Chapter 797 — Bones in the Riverbed

CHAPTER 797

Bones in the Riverbed

Yue Shaoan smelled the blood before anyone saw it.

“Man,” Yue Shaoan said, stopping so suddenly that Hou Tieshou walked into him. “Hurt. Badly. Down there.”

At the eastern edge of the Silver-Pine Ring, an old river had dried up long ago and left its bed behind. It was a broad channel of white stones and bleached driftwood, a hundred paces across, running straight toward the array wall. Beyond the far bank the wall’s gold shimmer rose through the trees.

A man lay on his back among the stones in the middle of the channel. A torn blue flag with a golden abacus on it lay beside him.

“That’s the Tang banner’s flag,” Hou Tieshou said. “Where are the rest of them?”

They climbed down. The man was young, perhaps twenty-five, in a blue hunting robe that had been fine that morning. His sleeves were slashed to ribbons. Long shallow cuts ran across his arms and ribs, and his belt hung open and empty. Both of his hands were the colour of cold ash, all the way to the wrists.

His eyes were open. When Shi Feng knelt beside him, the man grabbed his sleeve with fingers that barely closed.

“Grey,” the Tang man whispered. “Grey sleeves. They came over the wall. Over the array wall, like it wasn’t there. Five of them.”

“Where’s your banner?” Shi Feng asked.

“We split up to cover the riverbed. I was carrying the cores,” the Tang hunter said. His weak laugh turned into a cough. “All of them. Forty-one. They took the pouch and they laughed and said bandits have to eat too.”

“Bandits,” Hou Tieshou said, frowning. “Bandits inside the Imperial preserve?”

“They weren’t bandits,” the Tang man said. His voice was rising, and his eyes kept sliding past Shi Feng’s face to the trees. “Bandits don’t move like that. Bandits don’t ask questions. They asked me which banner had the alchemist. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know. One of them put his hand on my chest, and I couldn’t feel my arms anymore—”

Shi Feng opened the man’s torn robe.

There was a palm-print in the middle of his chest. It was perfectly clear, five fingers and the heel of a hand, and the skin inside it was grey, dry and cracked. Around its edges, the flesh was turning grey too, very slowly, spreading outward from the bone.

Shi Feng knew that palm. He had last felt it in the dark of the Guest Terrace lane, closing on his own wrist. Ash-Bone Palm. It rotted a man’s bones from the inside.

He didn’t say anything for a while.

The banner watched him. Hou Tieshou, who had laughed through every fight since the gate, closed his mouth. Yue Shaoan stopped fidgeting. Jiao Lanyin lowered her bow a little and looked at Shi Feng’s face instead of at the trees.

Shi Feng took a pill from his sleeve, a Deity Transformation-grade bone-sealing pill, and pressed it between the Tang man’s teeth.

“Swallow,” Shi Feng said quietly. “It’ll stop the grey spreading. It won’t undo it. The wardens’ physicians can do the rest, if they get you before nightfall.”

The Tang man swallowed. Some colour came back into his lips. He tried to lift his right hand to the jade token on his collar and couldn’t raise it more than an inch.

“I can’t,” the Tang man said. “I can’t close my hand. I’ve been lying here since noon trying to close my hand.”

“Brother Yue,” Shi Feng said, without looking round. “Crush his token for him.”

Yue Shaoan came forward at once. He untied the token from the Tang man’s collar with careful, trembling fingers, held it up so the man could see it, and closed his fist.

The jade broke with a sharp crack. A thin column of white light shot straight up out of the riverbed, above the pines, and hung there in the sky.

“They’ll come for you,” Yue Shaoan told the Tang man. “Wardens are fast. You’ll be all right.”

“Thank you,” the Tang man said, and closed his eyes.

Shi Feng stood up.

“They found a way past the array wall,” Shi Feng said quietly. He checked the grey palm-print once more, then faced the others. “Listen to me, all three of you,” Shi Feng said. “Those men weren’t bandits. They took the cores to make the attack look like a robbery. But they asked for the alchemist’s banner. They came for me.”

For a moment nobody spoke.

“You?” Hou Tieshou said. “Why you? What did you do to them, steal their wives?”

“I left a place they didn’t want me to leave,” Shi Feng said. “And I took a man with me when I went.”

“The old alchemist,” Jiao Lanyin said. “The one you sent the hawk about.”

“Yes,” Shi Feng said.

“Then they’ll come tonight,” Jiao Lanyin said flatly.

“No,” Shi Feng said. “Not tonight. Tonight they’ll find out which camp is ours and count us. They’re careful people. They don’t strike until they’ve counted.” He picked up his pouch, and the Gu pouch, and tied them both back on his belt where anyone could see them. “If any of you want to crush your tokens now and walk out with the wardens, I won’t think less of you. That’s not politeness. It’s true. This isn’t your quarrel.”

Yue Shaoan looked at the column of light, then at his own token. His hand moved toward it and stopped.

“I’ve never run away from a smell,” Yue Shaoan said. His voice shook. “I’m not going to start with this one.”

“Ha!” Hou Tieshou barked, slapping his chest. “Run from bandits in grey sleeves? Hou Tieshou would never live it down! Better to die standing! If they want the cook, they can come through this fist first!”

Jiao Lanyin said nothing at all. She only drew an arrow from her quiver, checked its fletching against the light, and put it back.

Shi Feng looked at the three of them, and despite the danger he was moved. Yue Shaoan was frightened, Hou Tieshou was angry, and Jiao Lanyin had answered by preparing another arrow. None of them owed him this, and none had chosen to leave.

“Then we stay,” Shi Feng said. “But from now on, nobody walks alone. Not to piss, not to fetch water. When they come, I want them to find all four of us.”

Down the riverbed, through the pines, came the sound of horses. The wardens were riding toward the beacon, and someone among them was already shouting the word “bandits”.