Chapter 906 — The Split Mask

CHAPTER 906

The Split Mask

Three cuts came out of three rifts, and Void-Crossing Step could only take him one way.

Left, and the right-hand cut caught him. Right, and the left one did. Forward, and the one behind him followed him through. So Shi Feng didn’t step through any door. He went up.

He kicked off the stones and rose straight into the air above the three rifts. The cuts crossed beneath him without a sound, so close that the one from behind sliced the heel off his boot.

At the top of the leap he turned the grey Sword point down.

Each rift had two ends. One end opened beside him. The other end opened beside the man who was cutting through it. Every rift was a door, and every door was standing open.

Falling Star Sword wasn’t made for going around things.

Shi Feng dropped.

The stroke came down out of the dark like a falling star, and the qi of the whole art drew into the point of the grey Sword. At Minor Success the Falling Star Sword could fall through stone and keep its edge. It fell into the rift on his left, straight down the black slit, and out the other end.

The masked man was standing at the other end, eight paces away, with his blade still inside the third door.

He saw the point coming out of his own rift and couldn’t pull his blade back in time.

Boom!

The Falling Star Sword hit the Silent Night Blade at the guard and drove it down. It split his stance, knocked his front foot out from under him. It opened the white mask from brow to chin and cut the face beneath, a long red line from the left eyebrow down across the cheek.

The mask fell off in two halves and clattered on the stones.

All three rifts closed at once. The cut had broken the masked man’s hold. The silence over the yard broke, and every sound came back together: the wind, the mules, the cook fire, the drivers’ breathing.

Shi Feng landed on one knee. The Falling Star Sword had taken almost the last of his qi, and his side was bleeding through his robe. His legs had nothing left in them.

The man in front of him was in his late twenties, thin-faced and pale, with blood running down his cheek. He touched the cut and looked at his red fingers as if he’d never seen his own blood before.

Under the second wagon, the young guard made a strangled sound. He snatched the Tianji issue off the stones and stared from the paper to the face.

“I know him!” the young guard shouted. “I saw him ride at the capital’s spring review! That’s Linghu Yan! Linghu Yan, the fourteenth!”

“The fourteenth what?” Lao Qi asked.

“The fourteenth on the Tianxing, you idiot! Late Shattering Void!” the young guard shouted.

The yard went dead quiet again, and this time no blade was doing it.

“Fourteenth on the list?”

“And the young one is only mid Shattering Void. I felt it when he lit the fire!”

“That can’t happen. Geniuses don’t lose to men below them.”

“It just happened. His face is bleeding.”

“…”

Linghu Yan’s eyes went to the guard. Then they went to the drivers’ faces under the wagons, every one of them looking at him, every one of them now able to say his name.

Linghu Yan went still. For the first time that night he looked afraid, and it wasn’t Shi Feng he was afraid of.

He didn’t say a word. He lifted the Silent Night Blade, tore one more rift behind him, and stepped back into it. Blood dripped from his chin. The rift closed over him, and a few red drops lay on the stones where he’d been.

Shi Feng stayed on one knee.

“Aren’t you going after him?” Hao Dafu cried, crawling out. “He’ll come back!”

“He’s late Shattering Void, and I’m out of qi,” Shi Feng said, getting to his feet slowly. “If I chase him into the dark now, he’ll have the dark and I’ll have nothing left. He won’t come back tonight. He’s bleeding, he’s been seen, and he’s got bigger problems than me.”

“What bigger problems?” Hao Dafu asked.

Shi Feng looked at the toll board. It lay where the masked man had stepped over it, face up on the stones, its notched edge rimed with frost.

“Every gate from Tianjing to Grey Goose cut a notch in that board,” Shi Feng said. “Not one of them refused your part, and he walked over it without reading it. A bandit reads the board first. He wasn’t sent by a stronghold.”

Hao Dafu’s mouth worked. “Then who—”

“Nobody on this road,” Shi Feng said. “And no chief will answer for him, or hand him over. That’s the bigger problem.”

Shi Feng picked up the two halves of the white mask and looked at them. Plain porcelain. No mark, no maker’s seal. A man who carried a mask like that had been sent somewhere he must never be recognised.

And now eleven wagons of salt drivers had recognised him.

“Whoever sent him,” Shi Feng said. He dropped the mask halves into the cook fire. “Master Hao, your mules are loose, and three of them are heading for the cliff.”

Hao Dafu yelped and ran.

The drivers came out from under the wagons in ones and twos. They didn’t go after the mules. They stood in a loose ring around the young man by the fire, and nobody seemed to know what to say to him.

“You beat the fourteenth,” the young guard finally said, holding the Tianji issue as if it might bite. “Who are you?”

Shi Feng sat down on the nearest salt sack, pressed his hand to his frozen side and looked at the paper.

“I’m the one paying for passage,” Shi Feng said. “Does anyone have a needle and thread? This cut won’t close by itself.”

Nobody moved for a moment.

Then Lao Qi ran for the sewing kit, and behind him, very quietly, the young guard began to read aloud from the list, looking for the name.