Threads 273-Grudges 4

Ling Qi took the central path, straight on toward the target. The old veteran and one of the officers went left, and the Ministry official and the others took the right. But all remained in her mist, and though she could not see them, she could feel them each and every one.

She took a steady pace into the frozen growth of the sewage tunnel, and a winking coin of silver light preceded her, sent spinning ahead into the dark, a probing eye. What she found was an extension of what they had found in the crater, suffering, maddened vermin grown cancerous and fat and strange and alien growths spewing impurity into the air. She sang softly to herself, the whisper of a coldsnap that ruined the fields come spring, and all withered before her.

These were not old growths, she could tell. The ministries and government of the city had not been that unobservant. She could also tell from the fresh cracks in stone from growing roots that these were unnatural growths, grown in minutes and seconds.

<Do you want them burned, Big Sister?> Zhengui asked in her mind.

Later, she thought. She would let him out when they arrived at the cistern.

She cast her senses to the others in her group. She felt the roiling smoke as the veteran stalked ahead, a makeshift mask over his face as he burnt the growth in his tunnels with dull red and orange flames. In the other tunnel, a rolling ring of wet brown earth smoothed and drowned the poison, hardening into sealing clay behind the cultivators’ advance.

And all around in every tunnel, her phantoms stalked, watchful and wary. It was not a raucous revel, but there was laughter, cold and mocking, echoing in the dark in scattered titters that faded in and out of hearing. This was no drinking party or dance, but a hunt. There were many ways to revel after all. This one suited her current mission best.

<You’re wrong. You can be mad now and laugh later. There’s no contradiction there,> Sixiang chided gently.

This was probably why it had taken her so long to wrestle the Dreaming Moon’s art into a version that really felt like it fit her. She was looking at it wrong, seeing only the surface of the art. In the end, the wild revelry was only one expression of the concept at its core.

Disruption.

Just as her visit to the Dreaming Moon had jolted her on her way and would have broken it, even driven her mad, if she’d not withstood it, so, too, was the heart of the art. Motion. Chaos. Disruption. The light and the noise confused the senses, the grabbing phantoms broke formations, the shades of futures-not-to-be sent her enemies’ plans askew, and the empowerment of her arts allowed her to force a change in a conflict’s tempo.

That was the lesson of the Dreaming Moon. Disrupt what is, and in doing so, shape what will be.

The first attack came on the right.

Worms with shimmering skin, all but invisible to mundane and even cloaked from spiritual senses, swam in the sluggish current of the sewer sludge. Slick and gray, the writhing creatures had maws full of barbed hooks. The Mist thickened, her qi pulsed, and darkness like a starless night sky shrouded the men and women who had come down here with her even as Sixiang’s voice whispered a warning to her group.

When the worms burst forth, frothing from the filthy waters, they found three cultivators ready and armored. Techniques flashed in the dark, and beasts squealed.

On the other side, she felt them creeping in a side tunnel, hunched and humanoid figures with eyeless faces covered in gasbag masks, limbs armored in chitin and bone. Dark armor flowed to the veteran and the guard on the leftmost pipe as well. A bobbing, jiving shadow in her mist spun around the corner the enemies hid behind. A goat horned man with a cruel and merry smile, the phantom seized upon the nearest undergrounder and dragged him out into the center to dance the last dance he ever would.

In her own tunnel, Ling Qi found herself confronted with swarming vermin, overgrown and spawning from impure qi. They died, crashing to the slick ground as chunks of putridly colored ice, but amidst the flurries, larger beasts struck out. Worms from the muck and mud launched themselves at her while fleshy plants and fungal growths grasped mindlessly at her. The corrosive impurity laden air ate away at the edges of her qi. She thickened her mist, bolstered her defenses, and continued to move forward.

And so, into the teeth of growing resistance, they advanced.

They pushed through the sewer system as quickly as they were able, and Ling Qi was not the only one who saw the way the stone was beginning to buckle and groan, brick and mortar cracking and corroding.

Ahead, an invisible sliver of silver flew, seeking the cistern. It was soon found. Moldy columns stood in a toxic purple mist, and the area was overgrown with the underground fungus. Three of the six columns had been hollowed out with fetid fungal flesh now packed within. The thickest and most noxious mist sprayed out from those, and the stone trembled, cracking more and more as the growths within swelled with unquiet life.

She saw the figure of another ith-ia, rubbery flesh with pouches strapped to him. He knelt in the waters as if in supplication, his cupped hands holding a smoking handful of some vile incense, the source of the smoke.

“Main target found. Sacrificial constructs are seeded into the columns of the cistern. Enemy is manually activating,” Ling Qi communicated under her breath.

A bubble of muck swelled under her feet, sewer filth stretching like a skin over the churning plague inside. By the time it had burst a bare second later, she was ten meters down the hall, a personal breeze kicking up the hems of her gown and tugging at her hair as it scattered the poisonous fog ahead.

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“Bogged down. Enemies generating constructs in greater numbers.” The short, clipped voice of the woman who had followed her from the Minister’s office responded back. “Detecting larger movements. Directed. Spatial anomalies in the tunnels.”

So that was why it felt like they were getting nowhere.

“Enemies show little regard for their lives. Creating difficult conditions.” The old veteran’s mental voice crackled like a banked hearthfire.

“Reinforcements?” Ling Qi asked.

A shadowed figure leapt from a crevice in the tunnel, a squirming, humanoid fungal construct with something noxious glowing in the center of its chest. It burst, and the image of the future where she had been disintegrated under the corrosive blast. Ling Qi put her fingers to her temple, focusing on the image from the cistern down the hall, the ebbing shockwave washing ineffectually over the silk of her gown.