Heaven’s Trash: I Devour Everything

Chapter 5: Black Crow

Azure Peak City was awake and shouting with joy.

Red silk banners hung from every rooftop. Lanterns lined the cobbles though it was morning. Merchants bawled their prices twice as loud as usual, because caravans choked every road and the richest cultivators on the continent had come to watch a golden saint marry a Frost Moon beauty. Fourteen days to the Great Alliance Feast, and the city had already lost its head.

Everywhere Leo looked, someone was selling the wedding. Paper effigies of the Saint Son and his bride grinned from the shop windows. Street singers bellowed ballads about golden light and frost-white silk. A betting stall outside the south gate took odds on how many sects would send envoys, and the biggest crowd stood in front of a painted board listing the gifts the Sun-God Sect had promised every guest. Hardly anyone was reading it for the gifts. It was the nearest thing to a promise most of them had ever been offered, and they wanted badly to believe it.

Leo stood at the south gate in a black mask and a patched traveler’s cloak. He’d been gone twenty-six days and had put on fifteen pounds of muscle. He hardly knew himself in the water barrels. Nobody else would.

“Name?” the gate guard asked, not looking up.

“Black Crow.”

The man scratched it down. “Foundation Establishment, eh? Rogue? Good timing. Wedding caravans are paying triple for guards.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Try the Mercenary Hall.”

Leo walked into the city that had spat him out. He’d half expected to feel something. He felt a cold, clear attention instead, and used it. He mapped the guard rotations. He counted the Sun-God banners hung over the gates of the Bai Clan and noticed that the townsfolk didn’t look at them. For one long breath he stared at the roofline of his father’s courtyard.

Not yet, said Bai Yuan.

“I know.”

Also, every third shopkeeper is wearing a red thread on his wrist.

Leo’s eyes sharpened. He saw them now, thin crimson cords tied tight on bakers and tea sellers and street sweepers.

Hostages, said Bai Yuan. The thread is a ritual tether. They aren’t Blood Ghost. They’re the meal.

Leo’s hands curled at his sides, and he kept walking.

He made himself breathe through it. He’d learned in the Abyss what happened when he swallowed anger too fast, so he did what Bai Yuan had taught him to do with everything else. He turned it over and set it aside to refine. A baker went by with a tray of sesame cakes and a red thread at his wrist, and his eyes met Leo’s for half a second, tired and polite and with no idea he was bait. Leo nodded to him. It was all he could do for now.

The Mercenary Hall was a cavernous barn full of rough men and wooden notice boards. Leo tore down one contract: escort duty for a gift caravan bound for the Mei residence. The caravan captain, a scarred woman named Gu, looked him over and grunted.

“You’re quiet.”

“I’m paid not to talk.”

“Good. Last three hired mouths ran off with a crate of silk.” She jerked her chin at the carts. “Stand by the third. Anything attacks, hit it.”

She counted out his deposit in silver, bit one coin, and tossed him a gray armband stitched with the caravan’s mark. “Curfew is the third bell inside the Sun Quarter. After that, anything on the street without a Sun-God badge gets questioned first and asked its business second. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“You don’t look scared of much, Crow.”

“I’m scared of plenty,” Leo said. It was even true, though not of anything she’d have guessed.

By noon he was walking beside a line of mule carts through the market, wedding silk and spirit-jade piled under oilcloth, and no one gave the silent mercenary a second look.

The route ran through the Sun Quarter, where the streets widened and the roofs turned gold, and a disciple in a sun-badged robe stood in every third doorway, watching the caravan with bored, practiced suspicion. Leo kept his head down and his pulse slow. He counted threads as he passed. Eleven on one street. Nineteen on the next. A girl selling flower garlands had one tied around her ankle, half hidden by her skirt, and when she smiled at him his stomach turned over, because the smile was so bright.

Don’t, said Bai Yuan. Not yet. Pull one thread and you tell the whole tapestry you’re here.

He felt her before he saw her.

Mei Ling stood at a jewelry stall across the street, hemmed in by nervous attendants. She wore pale blue silk. Her hair was pinned up under a crown of silver. She looked as flawless as the day she’d ground their engagement under her heel, and he didn’t know her at all.

She picked up a string of spirit stones and put it down without looking at it. A small maid trailed behind, clutching parcels.

“Miss, are you well? You’ve been quiet all morning.”

Mei Ling’s hand stopped. “Do you ever feel that something’s wrong,” she said, “even when everything looks perfect?”

“Wedding nerves, miss. Anyone would be nervous, marrying into the Sun-God Sect.”

“Long Chen is powerful. Respected. It protects my clan, this—” She cut herself off. Her voice dropped. “But lately I wake in the night sure that something is watching me through the walls.”

“You shouldn’t say such things in public, miss.”

“No. I know.” Mei Ling straightened, and the noble lady settled back over her face. “It doesn’t matter how I feel. Power is what keeps us safe. Everything else is weakness.”

Leo’s fingers tightened on his sword hilt.

He’d known she would be here. He hadn’t known what it would do to watch her breathe. She held her shoulders square and unbending, the way she always had. Someone had told her long ago that a straight back was the only armor a girl could count on, and she’d believed them. Her sleeve slipped as she reached for a hairpin, and for a second Leo saw a thin line of gold at her wrist, finer than any bracelet, where no jewelry should have been. It set his teeth on edge. Then the silk fell back and she was only a bride again, picking through silver.

