Chương 44

Han Yuan's eyes blazed behind the edge of his jian. And then he and his weapon became an unfurling lotus of soulsteel. Golden crescents of qi screamed outward from his blade in every direction. They shrieked through the air, carved trenches through the ice. Strike after strike, faster than the mundane eye could follow, a cascade of golden arcs that filled the air around him in an expanding dome of destruction. Lodin came in from the left.

Vacuum slashes came at him and he slipped and bobbed and weaved between them, his head always off the center line, the ice flying beneath his feet. He took the slashes he couldn't dodge on his forearms and shoulders and kept coming. Lorn came in from the right, at a casual walk. Blades of qi screamed toward him and shields of white fire materialized in the air before each one, shattering them into sparks. He did not quicken his pace, nor did he raise his weapon. They reached Yuan at the same time.

Lodin threw a cross and Lorn brought the white jian down in a vertical slash. Han Yuan drove his palm forward and a wall of golden qi erupted outward, striking both brothers and hurling them back across the ice. Before they could recover he'd shot straight up into the sky. He raised his jian overhead and brought it down in a single stroke, and the crescent that fell from the arc of his blade was the size of a house.

It struck the ice between the brothers and split the frozen surface open, and dark water erupted upward through the wound in a geyser that forced them both to leap apart. Lodin landed and skidded across the ice on his feet, his gaze fixed on the point of golden light rising above them. Lorn shouted, "Lodin! I'm going to move you!" Lodin looked across the chasm in the ice at him.

"What?" The world blinked. One instant his boots were on the ice. The next, wind tore at his skin and the lagoon was a dark smear far below him. Cold air filled his lungs and his stomach dropped and his arms pinwheeled for a full second before his brain caught up to what his body already knew. Lorn moved him straight up into the air, above Han Yuan. Yuan was a mote of gold beneath him, rising fast, and the distance between them shrank with every heartbeat. Lodin stopped flailing.

He tucked his chin, clenched his fists, and aimed himself at the light. Han Yuan looked up in shock. His golden eyes went wide and his sword came around in a desperate arc, but Lodin was already on him. He seized the Patriarch by the front of his robes and the impact of his descent drove them both downward in a tangle of limbs and golden light. Lodin's first punch caught Han Yuan on the bridge of the nose and the swordsman's head snapped back. His second caught him on the jaw.

His third split the skin above his eye. Han Yuan took control of their descent and banked hard to the right, and Lodin held onto him, slamming punches into his face the whole way. They screamed across the sky above the lagoon and twisted and rolled and dove, and Lodin hung from his robes with one hand and hit him with the other, over and over, each punch a flat crack that echoed off the ice below. Han Yuan slashed at him with the jian and the blade scored a line across Lodin's forearm.

Lodin's next shot loosened Yuan's teeth, and their flight path lurched. Golden qi guttered around his body like a candle in a gale and his altitude dropped, and Lodin felt the wind change direction as they fell. The statue of Anshavar rose before them. The Great Primordial's stone body filled the sky, the chimeric form vast and ancient, frozen in its triumph over Thurakethru, and Han Yuan saw it too late. He tried to bank and Lodin grabbed the back of his head and drove his face into the stone at speed.

The impact shook the earth, split the ice, and threw a cloud of dust and debris hundreds of feet outward in every direction. Lodin got to his feet, standing a few feet from the lowest point of the crater their landing had made. Han Yuan lay on his back, about ten feet away, close to the crater's center. His supine body was embedded in the rubble, one arm thrown out to the side, empty, the other was bent, hand near his face. His jian was gone, lost during the impact, somewhere in the debris.

Yuan opened his eyes slowly.

"How…" Lodin raised an eyebrow.

"How what." A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"How did you survive the God-Slaying Threefold Cut." Lodin's grin revealed the blood on his teeth.

"Didn't feel like dying, I guess." Han Yuan pried himself out of the crater within the crater, stumbled two paces forward, and called his sword to his hand. Lodin smacked him across the jaw with a right cross and the jian went clattering across the stone. Yuan opened his hand and the sword reformed in his grasp. Lodin hit him again, a left hook to the temple, and the jian flew. He opened his hand again. Lodin hit him again. And again. And again.

He'd backed Yuan up to a vertical wall of stone, a seam where Anshavar's vast hind paw met the snakelike body of Thuraketru. Lodin and Han Yuan were almost half as tall as the Great Primordial's smallest claw, and the expanse of Thuraketru's body stretched out beneath their feet like a great winding road of black stone. Han Yuan backpedaled, staggering and swaying. The golden glow in his eyes began to flicker. But then he gritted his teeth. Clenched his fists.

"I will not die like this," he said.

"Not to a barbarian. A stunted misfit who will never be immortal." The glow in Yuan's eyes blazed brighter as he stood up straight and dignified before Lodin. He opened his hands and this time he did not call his sword, he conjured a pair of them from his own qi, as Lorn had done. These two jian glowed gold, and their blades crackled up and down with yellow lightning. And then Han Yuan put on a clinic in swordsmanship. He attacked with blinding speed, his movements stately, graceful, powerful.

