

So it came out of the end that was tied to him.

The Falling Star Sword came out of the Seventeenth’s own shoulder, inside his body, and kept falling. It went down through his chest and out under his ribs on the far side. The iron arm cracked from the shoulder to the fist, and the frost in it burst out in a grey cloud.

Shi Feng landed on his feet in the yard.

Zhuang Yuhe sat down slowly in the alley with his back against the wall of the house. His veil had come loose. Under it his face was ordinary and tired, and his mouth was full of blood.

He looked at the broken arm. Then he laughed again, wet and soft.

“The Fifteenth remembers you,” Zhuang Yuhe said. “He remembers the alley.”

He was dead before Shi Feng could ask which alley. Shi Feng knew anyway.

He stood over the body for a long moment. Somewhere behind him, a child in the middle house was still coughing.

At the well, the fighting had stopped. Two grey men lay dead inside the fence of moonlight. The other two had gone over the south wall into the reeds. Shen Yaoqing stood at the well with her sword lowered and a long cut across one sleeve, and the patrol disciples were staring past her at the alley.

“He killed the bandit chief.”

“In two exchanges! Did you see it?”

“Late Shattering Void against late Shattering Void, and the bandit had him trapped from the start!”

“He walked straight through dead space. Who does that?”

“…”

Shen Yaoqing walked over and looked at the body, then at the cracked iron arm.

“The arm was a rift,” Shen Yaoqing said.

“Sealed in iron,” Shi Feng said, and coughed. “He trusted it to swallow every strike. Once I found the other opening, that defence let my sword reach his body.”

Shen Yaoqing looked at the blood running down his left arm.

“My master’s salve,” Shen Yaoqing said. “Use it.”

“Does it work on lungs?” Shi Feng asked.

“It works on wounds,” Shen Yaoqing said.

“My shoulder will have to do,” Shi Feng said, pressing a hand against the bleeding cut. “The lungs will recover.”

Shen Yaoqing didn’t answer him. She turned and went to see to her wounded.

On the gatehouse roof, Qin Wuyan hadn’t moved all night. He looked down at the yard, at the dead Elder and the living alchemist, and then he looked east into the dark for a long time and listened.

Shi Feng crouched by the body and took the ring off Zhuang Yuhe’s left hand.

The ring held very little. Some pill bottles. A purse. And a single sheet of oiled paper folded small, with a hill drawn on it in ink, and at the foot of the hill, a kiln.