Poetry Chants, Saber Howls – Chapter 10

Winds and Clouds Turn Without Warning, a Rain of Blood Tasted; the Goose Cut Off, the Fish Sunk Deep—Where to Seek Them? (Part 2)

It was the second ke of the chen hour; the sun had just risen, and heaven and earth were bright with it.

But Ling Cheng sat inside the cave, where no daylight reached, and the only light before her eyes was the gleam along the dagger blade in her hand.

            

Keen and cold as frost.

A little over two shichen earlier, Zheng Qi had told her and Su Ying where Lady Ling was being held, said, “Please take every care, the both of you,” and taken his leave with a sigh. No one yet knew how the emperor would deal with the women of the Ling family, but Ling Bingzhong’s death had come so suddenly that Su Ying’s dread for Cui Langzhen’s plight only deepened. Daring to delay no longer, she ran through countless rescue plans in her head — and then remembered last year, when the Ling Mansion household had gone roaming Mount Feng in the western outskirts of Chang’an. As head of the escort she had scouted the mountain, and by chance had come upon a cave.

It was a cave formed by nature itself, its passage long and narrow, with a small, cramped mouth at either end. Su Ying first laid Ling Bingzhong back into his grave, then brought Ling Cheng to the cave and said, with grave formality:

            

“Wait here, and keep your heart at peace. I’ll bring milady out very soon — then you take her and run for the far mouth.”

“And you?”

“By the word of the righteous man Zheng Qi, the soldiers set over milady aren’t keeping a very close watch. But to steal someone out from under their eyes, I’ll still likely be found out. I know martial arts; I can hold them off for a while. The moment you two are well away, I’ll use lightness skill and be gone.”

            

In truth, Ling Cheng had studied the martial arts under Su Ying for more than a year — but she understood that a year and a little had laid no more than a foundation. Her own skill hardly counted as strong; going with Su Ying would only make her a burden. So she nodded.

“Be careful.”

She watched Su Ying’s figure fade away among the mountain woods. Then, alone in the cave, Ling Cheng drew the bog-wood dagger and studied its edge — an edge that would sever a blown hair — while her father’s face and her mother’s rose unbidden before her, and one thought alone turned over at the bottom of her heart:

            

—Who, in the end, had killed Father?

—Who, in the end, was the foe with whom she could never share the same sky?

She had often heard Ling Bingzhong expound the great principle of “loyalty to the sovereign, service to the realm”; she knew beyond doubt that her father had never borne the court a divided heart. This so-called treason had to be a frame-up. The pity was that, though she had heard her father had enemies at court, she had never learned their names.

            

Did Mother know these things? Once Aunt Su brought her back, she would have to ask. The dagger’s gleam lit the hatred between Ling Cheng’s brows — and the worry in her eyes. She waited in an agony of suspense, heart lodged in her throat, until little by little the moon sank, the sun climbed, and rosy light broke through the black clouds. Then the ring of clashing metal sounded outside the cave, and she bolted several steps out — only to see the woods ahead black with armor like storm clouds, dozens of soldiers with weapons in hand cutting toward Su Ying. Thank heaven Su Ying’s lightness skill was superb: with Cui Langzhen on her back, she faced them, giving ground even as she fought.

Ling Cheng’s hand clenched around the dagger’s hilt. She was about to rush into the fray when a human shape came hurtling through the air toward her — Su Ying, it turned out, had quietly gathered her strength: her right hand still plied the saber in combat, while her left had already hurled Cui Langzhen from her back in her direction.

In the direction of the cave!

            

The throw, of course, was measured to the ounce. Cui Langzhen crashed heavily onto the cave floor — it hurt, but no harm was done. Ling Cheng hurried to help her up. Cui Langzhen caught her breath twice, reached up, and touched her daughter’s cheek, wonder and grief woven together across her face. “Fuli… are you all right?”

Something seemed about to well out of Ling Cheng’s eyes; she forced it back. She had a thousand things to say to her mother, but she knew how desperate this moment was. “Mother, I’m fine. We have to go.”

“Go?” Cui Langzhen stood rooted, not moving, her gaze drawn to the massed figures beyond the cave mouth, where the clang and ring of weapons still came without pause. Su Ying was no longer retreating by lightness skill even as she fought, as she had a moment ago — instead she had planted herself and was locked in a grinding melee with the soldiers.

            

Ling Cheng explained at once: “Aunt Su says this cave has another way out. We go first through that one — she’ll hold them off for a while. Once we’re far enough, she’ll come find us again.”

