“Then we have a problem.”
“Yeah,” Lily said, her voice tight. “That’s Fang. He’s brought his fifty back from the city.”
Li Lei pried open her eyelids and squinted out at disaster.
Dusk had not yet drawn its curtain on the day. The western sky wore its colors gently—pink rather than flame, a soft yellow misting into pale apricot where it blended with the pink. There in the west, a dragon the color of wet moss floated in di’shai while his children hurtled around him, a confusion of magics and power filling the air as they tried to kill him or one another. Down here, below that soft sky, people were about to die. The wrong people, curse it. And she could not see what was happening. Her view was eclipsed by those who would protect her if they could.
Li Lei summoned strength and slowly, carefully, rose to her feet, one hand on the stone of the tower. There she swayed, seeking balance that had deserted her in the loudness of pain.
The Fists she’d put to sleep still slept, but others had arrived. In that first second she watched one of them fall when Alice Báitóu pointed at him. But there were more, several of them much too close. Farther off were the ranks of men Lily had called a fifty, trotting briskly their way.
Rule engaged the nearest man with a sword. Cynna shouted a series of syllables and threw light in the face of another man, making him stumble. Lily cursed and threw a rock, which almost made Li Lei smile. Lily did not like being unable to act.
Neither did she.
She thought of a monk who had died before she could speak with him again. Of a woman who had lived her entire life in a small village in Tibet, and a man she had known over a hundred years ago, a man with a laugh so full and rich she could almost have subsisted just on the wealth of that laugh. Children’s faces flickered through her mind, children she had helped, had loved, where she could. And the face of her own son just after birthing, tiny and perfect, a bottomless joy. And the face of his father, wise in his way, patient, and dear. Sun, she thought. And Li Qin. Two great loves as different and as alike as sunrise and sunset. She wished the one could be here and was glad the other was not.
She had always been selfish that way. “Bah,” she said, deeply annoyed by her impending death.
Rule fought two Fists now. Lily somehow dodged another one’s sword and flipped him onto his back like a turtle. Li Lei wished she had seen that, but things were happening quickly now. Cynna spoke different syllables—hard syllables, edged with a darker magic. When she hurled this spell, there was no light at its end. Only death. Most of the Kanas had woken and the old man spoke, the one who had spoken for Reno, telling them to form their wall of bodies again.
“No,” Li Lei said sharply. “That is death without purpose.”
And some ten feet away, a small orange figure popped into view. Gan was fuzzy to Li Lei, which meant she was dashtu, which was good. At least one of their number would live through this.
Li Lei expected Gan to see what was happening and pop back into Edge and safety. Instead she screamed, “Lily Yu!” and started running, pumping her short legs. Li Lei’s gaze flicked back to her granddaughter in time to see Lily hit the ground, having stumbled over a body—a man dead or asleep, she could not tell and did not care. Another Fist, very much alive and awake, jumped over that body and swung his sword back for a stroke.
Gan jumped at him. With all the foolish, heartbreaking courage of the young, she leaped at him—every inch of her clearly visible. Not in dashtu anymore, for she couldn’t connect with the world in that state. The Fist reacted automatically, altering his stroke to meet this new threat.
His sword slid into the middle of Gan’s chest.
And the tiger called her.
? ? ?
LILY didn’t know who cried out as ten feet of Siberian tiger leaped onto the back of the Fist who’d cut down Gan. Maybe it was her. All she could think of, all she could see as she scrambled over to her friend, was the blood spurting out from the hole in Gan’s chest. The red, red blood ruining the many-pocketed khaki shirt.
Gan lay on her back, her eyes huge and shocked in a face bleached of color. “Ow, ow, ow.”
“Hold still,” Lily said, and untied her sash. “One of the Kanas is a healer. I’ll get her. She’ll help you.”
“He killed my heart,” Gan whispered.
“Shh. Don’t try to talk.” Frantically Lily folded the sash into a pad.
Gan groaned, her eyes rolling back in her head.
She couldn’t see, dammit. Tears were no help, no help at all. She dashed them away angrily and called Ah Hai’s name, trusting Grandmother to deal with the Fists—with any and all of them—as she pressed the pad she’d made against the wound.
The sky exploded.
White blanked out vision. Blanked out sound. For endless seconds Lily hung suspended in nothing but white, as if sound along with vision had been blasted out of existence. Then she heard a buzzing, high-pitched and irritating, as if she had mosquitos in her ears. The white began to break up in drifts of coruscating color as the buzzing subsided into voices.
Someone keened. Someone wept. Others called out to one another. Lily blinked rapidly as if that might help her stunned vision recover. And realized one of those voices belonged to Fist Second Fang.
“. . . immediately. I repeat: Squads Four and Six, stand down.”
“The Zhu Tú’àn gave us orders to—” someone shouted. “The beast will kill us!” came from a different voice.
Fang’s voice was parade-ground loud. “My orders are from the Zhu Kongqi, who has jurisdiction over the Fists at this time. You will all stand down. Those confronting the orange beast may keep their swords at the ready as you back away slowly.”
The dazzlement was clearing from Lily’s eyes. She saw Grandmother crouched over the downed and very bloody body of a Fist, snarling at two other Fists who began to retreat one slow step at a time. Behind and to her left, the pair of Fists who’d been fighting Rule backed up, too. They scowled as they did it, but they lowered their swords.
Above them, an enormous dragon the color of wet moss whirled. His tail lashed out, knocking one frantically dodging spawn from the air. His head shot out—and his jaws closed around another spawn. He did not swallow. Instead he spit out the spawn—and that one, too, went tumbling through the air. Lily didn’t see where either one went.
A single spawn remained airborne. Lily didn’t know which one. He spoke, apparently addressing Reno, though his words were indistinct.
“I speak for her!” Ah Wen called in a voice too loud and deep for an old man’s body. “Zhu Kongqi, you will retrieve your injured brother. Bring him to me when I land.”