A hundred fierce cavalry, howling northward.

Gao Xining stood at the edge of the grasslands and watched them disappear into the dark — riding north until there was nothing left to see. She knew this was men’s work, a battle she couldn’t enter. But that didn’t mean she would stand idle.

She watched Li Chi and the others vanish into the night, then turned back to face Jia Ruan and the Hanging Blade Sect disciples.

“Mister Jia, I’d like to ask a favor of you. I know it’s a great deal to ask, but…”

Jia Ruan looked back at the disciples. Almost as one, they nodded.

In certain moments, emotions travel through a crowd like a contagion — sometimes it’s fear, sometimes suspicion, sometimes regret. And sometimes it is courage. And sometimes it is loyalty.

Jia Ruan raised his voice: “Just say the word!”

—

Seventy or eighty *li* beneath the night sky.

Li Chi’s party was nearing the encampment as the sky reached its deepest darkness — the hour before dawn when the black is absolute, the last throes of the night before the balance tips. In another little while, this darkness would peak and then begin its retreat.

Perhaps that is the difference between the sun and the moon: the sun lets the day fade slowly, easing the world gently into night; but the moon does the opposite — it lets the darkness deepen and deepen until even its own light seems feeble against the black.

“There, just ahead. How do we go in?”

Borijitai kept his voice low as he spoke to Tang Pidi. Ahead, the encampment blazed with torches. After what had happened, no one in that camp would sleep tonight.

“Wait half an hour.”

Tang Pidi turned his head to read the sky, then gave the order and swung down from his horse. He settled himself on the grass with perfect ease, as if the uncountable soldiers in the camp across from them were of no concern whatsoever.

They had already muzzled the horses midway with cloth bits to prevent any whinnying. The party held their horses down and had them crouch in the grass while they themselves lay still and waited.

Tang Pidi had said half an hour. No one asked why. They simply obeyed.

Li Chi noticed a large tree roughly seventy or eighty paces from the edge of the camp. He turned to the soldier beside him. “Give me a bow and three men’s quivers.”

His wound still hadn’t fully closed — it wasn’t that he couldn’t draw the iron-sinew bow, only that drawing it more than a few times would tear open the old injury.

He slung the bow, hefted the quivers, and cat-crawled forward through the dark.

Borijitai murmured to Tang Pidi: “What is your friend going to do?”

“Hunt,” Tang Pidi said, with perfect calm.

Those half-thirty minutes were torment for Borijitai — he was the most desperate of all of them. Several times he glanced at Tang Pidi to ask whether it was time, but Tang Pidi sat with his eyes closed and resting, and each time Borijitai forced himself to hold on.

It felt as if dawn should be coming any moment — surely they had waited long enough. But the darkness still held the land in its grip, the sun still refusing to come, when at last Tang Pidi’s eyes opened.

“Mount up.”

A low command.

Borijitai asked: “How do we fight?”

Tang Pidi gave three words in reply.

“Stay behind me.”

He swung up onto his horse, pulled the iron visor down over his face — a grotesque iron mask, blue-faced and fanged, radiating a cold, murderous air.

“Break through!”

At Tang Pidi’s command, a single voice answered him from a hundred throats.

“Hoo!”

A hundred cavalry charged as one, following Tang Pidi in a straight line toward the camp.

The camp had no expectation of a charge. Central Plains Chu people had never dared casually set foot on the Nalan grasslands, and on this entire grassland there was only the Nalan tribe — no hostile forces whatsoever. So when Tang Pidi led his hundred riders crashing into the camp, many people were only just beginning to react.

Up in the tree, Li Chi drew his bow. He spotted an enemy far away, already pulling his own bow back to aim at Tang Pidi and the others. The arrow left Li Chi’s fingers.

A moment later: the shaft crossed the dark and the firelight, flickering in and out of light and shadow in its rapid flight — then sank with a clean sound through the enemy’s throat.

Precise as if the arrow knew its own way. One shot, straight through.

Ahead, a group had spotted the cavalry charge and were scrambling for rope. They sprinted toward Tang Pidi’s formation, intending to trip the horses — a rope-trap bringing down the lead horses could bury the entire column under a swarming mass of enemies instantly.

Li Chi stood up in the tree. One hand drew four arrows at once — four loosed simultaneously. All four flew ahead of Tang Pidi’s formation.

The enemy soldiers on one side of the rope went down. But there were seven or eight of them, and after four arrows felled some of them, a stream of follow-up arrows came through.

One after another they dropped, soft punching sounds through the dark. That side of the rope fell slack — like a panicked snake trying to crawl away beneath the hooves.

The formation charged through the crowd like something tearing through a curtain of darkness.

Borijitai screamed out his own name as he rode. Hearing it, many riders who had been moving to cut off the charge fell back in hesitation.

They had no great love for the Chu people — but they had even less for the Tiehe.

Li Chi glanced at the great tent in the distance. He dropped from the tree — a ghost vanishing through the crowd, swift and silent — and climbed up onto the roof of the great tent.

Ahead, a column of armored cavalry came charging at Tang Pidi — the Tiehe elite. Tang Pidi made a soft, contemptuous sound, pulled the iron lance from the side of his horse, and hurled it forward.

A line of soldiers was skewered.

Left hand drawing his long blade, riding at full gallop — each stroke brought down another Tiehe rider. The warhorse screamed, and Tang Pidi rode straight into the enemy cavalry’s midst, driving forward dozens of paces. One hand reached out and wrenched the iron lance back from the corpse, and as the lance tip left the body, blood scattered in a line.

