Chapter 75

There is a passage in the old books. The great merchant, it says, deals in every ware there is, reaches every land there is, races after every season there is, reckons every figure to the last, bends his whole strength to the one thing, and holds every kind of power in his hand... And in the market-stalls of Yanjing today the great merchants come, for the most part, out of Weiyan Commandery, and the Ping family were the finest of all Weiyan.

Chen Dasheng looked at Ping Shen and said in earnest: "Manager Ping, your words are too heavy. You mustn't call me patriarch. That's only the idle joke other folk make."

But Chen Dasheng went on filling his cup in earnest all the same, and Ping Shen, helpless, could only bend at the waist and steady the cup with both hands and thank him over and over.

The very sight of him set Chen Dasheng laughing.

An old thing came back to him, and he said to Ping Shen: "In the old days my family was poor. Even the land we farmed was another man's, rented from the head-house. When we wanted a little salt or rice or oil, we lived off the odd greens we grew along the field-banks..."

Ping Shen hurried to say how hard that must have been, but Chen Dasheng only shook his head: "Hai, these few years I often find myself thinking. Of all my first twenty years, the days I was proudest and happiest were those poor days at home. Now I eat gold and swallow silver, and it's not half so merry as then!"

Ping Shen did not know what he meant, and said nothing, only listened close.

Chen Dasheng went on: "I mean, as to dealing with you managers. In those days the greens we gathered we didn't dare eat much of. We'd dry them and sell them to the city wine-houses for a little pocket-money. I remember, I'd have been seven..." His voice drifted a moment. "Yes, seven! That was when I first saw tofu, in a wine-house. I remember it clear as clear. The head-manager there called the tofu 'white-jade broth,' eight coppers a bowl, and you could sit and eat it in a fine seat by the window.

"That was a grand seat. Sitting there you could see the prettiest boat-girls on the river back home. My eldest brother said then that from that day on, if ever he had money, he'd go and sit in the wine-house, and spend his eight big coppers and eat a whole bowl in style. Only, by the time he'd saved enough, the manager scorned his clothes for being too ragged, and him for a vegetable-seller's boy, and carried the tofu out and made him crouch under the window to eat it... I remember it clear as clear. My brother, a great tall lad, ate it and wept the while."

Ping Shen listened humbly. Hearing Chen Dasheng tell such a thing, he did not know how to weigh it, and said only, his face gone red: "That was no man of trade. A real man of trade doesn't do such things! Our line holds nothing more shameful. We're forever saying, a man who cheats his customer is a low booth-keeper's frame, and he'll never raise a second story over it."

Chen Dasheng smiled: "You're right, Manager Ping. After that my family would sooner earn a few coppers less than sell to him at all."

Ping Shen knew the wealthy and great of Yanjing well enough, and he knew too that this Marquis Chen had begun life as a contract-slave.

Selling with the tongue is a merchant's ground-work, and so he smiled and nodded: "It was a fit retribution. I've heard the old folk of my house say it too, that great wealth must pass through three disasters and three trials. Now that fortune has come to the Marquis, look back on all he suffered before, and it was only the passing of a trial. A little hardship in one's young days is a good thing, in truth."

That said, he raised his teacup, first looked at it carefully, took a sip, savored it and swallowed, then said in admiration: "This tea runs clear and bright, and its scent, when you breathe it, is there and not there, and one mouthful leaves the whole throat sweet. Could this be the tribute-tea of the four southern commanderies, picked this year before the rains?"

Chen Dasheng could make nothing of what he said, and answered, taken aback: "Is it? Is there so much to be said of it? I didn't know. Zheng Aman gave it me last month. Is it good tea, then? Then I've run up a debt to him."

Ping Shen sighed: "Good tea, and more than good. The kind of thing a hundred strings won't buy you an ounce of."

That said, he raised the cup again and savored it as a man savors a treasure. Seeing how he loved it, Chen Dasheng filled it for him again, and said with a smile: "A man of my sort, to know his letters at all is no small thing. Fine tea, fine wine, it's all one to me, something to wet the throat and drown a care. Our good days are only this year and a half old. It was coming to Yanjing that taught me there must be a whole learning to scent, and tea, and wine. You've a wide knowledge, Manager Ping, one mouthful and you know the very place a thing came from. That's a real gift, a fine skill!"