Understanding broke over Cui Langzhen.

When Su Ying had first come to rescue her, Cui Langzhen, afraid of dragging her down, had refused to leave with her — until she learned that Su Ying had already found Ling Cheng’s trail. Her heart was bound to her daughter, and Female Warrior Su’s martial arts were, after all, truly formidable; after one brief hesitation, Su Ying had swept her out of the prison.

            

Frail by nature — not wracked by illness the way Xie Miao was, but with a constitution a shade weaker than most — she had borne Ling Bingzhong only this one daughter in all their years of marriage, and could never have studied lightness skill or the martial arts under anyone. Her only course was to flee on Su Ying’s back.

Lying flat against that back, watching Su Ying carve her way out of the encirclement through a long road of wind of blood and rain of slaughter, Cui Langzhen could not help thinking: Fuli can’t do lightness skill either. For now Female Warrior Su carries only me — that’s well enough. But once she finds Fuli, how is Female Warrior Su to flee carrying the two of them?

So… this was the plan she had been shaping…

            

“Fuli.” Cui Langzhen had reasoned it through, and her voice rang out with iron resolve. “We cannot abandon Female Warrior Su.”

On the far side, Su Ying was one against many: saber in the right hand, palm strikes from the left, her body a wild swan’s fleeting shadow, both feet lashing out in flying kicks — every technique she had, she poured out.

In sheer skill she towered above those soldiers, and the cave mouth was narrow besides, with all the impregnable momentum of “one man at the pass, ten thousand unable to breach” — she made her own body the rampart, and she truly did hold every soldier at bay.

            

But she was not forged of iron. Fighting to this point, her strength was guttering by degrees. Seeing the two in the cave still murmuring to each other, she cried out in desperation: “What are you two still wasting time for!”

Why won’t they go?!

Ling Cheng’s eyes whipped back and forth — and only now did she see that Su Ying’s strikes no longer flowed with their wonted ease. Panic clutched her chest. “Aunt Su’s martial arts are so strong — those men… how could those men ever be a match for her…”

            

Cui Langzhen’s expression grew only graver, though the look she bent on Ling Cheng stayed full of pity and love alike. “Female Warrior Su is a master of the very first rank, yes. But however high one person’s might, it can never stand against a thousand men and ten thousand horses.”

She saw it with perfect clarity.

Su Ying was plainly staking her own life to buy mother and daughter one thin thread of survival.

            

And yet…

“Fuli, it is your mother who has failed you.” The sudden apology froze Ling Cheng mid-breath, blank-faced — so much so that when Cui Langzhen’s hand closed over the dagger in her palm, she half failed to register it. Then she saw her mother’s face go gentler still, saw her smile faintly. “In the days to come… in the days to come, Mother will no longer be able to… But you must remember: whatever strait you stand in, whatever the cause, whatever the deed — never pay the price with another person’s life. Female Warrior Su—” Her voice rang suddenly high as she turned the dagger about. “This great debt of grace I shall repay in the life to come. Fuli is entrusted to your care!”

The last word fell — and with it the blade sank into her chest!

            

“Mother!” A vast terror swept Ling Cheng from crown to sole in the space of a breath. Cold through and through, she sank to her knees, her trembling hands flying to stanch the wound welling blood at Cui Langzhen’s breast — and then a shadow came flashing in. Su Ying seized the dagger’s hilt and tore it free. Blood gushed out like a spring, and the spray of it splashed across Ling Cheng’s face!

Su Ying never looked back. Her left arm tucked Ling Cheng beneath it, and her feet flew.

Matters had come to this pass. Grieve as she might, Su Ying had no choice but to leave Cui Langzhen’s body behind and carry Ling Cheng away from this place with all speed — anything less would be to betray Cui Langzhen’s sacrifice.

            

A child’s weight is far lighter than a grown person’s. Carrying her, Su Ying ran as though riding the wind, and her pace was naturally much faster. In a blink they were out of the dim cavern — south first, then west, doubling through path after path. It was a good hour and more before the pursuit behind them was finally thrown off.

By now Su Ying truly had nothing left. She stopped and looked at Ling Cheng. “Are you all right?”

They had kept to the mountain road, and by now were far from Chang’an; the trees stood lush, the grass deep green. Ling Cheng did not know what place this was, and had less heart still for gazing at scenery. Even at Su Ying’s question she only stared, as if her scattered soul had not yet found its way back — until, abruptly, a sudden sweetness flooded her throat, and she vomited up a mouthful of blood.

