A Bargain on the Mud

Why would an assassin who had just tried to put two inches of tempered iron through your ribs agree to guard your back across three leagues of hostile mud?

The oil lamp on the low cedar table sputtered as Samizo trimmed the char from its hemp wick with a rusted surveyor's bodkin. Across from him, Himesa did not touch her cup. Her gaze remained pinned to the worn silk map unrolled between them, where the inked contours of the Enokawa ran crooked and dark under the greasy yellow lamplight.

"A killer does not change her trade because she took a tumble into a mudhole, Samizo," Himesa said, her voice dry as river gravel in winter. "The Yabushi order binds their shadow blades by blood oaths carved into bone. If she returned to her elders with empty hands and a broken arm, they would have drowned her in a water barrel before dusk. Her only path back into their good graces was your head on a lead hook."

"You speak as though loyalty is an invisible rope that pulls tighter the farther a dog runs from its master," Samizo said, setting the bodkin aside. He blew softly across the surface of his tea to clear the floating dust. "Men who write oaths on parchment love that metaphor. But flesh is not parchment. When you drop a stone on a person's shoulder and show them that their master's holy scripture put them directly beneath the cliff, the rope does not pull tight. It snaps."

He tapped a weathered knuckle against the lower gorge marking on the parchment.

"She wanted to live," he said. "And thirty days before the surge, living meant listening to the only man within ten leagues who understood what the river was about to do."

·  ·  ·

The sulfurous steam from the ruptured pressure vent still hung thick in the cold air of the gorge, smelling of boiled shale and rotten reeds.

Tsuyome sat propped against a fractured slab of gray slate, her knees drawn toward her chest. Her left arm hung dead at her side, the shoulder visibly displaced forward and down, stretching the dark homespun cloth of her tunic into a taut, unnatural ridge. In her right hand, she gripped a short skinning knife she had pulled from her boot—her twin fighting daggers had been blasted into the boiling mud when the bedrock gave way—and the point of the iron trembled slightly against the cold shale.

Her breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. Mud crusted the sharp line of her jaw and matted her cropped black hair to her forehead, but her gray eyes remained as clear and venomous as an adder under a flat rock.

"Come two steps closer," she rasped, her voice rough from the grit in her lungs, "and I will drive this iron through the soft meat under your collarbone."

Samizo did not stop. He walked to within four paces, resting the brass-shod tip of his hickory pacing staff in the gravel between them. He did not raise his hands in surrender, nor did he reach for a stone. He simply looked at the way her left clavicle bulged against the hollow of her throat.

"If you try to lunge off that hip with your shoulder out of its socket," Samizo said, his voice flat and practical, "the torque will tear the joint capsule completely away from the scapula. You will pass out before your knife travels six inches. After that, the Gamou dredge crews downstream will find you face down in six inches of river silt."

"I can kill you with three fingers of my right hand before I faint," she whispered.

"You probably could," Samizo conceded. "And then you would spend the next two hours trying to crawl up a sixty-foot wall of loose scree with one arm while the Gamou third gate patrols close in from the northern ford. By sunrise, you would be a dead trespasser, and I would still be a dead surveyor. A remarkably stupid ending for both of us."

Tsuyome did not lower the knife, but her fingers tightened on the bone hilt until the tendons in her wrist stood out like corded hemp. "You rigged that stone floor. You led me onto an explosive siphon."

"I did not rig anything," Samizo said. "Nature carved that siphon three centuries ago when the Enokawa cut through the lower limestone terrace. Your sect elders drew a line across a map and labeled it solid granite because none of them had the stomach to wade into the gorge with a sounding lead and check the depth. You trusted their doctrine. I trusted my eyes. The mountain did not take sides."

A cold gust of wind blew down the canyon, carrying the rhythmic, distant thudding of iron pounding into river silt somewhere to the south. The sound was faint—scarcely louder than a woodpecker working on hollow timber—but Tsuyome’s head jerked toward it, her pupils narrowing.

"Gamou pickets," she murmured.

"Not pickets," Samizo corrected. "Pile drivers. Heavy timber drop-hammers mounted on barges. They are working on the lower weir, which means they have sent out riders to sweep the gorge banks for lookouts. If we are still sitting here arguing over sect honor when the sun clears the ridge, their heavy-current cultivators will be walking the silt bars with iron spears."

He stepped forward, planted the bottom of his hickory staff firmly into the gravel beside her hip, and crouched down.

