The Ravine of the World

It was far from the first time Song Lan had seen the man who stepped suddenly in front of her, cutting smoothly between her raised horsetail whisk and the hooligan whose hand had just brushed her arm.

His glittering robes and careful charm didn't fit, here, in the wreckage of a dumpling stand on a narrow street. She felt the spark of recognition, but—heart still juddering and skin crawling from the unexpected contact—his name didn't spring to mind at first, only a wash of contempt. Song Lan felt her lip curling as she looked down at his conciliatory expression.

"Song Zichen daozhang, for my sake, please let her be," the man said, and his voice prompted her memory at last.

"Lianfang zun?"

"That would be me," he replied with a small chuckle. From over his shoulder, the girl who'd been fighting her smirked defiantly. She'd propped one foot up on the leg of a rough table, now pointing skywards at an angle, thanks to her, and leaned forwards over it. Not even a casual observer would have taken her for relaxed.

"Why is Lianfang zun defending such insolent behaviour?" Song Lan asked coldly. Belatedly, though not too quickly, she lowered her whisk.

"Ah, Song daozhang, this is a guest disciple of the Lanling Jin Sect." Lianfang zun's voice was soft, not yet plaintive. "She's still young, and her personality is somewhat..."

Behind him, the girl cocked her head, one eyebrow raised as if he could see her.

"Odd," the great cultivator finally decided. His guest disciple pantomimed offense, a grubby hand at her heart. Song Lan tracked the distance of the other hand from the sword she could see at her belt.

"She is still quite young indeed," commented a clear voice, and Song Lan felt at least some of the tension in her jaw release. Xiao Xingchen's steps were soundless, but Song Lan could follow her progress by the two faces turned towards her.

"Xiao Xingchen daozhang." When she'd come near enough, Lianfang zun bowed with respect.

"It's been several months since we parted, but Lianfang zun still remembers me? What a surprise."

Song Lan cast a glance over as Xingchen straightened up from returning the greeting, her face serene. When the two of them had settled into their habitual postures side by side, each with their whisk tucked into the crook of an arm, Song Lan felt her closeness even across the careful inch of air between them. She let Xingchen take a turn at discussing niceties with the heir of Jinlin Tai, but she didn't take her eyes off the girl.

"You call me hostile, but who was the one who attacked me first?" the guest disciple interrupted, illustrating her point by shaking a hand dotted with blood from Song Lan's whisk. In the weak lamplight, it looked grotesque: diseased somehow, and contagious.

"Chengmei, please hold your tongue for now," said Lianfang zun. The guest disciple bared her teeth at him.

There was a quick, firm touch on her shoulder. Song Lan blinked, her attention pulled back to the conversation. Lianfang zun was apologising again. She nodded her acceptance of whatever he was saying.

"Zichen, let's go," Xingchen said, and they were just turning away, together, when he spoke once more.

"Honoured daozhang, it would be remiss of me not to greet you in the name of my father as well. He will be glad to know you're travelling through our Lanling."

Song Lan simply kept moving. She heard Xingchen say, "Thank you, Lianfang zun. Please pass on our greetings in turn," in a measured voice, before she turned to catch up with her.

They'd walked in silence to the city wall, and then discussed their options. Xingchen had vaguely suggested continuing on through the rough country to the next village, and while Song Lan would have been glad to put even more distance between them and Jinlin Tai, the city bells had already rung and the gates were shut for the night. It would be less troublesome to find an inn and set out in the morning than try to barter their way through.

It was more expensive, too, especially when Xingchen insisted on asking for one of the tubs in the shared bath house to be refilled so that Song Lan could wash in fresh water. It was a luxury she always prickled at, a little, but as Xingchen always returned, what was the alternative? Simply not bathing was no more sustainable. They took a single room rather than buying a place on one of the big communal beds. Song Lan never protested at that: sleeping squashed between strangers was impossible even to imagine.

"Should I not have bowed to Lianfang zun, earlier?" Xingchen asked. They were both sitting on the edge of the narrow bed in their room, cleaning Fuxue and Shuanghua. Her hair was already braided for sleep, and it gave Song Lan an unimpeded view of her profile.

"No, that was fine," she said.

"Oh. You didn't bow, so I wondered if I'd misstepped." Xingchen ran the cloth along the flat of her blade one last time, before inspecting the impeccably sharp edge.

"No," Song Lan said again. Xingchen's respect for Jin Guangshan was not much higher than her own, she knew. The silent meeting of their eyes could communicate as much between them as whole speeches, and besides, they had agreed long ago that titles and positions alone were useless for reckoning a person's true worth. A sect leader who led his disciples astray was far worse than an honest slave—it was only his demands on other people that were higher.

As for Jin Guangyao, she supposed that Xingchen had only seen how hard he worked, harder than anyone else of his rank in the Lanling Jin Sect. They'd both heard the gossip about his mother, and Xingchen had doubtless erased it from her memory.

