The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 4 - Chapter 21

Chapter 21: How it Began

There was a piercing whistle. Jinshi felt his anxiety ease a little bit. The whistle was the signal that the mission had been carried out: several short tweets if there was a problem, one long one if all was well. Lihaku must have gotten Maomao safely out of the fortress.

Jinshi emerged from a long hallway. He thought back to the blueprints he’d studied on the way here: ahead of him there should be a large, open room, an office, and then the living chambers.

Basen was right behind Jinshi. Normally, this would have been Gaoshun’s place, but Gaoshun had his own job to do. But Basen had a habit of getting a bit out of sorts when standing in for his father.

“Don’t get too tense,” Jinshi advised him, speaking softly so that only Basen would hear. Two other officers followed them.

“Allow me to go in front, then,” Basen said. Jinshi understood what he meant—he wanted Jinshi to be protected both ahead and behind. Jinshi chuckled, then went to push open a heavy door, but he was suddenly seized by a bad feeling. He told the others to step back, to not stand in front of the door. Then he pushed it open and immediately flattened himself against the wall.

An almost deafening roar passed by him.

“What was that?!” Basen demanded, scowling.

“Nothing I didn’t expect.”

If they were producing fire powder here, one could at least assume they would use feifa in the fighting. There were constraints on where such weapons could be used—they were vulnerable to inclement weather, and even when in good working order, feifa took time to reload. And one needed at least as much space as there was here in this stronghold.

It was just as Jinshi had predicted—in the large room beyond the door, some men were frantically trying to reload their guns. “Let’s go!” Jinshi shouted. At the same moment, the men in the room tried to abandon their guns and draw their swords, but it was too late.

Feifa were fundamentally intended to be used with several people switching off firing. These men had missed with their first volley, and there was no time to reload fresh bullets. There were about five of them, all dressed in gorgeous clothing. Jinshi recognized several faces. The distinctive smell of fire powder suffused the large, flagstone-floored chamber.

“Where is Shishou?” he asked. He assumed everyone in this room was a member of the Shi clan. Their soldiers had abandoned them when they saw it was a losing battle; the feifa were a last-ditch attempt to turn the tide. “Not feeling talkative?”

“W-We don’t know! This was never our plan!” one of the men blurted, his eyes fixed on Jinshi. He was shouting so excitedly that spittle flew from his mouth. Basen quickly moved to restrain him, afraid that he might throw himself at Jinshi. “We were tricked! We were just dupes!” the man cried from where Basen pressed him to the floor.

“You brazen—!” Basen, enraged, shoved the man’s face even harder into the ground. “We have proof, proof, that you scoundrels embezzled national funds to rebuild this fortress! And you stood here with weapons drawn against us—even if that were your only crime, you know what it would entail!” Basen pressed the blade of his naked sword against the man’s neck. The man, now practically frothing, looked utterly desperate.

“I s-swear, we didn’t know! I didn’t know! He said this was for the country’s benefit. We did it all for our nation...”

Whoosh. The sword fell—and sparks flew as it struck against the stone floor. The man, his eyes practically popping out of his head, ceased his jabbering. A dark stain spread across the floor underneath him. The other men stayed silent, perhaps not wishing to be put in the same ignominious situation, but the fear in their eyes was complete.

Jinshi wished he could tell them not to look at him like that—but how could he? They could beg him for mercy with their eyes, but the judgment upon them was irrevocable. All that Jinshi could do for them now was to stand firm and let the speartips of their emotions lodge in him.

“Do be kind. The sword now or the scaffold later. Surely you could have the decency to simply end it for him.”

Basen and the other soldiers took up fighting stances as a voice approached, accompanied by noisy footsteps. A portly man shuffled slowly into the room: Shishou. He held a feifa in his hand.

Jinshi looked at the man known as the old tanuki. “You seem quite relaxed, Shishou.” He produced a scroll from the folds of his robes. Sealed with the Emperor’s personal insignia, it instructed him to apprehend the entire Shi clan.