            

The blood was scarlet. Su Ying startled — Fuli shouldn’t have taken any wound, so how…? She hastened to read the girl’s pulse, and quickly reasoned out the cause: from yesterday to this day the child had met catastrophe upon catastrophe, and yet she had not wept once, not cried out once. Extreme grief hoarded in the heart with no vent — how could it fail to wound her within?

A pity Su Ying was no physician. She had deduced the cause of the internal injury, but not how to treat it; she could only feed a thread of gentle inner force into her, sighing: Beneath the Nine Springs¹, your father and your mother… would never wish to see you like this.”

To her surprise, Ling Cheng did not take up her words. She only turned slightly aside, evading the palm that fed her inner force. “You’ve already spent so much strength. Don’t — for my sake…”

            

Su Ying gazed at her a long moment. Then, abruptly, she drew forth the dagger sheathed at her waist — the same dagger she had pulled from Cui Langzhen’s chest. It was Ling Bingzhong’s relic, she thought; it was the last thing Ling Bingzhong had left his daughter. So she returned it to Ling Cheng, and asked: “You don’t hate me?”

Ling Cheng’s face was empty, her calm frightening in its stillness. “I’m sorry. Last night I should never have blamed you. You’ve done so much for my family already. It’s I who have dragged you down…”

“Set grace aside entirely — your late father and mother had long since become my friends. What is done for friends is done as it ought to be; where does ‘dragging down’ enter into it?” Su Ying took out a handkerchief and wiped the blood from the corner of her lips, then said thoughtfully, “Don’t worry. I’ll take you to find someone. Find her, and ten times the pursuers would be nothing to fear.”

            

Ling Cheng’s eyes lifted a fraction.

The most terrible things this world held, she had already lived through them all.

What was left for her to fear?

            

Even if that pack of soldiers truly seized her, even with blade and axe laid against her body, she would not so much as blink. Yet Su Ying’s words stirred something in her chest: such martial might truly existed in the world — one person a match for a hundred? Her own skill was still far too small. Had she possessed the strength of the one Aunt Su spoke of, her mother would not have died in torment before her very eyes…

Mother and Father would never live again.

But those who had killed them had not yet paid.

            

She looked at Su Ying.

Su Ying was gazing at a broken cliff not far to their right, murmuring, “Of late she should be dwelling in the deep valley below this mountain. Only… I don’t know where, precisely…”

Ling Cheng still did not know who Su Ying meant.

            

Su Ying was about to explain when hoofbeats came drumming over the green grass. She turned — and there, sure enough, was a sword-bearing warrior on a black horse riding straight for the two of them! Barely a moment’s rest, and these people truly were ghosts that would not scatter! She could not hold back a curse; she swept Ling Cheng up and flew on.

By rights, having rested a while and recovered something of her strength, no soldier should have been able to catch her. She was a master of the jianghu — how could common soldiery compare with her in the light arts? To her astonishment, the warrior spied her from afar, sprang clean from the saddle, spread himself like a great peng² riding the wind — and with uncanny speed crossed above her head, in barely half an incense stick’s time, to bar her way.

Though Su Ying labored under the visible disadvantage of working lightness skill while carrying a child, she was still startled by the brilliance of the man’s leaping art. She put Ling Cheng behind her at once, shielding her, and said, her voice edged with frost: “You’re no ordinary court soldier, are you?”

            

“Nor are you. I’ve heard your name — the great ‘Hundred-Fold Saber,’ Female Warrior Su. Why quit the jianghu’s free and easy roaming to meddle in a matter like this? Why go looking for trouble?”

“Since you know my name, then you should also know: our kind, the chivalrous of the jianghu — when we see the good and innocent abused, of course we draw our blades to help.”

“The good and innocent? The good and innocent of treason and sedition?”

            

“Ask the first commoner you meet in any street. In their hearts they all know it perfectly well: General Ling gave his loyalty to the realm. The treason charge is nothing but a monstrous wrong.”

“You’re wrong. Wronged or not, that’s for the Sage alone to say. Or does one actually heed the fart-talk of mud-foot nobodies?”

When words don’t meet, half a sentence is one too many. At his answer Su Ying knew he was one of those “whose paths differ, with whom no plans can be made” — and her saber cleaved out.

            

The man rejoiced at the sight, judging her a bolt at the very end of its flight, no match for him now. One air-leap carried him past the saber’s edge; his longsword leveled, he thrust for her throat.

What he did not know was why the jianghu styled Su Ying “Hundred-Fold Saber” — the name spoke of her tenacity in battle: even cast into the direst strait, hammered and forged a hundred times over, she could hold herself upright on her last breath and grind her enemy down in a long war of endurance.

