Foundation of Smoke and Steel

Chapter 201

RyanRyan sat on the stone bench in the side garden of the inner courtyard and tried to remember how to breathe.

The garden was small. He had found it three days ago, in the narrow window between sessions when Nathan was occupied with Anmei and Lucas was managing something for Gavin and Caleb had gone to walk the wall again. He had wanted somewhere quiet to recover after training, and the side garden had been the answer. It was tucked behind the kitchens of the lower hall, a courtyard maybe ten paces across, walled on three sides with old dwarven stone and open to the sky on the fourth. Someone had planted herbs in the corners decades ago and the herbs had gone on quietly surviving without supervision ever since. The air smelled faintly of rosemary and something he did not have a name for.

He liked it because no one came here.

Nathan had run him through the Li Sword Forms pretty much every waking hour, having decided for some reason that Ryan needed to be under his wing.

Their last session had focused on a movement technique, the Three-Step. It was a Zhou family footwork pattern. Caleb had taken it and made his own version, and Caleb had taught it to Ryan, and Ryan had demonstrated it for Nathan, who wanted to understand his baseline before he built on it. Nathan had modified and developed it from there, because that was easier than starting Ryan on something new, and he had done it with enormous enthusiasm; he had decided this was now his contribution to the next generation's combat education. The technique was beautiful when it worked. It was punishing when it did not. Ryan's mana channels were vibrating in a way that suggested he had pushed well past any reasonable limit, and his legs felt like they had agreed to keep him upright on the condition that they were not asked to do anything else for at least an hour.

He was lucky he had the Li mana cultivation technique. The amount of mana it moved, and how cleanly his body converted it, was frankly unbelievable.

He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

In his pocket, the message crystal was warm against his hip. Lily would have sent something. He had been disciplined about not checking until after training. He reached into the pocket. The crystal pulsed once against his fingers in the soft pattern that meant a message waiting, unread.

He smiled.

He did not get to read it.

A footstep crossed the courtyard threshold at a pace that was wrong.

Ryan's eyes opened before he had finished deciding to open them. The footstep had been wrong. His brothers, Nathan, a year of formation training had taught him to catch that kind of wrong without thinking about it. The hesitation was off. The weight distribution was off. The pace did not match any servant or Warden or family member he had come to know over the last week.

A woman stood at the threshold of the garden.

She was one of the kitchen staff. Lillian, he thought. She held a basket of root vegetables in one hand, her other hand had gone up to her mouth, and her eyes were on something behind her in the corridor.

Her face had gone the color of paper.

Ryan was on his feet without remembering standing. Three-Step took his weight and held it without complaint. His mana, pooled in his core in the slow recovery cycle Nathan had drilled into him after training, came up into his arms and shoulders in the smooth lifting motion the technique required.

"Lillian," he said, quietly.

She did not answer. She did not look at him.

The shape in the corridor behind her stepped into the garden.

It was wrong. Ryan's body knew it before his mind assembled the reasons, before the shape had fully cleared the threshold. It walked like a man. It was about his height. It moved smoothly, but the smoothness was the kind a thing has when it has never had to learn that movement can cost effort. Its eyes were open and empty. Its skin had the matte stillness of meat. A seam ran along the line of its throat, where the collar of its tunic did not quite cover it.

The thing in front of him had been a person, hours ago. It was not a person now.

Ryan moved.

He stepped sideways and forward in the pattern Nathan had been beating into him, his weight settling onto his back foot as his front leg came up and crossed the distance to Lillian in three strides. He took her by the shoulder with his off hand and pulled her behind him, and his sword came out of its sheath at his hip in the same motion. It was a training blade. His hand knew the shape of it.

"Go," he said. "Kitchens. Tell someone. Run."

He did not look to see if she ran. He heard her move, her footsteps going back through the doorway and into the corridor, and the corridor swallowed them, and then there was only Ryan and the thing.

The thing came at him.

It was fast. Faster than the orcs at Moher had been, faster than the bandits Ethan had fought on the road, faster than Ryan had ever sparred against. The blade in its hand was a short curved knife, and the strike came across the air at a speed that made it a blur, and it came to Ryan, in the flat calm that had dropped over him, that he was not going to win this fight by being faster.

He was going to win by being correct.

He stepped into the strike.

The footwork was Three-Step. The third step was the one Nathan had been hammering on. Ryan landed it now. The thing's knife passed where his shoulder had been a half-beat before. Ryan was at its inside line, blade already moving, and the cut he made was sized to the target, angled for the throat where the seam already ran.

His blade went through, but the head did not come off. The steel had bitten deep. The cut should have ended it. He felt the edge pass through cartilage and stop against something denser, something that should not have been there, and the thing kept moving as though the cut had not happened. Its other hand came up and caught the inside of Ryan's elbow and twisted, and the joint gave in a way it was not supposed to give, and the training blade came loose in his grip before he could correct.