That said, open-handed as ever, he simply pushed the shabby teapot across for Ping Shen to drink as he pleased.

This teapot of his had come free. He'd bought thirty coarse porcelain bowls at the china-shop on the corner, and the owner had thrown it in for nothing, wouldn't take a coin for it.

Ping Shen was a lover of tea, and even bore the elegant by-name of tea-fool.

Seeing the little patriarch push the pot straight across to him, he smiled, took it up as though grateful, and, instead of pouring, fell to playing with the battered old thing.

He turned it over and admired it a while, then lifted his face and said to Chen Dasheng, smiling: "Heh heh. If you want a good price, you must give these things a history, a story to them. Else why would the great and rich pay high for them? The truth is, at your place there's no need for any of that. It all falls back to the plain root. Before a true god like yourself, no one dares put on airs. So tea is only tea, and wine only wine, and scent only scent. Traced to the source, they were only ever meant to wet the throat, drown a care, and drive off the gloom."

That said, Ping Shen set the pot down, stood, and bowed to Chen Dasheng: "The old patriarch reformed the commercial tax and gave the merchants of the realm a new road to live by. Whatever the little patriarch bids me today, we dare not refuse!"

At that Chen Dasheng laughed, and asked him: "You agree so easily, Manager Ping. Aren't you afraid I'll set you some sky-high hard task?"

Ping Shen lifted his face and smiled: "A sky-high hard task? The little patriarch would never set that to the likes of me. You and I have known each other but a few days. Never mind trust, we're not so much as familiar faces yet."

Chen Dasheng nodded: "There's the sense of it. It's only a small matter. Now, does Manager Ping know one Wu Xiu, Commissioner of the Changying Storehouse under the Board of War?"

Ping Shen sat down again, and thought a while before he could place who Wu Xiu was.

In the ledger of the great and mighty he carried in his head, Wu Xiu did not so much as feature.

Placing him at last, he asked: "Would that be the descendant of the old-dynasty Confucian general Wu Yisheng, and Tan Weitong of the Court of the Imperial Stud's brother-in-law?" At this Ping Shen held up four fingers of one hand and closed them. "The crippled one?"

Chen Dasheng nodded: "The very man."

Ping Shen thought, then said: "If it's him, it's simple enough. But how does the little patriarch mean to subsidize him? And over how long?"

Bred of merchant houses for generations, Ping Shen could guess Chen Dasheng's aim in a breath, and would never once pry into the grudges that lay between the two men.

Chen Dasheng thought a moment: "How long? Five years. If not five, then seven or eight will do. You've a wide knowledge, Manager Ping. Help me think it through. If a man wanted to feed up an appetite that runs through fifty thousand strings a year, how ought he to go about the feeding?"

Chen Dasheng grew curious, and asked: "What do you mean, do it in bits?"

Ping Shen smiled: "A gambler coming to the table has always his own notions. Which house's board is lucky for him, at what hour his hand runs strongest? Given time they'll spin themselves a whole code of what to wear and what to say, at what hour to set out, which foot to lead with going into the wrestling-hall. All we can do is train him slowly, and let him work the code out for himself. Only then is he ripe for the hook.

"Today he loses five strings at this house, tomorrow he wins ten back at the wrestling-hall. The city's halls are many. There are little boards a few coppers wide run by loafers at the street-side, and there are places where one round runs to tens of thousands of taels, and there are stakes thrown up on the spot, where the young lords of great houses fall to hot words and gamble seventy or eighty thousand taels against each other. That Wu Xiu is worth ten strings, eight strings, no more. To grow his hands and feet, we must do it in little bits."

Ping Shen's whole doctrine of little bits left Chen Dasheng dumbstruck. He turned it over a long while before he asked: "You don't mean to say those stakes the great lords throw up on the spot have a hand of yours in them too?"