Still moving slowly, as though he had all the time in the world, Shishou leveled his gun.

“Have you taken leave of your senses?” one of the soldiers asked in a quiet voice. Shishou carried no flint, and the man seemed to assume that that meant he couldn’t fire the gun.

Jinshi, though, grabbed Basen with one hand and another of his subordinates with the other and pulled them both down onto the ground. The explosion came next. The bullet bounced off the wall and hit the Shi man on the ground in the leg. A most unfortunate fellow. His scream echoed around the room.

“Oh, you’re embarrassing yourself. Didn’t you shoot an animal with this thing, just to see how it felt?” Shishou said to the screaming man. “And I was so eager to try it out on a real human. Truly, a shame.”

Jinshi registered the complete lack of emotion in Shishou’s voice, as if he were reading from a script. Or was Jinshi simply imagining things?

“Hmm. It looks like this is the end. What I wouldn’t have given for a little more time...” Then Shishou cast the feifa aside. He looked at Jinshi, and for just an instant, his face softened. What was he trying to say?

Jinshi never had the chance to ask him. Maybe Shishou wouldn’t have told him, even if he had.

“Go!” Basen shouted, still on the floor.

Blood flew.

Three swords lodged almost simultaneously in Shishou’s plump belly. He didn’t even cry out, just looked upward. A red froth foamed around his mouth, and his eyes were bloodshot. Yet he didn’t collapse, but only gazed at the ceiling, his arms spread wide. Was that laughter, or was he cursing?

There was nothing special on the ceiling. Perhaps he was looking through it, to something higher still. Jinshi didn’t understand; he felt like he was watching a performance, as if this place was Shishou’s theater and this moment was his stage.

Without ever revealing what it was above him that so fascinated him, Shishou expired. Anticlimactic, perhaps. But he was gone.

Beyond the great room was a hallway full of thinly clothed women and outrageous men. The women were babbling ceaselessly, eager to tell him who was within in exchange for their lives. The men kept insisting that they weren’t members of the Shi clan, unlike the women. Jinshi understood the impulse to save one’s own life, but he couldn’t bear the spectacle of everyone selling out everyone else to save themselves. He left it to his subordinates to apprehend the lot of them.

The former consort Loulan and her mother Shenmei were in the innermost room, he had been told. But when they arrived, Basen, who entered first, exclaimed, “There’s no one here!”

All they found was a large bed in the middle of the room and some couches. There was clothing everywhere, along with scattered wine and pipes, and some sort of clinging aroma. It was easy enough to guess what they had been up to in here. Basen’s face was red, but not from anger.

Jinshi, in something of a daze, tossed aside the incense burner. Some kind of dried herbs spilled out. If the apothecary girl were here, she would know what they were, what effect they had.

“Where did they go?” There was no one on the balcony in the next room either. “Did they jump down?”

As they surveyed the balcony, Jinshi puzzled. The room they had passed through and the one they were in now were supposed to be about the same size according to the blueprints—but something seemed off. The second room felt smaller. He went back and forth between the two rooms. There was only one door into the innermost room, and on the far side was the balcony. The relative lack of furniture made it feel more spacious, but the distance from the wall to the balcony was noticeably less than the dimensions of the other room.

He went back again, and this time he inspected a chest of drawers by the wall. It exactly matched the missing dimension of the other room.

Silently, he opened the chest. He reached in, past a panoply of gaudy clothing. Despite the chest’s seemingly solid construction, the backboard felt oddly thin. He found that with just a gentle push, it raised up.

He leaned into the chest, getting down on all fours to peer inside. Where he would have expected a wall, there was an open space. A secret tunnel. And he could see a dim light.

“Bang!” a voice said playfully. Jinshi discovered the muzzle of a gun held right up to his face. Loulan was there, in the tunnel, and she was holding some sort of firearm far more complex than the feifa Jinshi knew. It was like the one Shishou had fired earlier, but smaller, more portable; it could fit even in a cramped space like this. He was shocked to realize they hadn’t just been producing fire powder here, but also the newest firearms.

