The Hunter's Price

The hunter with the crossbow on his back found him the following evening.

He had not followed footprints or arranged to meet him along the old spring path. Helian Yuan was crouched beside a nameless stream, tending his wounded shoulder, when a short, headless arrow suddenly flew out of the woods and lodged in the wet mud three paces upstream.

Two horizontal notches were carved into the shaft.

The first was a warning. The second meant he had something to say.

Helian Yuan did not get up immediately. He checked downwind first, then the opposite bank. A quarter of an hour later, the hunter emerged from behind a moss-covered rock. He had changed into an old cloak, but the crossbow on his back was the same. He had merely wrapped an extra layer of dry hide around the string to keep powder from the gray threads off it.

"You stole their blank tags," he said as soon as he opened his mouth.

Helian Yuan tied the bandage tight. "Someone in the camp saw me take them and lived."

"I'm not one of them."

"Then how do you know?"

The hunter tipped his chin toward the east. "The gray-robed man doubled the guard at the north post. Before, they were afraid hunters would get close to the carts. Now they're afraid someone will understand what the carts mean."

He walked to the stream but did not sit. He only set a flat waterskin beside his feet. The full width of the stream still separated them.

"I pulled back west," he said. "The old stone hollow, the spring path, the meat caches-I've abandoned them all."

Helian Yuan nodded.

"You owe me more than a broken arrow."

"Name your price."

The hunter seemed to have expected that he would not play dumb. He took a broken boundary stake from his cloak. Two loops of black thread were wrapped around its top, not the gray-robed man's gray thread.

"The north post has taken over my last ravine out of the mountains. Four men, a crossbow wall. They check beasts by day and people by night. If I'm going to leave, that wall has to come down first."

"You could go around."

"That would take three days. I don't have enough food."

"Killing four men would cause too much commotion."

"I didn't ask you to kill them," the hunter said. "Burn their powder, destroy their nails, and force them back to camp for replacements. If the north post is empty for half an hour, I can get through."

Helian Yuan did not agree at once.

The north post was closer to the gray-robed man's camp. Sabotaging it would tell every search party that someone was deliberately dismantling their rules. More importantly, once the hunter left, Helian Yuan would lose the only person in Sunken Bone Slope who knew the limits of his movements.

Keeping him there would be to his advantage.

But trapping him in a route where he could no longer survive in the name of "cooperation" was no different in essence from the gray-robed man using boundary stakes to force hunters to accept his rules.

"Just the north post," Helian Yuan said. "Once it's empty, you go your way. I won't see you off, wait for you, or cover your retreat."

The hunter's gaze lingered on his face for a moment. "I won't ask about the blank tags, either."

"Even if you did, I wouldn't tell you."

"Then we're even."

They did not shake hands.

They did not go over the plan together, either. The hunter only said that the north post replaced its barrel of white powder every two hours. The barrel sat beneath the guard shelter, with two bundles of new stakes beside it. Helian Yuan told him that if three columns of gray smoke appeared on the southern slope the next afternoon, the men at the north post would be sent to investigate a false "seven" marker. If only two appeared, the plan had failed, and he was not to approach.

When they had finished, the hunter left first.

He did not ask how Helian Yuan would make the gray smoke appear, nor did he leave a backup route. The cleanest thing about a one-time partnership was that each person knew only what he needed to know.

The next afternoon, Helian Yuan took the white powder he had scraped off the recovered nails and circled around to a spot upwind of the north post.

The guard shelter stood between two enormous rocks. It had a clear view to the front, but a dry pine forest lay behind it. The four guards were not all inside the shelter. One guarded the ravine entrance, two checked the new stakes, and the last sat behind the crossbow wall, sharpening arrowheads.

Setting a fire directly would burn the forest first and leave everyone there to fight it.

Helian Yuan wanted them to leave with their things.

