Chang Ning grabbed Cai Zhao's wrist and ran straight for the cliff.
She had to ask. "Why are we going there?"
"You said it yourself." His robes snapped in the wind as he moved. "Qingque Sect has held for two hundred years. Wanshuiqianshan Cliff was carved out of nothing. What are a few foreign knives compared to that?"
Cai Zhao thought it over. "Ah. We're going to find out who sent them."
"People are already dying," Chang Ning said flatly. "Better to learn the reason fast than drag this out into something worse."
She flinched at how easily he said it. People are already dying. As though it were weather.
He stopped mid-stride and turned on her. "Listen. Muwei Palace has Master Qi, a hall full of senior disciples, and the third son of Song leading his people to assist. They do not need us. What they need is for us to find out why a demon cult army just walked through the front door. Unless you'd like to stay and watch your beloved Senior Brother Zhou get scratched in the mountain wind, in which case I'm sure the story of a beauty saving a hero will make a lovely legend. The six northern sects are one family anyway. A Zhou or a Song, what's the difference?"
Cai Zhao caught up. "What Brother Chang Shi said is not wrong. Master Qi is more than capable, and the Wu brothers arranged things well. We should find the source."
Chang Ning said nothing. He walked faster.
They had barely cleared the practice ground when the smell of blood hit them like a wall.
More than ten bodies. Scattered at every angle. Three or four wore the gray uniform of the demon cult, faces hidden behind oil-painted masks, long scarves wound tight around their heads.
Chang Ning barely glanced at them. "Tiangang Sha Camp. Nie Zhe's rabble. Two hundred years of crawling at our gates, and this is what they send."
They pressed forward. Twice more they walked into the middle of skirmishes, gray-clad fighters locked with sect disciples. Chang Ning stepped in, left hand on his sword. He was efficient in a way that was almost cold. Three fighters came at him at once, and he caught all three in a single arc of steel, each blade finding a throat. He walked out of it with his robes still clean.
One of the gray fighters squinted through the chaos at his pox-scarred face and didn't recognize him. "Your moves aren't from the six sects. Who are you?"
"Ask my sword."
Chang Ning laughed and pulled a broken blade from his sleeve. He held the sword in his left hand, tossed the knife up with his right, caught it on the drop and snapped his fingers against the flat of the steel. The blade shattered. With a single flick of his sleeve, dozens of razor shards scattered through the air in a tight, humming cloud.
The gray-clad man raised his wind-and-lightning guard. It didn't matter. The shards found the gaps. He went down like a sieve.
The sect disciples watching let out a single unified shout.
They kept moving.
A pavilion. More bodies, inside and out, as if everyone had been cut down mid-step. Then a sound, small and hoarse, like someone calling through a pipe.
Cai Zhao didn't stop to think. She jumped the steps into the pavilion.
She almost screamed.
A disciple, seventeen at most, lay propped against the stone pier. From the upper lip down, his face was gone. The jaw, the chin, the lower cheek, all of it sheared away in a single clean arc. Only his throat was intact. That was how he was still making that sound.
She made herself look lower. His hands and feet had been cut off. That was why he couldn't crawl.
She stumbled back two steps and her heel caught something. She turned.
A young maid in pink. The same wound. Lower face removed in the same curved line. Cai Zhao had seen her before. She was the girl she had sent to deliver a message to Qi Lingbo. She had heard the warning horn and been caught.
This is Senior Sister Lingbo's maid.
Chang Ning stood outside the pavilion without moving. His hand moved slowly to the broken blade at his wrist.
Two more bodies inside with the same wound. A cold gust came through and Cai Zhao felt her hair lift.
Then four gray-clad men stepped out from behind the rockery.
Their martial bearing was different from the others. Cleaner. Experienced. When they clocked Cai Zhao alone in the pavilion, one peeled off toward her without discussion. The other three went for Chang Ning.
Chang Ning met them left sword, right palm, each response timed exactly.