Ping Shen smiled a proud smile, poured himself a cup of tea and sipped it slowly before he said: "I'll not hide it from the little patriarch. It's only a few life-saving lessons I learned long ago. My teacher used to say a man's no different from a cricket, or a caged bird, or a fighting-cock. If you'd play a man, it all comes down to the skill of your teasing. To scratch him just on the itching spot, that turns on how far you've mastered the craft."

Chen Dasheng asked him: "And how far has Manager Ping mastered it?"

Ping Shen blinked: "Wu Xiu? Wu Xiu's no more than a little teasing. Set your mind at rest, Marquis Chen. We Weiyan men hold honest dealing the first lesson of the trade. At ordinary times we never lightly play on anyone. But a merchant's life is cheap. To us, a man who bleeds us of one layer of profit or two is a kind soul, and one who bleeds us of four or five is a patron, and one who takes above the half is an enemy. A man out in the world must have some means of saving his own skin."

The more Chen Dasheng heard, the more astonished he grew, and at the last there rose unbidden in his head that thing his wife had once said... Rule the seventh: the wine-shops the common folk can't afford, the study-towers with their courtesan girls, the gambling-dens, the dog-fighting and cock-baiting pits, the moment you so much as see one, back off fifty paces for me and get well away... And then Granny had added, and gamble your money away, and I'll break your legs!

She'd had the right of it after all. Every word had struck home!

If ever the family had an ancestral hall one day, this seventh rule should stand as the first law of the house. Breaking legs was the least of it. Any son or grandson to come who gambled above a hundred coppers should be cast clean out of the line.

Ping Shen had patience. Seeing Chen Dasheng lost in thought, he broke off and waited quietly, until Chen Dasheng had worked it through and asked him: "Then, why bring in Prince Xing's kin and the rest?"

Ping Shen smiled: "Only when the money falls to eight houses is it a real run of bad luck, a true win and loss. If it all fell to my one house, it's a rigged game, and no one's a fool. Wu Xiu is an official's son when all's said, and has his own backers. If he loses till his eyes go red and turns to foul means to get it back, can he claw the losses of eight houses all home again? There'll always be someone among them he daren't cross."

Chen Dasheng had learned something more. He nodded and asked again: "And if his affair, the silver he embezzles from his post, should startle the authorities, what then?"

Ping Shen smiled: "Even the Emperor can't claw silver back out of the old Dowager's natal house, can he? And this money isn't the Dowager's house alone, is it? We're all honest men of trade. He came in of his own will and lost his silver. Nobody dragged him through the door."

Chen Dasheng thought, then laughed: "Just so. That's exactly it. Manager Ping has the right of it." That said, he pointed at the gold on the table: "There's two thousand in gold here, worth about twenty-three thousand strings. Take it with you when you go, Manager. Rest easy. Twenty thousand strings this year, forty thousand next, and I'll not let you come out one copper the loser."

But Ping Shen shook his head with a smile: "Marquis Chen, if you order it that way, it's to slight me. Small as this game is, it's still a piece of business. Five thousand strings of capital is plenty. I daresay you'll even see your capital come back doubled in the end."

Chen Dasheng's eyes lit, and he asked with a smile: "I'd hear the whole of it."

Ping Shen pointed at the trays of gold: "It's late autumn now, and then the year's end. Every year the few great games are played at just this season. Rest easy. One round and I'll warrant that Wu Xiu strikes it rich. And when the common sort strike it rich, the way they spend runs all to the one pattern. A respectable three-thousand-string house in Yanjing, he'll buy himself one. A middling-good hundred-and-thirty-string horse from the Six Steeds Horse Farm, he'll buy.

"A house means fine furniture, and a study-tower girl to warm his bed sweetly, and a cook-woman to make his food smell good, and at the year's feasts, before kin and friends, he must play the open-handed lord a round or two. All these odds and ends bought, it comes to four thousand seven hundred strings at the most. The three hundred that's left over is his capital for next year."

Chen Dasheng could not make out the reasoning of it. He thought a good while and asked, puzzled: "Then how's next year's money to reach him?"

