The woman selling boiled roots had drawn a circle around Lu Chen's name.
He saw it from behind the road marker, where he had stopped to eat the last grain from his pouch. Her stall stood at the approach to Black Ridge. A charcoal pot smoked beneath its awning. Beside it, nailed to a board of freight notices, hung a sheet bearing the valley seal.
LU CHEN. APPRENTICE TO YAN. SOUGHT IN THE DEATH OF SERGEANT ZHAO HU.
Below that, someone had written: Thin. Seventeen. Conceals steel lines in sleeves.
He read it twice. There was no mention of the breath under his navel. The absence should have comforted him. Instead, he kept looking at the word death.
Liu San knew about Zhao. Liu had been lying in the drift when Lu left him, blood spreading beneath his head. A dead man could not give this description. Lu remembered the guard calling for a litter, a sound he had pushed out of his thoughts because there had been another gate to open.
He had been wrong.
The root seller looked up. Lu lowered his face before her gaze reached his. He was hungry enough to smell the salt in the pot from here, but he no longer knew whether he could ask a price without saying something that belonged on the paper.
A carter stopped beside the stall. She handed him a bowl and tapped the wanted sheet.
“You came through the northern turn?”
“No boys in my load.”
“They're asking about wires. My husband cuts packing wire all day.”
“Tell him not to wear it up his sleeves.”
The carter laughed. Lu held his empty pouch beneath his coat. His name had become a thing strangers could discuss while eating.
He backed along the retaining wall. The road rose between two abandoned cart sheds before descending toward the outpost. Beyond their broken roofs, Black Ridge breathed smoke into the dim sky. He could see people moving beneath the gate. There were more of them than he had ever seen outside a muster yard. Some carried children. Some stopped to argue without a guard striking them for delaying work.
He had imagined walking through that gate as an ordinary traveler.
Now he turned toward the sheds, hoping to cross the old hauling cut behind them. The chart he had taken from Zhao ended farther north. This was a road he would have to learn with his own feet.
The first bolt struck the wall above his shoulder.
He dropped so hard that his knee scraped through his trousers. Loose stone hit his neck. He crawled beneath the wall's broken edge before the bowstring sounded again.
“Stay down,” a man called. “Hands out where we can see them.”
Lu could see boots beneath the nearest shed door. The man there held a broad shield. Another stood by the uphill road with a crossbow already lowered for loading. The third had moved behind Lu, cutting off the retreat toward the stall.
They had waited until he left the witnesses.
Lu pressed himself against wet stone. His nine needles lay in their leather loops. For weeks he had practiced bringing two points home together. In the chamber, the timber stayed still. Here, the shieldman was already moving.
“I have a knife,” Lu said. His voice came out too thin. “For roots.”
“Set it down.”
“You'll take me back.”
The rear man drew a hook across the road, catching loose weeds and lifting them away. He wore a high iron collar. His gloves had leather sewn across the backs. Lu's eyes went to the covered throat, then to the hook. They knew what to look for.
“Hands,” the shieldman repeated.
Lu drew Yan's knife. He laid it beside his knee, keeping his fingers on the chipped horn handle until the man could see it.
The shieldman halted. “Away from it.”
Lu moved his hand. Beneath his other sleeve, he separated two wire loops with his thumb. His lower belly warmed as he let a little breath reach them. The remaining circles held steady. He had more to spend than in the forge. The thought steadied him for a moment, then the bowman stepped sideways and Lu saw how little a larger reserve mattered if a bolt went through his chest.
“Which one of you wants me alive?” he asked.
The rear man laughed. The shieldman did not.
“That depends on your hands.”
The man took another step. His shield covered his face and knees. Lu sent one point along the ground toward the boot beyond its edge. The rear man's hook caught the wire almost immediately.
“There.”
He stamped the line against a stone. Lu's fingers jerked forward. He loosened the loop before the pull could wrench his scarred palm open.
The shieldman advanced.
Lu threw the empty food pouch into his face and grabbed the knife. The shield struck the pouch aside. Its rim hit Lu's upper arm as he rolled behind a fallen roof beam. Pain ran across his chest. He crawled rather than rising, dragged the free wire through mud, and heard the hook scrape after it.
The bowman moved to the shed opening. He could see beneath the beam now.
Lu guided the second point up its far side. The first line remained trapped under the rear man's boot. He stopped pulling it. Instead, he watched the crossbowman's supporting hand settle beneath the weapon.
The needle entered the fold beside the thumb.
The man shouted and dropped the bow's front. A bolt tore into the earth beside Lu's face. He recovered the point before the wounded hand could close around its line. The movement was clean. The returning steel slid beneath his cuff instead of tangling in the abandoned wire.
For one instant, the weeks in the chamber had bought him exactly what he needed.
He crawled into the shed.
It had once held loaded carts. A broad timber arm hung over the far entrance, with a broken cart body chained beneath it. The roof over that end had fallen away. Snow lay in the bed, thick enough to show no recent footsteps. Beyond it, a gap opened onto the lower hauling cut.
The arm had a retaining peg at its foot. Lu knew the shape from the forge's ore hoist. He had watched men curse those pegs when frost held them in their sockets. This one stood crooked in rotten timber.
