Chương 109: Journey to the East 24

They rode under false, unquiet stars, and the desert dunes writhed with the Dead. Gu Xiulan's home was a harsh place, the golden dunes and blowing gray ash could kill as surely as the Walkers who roamed out from the Grave far in the south. But it was not like this. Not like the nightmare caricature they rode through. Around her, she saw the ruin of what her family had wrought. Guard towers crumbled at the side of a broken road that led to a village, ruined and cold, no longer even smoking.

Dead not in ancient panopoly but the colors of the modern Gu, the clothes of simple peasants, even faces she recognized if she looked too long into the shadow of a helm. Worthless, they had accomplished nothing, wrought nothing that did not die too and return to ash. Gu Xiulan snarled, sparks snapping between her teeth, the plumes on her helm catching flame as she hurled a spiraling javelin of blinding sunfire into the center of a formation of enemies blocking their way.

Dead, nightmares, whatever they might be, they burned well enough. The lances of her outriders rose and fell; bashing, crushing, breaking bodies knocked aside like pins and then trampling them under their horses' hooves.

"Take heart, sons of the dunes. This is only pathetic artifice. This shadow is the work of the Enemy, to break wills and shatter spirits. It has no more power than you give it. You are stronger than mere trickery." Guo Xinhua's rich voice reverberated in her ears, more than the mundane sound that would pass from a human's lips. It reverberated in the air, shook the nightmare desert from the earth to the sky, sending ripples through the crumbled ruins, leaving glimpses of golden dunes and a pale blue sky.

Of watchtowers still standing proudly along an unbroken road. Utter surety and confidence manifest, bolstering them. Where the Dead still clawed at walls, but spears and arrows still answered them, and there was always a Gu fighting back with purifying flames. False, false. The voice whispering despair and submission, so pathetic and repugnant, was false. The pain in her arm was real, the fire in her veins was real. Guo Xinhua's voice was real.

The Ambassador rode behind them, on hooves that never touched the earth, the mare she rode seeming to move at a mere lazy trot, despite keeping pace with the furious gallop of their own horses. A dune ahead of them shifted with malignant life, sand pouring down over an opening maw large enough to swallow their troupe whole with teeth of broken shards of masonry and fortification. Guo Xinyan leapt over them from where she ran beneath her mother, crimson hair billowing like a banner.

Her leg carved a downward slash in the air, and the dune horror split in twain with an echoing wail. Her men echoed the Ambassador's mantra, the words that had carried them through the nightmarish hours, with a dull roar from ragged throats. She could feel them flagging. Through the military formation that bound them, Gu Xiulan could feel the bare dregs of the qi they had pooled together.

There was a reason that cultivators did not dash to and fro at all times with echoing thunder at their backs from the broken air. Reinforced as they were, still mortal bodies were not meant for such things.

"Children of the Phoenix, the walls come, home comes, just a little longer," she said, raising her voice. The spear of lightning she conjured in her hand lit like a banner, renewing the heat.

"Children of the Desert, we who have clawed life from the very maw of death, we have nothing to fear," Guo Xinhua's voice echoed her. So much more powerful than hers. She was appreciative of it, even her own mind might have flagged without it and yet… She only wished to be so beautiful, so mighty, an unsheathed blade, gleaming in the sun untouched by any corrosion. Her throbbing scars and burning arm told her how far she yet had to go.

They thundered over the crest of the last hill, and for a moment, Gu Xiulan saw a dead town, a bleached ruin, stalked only by the Dead, the banners torn down, the camp of the army outside reduced to drifting ash and soiled wreckage. Father, father hung broken over the gates, his flames extinguished and… Reality sizzled. The illussion split and melted, gashes ripped in its fabric at the wave of a fan, dissolving from killing venom.

She saw past it, saw a city under siege by the Dead, few enough that they should have been easy to scatter. A burning crown of fire–Father – roosted atop the Baron's keep, wings of radiance spread over the town like a shield. What nightmare, what army did they see from inside those walls? Ahead was a barricade, scrap and stone and bodies fused and piled high, a monument to defeat/ raw, rough stone compressed from desert stone, worked with ancient defensive formations.

"Gu Xiulan. I will now force a confrontation. This will take all of my attention, and should soon bring the Lord Gu's attention. You will be on your own in the interim. Break the outer defensive perimeter, it is tied to the nightmare." The Ambassador's voice drifted in her ear, a silent whisper, almost lost in the noise of the raucous host of the Dead, limitless and vast/ the splintering of bone and firing of counter-siege engines into the masses of desiccated bodies.

