Free Web NovelChapter 112: The Wolf’s Mouth
With the towers theirs, no eye was left in the valley high enough to catch what moved below them. Three platforms, three pairs of dead men holding their posts, and beneath each one a knot of Skyedge blades waiting on the next word from Xuan.
Before he gave it, he turned to his brother.
"Good acting."
The hood swallowed most of his face, but he let a thread of the laugh slip out anyway, more breath than sound. He hadn’t expected Lin Kai to read the moment that fast, or to answer a suspicious guard in a dead man’s voice without so much as a heartbeat’s stumble. He’d climbed that tower fully prepared to put the relief down himself, on the switchback or the instant the man’s mouth cracked open to raise the alarm. The contingency had turned into furniture he never had to use. They’d be carving through these patrols inside the hour regardless, but a garrison with its guard slack was a gift, and he took the gifts the night chose to hand him.
Lin Kai caught the laugh, faint as it was.
"And what is it that amuses you so, dear brother?"
"Nothing, nothing — forgive me if it pricked." Xuan tipped his head a fraction, and the humor under the hood went honest. "It was good work. I didn’t expect anything like it out of you. Well done."
Wei Tianming looked from one of them to the other and held his tongue. In all his months at Xuan’s side, he had never watched the two young masters of the Skyedge Sword Sect trade words like brothers who half-meant them. He filed the sight away and asked nothing.
It was Mira who reeled Xuan back to the work, a line unspooling across the corner of his vision.
[ Eyes front, Xuan. We have only just pried the door open. ]
’Right, right, easy — I’m moving.’ He lifted a hand at the post and rolled it forward, the signal to push into the next phase: every patrol still treading the ground outside the mine, silenced or gone before one of them carried word back to the gate.
The three teams broke cover. Lin Zhen kept his own hands idle and let the two core disciples run their half of it, watching to weigh whether the inner court’s finest earned the silver the sect bled on them. The patriarch hadn’t crossed two days of foul country to gut watchmen. He was here for one reason alone — Xuan’s scouting report had flagged an elder among the Blood Fang garrison, a man at Foundation Establishment, stage unknown, weight enough to turn the whole operation into a grave for everyone walking it. Skyedge needed a body in the field heavy enough to answer that, should the answering come.
What Lin Zhen did not know — what no breathing soul but Xuan knew, and what Xuan meant to keep buried — was that the elder carried a centipede bedded against the marrow at the base of his skull and took orders from a master he’d never laid eyes on. Xuan already had the use of him mapped end to end. He would spring it when the board called for it, and not a moment before.
He drew Lin Kai and Wei after him toward his own quarry: three men pacing a slow loop of the mine’s outskirts, their route gouged into the dirt by their own boots, a habit pressed into the earth one shift at a time. The three of them folded into a tangle of scrub beside the trodden line and waited for the loop to swing the patrol back around. It did, right on its worn schedule.
"Agh — hold up, I’m about to wet myself, my bladder’s fit to burst. Give me a breath."
One of the three peeled away and stamped behind a tree. The other two clocked his outline against the bark, a shoulder jutting past the trunk, and let him be.
"Mind a boar doesn’t trot out and bite that little thing off you in one snap."
"Now that would be a tragedy," came the voice from behind the tree. "Imagine how crushed your wife would be."
"You son of a bitch. You hunting for a fight?"
Nothing came back. The shoulder hung where it was, unmoving against the bark.
And — well. Who on this earth takes the better part of a minute at a tree without once letting up? The pair swapped a glance and tramped over to find out.
"You’d best have packed that ugly thing away. I’ve no wish for an eyeful once we’re crammed up in those tunnels."
They reached him. One clapped a hand to the jutting shoulder, and the body came loose from the trunk and folded at their boots, throat laid open in one unbroken line — pinned upright against the bark until the touch undid it. freewebnøvel.coɱ
The truth struck both men at once. Before either could haul in the breath to scream ambush, to fling a single warning back toward the gate, two shadows in black dropped out of the very tree the corpse had been guarding. They fell with their blades out front — Marrow Dragon in one fist, in the other the sword Lin Kai’s mother had pressed into his hands — and drove them home before a boot kissed ground. Three patrolmen for the dirt, and the night kept its mouth shut over all of it.
From there the loops closed inward. Xuan, Kai, and Wei came down off the trail to the mouth of the mine last of the three teams, the others already pooled in the shadow of the entrance.
"Everything in order?" Xuan kept it under his breath.
His father answered the same way. "It is. We’re clear to move on the inside." Lin Zhen turned and tipped his chin at the trio of core disciples. "You three hold the ground out here. If Blood Fang sends anything up from the far approaches, I want word of it before it reaches our backs." The three dipped their heads and slid off to take their angles among the rocks, swift and without a wasted step.
He swept the rest of them with a look that spared no one. "Keep the maps Xuan drew fixed behind your eyes — every turn, every depth of the workings earns its place tonight. Guard one another’s flanks. From the instant we cross this threshold, we are walking straight into the wolf’s mouth."
With that, the six of them slipped under the lip of the entrance and down into the dark of the mine they had come to wrench back — where the air thickened to cold stone and old iron, and somewhere far beneath their boots, fifty throats they had yet to lay eyes on breathed on in the black, none of them aware the counting had already begun.
