Chapter 811 — The Tracker

CHAPTER 811

The Tracker

“Ink,” Yue Shaoan said, with his nose an inch above the reeds. “And old paper. B-Brother Shi, it’s here again.”

He was on his knees in the marsh mud with both palms flat on the ground. The fog of the Mist Marsh hung so thick that the far side of the reed bed was only a grey wall. Spirit Sense died a few yards out. A nose didn’t.

“Where did you smell him before?” Shi Feng asked, crouching beside Yue Shaoan.

“Here. And at the dead willow this morning. And on the bank where we filled the gourds,” Yue Shaoan said, swallowing. “It’s one man, and he’s crossed our path three times today.”

The Hundred-Scent Trail let a tracker hold a hundred smells in his head at once and follow any one of them for three days. Yue Shaoan was nervous about almost everything, but he’d never once been wrong about a smell.

“So he’s lost!” Hou Tieshou boomed from behind them. He was standing in the water up to his shins with a dead Mist Python over one shoulder, as if it were a sack of rice. “Everyone gets lost in this fog! I got lost twice yesterday, and I was standing still!”

“He isn’t lost,” Jiao Lanyin said coldly. She didn’t look up from the arrow she was straightening.

Shi Feng picked up a reed and drew in the mud. A mark for the willow. A mark for the gourd bank. A mark for here. Then he drew a ring through all three.

The ring went round last night’s camp. It went round the dry hummock where they’d meant to sleep tonight, too.

“Same distance from the fire each time,” Shi Feng said. “He isn’t hunting beasts. He’s walking round us and counting. How many fires we light, where we sleep, who stands watch and when.”

“Counting?” Hou Tieshou said. “Who counts a camp?”

“Someone who means to come back to it,” Shi Feng said.

His voice was quiet, and the good humour had gone out of it. Hou Tieshou closed his mouth.

Last night a warden had told him about a grey-sleeved man who’d stared straight into the fourth Mirror. Now there was ink and old paper in the reeds. Shi Feng had known a man who carried a folder everywhere and smelled of it. That man didn’t send letters. He came to collect.

“Since the marsh, we’ve done the same thing every night,” Shi Feng said. “Camp at dusk. One fire. Hou Tieshou takes first watch, Yue Shaoan second, me third, Jiao Lanyin the dawn. Anyone who’s watched us for two nights knows our camp better than we do.”

“Then we change the watches,” Jiao Lanyin said.

“We change the camp,” Shi Feng said. “Tonight we make it at dusk, exactly like always. We build the fire bigger than usual. Then we leave it.”

Yue Shaoan’s face went white. “Leave it? At night? In this fog? The beasts...”

“We’ll leave before anyone reaches it,” Shi Feng said. “The rest of you will hide downwind and watch. Yue Shaoan can smell them coming, and I’ll stay near enough to intercept them.”

“The golden cicada sheds its shell,” Yue Shaoan whispered.

Nobody answered him. Jiao Lanyin put the straightened arrow back in her quiver.

“A fire with nobody at it looks like a trap,” Jiao Lanyin said. “Anyone who counts would know that.”

“That’s why somebody will be sleeping by it,” Shi Feng said. He nodded at the python on Hou Tieshou’s shoulder. “Him.”

“It’s dead,” Hou Tieshou said, looking down at the python on his shoulder.

“It only has to look like a sleeping man under your blanket,” Shi Feng said. “In this fog, they’ll have to come close to check. That will give us the chance to see them first.”

“I’m much better looking than a snake,” Hou Tieshou said, offended.

“Then you’ll have to make up the difference with noise,” Shi Feng said. “Yue Shaoan. You still have those conches?”

Yue Shaoan fumbled at his belt and brought out two small white shells on a string. They were Whisper Conches, which hunters used to call to each other through fog. A conch kept the last sound spoken into it and said it again whenever it was warmed.

“Put one by the fire,” Shi Feng said, “and it’ll talk all night. Hou Tieshou, it needs your snoring.”

“I don’t snore!” Hou Tieshou roared.

“You snore like a landslide,” Jiao Lanyin said flatly. “Every night. The whole marsh knows where we sleep because of you.”

“…” Hou Tieshou said.

“So it’s your snoring they’ve been counting,” Shi Feng said. “Let’s give them some more.”

It took three tries, because Hou Tieshou couldn’t snore on purpose. On the third, he shut his eyes and tipped his head back. His bellowing snore sent a heron flying from the reeds.

Yue Shaoan held the conch at arm’s length, wincing. “That’s... that’s very like it.”

“It’s exactly like it,” Jiao Lanyin said.

At dusk they made camp on the hummock, the way they’d made it every night.

Hou Tieshou built the fire high and bright, with green wood on top so it would smoke and burn slowly. They laid the python down beside it, coiled long under his blanket, with his spare boots poking out at one end. Yue Shaoan tucked the warm conch into the ashes at the fire’s edge. In a few breaths, a landslide began to snore.

Then the four of them walked off the hummock into the dark and didn’t come back.

Yue Shaoan led them by his nose, a hundred paces downwind to a bank of tall reeds where the wind would carry every smell from the camp straight to them. Jiao Lanyin knelt there with an arrow on the string.

Shi Feng didn’t stay with them.

“Twenty paces behind the woodpile,” Shi Feng told her quietly. “If anything comes through the reeds here, it isn’t me. Shoot it.”

“And if something comes for you?” Jiao Lanyin asked.

“Then shoot that too,” Shi Feng said.

He went back toward the fire, stepping on the water rather than through it, and lay down flat in the reeds behind the pile of cut wood. The grey Sword lay under his hand.

The fire burned. The empty camp snored.

Half the night passed. Out in the marsh, things splashed and went quiet.

Then the snoring stopped for a breath, the way Hou Tieshou’s always did when he rolled over, and started again.

At the edge of the firelight, the fog moved against the wind.