"Zheng Nan! Open the way!!" She shouted over the din, real and imagined. Staring at the wavering nightmare, she almost thought she could see threads, woven densely into a net of cruel dreams thrown over the town and her father alike. She raised her hand and their formation parted, allowing the Zheng bond siblings to barrel through, blurs of muscle and laughter, even now they bumped their shoulders against each other as they ran, like children in a friendly footrace.

Even as the earth cracked under their feet, and the thunder of their passage tore at the manes of her men's horses. The impact against the sandstone barrier raised around the sieging force of the Dead was deeper than a temple gong and louder than thunder. Sand and chips of stone erupted in all directions, only a conjured wall of roaring flame called up at her hand stopping the shrapnel from peppering her forces as they charged on. The Ambassador's mare leapt, carrying her into the sky.

The nightmare wavered further, the yawning gashes in it more clear than ever, visible even to her lowest riders and the naked eye, by the ragged cheers she heard. It helped that the first ranks of the siege were slow to react and slow to turn. Gray and withered roots, nonetheless the size of centennial trunks, bashed aside their defenses and ripped into their formations, carving the sieging force into smaller chunks between towering walls of writhing living wood.

And Zheng Nan impacted among the closest like a meteor, a shockwave rippling out carrying fragmented bone, metal, and sand.

"We make for the gates!" Gu Xiulan called out to her men as they stormed the path made for them.

"We must show my father, show our kin that their eyes are merely clouded!" There was a thump, and Refeng let out a sharp whinny. Gu Xiulan felt a solid arm wrap around her waist, a body pressed against her back. Guo Xinyan's sharp eyes peered over her shoulder. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Every further detail wrong strains the lie more, and when Mother is in a cutting mood, the enemy will be hard pressed to begin with. The gate is right, make for the walls. There, your Father will see you." She nodded sharply, digging her heels into Refeng's sides as his mane caught fire, as she caught fire. If the nightmare legion were true, she would not be here. A stark and glaring hole in the lie.

Phantoms gnawed at her mind even now though she saw the Zheng Siblings being torn down by the Dead, saw the way they had cleared crumbling, saw nightmares rising. The eyes of corpses stared down at her from the walls of the town. It felt like cold claws… worse, worms in her mind, slick and sickly, trying to burrow into her thoughts.

She drew on the last dregs of her qi, let her fire rage, every hoofbeat was a flash of lightning, her banner like a pennant of sunfire, pouring her own will into her outrider's formation, burning the worms in their minds as well. The final, thin cordon of the Dead crumbled. Refeng leapt. Whatever the soldiers of the city saw in her, weapons and techniques spoke in her direction. Guo Xinyan's arched fingers tore them asunder. She felt heat, a killing heat that would evaporate even her.

Father's attention, drawn to the breach in their defenses. And she felt as he SAW her, not whatever image was being hastily thrown, like a dust cloth, over his eyes. The wind stilled, even the crackle of flames seemed to quiet for a moment. Until the vast wings that hung over the city beat, and a hurricane wind scoured the Dead outside the walls, to the tune of a phoenix's shrill cry. That awful, mocking sky tore apart like rotten cloth as Father's great wings of flame took him into the sky.

Gray and black sand became dun brown and golden grains, and a limitless host of the Dead became something far more ragged and finite, but deadly yet. In the sky, metal and glass shrieked under the killing blade, and roaring flames met the rotting bile from the depths of a swamp, releasing an awful scent that made her eyes water. She forced her attention away from the untouchable clash in the sky, where Guo Xinhua and her father alike met the general of the Dead, and a rotting bond beast.

Refeng's hooves clattered on the wall.

"You are relieved, soldiers of the Gu!" she called out, her banner snapped and waved in the terrible wind her voice struggled to rise over.

"Hold fast but a little longer!" The men on the walls looked back at her with eyes sunken from exhaustion. Too many were missing patches of their armor, wearing filthy bandages, holding chipped swords and spears, with quivers with far too few bolts to spare. Yet a cheer rippled out, repeating down the wall as comprehension spread, as exhausted eyes lit with a renewed fire. The Gu might gutter, but they were never extinguished.

A resplendent phoenix bearing the ruby of rule upon his brow spread vermillion wings in rage, and savaged the dust filled corpse-shell of a spider, whose web was spread across the dome of the sky. Nightmare ichor flowed from its wounds, spewed from the long empty and rotten holes where eyes should be, and sought to drown vermillion fire. Blades, one a mirror reflecting an endless sea of slime flecked horror, the other a pitiless sword wrought from killing sunlight and implacable equations, clashed.

Ink and seawater boiled, and the grasping limbs of nightmare were revealed as no more than shaped black sand, crumbling before the light.

