NOVEL NEXT 62: Eyes on the Horizon
Dust leaped with every strike.
Lin's fingers brushed his sleeve, but then his weight reversed, and she stumbled into Ao Lao's elbow. Fushuai pushed, both with his hand and his intent, and the pair fell to the baked earth. Overhead, the sky burned gold and red, stretched wide across the cracked plain. There was no wind.
"Will you continue?" He asked, his voice gentler than his strikes had been.
Lin lunged low, seeking his center, but he twisted, catching her wrist and turning with her momentum. She flew past him, landing hard on one shoulder. Ao Lao, teeth bared, tried to use his fingers like knives. His style was metal dominant, but he had a five-petal root. Someone who could speak to every element, but was the master of none.
Fushuai met him calmly, elbow, knuckle, the edge of a hand, then lashed out with a high kick. The young man ducked under it and retaliated with a short jab to the ribs. He didn't bother dodging, instead allowing his foundation-hardened body to absorb the blow as he drove a palm into Ao Lao's chest. The impact sent him rolling through the dust.
"You know," he said, "this exercise isn't about trying to hit me. You are meant to learn to avoid my strikes by first sensing my intent. You did well to dodge the kick, then lost your focus when you saw an opening to attack."
Lao rose with a glower. "I want to hit you more than I want to avoid getting hit."
"If I struck harder, would that change?"
"No."
They attacked together, Lin from the side, Ao Lao from the front. She feinted high, then kicked low, just as the other surged forward with an ill-conceived shoulder check. Fushuai jumped and landed behind them. Two fingers aimed for the base of Lin's neck, and she dropped to roll away. Ao Lao whirled only to have his legs swept out from under him.
Fushuai clapped his hands together. "Let's have dinner."
Zhang Sha sat cross-legged beside a squat iron cauldron, stirring with a carved femur. Whatever he brewed stank of scorched herbs and, oddly, carrots, which did not mix well with the scents wafting up from the cooking pot next to it. More crab soup. He looked up as they came to the fire, and tossed a stoppered vial of "antidote" to the prospective disciple.
Lao downed the potion in a single gulp, grimacing against its bitter taste, and then threw the vial to the ground, shattering it.
"If you break another, you're going to be drinking it straight from the cauldron."
"You're villains, all of you," Lao said. "You have no right to command me."
Fushuai rested a hand on his shoulder, and the young cultivator stiffened. In truth, there was only a few years difference between them, but the difference in their height made the gap seem more pronounced. Lao was only a few inches taller than Lin. "When you become a full disciple, you will no longer be subjected to this medicine."
"Is it still medicine when the only thing it treats is the venom you force on me?"
"Yes."
Fushuai wasn't sure exactly what Zhang Sha was putting into the draughts he prepared for Lao. It certainly smelled like poison, but he suspected it was largely composed of whatever old herbs and spare beast scraps Sha did not need for anything truly useful. For his part, Lao's complaints about his treatment seemed largely performative. He hadn't put up a genuine fight since taking the first dose of "poison" and having his restraints removed. It was not uncommon for lone cultivators, especially young ones, to be abducted into a sect. That was how his journey had begun.
"Once every three years," he told them over a bowl of crab soup, "the Steel Ribbon Sect would visit our village, and many other villages besides, and make all the children line up for inspection. Anyone who showed promise, they tested. And anyone who survived the test was taken. I became a prospective disciple when I was ten. And an outer disciple when I was thirteen. They didn't recognize me for what I was."
"And what are you?" Fushuai asked.
"A once-in-a-generation talent," he proclaimed.
"Is that so?" With all the portions served, Fushuai moved the cooking pot off the fire and presented it to Bai Tu. The rest of the story was accompanied by the sound of the fox slurping up his meal.
"It is so," Lao said firmly. "My root is strong, and I am a quick study. Quicker than any other outer disciple in the Steel Ribbon Sect. But because I have no sponsor, and my blood is not of some great clan, they would not give me the resources I needed to reach my potential."
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"So you robbed them," Zhang Sha said dryly.
"I took only what was my due. I served them faithfully through my youth. They owed me all that and more."
"The world owes us nothing," Fushuai said, "and men only owe us what they promise."
"I know what I deserve." His eyes were a storm of righteous indignation bordering on open challenge. "And I know what is mine. Like that ring on your hand and everything in it."
"Take it from me," Fushuai said calmly, "and it is yours."
The young man suddenly seemed to find great interest in his soup. If his attitude could be improved, helping him grow would be the natural thing to do. Maybe one day, they could be a real sect, one guided by principles of honor above naked power.