“Allow me to call you Master Jinshi. For convenience,” Loulan said, still holding the gun on him. She was covered in soot, and her hair was scorched. The candle in the candleholder she carried flickered each time she spoke. “Would you be so kind as to come with me?”

“What if I refuse?”

“If I was willing to let you do that, I wouldn’t be threatening you.”

Jinshi was almost impressed by her audacity. He looked at the current-model feifa, taking in all the things about it that were new and different. He raised his hands. “Understood.”

And with that, he followed Loulan into the tunnel.

The blueprints Jinshi had studied hadn’t shown any secret tunnels. Maybe that would have defeated the purpose of making them secret. Or perhaps Shishou had added this passage only recently.

The tunnel was narrow, and Loulan walked backward so she could keep the gun on Jinshi. It might have been easier with Jinshi walking in front and Loulan holding the gun at his back, but she was probably wary of the possibility that he would attempt to take the weapon from her as he went to walk in front of her.

“I’m a little surprised you’re just coming with me,” Loulan said.

“And yet you’re the one who told me to,” he replied, almost nonchalantly. Loulan giggled. Strangely, he found that she seemed much more human than she had in the rear palace.

“Surely it would be easy enough for you to take this from me?”

Yes—Jinshi couldn’t be certain, but he suspected he would be more than able to overpower her. But he didn’t say that, just remained silent.

There must not have been much air in the tunnel, for the candle kept flickering. Just before it guttered out, though, they arrived at a secret room. The candle flame regained its strength—some opening must have been letting in air—and its light illuminated two other women. One was a young lady who looked much like Loulan, although there was a dark bruise on her face.

“Oh, Suirei, my dear sister. She hasn’t done anything awful to you already, has she?”

The other woman shook her head in short, staccato twitches. Suirei—that was the name of the palace woman who had come back from the dead. And this was the face of the eunuch who had entered the rear palace not long ago.

Then Jinshi looked at the third woman in the room, middle-aged and wearing what struck him as outrageous clothing and makeup, without any sense of the dignity that was appropriate to her age. It reminded him of how Loulan had been back in the rear palace.

The only furniture in the room was two chairs and a single desk.

“Loulan,” the middle-aged woman began, “is this man...”

“Yes, Mother. I brought him here to make your wish come true.”

Loulan’s mother, Shenmei, glowered at Jinshi with undisguised fury.

But Loulan went on: “I know how much you’ve always hated him. His appearance. Is it because of who he reminds you of? Or simply because you’ve always been jealous of him, always resented how much more beautiful he is than you?”

“Loulan!” Shenmei snapped at her daughter. Loulan, though, didn’t so much as flinch—instead, Suirei trembled. She seemed so much different than Jinshi had been told.

“I’m sorry. That was going too far for a joke, I suppose. Then allow me to put on a little performance for you. A warm-up before the main event.”

Then she set down the candle, tucked the feifa into her sash, and calmly, clearly, began to tell a story.

Loulan’s story took place during the time of the previous emperor.

The imbecilic ruler had been his mother’s puppet when it came to conducting politics. (This was an awfully disrespectful way to talk about the former emperor; what kept Jinshi from getting mad about it was the knowledge that it was all too true.)

Jinshi had never thought that the man he called Father was frightening. But the woman who stood behind him, the empress regnant—she was terrifying.

Jinshi chased a wisp of an old memory. What the end of the empress regnant’s life had been like, he didn’t really know. All he remembered was that the former emperor had passed on quickly, as if hurrying to follow his mother into the next life.

Ever more impatient with her son’s lack of interest in grown women, the empress regnant had larded the rear palace with the most beautiful ladies. And then she had instructed the chieftain of one of the northern families to offer his daughter, who was to be set up—at least outwardly—as one of the ruler’s high consorts.

“What are you saying, Loulan?” Shenmei asked, puzzled by her daughter’s tale. The story wasn’t going quite the way she knew it.