The one who came for Cai Zhao was large, with a fighter's build. His eyes above the mask were bright with an ugly excitement. He was carrying sun-and-moon wheels, and fresh blood dripped from both blades. "A pretty little face like that, what a shame. Let me fix it for you. Come on, quack quack—"
She looked at the meat caught in the wheel's serrated edges. She understood the wounds in the pavilion then. The arc. The young disciple. The maid. These four had been collecting living mouths, mutilating them just enough to keep the sound in, leaving them as bait to draw the sect's masters out.
The fighter lunged.
Cai Zhao stepped in with her sword. Metal rang. The man's left hand exploded in pain, the moon wheel spinning free. He reeled back clutching his right arm. Blood ran through his fingers.
"You. Who are you."
She moved fast. The sword tip angled up, threaded through the sun wheel's handgrip, and swept down in a single arc. The arm broke at the elbow. Blood hit the stone.
"Luoying Valley," she said. "Cai Zhao."
The man's voice cracked. "You're Cai Pingshu's wife—"
"Her niece," Cai Zhao corrected, and stepped forward. Four strokes, left to right, butterfly-light, knocking the sun wheel away. Then a flat horizontal cut.
The man's head left his shoulders.
The body shuddered twice and stopped.
When Cai Zhao was a child, she asked her aunt a question.
Were you afraid the first time you killed someone?
Cai Pingshu had been fourteen. Following the Zhou family's children to the Beichen New Talent Competition, she had passed through a mountain village and found an elderly couple holding the body of their thirteen-year-old granddaughter, weeping. A bandit passing through had eaten their food, drunk their wine, and taken what else he wanted. The girl had scratched him. He had killed her slowly.
Her fellow disciples told her to leave some silver and keep moving. There were a hundred bandit nests in those mountains. Finding one was a needle in a haystack. The old couple's grief was real, but so was the demon cult, and Grandmaster Yin had called them.
Cai Pingshu didn't understand why the demon cult's kills counted and a bandit's didn't. She wrote a letter and left it. Then she turned around and walked back alone.
She took every wrong road. She searched for weeks. She leveled half the mountain forest, staring down ten different bandit nests, until she found the right one.
The village chief handed the man over immediately, sensing what she was.
She cut him in half. Then she walked back and dealt with the rest of the nest, too.
She missed the tournament entirely.
She thought she would be frightened. She wasn't. When the blade came down, she felt only a clean, rinsing relief.
Chang Ning had finished the other three. He came into the pavilion fast, looked at Cai Zhao standing over the headless body, and assumed the worst.
"There's a kitchen nearby. I'll walk with you. Anshen soup, settled nerves."
Cai Zhao looked at the body. The blood was still spreading from the neck.
"I'm not afraid."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she heard her aunt's voice, the way she had heard it at ten years old, standing over a man who had betrayed her father:
Hoeing down the wicked, holding up the weak. Correcting the natural order. What is there to fear?
Twelve words. Cai Zhao said them silently.
She understood them now. Not as instruction. As inheritance.
Her aunt hadn't left her nothing. She had left her everything that mattered.
Chang Ning watched her face settle. He tilted his head. "I said you were hiding it. The sword work you've been doing. It's not technique anymore. It's something else."
"Said the man who fights left-handed in every match I've watched," Cai Zhao said, wiping her blade on the dead man's sleeve. "And who I just watched fight right-handed."
Chang Ning's expression didn't flicker. His smile became, if anything, softer. "What exactly is Zhao Zhao implying."
"Nothing." She looked up, easy. "We've known each other ten days. There are already more unknown methods between us than I can count. It's probably better that way."
He considered that, then smiled. "Zhao Zhao is right."
They continued south, backs to the palace hall, toward Wanshuiqianshan Cliff. The further they went, the quieter it got. Scattered bodies, no gray fighters, leaves falling in the cold.