"Let's sleep," she said. "We've had a long day."

Xingchen nodded, and stood up to let Song Lan take the side of the bed nearest the wall, where she wouldn't fall off the bed if they touched accidentally in the night and she jerked away. It hadn't taken them long to learn that lesson. Resting her head on the inn's pillow wrapped in her own silk cover, she breathed steadily in and out and did her best not to think about Jinlin Tai.

It had been so unexpected.

Men didn't approach her in that way, as a rule. Song Lan had never made a study of what it was, exactly, men desired, but she had heard enough bawdy songs and whispered tales from her martial sisters to have some idea. If she had been more buxom or sweeter-faced, with a mouth like a peach blossom and eyes like sloes... if she had been more inclined to laugh or had daintier hands and feet... perhaps then she might have dealt with more trouble in her life—but likely not. What made the difference, she was fairly sure, was the fact that she was taller than most grown men and wielded Fuxue as easily as flourishing a brush.

She hadn't considered that, to a man who'd fought a war against one xiandu and promptly crowned himself with the same title, even Fuxue and her frown might not be a deterrent. She'd known that the honour claimed by the great sects was a world away from that of the temple where she'd grown up, and yet she'd let herself relax at Jinlin Tai, to the point of missing the warning hidden beneath Lianfang zun's courtly words.

"I beg the honourable daozhang to enjoy the hospitality in the Glamour Hall and the adjoining gardens," he had said, "and not to linger in these poor, shabby corridors, or judge us by them."

The corridors were classically proportioned, the simplicity of their original design remedied by gilded columns and delicate murals depicting the Sparks-Amid-Snow peonies whose fragrance suffused the entire estate. Considering that any judgement she might make on the Jin Sect had already been settled, Song Lan had seen no reason not to take a walk by herself. It would be less than an incense stick's time, she told herself. She only needed to recover the strength to go back into the banquet they were holding for Xingchen and, as an afterthought, for her.

"Song Zichen daozhang!"

The wine poured so freely with dinner had affected her host, if the warm colour in his cheeks and ears was any indication, but his strong cultivation was keeping him upright and gliding towards her, as assured as any hawk in its dive.

"Or might an old man address you as simply Zichen, my dear?"

(Weeks later, she'd stopped still in the middle of a village street as the thought dropped into her mind: he'd expected her to say, "Xiandu, you're not at all old!")

His hand was on her sleeve, the sleeve of her sword arm, heat sinking through four layers of fabric to smear against her skin. The flinching breath she sucked in through her teeth was loud in her ears, but his eyes didn't even flicker.

"It's such fortune that I've stumbled on you alone like this," he said, and the hand skimmed its way up her arm. "Xiao Xingchen daozhang is most impressive, but you, Zichen, are perhaps even more interesting. Your reticence makes one curious!"

Her gorge rose. She wrenched her arm away from him, finding the wall at her back—of course, he was practised at this, and she could shove her way past him if she had to—probably. Lifting her arm for Fuxue with him inside her guard would leave her chest exposed. Song Lan twisted, but her robe was caught in his strong grip, and he was pulling her back, halfway into his embrace. Jin Guangshan's eyes narrowed and were suddenly, completely sober.

"Shyness is understandable in one so young," he said, "commendable, even. But are the manners taught at Baixue Temple really so rustic?"

"Please forgive me, xiandu. I am not feeling well," she choked out.

Jin Guangshan let go of the fabric snarled in his fist, stroking it flat against her shoulderblade with his fingertips, and the way the colour fell out of her face in response to that dragging pressure must have been what changed his mind. He took one step backwards, flicking his golden skirts out of her way, and Song Lan escaped back to the banquet as swiftly as she could.

She stuck closely to Xingchen's side for the rest of their time at Jinlin Tai. No one but Xingchen could have noticed the change in her mood, and Xingchen must have, but she didn't ask about it. When they left the next afternoon, Jin Guangyao waved forwards six servants with an absurd amount of farewell gifts, or rather bribes, supposed to tempt Baoshan Sanren's prodigy from the mountain to cast her lot in with the Jin. There were copies of famous texts, incenses with all manner of supposed effects, fine talisman papers and even two inkstones, one carved with a moon wreathed in clouds, the other with snow on plum branches.

"Many thanks, Lianfang zun, but we cannot accept these gifts," Xingchen said, bowing. Her dark eyes gleamed with sincerity.

Later, on the road, Song Lan said, "We could have sold some of those things and given the money to the needy, you know. Or used them when we found our sect."

"I thought about it," Xingchen admitted. "Actually, I wanted to do just that, but I remembered what you said before—that it's more complicated with people like them, a gift is never just a gift. I won't be beholden to Lianfang zun or his father."

Song Lan nodded and walked on.

