The songs never mentioned how much of taking a city was just walking uphill.
Xuan went up out of the gatehouse at the head of Bo Ren’s guard with a sword he could barely hold level and a body scraped hollow from the inside, and told himself with every crooked street they climbed that this was what winning looked like from the ground.
It didn’t look like much. A dead city in the dark, a handful of tired people, and a hill that got worse the higher you went.
[ You’re running on fumes and you know it, ] Mira said. [ So don’t try to be a sword right now. Be the thing that decides where the swords go. The net carries the weight it can. You carry the rest with your head, not your arms.]
’Working on it. Where’s the first wall of them?’
[ Two streets up. Wagons across the avenue, men behind them, and they are not grey. Tianlong’s leftovers, dug in and waiting for you.]
The wardens made the first stretch easy and horrible at once. The net had them penned in the side-streets and the dead squares, hundreds of them standing dead-still in the dark like a museum of things that wanted to eat him, held on a leash of imperial ward-work that Xinhua kept taut from the mechanism below. Xuan walked his people past close enough to smell the graveyard coming off their plates, and not one of them stirred. That was the part that scared him, because Mira wouldn’t let him call it safe.
[ It’s a leash, not a cage, ] she said, as a warden’s crowded skull tracked them past a barred archway, slow, testing. [ The mechanism holds them, but they pull. The higher you climb the harder they pull, because the higher you climb the closer you get to whatever’s fraying the net from the top. Keep moving.]
The barricade came at them two streets up, right where she’d put it. A good position, an overturned line of market wagons filling the avenue between two walls, archers behind it, and among the archers a few cultivators with the look of men who’d bet on the winning prince and meant to go on having been right. Tianlong’s people. The ones who’d sold Xinhua out when he looked certain and had spent the days since dug into the high rings, waiting to see if the bet came good.
Xuan didn’t slow down, because slowing down in front of a prepared line was how you fed it.
"Wuji," he said. "Left flank’s thin. Open it."
Yan Wuji went left without a word. Xuan gave him the opening himself. He dragged up what little he could spare along the length of Marrow Dragon and threw a single Severing Dragon Roar down the avenue, one flat crescent that sheared through the front rank of archers and the qi-wall the nearest cultivator flung up to stop it, both in the same breath. Even that much left him swaying. One throw was all he had in him, so he made it the right one, straight into the seam Yan Wuji was already moving to hit.
Then Yan Wuji hit it, and the loyalists learned what Xuan had learned in the gatehouse: grief had turned the Pavilion’s golden son into something worse than angry. He came down on the thin end of the line with that flawless vertical of his, over and over, and every time it fell a defender stopped defending. He didn’t shout, and he didn’t slow. He cut a door through the flank of a fortified line the way another man walks through a bead curtain, and Bo Ren’s guard poured through the gap before the loyalists could drag it shut.
The barricade broke. The men behind it didn’t break with it.
They fell back in good order to a second knot further up, a walled yard with one gate, and dug in again, and Xuan felt the whole night threatening to become the exact grind he couldn’t afford - a dozen prepared positions, one street at a time, his people bleeding for every yard while his own body still ran on nothing at all.
So he stopped fighting the yard, and reached for the thing everyone else had spent the night running away from.
’Xinhua. The big pen, the east square. Can you crack it? Just that one, just for a breath.’
Down at the mechanism he felt her understand, felt the net shudder as she reached into it and pulled a single thread loose on purpose. The wards over the east square let go, and forty penned wardens remembered all at once that they were hungry, and the nearest warm and shouting thing to them was a walled yard packed with Tianlong’s men.
Xuan watched the second position come apart from the inside as the grey tide poured into it, and found he had no guilt in him worth the name. They’d picked the wrong prince. The city he was taking back would remember the ones who hadn’t.
After that the first ring came apart fast. With the net turned from a shield into a hammer, the loyalists had no good answer left - stand and be overrun by wardens, or come out from behind their walls into the open and meet Bo Ren’s guard and a swordsman with a grudge. Most chose wrong twice.
And there was Xinhua, which did more than any of the fighting.
She came up the ring behind the front with her bandaged hand and her plain sword, and the imperial soldiers among the loyalists kept catching sight of her - the Third Princess, alive, in the capital, taking it back - and Xuan watched the fight leak out of a few of them every time they did. Not the cultivators. The cultivators had chosen and would ride the choice down. But the ordinary men, the conscripts who’d been handed to whichever prince held the wall that week, started looking at the princess and then at their own officers, and Xuan filed the look away for later. A crown wasn’t only taken. Sometimes it was just recognized.
By the time the first ring was theirs, Xuan had stopped feeling like a man winning a fight and started feeling like a man being allowed up a staircase.
That was the thing that caught in his head as he stood in the taken square, finally spending a breath he’d been putting off for an hour. The loyalists had fought hard. But they hadn’t fought like men defending a city. They’d fought like men buying time, falling back, trading ground, dying in good order to keep him slow. Every position had faced the wrong way to hold the ring and the right way to hold the road up.
They weren’t defending the capital at all. They were guarding the climb, keeping him off something higher up the hill for as long as their lives could pay for it.
’Mira. What’s up there that’s worth this?’
[ I don’t know, ] she said, and the fact that she said it flat, without a scrap of the usual edge, was worse than any answer. [ But they do. And whatever it is, they’d sooner die slow than let you reach it a breath sooner.]
Xuan looked up the dark hill at the palace waiting black against the sky, and the thing sleeping under it, and started counting how many rings still stood between him and whatever the dying men were trying so hard to keep him from.
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