"The Guo have come, we have come. I ride now! Victory is within our grasp!" She had neither the time nor the head for a longer or better speech. She chose instead a more percussive statement; the corkscrewing spear of lightning in her grasp flew, and blew apart a formation of the Dead whose commander she had seen go down under grasping roots and devouring flowers. Chips of bone and dust clattered against the walls themselves, even ten meters distant, and from glassed sand no more Dead rose.

Refeng leapt back down into the fray a moment later with a thunderous boom.

"Most effective." Guo Xinyan, who still held onto her back, chuckled in amusement.

"I take my leave now."

"Good hunting," Gu Xiulan said tersely, wheeling Refeng about to face the Dead who had gathered and regrouped, her eyes fixing on the plumes of officers' helmets, gray and rotten.

"Good killing," Guo Xinyan replied, and she felt the older woman's tight bladelike smile with the words. Her weight left the horse, and bones and metal alike split apart to her right. Gu Xiulan snorted, raising her arm, lashes of fire whipped, coiled, and intensified, orange blue white, a new spear of liquid fire began to flare to life as she guided Refeng into a gallop. She could not measure precisely how long the battle raged.

Long enough for her guttering qi to ebb the lowest it had been since that day in the mountains when that awful thing from beneath the earth had nearly killed her best friend… She was not wrong. In the end, victory had never been in doubt. Ichor rained down on the sands, and a sound like a kilometers-long pane of glass shattering echoed like thunder over the battlefield.

Finally– finally –that oppressive weight, the awful whispering which had clung onto her thoughts even as the rest of the illusions faded, was cast off, like the dregs of a bad night's sleep. That same feeling, she could tell, swept through all the soldiers. She saw backs straighten, eyes brighten, shaking hands tense as a renewed roar of energy went up.

Together with the siblings Zheng, she gathered her outriders again into a wedge, galloping away from the faltering ranks of the Dead, only to return in thunderous charge, fist and branch and whipping lighting tearing apart the wavering commanders as her soldier's mounts and barbed spears pounded bone to ash and dust. And overhead a phoenix screamed in victory and the awful stench, the miasma of lingering death, blew away on the wind of his wings.

When phoenix fire and purifying blades turned upon the dregs left struggling to siege the city, the battle ended in an instant.

She came to her father at the head of her outriders, flanked by the Zhengs, riding with her back straight and head held high, despite the exhaustion biting deep in her bones. At the gates, Father stood. He wore no mantle, only the gleaming armor of a warrior, its wide feather-edged pauldrons dinged and stained where something vile had splashed, etching even the talisman's qi-forged steel.

Unlike her, there was no sign of fatigue despite enduring longer; indeed, he was immaculate save those acid-etched marks upon his armor, as expected for the head of the Gu clan. Ambassador Guo Xinhua stood at his side, the only sign that she herself had done battle the short, hiltless blade she held loosely in one hand, running an oilcloth across its clouded, blackened blade. She shook out her hand, the remains of the oilcloth sizzling and burning into blowing ash as Gu Xiulan approached.

Behind them were some of Father's commanders, and a great many men in parade formation, lined up inside the opened gates of the town. Gu Xiulan swung herself out of her saddle and landed heavily. She was much more aware of the scorched and battered plates of her armor, the tears in the banner on her back, the way one of the twin plumes on her helm had been torn out and lost. She swept her helm from her head, and held back a grimace at how sticky and mussed with sweat her hair must look.

Marching forward, she clapped a gauntleted fist to her chest and knelt.

"My Lord Father, your daughter returns and presents herself for inspection."

"I see and acknowledge you, my child," he said.

"Through great hardship you rode, as our guests tell it."

"No more hardship than any brave soldier of the Gu would endure," she replied proudly. And she was proud, despite how she had failed to be as immaculate as Father, how she could not yet shatter an army with the sweep of her flames. She had fought, and fought well, and so had the men under her command.

"You are too humble, Daughter," he said, breaking with her expectation, for her deed to simply be acknowledged.

"I am proud of what you have accomplished with the command given. Thanks to you the siege is relieved and we may now march out. Raise your head, and be proud." Gu Xiulan felt her heart pound; something stung in the corner of her eye and the crackle of lightning in her arm reached a sizzling peak. She stood up, raised her head, and clapped her fist once more to her breastplate. The ragged cheer of the siege defenders was sweet in her ears.

"I do not disagree. Lord Gu has a fine daughter indeed," Gui Xinhua said. The blade in her hand was once again a fluttering fan.

"But, if you would. I think it is time we spoke more."

"You are not wrong," Father said quietly. Then he gestured to her and her men, his voice rising to be heard from far away.

"Daughter! Let your brave soldiers rejoin their fellows. This night men shall make merry and nurse their wounds, and receive their well deserved rest. On the morrow, we will march again, and relieve our fellows!

"Join me and our honored guests now. There is much that needs to be said."