Book 3: Chapter 41: Cake Ingredient Stealers |
Hu Shui moved through the western gate.
This time, there was no fanfare, carriage, white horses groomed to a mirror sheen, or expensive clothes she spent a fortune on.
She wound through the roads and pushed past the gates and slums.
Mr. Mo Mo sat across her back and the weapon spirit's hum pressed against the ambient air in waves that made the gate guards stumble sideways into each other. Neither one reached for their weapons or opened their mouths. They flattened against the stone archway and watched her pass. Not exactly sure what had happened, but positive it had something to do with the little girl or the old man keeping up with her.
Shui didn't look at them.
Her Qi was pulled so tight against her core that the air around her carried nothing. No miasma or pressure. No leaking intent or stray wisps of red that usually curled around her ankles like affectionate snakes. Everything coiled inward and compressed, held in a fist she hadn't opened yet.
The crown sat straight on her head for the first time since she'd bought it.
Behind her, the slums parted.
Fao Wen's CoolSpear contingent emerged from the southern alleyways in columns of four. Eight hundred bodies moving in lockstep, spears vertical, pale red sashes tied at their waists, faces set in expressions that ranged from grim determination to the thousand-yard stare of men who had looked into the Red Demon's eyes and decided that whatever waited at the river docks couldn't possibly be worse.
The Jade Serpents poured from tunnel exits that opened in the mud like wounds. Dui led them, thin and pale, his unconscious boss Pao finally awake and waddling behind him in armour that had been let out four times and still didn't fit. Two hundred members carrying blades armor and grim focus.
The Broken Fist Collective came from the east.
The River Rats from the river itself, boats scraping against the shallows as figures vaulted onto the banks and jogged to their positions.
The Black Nail Gang. The Gilded Knives. The Ash Walkers. The Stone Tide Crew.
Nine banners of pale red converging from nine directions.
Four thousand bodies funnelling toward a single point outside the city walls where the northern river docks sat in their cluster of rotting timber and stolen iron plating.
Shui kept walking.
Long Ti materialized at her right shoulder. His ledger was gone and hands hung empty at his sides. His jaw was set in a line she'd never seen on him before. The old man's eyes swept the converging columns with an expression that had abandoned terror somewhere around the second thousand and settled into a quiet, exhausted acceptance of the reality he now inhabited.
Not even a few weeks ago, he had been the owner of a very small stall barely scrapping by… and now?
Long Ti shook his head and said nothing.
Good. Shui didn't need words right now.
The slums thinned as they pushed past the refugee camps. Mud huts gave way to scrub grass. Scrub grass gave way to the rocky slope that descended toward the river bend where the tannery's stench hit her nose like a physical assault even through the perfumed scarf. She could see the warehouse cluster from the ridge. Grey stone, rotting timber, and stolen iron plates bolted across surfaces that had been frozen, cracked, and refrozen by something that left frost patterns she didn't recognize.
Ice Qi. Someone used ice Qi.
It reminded her of a much weaker version of the Greater Dao her Ancestor had shown them when they first arrived into her favorite city ever.
Her lieutenants fanned out along the ridgeline. Fao Wen took the southern approach with his eight hundred. Shen Mei's assassins vanished into the tree line on the western perimeter. Dui's Jade Serpents sealed the tunnel networks that connected the docks to the city's underground. The River Rats held the waterline. The remaining five gangs filled every gap, approach, line of sight, and escape route until the warehouse cluster sat at the centre of a noose made of four thousand armed cultivators who awaited a single word.
Shui descended the ridge alone.
Long Ti followed a few paces behind.
The warehouse doors hung from their hinges. One had been torn clean off and lay flat in the mud, boot prints stamped across its surface in overlapping patterns that told the story of a fight that had gone back and forth across the threshold multiple times. The iron plates bolted to the exterior were coated in frost that hadn't melted despite the morning sun. Claw marks, deep gouges in the metal that looked like they'd been made by something with five fingers and the grip strength of the surly ox that Zhong Da used to carry stuff with, decorated the frame.
Shui stepped through.
The interior smelled like blood, sweat, frozen metal, and something else. Something sharp and clean underneath the violence. Fox musk, maybe?
Bodies lined the walls. Her people. Sixty-odd fighters who had held this warehouse against a force that should have rolled through them like a boulder through a paper screen. They sat, slumped, leaned, and lay in varying states of consciousness. Bandages wrapped around arms, legs, torsos, and heads. Makeshift splints held broken limbs at angles that suggested the bones beneath had been in the wrong direction at some point recently. Blood stained the stone floor in patterns that mapped the battle's progression from the shattered entrance to the back wall and back again.
But they were alive.
All of them.
Beaten, bruised, cut, frozen in places, exhausted beyond the limits of what their cultivation bases should have allowed them to endure. Every single one of them breathing.
Fao Wen knelt at the centre of the warehouse.
His blue cape was shredded. His armour bore dents that hadn't been there yesterday and frost still clung to the leather of his boots in patches that crackled when he shifted his weight. The scar that bisected his eyebrow had reopened, a thin line of red running down his face and dripping from his jaw onto the stone. His spear lay across his thighs, shaft cracked in two places, blade chipped.
He pressed his forehead to the frozen ground the instant she crossed the threshold, ignoring the large scar bleeding.
"Forgive me, Lady Shui." His voice scraped against his throat like gravel. "I've failed you and my oath to protect this place for you."
Shui closed her eyes.
Mr. Mo Mo rumbled.
The sound started low, beneath hearing, a vibration that climbed through the hammer's shaft and into her spine. Then spread outward through her ribs until her whole chest resonated with it. The weapon spirit sensed what coiled behind her sternum. The fury, the grief, the protective rage that tasted like copper and lightning and the specific flavour of a girl who had watched people she'd claimed as hers get hurt while she wasn't there to stop it.
