"I'm going," he muttered. "I can even buy a motorcycle." There it was, a glossy black picture of it, chrome gleaming, under a price tag of 30,000 taels. He scrolled down. "Wait. There are tanks?!"
A tank. An actual tank, olive-green and squat and bristling, 5,000,000 taels.
He stared at it for a second, then laughed weakly and scrolled away. Sky-high prices. With the money he had right now, he could not even afford the tank's paint.
Got to make more money, he thought. Tsk, tsk.
He went back to the firecrackers.
They were the old-fashioned kind, the kind he remembered from New Year's when he was a boy—long strings of small red paper tubes, braided together by their fuses, a hundred or more in a string. 10 taels per string. It was a ridiculous price for firecrackers. But he thought about it: in a world that had never heard of gunpowder in this form, a string of firecrackers going off at once would sound like the sky splitting open. If I run into a wild beast or something, the noise should be enough to scare it off.
He bought three strings, and a cheap plastic lighter.
Whistle—thok. The little wooden box dropped onto the path ahead of him. He scooped it up without breaking stride, tucked the red strings into his sleeve, and closed his fist around the lighter.
Deng. Deng. Deng.
He heard the hoofbeats.
They came from ahead and behind at once.
Riders, coming fast down the narrow lane from both ends, hooves drumming on the hard-baked earth, raising twin clouds of dust that rolled toward him between the high mud-brick walls. He spun around, then back. A dozen of them—no, more. Big men on shaggy, wild-eyed horses, wearing ragged vests and cloaks of animal skin, wolf and boar and bear, the fur matted and stinking. Their faces were wrapped in strips of dirty cloth, leaving only their eyes. Every one of them carried a blade.
They reined in and blocked the lane completely, front and back, a wall of horseflesh and fur and steel.
Li Yuguo stood alone in the middle.
"How is this possible?" he said aloud. "How can there be horse thieves inside Nalan City?!"
The lead rider nudged his horse a few steps forward. He was the biggest of them, broad as a door, with a bearskin over his shoulders and a long, heavy blade slung across his back. Above the cloth over his face, his eyes were small and pale and amused.
"Ah, it's Lord Yuguo," he said. His voice was thick with mockery. "My apologies. Somebody has bought your life. So please—die here, would you?"
Li Yuguo looked around, fast, his eyes darting from rider to rider, from the high walls to the dry ditch to the waste ground at the end of the lane. No way out. The walls were too high to climb. He gritted his teeth.
"Who?" he demanded. "Who wants my life?"
"Dead men don't need to know so much." The leader laughed and raised his hand. "Brothers! Get rid of this King of Soft Rice for me!"
The horse thieves rushed at him.
The first one off his horse came at him on foot, a big man with a boar's-head hood and a curved butcher's blade, roaring as he charged.
Li Yuguo did not think.
His body moved on its own—not the soft, cowering, practiced flinch of yesterday, but something older and deeper that had been sleeping in the muscles all this time. His feet slid apart into a stance. His knees bent. His left fist came up and his right fist drew back to his hip, and his mouth opened, and the name of the technique came out of it in a shout, the way it had come out of his father's mouth on a training ground long ago.
"Pao Fist!"
It was nothing special. He knew that. The Cannon Fist was the most ordinary boxing technique of the Li family—the first thing a child was taught, an entry-level external skill, only fine grade. The original Li Yuguo had learned it as a boy without much effort and then forgotten it.
But the body had not forgotten.
And now the body had the Lieyang Shenjian burning in it.
The boar-hooded man's blade came down. Li Yuguo slipped sideways—fast, faster than he had known he could move—and let the blade hiss past his shoulder. He stepped inside the man's swing. Ducked under his elbow. And with all the fierce red heat in his belly rushing up through his chest and down his arm in a single blazing surge, he drove his right fist into the center of the man's chest.
BOOM.
It did not sound like a punch. It sounded like a cannon.
The horse thief left the ground. He flew backward through the air with his arms flung wide, his blade spinning away, and slammed spine-first into the trunk of one of the dusty trees that leaned over the wall—and the tree broke. The trunk cracked straight across the middle with a sound like a whip, and the top half came crashing down over the wall in an explosion of gray leaves, and the man slid down the splintered stump and lay still.
Silence.
Every horse thief in the lane froze.
Li Yuguo looked down at his own fist. It was trembling. The knuckles were red and stinging, and the fierce heat of the Lieyang Shenjian was still crackling across them like sparks off a whetstone.
Did I do that?