The sun crept across the ceiling of their room at the inn, months later, in Lanling again but not for long, and she rolled to one side to see Xingchen curled in a sheet on the floor. She'd decided at some point in the night to give Song Lan the whole bed, then. Thank the heavens it was me and not her, Song Lan thought, a familiar, fond refrain. She would have bound him to a pillar by the wrists and presented him to his own sect for justice to be done. We'd never have got out of there.

They were together when they heard about the massacre in Yueyang, her and Zichen. They'd been travelling with each other for weeks, since the beginning of Guyu, when the duckweed began to sprout, and all too soon they were planning to part again. Zichen would head back to Baixue Temple for the celebration of its founder's birth. Xingchen would find something else to do for a while. Well, there was always plenty to be done down here in the world.

She could feel herself starting to get clingier in anticipation of their parting, and it irked her. Ridiculous, that she had to stop herself reaching out for Zichen's hand this many times a day, when she knew it wouldn't endear her to her. Embarrassing, that she found herself babbling to Zichen about everything they saw on the side of the road, as if she could make up for the days to come when Zichen wouldn't be there to listen to her. Xingchen wasn't looking for a distraction, exactly, but when she overheard the gossip from the next table at the teahouse, she was investigating before she'd finished her first cup of tea.

"Oh yes, we heard the screams with our own ears, all the way from the Chang manor," the older of the two men told her, leaning back in his chair. "Screaming and shouting and banging on the gates, they were, but they couldn't get out, the whole night. My wife stuffed rags into the children's ears just so they could sleep. Should have done the same myself!" He shuddered demonstratively.

"Didn't anybody go to the manor to help them?" Xingchen asked, appalled.

"And do what?" the younger man asked her. He was barely older than her and Zichen, lanky and sunburned. "The whole Chang clan were cultivators. They killed ghosts and monsters just like we cut rice. If anything, they were responsible for protecting us, not the other way around."

"A whole cultivation sect, killed in one night. And no one knows who could have been responsible?"

"Nobody!" The older man reached out for a handful of sunflower seeds to shell and launched into another description of the bloody, vomit-covered bodies that had choked the Chang courtyard the next morning, but his friend interrupted him.

"It wasn't the whole clan that died, daozhang. The young master and a handful of others were away when it happened. By the time they came back, the corpses were three-days bloated and stinking!"

She almost asked again why nobody had moved to take care of them, but held her tongue.

"They've been staying at the Liu manor, over by the river. That's the young master's wife's family, as was." He spat a seed shell into his hand, dropped it on the table, wiped his palm off on his robes. Beside Xingchen, Zichen made a faint noise in her throat. "If anyone does know more, it'd be Chang zongzhu, but he hasn't been seen out in town since the funeral."

Xingchen glanced at Zichen, who nodded back. After enquiring the names of the two men, in case there was more to learn from them in future, they set off down the hill, towards the river.

"We're not interested in buying from peddlers today, thank you," said the footman at the gate of the Liu residence.

"We're not selling anything," Xingchen replied, adding, to be clear, "not soap, not flowers, not laundry services. We two are travelling cultivators, and we're here to aid Chang zongzhu in finding out what happened to his clan."

He stared at her. She smiled blandly back. When she let Shuanghua slide an inch out of its scabbard, blade glowing with spiritual energy, he startled and ran back towards the house.

Two maids came out, after a while, and led them to wait in a parlour for the young widower and new head of his clan. With her cultivation-sharpened hearing, she could hear the footman's defensive complaints somewhere else in the house: "How was I supposed to know? … not as if they looked it… and what are more cultivators going to do, anyway? A whole house full of them and they couldn't…"

When Chang Ping shuffled into the room, supported by his mother-in-law, he looked like a man half-destroyed. A gust of wind might blow him into pieces. The old lady settled him down in front of the two of them and then took a seat at the side of the room, sighing and shaking her head at intervals apparently unrelated to their conversation.

Chang Ping had light-coloured eyes that had once, probably, been bright and lively. They drifted in and out of focus as Xingchen introduced Zichen and herself, and he answered her in monosyllables—until, all of a sudden, he noticed something over her shoulder and his face jerked into animation.

"Shuanghua?" he gasped. "Is that really it? It looks exactly like the pictures in the sword catalogues. It would be an honour to see it more closely, Xiao daozhang."

Smiling to herself, Xingchen loosened the strap that held the sheathed sword on her back, and laid it gently on the table between them. Chang Ping leaned forwards to admire the intricate snowflake patterns in the bronze-coloured scabbard, through which Shuanghua's blade shone like sunlight cutting through a blizzard. She answered his questions as well as she could without giving away her shifu's secrets, not that he seemed interested in gaining any such advantage.

When she turned their conversation back towards the massacre of almost his entire clan, Chang Ping retreated again, but he left one hand resting on the edge of the table, half-reaching out towards Shuanghua. He would be grateful for their help, he said at last. Everything they needed would be provided by the Liu family—that promise underscored by a beseeching glance at his mother-in-law—and with that, he seemed to reach an internal limit. Supporting each other, the two left Xingchen and Zichen alone in the parlour once again.

