Legend of The Young Master

Chapter 228: Cast

Xilai spat with rage, turned his horse, and followed the king, who was throwing himself into the arms of his enemy when almost any other action would have saved him.

"The Princess would die. And he, Xilai, had the responsibility of saving the royals. Now, he was torn. Why was she here anyway? There was no reason for her to be here. Half of the things were not making sense to him.

But then again, why was the king heading to battle in a way the king never could?"

But like an artist with a favorite painting, Xilai could not bear to see the king die either. Not here – not so close to triumph, or at least to survival.

"We are all making the wrong decisions," Xilai thought. And he realized that if he died here, his newfound knowledge would die with him.

It was like some ancient tragedy in which a man is granted knowledge only to be destroyed.

But he didn't have to waste much more time on such thoughts.

On the opposite end of the battle, Luding watched, almost unbelieving, as the target of his campaign threw himself forward, unprotected. He couldn't have manipulated the king into such a foolish move.

The king.

He had made a dash for the fortress, and Luding had suddenly seen his defeat – for in the fortress, the king would be unassailable.

But no.

The fool was now leading his warriors forward into the very maw of Luding's monsters.

And his Swamplings were in the fortress.

Just for a moment, he was balanced on an exquisite knife-blade of doubt as to whether to kill the king himself, by means of a spell, or to send his choicest creatures to do his work.

But in that moment, he decided that, regardless of the campaign, if he killed the king, he had won. No matter which entity was using him, killing the King of Tianqin would place him in the front rank. It would cause a civil war in the kingdom. It would weaken the empire's hold on Tianqin.

He gathered demonic Qi to him.

✶ ✶ ✶

At the center of the battle, Wuyi could feel the warriors dying around him.

The anonymity of armors and masks kept him from knowing who – he could never spare more than a glance, and he had no essence to waste on a statue – but as the Swamplings surrounded them and hemmed them tighter and tighter, armored figures went down – either hamstrung horses, spear thrusts, or lucky arrows.

Baijian continued to be like a hammer at his side, Meiying was like an avenging fairy, and the order warriors fought like the legions of Heaven.

Even as he raised and lowered his sword yet again, he would have chuckled at the pointlessness of it all, if he had not been occupied. They had bought the time, and the battle should now be safely won. And the bitterness – had Yushen Feng not gone down with the horn, had some of the warriors lived fifty more heartbeats – he had no regrets.

He planned to battle to his heart's content; if he did not succeed, he could always disappear.

He slew two more Swamplings before he saw the Dusha.

It reared, its blank stone face smooth and black, and it belled, its shrill voice ringing out above the clash of weapons and the silent intensity of the Swamplings.

Not just one of them. Six of them.

And the wavefront of their fear made the Swamplings beneath his horse's hooves quail and void their attacks. Baihu rose, kicked out, and then plunged forward.

The wave of terror passed over them.

Wuyi got his sword in a good grip, and Baihu leaped for the nearest Dusha as he brought it up high above his head on the left. "You are supposed to use a lance on these things," he thought.

The Dusha saw him, turned, and put its head down low, so its head with two horns hid its neck, and charged, seeking to get its horns under Wuyi's sword and unhorse him.

Baihu turned mid-stride.

Faster than human thought, the animals struck.

Like a cat, Baihu pivoted his weight and one hoof lashed out, catching the monster a staggering blow in the center of the forehead, so hard that it cracked its stone face.

The Dusha screamed, turned its head, whipping its horns through a spray of motion, and leaped, turning, catching the horse in the right rear haunch. Baihu got his back feet off the ground with a caper, and the blow slewed the horse around on his forefeet—

The line of attack opened like a curtain as the two creatures turned into each other. Wuyi felt as if he had all the time in the world – as if this moment had been predicted since the dawn of the world. The Dusha's turn – his horse's turn – the open line at the back of the monster's neck . . .

