Chapter 309: Her Plan, His Blade

She made him eat first, and keep it down, and drink two cups of the brown water before she would say a word about any of it. Then she set the lamp on a flat stone between them, laid four tubes out in a row, and sat back on her heels with the stitched arm held against her chest.

"I can’t do anything about that air," Qingluo said. "Nobody can. It’s heavier than what you breathe and there’s forty years of it lying in a hole, and a mask is useless because the trouble starts once the stuff is inside you."

"Then what’s the other half of it?"

"I change what it finds." She tapped the first tube. "This goes in your blood and lines your airway, and it binds the exhalation before your body does. The thing gets eaten on the way in. You’ll breathe that air and it’ll go nowhere."

Xuan looked at the tube. "That sounds close to a cure, and nothing on this mountain has ever been a cure."

"It isn’t one, and I want you to hold on to that. It’s a purse." She turned the tube on its end. "Every breath of that air spends some of it. When the purse is empty you’re a man standing in a sink again, and the change comes with no warning at all. You won’t feel the last good breath go."

"How much is in the purse?"

"On a normal body, about a hundred and twenty breaths of working air." She said it flatly. "Which is why I asked your count from this morning, and why the number was forty-one, and why I spent the afternoon being unhappy about the arithmetic."

’Mira.’

[ I’ve already run it. Two hundred and eleven seconds of holding, at the rate you were breathing at the end.] A pause. [ She’s right to be unhappy.]

"Say what it takes off me while it’s working," Xuan said.

"Three things, and none of them are a surprise once you think it through." She counted them off on her good hand. "Your hands go stupid. Fine feeling in the fingers goes first, so you won’t feel the hilt properly and you’ll grip harder than you mean to. Your reflexes come late by about half a breath, which on a good day you’d never notice. And you don’t circulate at volume. Nothing big, nothing thrown, nothing that runs your qi hard through all of you."

"Why the last one?"

"Because the binder rides the same roads your qi does. Push a lot of power through and you’ll burn it off in a quarter of the time, and you’ll send what’s left where I didn’t put it." She set the tube down. "So tomorrow you’re a man with a sword and no art. Strength, weight and the small forms. That’s the whole of your kit."

"And if it goes wrong?"

"You drown on dry rock while I’m elbow deep in an animal’s throat." She said that as levelly as she’d said the rest. "I’d get you up the slope and there’d be nothing at the top of it for me to do."

He sat with that for a moment and asked the question he’d been holding since she opened the case.

"How many times have you done this?"

"Eleven, on our own people, going into the pits where the air is bad." She didn’t dress it up. "Four were my own hands and the rest I watched, every one of them came out fine, and I’d put my name on it in front of any bench in the house."

"That isn’t the question I asked."

"No." Qingluo turned her stitched forearm over on her knee. "On a body with a channel burnt shut, a core that isn’t round, and a physique that keeps qi sitting in the arms while it’s asleep, I have done it exactly never. Nobody has. I’ll be doing sums on you, out loud, and I’ll be checking them twice, and it’s still sums."

The fire moved. Down in the bowl something big turned over in the water and was quiet again.

He thought about his wife sitting on the chest by the window with her hair down, telling him to hand over the thing he’d never handed anybody, and the specific way she hadn’t asked what it was.

"Then you should have the rest of it," Xuan said.

"Go slowly. I’m writing."

"The channel under my right arm is dead. I closed it myself, pushing something through it that it wasn’t built to carry, and it went in one go." He kept his voice ordinary, because ordinary was the only way to say it. "My qi doesn’t go near it. There’s a method underneath my thinking that routes around it at reflex, and it runs whether I’m awake or not."

The charcoal stub went fast on her flat stone, and she did not once ask him to slow down.

"The core has flat faces on it. You found them. It isn’t decoration and it isn’t damage, and it means my qi doesn’t sit in me the way it sits in anyone you’ve ever treated." He turned his hand over and looked at the palm. "And my body holds qi in the forearms at rest, all on its own. You told me that, and you were right, and I’ve never said it out loud to anybody before."

Qingluo wrote all of it down and did not look up, and when she did look up there was nothing on her face he could call gratitude. She had gone somewhere behind her eyes where the work lived.

"Right. That changes three things." She pulled the second tube out of the row and put the first one back. "The routing is the important one. Everything I mix assumes the stuff spreads evenly and it won’t, it’ll thin where your qi doesn’t go and pool where it turns. That scar is a dead end with a corner in front of it, so I’ll get a collection at the corner, and if it sits there long enough it’ll do to that channel what the first thing did."

"Can you work around it?"

"Smaller dose, given twice, and the second one at the halfway mark so it never builds up in one place." She was already uncorking. "The forearms cost you as well. With qi sitting in them at rest the binder will settle there first, so your hands go before anything else does, and they’ll go further than I told you ten minutes ago. Plan on holding that animal with your arms and not your fingers."

"You’re not pleased that I told you."

"I’m pleased it wasn’t tomorrow morning." She held the second tube up to the lamp and flicked it. "Sleeve up. Left arm."

He rolled the sleeve and laid his arm across the stone. She cut the inside of the elbow with something small, set the mouth of the tube against the cut and held it there with her thumb.

"Count with me," she said. "To sixty, slow. If it goes hot before thirty, tell me and don’t be brave about it."

He counted. She counted under her breath in the same rhythm. Mira counted in his skull, half a beat behind, which he found he minded less than he expected.

It went cold at nineteen and stayed cold. At forty the cold reached his shoulder and turned into a dull ache that had nothing sharp in it anywhere.

"Sixty," Qingluo said, and took the tube away, and pressed a folded cloth on the cut. "Now the part where you listen and don’t improve on it. Tomorrow, in order. One, you stand on the rock at the jaw hinge, uphill side, and your boots never touch the mud. If you slide, you slide into the water and I lose the whole thing."

"Two."

"You hold and you don’t cut. Whatever the animal does to me, whatever I sound like, your blade stays where it is." Her voice didn’t move at all. "If you open that thing to save me I’ve lost the fluid, and I’d rather be bitten than come up this slope for nothing."

"Three."

"You count out loud from the moment it breathes at you, so I know where we are without looking. At a hundred I stop wherever I am. If I say out, we go on that word and neither of us argues on the shelf."

"And if I go down."

"Then I leave you and I climb." Qingluo said it without a flicker. "You’d do the same with me and I’d want you to. Say yes to it now so neither of us has to decide it tomorrow with the noise going."

"Yes."

They put the lamp out after that, and the bowl below them went on making its noises in the dark.

[ Xuan.] Mira came in quietly, some time after he’d lain down. [ I want to say one thing and then I’ll leave you alone. If that mix goes wrong in you tomorrow, there is nothing I can do. No panel, no shop, no clever line. I’ll be watching you drown and talking to you while it happens.]

’I know.’

[ I wanted it said between us, so you’re not surprised by my being useless.]

Above him, Qingluo turned over on the dead ground. "One thing I didn’t ask," she said. "What happens if you lose your count down there?"

"Then I’ll stop being where you think I am," Xuan said. "Work faster than that."