Left hand: sword. Right hand: lance. The sword carried sword-force; the lance carried lance-fury.

A hundred cavalry formed themselves into a blade, and Tang Pidi was its point. He broke into the enemy’s formation alone; the cavalry behind him kept widening the breach. A knife splitting a taut piece of cloth — the enemy was the cloth, he was the blade. The knife drove forward, and the cloth split apart on either side.

Farther off, Tiehe cavalry who had not engaged in the direct charge were drawing bows, trying to shoot Tang Pidi down from his saddle. One had barely taken aim when an arrow crossed the space toward him, sinking with a *thwack* into his eye socket. The shaft cut through the eye and into the brain, punched through the back of the skull — the tip emerging from the back of his head, painted in blood.

The next arrow grazed the cheek of the rider beside him, slicing a perfectly straight line of red — but that line was immediately swallowed by the blood pouring from his neighbor’s eye.

The third arrow found the throat of the rider behind him. Such was its force that it drove clean through — in one side and out the other, white feathers turned to red.

“Die for this!”

Zhachaleng — the Tiehe tribe’s formidable warrior — watched a small cavalry force drive straight through his line and felt his face go cold. These were the elite riders of the Tiehe, feared across the outer steppe, and they outnumbered the enemy many times over. Yet they had been punched through without pause.

Tang Pidi drove forward without deviation. For those who have never felt the sensation of charging through a battlefield at full speed, perhaps this is close enough: imagine sprinting through a field of tall crops, the stalks and leaves lashing at you without stop.

What lashed at Tang Pidi was not corn leaves. It was curved blades.

Yet when he had driven through six hundred enemy cavalry, he was soaked in blood — not one drop of it his own.

With him at the front, none of the riders behind him faced the slightest resistance. Tang Pidi’s speed in breaking open the enemy’s formation was such that they simply had to follow. A knife splitting cloth — the enemy was the cloth, he was the edge — and where the knife went, the cloth parted on both sides.

“I am Borijitai!” Borijitai rode hard at the rear, voice ringing out with every stride: “It was not the Chu people who killed the Khan — it was the Tiehe! Think — the Tiehe asked our Khan to lead troops against the Chu people, and our Khan refused them. So the Tiehe killed him!”

The Nalan cavalry converging from all directions had been moving to encircle the attackers — but at Borijitai’s words, they wavered and held.

Zhachaleng’s fury broke. He yanked his curved blade free and rode at Tang Pidi. Behind him, Getai’s face had gone the color of ash.

He had only been Khan for half a night. And in that half a night, he had felt no joy at all — only a saw working back and forth inside his chest, cutting without pause.

He had tried to give the order to loose arrows. But each time he had seen his own son, Borijitai, among those riders, and the words had died in his throat.

“Zhachaleng of the Tiehe!” Zhachaleng thundered as he charged in. “Who dares be insolent before me!”

He came on with full force and fury.

“Quiet.”

Tang Pidi said it almost softly. His right hand drove the iron lance forward at an angle that seemed impossible — entering from beneath Zhachaleng’s jaw, punching out through the back of his skull. Zhachaleng’s eyes rolled sharply upward, as if trying to see what had just passed through his head — or as if they were those of a dead fish, rolling up and bulging as they went.

One thrust killed Zhachaleng. Tang Pidi’s single arm applied force and lifted — the man must have weighed two hundred *jin* — and heaved him off his horse. Zhachaleng hung on the lance tip, his heavy body swaying, blood pouring down.

Tang Pidi rode forward to Getai, then drove the lance into the ground — a concussive *thud* — lance planted, body dropped, landing in the dirt right at Getai’s feet, raising a cloud of dust.

One charge. One hundred cavalry drove through six hundred. The enemy commander killed in a single strike.

The eastern sky had begun, at last, to show the very first change. No light yet fell — but the sky itself seemed as if light was pressing against it from behind, stretching it thinner and thinner, until at any moment it would simply burst through.

The Tiehe cavalry had taken more than a hundred dead. When they tried to regroup, they found Zhachaleng already gone.

The deputy commander looked around, and immediately gave the call to retreat. Nearly five hundred riders wheeled and drove for the open ground beyond the camp.

Borijitai shouted: “Don’t let them escape!”

—

Outside the camp.

A lanky old yellow horse ambled along in no great hurry, carrying a lazily settled young man in fine clothing. Behind the man and horse, the light of the breaking dawn was just beginning to press up against the horizon.

The man saw the Tiehe cavalry bearing down on him from ahead. He reached down and patted the old horse’s neck, murmuring with a light smile: “Feel like a bit of play?”

The old yellow horse let out a sudden long cry and reared up on its hind legs. In that single instant, every trace of age and indolence was gone — it lunged forward like a yellow dragon full of killing intent, straight into those hundreds of riders.

Dantai Yajing laughed aloud. “Now *that’s* my old yellow!” He pulled the lance from across his horse’s flank, shook his wrist, and the wrapping cloth was flung away. The lance spun through the air in a blurring arc.

He brought the lance to rest in his hand, and cold light flashed through his eyes.

A sweep of the lance tip — three men fell. The old yellow horse, charging full speed, abruptly drove the side of its neck into the neck of the nearest enemy horse. The other animal cried out and staggered sideways. By then the old yellow horse had already pivoted — and its two hind legs delivered a kick to the staggered horse’s flank, a blow of such terrifying force that it sent the horse rolling to the ground.

With that horse thrown aside, the old yellow horse leaped forward — hooves clearing the ground to the height of a man’s shoulder — and on its back, Dantai Yajing drove the lance straight down. A *thud*, and the skull of a rider below was pierced through.