Her eyes drifted across the street and found him, a masked mercenary in a patched cloak. For a heartbeat they met his through the eye slits. She frowned. It landed on him sharp and sore.

She doesn’t know you, said Bai Yuan. Don’t make it hard on yourself.

She looked away.

The caravan lurched forward. The street dipped toward the lower district, and the crowd thinned along a long downhill slope. Leo felt the air change, a pressure shift only a Chaos Root would notice, a slow greasy tremor creeping through the street.

Leo, said Bai Yuan. Left. The carriage.

A heavy merchant carriage stood just ahead of Mei Ling’s party. Its horses screamed, a high, wrong sound. The leather reins parted, cleanly. The carriage lurched and began to roll, gathering speed down the slope toward the market crowd.

“Out of the way! Look out!”

Vendors scattered. People dove for doorways. Mei Ling stood frozen a half-heartbeat too long, eyes wide, as two tons of timber and iron came down on her.

Leo moved.

He crossed twenty feet in one stride, caught the carriage shaft in both hands, and twisted his whole body. Wood splintered. The black qi in his arms flared and bled the speed out of the carriage and slewed it sideways. Wheels shrieked on stone. The carriage smashed into a heavy barrier a handspan from Mei Ling’s feet.

Silence fell on the square.

On the box of the wrecked carriage the driver sat upright with the reins still in his hands. He had not moved through any of it, not the screaming horses, not the crash. His eyes were open and wet and empty, and around his right wrist was a red thread pulled so tight the skin had gone white. Someone had spent this man and not cared what it cost.

Then three figures dropped from the rooftops with blades aimed at Mei Ling’s throat.

Leo stepped in front of her.

His left hand caught the first assassin’s wrist. Chaos qi pulsed and the man went rigid and fell. The second blade swept across Leo’s chest and cut the chain at his collar, and he barely felt it. His elbow cracked into the second man’s jaw, spun him round, and a short brutal palm strike finished it. The third ran. Leo’s thrown dagger took him in the back of the knee, and the follow-up ended him.

Three breaths. Three bodies.

His chest stung where the blade had opened his shirt, a shallow line, nothing. What bothered him was how little he minded. Three men dead in the time it takes to cross a street, and his heart had hardly sped up. The Hunger lay curled and sleepy behind his ribs, and for once he couldn’t tell whether the calm was his or its.

Leo knelt beside the last man and shoved back his sleeve. A small black sigil was branded inside the wrist, three drops of blood forming a triangle.

Blood Ghost, said Bai Yuan grimly. Their own people, trying to kill their own saint’s bride. Interesting.

City guards flooded the square, weapons out. “Protect Lady Mei! Surround her!”

Leo stepped back into the shadow of an alley. Mei Ling turned toward him, white-faced. “Wait. Who are you?”

He didn’t stop. By the time she’d shoved through the ring of guards the masked mercenary was gone, and only splintered wood and churned mud remained.

Something small lay half-buried in the dirt near her foot.

She knelt. Her hands were shaking before she touched it.

Half a jade pendant, tarnished by years against someone’s skin, its broken edge jagged. She had cracked it herself when she was ten years old, and cried, and a boy had told her it looked better with a flaw.

Mei Ling stopped breathing.

“No,” she whispered. “He’s dead. He was trash. He was—”

The jade was warm in her palm; someone had only just let go of it.

Her attendants closed around her in a flurry of hands and anxious voices. Lady Mei, are you hurt? Lady Mei, the physician— She heard none of it. She shut her fingers over the pendant until the broken edge bit into her palm, and the small clean sting steadied her. She looked up at the empty roofline, the alley mouth, the crowd already murmuring and pointing.

“It’s nothing,” she said, in her perfect voice. “A trinket I dropped.”

She slid the jade into her sleeve, against the thin gold line at her wrist, and for the first time in weeks the line felt cold.

Three streets away Leo put his back to an alley wall and felt for the chain at his throat. His fingers found nothing.

You dropped it, said Bai Yuan.

“I know.”

You saved the girl who threw you away. Why?

Leo watched the roofline, jaw tight. “I didn’t save her. I saved my revenge. She doesn’t get to die before I’m done.”

Mm, said Bai Yuan, and left it there.

Leo pulled the mask straight and went back up the slope. Captain Gu was walking the line of carts, counting crates. She looked at his slashed shirt, then at the shallow cut under it, and said nothing. She dug a needle and a length of black thread out of her belt pouch and held them out to him without stopping. Then, from the same pouch, she pulled a short loop of red cord.

“Mei residence is handing these out to every hired guard tonight. For the wedding. Safety measure, they say.” She shrugged. “Everyone wears one.”

Leo looked at the red cord in her hand.

Don’t take it, said Bai Yuan. And don’t refuse it either.

Behind them the noon bells began to ring. Leo held out his hand and took it.

The cord was warm. It tightened as he tied it, and when he reached to loosen the knot his fingers found only skin. The red thread had sunk in without a mark. No knot, no end.

Leo, said Bai Yuan quietly. Look at the other guards.

Down the line, men were glancing at their wrists. Their cords were dull. His was glowing, steady and bright, and one by one the heads began to turn.

“Crow,” Gu said, very low. “Mine doesn’t do that.”

The thread pulled, once, toward Azure Peak.

Leo’s left foot stepped forward. He hadn’t told it to.