Zichen stayed only long enough in Yueyang to help her divine what they could from the remnants of resentful energy lingering in the Chang manor, and perform a final liberation of the victims' souls. Chang Ping, or whoever had aided him, had done a fairly good job of that, some weeks before. All Xingchen and Zichen could discern from the dark wisps of energy remaining was a sense of fear and injustice, as would be expected after any violent death, and a deep, disorienting confusion.

Xingchen looked back over her shoulder at the solid wooden gates, not bolted right now, but swung closed against the eyes of any townsfolk both daring and inquisitive enough to walk out to the abandoned estate, and shivered. She couldn't help imagining the Chang family and their servants beating against the wood until their hands were broken. They had been so bewildered by terror that they weren't capable of pulling the gates open.

The protective array in front of the entrance had been disrupted. That alone shouldn't have led to this disaster. It was, however, a sign that it had been provoked deliberately, by someone with knowledge of cultivation. That evening, Xingchen wrote out a list of thoughts, while Zichen organised and packed up her belongings.

Ask in Yueyang if any strangers were seen.

Ask about enmities against the Chang clan.

Who knew that Chang Ping would be away night-hunting?

Were any of the bodies especially mutilated?

"When shall we meet again?"

Caught up in her thoughts, she answered with an undignified, "Huh?"

"When and where should we plan to meet, Xingchen?" Zichen repeated. "I'd like to stay at Baixue Temple for at least two weeks, perhaps even until the summer solstice. You could join me there for the festival, if you liked."

"I'd like that," Xingchen said, her wide smile audible in her voice. She got up to rinse her brush and inkstone, calculating in her head the days till Xiazhi and the miles between here and Song Lan's home.

The guest bed was broad enough for them both to sleep comfortably, side by side. "Tell me what you'll do when you get back to Baixue Temple," she said into the soft darkness above them. "Tell me about your founder's celebration. Tell me what we'll do together at the summer solstice."

"All of that at once?" Song Lan asked.

"Yes," Xingchen said firmly. "When we meet again, I'll have to tell you everything about how I solved this mystery. You won't get a word in edgeways, so you'd better make up for it now."

"Hm. All right, then," she agreed, and Xingchen drifted off to the low tones of her friend's voice, wrapping around her like the warmest embrace.

Identifying the Chang clan's killer was not quite as much fun as she'd hoped. That is to say, not quite the challenge she'd anticipated. In such horrendous circumstances, Xiao Xingchen would have been a monster to have had fun. Still, she had to admit that, in a way, she'd looked forward to the investigation: discerning clues no one else had recognised, comparing witness testimonies to find out where they failed to match up, weaving together a narrative from a thousand discarded threads. Liberating ghosts and defeating yaoguai were the kinds of service she'd been trained for, up on her shifu's mountain, and she loved that she could perform those services when they were needed. This was something new and, it had seemed, far more interesting.

It had turned out to be far too easy. Were any strangers seen? Well, there was the young cultivator in dark but eye-catching robes, the one who wielded a sword with two blades and laughed when she terrorised street vendors. Did the Chang clan have enemies? Now that the townspeople thought about it, there used to be a street kid in Kuizhou who would spit on the name of the old Chang zongzhu at any opportunity. What was her name, Xue something?

Who knew that Chang Ping would be away night-hunting? It didn't matter—the delinquent of Kuizhou didn't seem to plan much at all, let alone the elaborate schemes Xingchen had dreamed of unravelling.

"There are lots of things in this world that happen without rhyme or reason. This is what they call an unexpected disaster!"

Xingchen wrote those words down alongside the notes she'd been keeping of her investigation, such as it was. How could this person be a cultivator with such a philosophy? Nevertheless, she wielded her sword with power no mere vagabond could equal.

In her time down here in the world, Xingchen had heard talk of demonic cultivation, cultivating with resentful energy instead of qi. It destroyed its practitioners, naturally; it had won a war between four of the so-called great sects and another one, now destroyed. The topic made her strangely bashful. She hadn't left the mountain to act as a living demonstration of the righteousness of her shifu's teaching, after all! If the grandmaster of this unorthodox cultivation was, technically, her shizhi, that didn't make hunting his imitators her responsibility.

Did it?

Before she could settle this in her mind, it became clear that Yueyang held nothing more that would aid her in tracking this particular killer. Xingchen took her leave of Liu furen, Chang Ping, and his handful of remaining disciples, and followed the trail of fights and petty vandalism that Xue Yang had left behind her, across three provinces.