Loulan covered her mouth with her sleeve and giggled. “Is this the first time you’ve heard this story, Mother? My grandfather mumbled it like a mantra on his deathbed as he wasted away from illness.”

There was nothing new in the idea of nominally making a high official’s daughter a consort in order to effectively hold her hostage. It had happened throughout history.

“Do you know why the rear palace got so large?” Loulan asked Jinshi.

“I’ve heard it was at the instigation of your father, whispering in the ear of the empress regnant.”

That was the general view within the court: that Shishou had wormed his way into the notoriously cagey empress regnant’s inner circle. Shishou had originally been nothing more than the unremarkable son of a branch of the Shi family, but by dint of his own cleverness and the blood in his veins, he had gotten himself adopted by the main house, which lacked an heir, and been given the name Shishou.

The main house: that was Shenmei’s family. She had been betrothed to Shishou since before she had been gifted to him by the emperor.

“That’s right,” Loulan said. “I believe he suggested the expansion of the rear palace as a new public works program.”

A nice way of putting it, Jinshi thought. A way of sidestepping the issue any time the question of the diminishing size of the rear palace came up.

“He proposed it in connection with the slave trade.”

That caused Jinshi’s eyes to widen. Shenmei looked as surprised as he did. Suirei, meanwhile, remained expressionless.

Loulan giggled at Jinshi. Then she looked at Shenmei. “You really didn’t know any of this, did you, Mother? You don’t know what Grandfather did to draw the empress regnant’s ire. Why he had to offer his daughter to the rear palace to keep him in line.”

Slavery had been alive and well at that time; the palace had even been staffed by enslaved eunuchs. But Loulan had referred to the slave trade.

Li’s system of government-sanctioned slavery operated on similar principles to its brothels: when a person had worked long enough to repay their purchase price, or fulfilled a set term of service, they could be considered emancipated. But that held true only within the nation’s borders. The export of slaves to other countries was supposed to be forbidden, and yet...

“It seems slaves are quite a profitable commodity. Forbidden or not, there’s no end of people eager to get their hands in that particular till. At the time, it seems young ladies brought an especially high price.”

With one of its most prominent daughters now held hostage, the Shi clan had been forced to scale down its slave-trading operation. The trade didn’t disappear entirely, however, and what remained was said to center around the rear palace. It involved not just young women, but often men, who were frequently castrated before they were sold off as slaves.

This had been Shishou’s suggestion: use the rear palace to shelter the women who would otherwise have been sold abroad. His thinking matched up neatly with that of the empress regnant, who saw his proposal as a way to kill two birds with one stone—politically, and with respect to her son.

Parents felt guilty having to sell off their daughters, and given the choice, they would rather see them serve in the rear palace than be carted off as slaves. Two years of service would also be likely to leave them with some skills or education that would lessen the chance that they would fall into slavery afterward. Above all, serving in the rear palace was a distinguished qualification in its own right. Unfortunately, with the dramatic expansion of the rear palace, the plans for education and so on had come to little.

“But of course, the empress regnant had more than one iron in the fire—and so did my father.”

By gaining the empress regnant’s trust, he hoped to repair the reputation of the Shi clan. And if that proved impossible...

“I know things have been hard for you, Mother. If this was where it was going to end, then I wish you had run away before it all started. After Father went to all that trouble to give you the chance.”

Was she referring to the secret passage out of the rear palace? Was that what it had been for? Jinshi wondered.

Shenmei’s face was like a storm.

“Was it that you couldn’t trust a man who said he would throw away his position to leave with you?”

“Loulan, you little...” Deep creases formed on Shenmei’s face as she looked at her daughter, yet it was not Loulan but Suirei who looked intimidated. Shenmei seemed to notice this; she turned a look on Suirei as if glaring at some filth on the ground. “Of course I didn’t trust him. How could I? My father’s body was hardly cold before he took over headship of the family and married the mother of this wench!”

Suirei was watching Shenmei, still shivering.