The warehouse trembled.
Dust fell from the rafters, the planks shook, the loose pebbles on the ground rattled and jumped, and the entire building groaned.
A crack appeared in the frozen stone beneath her boots, spreading outward in a spiderweb that reached Fao Wen's knees before she caught it and pulled the pressure back.
"Did they take the ingredients?" Hu Shui, Red Demon, direct descendant of Yin Hu, said.
Fao Wen did not lift his head. His fingers pressed harder against the stone. Around the warehouse, every conscious fighter went rigid. Spines straightened against walls. Hands found weapons they couldn't lift. Eyes locked onto the small figure standing in the doorway whose Qi hadn't leaked a single wisp and whose presence made the air taste like the moments before a thunderstorm splits the sky in half.
Even the old beggar, perched on a rafter beam in the far corner where shadows pooled thick enough to hide a man who didn't want to be found, went still. His red and silver hair hung limp around his sharp features. His trademark smile was absent. His coin had stopped rolling across his knuckles and sat pinched between two fingers, frozen mid-trick.
His eyes never left Shui.
"Y-Yes." Fao Wen's forehead ground against the stone. "Their leader said that they were pretty terrible overall, but serviceable."
Serviceable.
The word bounced around the inside of her skull.
She thinks my awesome and best ingredients are serviceable? I spent weeks finding those. I went to the auction house. I sat through a hundred lots of garbage weapons and trash herbs and boring armour. I bought a crown. I conquered nine gangs. I built an army. I planned and schemed and plotted and did everything right and found the smugglers and took over their operation and secured the supply chain and placed guards and—
Serviceable.
Shui's jaw clenched. She had never felt so insulted before–
Wait.
Serviceable means she used things like them. Which means she can tell quality. Which means she has standards. Which means she knows what good ingredients look like.
Which means she might have better ones.
Which means…
Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe she has ingredients that are even better and I can finally make Ancestor his favorite lemon cake! Does he like lemon cake?
The fury didn't vanish though. It sat where it was, hot and heavy as it coiled around Mr. Mo Mo's resonance like a snake around a warm stone.
Shui opened her eyes and looked at Fao Wen's beaten form.
His forehead hadn't left the stone. Blood from his reopened scar pooled in the gap between his face and the frozen ground. His spear shook across his thighs, the cracked shaft rattling against his armour in a rhythm that matched his pulse. He waited for judgment the way a man waited for an executioner's blade, muscles locked, breath held, every fibre of his being braced for the impact of words that would determine whether his failure cost him everything.
Shui's gaze moved past him.
She surveyed the warehouse.
Every bruised face, bandaged limb, and fighter who had stood against a force that outclassed them and held their ground long enough for the morning to find them still breathing. The pale red sashes, torn and stained, still tied at their waists. The crooked mushroom-hammer banner, ripped from its pole during the fighting, clutched in the hands of a woman who'd used it to tourniquet her own leg wound.
"Our Red Demon!" The woman lurched upright. A deep cut ran from her hairline to her jaw, bisecting her left cheek in a line of crusted red that pulled her face into a permanent grimace. She swayed on her feet, one hand braced against the wall, the other still gripping the banner. "They ruined my face! Kill them all for us! Give us vengeance!"
Shui looked at her for a long moment.
The woman's eyes burned. Not with fear or pain or the dull acceptance of someone who'd been beaten. They burned with the specific fire of a person who had been hurt and wanted the thing that hurt them to understand what that felt like. Her grip on the banner tightened until her knuckles went white and the fabric bunched between her fingers.
Shui nodded once.
She turned and walked out of the warehouse.
The morning sun hit her face. The ridge rose before her, rocky and sparse, dotted with scrub brush and the occasional stunted tree that had given up on growing tall and settled for growing stubborn. Beyond the ridge, hidden from the warehouse's line of sight, four thousand soldiers waited in positions that sealed every approach, exit, and escape route within a mile radius.
Shui stopped in the clearing between the warehouse and the slope.
She planted her feet.
Her chin rose.
Mr. Mo Mo's hum climbed from subsonic vibration into something audible. A low, steady tone that pressed against the morning air and made the frost on the warehouse walls crack and fall in sheets. The crown on her head caught the sunlight and threw it back in fractured rainbows that painted the mud and stone around her in colours that had no business existing in a place this ugly.
Her eyes found the ridgeline.
“I sense a mighty being,” Mr. Mo Mo said to her. “Not as strong as I, but the fight between us would rend this world into forgotten memory.”
Shui sneered.
That’s it?
She felt Mr. Mo Mo’s confusion.
Ancestor is far stronger.
She could feel them up there. Presences that carried weight beyond anything the gang territories had produced. Qi signatures that tasted like winter and predator musk. They watched from positions they thought were hidden, perched among rocks and brush and shadow, studying the warehouse and the army that surrounded it and the girl who stood alone in the clearing below.
Shui's lip curled.
The red miasma stirred.
She let it.
A single wisp escaped her core and curled around her right ankle. Then a second around her left. Then more, rising from the ground around her boots like steam from heated stone, climbing her legs, her waist, her arms, coiling around Mr. Mo Mo's shaft in spirals that pulsed with each heartbeat. Red fog that screamed at frequencies only cultivators could hear, filling the clearing, pressing against the ridge, climbing the slope in tendrils that reached for the hidden figures above like fingers searching for a throat.
Her voice carried without Qi amplification.
She didn't need it.
"Come out." The words hit the ridge and echoed off the rocks. "I have little patience for cake ingredient stealers!"