Chapter 1022 — A Hundred Mirrors

CHAPTER 1022

A Hundred Mirrors

Mirror Ice Lake lay in a bowl of black hills, three li across and frozen white from shore to shore. There was no snow on it. Wind had swept the surface clear. The ice reflected the sky.

Qin Wuyan stopped on the south shore, at the edge of the reeds.

“This one waits here,” Qin Wuyan said.

“I know,” Shi Feng said, and stepped onto the ice.

Helian Ba stood a little behind the old man with his axe on his shoulder and twelve Helian warriors at his back. Further along the shore, Shen Yaoqing waited with four patrol disciples, because the lake was on the sect’s border and the border was hers to watch. They kept to the agreed positions on shore.

Lan Yezhi was waiting in the middle of the lake.

She stood perfectly still, tall and pale, with her silver-grey hair bound high and small white circles embroidered on her grey sleeves. A boy of fifteen knelt on the ice beside her. His wrists were tied with grey cord, and his lips were moving.

“Master Shi,” Lan Yezhi said when he was a hundred paces off, and she bowed to him politely. “You left the old man on the shore. That will do. I dislike being lied to.”

“Let the boy walk to the shore,” Shi Feng said. “Then we can talk.”

“He’s my guest,” Lan Yezhi said. “So are you. My orders say alive, with your hands unharmed. They say nothing about your legs.”

She lifted one sleeve.

The air over the lake split.

It didn’t split once. It split a hundred times in a single breath, in long upright cuts, and every cut turned to face him. A hundred standing mirrors rose out of the ice in rings around him, each one taller than a man and edged with a thin line of black.

Shi Feng stopped and checked the reflections before moving.

In one he stood with his sword drawn. In another he was bleeding. In a third he was walking away. In every mirror the boy knelt somewhere different, close or far, left or right, and in every mirror Lan Yezhi stood in a different place with her sleeve raised.

“Thousand-Facet Mirror Rift,” Lan Yezhi said, and her voice came out of all of them at once. “Find him, Master Shi. He’s in one of them.”

Shi Feng didn’t answer. He picked the nearest mirror, the one where the boy knelt closest, and crossed to it with Void-Crossing Step.

He landed in it.

Then he came out of a different mirror forty paces to the west, facing the wrong way.

On the shore, the Helian warriors shouted.

“He went in that one and came out that one!”

“How? They’re not even next to each other!”

“Don’t look at it too long, my head’s spinning!”

Each mirror was a fold of space, not a picture. Whatever went into one came out of another. He’d fought folds before. A fold had a seam, and a seam could be found. But there were a hundred of them, and they all moved when she moved her sleeve.

Shi Feng chose a direct strike to test the mirrors.

He drew the grey Sword and cut at the mirror that showed Lan Yezhi nearest, with Sunset-Splitting Sword at Perfection. The cut went out red and wide, the full arc of a late sun, wide enough to take her and the mirror with her.

It went into the mirror.

It came out of the one behind him.

Shi Feng felt it at the last instant and twisted. His own sword qi went through the outside of his left thigh, a hand’s length of it, and the blood came out hot and ran onto the ice.

He went down on one knee.

“Master Shi!” one of the patrol disciples shouted, and took a step toward the ice.

“Stay where you are,” Shen Yaoqing said coldly, without turning her head. The disciple stopped.

Helian Ba had both hands around his axe haft.

“Stop hitting yourself!” Helian Ba roared across the ice. “Brother Shi! You’re cutting yourself in half out there! Stop hitting yourself!”

“I heard you,” Shi Feng said, and stood up.

His injured leg held, but pain shot through his thigh.

Qin Wuyan remained on shore, hands in his sleeves. He watched the clouds for stronger enemies. This fight was below his line.

“You see?” Lan Yezhi said gently from a hundred mirrors. “Every blow you strike comes back to you. The harder you strike, the harder it comes back. Stronger men than you have killed themselves on this ice, and I only stood and watched.”

“Who were they?” Shi Feng asked.

“Does it matter?” Lan Yezhi asked.

“I’d like to know whose company I’m refusing,” Shi Feng said.

For a breath the mirrors were quiet. Then Lan Yezhi laughed, low and pleased, and all hundred mirrors turned a little, so that every Shi Feng in them turned as well.

“Kneel, Master Shi,” Lan Yezhi said. “Put the sword down, and I’ll tie your hands with silk instead of cord. The Sect values its alchemists. It’ll even let you keep the boy as an assistant.”

“I’m not putting down my sword,” Shi Feng said.

On the shore the warriors had gone silent. Twelve Helian men and four Serene Jade disciples were watching one man stand in a ring of a hundred copies of himself, bleeding, and none of them had any idea what he could do next.

“It’s a cage,” one of the Helian men muttered. “He can’t see out of it.”

“He can’t see anything,” another said. “Every way he looks, it’s him.”

Shi Feng looked at the mirrors for a long moment. Only one reflection showed the real boy. Shi Feng couldn’t find him by sight, and another strike might hurt the hostage.

He lowered the grey Sword until its point touched the ice.

Then he closed his eyes.