Loulan giggled again and went over to Suirei. She took the hand of this sister from a different mother, placing her other hand at Suirei’s collar and tugging at something that dangled around her neck. Something very similar to Jinshi’s own silver hair stick hung from a string. But where Jinshi’s depicted a qilin, Suirei’s was in the shape of a bird. Those who recognized it would have known it was a phoenix. Like the qilin, only a select few were entitled to wear that symbol.

“I guess His Former Majesty must have felt guilty. Worried about the baby he’d expelled from the rear palace. Because it seems he visited her rather frequently, by Father’s good offices.”

It was Shishou who had secretly sheltered the doctor and child who had been banished from the rear palace. In time, the child had grown up; Shishou took over headship of his family, and the young woman had reached an age to be married.

“The emperor had denied his daughter once, but in time he must have come to terms with the fact that she was his. Because do you know what he said to Father?”

Would you be so kind as to take my daughter as your wife?

Shishou, trusted by the empress regnant and almost like family to the former emperor himself, must have seemed an ideal son-in-law to the sovereign. The former emperor vowed to grant any wish Shishou might have—how then could he refuse?

So the former head of the Shi clan, who had attracted such scrutiny from the empress regnant, died on his sickbed, and leadership passed to Shishou, whom the empress regnant trusted. There was no more need to keep Shenmei as a hostage. It was the emperor who had ultimate discretion as to what happened to the flowers of the rear palace. Shishou had married the sovereign’s daughter, and a child had been born to them. They named her Shisui, granting her the clan name, Shi. This was the woman now known as Suirei.

“And thus you, Mother, were graciously bestowed upon Father.”

The former emperor was a fool of a man, and had completely failed to understand the effect this choice would have on his daughter. Suirei’s mother died of “illness” soon after, and Suirei was taken in by the former rear-palace physician. That man would later be hired and brought to this very fortress to create an elixir of immortality—but that’s another story.

About the same time the doctor took Suirei in, the former emperor took to secreting himself away in his room, and for the more than ten years from then until he died, there was no word from him. Left with only a single piece of silver jewelry, the girl now known as Suirei never learned that she was the former emperor’s granddaughter, and after Loulan was born, she was treated as no better than the child of a concubine. Even her name was taken from her and given to her newborn little sister.

“You— You’re lying. That’s enough mindless drivel from you!” Shenmei, faced with the truth, backed away.

The story must have been shocking for Suirei as well, but she appeared virtually unmoved. Only, she kept looking uneasily at Shenmei. Perhaps Suirei had known all along.

Loulan, still smiling, approached Shenmei. “Drivel, Mother? And after Father labored the rest of his life for you. Knowing all the while that it could only end in destruction. You don’t even know why Master Jinshi is here, do you?” She looked at her mother contemptuously, then turned to Jinshi. “Tell us about the end of my father’s life.”

“He died...laughing,” Jinshi said. He didn’t know what the laughter had signified, as he didn’t know anything Shishou might have been thinking. Having heard Loulan’s story, though, he started to think he could sense a different perspective. He even began to wonder if he had been looking at the Shi clan’s rebellion the wrong way all along.

“That man... Power was all he ever wanted. I’m sure the only reason he even married me was so he could lay claim to the family headship.” Shenmei’s face contorted.

Loulan, though, smiled again. “And yet, within the clan, it was you who held sway, was it not, Mother? Do you understand what kind of people they were, the family members who worked so hard to flatter you?”

They were fools, taking bribes and embezzling money, but they sucked up to Shenmei, knowing that if they had her favor, Shishou, the nominal head of the clan, would say nothing. He was just an adopted son, after all, a little boy who’d stumbled into the family; as much influence as he might wield at court, within the clan his power was minimal. Shenmei systematically chased out anyone who said things she didn’t like—until finally, there was nothing to check the rot. And this was the source of a pernicious misunderstanding.

What had been the motivation behind the expansion of the rear palace on the one hand and the embezzlement from the national treasury on the other? The two should be viewed separately, not as all the doing of the Shi clan.