Chang Ning noticed the expression on her face while she walked and asked, "Why are you happy? Killing a wicked man is satisfying but that smile is something else."
Cai Zhao asked back: "Did you know that more than twenty years ago, Grandmaster Yin Dai held the first Beichen New Talent Competition?"
"I know it."
"Uncle Zhou and Wu Yuanying were both competing. Matched evenly." Her smile widened. "But Aunt Zhixian told me that Uncle Zhou should have won. He held back on purpose, because he could see that Grandmaster Yin wanted his beloved disciple Jianwei's son-in-law to shine. Zhou was too much of a gentleman to steal the moment. Qiu Renjie lost so fast that Zhou hadn't even figured out how to let him win gracefully. So he went half-effort against Wu Yuanying instead."
Chang Ning made a skeptical sound. "And your aunt? Wasn't she competing?"
"She was delayed. She didn't go."
"That's what's making you smile like that? Sweeter than the chicken soup wonton night."
Cai Zhao's expression softened. "It's not about any of that. It's about thinking of her. Her life. How she carried herself." She paused. "A year after that first competition, when it came around to Chu Guan's turn to host, she went."
"That's the competition where she broke the Chu Guan guardian sword."
"Yes."
Her mother had only told her the full story a few weeks ago.
Cai Pingshu, sixteen years old. On her left, Chang Haosheng, who worried about everyone and carried the weight of it visibly. On her right, Ning Xiaofeng, freshly returned from the Hanging Temple. In the middle sat Qi Yunke, who was brilliant and crushed beneath it. She wanted to lift all three of them. She had been wandering alone for over a year by then, and had no idea how far her cultivation had grown past her peers. She fought with everything she had.
The Chu Guan guardian sword shattered. A rift opened that never fully closed.
Ning Xiaofeng had said later that he didn't regret being connected to Cai Pingshu. Wu Yuanying was worth knowing. It was a pity that everyone who suffered for it couldn't see that clearly.
The cliff appeared ahead of them.
Seven iron chain boxes stood along the edge of the drop, massive and black, each one square-faced with a round interior, housing iron sprocket shafts thick as a man's torso. Strong enough to hold chains across the abyss. Strong enough to have held for two hundred years.
Now all seven chains were deployed. All seven locks were open. The chains hung loose over the edge into empty dark.
The cliff-guarding disciples lay around the boxes where they'd fallen. Scattered between them were gray-uniformed bodies from the cult.
Chang Ning moved through the field methodically. He turned bodies, checked wounds, crouched, moved on. Cai Zhao followed in silence.
After a while he said: "There's a traitor inside."
"You turned over bodies for a quarter of an hour to say that." Cai Zhao exhaled. "The chains dropped from within the sect's own cliff. That much is obvious. Was it an outer disciple who was bought off, or did someone dress up as a visiting family member?"
"What's strange," Chang Ning said, "is this." He pointed to a cluster of bodies. "This one died to a Judge's Pen. That one to Fenshui River Emei Thorns. These three to a Purple Gold Hammer. But none of those weapons appear on any of the demon cult bodies."
Cai Zhao worked through it. "Whoever used those weapons killed their targets and left the cliff immediately."
"And look at these gray-clad bodies. Except for one sword wound, the other four were killed by Great Compassionate Hand and Vajra Finger techniques. But none of the cliff-guarding disciples had the hand calluses that come from practicing those arts."
The Great Compassionate Hand and Vajra Finger were external martial arts. Hard, prolonged training. The kind that left permanent thickening along the palms and knuckle joints. Anyone who practiced them long enough wore the proof on their hands.
Cai Zhao thought of the two secular monks in the sect. "Master Chen and Master Ouyang. They were both from Jialan Temple originally."
"You don't have to be a Buddhist to know those techniques," Chang Ning said. "What I mean is this: both sides have already left. This wasn't two groups fighting to exhaustion. The demon cult thieves retreated first. The cliff-guarding disciples chased them. Both groups abandoned this ground."
