Ruan Ye took the lead, saber at the ready, and advanced around the bend in the tunnel.  His motions were silent as a cat, his power tightly controlled so as to keep others from noticing his presence.

[Wait here,] he sent to Ma Qianle.  [The light will alert them before we are ready, and I do not need it to see.]

[Fine,] Ma Qianle sent back.  Ruan Ye quickly disappeared from view, and Ma Qianle was left alone.  He was uneasy.  Not only because he knew that even now people were putting their lives on the line for his sake, or because he knew he himself almost certainly had a difficult fight ahead of him, but because he had no way of knowing what lay beyond his meager pool of light.  It was the primal fear that had existed longer than man, that of the unknown lurking in the dark.

He was not left to face this alone for long, however, before Ruan Ye sent him another message. 

[Put the pearl away, and come forward.  Use a hand on the tunnel wall to guide you.  There are no side passages, and the floor is even.]

Ma Qianle grumbled silently to himself, but he did as he was told.  'You put the light away!  Put your whole family's light away! I'll blindfold you, see how you like it!'

Getting no response, Ruan Ye sent again. [Ma Qianle?]

[I'm coming,]  Ma Qianle replied tersely.  He moved as quickly as he dared, one hand out to guide himself as Ruan Ye had suggested.  He was completely blind in the inky blackness.  There was not even the smallest hint of light to see by.  His steps were methodical, feet kept low to the ground and moving slowly but smoothly to intercept any obstacles without falling over them.

Moving like this, Ma Qianle rounded first one curve in the tunnel, and then another.  He began to see light glimmering against the ceiling as the tunnel sloped upwards.  He felt relieved at the sight of the light, and some of the tension he hadn't even realized had gotten worse went out of his shoulders.  Reaching the top of the slope, Ma Qianle saw a tunnel mouth outlined ahead of him.  As he approached, a dark mound low to the ground resolved into the crouched figure of Ruan Ye.  He could hear male voices ahead of him.

"How long do we have to stay in this damn cave?" one said as Ruan Ye motioned for Ma Qianle to crouch alongside him.  The mouth of the tunnel turned out to be set high in the wall of a cavern approximately a quarter the size of the one where the villagers had met their end.  Four men, all tall and broad to varying degrees, stood or sat gathered around a battery powered lantern.  Ma Qianle was blinded briefly before his eyes adjusted to the sudden direct light.

"I don't see why we couldn't have done this from your living room, Lao'er,"  another of the men said.  He was balding, and wore a jacket that was a knockoff of a brand that had been popular a decade before.  He and two of the other men appeared to have been playing a card game.  "It's not like we're doing any of the fighting."

"You remember what that pretty boy Jiang said," Lao'er replied.  He appeared to be the eldest of the four, and was tending what looked like some form of altar.  "The ghost wall will only work if we're in the same space.  If we want to get rid of that Mortal Agent like we agreed, we have to do it from here."

'Jiang?  Could they mean the same Lao Jiang that Fang Zhelan met?'  Ma Qianle thought.  And what was this about getting rid of a Mortal Agent?  They couldn't mean him, could they?  This wasn't even his territory!

"Yeah but why did you drag us along?  You're the one casting the spells," said the first speaker, the slimmest of the four.  He had a nasal, weedling tone to his voice that Ma Qianle could tell would drive him crazy if he had to listen to it frequently.

"You expect me to cull the village by myself?" Lao'er asked.   "Quit complaining, or better yet make yourselves useful and go see if anyone has gotten away from the corpse soldiers."

"Sure, sure," the first man said.  "Xiao Cheng, go see if anyone has gotten away."  Dissatisfied, the final member of the group threw down his cards and got up.  He was clearly the youngest of the group, a man in his 30s compared to the others who all appeared to be past 50. Wordlessly, he disappeared down the only other passage out of the cavern Ma Qianle could see.

[I will hide our movements. Go and guard the other passage while I approach the three who remain,] Ruan Ye sent.  Ma Qianle made no argument.  He was perfectly happy to let Ruan Ye handle the fighting, in this case.  Ma Qianle was fit, but the men all had the look of lifelong laborers who relied on the strength of their bodies to make a living.  Even the youngest who had left was likely to cause him trouble, and that was assuming he didn't turn into a bear, or whatever was behind the attack on the villagers.

At Ma Qianle's nod, Ruan Ye dropped gracefully down from the ledge to the cavern floor below.  The drop must have been five meters at least, but Ruan Ye landed as lightly as if he had simply hopped over a low fence.  

"Sure, offer to help and then leave me at the top of a small cliff on my own.  We can all float down like you can!'  Ma Qianle cursed Ruan Ye in his head, then made his way down the cavern wall the slow way. Luckily, there were ample hand- and footholds, so it was not a difficult climb for him.

When Ruan Ye saw that Ma Qianle was in position by the passageway, he lifted his saber and placed the tip beneath the chin of Lao'er, who was seated on a boulder near the altar.  He dropped the spell covering them, and the other two men jumped up in shock.

"Remove the ghost wall and dismiss the corpse soldiers, and I will consider leniency,"  Ruan Ye said.  His voice was strong and powerful.  In the stark light of the lantern, his beauty was overshadowed and, saber extended at arms length, he looked like a cold, arrogant prince.

