Chapter 646 — The Lesser Wan

CHAPTER 646

The Lesser Wan

The sunset-coloured stroke hit the boar across the snout.

The beast screamed and jerked its head back out of the gap. A strip of iron plate the length of a man’s arm went spinning into the dark, glowing red at the edges.

Shi Feng landed in the gateway with his back to the bowed doors.

“He cut it!” a guardsman shouted from the wall. “He actually cut the plate!”

“Who is that?”

“Isn’t that the noodle-lane alchemist?”

“…”

The boar backed up ten paces, pawed the frozen mud, and charged again.

This time Shi Feng didn’t swing. He stepped half a pace aside, and as the tusk went past his ribs, he laid his left palm flat on the beast’s cheek. The force of the charge ran into his hand, and the Physique swallowed it the way a dry field swallows rain. The boar’s head turned with his palm, and the beast hit the gatepost instead of the gap.

Bang!

Stone chips rained down. The boar shook its head, dazed and furious.

“Spears! Down the inside stair and close the gap behind him!” Gao Rukui roared from above.

“Captain, the gap’s only one man wide!” a sergeant shouted back.

“Then he’ll have to hold it,” Gao Rukui said hoarsely. “One man holds the pass, and ten thousand can’t get through.”

Shi Feng held the gap for an hour.

He didn’t give up a single step. Wolves came, and the grey Sword cut them down. The hares came in a wave, and he kicked them back over the wolves. Every time the boar charged, he caught a little of the blow, gave a little back, and cut another plate off its back.

By the end of the hour the boar had no plates left on its left side. It lowered its head for the last time.

The second stroke was brighter than the first. It went in behind the boar’s shoulder, where the iron plates had been, and came out the other side.

The Iron-Back Boar ran four more steps on its own momentum and fell across the gate road like a collapsing wall.

Two hundred men started shouting at once. The shouting lasted three breaths.

“Fire on the river terraces!” the scout on the gatehouse roof screamed. “The drying sheds are burning! There are people on the roofs!”

Shi Feng climbed the inside stair and looked west along the wall.

West of the gate, the Lesser Wan came down out of the hills, white with ice along both banks and black in the middle where the current ran. On its far side the terraces climbed toward the ridge. The Pavilion’s frost-lily rows were there, with the Zhuo Old House’s rows beside them. A lantern had gone over in one of the drying sheds, and its fire lit up wolves in the rows and a herd of red-horned goats tearing up spirit herbs by the roots.

“Those are my frost-lilies,” Shi Feng said.

“The bridge is that way,” Gao Rukui said, pointing upstream. The stone bridge was black with wolves. “And I can’t send you one man. If this gate opens again, the city opens with it.”

“The gate’s yours,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll take the roots.”

He went over the wall at the river corner, slid down the iced stone and landed on the bank.

Forty wolves held the bridge, all facing the bridge road, waiting for anything that tried to cross. None of them was watching the water.

Shi Feng stepped off the ice onto the black current.

His first foot went in to the ankle, and the cold bit to the bone. Riverless Step was still at Entry. He’d learned it on a quiet canal, and the Lesser Wan in midwinter was nothing like a quiet canal. He stopped pushing down and let the current come up under his heel, the way the jade slip said. The second step held. The third carried him three paces downstream before he could stop it.

So he let it carry him. He crossed on a long slant, half running and half sliding, and came up the far bank below the terraces. The forty wolves were still facing the wrong way.

“He’s on the water!” someone yelled on the wall. “He walked the river!”

“He’s soaked to the knees! That’s not walking!”

“Then you go and try it!”

On the roof of the burning shed, an old farmer with a hoe and three women with rakes stared down at him.

“Young man!” Old Farmer Mao shouted. “The wolves are behind you!”

“I know, uncle,” Shi Feng called back. “I came the long way so they would be.”

The pack came off the bridge and up the slope at him. He went up to meet them one terrace at a time. Each terrace edge was a step of frozen mud a foot high, and the wolves had to jump each one. Every wolf that jumped met the grey Sword at the top. Iron River Sword Art had been at Perfection for a long time. It didn’t need to be bright. It ran level along each terrace edge like a flood along a field wall, and the wolves that came over the edge didn’t come over it again.

The goats broke and ran for the ridge. The shed fire burned down to its beams.

On the roof of the Zhuo drying house, Zhuo Heng stood with a drawn sword and four apprentices behind him. His face was black with smoke.

“I didn’t ask for help, Feng Shi,” Zhuo Heng said stiffly.

“You didn’t get any,” Shi Feng said, shaking river water out of his boots. “Your shed is next to the Pavilion’s frost-lilies. Those are mine. Your shed was just lucky.”

Zhuo Heng opened his mouth and shut it again.

Old Farmer Mao grabbed his sleeve.

“The goats,” Old Farmer Mao said. “They were running before you came, young man. Goats don’t run from wolves like that. They run like that from the ridge.”

From the ridge above the terraces came a howl.

It was long and deep, and it rose and fell like a man laughing. Every wolf left on the slope dropped flat on its belly. On the north wall, the guardsmen who’d stood at the south gate the night before went pale. They’d heard that howl until dawn.

Something stood up on the ridge, black against the snow. It was taller than the drying shed, and it was looking straight down at him.