Loulan looked at Jinshi and smiled, for she could see that he grasped what she was trying to say.

The slave trade had been abolished on the accession of the current Emperor—yes, it continued underground, but it was the groundwork laid by Shishou and the empress regnant that had allowed the system to be ended more or less easily. Now Jinshi was looking for something to conceivably replace it as the rear palace shrank again—and even in this case, the Shi clan had managed to interfere.

“Everyone always called my father a tanuki, but they forget that tanuki are cowardly creatures. It’s because they know they’re secretly so small and weak that they try so hard to trick everybody.”

With that, Jinshi understood. He knew why Shishou had died laughing: because the cowardly tanuki had succeeded in deceiving everybody right to the very end.

“Did Father play his part properly? Was he the villain he needed to be?” Loulan asked, a smile flitting across her face.

Jinshi at last understood what Shishou had been aiming for. He sought to become the necessary evil, bringing all the country’s corruption together in one place. A role that could never be rewarded, for which he would never be celebrated.

Jinshi clenched his fist so hard that his fingernails bit into his palm, drawing blood. “Do you have any proof that any of this is true?”

“Was the corruption consuming the court from within largely eliminated, or wasn’t it?”

“How could you know your plan would work?”

“If it didn’t, we could always simply fall back on a coup d’état. If a nation is weak enough to be dragged along by corruption like that, then better that it not exist.” Loulan sounded almost offhanded.

“You... You were plotting this all along?!” Shenmei demanded, her voice trembling. “You and him—you’ve been deceiving me this entire time?!”

“Deceiving you? I did exactly what you said, Mother. Didn’t you say this nation deserved to go to dust? Then you chased out every fellow clan member who didn’t march to your tune, and surrounded yourself with sycophants who hung on your every word. Did you really think that a rabble like that could defeat the country’s own army?”

Shenmei looked furious at her daughter’s hard words. Finally, she jumped at Loulan, her nail caps leaving two long, red streaks down the side of her daughter’s cheek.

“Is that not what these are for?” Shenmei demanded. She had grabbed the feifa.

“That’s more than you can handle, Mother. Give it back, please.”

“Be quiet!”

But Loulan only chuckled mockingly.

“What’s so funny?” Shenmei snapped.

“Mother... You sound like a two-bit thug.”

Shenmei’s face twisted horribly, and she fired the gun. Jinshi threw himself to the ground. Something went flying past him, accompanied by the earsplitting roar.

“I’m such a bad daughter. If I really wanted the same thing as Father, I could never have done this.”

Loulan’s face was streaked with blood. Across from her, though, Shenmei was absolutely covered in it. In her hand was what remained of the exploded feifa.

“These new feifa are very complicated. That one was a prototype.” She’d only brought it along in order to intimidate Jinshi. It might simply have had stuffing inside it. “Didn’t it ever occur to you to take it from me, Master Jinshi? Surely there would have been any number of chances, if you’d been looking for them.”

“I assumed you had something you wanted to tell me.”

“Hee hee! If only your pretty head were as empty as it looks.” Laughing (and still being rather rude), Loulan plucked the feifa out of Shenmei’s blood-soaked hand and threw it away. Then she gently laid her mother down, holding her shaking hand. “Father is dead. You could at least shed a tear for him. He was waiting for you all his life. If you had cried...I wouldn’t have said what I did.”

Until the former emperor had made his request, Shishou had remained completely chaste, not taking so much as a single concubine. It was the sort of purity that could only have been mustered by a man whose heart still beat solely for the woman to whom he had been betrothed when he was young.

Shenmei didn’t speak—she couldn’t. Flying shards of metal had ravaged her face in the blast. No shadow of her former beauty remained, just a red mess.

Suirei observed all this with trembling.

“There must have been another way,” Jinshi said, getting to his feet.

“Maybe,” Loulan replied. “But it’s hard to give everyone what they want. We aren’t wise enough for that.”