The early summer had already passed, when she caught up to her. Xiazhi was still some time away, but preparations for the holiday were in progress. The fields she passed were full of farmers carrying bushels of freshly-harvested wheat, village markets were bursting with green lettuce and brightly coloured fans, and everyone she spoke to complained of headaches. Sometimes it was due to the the heat that kept them awake through the night. Sometimes it was the aggressive daylong song of the cicadas. Sometimes, it was the lingering effects of a fight with Xue Yang.

"A fan for your girl, gongzi?" called out a stallholder as she passed, before quickly correcting himself when she turned around: "A fan for your friend or your sister, xiaojie?"

Xingchen smiled, cast her eyes over his wares and then politely excused herself. A fan for her girl would have to be black, its pattern restrained but more beautiful the longer one looked at it. She designed it in her head as she walked.

If only Zichen was here with her, instead of studying under her shifu or teaching the younger disciples, or whatever else she was doing right now. It wasn't even that she was desperate for her company, or not quite yet. They'd both noticed the way that time apart, now and then, only refreshed the joy they felt on coming together again, and it was clear that not every night-hunt needed both their talents.

Something about the thought of Zichen at home, with her martial family, just wound a painful coil around her heart.

It was only a few hours before she found herself sword-to-sword with the murderer she'd been chasing for weeks. Waiting at the counter of an inn in a new town, she heard shouts from along the same street. Xingchen forgot about where she would sleep that night and ran towards the noise, to find a brawl spilling out of the wine shop on the corner like spores from a puffball. In the centre of the raucous mass was a girl younger than Xingchen, sneering and giggling by turns as she cut her way through the other patrons.

If the strange, double-bladed sword hadn't given her away, the acrid-smelling shadows that twisted through the air behind it would have told Xingchen that here was her quarry. She dived into the fray, catching Xue Yang's attention with a feint and then drawing her out onto the street. The risk of Xue Yang escaping was higher, outside of the confined space where she'd started the fight—because it must have been her who attacked first, if anything Xingchen had learned about her was accurate—but it would allow the drinkers who had been trapped inside to get away, and hopefully cause less damage.

"Xue Yang," she called out, as soon as they could see one another's faces. "I know what you did in Yueyang. Surrender now, and you'll face justice for your crimes—if you keep fighting, things will only go worse for you."

"That's an awfully tempting offer, daozhang," said the girl. She flipped herself upwards and back, onto the awning over the wine shop's front windows. The street was emptying, now, but Xingchen was aware of every passerby who still stood in the street, curious and vulnerable. "Maybe you could explain to me just what you mean by 'worse'? I'm not terribly knowledgeable about such things, you see."

Shuanghua whipped out to the side, almost without Xingchen intending to move, and the scream of metal told her she'd knocked away her opponent's sword in midair. No more talking, she decided. Anything this delinquent wanted to say to her could be said just as well with her bound in ropes.

Stepping lightly from the ground onto a flower pot and into the air, she kicked away off a decorative pillar and onto the roof of a carriage at the side of the street. Xue Yang sprang away and then back towards her a moment later—the lanterns hanging off the ends of the awning were flung into the air like drops of water from a blade of grass. Her qinggong was just as agile as Xingchen's, but she was making no effort to get away. The excitement of the fight had snared her.

They were on a rooftop, blades clashing and Shuanghua's sword glare irradiating the night, when the angle of the girl's sharp cheekbone and her hair, whipping across it, brought a memory up before Xingchen's eyes.

"Chengmei—Xue Chengmei?" An unforgettable name for somebody so violent but, yes, so beautiful.

"And what's it to you?" Xue Chengmei spat back. Her eyes were wilder even than a moment ago. "Which one were you, daozhang? The bright moon, the gentle breeze?" She sliced downwards with her sword, but she'd aimed badly; her balance was off, her boot sliding against the tiles.

Xingchen pressed her advantage, bullying forwards with Shuanghua almost at Xue Chengmei's throat.

"Or was it the distant snow, the cold—"

She was suddenly gone, a gasp cutting off the end of her taunt. From beneath came the sound of a body hitting the ground.

When Xingchen looked cautiously down, she saw the girl's dark figure outlined against the dirt, facedown and struggling. An even darker shape was hunched over her, pressing her down relentlessly. It shifted—a pale oval appeared, turned upwards towards her.

"Thank you for distracting her," it said in Zichen's dry voice.

"What are you doing here?" Xingchen asked, floating down to her friend's side. "I thought you'd still be at Baixue Temple, with all your shijie and shimei." She picked up Zichen's horsetail whisk from where it had been dropped, after she'd used it to tug Xue Chengmei down from the roof, and stroked the hairs back in order while she waited for Zichen to finish tying her up.

"We heard news from visitors to the Temple, of your pursuit of her. I thought you might welcome help."

"I do. Thank you, Zichen." Xingchen dusted off the whisk's handle with her sleeve and passed it to its owner, watching while she wiped it again, more fastidiously.

"You'll get no thanks from me, you uptight prigs," Xue Chengmei grumbled into the mud.

