Chapter 33

Chapter 33: Chapter 33

"He’s coming," Lanying said. "He’s already moving."

She stood in the middle of the tiny room with her left wrist clutched hard against her chest. The brand’s light leaked through the white bracer in thin red rays, pulsing slow and steady, like a second heartbeat that didn’t belong to her.

"How close?"

"I don’t know. Closer with every breath." Her voice was perfectly level, which meant she was terrified. "He can feel where I am. Not clearly. Just a direction. Yet it’s enough." She looked at him. "If he finds me here, in your room, past midnight—"

A betrothed woman found in an outer disciple’s cell in the dead of night. The Chi Clan would call it a broken contract. Chi Yao would call it a blood insult to his house. And no elder on this mountain would raise a single finger to stop the heir of Blazing Sun City from killing the man who had shamed him—quietly, in the dark, with no witnesses save his fiancée.

’Brat,’ Qin Wuyue said sharply. ’Out. Now.’

’Where? He can track her anywhere.’

’Not anywhere. Go to the vein. The heart of the mine, down in the old workings where it’s still strongest. A starving vein drinks every scrap of qi that comes near it. If she goes deep enough, it will swallow that brand’s signal the exact way dry sand swallows water. He’ll lose her.’

’Are you sure?’

’No. But it’s the only place on this mountain where he can’t simply stroll in after you.’ Her phantom voice tightened. ’Go.’

"The mine," Yan Shuo said aloud.

Lanying stared at him.

"The heart of it. Down past the old workings. The vein there is dense enough to choke out the brand." He was already pulling on his boots. "He won’t be able to track you down there."

She didn’t ask how he knew. She looked at him for a single heartbeat, then nodded once and drew the grey cloak tight around her shoulders.

They went out the window.

It was narrow, barely wide enough for his shoulders, opening onto the steep tiled roof of the dormitory row. Lanying went first. She slipped through the gap like a cat and dropped onto the tiles without a sound, frost blooming beneath her bare feet so she wouldn’t slide. Yan Shuo followed with considerably less grace, leaving a scrape of skin from his elbow on the stone sill.

The night was clear and bitter cold. Stars blazed over the peaks. Far up the mountain, on the dark flank of Cloudpiercer Peak, he saw it: a single point of white-gold light, sliding down the slope faster than any man could run.

"He’s flying," Lanying breathed.

Foundation Peak. Of course he was. A cultivator at Foundation could ride a spiritual artifact through the air, and the heir of the Chi Clan would own the finest gold could buy. The light swooped low over the Scripture Pavilion and banked, circling.

Then it straightened, and arrowed straight toward the Outer Valley.

"Move," Yan Shuo said.

They ran along the ridge of the roof, bent double, and dropped off the far end into the deep shadow of the woodpile. Behind the dormitories, the path to the mines ran downhill through thick stands of pine. They took it at a dead sprint.

A door banged open behind them.

Yan Shuo spun, ready to fight, and nearly took a fist to the teeth from Ruan Tie, who came barreling out of the senior outer disciples’ row in his sleeping trousers with his hair standing straight on end.

"Brother!" Ruan Tie hissed. "I heard the window! What’s—" He saw Lanying. His jaw dropped open. Then he looked past them, up the mountain, at the white-gold light diving toward the valley, and his mouth closed again very slowly.

"Is that him?"

"Yes."

Ruan Tie looked at Lanying, barefoot in a grey cloak with her silver hair unbound. Then at Yan Shuo. He seemed to do a great deal of calculations on a very short amount of time.

"What do you need?" he asked.

Yan Shuo could have kissed him.

"We’re going down the lift. The moment we hit the bottom, break it."

Ruan Tie’s eyebrows shot up. "Break the lift?"

"Jam the gears. Snap the chain. Do whatever you have to do so the basket won’t run. Then get back to your bunk and be dead asleep when anyone comes knocking."

Ruan Tie looked back up at the light in the sky. It was close enough now that they could make out the shape inside the glare—a figure standing balanced on something long and flat, like a great blade or a fan, wreathed in white-gold fire.

Ruan Tie cracked his knuckles. A faint, slate-grey sheen crept over his skin in the starlight.

"Go," he rumbled. "I’ve wanted to break that damned thing for two years."

The lift shaft was a black mouth in the hillside with a wooden shed built over it, where the night crew dozed beside the great iron winding wheel. Tonight there was only one old man on duty, snoring on a three-legged stool with his chin resting on his chest. They slipped past him and stepped onto the iron grate of the basket.

"The lever," Yan Shuo whispered.

Lanying found it. The heavy brake released with a loud clank. The old man woke with a snort, saw the Frost Lotus Fairy standing in the ore basket in her bare feet, decided he was dreaming, and closed his eyes again.

The basket dropped into the dark.