Saber-light crossed sword-shadow, a cascading clangor of steel on steel. Ling Cheng’s eardrums buzzed, her eyes swam — there was nothing she could do to help — and at the very height of her frantic dread, a streak of white light whipped suddenly at her!

            

She could not read either fighter’s moves, but this white streak driving at her face she saw with perfect clarity.

—A concealed weapon! The very flying steel out of the jianghu storybooks!

Mercifully the man, dueling Su Ying even as he loosed his sneak attack on Ling Cheng, had one mind split between two tasks, and his aim went a hair awry. And Ling Cheng was quick: in that hair’s-breadth instant she twisted into the evasive footwork Su Ying had once taught her, and by the narrowest of margins slipped the flying dagger — then her foot slid, met empty air, and could not gather itself back. She heard Su Ying cry out “Fuli!” — heard the wind roar past her ears as her body dropped, straight down.

            

Down past the ten-thousand-fathom cliff!

She knew only the most rudimentary evasive weaving; the true arts of lightness and leaping she had never learned. Cast into midair in that instant, terror seized her, her arms flailed without thought — and suddenly caught hold of a hand.

In the same breath, that hand clamped hard around her wrist.

            

Ling Cheng raised her eyes: Su Ying hung in the void just as she did, swaying on the very brink, held solely by her left hand locked fast upon the branch of an ancient tree rooted at the cliff’s lip.

If that branch gave way, the two of them would go down to the Yellow Springs together.

“Aunt Su…” Ling Cheng looked down once at the torrential river below the cliff — and horror froze her rigid, not daring to move at all. So she could still feel fear… not fear of death itself; only, first, the fear of dying with regrets, and second, the fear of dragging down one of the few people she had left in this world to care for. She asked, “Can we still climb back up?”

            

Su Ying was silent.

Alone, she might perhaps have borrowed the old tree’s strength and gone flying up the cliff face. But with Ling Cheng to carry, then…

Ling Cheng stared up at her for a long moment, understood the meaning she would not speak — and her heart went cold, all of it, in an instant. Just then a boom sounded from the clifftop, and a ball of flame seemed to ignite against the sky.

            

“What is that?”

“A signal flare.”

The storybooks too had spoken of such things and what they were for. Ling Cheng’s heart lurched.

            

“He means to…”

“That’s right. He means to summon every other soldier to him.”

From the clifftop the man must have marked that they had not fallen to their deaths; only the distance kept him from taking their lives outright, and so he was gathering his fellows. If a single soldier up there had a bow to hand and one arrow found her body, then she and Fuli would truly have no place even to be buried. Su Ying’s brow knotted tight — this time, she thought, she was well and truly in a death trap. Yet no one, while they still live, gives up lightly. She was still casting about for some countermeasure when a child’s voice came riding the wind — young yet, and utterly unshakable: “Aunt Su, let go.”

            

Aghast, Su Ying said, “What?”

Ling Cheng bit her lip, steeled her heart, and said, “If you let go of me, you alone can make it up. Right?”

“What lunacy are you spouting!” Su Ying refused outright, and to strangle the thought at birth went on at once: “To die like this, just so — can you accept it? Don’t you want your revenge?”

            

Ling Cheng felt, unmistakably, the grip around her right wrist tighten — utterly beyond breaking.

After a moment’s silence, Ling Cheng’s left hand stirred.

It slid, quietly, to the dagger at her waist.

            

The dagger Su Ying had only just returned to her — the one and only blade her father had ever given her in his life, and the last. Her fingers traced over the hilt. Her face was cold as ice; her voice was as steel fresh from the quench. “I can’t accept it.”

—I will never accept it!

“But…” The words checked, barely a breath; her mother’s face flickered, faint, before her eyes. Her left hand tore the dagger from its sheath. “I cannot pay the price with your life.”

            

The blade’s cold light flashed once through the air. Ling Cheng feared that one instant’s hesitation would make the deed forever impossible — so her motion held no pause, no tremor. With the basic saber stroke Su Ying had once taught her, she hacked down hard at her own right arm!

It was indeed a divine edge, one that cleaved iron like mud.

Blood scattered on the wind. An arm severed into two pieces in the space of a breath, and even as agony tore through her to the marrow, her body dropped once more, straight down.

            

At the foot of the cliff the great river ran on and on. That single cry of “Fuli,” lost in the empty air, was too far from her now — too far.

She could no longer hear it at all.

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