He caught three mountain rats in the pine forest. Without hurting them, he rubbed a little bitter powder on their backs, then temporarily tied them to tree roots with grass cord. When the man replacing the powder at the north post opened the new barrel, he cut the cords.

The mountain rats smelled the stronger scent from the barrel and ran toward the shelter first. The first knocked over the lead strips lying on the ground, the second burrowed into the pile of new stakes, and the third jumped straight onto the rim of the powder barrel.

The man guarding the ravine entrance cursed and went to drive them off.

But the guard sharpening arrowheads immediately stood up. "Don't touch them! Something brought powder in here!"

They were not afraid of mountain rats. What they feared was the powder being touched by beasts of unknown origin. If someone deliberately got powder on beasts and sent them running into camp, everything capable of leaving traces would be contaminated.

The guards sealed the powder barrel and prepared to send it back to camp along with the new stakes for replacement.

Helian Yuan lit the first column of smoke at that moment.

It was not behind the guard shelter, but farther away on the southern slope. A handful of damp grass was pressed into a crack between rocks, producing thick gray smoke, as though someone had hastily put out a fire. The second column rose half a li away, and the third stood right next to a boundary stake that had just been replaced.

The man guarding the ravine entrance saw the smoke and, sure enough, blew a short whistle.

"Three spots on the southern slope!"

Not everyone behind the crossbow wall left. Two men escorted the contaminated powder barrel back to camp, one went to investigate the southern slope, and the last stayed behind. One more remained than Helian Yuan had expected.

Helian Yuan made no further disturbance.

The north post had already gone from four men to one. If the hunter could not get past even that, it was not a debt Helian Yuan needed to make good.

A moment later, a bird called from the woods on the western slope.

The guard who had stayed behind looked up.

A short arrow flew in from outside his line of sight and lodged in a crossbeam of the shelter. A small strip of burning animal-fat-soaked cloth was tied to its tail. The guard immediately went to pull it free, but a second arrow severed a hanging rope beside the powder barrel. Spare stakes fell from the shelter roof, blocking his path toward the western ravine.

The hunter did not kill anyone. He simply used his own method to trap the last man at the post.

Standing farther away, Helian Yuan saw a cloaked figure flash along the bottom of the ravine. The man carried his crossbow and everything else he could still take with him. He did not look back.

The north post was back in operation half an hour later. The gray-robed man came in person, checking the powder first, then the three sites of the gray smoke. At the third, he picked up a small corner of a blank wooden tag that Helian Yuan had deliberately left behind.

The real tag was still in Helian Yuan's hands. The fragment had merely been shaved from another piece of old wood.

The gray-robed man studied it for a while but gave no order to pursue anyone into the western ravine.

"Seal the north post," he said. "He isn't trying to get out. He wants us to think someone got out."

Helian Yuan lay hidden on the southern slope and heard that assessment.

The gray-robed man was half wrong.

Someone really had gotten out.

But the man who remained had no intention of escaping by the same route.

That evening, Helian Yuan returned to the nameless stream. The hunter did not appear. He had only left half of a whittled-flat crossbow stock on a rock upstream. A line pointing west was carved into its inner face. Other than that, there were no words of thanks and no arrangement.

Helian Yuan put the broken arrow beside the rock and left the crossbow stock where it was.

The debt ended there.

Helian Yuan waited by the stream for another quarter of an hour. There was no second arrow, and no one secretly turned back. The hunter really had left, rather than waiting for Helian Yuan to catch up and suggest traveling together long-term. The crossbow stock gave a direction and fixed the boundary: the west was the other man's own road, and Helian Yuan should not use "having repaid a favor" as an excuse to keep prying.

As he turned, the sound of wheels came from the east. After the north post was sealed, the gray-robed man had begun moving the live cages and supplies to a deeper transport ravine.

The opening created by the hunter's departure had instead given Helian Yuan a chance to follow the convoy.

He had repaid the favor he owed.

Whatever he obtained next, he would not have to share with anyone.