He stepped back. The thing's knife came up. The first cut took him across the upper arm. The second across the ribs.

He stopped feeling them as cuts almost at once. He felt them as cold, a cold that traveled inward from the cut line and went looking for somewhere to settle. His mana, which had been holding steady, dropped by a third in two seconds. His pulse went strange in his ears.

The thing did not stop.

He brought the blade up again. Three-Step had a fourth movement that was not part of the named sequence, a recovery step, drilled into him for exactly the moment the first three did not work. He used it now. He pivoted, opened the distance by half a pace, and brought the blade across in a horizontal arc that took the thing across the middle.

The cut went through.

The thing came apart at the waist.

Both halves kept moving.

The upper half landed on the stone and began to drag itself toward him on its hands. The lower half stayed where it had fallen and began to roll, hunting for the place its other half had gone.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from NovelFire. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Ryan stared.

He recognized what he was looking at, though he could not have said how. It was not a normal body. Whatever held it together did not care about cuts.

He did not have time to think about it.

The upper half was almost on him, knife still in its hand. He stepped back again, brought his blade down on its arm at the elbow, and felt the steel cut through and not finish. The arm did not come off. The hand went limp, but the arm stayed attached by something he could not see.

His back was against the garden wall. His off arm was bleeding cold, and he was running out of room.

Then there were footsteps in the corridor.

Three people came through the doorway, fast and disciplined. Li retainers. Ryan knew the cut of the robes, the formal Li sword forms in their carriage. They had heard the fight, or Lillian had reached them, or someone had sent them, and they came in with their swords already out and their mana already up.

The first retainer reached the upper half of the thing and put a clean Li-form strike through its chest.

The strike went through.

The thing kept dragging itself toward Ryan.

"It does not die," Ryan said. His voice came out thinner than he had meant it to. "It does not die. I cut it twice. Cuts do not work."

The retainers traded a look. The first one tried the cut again, twice, with more mana behind it. The thing flinched but kept moving. The lower half had found its footing somehow, and Ryan was not going to think too closely about how, and it was pushing itself upright on legs that no longer had a torso and were attempting to function anyway.

The second retainer put a strike through the lower half's hip joint. The leg detached and lay on the stone twitching. A new leg started to grow from the torso end of the wound, slow and wrong.

"Figure out a way to restrain it," Ryan said.

He did not know where the order came from. He did not have the rank to be giving orders to Li retainers. But the words came out of his mouth and the retainers took them without argument, because the alternative was watching the thing eat their swords without dying.

The first retainer stepped wide and brought his blade across both of the thing's wrists. The hands came loose but stayed attached. He kicked the knife away. The second retainer moved to the lower half and pinned it to the stone with two mana-bound stakes the Li house used for binding spirit-touched creatures.

The thing kept trying.

Ryan slid down the wall and sat. His off arm was bleeding through the cloth of his sleeve in a way that was wrong. The blood ran cold and dark, and it was not clotting, and the cold was spreading.

That was when Marissa came into the garden.

He saw her over the shoulder of the third retainer. He saw her clearly. She was not the woman he had been told was too sick to be visited, and she was not barely conscious. She was on her feet, and her eyes were lit from inside with something Ryan had never seen in a person before, something gold and steady and patient. Elizabeth, the princess's handmaiden, was at her elbow, half a step behind, and behind Elizabeth came an older woman in dusty gold and moss-green robes whom Ryan had seen at a distance once and could not have named.

Marissa's eyes found him.

Her face did something. The steadiness broke for a moment, and her expression went through grief and relief and something fierce, and then the steadiness came back.

"Ryan," she said. She crossed the garden in three quick strides and knelt beside him. Her hand went to his face, and her hand was warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

"It cut me," he said. He felt stupid saying it. "It does not... they cannot kill it."

"I know."

She took his off hand in both of hers. The blood on it was cold and dark. She did not flinch.

Then she pressed her thumb against his palm, and something moved.

It moved out of her and into him, and it moved with the quiet confidence of something that knew where it was going. The cold in his arm drained backward toward the cut line and out of him. His mana settled. His pulse came back to something he recognized. The bleeding slowed and stopped.

He looked at her. He did not know what to say.

She kept her hand on his and looked over her shoulder at the woman in dusty gold and moss-green.

The woman crossed the garden toward the upper half of the thing, which the retainers had pinned to the stone with three more mana stakes and which was still trying. Ryan watched her cross, and his memory caught up a full beat late.

Yu Meishan.

The Poet of Earth. One of the Four Great Beauties.

He had heard the name his whole life, as every fifteen-year-old in the Empire had heard it. He had seen her likeness in scrolls his cousins passed around with the embarrassed reverence of boys who knew their mothers would take the scrolls away if they found them. The likenesses had not done her justice. Even with the cold of the death-mana still working its way out of his ribs, even with Lily's newest message warm in his pocket and the steady fact of her standing as the only girl in his world, Ryan registered that the woman crossing the garden toward the deathwalker was the kind of beautiful that did not happen to ordinary days. She was small and graceful and held herself like a calligrapher's brush before the first stroke. The robes were not for show. They were what she would wear to garden in. She did not need anything for show.