Resources were going to be a problem. If Lin was ever going to catch up to him, they would need pills and elixirs aplenty. They could provide some for themselves by harvesting the cores and seeds of beasts they came across as they traveled. But with four cultivators and one spirit beast to support, there would never be enough to go around. They couldn't fall back on family connections. Though the Long clan might take in his siblings, they would surely give him over to the judgment of the empire. Unless Xiao Sheng returned, there would be no great benefactor for him to rely on. Who on the Golden Continent would dare defy the last words of the fallen emperor?
Lin shifted uncomfortably, stirring her own bowl. "If you didn't like the sect, you should have just left. You shouldn't have stolen from them."
"They didn't give me a choice about joining. Why should I give them a choice about the price of my service?"
"I don't entirely disagree with you," Fushuai said. "The practice of catching disciples like fish in a net is not something I approve of. Loyalty won at the end of a sword is only a paper mask."
"How are you any different?" Lao demanded.
"I acted on behalf of the people of Sand Orchard. They would have been happy enough to see you killed. But I have more hope for your future than that. Consider this time with us a penance, if you cannot see it as an opportunity."
"Pfft. Mortals do not have the right to decide their master. You acted out of greed, nothing more. That's why you took my treasures."
"I think they do have that right," Fushuai said. "There are matters of debt and protocol to consider, of course. But lacking power does not transform a person into a coin to be taken and traded as we will."
"That's exactly what it does."
"In practice, perhaps, but not in truth."
A breath of wind, the first in hours, and the cookpot rolled as Bai Tu kicked away from it, facing out from the fire. His bark began high, then dropped low in warning. The land was flat, and there seemed to be nothing on the horizon apart from the falling sun and the shadows of a few scraggly brush plants. A sweep of the spiritual senses revealed nothing more.
Zhang Sha rose. "I will search. It may be nothing, but I trust beasts more than my own eyes in matters like this."
"A thousand thanks."
"It's alright, Bai Tu," Lin opened her arms. "Come here." The fox was now much too large to rest in her lap, but he came to her anyway, half in and half out. Still alert as she ran her hands through his long, silver-gray fur.
Fushuai watched as the other cultivator took off running at an angle. He disappeared a moment later, covering himself in a veil that made him appear as less than a shadow across the sand. Bai Tu whined.
***
The accursed wind slid over the plain in long, unbroken lines, stirring dry stems and powdery soil. The air had been still for so long that she had grown to accept it as a gift when she should have questioned her good fortune. Han Luo did not move.
There was no cover here. Only the brittle sprawl of low shrubs and smooth stones bleached by sun. She lay among them like one more forgotten thing. Her breath was shallow, spaced by the Frozen Rhythm Method. Her sword lay undrawn beside her, its scabbard faintly rimmed with frost to spite the heat.
They had made camp. Gao Fushuai and his band of rogues were sitting about a low cookfire. His spirit beast, head stuffed in a pot, might not have caught her scent on the wind. But it did.
They had collected a new member and left behind one of the women in a no-name village. She had considered stopping to kill her. The dream root cultivator had not shown herself to be a threat during their fateful clash, and it might not even have meant losing much time. But Han Luo's first encounter with the disciple of the Living Blade had taught her to be more careful than that. There could be no more mistakes, no more errors of overconfidence. Besides, killing the woman would mean drawing her sword, and therefore having to begin again
Zhang Sha moved at the fox's warning and vanished as he left the camp. The veil was not perfect; she could see the ripples as he moved, and if he drew closer, she was sure that she could have followed him by the sense of his energy alone. Still, it was good enough to fool anyone beneath foundation, and it could lead to deadly misjudgments in combat. She had already seen that once.
Running was not an option. It would have broken her concealment. If he came close enough to find her, then she would have to strike, wasting all of her gathered power on a man who meant nothing, who was nothing. His behavior as a guest of the Ash Eater sect had been that of either a fool or a warrior certain that he would soon die. Partaking of everything, laughing at jokes no one else understood, with eyes that had seen nothing but the abyss for far too long. Killing Zhang Sha would have been satisfying in its own right, but then she would almost certainly lose her own life.
The disciple of the Living Blade was no longer hiding his advancement. He was foundation stage, which explained how their encounter had gone so terribly wrong. And he was fast enough to catch her if she spent herself against the man with empty eyes.
She fell deeper into her method, becoming stiller even than the earth and stones. Even the qi within her meridians now flowed no more swiftly than glass. Han Luo was not the same woman who had run headlong into battle with her sect brothers. They were dead, and she was reborn. The moment Gao Fushuai had struck her throat with his staff, she had lost voice and breath alike.
In that moment, she had glimpsed the first true revelation of the Path of Winter's Spring.
Every word uspoken grows louder.
The longer her blade remained sheathed, the sharper it would cut.
Her hand drifted to its hilt as Zhang Sha approached. His spiritual sense swept over her, and found only stillness, then he moved on. She didn't allow herself to exhale. It was not yet the time.