The Live Cage

The heavy cloth was not meant to keep out rain.

Lead weights were sewn to all four corners. When the mountain wind blew, the cloth billowed only slightly, and the things beneath it were not easily exposed. The cart stood at the very back of the camp, with a guard at each end, but its wheels had not sunk deeply into the ground, showing that it held nothing heavy at the moment.

Helian Yuan lay behind a fallen pine and waited for the changing of the guard.

As the two guards exchanged duties, the newcomer first checked the cart's lock, then reached beneath a corner of the cloth and felt around. The previous guard asked, "Is the tag still blank?"

"Still blank."

"The higher-ups are pressing us."

"The thing hasn't come back. What am I supposed to write?"

"Write it down first, and it'll come back easier." The previous guard lowered his voice. "Name first, thing second. That's how it's always done."

The newcomer said nothing, only weighing the corner of the cloth down again.

When Helian Yuan heard "name first, thing second," his fingers slowly tightened in the dirt.

Why was the name field for number seven blank?

Perhaps it was not that they did not know what it was, but that someone had deliberately left the name unwritten this time. The organization usually chose a target first, a beast species or a purpose, then sent a recovery team to search for it by name. Yet number seven had only a status and no name, as though they were waiting until they actually found it before deciding what to classify it as.

That cart was no ordinary cargo wagon.

It was a live cage.

That afternoon, the gray-robed man left camp with two guards to inspect a new enclosure to the east. Two guards remained by the cart, and three workers in charge of provisions were still by the cooking fire. Helian Yuan did not wait until nightfall. At night, another lock would be added to the cart, and torches would light the space beneath it. There were more people around during the day, but someone was always assuming someone else was watching.

From downwind, he sent out a torn waterskin filled with beast oil.

A thin cord dragged the waterskin across the grass, leaving an intermittent trail of oil scent outside the camp. Several mountain foxes, already agitated by bitter powder, picked up the scent and gave chase. They circled the provisions cart first, then darted into the cooking shelter. As soon as a pot overturned with a crash, all three workers rushed to drive them away, and one of the guards by the cart turned his head and cursed.

Helian Yuan slipped in close against the outermost wheel.

Under the heavy cloth was an iron cage, roughly ten feet long and no higher than a man's chest. Its bars were thinner than those in Old Mo's memory, but their horizontal and vertical spacing was just as even. Two copper clasps hung outside the cage door, and a blank wooden tag was fastened to one of them.

There was no writing on the front, but seven shallow cuts marked the back.

They did not form the character for "seven"; they were merely seven knife marks for checking whether the tag had been replaced.

Thick grass lined the cage. There was no fresh blood on it, only a lingering, exceedingly faint scent, both bloody and sweet. Helian Yuan picked up a hair with the tip of his knife. It was short and black, gray at the root, unlike the hair of either a Blue Rock Panther or an Ironback Mountain Badger.

Before he could take a closer look, footsteps sounded outside the cart.

"Did you drive the foxes away?"

"They got into the grain sacks, damn it-"

The speaker walked up to the cart and suddenly stopped.

Helian Yuan pressed himself beneath the cart and saw a pair of boots turn toward his hiding place. The man did not lift the cloth. Instead, he reached out and felt the blank wooden tag first.

The tag swayed gently.

Helian Yuan had brushed the copper clasp on his way in.

The guard drew his blade almost without pause.

"Under the cart!"

A blade stabbed through beneath the cloth. Helian Yuan rolled aside, and the iron blade grazed his clothes beside his ribs. Instead of retreating the way he had come, he used his shoulder to knock open a movable iron plate in the cage floor and slipped inside.

The other guard lifted the cloth and opened the lock.

The instant the cage door swung outward, Helian Yuan thrust his short spear between the bars. The spearpoint did not stab the guard; instead, it caught the wrist of the hand holding the lock. The copper lock fell from his grasp, and Helian Yuan kicked the door, sending it crashing into the guard and forcing him back two steps.

The people by the cooking shelter were already rushing over.

