The Ash Horde’s camp stood upon a low rise at the edge of the Red Plain, and it was not what Li Xuan had expected.
He had pictured a war camp. What he found was a village that had learned to move. Felt tents stood in uneven rings, patched and re-patched, with smoke curling from their roof-holes. Goats nosed among the dung-fires. Women in layers of sheepskin tended iron pots, and small, solemn children with painted ash upon their cheeks watched him pass, round-eyed, and ran to hide behind their mothers’ skirts. He saw an old man mending a bridle. He saw a girl no more than ten years old, with a bow nearly as tall as herself, practicing at a straw target and missing, and missing, and missing.
Three hundred households. Fifty years of dark moons.
"This is all of us," Granny Hulan said quietly, walking beside him with her bird-bone staff. "The ones who still keep the vow. The others went north long ago, to the grass the Nine Sects have fenced and taxed. We stayed. Someone had to."
She led him to the largest tent, and held the felt flap aside.
Inside, around a low fire of dried dung, sat perhaps a dozen people. Most were old. Temur, the young man with the scarred lip, knelt near the door. At the far end of the fire, on a plain felt rug with no cushion beneath her, sat a young woman in a gray coat.
She was perhaps twenty-three. She had a long face, high-boned and weather-browned, with a mouth set like a closed door, and a single thick braid over her shoulder tied with a strip of white bone. A bone-handled sabre lay across her knees. Her eyes were the same pale river-ice gray as the old woman’s, but where Hulan’s were wet, hers were sharp and level and entirely dry.
"Tuoba Yue," the old woman murmured, "granddaughter of the Ash Khan. She leads the riders."
"You are the Sweeper," the woman said. Her Great Liang was flat and correct.
"I have been called worse."
She did not smile. She reached down and, without breaking his gaze, set two things upon the cloth between them. A bowl of steaming, pale, salted milk tea. And a knife.
"A bowl for a guest," said Tuoba Yue. "A knife for an enemy. I have set both. Choose."
The tent was silent. Temur’s hand moved toward his hilt.
Li Xuan looked at the bowl, and the knife, and the woman. Then he lifted the bowl in both hands, bowed his head to her, and drank it to the bottom.
It was bitter, and smoky, and thick with butter, and not unpleasant.
He set the bowl down, took the copper stove from his hip bag, and set it on the cloth. He put a pinch of dried leaf in the little pot and poured water from his skin onto the embers, which caught at once. When the water sang, he poured it into the bowl, and slid the bowl across the cloth to her.
"A guest brings a gift," he said. "It is only mountain tea."
Tuoba Yue looked at the bowl for a long moment. Then she drank.
Her eyes widened a little. It was not mountain tea. It was one of the hundred Spirit-Nourishing Jade Teas of the Sign-In System, and it tasted like the first cold morning of the year, clear and quiet and strangely sweet. She put down the bowl carefully.
"No one in this tent," she said, "has ever served me tea that tasted of stillness."
"I am told it is an acquired taste."
A muscle moved at the corner of her mouth. It might have been the beginning of a smile. She picked up the knife and slid it back into her sleeve.
"Granny says you swept the dead."
"Someone had to."
"No one did for fifty years." She leaned forward, resting her hands upon the sabre. "I will tell you what we are, Sweeper. My grandfather led two hundred thousand riders into Great Liang because the Nine Sects of the Wilderness had fenced the grass, and our herds were dying, and our children were starving. He was not a good man. He was a desperate one. And at the end of the third month, the Wall’s sorcerers burned a hundred thousand of us in a single night. Not as warriors. As kindling."
She said it without heat, as a fact of weather.
"My father rode at the Wall on his twentieth dark moon, because the vow said we must. The dead struck him down. My mother froze the winter after. I have ridden at the Wall four times myself, and I have lost nine of my brothers, and no one in this camp can tell me why." She looked at the fire. "The vow says we ride until the Wall falls. The Wall will not fall. The dead cannot be moved. And every month I send my people to die for a sentence that no one understands."
"What would end it?" asked Li Xuan.
"If the Wall fell, the vow would be kept, and we could bury it." Her mouth twisted. "But I will not ask that of the dead. I have seen them. They are boys."
Li Xuan was quiet a moment. He thought of the long, dim aisles of the Archive, and of the Wilderness treaty-rolls that he had dusted and read in his months among the shelves.
