Chapter 308: Nothing Works

They went down at first light the next morning, with the rope over his shoulder and her case strapped flat against her back.

The plan she had built overnight was the plain one. He put the animal’s head where she needed it and held it there, she worked at the jaw, and the moment the sacs came up full she took what she could take. Hands, weight and a needle.

"How long do you need at full pressure?" he asked on the way down.

"Four minutes if it fights me the whole time, and it will." Qingluo had the leaf tin out and took hers first. "Two if I get a clean seat on the sac. I’ll shout when I’m in and I’ll shout when I’m out, and those are the only two things you’ll hear from me."

The silver was already lying along the bottom of the shelf when they came onto it, ankle deep and moving, going nowhere because there was nowhere lower for it to go.

’Talk to me while I walk.’

[ You’re about to run the list in your head anyway. Run it out loud and I’ll tell you where you’re being stupid.]

He ran it. Falling Stars went before he finished thinking the name. The whole art was seven marks planted in seven places by a man moving over ground that held still, and the shelf under his boots was mud over wet rock with water running across it. Half those marks would slide and the rest would never set, and a constellation with a hole in it cuts nothing.

Storm Dragon and Heart of the Dragon went the same way for the opposite reason. Both of them worked. Both of them, landing where they were meant to land, would open that animal from the jaw to the middle and leave him standing over thirty feet of ruined meat with a thumb of thin water inside it.

Severing Dragon Roar would reach it from the top of the shelf and cut it in half at the waist, which was the entire problem with Severing Dragon Roar.

He thought about Profound Release for as long as it took to breathe in. One breath, the whole of it, drawn deep and spent at once, and he was walking into air that punished a deep breath worse than anywhere he had ever stood. The last time he forced Profound through that channel it closed and stayed closed, and the woman beside him had found the scar with her thumb in four seconds.

[ You’re not doing it.]

’Not a chance.’

[ Good, because I was going to be extremely rude about it.]

What he had left was the small end of everything he owned, which is the part nobody writes songs about. It came off the water at the near end of the shelf and it came fast. Thirty feet of animal moves the way a whip moves, from the middle outward, and the head arrived a long way ahead of the rest of it.

Xuan met it with Coiling Dragon. The blade took the jaw on the outside and rolled it, small circles, wrist doing the work, and the head went past his hip instead of through it and hit the rock hard enough to throw grit in his teeth. He got his shoulder into the hinge behind the jaw and shoved, and for about two seconds he had it.

"Now," he said.

Qingluo came in low along the neck with her hands open. She got a palm flat on the sac and it was soft under her hand, which meant the animal was not working hard enough yet, and that this would take longer than four minutes.

Then it threw him off with a twist that came up through the whole body and put him on his back in the mud.

The next three minutes were the ugliest fighting he had done since the war. He kept his feet twice and lost them three times, because the rock was slick where the silver had run over it and the mud past the rock took his heel every time he planted and turned. Cloud Step put him across the shelf when he needed to be elsewhere, and it pulled Qingluo out of the line twice when the head came round, and it did nothing about the fact that he could not hold thirty feet of furious animal still with a sword built to cut things apart.

He was not trying to win. That was the part that wore at him. Every opening the thing gave him was an opening to kill it, and he had to let each one go by and go back to leaning on it.

Then it stopped, put its weight down and breathed out at him. The silver came across the rock at knee height and he was standing in it before he could get clear. He had been holding the short, high, shallow rhythm since the bottom of the slope and it stopped being enough. His throat closed from the back forward. His eyes ran. The inside of his nose went hot and then stopped feeling like anything at all.

He kept hold of the jaw hinge anyway, because letting go of it put her underneath it.

’Count for me.’

[ I’m counting.]

He lost the number somewhere after that. He knew he was breathing because his chest was still moving and he knew each one was smaller than the last, and past a certain point the whole of him narrowed down to the weight against his shoulder and the sound of her working somewhere below his elbow.

Then her hands came off the neck and she went in under the jaw, because the sacs had finally come up hard and she had two seconds to take a seat on one.

Then the animal turned into her. It was not aimed at her and it had nothing to do with her: it swung its head to shake him off, she happened to be standing in the arc, and there was no time to be clever about any of it.

Xuan got a fist in the loose hide behind the jaw, dragged the head six inches out of line, and threw her by the back of her belt onto the higher rock.

She landed badly. He heard it.

The head came back and he was no longer in a position to do anything useful about that, so he went up the shelf after her with his hand in her collar and the animal’s mouth closing on the rock where his boot had been, and the two of them came off the ledge and onto the slope and kept going until the silver stopped following them.

It took a long while before either of them was a person again. He got forty paces up the slope and was sick until there was nothing left in him, on his hands and knees with his fingers spread in the wet grit. Qingluo did the same eight paces above him, which he heard and did not turn around for, because she would not have wanted him to and he had nothing spare for turning around. His hands shook for a while afterwards and he let them.

She had opened her left forearm on the rock from the wrist halfway to the elbow, and there was a second thing wrong with the shoulder on that side, and she got the sleeve off and looked at both without making any noise about either.

"Say the damage," he said, when he could.

"The arm is a mess and it’s only skin. The shoulder went out and back in on its own, which I’d rather it hadn’t." She had a needle out already and was threading it with her teeth. "Three tubes left of the mix I wanted. The glass is fine, which is the only good sentence available."

"And time?"

"Six days before the road back stops being worth walking, and Lian gets nothing." Her thumb pressed the edges of the cut together. "Call it four, because I’d like a day at the end for something to go wrong in."

She sewed her own arm on a slope of dead ground while he sat with his back against a dead tree and worked out that he had achieved, in a quarter of an hour of the hardest work of his life, nothing whatsoever.

[ Forty-one breaths from the time it breathed out at you. The first six were full. By the twentieth you were taking about half of one and by the thirty-fifth it was a third, and the last four did nothing at all except move your chest.] Mira had none of her usual edge on. [ You were already finished when she went under that jaw. You just hadn’t been told.]

He sat with that, and with the grit in his teeth, and with the sound of her pulling thread through her own arm eight paces up the slope.

"I can’t stand in that for the time you need," he said. "Not in a week of trying. I’ll get four minutes of standing up and two of falling over, and you’ll be working under a jaw with nobody holding it."

Qingluo bit the thread off and looked at her stitches.

"There’s a way around you," she said. "I’ve had it since yesterday and I was hoping the rope would work so I wouldn’t have to say it out loud."

"Say it now."

"Not until you’ve drunk something and I’ve seen you keep it down." She started on the knot. "And you’re going to hate every part of it."