Zichen yanked her mostly upright by the ropes around her upper body. "Do you have a room?" she asked Xingchen.

Now that the fight was over, the street was filling up again. A heavyset man was approaching them from the wine shop, and Xingchen wasn't in a mood to accept either thanks or a bill.

She led them back to the inn where she'd stopped earlier. In her short experience, reactions to two cultivators with magnificent swords entering an establishment were sharply divided: business owners either assumed they were here to cause trouble, or hoped they'd be able to contain any that broke out independently. Improbably, despite the fact that the two of them were escorting a bloody-nosed, dirt-smeared captive, the innkeeper here welcomed them in.

"Where should we take her?" Xingchen asked, once they'd drunk a pot of tea and she'd given Zichen a skeleton of their time apart. "There's no point returning her to Yueyang. What's left of the Chang clan is in no position to carry out justice."

Her friend considered the question seriously. "There's a cultivation conference at Jinlin Tai this month. Perhaps it would be most efficient to ask the gathered sects to try her there."

"At Jinlin Tai? Do you really think that?"

Zichen couldn't meet her eyes for long. "It wouldn't be my first choice. But it is close by."

From the end of the bed, where Xue Chengmei had been secured, came the sound of boots kicking out at whatever was in reach. " Not fucking Lanling!" she snapped. "Send me anywhere, I don't give a shit, but not to the poxy Jin, all right?"

"Stop that, or I'll gag you," said Zichen.

"Fuck off," she replied, so Zichen found a length of cloth to use as a gag, and then she blew out the candles too, but the two daozhang kept up their discussion in whispers.

"I'm sure even Jin… Jin xiandu can be relied upon to serve justice, in such a clear case." Zichen's voice would have sounded even enough, to someone who didn't know her, but Xingchen could hear the strain in it, and feel the tension in her muscles through the sheet that covered them both.

"She's barely grown," Xingchen said. "Just a girl, even if she is a killer and a demonic cultivator." She wasn't used to hinting at things or making implications, and suddenly that seemed like a skill she should have learned—if not up on the mountain, then not too long after she came down from it.

"Does that make a difference?"

"She said she didn't want to go back there." Xingchen sucked on her lower lip, not even sure exactly what she was worried about. All she knew was that there was something there. Now that it had been left unacknowledged between her and Zichen for so long, since the banquet that had only been boring for her, and something else for her friend, perhaps it was too late to talk about it at all.

"It's a ruse," Zichen said tightly. "She hopes to trick us into taking her to Jinlin Tai, thinking that a former guest disciple will get better treatment, but her crimes are too severe for that to make a difference now."

In the stuffy air of a closed-up room sheltering three people, Xingchen could hear little irregular huffs of breath, like somebody trying to stifle their sobs. Was that a ruse as well?

"We know Lianfang zun was minding Xue Chengmei," she tried, one last time. "Do you think Jin zongzhu was also—aware of her, while she was a guest at Jinlin Tai?"

The breathing from the floor stilled entirely. So did Zichen's. A moment later, she shuddered so hard the bedframe creaked.

"Enough!" The word was forced out through her teeth.

They took her to Qinghe, in the end, to the Unclean Realm, where Nie zongzhu swore he would have her executed by the new moon.

Chang Ping wept when Xingchen told him the news. She looked away, to give him the barest scrap of privacy, and imagined losing the disciples of the sect they hadn't even founded, yet.

Later on, Xingchen learned that Xue Chengmei had spent only days in the Unclean Realm's impenetrable dungeons. She was stolen away before the executioner had even thought of sharpening his sabre.

The cultivation world gossiped to no end about where Xue Chengmei would end up, but it didn't make a difference to Xingchen or to Zichen, because Xue Chengmei found Baixue Temple first.

Baoshan Sanren's celestial mountain was tall enough, and the sea of clouds that lapped at its flanks most days thick enough, that there was no way to look out from it and say, here I am, this many miles from Gusu and that many miles from Qishan. Perhaps it would have been different if Song Lan had climbed up there herself, one step after another up narrow trails and along the edges of cliffs, but she hadn't been capable of making that journey. Instead, she'd been carried in Xiao Xingchen's arms, shivering with what might have been infection or might have been the wind rushing past them as Shuanghua cleaved the cold air, faster than Song Lan had ever travelled before. Perhaps it had just been the constant intrusion of another body against hers that made her shake so much.

Once on the mountain, things had not improved. Worse than the firm touch of a dear friend by far were the hands of strangers, guiding her to eat, bathe and dress herself. Fighting them off during those tasks at least won her temporary respite. Trying to struggle free when Xiao Xingchen's shifu ran her cool, hard fingertips over Song Lan's wounded face brought nothing but pain. They strapped her down to the bed, once, so that Baoshan Sanren could press on the stinking remains of her eyeballs, and she panted for air like a horse ridden into exhaustion, her lips flecked with foam just the same way.

