Chapter 11: The Bureau Net

"Give me the gourd, Priest Gu," said Inspector Shao, "and nobody has to be hurt."

Forty torches hissed in the night wind.

Behind the shutters of every house along the waterfront, Pingan could feel the village watching.

Auntie Xu stood in her doorway with her cleaver and two ferrymen at her back, saying nothing.

"The gourd is empty," Pingan lied.

He was a terrible liar.

Shao smiled, because he could see the ghost standing at Pingan's shoulder, ash-haired and solid and holding a black sword.

"I'm sure it is," he said. "Net."

The priests flung it.

It was a huge square of yellow paper, written edge to edge with red seals, and it opened over the dock.

Zhuoran moved.

He cut it in half with one stroke, and the pieces fell burning to the boards.

"Again!" Shao called, almost cheerfully.

The second net came.

So did a third, from the left.

The dock was crowded with white-and-gold robes and flying paper, and Zhuoran was in the middle of it, spinning, a dark blur with a needle.

He did not kill anyone.

Pingan, backed against a mooring post and slapping charms out of the air, saw how carefully he was not killing anyone.

He disarmed.

He knocked swords out of hands and kicked feet from under men.

He flicked a seal out of the air an inch before it landed on a priest's face.

Then a small voice screamed.

Pingan turned.

The child from the inn, the little girl with the bowl of rice, had come out of the crowd.

She was standing under the dock's old timber crane, with her hands over her ears, looking up.

A Bureau priest's wild net had tangled in the crane's rope.

The big beam above it was swinging loose.

It was a ton of black river oak, and it was coming down on her.

Zhuoran saw it a half-breath after Pingan did.

He didn't shout.

He crossed twenty feet of dock in one stride, caught the child up against his chest and turned his back to the beam.

It hit him across the shoulders with a sound.

He went down on his knees with the girl in his arms.

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