Ping Shen laughed softly: "In little bits. Five thousand strings is a great sum. Money enough brings friends enough. Let there be one man who's won five thousand strings of easy money, and behind him stand five thousand who think just as he does. When did the man who keeps the board and holds the bank ever lose his own shirt? Rest easy. An appetite of fifty or a hundred thousand strings, that's nothing. Should you want to feed him up an appetite of a hundred thousand, a million strings, we could do that for you too."

Listening, Chen Dasheng felt only a chill run through him, and he turned his wife's words over and over. Savored fine now, they filled his whole mouth with fragrance. His wife had spoken of five-string shoes and hundred-string girdles and such small things, yet look back on it, and where was the difference between her words and this Manager Ping's?

He had only to do as his wife had said, wear plain cloth the year round, and though the Emperor himself kept the great board, he'd have nothing to fear. In the end, a man need only stand steady.

And remembering that these were his wife's words too, a little pride showed in his face.

This Ping Shen was the shrewdest of readers of a face. Seeing the pride in Chen Dasheng's, he thought at once that this little patriarch was, mm, a touch deep and hard to fathom. Oughtn't he to be won over by this show of Ping Shen's skill, and take him into his service from now on? So why didn't that smile look meant for him at all?

Chen Dasheng, having praised his wife to himself and had his moment of pride, called toward the door: "Si'er?"

Before long Guan Si'er came in smiling and asked: "Brother, you called?"

Ping Shen kept his face steady, until he'd taken the box Guan Si'er handed him and opened it, and then he sat there dumb.

For no more than this: inside the box lay a gilt token, and cut into it the character She.

Chen Dasheng smiled at Ping Shen: "I can have as many special-trade tokens as I please. But I won't give you that. Gambling-halls, wrestling-halls, study-towers, they're all places I loathe. Yet since I'm to use you, I can't wrong you either.

"So I'll give your Ping family a doorstep to step up by. I hear the merchant houses of the capital have all been wanting a rank of some kind this while. As it happens, other gifts are beyond me, but the affairs of the Twenty-Four Yamen I can still see to a little."

Ping Shen held the token, his hands and feet trembling. What was this? This was the plain and solid standing of an imperial merchant. With this, his family could change its whole gate, and count as a house of officials.

He clutched the box and dropped to his knees with a thud, and was stammering out some vow, when a voice called from beyond the door: "Chief! Quick, there's an assassin got into the palace..."

Ping Shen started, and the box slipped from his hands. In the instant before it hit the ground a hand came in from the side and caught it a hair off the floor. Guan Si'er handed the box back to Ping Shen with a smile: "Manager Ping, a thing this precious, mind you hold it steady..."

"Yes, yes, yes! Steady it is, steady and safe!"

Half an incense-stick's time, and Chen Dasheng was already leading his men into the Great Liang palace.

And the palace at that hour was in an uproar. It was ill luck, when you came to it. Tonight the Jinwu Guard were all on full watch, and in the first half of the night, seeing all quiet, Liu Daya had taken a few of the brothers to drink a couple of cups.

The wine half drunk, they saw a nun in white treading the palace wall, stepping over the tiles of the halls and into the Great Liang palace.

An outsider come in was, of course, an assassin, and Liu Daya led the brothers to head her off along the way. But this nun's skill was deep. Dozens of them charged her, and in a dozen exchanges or fewer she had cut a great swath of them down.

Plainly she was a master with an old recluse's power. And even as she cut men down the nun was crying out: "...brothers ten years and more, and the first to break faith and cast off honor! Yang Zao! Come out, Yang Zao..."

The nun did not, of course, know which chamber the Emperor slept in tonight. Unable to call him forth, she set to turning the whole inner palace over.

All the way through she went, and there was hardly a man could stand one stroke of hers, half a stroke. It was well she did not kill lightly. Any who blocked her she'd cut down without ceremony, and one cut left a gash a foot long, and the man's fight went out of him on the instant.

By now the Emperor had been roused in a muddle and hurried, under his guards' cover, all the way to Attendant She's little courtyard.

There was no help for it. The nun's road ran through the great halls, and however thick the palace door, one stroke of her sword split it in two. So you may judge how fearsome she was.