He touched it and found it firm.
The shieldman came through the door. He did not hurry into reach. He held the shield low and swept his short blade beneath the old workbench.
Lu went behind the cart bed. The bowman remained outside, cursing as he pulled a strip from his sleeve to bind his hand. The third man was winding the captured wire around his hook.
“There's more in the coat,” he said. “Cut it off him.”
Lu put his back against the wheel. He could squeeze through the far gap, but not while the shieldman watched him do it. The man's stance left no soft throat or reaching wrist. Behind him, the rear tracker held Lu's lost needle up by its wire, black point hanging beneath the hook.
It was a small thing to see in another man's hands. Lu had honed that steel while Zhao's boots crossed the yard. He had carried it through the siphon and warmed his fingers around its tether during the worst nights. Now it was proof.
The shieldman glanced at the hanging arm, then at the cart.
“Don't stand under that.”
The warning was for his companion. Lu looked at the retaining peg again. He could not pull the heavy cart with breath. But the peg held timber already coming apart.
He scraped at its socket with Yan's blunt work scraper. Rotten wood came away beneath the iron lip. He made two hurried strokes before the shieldman rounded the bed.
Lu sent a needle toward the man's forward ankle. The shield dropped. The point struck its rim and glanced beneath the cart.
He drew the line back along the ground, bringing it across the peg's exposed head. The man saw the wire and planted the shield over it. Lu let the line slacken, then twisted his wrist while feeding breath into the point.
The steel turned beneath the cart. Its tether caught behind the peg.
The shieldman felt the movement beneath his rim. He stepped aside and drove his blade into the wire's path. Lu pulled with both his hand and the small flow he had kept behind the point.
The peg tore loose with a lump of dead wood.
The hanging arm dropped. The shieldman flung himself toward the door. Its chain struck the workbench, broke the nearest leg, and hauled the cart bed sideways across the entrance. Lu threw himself through the rear gap as the wheel jumped behind him.
The chain caught his sleeve.
He stopped abruptly, belly on the sill, one boot hanging over the hauling cut. The coat tightened across his throat. He clawed backward, found the wire drawn around the falling chain, and tried to bring the point home.
It held somewhere beneath the cart.
A blade scraped across the bed. The shieldman was coming over it, using the broken timber as cover instead of trying to lift it. Lu slashed through his own tether. The wire sprang away. He pulled the sleeve loose and slid down onto the cut, striking his hip against stone.
Seven needles.
He had gained room to run, and there was no time to count anything else.
The bowman had moved beyond the far wall. His injured hand rested against the crossbow's body while the other worked its trigger. Lu saw the raised weapon and flung himself along the retaining lip.
The bolt scraped his left shoulder.
His coat tore. Heat spread beneath it. He reached for the wall, missed, and fell onto his knees. The bowman was trying to reload one-handed. Lu lifted a needle, then stopped. The man stood behind stone. A shot that missed would leave Lu still kneeling when the next bolt came.
He ran downhill.
At the first turn he cut away from the road, passed behind a shale mound, and climbed into a dry spillway. The trackers could follow his blood. They could also see the gate from the upper road. He had to stop giving them a straight line to either.
The spillway emerged behind the fuel queue outside Black Ridge. A row of handcarts waited beneath the wall, their owners arguing with a clerk who refused to open the lower entrance until the incoming ore count was complete.
Lu crouched beside the last cart. He pressed a fold of his coat against the shoulder. The graze stung whenever he moved the arm, but his fingers still closed. No shaft remained in the flesh. He could bind it if he found somewhere to sit.
A carter looked down at him and moved away.
“Don't bleed on my sacks.”
Lu tried to answer. He had been running with his mouth open, and the cold had scraped his throat raw.
The carter pulled the handle, leaving him exposed beside the wall.
At the gate, the clerk unfolded another copy of the wanted sheet. Lu saw his own name above the man's thumb. The trackers did not have to catch him themselves. They only had to tell enough people what to refuse.
He looked at the fuel loads, the laborers moving between them, the rough cloth tied around a worker's freshly burned forearm. Everybody who passed the lower gate carried something the outpost wanted.
He still had the patrol token beneath his vest. He could display it and hope the clerk checked the seal before the missing sergeant's name. The hope lasted until he imagined the token on the desk beside the paper.
Lu pushed it deeper into the lining.
He moved along the waiting carts until he found one whose owner was trying to lift a spilled sack alone. Loose coal lay across the road. The man looked at Lu's face, frowned, and raised his free hand to wave him off.
“I'll clear it,” Lu said. “A bowl inside.”
“Half.”
“Whole. I carry the sack too.”
The man looked at the bleeding shoulder. Lu shifted the weight onto his other side before being asked. The sack was heavy enough to make his knees tremble.
“You drop it, you get nothing.”
Lu nodded. He lowered his head and began gathering coal, keeping the seven steel points hidden while the gate clerk checked the loads ahead of them. The shoulder burned under the cloth. Beyond the wall, somebody rang a meal bell.
He had escaped men who knew his name. For the next few steps, he would be the man carrying a sack.