Fox and Phoenix (Lóng City 1)

With more trial and error, I found the black pillar again. Adjusted the brass rings until the pillar seemed to recede into the distance. Another blur obscured the pillar, but only for a moment. Then a second one blocked my view. Without taking the lens from my eye, I twisted the smallest brass ring just a hair.

And saw a dark brown face staring upward.

I yelped, nearly dropped the cylinder. Yún grabbed for it, but I yanked the device away and hunkered down to try again.

Of course the man below didn’t see me. It was only an illusion that his gaze drilled into mine. Still, my heart was thumping hard and my hands shook as I adjusted the lens to draw back a few more feet.

Five men stood around the black pillar. They were dressed in gray woolen cloaks with hoods, over leather armor. One man pushed his hood back and adjusted his steel helmet. They were pointing at the stone pillar and the different roads leading away.

Silently, I handed the cylinder to Yún. Waited for her to make the same discovery I had.

These were not bandits. And I would bet the rest of my reward from Princess Lian they weren’t soldiers from Golden Snowcloud. They were mercenaries. Assassins, Yún had called them. And they were looking for us.

Someone wants to find us, I thought. To stop us.

If they had magic, they could. The ancient wizards could see through all the roads of time, according to my mother’s lessons—past or present or even the possible futures. Cold crept over my skin. It had nothing to do with the winter winds scudding down from the mountain peaks.

Chen? I kept my inner voice to a whisper.

No. No magic.

Can you tell where they come from?

Too dangerous. Their companions are watching for us, too.

Through Chen’s eyes, I glimpsed a raven, a giant rat, a scorpion, and other, stranger creatures I couldn’t identify. They weren’t magical—there were few humans with those beasts as their companion spirits—but ones that made me think of foreign lands, far away from these mountains.

Yún laid down the cylinder. “Not good. But not so bad.”

“What are they doing?”

“Going the wrong way,” she said. “Qi is distracting them with a false trail.”

But her tone was plainly unhappy.

“Why is that not good?”

“Because whoever sent these men probably sent more.”

Right. Like those mercenaries we’d already met.

A dozen last week. Five here. No, wait. There had been six, counting the thief in Golden Snowcloud. The number six teased at my memory. Weeks and weeks ago, when we were ordinary apprentices, Ma mi had given us a lecture about the magical properties of numbers. Some of those properties were genuine, some the heartfelt delusion of certain practitioners. The key to dealing with any opponent, she said, was to tell the difference.

“Six of them,” Yún murmured. “Twice six before.”

So she had noticed, too. “We should go,” I said.

And for once, Yún didn’t argue.

It took us three days, battling unnaturally fierce winds, before we crossed that pass. Neither of us had the strength to bicker with the other. If the griffin hadn’t nipped us bloody, we might have forgotten to feed him. Six more days creeping along foot-wide paths brought us to the final pass, where the mountains spilled outward into the plains.

I paused. So did Yún. Seeing a chance to rest, our pony dropped its head and blew out great steaming gouts of breath into the chilled air.

All my life, I’d lived with soaring walls of stone around me. The skies reached up toward infinity,

but left and right, with hands outstretched, you always felt as though you could touch the next mountain, not so very far away. All that had vanished. Before me lay an impossible stretch of brown and gray—so flat, I felt as though I’d lost my balance, and I was falling sideways.

Well, not exactly flat. The land undulated toward the horizon, interrupted here and there by rivers and their valleys, fringed by thin stands of trees. Farther north, a line of blue hills rippled outward toward the horizon. In the other direction, gold mottled the brown fields. Beyond that, I could just make out a few blotches of dark green, and some larger, darker spots that might be cities.