The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 3 - Chapter 18

Chapter 18: The Hunt (Part Two)

The soldiers serving as bodyguards were clearly distressed. The officials were discussing something amongst themselves, with occasional exasperated glances at Basen. It had now been two full hours since his master had left his seat. Well beyond a reasonable amount of time to answer the call of nature.

Basen knew it was too late to regret his decision not to accompany Jinshi. Anyway, Jinshi had specifically told him to stay behind. Basen had seen his father give some sort of instructions to that maid who was always with them.

Basen grunted and furrowed his brow. Everyone told him he looked like his father when he did that. At this moment, though, his father—Gaoshun—remained expressionless, simply observing what was happening. Basen was directly involved, but today, Gaoshun was a bystander. He was just acting like the other officials. Basen was desperate to ask his father what he should do, but he couldn’t approach him under the circumstances. Instead, he tried to imagine where his master might be even as he tried to ignore the distraction of the other officials’ annoyance.

He’d already sent one of his subordinates out to search, but truth be told, he wished he could have gone personally. Sickened to be stuck in a role that seemed purely formal, all he could do was wait for his man to get back.

One of the servants claimed to have seen Jinshi leave the building, saying he was going to get some air. He’d told the guards not to follow him, but a petite lady-in-waiting had gone after him with some water. Basen knew who that must have been—and it only made him more certain that something had happened.

He shouldn’t have just waited here.

At the moment, there were two distinctly different attitudes among those present: those who were worried about their missing master, and those who were openly amused that he had disappeared for so long with a serving girl. Basen was particularly furious at the idiots in this second group. He restrained himself from arguing openly with them—That would never happen! he wanted to exclaim—but the result was a compulsive tapping of his foot against the floor.

The atmosphere at the banquet was quickly turning sour. Basen felt as if Shishou could have put things back on the right footing with just a word, but their host was too busy pouring wine into his portly, tanuki-like belly. Basen couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. Shishou would never have gotten where he was without being who he was, but from that perspective, there was one man who might have been able to surpass him: the strategist, Lakan. Yet it was widely understood that Lakan had no such ambitions. The man people called eccentric, strange, bizarre—he’d recently bought out a courtesan, and he was shut up somewhere with her instead of attending this hunt. His absence wasn’t particularly remarkable; what had the court chattering was the realization that the monocled eccentric had actual human feelings.

All this being said, Shishou was the host of this banquet, hardly in a position to carry out any plots personally. Basen dearly hoped that nothing untoward would happen while he was the one attending his master. If anything did occur, he suspected it would be instigated by someone other than Shishou, that their host wouldn’t be involved.

It was then that a soldier, muscular and still young, ran up, his footfalls pounding on the floor. “Pardon me, sirs,” he said as he entered the banquet hall and stood in front of Basen. It wasn’t quite proper, but nobody stopped him. The soldier knelt before Basen, who bade him look up.

“What is it?” Basen asked.

In response, the soldier glanced around the room, then passed Basen a piece of cloth. He recognized the damp, shredded fabric immediately. He took in the soldier’s expression. He was desperate to glance over at his father to see what he might be thinking, but he suppressed the urge, clutching the cloth tighter.

“Is that—”

An official reached out, but Basen hid the cloth from him. Not raising his eyes from the ground, he said, “A piece of my master’s robe.” Carefully expressionless, he looked at the soldier.

The young man was looking at the ground again as he said, “I found it hanging on a rock in the waterfall basin.” That set the room buzzing. So the missing guest had torn his robe. “There was no one in the area,” the soldier continued. “The river is rapid there, however, and swollen by the recent rains.”

The people who had been snickering over the visitor’s assignation with one of the ladies went pale. “Send out a search party immediately!” someone shouted, but it was a little late for that. Guests began to pour out of the banquet hall until only a handful of people were left, including Basen, the soldier who had brought the report, and Shishou.

The soldier glanced in the direction of those who had left, then stood. “If I may, sir, I’m going to go back where I found that and have another look around,” he said, and then he left as well.

Basen pretended not to have noticed that when the soldier looked up, he grinned.

Basen left the residence, instructing two of his subordinates to stay behind at the banquet hall. Those who had shared Basen’s concern for his master had already sent their men to search the first time Basen had asked, so that now it was only the scoffers who were stumbling over themselves to look useful.

Basen heard some of the other guests shout to him, and he answered them offhandedly, but what he was really doing was looking around. He found the soldier who had reported to him; he was now accompanied by a dog that sniffed around, searching for something. It looked like a hunting animal tracking game, but then one of the officials passed in front of it and it began howling.

“Wh-What the hell?!” the man exclaimed, cringing to find himself the object of all this noise.

“Ah, I’m very sorry, sir,” the dog’s handler said.