Shenmei was simply mean-spirited. She’d wanted to destroy the country that had made such a fool of her. Shishou; everything he had done had been for Shenmei’s sake. Even if it had backfired on him, he had done it all out of his feelings for her. Yet at the same time, he was a loyal retainer unable to abandon his country. And thus he had spent decades upon decades playing the villain, all the way to the end.

Jinshi couldn’t tell what Suirei was thinking. For her, had this been about appeasing the spirits of her mother and grandmother? And did she look somehow relieved as her empty gaze settled upon Shenmei, gasping for breath? Or was that simply Jinshi’s imagination?

As for Loulan...

“I know I’m in no position to make demands, but perhaps I could request two favors of you?” she said.

“What are they?”

“Thank you,” she said first, bowing deeply. She knew she had no reason to expect that Jinshi would listen to her. Then she produced a piece of paper from the folds of her robe and handed it to him. He caught his breath when he saw what was written on it, for what it said was unimaginable.

“Truthfully, I was hoping to use this to bargain for my life. But I don’t think it would get me very far now. That paper reveals what’s going to happen to this country. If the Shi clan still existed when it did, they might have compounded the situation and destroyed the nation.”

Written on the piece of paper was a prediction of something far worse than this rebellion.

Loulan’s fingers brushed her mother’s skin. Shenmei’s breath was rapidly fading.

“Any members of our clan with any sense abandoned the Shi name long ago. And my older sister is the same. They’ve already died once...so perhaps I could ask you to overlook them.”

There was a beat. “I’ll do what I can,” Jinshi said.

“You’ll let the ‘dead’ lie, then?” Loulan repeated, seeking confirmation. “I appreciate it.”

Suirei, as someone with a connection to the former emperor, could not be wholly ignored.

“Thank you very much.” Loulan bowed her head again and took Shenmei’s hand. The deformed nail caps were still clinging to it, just barely. Loulan stuck them on her own fingertips.

At the same moment, Jinshi thought he sensed someone. Basen and the others had finally realized he was missing, and had eventually succeeded in finding the hidden passageway. Did Loulan realize they were coming?

“My second wish, then.” She reached out toward Jinshi, stretching toward him with the hand decorated with the long nail caps. She seemed like she was moving so slowly. He could easily have dodged her, had he wished to. And yet Jinshi didn’t move, but accepted it.

The terrible nail cap bit into his cheek, tearing skin and flesh. A few drops of blood flew into his eye; he squeezed it shut, but with his open eye, he looked at Loulan.

“Thank you very much,” she repeated, and bowed for the third time. She had done what her mother, unable to escape death, had not had a chance to do, and scarred the face Shenmei had reviled so much. It might seem a pointless act now, but it sealed Loulan’s fate.

“I wonder if I could be an even better actor than Father,” she quipped, and then she turned to look at Shenmei. “Dear Mother, I’ve done everything I can do.” Still smiling, she opened the door across from them, revealing blowing snow. They were on the roof of the fortress. Loulan twirled out the door, sleeves waving, black hair flying; the dancing flakes surrounded her.

Basen and the others were in the narrow passageway, looking for their moment. Basen, his eyes full of fury, leapt forward, hardly understanding what had happened. When Loulan was sure he was in the room, she raised her long-nailed fingers high. Even in the faint moonlight, you could see the blood on them. Loulan, blood streaks on her face, almost appeared to float above the snow. And behind her was Jinshi with a fresh wound on his cheek.

Suddenly Loulan laughed, loud and long. “Ahhh ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Her voice rebounded off the snow. She sounded wild—but in her eyes, at least, you could see that she was still sane.

The faces of Basen and his companions turned to sheer fury.

The light had gone out of Shenmei’s eyes. One could think only that she reaped what she had sown.

Suirei, still trembling, stretched out her hand—but she couldn’t reach Loulan.

Jinshi could do nothing but witness Loulan’s last moments, clutching the piece of paper she had given him.

