Chapter 12: Chains in the Water

Yanzhi did not think.

He crossed the orchard at a run, through the rows of peach trees, with his silk flying and his bare feet cutting on the roots.

"Stop," he said. "Stop it."

The Warden did not look up.

He drove the spade in again.

A stone rolled off the top of the cairn and bumped to Yanzhi's feet, and he felt it in his teeth.

"Good evening, little fox."

"Get away from her."

"From whom?" The Warden straightened, mild and tidy, with a smear of earth on his sleeve. "I am inspecting the ground."

"The orchard lies within the temple's tithe, and the Three Halls must confirm that no grave holds an unclean thing."

"She is not unclean."

"You admit it, then. That it is a grave."

Yanzhi stopped.

The Warden smiled in the lantern light, and Yanzhi saw that he had been hoping for exactly that.

"A fox's grave," said Bian Chengzhi. "In a holy orchard, tended for seven years by a novice of this hall."

"I wonder what the Council will make of that."

"You vile..."

"A pearl does not simply vanish when a fox dies, you know. It stays in the body, or it passes on. It must be somewhere."

His grey eyes went to the stones and back to Yanzhi. "Yours, I think, is very old."

"It would be so much simpler if you gave it to me."

"No."

"Then I will have to take it."

He lifted two fingers.

Two exorcists in black and white stepped out of the dark between the trees, one on either side.

Each had an iron chain wound around his arm.

Yanzhi ran.

He ran for the only thing in the world that was not terror, and he knew where Jingmo would be.

The path to the springs went up behind the orchard in the dark, steep and rooty, and the chains rang behind him.

One of them caught his ankle.

He fell on his face, tore free, and kept going on his hands and knees.

A second chain whipped around his waist and dragged him back.

He came down in the shallows of the lower pool with water to his chest and the iron burning cold across his ribs.

"Jingmo!" he screamed.

The exorcists splashed in after him.

One caught his hair, one his arm, and the chain tightened until the breath went out of him.

The water churned and steamed in the moonlight.

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