The sound came again as they climbed, thin and sharp, metal ringing against stone, and then it stopped, and the silence afterward was worse.
Lin Tianren and Xia Qing reached the upper ridge a little after midday and stopped at its lip without a word. The ground before them was a ruin of fresh damage. Boulders lay split in half along clean, narrow lines. Slabs of rock had been knocked loose from the ridge wall and lay scattered across the path, still sharp-edged and pale where they'd broken. And on one flat stone beside the trail, a spray of dark drops had dried in a long arc, with a smear running toward the north where someone had dragged an arm or a leg through it.
Xia Qing knelt beside the stain without touching it and held her palm a few inches above the rock. She stayed that way for some time.
"This is recent," she said at last. "Hours, maybe less. The residue is still sharp. There was an intense fight here, and it wasn't one-sided. Someone was cut, and kept fighting after he was cut."
"Can you tell who?"
"No." She stood. "But whoever it was, the fight was brutal."
Lin was already walking the ridge's edge, scanning the stone, and he stopped at a cliff face where the rock was gouged by a single short cut. It was blunt and low, a downward stroke with the hilt dropped near the hip, ending hard against the stone as though the blade had struck a wall. It was the same cut he'd seen on a tree three days ago and on the lip of a crater just yesterday.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. Xia Qing came to stand beside him and looked at the mark for a long time.
"I used to watch him practice that behind our shops," she said quietly. "He could never finish a stroke properly. He just stopped wherever the target stopped." The corner of her mouth moved. "He thought it was strength. My father said it was stubbornness."
"Is it him?"
"I think so." She took a breath. "I'd like to be certain."
They found the platform a little further on, a shelf of flat rock set into the slope like a step, ringed by boulders on three sides and open to the valley on the fourth. It had been used recently.
Three shallow hollows had been scraped out of the thin soil where people had slept. A ring of ash sat at the center, the remains of a small spirit-fire burned down to grey powder. A scatter of stripped herb stems lay beside it, and a number of footprints crossed the stone in several directions, tangled and overlapping. Lin counted the sleeping places twice.
"A three-person camp," he said. "A small group, working together."
"And they left in a hurry," Xia Qing added, studying the ash. "Or were made to."
She found the fragment near the edge of the shelf, half hidden between two stones, and picked it up before he could see what it was. When she turned, her face had gone still.
It was the broken tip of a blade, a hand's length of crude grey metal, smelted from mountain iron and hammered into a broad, plain shape. Just above the break, the beginnings of a crossguard curved outward, and a small notch had been cut into it, neat and deliberate.
"Wait," Xia Qing said. "I've seen this before."
"Do you recognize it?"
"I can't be certain." She turned the fragment in the light. "But Gu Chen has carried this shape since we were children. A plain broad blade, with a notch cut into the guard where his father's apprentice tested the temper. He's never used any other pattern." She looked up at Lin. "This one was made out of whatever he could find in this mountain. But he couldn't help copying it."
Lin took it from her and weighed it in his palm. The break was fresh.
*A group camped here,* he thought. *Gu Chen fought them, or fought through them. And he's still somewhere above us.*
"North," he said.
"North," she agreed, and tucked the broken blade into her sleeve.
The sounds of fighting began again before they'd gone a hundred paces.
It was close now, from beyond a natural arch of stone at the platform's far edge, a hollow clash and a harsh shout and the thump of a spiritual blast against rock. They went the rest of the way along a narrow ledge, low and quiet, and looked down through a gap in the arch into a rocky clearing below.
Five participants had surrounded a sixth.
The one in the middle stood with his back to the cliff wall, which left only a narrow arc of open ground in front of him, and that was exactly what he'd chosen. He was round-faced and heavyset, with small, sharp eyes, and his grey robe was torn open along the left side and dark with blood from the hip down. He favored his right leg badly. He held a plain, crude, broad blade in both hands, and he swung it with a brutal, hard-ending economy that kept every opponent just out of reach.
"Gu Chen," Xia Qing breathed.
He didn't look up. He couldn't spare a glance. But Lin saw his shoulders move slightly, a breath of tired satisfaction as another cut drove a flanker back a step.
*We've found him,* Lin thought, and let the realization settle through the long days behind it. Five days of searching, and he was alive. Injured, outnumbered, and still fighting like a wall.
Lin held Xia Qing's sleeve before she could move.
"Wait."
"He's bleeding—"
"I know. If we go in blind, we make it worse." He counted again, carefully. "Five. One with a sword, standing back, who hasn't committed yet. Two flankers rotating in and out. Two behind them throwing spiritual blasts."
He recognized the sword as soon as he looked at it properly: a long, patient style, with strokes that began narrow and finished late. The same hand that had cut the boulders in the valley two days ago. The leader moved with the calm of someone who had been cultivating at one ceiling for decades, and the others glanced at him between every exchange, waiting for something.
*They're taking their cues from him,* Lin realized. *Two fingers, a nod. Everything flows through that one man.*
That was a weakness. It was also the only one he could see.