In the snow, her sleeves flapped and her hair whipped. Her laughter was suddenly accompanied by the crack of gunshots. Loulan danced along even as the bullets brushed past her sleeves and grazed her cheek. Finally, Jinshi was sure: this was her stage. And all those around her were merely supporting actors drawn into her performance.

The rear palace was a stage, and the country itself, and perhaps she saw her role as the villainess who would overturn them. If her father Shishou had been a tanuki, then maybe Loulan was a fox. After all, in the stories, the villainess who proved a country’s undoing always turned out to be a vixen.

Loulan continued to dance lightly along. How could she move so delicately among such deep snow? The soldiers, brought up short, were more occupied with firing their feifa than with chasing after her.

Should he have stopped her?

No, he couldn’t.

He couldn’t mar the performance of the great villainess of her time. Couldn’t even take his eyes off it.

Another shot—how many was that?

There was a thump, and Loulan stopped moving. The unmistakable, nose-prickling smell of fire powder drifted through the air.

The bullet had hit Loulan in the chest. She reeled backward, pain spreading over her face.

“Arrest her!” Basen shouted to his men. To Jinshi, the idea seemed repugnant. It wasn’t the wrong thing to do. But he felt like someone had told him the end of a story he’d been enjoying before he got to it.

The smile returned to Loulan’s twisted face. Then it vanished again...

No, it only seemed to vanish. She had tumbled backward, and there was nothing behind her. Except the fall from the roof.

That was the last he saw of Loulan.

His body felt impossibly heavy, like all the fatigue of the past several days had finally caught up with him.

The moment they’d gotten out of the stronghold, they’d linked up with a reserve unit and he’d received first aid, with someone stitching up his cheek. He was the one getting the stitches, so why did everyone else look like they were in such pain from it? Was it because he had gone without anesthetic?

They finally saw Gaoshun again as well, who promptly told Jinshi to get some sleep. Of course Gaoshun was there—the story was that Jinshi had been with the rear unit all along, so Gaoshun had to be seen there.

Truth be told, it was only just now that Jinshi was realizing he really hadn’t slept for the past several days.

“How’s the girl?”

“She’s fine—so go sleep.”

Did he really look so tired? Maybe he did, but he couldn’t bring himself to rest. Gaoshun, clearly sick of Jinshi’s intransigence, pointed at a carriage. “I’d recommend keeping your distance.”

Jinshi promptly ignored him and entered the vehicle. There he discovered a diminutive young woman, soot-stained and blood-stippled, lying asleep on top of several blankets. She was curled up like an infant, making her look even smaller than she usually did. She was surrounded by a collection of objects wrapped in white cloths.

“The dead children of the Shi clan,” Gaoshun explained.

“Why is she sleeping with them?”

“You know it’s impossible to talk her out of something when she gets an idea in her head.”

He was right; this young woman, Maomao, had a distinct stubborn streak. Was there some reason she wanted to be there?

“She looks awful.”

“Speak for yourself, sir,” Gaoshun said, grimacing. It pained Jinshi to remember the sight of Gaoshun beating Basen after they had returned. Jinshi had been injured, yes, and he knew that a soldier who failed in his duty must be punished—but it was only because Jinshi had acceded to the wish of that vanished vixen.

“Forget about me,” he said brusquely. “In any event, you made the right choice not to let the strategist see her.” From what Jinshi heard, the man had not made a very graceful landing on leaping out of the carriage and had injured his back. He couldn’t take a step on his own.

Jinshi climbed into the carriage. “Wait outside.” Gaoshun nodded slowly.

Jinshi gazed at Maomao’s face. There was blood on it, and her left ear was swollen, although it had been smeared with ointment. None of this would have happened to Maomao if she had never gotten involved with him. The thought made his heart ache.

Other than her ear, she had no injuries to speak of, but he could see a dark bruise on her neck. Had someone hit her? And the blood, it must have come from somewhere.

Slowly, Jinshi reached out his hand. And then...

“Excuse me, Master Jinshi, but may I ask what you’re doing?” Maomao looked at him just like someone trying to drive away a nasty little housefly.