"Well well, I didn't expect to see you so soon, Lord Keeper," Lao'er said.  His voice was full of derision, and he practically spat Ruan Ye's title. "Are you working for the ghost killers now?"

"My allegiances have not changed," Ruan Ye said.  He didn't respond to Lao'er's obvious goading.  "But it seems yours have.  I am curious to know when the Xiong clan decided to become ghost practitioners."

'Oh, this time he wants to talk?'  Ma Qianle was impatient.  He didn't want any part in this fight, but drawing it out like this wasn't making things better.

Lao'er sneered. "We Xiongs do what's needed to get justice for our own.  Jiang offered us revenge and we took it.  All we had to do was get rid of a couple little obstacles for him."  He looked sideways at Ma Qianle.  The other two men, who had been standing by uncertainly, started to move towards Ma Qianle.  Ruan Ye lifted Lao'er's chin more sharply with his saber, and they stopped.

Ma Qianle was incredulous.  "You took revenge on the whole village?"  

Lao'er scoffed.  "Why not?  They all deserved it!  The Lord Keeper steps in when it's mortals that are dying, but not us.  Where were you 20 years ago when my brother and his wife were captured?  The farmers tortured them for years to get ingredients for their precious medicines!"

Ruan Ye frowned.  "And had you reported this when it happened, the farmers would have been punished."

"Pei!" Lao'er spat.  "What 'punished'? Everyone knows you're on their side!"

"Enough talking."  Ruan Ye had had enough.  "Release the spells and tell us where to find Jiang.  For your crimes, you cannot escape death, but I will consider allowing your souls to enter the cycle of reincarnation."

Lao'er laughed.  "Laozi will never submit to you!  Laosan, Laosi, get the kid!"  

Several things happened at once.  Lao'er threw himself to one side, rolling on the ground to avoid being cut by Ruan Ye's saber.  Laosan and Laosi, finally given orders, lunged towards Ma Qianle.  Ma Qianle quickly swallowed the qi enhancing pill he still held, having retrieved it from the pocket where he stored it while climbing down the wall before the confrontation even began.  Ruan Ye swore and kicked over the altar, backlash from the suddenly broken spells washing over him.  He ignored it as best he could and rushed after Laosan and Laosi.

The time for talking was over, and the fight had begun.

~~~~~~~

Wei Yaling wasn't sure how long they had been fighting.  She had lost count of how many corpses she had cut down, how many times they had stood back up before her just to come at them again.  The corpse soldiers had been cut to pieces, beaten into bloody pulp and shards of bone many times over, but the resentful energy that animated them just reformed them into a shape that continued fighting.

'What are those two doing back there?' she thought.  'If they take much longer they can deal with these corpse soldiers themselves because we'll all be dead!'

The onslaught was relentless.  The corpse soldiers may have been mindless, but they were fierce fighters in spite of the fact that in life they had mostly been middle aged farmers.  Despite their best efforts, the Impermanents had been slowly forced back into the tunnel they were guarding.  Six of their number had been left behind, never to fight again.

Wei Yaling wiped blood from her eyes as she surveyed the situation.  'We need something else that can delay these damn things,' she thought.  They had retreated far enough down the tunnel to reach a fork.  She quickly came to a decision.

"On my signal, squad one takes the left path and squad two takes the right.  Try to split them up,"  she shouted.  There was no need to speak directly to her subordinates' minds, as the corpse soldiers were too stupid to understand.  She waited for a moment for her orders to register.  "Go!"

At her shout, the Impermanents split into two groups.  They ran down the tunnels, putting some distance between themselves and the much slower corpses.  Wei Yaling's group reached a point where the tunnel first narrowed to the width of a single person, then widened out again.

"We'll stop here," she said.  "Take a moment to regroup, and defend this point.  If we're lucky, we can get them stuck here."

The Impermanents took a few moments to ready themselves, knowing the corpse soldiers would not be far behind.  Wound healing pills were eaten, and blood and less pleasant fluids were cleaned away from hands and the grips of weapons.  One man pulled a bow from his back and nocked an arrow, ready to shoot the first corpse soldier he saw.  

The noise of the shambling corpses drew nearer.  A figure appeared around the bend, and then another, and another.  The man drew back, thumb hooked around the string, to his shoulder, his mouth, his ear…

And the corpses dropped.  They didn't get back up.

There was silence for a moment as the Impermanents processed what had happened, and then one of them crowed, "If you can shoot them down like that why didn't you do it earlier?"

The archer let down on his bow.  "I haven't even shot yet, idiot!" he fired back.

"Both of you, shut up!"  Wei Yaling said.  The corpses no longer showed the slightest hint of life, and she could feel that her innate sense of direction was reasserting itself.  'Finally!'  She rejoiced silently, but not for long.  She knew they weren't done just yet.  "The spells have been broken.  We need to find Keeper Ruan and Agent Ma.  Come on!"  She ran down the corridor, subordinates trailing behind.

flying_paper_crane

Thanks to ML Peregrine for editing and beta reading!