His sword struck, two-handed, like the fall of a shooting star to earth, and cut along the line where two great plates of hardened flesh met; sliced through the Dusha's spine, and in, down, out and free in a gout of ichor—

Baihu leapt free, stumbled, and Wuyi was thrown from the horse's back. He got a shoulder down, landed on something squishy, and rolled, the guard of his shoulder armor clanking like a tinker's wagon, and the muscles in his neck, injured and re-injured since early spring, wrenched again.

But he ended his shoulder roll on his knees, and pushed immediately to his feet.

Off to the right, Baijian and Meiying were pouring blows into another Dusha, but behind them, the thick knot of companions had begun to dissolve as the remaining Dushas ripped into their horses. Armor crumpled; men died.

✶ ✶ ✶

Back in the fortress, Guan followed Xuanxian Luo as the archer followed Liwei – down the stairs, across the courtyard to the entrance to the cellars where the stores were kept.

There were two archers guarding the heavy oak door to the cellars.

"The demonics are coming up the escape!" Liwei yelled, fear and frustration powering her words.

Every farm wife and pavilion woman in the courtyard heard her. The two archers looked at each other.

Xuanxian Luo came up next to her. "Young Master's orders!" he yelled, his thin voice shrill and not very heroic.

The bigger of the two archers fumbled with his keys.

Guan ran across the yard to join them.

The women were frozen, and he had a moment to consider the looks on their faces – panic, determination, and a sullen kind of anger that it should come to this when they had already lost so much.

Yes, he understood those looks of loss. Of failure. "Arm yourselves!" he called to them.

The bigger archer opened the iron-bound door, and Xuanxian Luo ran down the steps into the darkness.

Guan pushed past Liwei .

The first cellar was gloomy but well-enough lit. A stack of spears leaned against one of the group's great wagons. Guan caught one up as he went by.

There was another door ahead, which was just opening.

Xuanxian Luo was too late to stop it, so he spitted the creature that opened it – ripped his sword out of the Swampling's armored thorax and kicked it so hard that it folded backward—

Guan caught a glimpse of steps going down and a seething knot of the creatures filling the stairwell.

"Hold the door!" Guan called. He thrust with his spear, and felt the steel head crunch through the soft hide around the Swampling's neck and head – just like digging a knife into a lobster. Something popped, it fell off his spear, and he pushed.

Xuanxian Luo cut, and cut again, and again, desperation and terror lending wings to his sword arm.

The stairwell was crawling with them. He killed another one.

And another one.

Liwei turned, raised her hands, and spoke a single word in Zenith, and golden-white light filled the cellar.

At the same time Inside the fort, the princess could scarcely breathe. And she was in pain, which was growing. She made a sign.

She could feel it as surely as she could feel something was wrong in the fort.

"What's happening here?" one royal warrior asked. He saw the princess was trying to point something.

An older woman dressed plainly, like a servant or a farmwife, had a spear in her hands. "If it please you, lord – there's Swamplings got into the cellars, and all the warriors are trying to hold the doors."

"Heavens!" the royal warrior cursed. The other warriors of the escort drew their swords.

✶ ✶ ✶

At the other end of battle, Luding watched as the king and his warriors obligingly fought their way into the center of his range.

Sometimes plans did work out.

His Dushas – the magnificent Kwimok – were cutting the warriors to pieces. They were also dying, but he had more. Or he could obtain more. The demonic was fecund beyond human imagining.

He let the king fight on – on and on – until his reckless charge broke through the ring of bone and hide around the isolated warriors. Around the dark sun.

The king and the dark sun together.

He took his gathered energy, summoning every tendril that he could muster – the might that had been Jianfeng, the souls of other demonics, the convoluted essence of the nomads—

He savored it, for a moment.

There was nothing to interrupt him, no distractions as he placed his spell almost lovingly on a spot just between his two foes.

The edifice of his memory was no palace but a twisted yarn of ropes and webs, and he braided them in his mind with the mastery of an aeon.

He laid his hand to the completed cord and cast.

Xilai felt it, saw it, and cast his counter: a mirror. Even his counter had tails and vestiges – traps within traps. As he had learned.