“Just get him away from me!” the man demanded. The soldier managed to pull the dog back, but now the animal started barking at the official’s subordinate. The man and his underling moved off, clearly thinking what an ill-trained hunting animal they were dealing with.

After another thirty minutes or so of searching, someone shouted from the direction of the waterfall. A bevy of guests were gathered downstream of the basin. There was a torn robe there, with dark-red stipples—and a broken arrow stuck through it.

“What is going on here?” Basen said, but the discoverers of the robe shook their heads. The tear in the outfit perfectly matched the piece of cloth that had been found earlier. Water had caused the red stains to fade, but they were unmistakably blood, and they clearly traced back to where the arrow had struck.

The owner of the robe was nowhere to be seen. If the robe had been carried to them by the current, then he must be upstream—but if the arrow had caught the outfit and the owner had wriggled out of it, then he might be downstream. There were no wet marks on the banks of the river, though, making it unlikely he’d climbed out here.

Basen looked at the torn piece of cloth and frowned. “Show me the arrow.” One of his men passed him the broken projectile. He inspected the tail feathers and the head. Then he turned toward the still-growing crowd of officials and announced, “I apologize, but we’re going to have to search everyone’s belongings.”

The arrow had been fletched with hawk feathers. Those were expensive, limiting the number of people who might have used them. However, many of the guests on this expedition, knowing that hawks were to be used in the hunting, had superstitiously brought supplies decorated with hawk feathers. What was more, each of the items had been painstakingly handcrafted by professional craftsmen. The highborn hated to see a design repeated; even when it came to consumables like arrows, they preferred to be unique. Each of them could be expected to carry arrows of exceptional construction and materials.

Though obviously displeased to find themselves objects of suspicion, the guests reluctantly complied, each producing the hunting implements from his carriage, appearing confident that no such arrow was to be found among his belongings.

“Can you explain this to me?” Basen asked icily.

“Just what is that?” responded the distressed owner of the arrow Basen was holding. His name was Lo-en, a high official of the board that handled finance. But his title or station mattered little. At the moment, his abundant beard was trembling as he denied any knowledge of the arrow. “I don’t own anything like this—there must be some mistake!” he said, with much shivering and gesticulating.

The onlookers started murmuring. Suspicious glances began to turn on Lo-en. Despite what the man said, the broken arrow in Basen’s hand perfectly matched the ones in Lo-en’s baggage.

“Please, explain how it’s a mistake,” Basen said.

“Somebody must have planted those there to frame me!” Lo-en’s face was drawn with panic, and his servants shared his distress. They were all obviously deeply shaken by this utterly unexpected turn of events. Lo-en’s defense started the crowd talking again. It was true, they seemed to agree, that only an inordinately clumsy criminal would keep a quiver full of the arrows used in a crime.

The soldier with the dog stood behind Basen, watching the scene as if he wanted to comment. Basen studied the shred of cloth again. “Then perhaps the arrows that were switched out were thrown away somewhere nearby.” His gaze took in the residence and all the scenery around it. “We’ve searched the riverbanks fairly thoroughly, so perhaps it’s time to start looking in the woods.”

Somebody flinched at that. It was the slightest of movements, but someone who was watching carefully would have seen it. But would this person take the bait?

“Shall we split up and search, then?” Basen asked. “I don’t need everyone here. If about half of you could help me look for my master, that would be enough.”

No one dared object to this proposal. Lo-en and his party, meanwhile, were still recovering their wits. Basen let out a sigh and looked at the soldier behind him. The man gave him a friendly smile.

This would do it, Basen thought. He looked at the torn robe, openly annoyed. The fabric bore familiar handwriting.

○●○

The man looked around, panicked, wondering if anyone would show up. He was sure they couldn’t possibly find it, but having everyone looking for you was an unsettling feeling nonetheless.

They would never find it, he was sure—but the thought naturally led him to edge toward it. He was in the woods, with its piles of fallen leaves and soft soil. The leaves were neatly scattered, so it wouldn’t be noticeable at a glance. If that bunch of determined men started rooting through the leaves and digging in the ground, though, that might be a problem.

What to do?

The man was flustered. Why had that been there? The question hounded him. Maybe that was what made him more panicky than usual.

When he arrived at his destination, he breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing had changed. The ground was undisturbed, just as he’d left it.

“Is there something there, sir?”

The man flinched at a voice from behind him. He turned to see a young woman with sopping hair, holding a mud-stained, cloth-wrapped package. His eyes went wide. “Hey! That’s—”

The man reached out, but a large hand grabbed his wrist. He looked and saw the owner of the hand: a beefy soldier, the one with the hunting dog.

For the second time that evening, the dog howled at the man.

“Guess dogs don’t like you much,” the young woman said, asserting her grip on the package, her gaze cold. “I’m betting this is why you didn’t want to hunt with them.”

From within the bundle, she produced a feifa gun.