There was never a moment where a slash, thrust, step or turn did not look textbook perfect, as if hundreds of thousands of hours of merciless training had been sifted through a sieve, leaving even his tiniest movements flawless. Lodin slipped to the sides of thrusts, dipped under slashes, stepped off of attacks at tip range. Compared to Yuan his movements were plain, minimal, nondescript, and they never took his body an inch farther than they needed to.

He caught the tip of a glowing sword in his hand, pulled its owner in for an overhand right that struck Han Yuan's head so hard it blew a shockwave across the frost-covered stone. Lodin let go of the weapon as Yuan backpedaled, righted himself, set his stance anew and opened up the next chapter of his encyclopedia of gorgeous techniques.

Yuan whirled through a three-turn triple slashing sequence and Lodin ducked most of it so closely the blades sheared off the tips of his hair, then he slammed Yuan in the liver with a brutal left hook. Yuan staggered back and began again. He harried Lodin's guard with a flurry of thrusts that he slipped as if they were straight punches. Lodin returned fire with another body shot that made the air rush from Yuan's lungs.

Lodin had to wait longer and longer between opportunities to strike, as Han Yuan's attack patterns grew faster and more elaborate. But every time he landed a punch, it landed with a thunderclap. Yuan tried to keep Lodin at tip range, he tried to shepherd his lateral movement with sweeping slashes and checking any attempt at advancing with thrusts that darted at him like striking serpents. Lodin hopped to the side of an especially dramatic thrust. Only to be caught with one, two, three broad slashes across his body.

The force of them sent him skidding backward into a crouch. His head dipped down for a moment as he gasped for a breath, looking at the fresh cuts across his chest, and he looked back just in time to see Han Yuan leaping into the air to deliver a coup de grace, a vertical chop that would split Lodin's head like a log. Lodin's legs uncoiled. He came off the stone like a bolt shot from a crossbow, straight up, and his right fist found the bottom of Han Yuan's chin before the swords found the top of his head.

The sound it made echoed off the statue and came back twice. Han Yuan's twin jian dissolved. His body snapped backward, head thrown back, arms flung wide, and the golden light behind his eyes went out like a blown flame. He rose another ten feet from the force of the blow alone, limp, turning in the air, and then gravity remembered him and he fell. Lodin stared at Yuan, lying prone and motionless. And then looked to his left, as Lorn came swooping down to land next to him.

"I got him," Lodin said.

"Damn, I missed the finish," said Lorn. Lodin looked back at Han Yuan, shrugged.

"Don't be too upset. I get the feeling this is gonna be the first of many." - - - - The battle for the lagoon ended in pieces, and then all at once. The lagoon itself was a mess. Trenches and craters and great ragged holes gaped in the ice, and dark water churned beneath them. The statue of Anshavar presided over the wreckage, the scars and chips from the violence miniscule against his immense size.

Hollow Prince Yun's army of spectres dissipated the instant Mayari Lakan killed him, as did the unnatural chill he'd cast over the lagoon. The child's body lay face down on the rapidly thawing ice, small and still, and the souls of his mother and father were the last to dissolve around him. Artisan Suwen took Jorin Shen's left eye and his left ear before the tide of the battle turned against her, and when it did, she fled. A handful of her creations followed, those few that still had legs.

The rest lay in heaps across the ice. Shen sat on the far bank and bled, and the Steel Serpent disciples who found him said he waved them off and asked for a flask of something strong. The Steel Serpent and Jade Nettle Sects had held their lines against the forces of the Burning Lotus. Three elders died in the holding. Elder Wa sat on the bank of the thawing lagoon.

Evidently the White Root Soul Shriving had cost him dearly; his great body sagged beneath its own weight, and his pipe hung unlit from the corner of his mouth. Kang Dae Han knelt beside him, bruised and bloodied but upright, and Elder Wa nodded gratefully when he lit the pipe for him and sat back to light his own. Sarin Jeida sat with her back to a tree, her crows roosted in the reeds behind her in a silent row. Her eyes were closed, and there was a relaxed, blood-drunk smile on her face.

Han Yuan's unconscious body was borne away by the elders of the Divine Gale Sect. They exchanged icy looks with Lodin and Lorn on their way. After that tense exchange, the brothers leapt onto the top of Anshavar's head and had a seat, the better to look out over the ocean and observe the sunset. The sun touched the horizon and bled across the water.

Orange light spread over the ocean in a long bright band that reached across the edge of the world for as far as the eye could see, and the sky above it turned from gold to copper to a deep violet.

"Kinda like Master Yan's back yard," said Lodin. Lorn nodded.

"Yeah." Lodin and Lorn both let it be quiet for a little while. A warm wind came off the water carrying the smell of salt and wet stone.

"There's a guy down in Saltside that makes really good sweet and spicy toba beans," Lodin said. Lorn raised an eyebrow.

"Better than yours?"

"Way better. Let's get some tomorrow."