Heaven's Bound: The Rise Of The Infernal Sage

Chapter 4

Jian Lei's POV

"Run," Mei Lin'er breathed, and we ran.

We cut off the main path into the treeline, branches whipping at my arms, the voices behind us shouting now, Elder Fang's among them, high and cracking with excitement like he'd just won something instead of selling me. I didn't look back. Looking back never made legs move faster, Sun Hao used to say that about deer fleeing wolves, and right then I understood exactly what he meant.

"This way," Mei Lin'er hissed, pulling me hard to the left where the ground dropped toward the ravine. "If we stay on the main trail they'll catch us before we reach the falls."

"You know these woods better in the dark than I thought," I said, breathless.

"There's a lot you don't know," she said, and something in her voice made me glance at her even as we ran.

We didn't stop moving until the shouting behind us faded into the general noise of the forest at night, crickets and wind and our own ragged breathing. Mei Lin'er finally slowed near a fallen log, resting one hand against the bark, chest heaving.

"They'll search the falls path first," she said. "Elder Sun knows that. He'll take the long way around through the goat trail."

"How do you know that," I said.

"Because that's what I would do," she said, "and because your Elder Sun taught me a few things too, back when I was small enough that nobody thought it mattered what he taught me."

That stopped me cold. "He taught you something. What."

She hesitated, and in that hesitation I saw something I'd never seen on her face before, not fear exactly, but the particular strain of someone who's carried a secret so long it's grown heavier than she expected.

"Not now," she said. "We need to keep moving."

"Mei Lin'er." I caught her wrist before she could turn away. "Men just said they don't need the rest of me to be useful. I think 'not now' stopped being a good enough answer about an hour ago."

She looked at my hand on her wrist, then up at my face, and something in her seemed to give way all at once.

"My grandmother has been acting strange since the riders were first spotted near the pass," she said. "Not tonight, before tonight. Days ago. She started sleeping with her door barred. She stopped letting me help with the morning offerings at the shrine, which she's never done in my whole life. And three nights ago I saw her holding something in the firelight, something small and green, and when she noticed me watching she hid it so fast she nearly burned her own hand doing it."

"What kind of something," I said.

"A jade token," Mei Lin'er said. "Old. Carved with symbols I didn't recognize. I asked her about it the next morning and she told me I'd imagined it, that there was nothing to see, and she's never lied to me about anything in nineteen years, Jian Lei. Not once. Until that morning."

My mind was racing faster than my legs had been a minute ago. "Sun Hao said tonight that there are techniques older than the sects. Things people were never supposed to learn. If your grandmother has something like that hidden away—"

"I know," Mei Lin'er said, cutting me off, and I realized she'd already put the pieces together long before I had. "I've known something was wrong for days and I didn't say anything because I didn't want to believe my own grandmother was keeping something from me that might be connected to whatever's happening to you."

"You think they're connected."

"I think," she said slowly, "that a jade token my grandmother hides like her life depends on it, and a mark on your shoulder that grown men are willing to hurt you over, showed up as urgent secrets in the same handful of days. I don't believe in that kind of coincidence."

Somewhere behind us, distant but not distant enough, a horn sounded again, three short blasts this time instead of the long ones from earlier. A different signal. A closer one.

Mei Lin'er's head snapped toward the sound. "That's not Elder Fang's group."

"How do you know?"

"Because that's the signal my grandmother taught me as a child," she said, voice gone tight with something between fear and disbelief. "For when the shrine needs defending."

I stared at her. "Your grandmother is out here."

"My grandmother," Mei Lin'er said, already turning to run toward the sound instead of away from it, "just told the entire forest exactly where we are."