After a while of this, she felt a curious effect, something like jumping from a sun-warmed river bank into the freezing water. Just as rapidly, her face seemed not to belong to her any more. The squeezing and dragging of the treatment were far away, irrelevant, and at last she could stop screaming, so she did.

When Xiao Xingchen knocked on the doorframe of her room that evening, Song Lan was kneeling at the low table, Fuxue across her legs. She didn't quite dare to unsheathe and clean it, yet, but just holding it gave her some comfort.

"Xingchen?" she asked.

"It's me." Instead of light footsteps, the next sounds Song Lan heard were Xiao Xingchen's knees hitting the floorboards, and then the sudden knock of her forehead against the wood. "Zichen," she said, muffled, "I am sorry. I can never make it right, I know I can't."

Song Lan said nothing. After a while, she imagined she could hear tears rolling off Xiao Xingchen's eyelashes and onto the floor. She sat still for a while longer.

"Xue Chengmei slaughtered everyone in my temple," she said, then. She hadn't been able to say that out loud until now, until falling into that strange cold river.

"Yes."

"She murdered my family and she ruined my eyes."

"I know."

"She escaped from the Unclean Realm, and she was there because you argued against taking her to Jinlin Tai. You—you made it impossible for me to argue against you."

"Yes, but I—" Xiao Xingchen swallowed, let her head fall down against the floorboards again. "Yes."

More time passed. Song Lan couldn't track it by the shadows any longer, only by the stiffness in her legs from sitting still and waiting for Xiao Xingchen to speak or walk away.

At last: "Zichen, my shifu is going to heal your sight. I spoke to her tonight. There is a method only she can perform. She needed to make sure of it before she could begin, and now she's certain it will work."

"I don't want your shifu! I want mine!" Song Lan cried out. She doubled over at the pain that rushed up alongside her tears. Through a mouthful of blood, she shouted, "Let her heal me, she might as well! But after this, you and I need never see each other again. Do you understand, Xiao Xingchen?"

The healing process worked faster than she would ever have dreamed. Within days, Song Lan could walk around the little house she had been placed in and handle her own chopsticks, even by candlelight. Reading still gave her a headache, and there were other odd effects: she had the impression that the colours of the world had shifted slightly, just a little bit greener and brighter than she remembered them. The needles of distant pine trees seemed sharper than they used to be; holding her fingers up to her face, she saw the ridges in less detail.

All that was merely a matter of adjustment. What was important was that Song Lan could see again.

Half a month after the treatment, Baoshan Sanren deemed her fit to walk around the mountainside by herself, should she want to, and one more month later, she was allowed to train with the immortal's disciples. Had Song Lan considered herself skilled with the blade before this? After sparring with any of the other cultivators on the mountain, even the children, she found herself out of breath and frustrated with her poor condition—but not so frustrated that she would pass up the opportunity to learn more of their unusual sword forms.

So this was how Xingchen learned to be so swift, she thought once, fighting amidst the pine trees against a white-bearded disciple who was still as flexible and strong as a twenty-year-old man. Then she remembered that Xingchen had left her here at her own request, and her hand started shaking so much she could barely hold her whisk. Fuxue remained steady in her grip, more thanks to the sword's prowess than her own. Nonetheless, her opponent's eyes sharpened. He drew himself up straight and then bowed to end their bout.

There was a small mirror in her room. When she first discovered it, she hid it away in a chest, and when she turned it up again, looking for a needle and thread, she left it on the table with its reflective face turned down.

One night, indulging in a rare crying fit and hoping for another knife to twist in her own heart, Song Lan snatched up the mirror and faced herself in it. Disappointingly, she was not scarred beyond recognition. Her straight brow and pale cheeks held the same lines they always had, if sadder than before. Even her eyelids, though swollen from rubbing and saltwater, were smooth; the burnt skin had fallen away and left no traces behind it.

The only difference she could see was that her irises were far darker than she remembered. It was most likely an effect of the herbs they had packed under her bandages in the first days of healing, she supposed.

When the autumn nights began to draw in, mistier and earlier each day, Song Lan received an invitation to drink tea with Baoshan Sanren herself after dinner. It was anticlimactic, the first time: a pot of fine white tea shared between them, with only greetings and good-nights to accompany it. Song Lan retreated to her room and slept earlier, and more deeply, than usual. The summons came again after that, though, and then more frequently. By the winter solstice, she came to the immortal's house every fourth evening, and their exchanges were tentatively growing into real conversations.

Baoshan Sanren was as adamant as Xiao Xingchen had always claimed in her rule of keeping the conflicts of the world away from her mountain school. She seemed interested in Song Lan's principles, though. How did a cultivator who believed in such ideals move through society without compromising them, she wondered. Song Lan stuttered and hesitated, at first. Had she and Xiao Xingchen really managed that, or had they fallen at the first stumbling block?

