Chapter 645 — The North Wall

CHAPTER 645

The North Wall

The horns started at dusk, three long notes from the north.

Shi Feng was behind Old Tao’s noodle board with a ladle in his hand, serving porters for one bowl’s wage because Tao Erniang’s wrist was sore. The whole lane stopped eating at once.

“Beasts!” Tao Erniang shouted, grabbing her daughter by the collar. “Xiaoyu, shutters! Now!”

“That’s the north horn, Ma,” Tao Xiaoyu said, already counting the notes on her fingers. “Three long ones. That means the wall.”

Fan Baoshou came running down the lane with his robe hitched up to his knees, sweating in the cold.

“Brother Feng! Brother Feng, it’s the hills!” Fan Baoshou gasped. “Midwinter hunger, the whole slope’s come down! They’re already in the herb farms! Half the Pavilion’s winter stock is still in the ground up there. Last night something howled at the south gate until dawn, so every sect hall in the port sent its men south. The north wall’s got Captain Gao and two hundred guardsmen. Not one Soul Formation among them.”

Shi Feng’s eyes narrowed.

A loud feint at night, and the real blow at the other wall, he thought. That’s not hunger. Something up there can count.

“My herbs are in those farms,” Shi Feng said.

“Yours?” Fan Baoshou asked.

“I signed for the Pavilion’s winter allotment a month ago and paid half up front,” Shi Feng said. “If those fields get trampled, the Pavilion bills me a shortage, and I bill my clients a delay, and my clients cry at my door.”

Shi Feng handed the bowl to the nearest porter, tucked the ladle into his belt and walked north.

“You’re taking the ladle?” Tao Erniang yelled after him.

“I’ll bring it back, Auntie,” Shi Feng called over his shoulder. He’d forgotten it was there, and stopping for it would only delay him.

The north wall of Wanhe was old grey stone, forty feet high, with the herb terraces climbing the hills right beyond it. Below, in the dark fields, shapes moved between the rows.

Captain Gao Rukui was a square, broad man with a bandaged left hand and a voice worn raw from shouting. He was late Nascent Soul, and he was clearly the strongest man on the wall.

“Civilians off the wall!” Gao Rukui roared. “Who let you up here?”

“I climbed, Gao Rukui,” Shi Feng said, glancing down at the fields. “I can help. What’s your fee schedule?”

Gao Rukui stared at him.

“My what?” Gao Rukui asked.

“Your fee schedule for hired defenders,” Shi Feng said. “Bounty per beast, damages, spoils. I won’t claim anyone else’s kills. I need to know whether your men will let me take my own.”

“Are you out of your mind?” a guardsman beside the captain shouted. “The tide’s at the gate, and he wants a contract!”

“I’m asking your captain,” Shi Feng said. He kept his eyes on Gao Rukui.

Gao Rukui looked at the ladle in his belt, then at the black fields.

“Distant water can’t put out a nearby fire,” Gao Rukui said through his teeth. “The sect halls aren’t coming back before midnight. I don’t have time to haggle with you.”

“Then don’t haggle,” Shi Feng said. “Just write one line.”

Gao Rukui snatched a charcoal stick from the signal brazier and scrawled across the parapet stone in front of his men: Kills on this wall belong to the killer. Gao Rukui, Captain.

“There,” Gao Rukui snapped. “Satisfied?”

“That will do,” Shi Feng said. He read it twice. “Get your men ready. Something bigger is coming.”

“…”

The captain turned his back on him and started bellowing orders.

Full dark came, and the tide came with it.

First came the small beasts, wolves and horned hares half mad from hunger. The guardsmen held them with spears and arrows. At the low corner, the dead piled up against the stone, and the living ran up the pile.

A grey wolf the size of a calf came over the parapet in one leap and knocked a young guardsman flat.

Shi Feng didn’t draw. Drifting Ash Step took him three paces before the wolf’s jaws closed, and he caught it by the scruff and threw it. The golden bones did the rest. The wolf went back over the wall, over the pile and over the first rank of its own pack, and didn’t get up.

A horned hare jumped the gap behind it. Shi Feng pulled the ladle from his belt and hit it on the nose.

Clang!

The hare dropped back into the dark.

“Get up,” Shi Feng told the boy. “You’re lying in the brazier oil.”

“That was a soup ladle,” the young guardsman said faintly.

“It’s Old Tao’s,” Shi Feng said, tucking it away. “Don’t tell her I hit a hare with it.”

Then the ground started shaking.

“Captain!” a scout screamed from the gatehouse roof. “It’s the leader! It’s coming straight for the gate!”

It came out of the terraces like a moving hill. It was an Iron-Back Boar, twice the height of a man at the shoulder, its back covered in grey plates that looked like hammered iron. Its tusks were as long as spears. The air around it pressed down on every man on the wall.

“Soul Formation!” someone shouted. “That’s a Soul Formation beast!”

“Brace the beam! Brace the beam!” Gao Rukui roared.

The boar lowered its head and hit the north gate.

Boom!

The whole wall jumped. The great oak beam across the gate cracked down the middle like a dry stick, and the doors bowed inward.

Boom!

The beam broke. The doors swung open a foot, and through the gap came the boar’s snout and the red light of its eyes.

“Hold the line! Spears to the gap!” Gao Rukui shouted, but his own voice was shaking now. Two hundred men and no Soul Formation.

Shi Feng had already stepped up onto the parapet.

He drew the grey Sword from his ring and glanced at the charcoal line on the stone one more time. Six spearmen stood in the gateway below. They’d take the first charge.

“Hey!” Gao Rukui yelled. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Keep your archers clear of the gate,” Shi Feng said. “I’m going down.”

He jumped.

Halfway down the wall, the Thousand Forge fire ran down his arm into the blade, and the grey Sword turned the colour of a setting sun.

The first stroke of the Sunset-Splitting Sword that Wanhe had ever seen lit the whole north wall from end to end, as bright as evening.