"Can you lay a line across the arch?" he asked softly. "Behind the two in the rear. Something to catch them if they step back."
Xia Qing was already crouching, her artifact's point against the stone. "I don't have much ink left. It won't be pretty."
"It only has to hold for a breath."
She began to draw, quick and precise, working along the underside of the arch where the shadow hid her lines from anyone below. Lin watched the leader and waited.
The moment came when the leader signaled again, two fingers lifting, and the flankers pressed in together, and Gu Chen swung a hard defensive arc that bought him a half-step and cost him his balance. His bad leg buckled. The leader moved at last, his sword rising for the finishing stroke.
"Now," Lin said.
He dropped from the ledge.
He landed behind the nearest flanker and didn't try to strike him down. He turned the man's own momentum instead, catching the arm that was already swinging toward Gu Chen and redirecting it into his partner's path, so that the two collided and fell tangled across each other.
"Lin Tianren?" Gu Chen's voice, hoarse and disbelieving.
"Hold the wall," Lin said, and moved into the gap.
The rear supporters reacted late. One loosed a spiritual blast at him, and he angled his palm to shed it sideways into the cliff. The other backed up a step, then another, and set his heel on the line beneath the arch.
Xia Qing's formation caught him. Light flared along the stone in a short, sharp snare that wrapped his ankle and locked it to the ground. He cried out and went down. His partner, turning to help him, lost his footing too.
The leader checked his stroke at the last instant and wheeled on Lin, and for a few breaths the clearing narrowed to the two of them. Lin did not try to match him. He couldn't. He read the long, patient sweeps, read where the narrow starts widened, and slipped each one by a hair, using the broken ground and the fallen flankers to keep the man's blade from ever coming around clean. He wasn't winning. He was holding, and it was all he'd meant to do.
"Gu Chen!" he called. "Now!"
Gu Chen had been waiting. He came off the wall with a roar, dragging his bad leg and swinging his crude, notched blade in a single hard, blunt, downward stroke that ended against the leader's sword with a sound like a hammer striking an anvil.
The leader's blade cracked down its length.
He stared at it. Then he looked at the clearing, at two of his people still struggling in the snare, a third on his knees, a fourth hurt, and three opponents who hadn't existed ten breaths earlier. The calculation took him no more than a moment.
"Withdraw," he said, and he said it without heat.
He hauled up the nearest of his people and the rest scrambled after him, the two in the snare cutting themselves free with ragged effort, and they vanished into the rocks.
"We'll remember this," the leader called back, once, from the shadow of the arch.
Nobody chased them.
The silence after the fight was strange and almost gentle. The dust settled across the clearing, and Gu Chen lowered his broken blade and looked at the two of them.
He didn't say anything for several seconds. His small eyes moved from Lin's face to Xia Qing's, and something in his round, scarred, tired face worked once and went still.
"Well," he said finally. "I didn't expect to see you two here."
Xia Qing crossed the clearing in three strides and looked at his torn side, at the blood soaked into his robe, at the leg he was favoring.
"How," she said, in a very controlled voice, "did you manage to get yourself surrounded by so many people?"
"They were looking for trouble." He shrugged, and winced. "I just helped them find it."
Lin laughed. He couldn't help it. It was the first time in days he'd laughed without any weight behind it, and Gu Chen's own grin answered, crooked and exhausted and exactly as stubborn as the cuts he left in rock.
Xia Qing drew a long breath and then, to Lin's surprise, pulled something from her sleeve and held it out. It was the broken tip of a crude, notched blade.
Gu Chen looked at it. "Where'd you find that?"
"Back at the platform. The one with three camps." She put it in his hand. "You couldn't help copying it."
"No," he admitted. "I never could."
They sat for a while in the clearing's lee, out of the wind, while Xia Qing bound his side with strips torn from her own sleeve and Lin gave him a sip from the stream's trickle and the healing pill he'd made two days ago. It wasn't a good pill, but it was clean, and Gu Chen took it with the calm of a man who knew what he was swallowing.
When the bleeding had slowed, Lin asked the question that had been sitting at the back of his mind since the arch.
"What have you been doing all this time? And how many pills do you have? What would you guess your points to be?"
Gu Chen's expression changed.
The humor drained out of it, not all at once but slowly, as though something heavier had been set down in front of him. He looked at the broken blade in his hand, then toward the north.
"Points?" he said. "That's an interesting question." He rubbed his jaw. "I'm not as far behind as you think. I've been working three days, and I got a clean pill out of it, and a few other things. But before I tell you any of that, you two should know something."
"What?" Xia Qing asked.
"I've been scouting the northern region since the second day." He looked at them both. "A few powerful participants have taken control of the medicinal resources up there. Whole valleys of them. They've been guarding them like territory."
Lin felt the shape of it before he heard the rest.
"And one of those groups," Gu Chen said, quietly, "has already refined high-grade pills."
**[Tournament Day: 9]**
**[Participants Remaining: Unknown]**
**[Host's Current Alliance Status: Xia Qing — Provisional | Gu Chen — Reunited]**