"Put the knife away," he said. "Or use it. Decide now."

Tsuyome stared at him for three long heartbeats. Her jaw worked as she bit down on a spasm of pain that rippled across her torso. Slowly, without taking her eyes from his face, she reversed her grip on the skinning knife and slid it back into the leather sheath sewn along the calf of her left boot.

"If you touch a meridian with killing intent," she whispered, "I will bite your throat open."

"I do not possess enough cultivation to kill an ailing field mouse with my meridians," Samizo said dryly. "And resetting an anterior dislocation does not require martial arts. It requires a lever."

He slipped out of his rattan pack, setting his measuring slates and the oiled leather roll containing the stolen Gamou calibration plate onto a dry boulder. He took his hickory staff, wiped the river slime from its polished grain with the hem of his tunic, and positioned the rounded head of the staff directly into the hollow of her left armpit.

"You need to hold your torso rigid against that slate," Samizo instructed, positioning his left foot firmly against her ribcage to brace her body, while his right hand grasped her wrist and his left took hold of her elbow. "When the bone slips over the rim of the socket, it will feel as though someone struck your arm with a flat iron shovel. Do not scream. Sound travels half a league down this gorge."

Tsuyome set her teeth, her knuckles digging into the gravel beside her knee. "Do it, surveyor."

Samizo did not hesitate. He applied steady, tractional pressure along the line of her humerus, drawing the arm outward and slowly rotating the forearm toward the sky. When he felt the tight spasm of the pectoralis muscle yield under continuous tension, he leaned his weight into the hickory staff, using it as a fulcrum to lever the head of the bone laterally.

A sharp, wet thunk echoed against the shale wall.

Tsuyome let out a sharp hiss through clenched teeth, her whole body arching as her forehead struck the cold rock behind her. Sweat broke out across her temples, mingling with the gray mud on her skin. She remained slumped against the stone for several seconds, her chest heaving, before she slowly lifted her left hand and rotated the wrist.

The joint was back in place. The swelling was already purple and angry beneath the skin, but the limb obeyed her nerves once more.

"How does an unranked mud-measurer know the leverage of a high-tier shoulder?" she muttered, probing the joint with two fingers of her right hand.

"A surveyor spends half his life lifting five-hundred-pound granite boundary markers with timber poles and hemp ropes," Samizo said, retrieving his staff and strapping his rattan pack across his shoulders. "Bones are only timber that bleeds. You can use the arm for balance and light climbing, but if you swing a blade with full weight behind it in the next three days, the socket will pop out again like a greased plum."

Tsuyome rose to her feet with a smooth, feline efficiency that concealed how much the effort cost her. She tested her footing in the loose scree, her gaze flicking across the canyon floor, cataloging every broken rock and drift of silt.

"You stole our reconnaissance silk," she said, nodding toward the waxed cylinder protruding from the side of his pack. "And you carry the Gamou gate plate. My orders from the Shadow Hall were simple: recover the plate, burn the surveyor's maps, and leave no tongue alive that can speak of the Great Bend."

"Your orders were based on a lie," Samizo replied, turning his back to her to inspect the scree path leading southward along the river terrace. "Your elders told you the Gamou were merely encroaching on pasture boundaries. They did not tell you that the Gamou are preparing to blast the sandstone bluff at the bend and drop seventy million cubic feet of floodwater directly onto your clan's tenant villages in the Mabune basin."

Tsuyome's expression hardened into a mask of cold skepticism. "The Gamou do not have the cultivation to breach the Mabune bluff. The rock is ninety cubits thick."

"They do not need cultivation to break the bluff," Samizo said, stepping onto the first gravel ledge. "They only need three iron gates, twenty-seven degrees of hydraulic redirection, and the monsoon surge. The river will do the cutting for them. In thirty days, your clan will lose twelve thousand farmers, three hundred storehouses of grain, and the entire southern alluvial plain. And you will have died in a ditch protecting a map that showed a granite cliff where there was only rotten shale."

He began climbing the slope, his hickory staff finding purchase between the loose stones with practiced precision.

"You can take your knife and try your luck walking north through the Gamou cavalry lines," Samizo called back over his shoulder, not slowing his pace. "Or you can come with me to the Mabune bluff, look at their dredging works with your own eyes, and decide whether your elders sent you here to serve the clan or to die as an inconvenient witness."

Behind him, the gravel crunched.