Wild Pig Yi nodded at the palanquin.

“Help me get it out of here, and I’ll give you half,” she suggested, and it sounded to Gravewraith Chen that it was better than no prize at all.

Wild Pig Yi took up the forward position, Gravewraith Chen took up the rear, and they ran into the forest, away from the roads, along the darkest paths that Wild Pig Yi knew well. The branches lashed at her face, the arrows rushed around Gravewraith Chen’s head, and inside the palanquin, Beautiful Nie was thrown around like an ivory die in a gambler’s cup.

The bandits, members of the Hollow Hand sect, chased them through the forest sometimes no more than five or six strides behind. They were not only archers. Among their ranks they counted the foulest murderers of the day. There was an innkeeper who struck lone travelers on the head from behind with a club in order to rob them. There was a man who was truly a tiger, banished from his people in the north for his habit of eating the dead. There were monsters who looked like men, and there were men who became monsters, and they chased Wild Pig Yi and Gravewraith Chen through the forest.

The Hollow Hand sect lost them for a short while along the river, and they cast along both sides like hounds until they picked up the scent again, two people carrying a third so that their prints were deep, traveling afraid in the dark. The hue and cry went up, the hunt continued.

The Hollow Hand disciples followed the tracks up into the cliffs, and by starlight, they came to the narrow edge of a steep ledge, looking down over a deep ravine. At the bottom of the ravine, there was the shattered wreckage of the palanquin, but no sign of Gravewraith Chen, Wild Pig Yi, or their precious cargo.

Then from the woods behind them, they heard two cheerful voices singing the old market song.

“My black hen laid eighteen eggs,

Eighteen eggs, eighteen eggs,

I’ll cry if I drop even one!”

The eighteen wicked disciples spun around, but it was too late, because the two fighters were among them, too close for their archers or their superior numbers to do any good.

With lance and hammer, Gravewraith Chen and Wild Pig Yi tore through the ranks of the Hollow Hand, and every time they heaved another disciple over the edge of the cliff to shatter on the rocks below, they sang again,

“My black hen laid seven eggs,

Seven eggs, seven eggs,

I’ll cry if I drop even one!”

When the final egg cracked on the ground below, they turned to each other warily.

“One more egg,” Wild Pig Yi said, but Gravewraith Chen shook his head.