Attendant She rose in alarm and threw on his robe. He did not light a lamp, and said to the guards: "Douse every light in the palace and let her go turning it over. That's the heir of Qin She of the southern martial house. She calls herself Qing Buyi now... and she was Tan Shize's senior sister too. That skill of Tan the Second's, the inner force of it was mostly hers, taught him on the quiet. The whole lot of you together aren't enough for her to cut."

That said, he frowned and asked the astonished Emperor: "Weren't they to let no word leak? A few days only, and how has she been drawn here?"

The Emperor's face was strange. Waited on, he sat down, and after a while said: "That she's come is no great matter. But this tone of hers? Something's wrong here. Who has been whispering idle words in her ear, that she thinks I did Tan the Second to death? How could that be!"

Attendant She asked, astonished: "How can this be? Qing Buyi's no fool. How does she believe a thing the moment it's said?"

Just then a guard standing by put in: "Grand Companion, when our chief went up to block her, he made the whole thing plain to her, and got a sword-stroke down on him for it. Our chief says the nun's likely gone wrong in the mind."

"Qing Buyi's mad?!" Attendant She cried out in astonishment, and then, from the palace roof not far off, the nun, like a night-walking phantom, began to sing:

The wind blows clear, and the cold comes on. The bright moon rides the sky. The fair one mends her winter clothes, ten thousand knots, the toil of block and mallet. The clear dew freezes like jade. A cold wind rises at midnight. My love comes not back to lie by me. He roams for pleasure beneath the bright moon. The wild geese draw away to the south. The fledgling swallows point to the north. The far traveler is a hard thought to bear...

Something stirred in Attendant She, and he sat slowly down and sighed: "The Midnight Songs of the Four Seasons. Poor fool... poor fool! A pity of it..."

The Emperor sighed at his side too, and gave the order at last: "Let it be. For Tan the Second's sake, don't harm her. She's a pitiful creature. Leave her be..."

But before the words were out came a great crashing roar, as though somewhere the mad nun had torn half the roof off a hall.

Attendant She gave a cold laugh: "Don't harm her, still? Look to yourself! Change out of that robe of yours..."

"I am the Emperor of Great Liang. How can I shrink from a fight? It's not to be thought of!"

Up on the roof the mad nun cried, tearing at the heart: "...Yang Zao, he trusted you most! He trusted you above all! And you did him to death!"

The Martial Emperor sighed, helpless: "I trusted him most too. When did I ever fail him..."

But the mad nun could not hear the answer. She split one more palace door, then sprang back to the roof and sang on, shrill and grieving:

In autumn I love the geese, that go in pairs. In spring the swallows move me, two by two. The fine hawk takes the wild fowl. The pheasant falls, and who is there to see? I lift my head and look at the paulownia. Its blossom is a pitiful thing. Would the sky had no frost nor snow, that the paulownia-seeds might set fruit a thousand years...

Ze'er, did your senior sister sing it sweetly?

"A-Ze... I've made myself ready. When will you come to marry me..."

The Emperor and Attendant She looked at each other in the dark, and both gave a shudder.

The thing was a long story. A few mornings back, an inner-palace official on his rounds had seen a corpse in the lotus pond.

That was ill luck indeed. The inner palace told the guard-post, and told the Jiusi Hall, and called the coroner. And when they'd all fished the corpse up between them, the corpse was not all they hauled out. They fished up a head as well.

A head was no great matter. Last year the palace had seen a whole war of a dynasty's fall, and the dead were many. Why did a dozen and more of the wells in the Great Liang palace stand sealed to this day?

Men had died in every one.

The Emperor was soft-hearted, and gave the order at once for the Tan family to be called into the palace, and it was given out that the old-dynasty Black Cavalry, in their hatred, had cut off Tan the Second's head and thrown his body in the river, that his corpse should not be whole.

There's an old saying, that a man whose bones are not whole is born not whole into his next life.

Now the head was found, and one wish at least could be laid to rest. Tan Shize would have a whole corpse. The matter was an ugly one, and there were so many consorts in the palace besides, and the old Dowager well on in years, and so the Emperor had laid a ban on all talk of it.

