As Li Xiangping raised his head and gazed toward the distant mountain, the summit rang out with the shrill neighing of a horse. A mount black all over, with not a single strand of stray color to be found, was trotting freely across the heights, its hooves lifted and falling clear of the ground, pacing the rugged path as if treading level earth. It was, in truth, a beast of Qi Refining cultivation.
The dark hooves pressed lightly into the mud and water and the horse simply rose into the air. The rider bore a suit of leather armor and wore no adornment of beast bone or jade about his person, and looked for all the world like a man among the living.
Ganixo gave his old partner a gentle pat on the head, tightened his thighs about the flanks, and turned his body sidewise to survey the village laid out at the foot of the mountain.
All the Mountain Yue of the northern range swore that Ganixo had four eyes and eight arms, but in truth his appearance was entirely ordinary — his eyes were even somewhat small, and his brows thin and spare. Had he shut his eyes and stood with his hands on his hips at the edge of a field, no one would have taken him for anything of consequence.
It was only when those brown-yellow eyes opened and quietly fixed themselves upon a man that a chill ran down the spine.
"Great King, before us lies the territory of the Demon Sect," a voice said presently from behind.
Hearing the words of the attendant with the long braid who followed him, Ganixo arched a thin brow, swept his brown-yellow pupils across the military formation in the valley below, and gave a slight nod.
"To break them, I shall need a quarter of an hour."
His voice was light, pitched high, his tone flat and matter-of-fact, as though he were reading the words off a page.
The long-braided man inclined his head a little and listened quietly as Ganixo spoke. Behind him there was no longer a single soldier to be seen — as king who had unified the Mountain Yue of the northern range, he had walked straight into the territory of the Qingchi Sect with but a single retainer, little more than three thousand paces from Li Xiangping's command tent.
After a few glances, Ganixo lost interest in the clan soldiers below. He tightened his legs, and the horse obediently turned about and headed back the way it had come, treading the rugged mountain path as though it were level ground.
"Our time is short. There is no need to wait any longer."
The long-braided retainer spurred his horse to catch up, and said hesitantly:
"But these people of the living are cunning. Who knows how many human shamans ride in that Demon Sect's host. Great King, you must not take the foe lightly."
Ganixo laughed lowly, lifted his long blade a little, raised his head to gaze at that moon veiled by black clouds, and his lips moved.
"Who said I meant to strike at him."
---
Chen Sanshui woke blearily from his doze to find a Mountain Yue clad in leather standing before him, a great hand clamped hard on the front of his robe, hauling at it until he was choked near to suffocation.
"Whump."
He was flung savagely out of the courtyard, landing with stars spinning in his eyes and his sight swimming. Two teeth were knocked clean out of his mouth. The whole world wheeled about him, and as he saw the Mountain Yue soldiers standing bolt upright on either side, Chen Sanshui wiped the blood from his face and groped about for his lost teeth.
But his hand was stepped on. Lifting his head and meeting those brown-yellow eyes, Chen Sanshui had no choice but to face the cruel truth — in the quarter of an hour he had lain asleep, Lichuan Gap had fallen without the least resistance.
"How could it be so fast?!"
The clan soldiers that Li Xiangping had led, the very ones encamped on the far bank of the river — were they really crushed without a sound? And Li Tongya, who flew so high among the clouds? The other immortals of the Li family? How had all these people gripped Lichuan Gap in silence? A constricting dread seized Chen Sanshui's chest. The pain in his mouth no longer mattered. A hundred questions were crowding up in his mind.
"Where is the Li family's old lair?"
The man treading on his hand spoke calmly. Chen Sanshui stared at his thin, spare brows and those fearsome eyes, and only one question remained in his mind.
"If Father were here, what would Chen Erniu do?"
Before long, Chen Sanshui had no time left to think. Ganixo casually pulled his left arm off him, spilling a pool of blood, sinew and flesh across the ground. Chen Sanshui's eyes rolled up into his head; spittle burst from his mouth in a rush, and the pain flooded over all his thought.
"It hurts... it hurts so much."
Ganixo tapped the man's head with a finger and cast a hand seal upon him, drawing his awareness back into clarity so that he might savor that suffocating agony to the full, while holding his vitality in check lest he bleed out and die on the spot.
"Li... Li... Li Jing... Mountain."
When the thought of playing the hero struggled up in his mind for the space of a single breath, the filth and the piss beneath him reminded him of the truth: he was only an ordinary man. He was not a martyr deaf to pain, not his father, not Li Xiangping — and even if Li Xiangping himself had been set in this very place, he could hardly have fared any better.
"Bring us there."
Chen Sanshui was hauled up by the scruff. Hanging upside down, he watched the feet of the Mountain Yue moving around him. That deadly instinct that his father Chen Erniu had hammered into him over more than twenty years finally awakened within him. Chen Sanshui understood that he was a dead man walking; recalling the wild, foolish things he had done in his life, a great loneliness settled over his heart.
The ranks of Mountain Yue soldiers began to move. Their ankles were carved with simple runes, and these made their footfalls utterly soundless. Two contingents of Mountain Yue troops followed Ganixo out of Lichuan Gap and set off toward Lijing Mountain.
Chen Sanshui caught sight of the Mountain Yue man behind Ganixo, who also carried a man slung over his hand — a backbone of the village — and understood that lying about the route would only bring him more suffering. Hatred filled his heart, and he thought:
"What sly folk these are, the people of the living."
He had lived all his life in the shadow of the Li brothers, just as his father Chen Erniu had lived in the shadow of Li Mutian. Always he had listened to his father say:
"Of the four Li brothers, Li Changhu is mild and pitiable as a good deer, Li Tongya is still and wary as a serpentsnake, Li Xiangping is cruel and venomous as a starving wolf, and Li Chijing is keen and handsome as a white fox."
"Then what about me?! What am I!"
Chen Sanshui had asked eagerly, his face full of hope, gazing at his father.
"A good-for-nothing."
Chen Sanshui had been bitterly disappointed. And so he had truly become a good-for-nothing, drifting muddleheaded into marriage and children, squandering his pleasures on the strength of his father's prestige and influence.
It was not until Ganixo tore off his left arm that it seemed he woke fully at last, and everything before him opened up clear and bright. He even came to hate that Ganixo had not come ten years earlier to tear off his arm, that had made his father worry over him all these years for nothing.
"How often do you send word to those troops?"
Ganixo spoke softly. He had seen at a glance that this man in his grip had been frightened out of his wits and could not deceive him — yet little did he know that the man in his grip had already awoken from the fog of a wasted past, that what he held by the scruff was no longer thirty-year-old Chen Sanshui, but something more like sixty-year-old Chen Erniu.
"Every three hours."
Chen Sanshui's heart was calm as still water. Feigning a tremble in his voice, he spoke, and at last felt in his heart a measure of ease, that he had not betrayed the twenty years of fine clothes and fine food his masters had given him.
Lijing Mountain had at last crept into view when Ganixo reined in his horse, twisted off Chen Sanshui's head with a casual twist, stared at the headless corpse of writhing sinew, flesh and blood, at the ground stained scarlet, and laughed coldly.
"Good-for-nothing!"
As heaven and earth wheeled about him, Chen Sanshui's head came to rest lightly at the roadside, his eyes staring straight up at the sky choked with clouds, and one single sentence surged up out of his memory:
"Li Xiangping, a fellow like me can only do this much. Mighty as you are, you've finally slammed up against an iron wall!"