He decided, in that same flat calm, that he was going to be polite, and competent, and not embarrass himself or his brother in front of her.

"It's a Death Lattice," Yu Meishan said. "Demonic thread runs through it. The lattice regenerates from the thread, and the thread is anchored to something the thing is not, somewhere else. The Saint who made it is holding it open. As long as the thread is intact, the body keeps trying to come back together. You cannot kill it, not for long. You can only sever the thread."

The retainers stared at her.

"That takes divine power," Yu Meishan said. "Or something close enough that the lattice cannot tell the difference."

She knelt beside the upper half of the thing. The retainers stepped back. She set her palms on either side of its head and breathed out slowly, and the air around her hands changed in a way Ryan felt in his chest. It was not the air of the garden anymore. Something was present that had not been present a moment before, something that traveled with Yu Meishan, close as a companion, and Ryan knew without being told that it was a separate being, and that it was paying attention now.

"Gaia," Yu Meishan said quietly. "If you would."

She paused, as though listening. Ryan did not hear what she was listening to. He watched her register it. A small private smile crossed her face, there and gone, as though Gaia had said something she had not quite expected. Then her expression settled and her hands moved.

The thing on the floor made a sound. It was the first sound it had made since it walked into the garden. The sound was small and wrong. Then the body went still. Not dead-still. Severed-still, like a thread cut from its anchor, a thing that had been pretending to be alive reminded that it was not.

Yu Meishan stood.

"It will not get up again," she said.

She came toward Ryan. Marissa was still holding his hand.

"I am Yu Meishan," she said. "I have been treating Marissa. I am told you are her family."

Ryan raised an eyebrow at Marissa, who, to her credit, looked a little embarrassed.

"Something like that," Ryan said. He tried to make the words come out like Nathan's did, easy and warm and sure. He thought they came out close enough. "It's nice to meet you, Lady Yu. Of course I've heard of you."

Yu Meishan smiled. She had been receiving variations of that sentence since she was twelve, and there was nothing cold in it. She was kind to him, the small kindness the beautiful spare for earnest fifteen-year-old boys.

"You Zhou boys are all sweet-talkers." She knelt beside him a moment, her hand brushing the air just above the cut on his upper arm, her attention on what was underneath. "You should know the cut you took was death-mana. Marissa cleaned the channels. The wound itself will need real healing. It was made by something divine, or close to it, and ordinary methods will not finish closing it. We do not have time for that right now. Can you walk?"

Ryan thought about it. He moved his legs. They held. His off arm hurt in a deep way he was going to feel for days, but the cold was gone, and his mana had settled, and he could feel his pulse in his fingers again.

"Yes."

"Good."

Marissa was still holding his hand. She had not spoken since she put her thumb against his palm. He looked at her now. She was looking at him in a way he did not understand. Her eyes were lit with that gold thing, her face was a little too smooth for the situation, and her free hand was trembling.

"We have to get to Daniel," she said.

The retainers heard the name and did not react. They did not know a Daniel.

Marissa heard herself say it. Her expression broke for a second. She closed her eyes. She opened them.

"Ethan," she said. "We have to get to Ethan."

Ryan looked at her.

He said nothing. He did not understand what he had just heard. It had been a name, and Marissa had said it like the most familiar word in the world, then caught herself like someone who had let slip a thing she was not supposed to say yet.

He held on to it.

He stood. His off arm did not like standing. He stood anyway.

"Yes," he said. "We go."

Elizabeth, who had not spoken once, finally moved. She crossed to Yu Meishan and took her elbow lightly, steadying her. Yu Meishan allowed the touch, then moved past her toward the garden doorway. Elizabeth followed. Marissa rose, Ryan's hand still in hers, and pulled him to his feet.

"Stay close," Marissa said.

The Li retainers fell in behind them. They had no orders and no commander, but they had just watched a fifteen-year-old hold his ground long enough for help to arrive, and they had just watched a woman who should have been in a hospital bed walk into a fight on her feet, and they had just watched another woman sever the binding thread of a thing they could not have killed in a week of trying. They were coming with.

The five of them moved through the garden doorway into the corridor on the other side.

The corridor was quiet. The mana lamps burned low. The dwarven stone underfoot was steady. Ryan's off arm throbbed in time with his pulse, and the divine warmth from Marissa's hand was still settling under his skin, and the training blade was back in his right hand, and somewhere ahead of them was the great hall, where his brother was, where Marissa needed to go, where whatever was happening in the fortress tonight was going to land hardest.

They moved.

Behind them, in the garden, the thing on the floor did not get up