Threads 274-Grudges 5

The ith-ia gardener raced toward her.

He leapt, and she vanished, ghosting backward, a dress and the silhouette of a face in the dark without hands or limbs like her teacher once had appeared. The stalking beasts and men and things between that stalked her mist circled and closed in. A burst of red powder incinerated a cloud of screaming birds, a short knife of yellow bone spun into a backward grip slashed the head from a laughing horned spirit whose mirth echoed even as his head splashed into the water around their ankles, and a plume of dark blue shredded the phantoms caught in its arc into less than dust.

But there were too many to stop.

Figures melted into one another and moved without stepping, their hands and claws and teeth reaching for the desperately keening undergrounder, and drew dark blood from a hundred cuts. And out in the billowing mist that had swallowed the world, a howl sounded, deep and resounding, a mournful funeral dirge. A black shadow with crimson eyes larger than a man’s head towered higher than should have been possible in the confines of the cistern, called forth by Ling Qi.

The shade of the wolf god’s howl was a blanket of malice across the mist, and under it, her phantoms grew sharper, bodies settling with a weight of reality that a moment before they had lacked. The gardener’s knife lashed out, and this time, rather than carving through illusion like air, it stuck into the guts of a great black hound as if it truly were two hundred kilograms of muscle, fur, and meat.

The moment of surprise was enough for hands to grasp its strap-covered shoulders and for hungry jaws to close on an ankle with a squelch.

Far back in the Mist, all but touching the damp ceiling of the cistern that only she could see, Ling Qi palmed a glittering bundle of diamond cord. In the tedium of waiting in the Ministry, she had taken the chance to reset her diamond snare, leaving Yan Shenyi to the Ministry’s non-existent mercy. And here, with a foe she could not risk killing, was this not the best place to put it to use?

Below, the phantom of the wolf god leapt into the fray, scattering lesser shades and revelers around his feet, jaws open to catch and trap. Held and grappled by others, the ith-ia gardener let out a cry of pain as teeth like swords dug into his flesh.

But as she was winding back to throw the snare, her eyes caught on the movement of its fingers. Covered in glittering kaleidoscoping dust, the fingers dragged through the dark ichor that wept from its wounds, spinning headache-inducing patterns across its skin. The fabric of space within the cistern buckled, and in the instant she had to react, she turned her Mist outward, shattering their isolation together as she gathered her little brother and allies into a cold embrace of impenetrable mist.

The cistern rocked as weight and direction and distance all warped at once, ripping down columns and turning the water into fractal streams flowing between briefly bent space. It was only in the embrace of her Mist that the world remained right in that single moment of twisting chaos.

It passed, and the Mist dispersed. Two of her allies fell to their knees, blood leaking from the eyes and strange bruises blooming on their skin, but otherwise unharmed.

As Ling Qi grimaced, feeling her twisted senses righting themselves, she saw the wheezing gardener on its knees in the cistern, silhouetted by the last remaining fungal bloom. Its dagger was being raised to its throat.

Suddenly, falling drops of water from the newly cracked ceiling transformed into a man, hooded and cloaked in gray. One fist cocked back, swelling with monstrous and disproportionate muscle and the dark fur of a great ape, before it smashed the gardener into the earth with a shockwave that flung a ring of filthy water in every direction and pulverized the stone beneath.

Ling Qi felt an inkling of memory, a figure briefly seen in the raucous tavern within the Dream of Xiangmen.

The gardener bounced away from the powdered floor, and the man, arm shrinking back to normal proportions, followed, his legs bending strangely as he crouched and launched himself. Chitin rippled down his left arm as it bent and sharpened, a grass green organic blade emerging from his handwraps.

“Don’t kill it!” Sixiiang cried out. “Capture!”

There was a faint twitch of the man’s head, the only acknowledgement. The blade rippled, becoming flesh once more, and his hands grasped the gardener’s shoulders even as flames erupted, setting his cloak alight.

He flung the enemy back toward Ling Qi where she floated near the broken ceiling. Her hand snapped out, and the diamond snare flew, a glittering web in the ruddy light that filled the cistern. The gardener fell into the water with a splash, a squirming and immobile bundle. Itsflesh distorted weirdly as if made of soft clay, pushing and straining against the gaps in the snare, but it merely tightened, changing its size to keep it bound.

“Hah! Was too slow. Hardly needed me at all,” said the man as he hit the water with a splash. He threw his burning cloak aside, revealing a tall, thin man. Bits of red hair peeked out of the wrap over his face. “Zheng Fu, at your service.”

“We’re not done yet,” Ling Qi replied, qi carrying her voice through the Mist as she turned to look at the crumbling fungal tower. It burned, blades and hands carving it into burnable chunks. She wasn’t taking any chances…

A pulse of power, only one step below that of a sovereign, rocked through the cistern and far beyond. It was a sudden gale, wind that screamed through the tunnels and streets.

“Ah, looks like the big man finally woke up his grandad,” said Zheng Fu conversationally. He moved to stand over the prisoner, eyeing the snare and the squirming creature alike. “So, you goin back south after this?”

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***

“Some things never change.”

Ling Qi continued to cycle her qi, feeling the flecks of darkness, the motes of want and desire that filled the gaol like so many droplets of dew in the morning. The qi here was so intense, so focused, that even without the thieving games of the old skeleton, her cultivation flowed as smoothly as a stream. In this case, it was a stream flowing into a dam, pressure building in her meridians and in her bones.

She was nearly there, nearly broken through to the fifth stage of the green realm. This long journey was coming to its next step.

“You’re familiar with the Zheng clan then, elder?” Ling Qi asked, pausing her tale.

“Once, I lived in the mountain of flowers and fruit. It was a beautiful decade of youth.”

Wistful. That was new. “He is an envoy. It seems the whole Empire has an interest in the Emerald Seas these days.”