"How—" The leader's voice had lost all its amusement. "How have you reached Martial Teacher?! Aren't you supposed to be a waste who can't even become a Martial Warrior? Damn it!"
"Boss!" One of the riders beside him had gone pale above his face-cloth. "What's going on? The information was wrong!"
The leader ground his teeth so hard that Li Yuguo could hear it. "Damn it! That bastard set me up! If I'd known Li Yuguo was a Martial Teacher, I'd have brought twice as many men—" He spat. "Bah! Forget it! All of you go together! You have to kill this kid for me!"
Li Yuguo's eyes narrowed.
"So you were hired," he said coldly. "Who's trying to kill me?"
"Go to hell!"
The leader came off his horse in one heavy leap, and his blade came free of its sheath on his back.
It was a machete—huge, broad, gold-backed, with a row of heavy copper rings strung along its spine that jangled as it moved. It came down at Li Yuguo's head like a falling door.
And Li Yuguo, drunk on his own strength, did the stupidest thing he could possibly have done.
He blew on his fist, and without a word, he punched the blade.
CLANG!
The sound was enormous. It slammed off the mud-brick walls and rang in his skull. The machete's edge folded—the steel curling back on itself like a leaf in a fire, the copper rings jangling wildly. The leader staggered backward with both arms numb to the shoulder.
And Li Yuguo's fist split open.
He felt it a moment later: a white-hot, tearing pain across his knuckles, and the hot wetness of blood welling up and running down between his fingers. The skin had burst. He was almost sure a bone had cracked. He clutched the hand to his chest and hissed through his teeth.
Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Even if it's an ordinary blade, it's still a blade. What kind of idiot punches a machete with his bare hand? You're a Martial Teacher, not a Martial King—
The leader was cursing. His hands and mouth had gone numb, and his eyes were bulging with fury. "Get on him!" he roared at his men. "All of you! Ride him down!"
The riders spurred their horses.
They came at him from both ends of the lane at once, a thunder of hooves, a wall of horseflesh, the big wild-eyed beasts snorting and foaming.
Li Yuguo backed up fast, his torn hand pressed to his chest.
He could fight men. He knew that now. Against a man on foot, he had the strength. But a charging horse was a thousand pounds of bone and muscle and iron-shod hooves, and his body—a Martial Teacher for all of half a morning—could not stand against that. He would be trampled into the dirt like a dropped rice cake.
His good hand was already in his sleeve.
He pulled out a string of firecrackers, flicked the cheap plastic lighter—once, twice, come on—and on the third try a little yellow flame sprang up, and he touched it to the fuse and threw the whole crackling red string straight down into the dirt in front of the lead horses.
The horse thieves stared at it. None of them had ever seen anything like it. Some of them actually slowed down, peering.
Pa! Pa-pa-pa-PA-PA-PA-PA—
The string went off like a war.
In that narrow lane, between those high walls, the noise was unbelievable. It cracked and banged and echoed back on itself until it sounded like a hundred men firing a hundred muskets at once, and the air filled with red paper and sparks and a choking cloud of gray-white smoke that stank of sulfur—that smell, that smell he knew from Lord Yama's hall.
The horses went mad.
The two in front reared straight up, screaming, hooves pawing the air. Their riders clawed at their manes. Then the beasts came down and bolted—in two different directions, blind with terror, straight into the smoke. One of them galloped headlong into a great jagged rock on the waste ground at the end of the lane, and the rider flew over its neck and struck the rock headfirst with a sound Li Yuguo would hear in his dreams. The other veered off the path and plunged down the steep bank of the dry irrigation ditch, and horse and rider went over together in a tangle of legs, and only the horse got up again.
Two men dead.
Just like that.
The rest of the horse thieves had reined in hard, their own mounts wheeling and shying, fighting the bits. They stared at the drifting smoke, at the scattered red paper, at the two still shapes in the dust. Above their face-cloths, their eyes were wide and white.
"How—" The leader's voice came out cracked. "How can you still do magic?! Damn you!" He pointed his ruined, curled machete at Li Yuguo. "You'll pay for the lives of my two brothers!"
"Come on, then!" Li Yuguo pulled out the second string of firecrackers and held up the lighter. His torn hand was dripping blood onto the dust, and his voice shook, but he did not step back. "Come and hurt each other! Let's see whose life gets paid for!"
The leader looked at the red string in his hand.
Li Yuguo could see him thinking. In truth, firecrackers were not dangerous—they were nothing like real bombs, nothing like the weapons he had written in his novel. A string of them could barely singe a man's beard. But the horse thieves did not know that. They had just watched a little red string explode like the wrath of heaven and kill two men without touching them. And against horses, it was obviously, devastatingly effective.
