Chapter 904 — The Unheard Cut

CHAPTER 904

The Unheard Cut

The fifth lamp went out, and Shi Feng was already sitting up on the salt sacks.

The Grey Goose Pass waystation was a walled yard on a shelf of rock, stables along the cliff side and a drop of three hundred zhang along the other. Hao Dafu’s eleven wagons stood in two rows in the middle, and a quarter of an hour ago six lamps had hung around them. Now there was one, on the post by the gate.

None of the others had made a sound. There was no wind and no crack of paper. The flames had simply gone out, one after another.

“Who’s playing with the lamps?” Hao Dafu shouted, getting up from the cook fire with a ladle in his fist. “Lao Qi! If that’s you, I’m docking your pay!”

“It’s not me, boss!” Lao Qi shouted back from the wagons. “I’m lying right here!”

Shi Feng slid off the sacks and listened.

The mules in the stable had stopped shifting. The wind still blew through the pass. But between the gate and the second row of wagons there was a patch of the yard where he heard nothing at all. His Spirit Sense swept it and found nothing, not even an edge.

Shi Feng’s face went still. A hole like that had to be carried by a person.

“Master Hao,” Shi Feng said. “Get everyone under the wagons. Now, please.”

“Under the wagons?” Hao Dafu said. “Young man, it’s a lamp, not a—”

The last lamp went out.

The young caravan guard who’d been reading the Tianji issue dropped it and drew his saber. His voice cracked.

“Boss, get down!” the young caravan guard shouted.

Then the cold came.

Shi Feng didn’t hear it, and he didn’t see it. He only felt the air on the left of his neck turn cold, the way it does before snow. Nothing moved in the dark.

He stepped.

Void-Crossing Step folded the three paces in front of him into nothing, and he was standing beside the cook fire. At Minor Success the art could take him ten paces and hold the fold for one breath, but it couldn’t answer a cut he hadn’t heard. He’d moved half a breath late.

The cut caught him under the left arm and ran across his ribs.

It didn’t hurt at first. Then it went cold, a deep cold that sank into the flesh like well water. He put his hand on his side and it came away wet, and the blood at the edges of the wound was already stiff with frost.

The cook fire lit the yard a little. In its light a man stood where Shi Feng’s neck had been.

His face was covered by a plain white mask with two narrow eye slits and no mouth. In his right hand he held a long, thin blade, and the blade was the one thing Shi Feng couldn’t look at properly. The firelight touched its edge and disappeared, and the air for a hand’s breadth around it was perfectly still.

The pressure of late Shattering Void came off the man, flat and heavy, and the drivers dived under the wagons.

“My salt! Not the salt wagons, please!”

“Shut up about the salt!”

Hao Dafu didn’t go under the wagons. He stood by the cook fire with his ladle up like a sword.

“Bandit!” Hao Dafu shouted. “This is Hao Dafu’s train! I pay my road money to every stronghold from here to Hanli! Who’s your chief?”

The masked man didn’t look at him. The eye slits were on Shi Feng.

Hao Dafu went to the lead wagon for the toll board and set it upright on the stones between them. Its edge was cut with a notch for every gate between Tianjing and Grey Goose.

“One part in ten, once, at the gate, on salt,” Hao Dafu recited, loud enough for the drivers. “No gate takes twice, and no gate takes on the return load.”

The masked man stepped over it the way a man steps over a puddle.

“Twenty-two years,” Hao Dafu said. “Not one stronghold has ever refused it.”

Shi Feng ran his qi into the wound. Golden bone sat under the cut and stopped the cold from going deeper. But the flesh didn’t close.

The blade took sound and light out of a pocket of space around its edge, and what it cut stayed open.

A late Shattering Void killer with a refined artifact like that wasn’t hired with salt money. He’d been sent, and he’d been sent for one name.

“You put the lamps out one at a time,” Shi Feng said calmly. “You didn’t want the drivers running before I came off the sacks. That’s patient work for a bandit.”

The masked man said nothing.

“And you went for the neck first, not the money,” Shi Feng went on. “So you’re a borrowed knife. Whoever lent you didn’t want his own hands in the cold.”

The mask tilted very slightly.

“Shi Feng,” the masked man said. His voice was quiet and dry, and it came from the mask without the mask moving.

“That’s me,” Shi Feng said. “If you want the salt, it belongs to Master Hao and he’ll argue with you. If you want me, you could have knocked on the gate. I was awake.”

Under the nearest wagon, Lao Qi whispered, “Is he joking? He’s bleeding and he’s joking?”

“He’s not joking,” the young guard whispered back. “Look at his hands. He’s ready.”

The masked man lowered his blade a finger’s width.

Around it, the stillness spread.

It ran out from the edge across the stones, a ring of silence a pace wide, then two paces, then five. The crackle of the cook fire stopped as it passed. Hao Dafu’s mouth opened in a shout, and no sound came out of it. The fire still burned, but the light on the near side of it went thin and grey.

Then the masked man stepped backwards into his own silence, and the blade was gone from sight and sound together.

Shi Feng stood alone in the dead grey yard, with the cold spreading in his ribs. He couldn’t hear his own heartbeat anymore.

Somewhere in that silence, the second cut was already coming.