Xiao Xingchen's shifu was sharper and more learned than any other teacher Song Lan had debated with (all of them were dead, she remembered, her mouth flooding with bitterness), but after a while, Song Lan began to sense the emotion she hid behind her searching questions and elegantly-phrased insights. It was fear.

"You know," Baoshan Sanren said at the end of one evening's debate, "I withdrew to cultivate here, and to teach, because I couldn't understand the human world, and I didn't want to understand it. I couldn't trust the world, and I'd given up wanting to trust it." She sighed. "When Xingchen came to take her final leave from me—or what she vowed would be her final leave—I told her that, and she replied, 'Shifu, I will understand the world for you.' I believe she thought it would be easy."

Song Lan bowed her head, uncertain of how to respond, and the immortal rose gracefully to her feet. It was Yushui, and an arrow of wild geese shot through the sky outside, far above the patched-together clouds.

"Forgive me, I'm being sentimental," Baoshan Sanren said. "It's only that it's hard not to remember her when we talk about these matters, and you look up at me with the very same eyes in a different face."

The room around Song Lan lurched to the side without warning. Was she swaying, or was it just that she was being tipped into that coldest of rivers again, into that separation from her own face and body? She gasped as if afraid of drowning.

"Honoured immortal," Song Lan whispered through lips that did not curve as they should, "please explain to me how you healed my sight."

The valley where the town was built was overshadowed by crooked, dark-faced mountains: nowhere near as majestic as the celestial mountain where Song Lan had lived a year of her life, only tall enough to block healthy winds from sweeping the air of the valley clean. In their place, noisome mists wound up from the damp earth. The flow of qi through the landscape was tangled, the inhabitants stooped and congested-looking. Song Lan strode through the streets like an apparition from another world. Cultivators were rare here, she knew, but the passers-by seemed uninterested in her. Perhaps they didn't dare to meet her gaze.

It wasn't even inside the town that she found her old friend, but in the courtyard of a shabby house outside the town wall. Through the half-open gate, she saw her clearly: Xiao Xingchen was dressed in greys that might once have been white, with a bandage masking her empty eye sockets from view. She was giggling like a child at a festival, and she was sitting on a coffin.

"How dare you trick me?" Xiao Xingchen asked, between bouts of laughter. "How could you exploit the fact that I can't see?"

"When you're so easy to fool, how could I not?" replied another voice, one that scratched at Song Lan's memory. A whirl of robes, dark grey and gold, spun into view in the gap through which Song Lan watched. Somebody leaned down to kiss Xiao Xingchen, their black hair raining down over her faded old clothes, and Xiao Xingchen's arms came up around their waist—casual, comforting, loving.

"All right, I'm going," said the familiar-unfamiliar voice. Grabbing a basket and spinning it up into the air, Xiao Xingchen's lover walked out of their courtyard.

Through sheer luck, Song Lan didn't fully faint as Xue Chengmei, Xue Yang, delinquent of Kuizhou and exterminator of sects, passed her by. If she'd slumped to the ground or slammed her head against the gatepost, it would have meant her death for sure. Instead, her blood rebelled just enough at the sight that she wavered backwards, into the shadow of the wall. Xue Chengmei was too relaxed to notice the righteous cultivator surveying her lair. Swinging her basket, perhaps savouring Xiao Xingchen's kiss, she loped off to the market.

Song Lan's heart pounded in her chest. A single wave of sweat poured down her face and then ceased. Her eyes burned in their sockets, worse than they had done for years, since she'd discovered whose eyes they really were. Slowly, she let herself slide down the wall to the ground, to bury her head between her knees.

A door rattled, somewhere inside the run-down house.

Dancing steps and the crisp knock, knock of a bamboo pole rang through the courtyard, and a young girl's voice called, "Daozhang!"

"I'm here, A-Qing," said Xingchen. Her giggles had died down, leaving only a satisfied warmth in her voice.

"Daozhang," the girl singsonged, "why do you let her treat you that way? She just makes fun of you all the time. It's not nice."

"Well… our friend might not seem nice," Xingchen answered, "but didn't you hear, just now, that she went to the market for us anyway? Even though she won our bet." A chuckle slipped out through Xingchen's self-control.

"She went because she had to. You should have forced her to go if she really tried to stay at home! You have a sword, daozhang. That would have shown her!"

"A-Qing, A-Qing." There was a soft noise, and then a louder clunking sound: Xingchen had patted the coffin lid beside her to invite the girl to sit down. "You know, most people will do the right thing of their own accord, if they only find out what it is. And as for our friend… I really think she would do anything for me. For both of us."

Song Lan crouched by the gatepost until the white clouds above the valley had dimmed into a deep grey, and then she left. I'll come back, she promised herself. When I know what to do, I'll come back for her. How long that would take her, she couldn't guess at all.