It fell much faster than it ever did on a working shift, the heavy chain rattling and screaming through the pulleys overhead, the rough walls of the shaft rushing upward in a dizzying blur of stone. Lanying grabbed the chain with one hand and Yan Shuo’s sleeve with the other. Her frost spread across the iron rim of the basket. Level after level flashed past them—a brief flicker of lamplight, then pitch black, over and over.

She was shaking. He could feel the tremor through her hand.

"Lanying."

"I’m fine."

"You’re shaking."

"I have never been this far underground at night." Her voice was tight and clipped. "I don’t care for it."

"I’ve been down here every night for a month," he said quietly. "I know every tunnel on level nine but he doesn’t."

She looked at him in the rushing dark. Then her grip on his arm eased, just a fraction.

The basket slammed onto the stone floor of the ninth level hard enough to throw them both to their knees.

Far above, at the top of the shaft, something screeched. Metal tearing against metal. A great, wrenching iron groan echoed down through the hollow mountain, followed by a deafening crash—and then a long, rattling roar as the severed lift chain came pouring down the shaft in loose, heavy coils like a falling iron snake.

They scrambled clear of the basket a heartbeat before the first loops smashed into the grate.

Yan Shuo glanced up the vertical black tunnel. High above, a faint dusting of grey light drifted away from the rim: Ruan Tie’s stone-skin glow, there and gone as he vanished into the night.

"He broke it," Lanying said blankly. "He actually tore it out of the stone."

Level nine was dark and dead silent. The deep-shaft miners were asleep in the barracks cave. The watcher’s bucket stood empty at the mouth of gallery seven. A single oil lamp burned on a hook beside the ruined lift.

Yan Shuo lifted it from the iron peg and led her into the tunnel.

They moved fast down the long, sloping throat of gallery seven, stepping over the wooden rail ties he had counted a thousand times. He knew every crack in the rock. He caught her elbow a breath before she stumbled over the loose tie at the bend, steered her left at the fork, and brought her past the faded red paint markers without slowing his stride.

"Where are we going?" she whispered.

"Past the chamber. Deeper. There’s a narrow crawlway in the old workings that drops down to the oldest part of the mine. Hao calls it the root. That’s where the vein is thickest."

"Have you been down there?"

"Once."

She didn’t ask what had happened. He didn’t tell her that he had laid his palm against the stone and felt the starving vein reach back for him like a drowning man in the dark.

Beside him, the red-gold light beneath her leather bracer was still pulsing. Yet it was slower now. Dimmer. As if the fire were struggling to push its way through deep, muddy water.

’It’s working,’ Qin murmured in his mind. ’The deeper you go, the less he feels. Keep moving.’

They passed the burned chamber without a second glance. Beyond it, a narrow passage sloped steeply downward, its rough walls webbed with grey-green threads of spirit vein that grew thicker and brighter with every pace. The air turned warm and heavy. The faint, slow pulse he had felt in gallery seven beat much stronger here and it seemed to quicken as they drew near, as if something ancient buried in the bedrock had noticed their steps.

Lanying stopped dead.

"Shuo," she whispered. "Look."

She held up her left wrist. The angry red light beneath the white leather had faded almost to nothing.

"I can’t feel him," she breathed, her voice cracking with sudden, dizzying relief. "I can barely feel him at all."

Yan Shuo let out a long breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

Then, far back up the passage behind them, the darkness began to glow.

It was faint at first. A dull orange tint creeping along the rough stone walls, the exact way the eastern sky looks a breath before sunrise. Then it flared bright, and a wave of dry, suffocating heat rolled down the tunnel after them, carrying the sharp stench of burning pine.

Yan Shuo spun around.

Far back up the slope—beyond the burned chamber, beyond the red markers, all the way at the top of gallery seven where the ruined lift sat—light was blooming. White-gold fire poured down the vertical shaft from above like molten brass into a mold. The rotting timber props at the mouth of the gallery caught one after another, crackling and roaring, until the entire entrance of the tunnel stood sealed behind a solid wall of flame.

Through the blaze, warped by the shimmering heat, a figure drifted down out of the shaft. Red silk and bright gold. Fire curled lazily around both his open palms. He had ridden his flying blade straight down the throat of the mountain, burning through every obstruction in his path, leaving Ruan Tie’s broken lift far behind.

Chi Yao’s voice carried down the long stone gallery, warm, pleasant, and terrifyingly clear.

"Lanying, my dear," he called out. "I know you’re down here. The brand went dim the instant you crawled into the deep rock, yet I know precisely which hole you went down." A soft, easy laugh echoed off the stone. "And there is only one door out of a mine."

The flames at the mouth of gallery seven roared higher, licking at the ceiling.

"So I’ll wait right here," Chi Yao said pleasantly, "until you come back up. Or until I decide to come down."