Helian Yuan snatched the blank wooden tag, turned, and slid out through the movable plate in the cage floor. There was only half a foot of clearance beneath the cart. He forced himself through sideways, and the iron edge pressed against the old wound on his right arm, making it go numb. The first guard came after him around the cart, slashing down from behind the wheel.

Tiger Shadow suddenly sank against the ground.

Helian Yuan did not let it pounce. He merely took the momentary warning of danger and hunched his shoulders. The blade skimmed his pack and severed a strap. He rolled out from under the cart and was already in the grass outside by the time he got to his feet.

"Catch him!"

Whistles blared throughout the camp.

Helian Yuan did not head straight for the woods. He circled toward the grain sacks the mountain foxes had torn open and kicked the spilled dry beans into the fire pit. The beans burst in the heat, startling several packhorses by the cooking fire into pulling at their reins. Only after the crowd had fallen into some confusion did he dart beneath the horses' bellies and race toward the rocky slope on the west side.

More people pursued him than last time. Although the gray-robed man was away, the camp still had crossbowmen assigned specifically to guard the cart. The first bolt struck the ground ahead of Helian Yuan, and he immediately abandoned his descent, stepping on an overturned provisions cart to vault to the other side.

He had already studied the terrain here.

The western side was not a safe route. There was only a dry gully ending at a thirty-foot drop. When the pursuers saw him go in, they slowed instead, splitting up to block both sides of the lip.

Helian Yuan ran to the end, looped a hemp rope around a protruding rock, and went over the drop without slowing. The rope was only twenty feet long. He let go for the final stretch, bending his knees and rolling aside when he landed. His right shoulder slammed into the rock wall, and his vision went black for an instant.

Someone peered over the edge above.

Helian Yuan grabbed a pine branch he had left at the bottom of the gully and used it to flick the knot loose. The hemp rope slipped off the rock and fell, depriving the pursuers of their quickest way down.

He had picked out this gully as an escape route while observing the camp yesterday. Once used, it could not be used a second time.

He endured the pain in his shoulder as he walked several miles, stopping in a rock hollow only after he had made sure no one had taken another route to catch up with him.

The blank wooden tag was still in his hand.

Helian Yuan checked his pack first. The strap severed by the blade had allowed a packet of hemostatic powder to fall beneath the cart. He had not had many packets of medicine to begin with, and losing this one would slow his shoulder's recovery. He tore a strip from the hem of his clothes to secure the shoulder and confirmed that he could still raise his arm, though he could not swing his spear repeatedly. The cost of stealing a wooden tag was not the abstract idea of "exposure," but having one less dose of medicine and one less chance to fight head-on in every battle over the coming days.

He committed the loss to memory before continuing to examine the tag.

There were seven cuts on the back, and a line of tiny characters burned into its edge: add name after return alive.

Helian Yuan placed the black hair on the tag. Besides the bloody sweetness, it carried a very faint herbal scent, different from the recovery team's white powder and more like the hemp grass used to suppress demonic beasts' agitation.

The cage had once held a living creature.

Yet even now, the wooden tag still bore no name.

That meant number seven was neither an old record of something already dead nor simply a lost iron tag.

There were also two extremely shallow bite marks on the lower corner of the tag. They were close together, unlike those of an adult leopard or wolf, and more like marks left by a young beast gnawing in agitation. Helian Yuan did not use them to determine the species; he only made a rubbing of the marks on paper. The more a clue resembled an answer, the more important it was to preserve its shape first, lest he later remember only what he had guessed at the time. It had been shut in the cage alive, then disappeared from the recovery process. The organization was still waiting for it to return before deciding what name to write for it.

Distant hoofbeats sounded outside the rock hollow.

The gray-robed man had returned to camp.

Before long, a long blast from an iron whistle sounded to the east. It was not a call to assemble, but more like a shrill note that could carry a great distance. Several birds in the mountain forest took flight at once, but no demonic beast answered in the distance.

Helian Yuan turned the blank wooden tag faceup again.

The front was completely blank.

But from this moment on, the blank itself was already part of the answer.