The leader was afraid of it. Li Yuguo could see that he was afraid.
"Brothers," the leader said at last, hoarsely. "We withdraw."
The riders turned to him.
"It's five hundred taels of silver." He spat into the dust. "We don't need to lose any more men over five hundred taels. We'll go and find the bastard who sold us bad information and get our justice from him—"
He never finished the sentence.
Because there was a figure standing on top of the warehouse wall.
Li Yuguo looked up, and his heart leapt.
"Brother Yunfan!"
The King of Thieves stood on the narrow ridge of the mud-brick wall as easily as if it were a road, his ragged cloak hanging still in the windless noon, his family's sword in its plain black scabbard on his back. His one eye was looking down at the horse thieves in the lane, and his scarred face was completely without expression.
"Benefactor," he said, "I'm one step too late. Please forgive me." His hand moved to his shoulder and closed around the hilt of his sword. "But leave all these scoundrels to me."
He jumped.
Li Yuguo did not see him land. There was a blur—a flicker of gray cloak against the white sky, like a ray of light glancing off water—and then Guan Yunfan was simply in the lane, in the middle of the horse thieves, and the long blade was out.
Shhhk.
Shhhk. Shhhk. Shhhk.
It was over in less than a breath.
One by one, the horse thieves fell. They did not cry out. They did not have time. They simply folded off their horses and dropped into the dust, one after another, like grain falling before a scythe, and their horses ran off riderless down the lane. Li Yuguo had written fight scenes for Guan Yunfan. He had written breathless paragraphs about his speed, his precision, the way his blade moved faster than the eye could follow. None of it had come close.
When it was done, only one man was still alive.
The leader knelt in the dust in the middle of the lane, his ruined machete lying beside him, his bearskin cloak torn half off his shoulders. The face-cloth had been cut away, revealing a broad, brutish, sweating face. And resting on the side of his neck, so lightly it barely dented the skin, was the edge of Guan Yunfan's sword.
"Who," said the King of Thieves coldly, "asked you to attack Yuguo? Say everything."
"It—it's—" The leader's eyes rolled toward Li Yuguo, then back up to the blade. His voice cracked. "It's Li Yutang!"
Li Yuguo's teeth clenched.
"Li Yutang," he hissed. "It really is him."
"It seems," said Guan Yunfan, "that there's still a great deal of trouble around my benefactor."
Li Yuguo walked over, cradling his bloody fist. He looked down at the kneeling man. "What does Li Yutang have to do with the horse thieves outside the city?"
"What—more than that—" The leader's words came tumbling out in a desperate rush. "Every harvest day, he sends word to us! Tells us which merchants are on the road, which villages have brought in their grain, and we go out and plunder them. We split it half and half. He takes good care of our business, he does—and he—" The man swallowed hard. "He likes the city lord. Nalan Meng. He wants her. He's always treated you as a thorn in his eye. And last night—last night he came to us and said you'd been acting a little strange lately. Said he was worried you might do something to spoil things. So he told us to take you out. We were forced to—we were forced to help—"
"Finished?" said Guan Yunfan.
The leader's lips twisted into a desperate, pleading grin. "I've said everything! Everything! Now please—spare my—"
He never got to say life.
The King of Thieves' sword moved.
It was one stroke, clean and quick and almost gentle, and the leader's head left his shoulders and flew up into the white sky, turning slowly over and over in the sunlight. A great hot jet of blood sprayed out of the stump of his neck—and splashed across Li Yuguo's face.
He felt it hit him. Hot. Wet. Thick. It ran down his cheek and over his lips, salty and metallic on his tongue, and dripped off his chin onto the front of his robe. The head came down somewhere behind him with a soft thump. The body knelt there for a moment longer, upright, as if it were still waiting for an answer. Then it toppled over sideways into the dust.
Li Yuguo stood absolutely still.
He had written a thousand deaths. He had written heads flying and blood spraying and bodies falling. He had always thought of them as beats—the end of a fight, a moment of satisfaction for the reader, a full stop on the page.
He had never felt one land on his face.
Guan Yunfan flicked the blood from his sword with one sharp snap of his wrist and slid it back into its scabbard. He looked at Li Yuguo's blood-spattered face without apology. His one eye was flat and calm and cold.
"If we let him go," the King of Thieves said, "he would definitely run and tip off Li Yutang." He glanced down the long silent lane toward the city, toward the north, toward the City Lord's Mansion. "It would be better for us not to stop here, benefactor. Let us go and kill Li Yutang as well."