Chapter 130: Crow's Throat
My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 130
Chapter 130: Crow's Throat
The gorge earned its name honestly. Two walls of grey stone rose sheer on either side of the path, narrowing near the middle to a gap barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast, and somewhere above the crows themselves sat in silent rows along the ledges, watching the narrow strip of sky rather than the ground below it.
Li Fan had chosen the route deliberately. A gorge this tight left almost nothing for a pursuer to hide behind, and after three days spent checking his own back trail more carefully than he'd ever needed to before, the idea of a corridor with clean sightlines in both directions had seemed, that morning, like a reasonable trade against the risk of being boxed in.
The gorge's floor was littered with old rockfall, boulders worn smooth by whatever seasonal water once ran through here, and Li Fan picked his way between them without hurrying, listening to his own boots against loose shale, to the thin whistle of wind funneling between the stone walls, to the dry rattle of a pebble dislodged somewhere above and clattering down into a crevice out of sight. The air smelled of old dust and cold stone, the particular mineral scent of a place the sun rarely reached deep enough to warm.
He understood the mistake the moment he was a third of the way through, when the ordinary sounds of the gorge — wind, shale, the distant complaint of a settling crow — went quiet all at once, the way a room goes quiet when someone has just walked in that everyone else recognizes and fears.