Chapter 465 — They All Move at Night

CHAPTER 465

They All Move at Night

The sign lasted four breaths.

A raider in a crimson sash read it aloud, laughed, and kicked the post. The board cracked in half. Behind him, sixty men in dark robes came up the last stretch of road with their lanterns shuttered and their blades out.

Captain Lei Bo walked at the front. He was at early Golden Core, a broad man with a red sash and a short sword. He looked at the dark gate, then the empty court, then the old storehouse with its one lit lamp.

“No guard?” Lei Bo said.

The man beside him confirmed that no elders were present. It was settlement night, exactly as the report said.

“Then we'll be quick,” Lei Bo said. “Doors, crates, torches. The goods first, then the roof.”

They went in.

The storehouse was long and low, and the single lamp on the crate made the shadows worse. Auction goods sat in neat stacks. Eight iron coffins stood along the wall. Between them, rows and rows of clay-faced puppets waited in the dark with their hands at their sides.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Knock.

A raider at the back stopped walking.

Knock. Knock.

“Who's that?” someone whispered.

“The wind.”

“There's no wind.”

The fifth coffin's lid moved. It rose the width of a finger, and then dropped back with a clank loud enough to carry out the door.

The raider nearest the fifth coffin shrieked and pointed at its moving lid.

“They all move at night,” Shi Feng said. “Please leave your rings at the gate.”

He hadn't raised his voice. He sat in the dark corner by the door, and nobody had seen him there. Every head in the room turned toward him. Then, together, so did every puppet.

Gongsun Ce, up in the rafters with the wire in both fists, closed his eyes with pure joy.

The puppets' necks ground around in a single long creak. Sixty clay faces looked at sixty raiders. Behind the furnace, something belched. A gout of orange flame rolled out of the stove and lit the whole hall from below, and in the middle of it sat a soot-grey toad with gold-rimmed eyes, smoke curling from its nostrils.

“Ghost fire!”

“It's the old puppet storehouse! It's haunted!”

“I told you this place was cursed!”

“Run!”

“I'm not dying for sixty-three stones!”

Thirty of them ran. Two of them ran straight into a stack of crates and had to be dug out of the packing paper later. By the time Lei Bo had finished roaring, the doorway was jammed and the lanterns of the fleeing men were already bouncing down the hill.

The rest stood still. They were the ones who had fought in a real war, and they had seen worse than a toad.

“Cowards,” Lei Bo said. “They're puppets! One boy and a toad. That is an egg thrown at a rock! Kill the one in the corner!”

“Thirty left,” Shi Feng observed, watching the fleeing lanterns. “Running won't take their names off the bill.”

Lei Bo laughed and charged.

The fight ran through the crates and between the coffins. Shi Feng fought with the Sword and almost no qi, short cuts in the narrow lanes, letting the puppets block half the angles for him. A raider's saber rang off the Slag Weight and flew from his hand. Another went down under three clay arms that had been held up on Gongsun Ce's wire. Old Soot spat slag fire at ankles. Zhu Liu's knocker kept going inside the coffin, now frantic, now random.

A young disciple screamed at the doorway, drawing Shi Feng's attention.

Zheng Yu, the gate disciple, had run in from the court with a lantern in each hand. He was Qi Condensation, nineteen, still trying to save the sect's lamps from the raiders. Behind him a raider in black lifted a throwing blade.

Shi Feng saw it a breath too late to reach him.

Sima Lan did not need to be told. She had been standing behind the furnace with her thin sword, and she was already moving. She crossed the lane in three steps and turned her back to the blade.

It went in below her left shoulder and ran down along the ribs.

She didn't make a sound. Her thin sword came around in the same movement and took the thrower across the wrist, and he dropped, clutching his injured wrist. She forced herself to stand straight and looked at Zheng Yu.

“Attendant. Not a shield. Get the lamps down before you burn the hall,” Sima Lan said evenly.

Then her knees gave.

Shi Feng was across the room before the last word ended.

Lei Bo saw his face and raised the short sword. It was a good guard. It lasted two exchanges, and then the Slag Weight came down on his wrist and the dirty move took the rest. Lei Bo fell on his back among the crates. The Sword stopped a thumb's width from his throat.

“Rings,” Shi Feng said.

“I'll—” Lei Bo began, terrified by the sword at his throat.

“Now,” Shi Feng said.

The remaining raiders dropped their weapons and their rings in a clattering pile.

Dawn came grey over Thousand Forge Peak.

Zhu Liu climbed out of the coffin with the rings in his arms, still pale from the night's fright. Gongsun Ce lowered himself from the rafters and counted puppets, one by one, aloud. Sima Lan lay on a pallet in the storehouse corner with one of He Zhen's dispensary boys pressing a cloth to her back. She was awake and hated it.

Shi Feng was sitting on an overturned crate. There was blood on his sleeve. It wasn't his.

A sword came down out of the sky.

It was a slender Valley sword glowing faintly green, and it landed in the court so lightly that the gravel didn't move. Ling Qingzhu stepped off it. Her veil was crooked from the wind, and she carried a Valley medicine box in both hands.

Ling Qingzhu's expression changed at the broken sign and damaged storehouse. She looked straight at Shi Feng.

“I was passing,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“At dawn,” Shi Feng said.

“I saw a glow over your peak last night,” Ling Qingzhu said. “It lit half the mountain. I thought someone had burned your kitchen.” Her eyes dropped to his sleeve. “Whose blood is that?”

“My attendant's,” Shi Feng said.

Ling Qingzhu put the box down on the crate.

She said nothing more. She rolled up her sleeves, walked into the storehouse and knelt beside the pallet. The Valley's first fairy took the bloody cloth from the dispensary boy as though she'd done it a hundred times.

“Hold still,” Ling Qingzhu told Sima Lan, pressing the cloth to her wound. “You'll live. Otherwise he'd invoice me for the funeral.”