The warden came off the mechanism, and Xuan had about a heartbeat to work out how not to die and take the thing they’d come for in the same move.
’Mira. Fast version. Can we kill it before it wrecks the column?’
[ Not fast, and not without one of you on the floor, ] she said, already running it. [ It’s first-tier. You and Wuji together barely put one down in a corridor, and that was without a delicate imperial machine to keep whole. Swing wrong in here and you break the one thing this entire plan stands on. ]
’Then we don’t kill it. We use what it is.’ The pieces were snapping together even as he gave ground, blade up. ’It came up the root of the net. It’s part of the net. So we wake the net and let the net have it.’
[ Xinhua’s blood on the column. ] Mira caught him in the same breath. [ The wards reassert, the rogue sitting on the control point takes the whole weight of it at once. Elegant, if you can get her hand on that iron with this thing in the room. Which you can’t, unless someone holds it off her long enough. ]
"Wuji." Xuan kept his stare on the warden. "This is the kind that did Fang. I need it looking at you, not at her."
Yan Wuji was already moving, and his voice came out low and even. "Gladly."
He took the warden the way a man takes a debt he’s waited too long to pay. In high and fast, that flawless vertical of his hammering down at the crowded skull, and the thing wheeled to meet him with all its horrible economy.
It slipped his second cut, its limb unfolding farther than a limb had any right to, and only a twist that nearly spilled him off his feet kept it out of his chest.
He gave ground and kept its blind face turned on him, because that was the job, and he did it bleeding.
"Qingyue, lock it." Xuan had Xinhua by the arm, already reading the gap under the warden’s reach, the one place its length turned against it. "Xinhua, palm open. On my mark, and we go low."
Qingyue wasted nothing. Frost bloomed off her boots and tore across the floor, and where the warden’s limbs came down she pulled the stone out from under them, welding one grey joint to the ground. "Half a breath, then the ice lets go," she told Xinhua, fast. "Don’t dawdle."
"I never do," Xinhua said, and there was warmth buried in it that had nothing to do with the fight.
Xuan went in under the reach with Xinhua tucked at his shoulder, into the dead space the thing couldn’t fold to reach, and where its length worked for him he drove Marrow Dragon through the joint the ice had pinned.
The Armorcleave edge sheared what should have held, and the warden loosed that held-breath scream and lurched, and Yan Wuji rode the opening to haul its skull back toward himself.
That was the half breath. Xinhua spent it.
She dragged her opened palm down the black iron of the column, blood smearing dark across the dead ward-light, and spoke three words in a court tongue Xuan didn’t know and the mechanism did.
The net woke.
It came up out of the column in a pulse he felt in his teeth, a cold weight rolling outward through iron and stone and the streets beyond, and the wards that had hung slack over the whole lower city drew tight all at once.
The warden convulsed on the mechanism.
Whatever the net was to it, the thing answered now, and it answered like a fist closing: the grey limbs locked rigid, the crowded skull wrenched back, and the same imperial work that had once caged its kind reached through it and snuffed it like a lamp.
The first-tier warden that had opened a Pavilion sword in a corridor folded down into a heap of dead grey plate and stopped being anything at all.
Yan Wuji stood over the heap of it, blade dripping, chest heaving, and for a moment he didn’t move.
"That’s the kind that took Fang," Xuan said quietly.
"I know. I thought it might help, killing the thing that did it." Yan Wuji wiped the grey off his edge, and his face had gone to that cold, far place Xuan had learned to read on him. "It doesn’t. I’ve a growing list of these. Shen on the road, Fang in a corridor, and now something that dies and stays dead and still hands neither of them back." He sheathed the blade. "One day the man who started all of it will be at the end of my sword. I’d like to learn whether that one helps."
[ Xuan. ] Mira, and for once there was no dry in her, only something close to awe. [ It’s working. Every warden between here and the tower just stopped. They’re draining out of the lower streets like a tide going out. You took the city’s leash. ]
Xinhua sagged against the column she’d just bled on, cradling her hand, and Qingyue reached her before Xuan could, already tearing a strip from her own sleeve to bind it.
"You promised me half a breath and handed me a whole one," Xinhua said, letting her wrap the palm. "I’m keeping you."
"Get in line." Qingyue knotted the cloth off with a tug. "He’s slow on the uptake, but the spot beside him fills quick."
Xuan concluded, and not for the first time, that these two getting along was going to end worse for him than any warden ever could.
The quiet held for about as long as anything good held in this city.
[ Movement. ] Mira again, the awe gone cold. [ Coming up toward the gatehouse. And these aren’t wardens, Xuan. Wardens don’t hold a line. They don’t stack at a corner and wait for the ones behind to close up.] A beat. [ These move like men. Trained men. And they’re the one thing in this whole city that didn’t flinch when the net woke. It doesn’t touch them.]
Xuan turned from the mechanism they’d bled to take, toward the black mouth of the gatehouse door and the streets past it, where something that walked like men and feared no ward came climbing toward the last prize in the city worth having.
They’d just turned the whole capital into a trap for monsters. And something that wasn’t a monster had strolled straight in through it.
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