He walked to the edge. "But then ask yourself why the bodies look like this. These were killed from behind. Swords still sheathed or half-drawn. Wound angles show surprise, no time to react. These were killed by someone they trusted. Someone standing beside them."
Cai Zhao looked at the count. "To take out all eight cliff-guarding disciples cleanly, there had to be more than one traitor."
"Yes. After the disciples were down, the inner thief opened the machine box and ran the chains across. By then, Fengyunding was probably already held by the demon cult. But moving the iron bracket makes an enormous sound. You can hear it seven or eight li away. The patrol disciples would have heard it immediately."
Cai Zhao rested her hand against the cold black iron of the machine box. The metal was solid, immovable-feeling even now. She could imagine what it sounded like when it moved.
"So the traitor had almost no time," she said slowly. "Even if the cliff disciples were silenced before they could blow their whistles, the machine noise gave everything away. Patrol teams would have converged within moments."
"How long does it take to cross the iron rope from Fengyunding?"
She thought about the carriage crossing, the swaying, the grinding drag of iron on iron. "Our family of four took a long time. But light-footed? Much faster."
"Half a watch at a walk. Half that with proper light work. Which means the first wave of demon cult fighters was reaching the top right as the patrol teams arrived." He moved along the edge. "Seven ropes open, seven fighters on the ropes at once. But the moment the patrol teams arrived, the traitors only had to cut the locks. Every rope drops. Everyone on them falls."
Cai Zhao pulled at the thread. "So the first patrol team to arrive met the first wave of fighters at the cliff's edge. The cult fighters were individually stronger, and they killed several of ours. But the sect kept sending more. The fighters still on the ropes couldn't board. The ones already on top were outnumbered. They weren't going to win a prolonged fight and they knew it. They killed what they could and ran north."
"About twenty fighters, I'd estimate."
"And the sect chased them." She looked at the footprints still visible in the dust. Forty, fifty people through here. "So what did they actually accomplish? Twenty fighters, all this preparation, all these traitors, all this blood, and they got on the cliff for minutes before being driven back. What was the point?"
Chang Ning had no answer. Not yet.
Cai Zhao turned and almost immediately pointed to a body she hadn't looked at closely. "You said this one died to a traitor."
"Yes."
"That wound. That's first-form swordsmanship."
Chang Ning went still. He crouched over the body and looked.
A long sword, driven in through the left chest and out through the right back. One thrust, full depth.
"Are you certain?"
"Tear the shirt open."
He did. There it was, at the entry point: a half-spiral scar in the flesh, where the blade had rotated as it entered.
Cai Zhao said, "Thirteenth style. Chu Guan's sword discipline. 'Looking Back at the Window by Moonlight.' Xiaoyaozi's created move, third-generation sect leader. The rotation on entry is what makes it. You lower the blade first, stab upward, and twist the hilt as the blade enters flesh. That's the curved mark."
Chang Ning looked at the silver whistle around the corpse's neck. Faint marks on the metal. Tooth marks. "He saw what was happening. He put the whistle in his mouth first, then drew his sword to fight and blow at the same time."
"And the traitor couldn't let the whistle sound before the ropes were deployed," Cai Zhao said. "So they used their own technique without thinking. One thrust. Clean kill."
Chang Ning stood. "'Looking Back at the Window by Moonlight.' Who inside these walls knows Chu Guan sword technique?"
Cai Zhao's stomach dropped.
"The Wu brothers."
Wu Gang. Wu Xiong. The two brothers currently inside the sect, resting from injuries, unable to fight. The two brothers every sect disciple would recognize on sight, would trust without hesitation.
"The other disciples would know their faces," she said. "Why didn't anyone send a warning—"
"They left immediately after the ropes deployed. Everyone who saw them is dead. The patrol teams that came after saw nothing."
Cai Zhao looked at Chang Ning.
He was already moving north.
She ran to catch up.