"Your vow," he said slowly. "What are its exact words?"
The old woman Hulan answered, in a low, singsong voice, as one recites a thing learned in childhood. "Until the gate of the Wall is opened to the Khan’s blood, we will not rest."
"Opened," said Li Xuan. "Not broken. Not fallen. Opened."
The tent fell very still.
"Two hundred thousand riders heard that vow in the dark and thought it meant a siege," he said. "But the words say that you will not rest until the gate is opened to the Khan’s blood. Opened, by a hand that may open it. Which the Wall has never done." He looked at Yue. "The Marshal of the Western Army stands tonight on the gate tower. He wishes to speak with the Khan of the Ash Horde."
"My grandfather has been dead for fifty years."
"Then with the Khan’s granddaughter."
The fire popped. Somewhere outside, a goat bleated.
Tuoba Yue did not move. But her hands, resting on her sabre, had gone very white.
"A trick," growled a voice from the tent flap.
The felt was thrust aside. A man filled the doorway, vast and bearded, in a bear-skin coat with a horse-tailed axe slung across his back. He had a face like a split boulder and the heavy, unhurried tread of a man who seldom had to hurry. Behind him pressed a dozen riders with their hands on their hilts.
"Uncle Kui," said Yue, without turning her head.
"A Wall-dweller’s sweeper at the Khan’s own fire." Tuoba Kui’s voice was a rumble. "A trick of words, to melt the vow. My brother died for that vow. My father burned for it. And you would give it away for a cup of leaf-water?" He stepped into the tent. "If this scholar is a man of the Wall, let him show it. Let him stand before my axe."
"Uncle," Yue said sharply, "he is a guest."
"A guest drinks. A man of the Wall stands." Kui’s lip curled. "He swept our dead. Let him prove that he is not afraid of the living."
He drew the axe from his back. The horse-tail on its haft was stained dark. It was a heavy, ugly thing, longer than a man’s arm, with an edge that shone dull and red in the firelight.
Li Xuan stood up slowly. His cracked ribs complained. He laid his broom aside, and set his feet apart, and let his weight settle down through his heels, into the earth, as the Iron-Wall scripture had taught him the night before.
He did not draw anything. He did not reach for anything. He only stood.
"I will stand," he said mildly.
Kui roared, and swung.
The axe came down in a crimson arc, with the whole weight of a Foundation Establishment warrior behind it, and Li Xuan did not move. He could not have. He did not try. The blade came toward his head like a falling beam.
It stopped.
It stopped three fingers’ breadth from his hair, because a lean young man with a scarred lip had thrown himself between them, and caught the haft in both hands, and was holding it with his arms shaking and his teeth bared and his whole body braced.
"Temur!" Kui thundered. "Get out of the way, boy!"
"No." The young man’s voice shook. "He swept my father’s bones. I will not let you."
Cold steel touched Kui’s throat from the side.
Tuoba Yue had risen without a sound. Her sabre was out, and the point of it lay against her uncle’s windpipe, and her gray eyes were steady.
"Put it down, Uncle," she said softly.
For a long breath, nobody moved. The old men by the fire sat very still. Granny Hulan’s staff rattled faintly, all its small bones trembling.
"The Sweeper stood," the old woman said, in her cracked voice. "The dead did not refuse him. The axe did not fall. I have asked the sky for a sign for fifty years, and the sky has sent me a young man who would not step aside." She pointed with her staff at Temur. "Is that not an answer?"
Kui looked at his niece. He looked at the old woman. He looked at the young man who still clung to his axe with shaking hands, and at the scholar who had not so much as blinked, and something in his heavy face gave way.
He let the axe go. Temur staggered back with it, panting.
"If this is a trick," Kui said hoarsely, "I will kill you myself."
"I should expect nothing less," said Li Xuan.
Kui turned and went out of the tent. The riders at the door looked at one another, and followed.
Yue sheathed her sabre. She stood a moment looking down at the thin young man in the patched blue robe who had not moved from his place, and the faint, unreadable thing at the corner of her mouth deepened.
"You have a very odd way of winning an argument."
"I do not think I won it," said Li Xuan. "I think Temur did."
She was silent a moment.
"At dawn, then," Tuoba Yue said. "Let your Marshal open the gate."