The thing was so close a secret that Attendant She himself only learned of it the next day. He had not even told Chen Dasheng.

But who could have thought how the word got out, that in the dead of this night the mad nun should come?

Never mind how the nun came to be mad, or how she fixed it in her head that the Emperor had killed Tan Shize. Only think of where she came from.

Why had Tan Shize toiled so bitterly for merit and station, all to win this Qing Buyi? It was because Qing Buyi came of the first house of the southern martial school, Qin She. Tan Shize had fled the South Nation-Protecting Temple to the house next door, and there met Qing Buyi.

The people who could build a house next door to the Nation-Protecting Temple were no ordinary folk. They were the first house of the martial Confucians.

And by Qing Buyi's generation, Qin She had come down to her one thread of blood. It was an ill-fated love. A martial-world house it might be, but Qin She bore the word Confucian, and with that word came a strict and iron code of rites. The old master of Qin She would never give his one true-born daughter to Tan Shize, then of a third-rate house, not even a true-born son, and a maidservant's child besides.

Never mind Tan Shize. Had Tan Shiyuan himself come, the old master of Qin She might not have looked at him.

And for that mismatch of house and house, two who loved each other became a pair of mad souls, and it ended with one alive and one dead.

Chen Dasheng did not know that his cutting down of Tan the Second and throwing him in the lotus pond had brought such a disaster upon the Emperor. He and a few of the brothers threw themselves together in haste, slung their long sabers on their backs, and ran all the way to the Great Liang palace.

Come into the palace, he saw the outer courts strewn with the bloodied. Liu Daya, closest of all his friends, had been laid open by one sword-stroke from the left shoulder down to the ribs on the right, and lay there now at his last gasp while the court physicians fought to save him.

Chen Dasheng bent and looked at the wound, and by his own long experience he knew it for only a few layers of skin. Staunch the blood in time and the man would live. His opponent had held her hand.

But before he could speak a word of comfort, Liu Daya reached out and caught him and said low: "Brother! Quick! The Emperor's in Attendant She's courtyard. Guard the Emperor whatever comes..."

At that Chen Dasheng let go of his hand at once and turned to go. What became of the Emperor was no matter to him. His father must not come to harm.

Running all the way, he reached his foster-father's courtyard, and there he and the brothers saw several shapes hurled bodily out.

And a woman's voice, gone hoarse, roared: "Let me see who dares stop me!!"

One man fell at Chen Dasheng's feet. He looked down and was startled, for it was Meng Dingchen.

Meng Dingchen sat up, clutched his chest, spat a mouthful of blood, and got to his feet and charged again for Attendant She's little courtyard.

Chen Dasheng, in a panic, gave a shout: "Father!!"

He carried his saber in through the gate, and there in his foster-father's little courtyard lay men strewn every way. This Qing Buyi was not cruel of hand. She was a fine hand at wounding. Everyone she cut was as Liu Daya was, one slash across the body, left to right, and after it, let the man only stir, and the last layer of flesh would give and spill the organs out.

By that alone you could see how terrible the skill in the mad nun's hands was.

The little courtyard was a desolation. Attendant She's vegetables lay scattered every way, and the ground ran with blood. On the low little steps stood only two people, and three more clung fast to the Emperor and would not let him go forward.

In the confusion Chen Dasheng could not see who the three were, but he saw his own foster-father, both arms flung wide, barring the Emperor's way and glaring at Qing Buyi: "Do not harm my lord!"

The Emperor was past all patience too. He shoved hard at She Qingling and shouted: "My lord, my eye! I'm your elder brother! While I stand here, let me see who dares harm you..."

Qing Buyi was bathed in blood, her gleaming shaven head casting a cold light in the night. She leveled her sword at the Martial Emperor and laughed coldly: "Yang Zao, come out and die!"

But before the words were done, Chen Dasheng and the brothers had ranged themselves across the way between his father and the Emperor.

Qing Buyi laughed a scornful, cold laugh: "Another pack come to die."

Attendant She saw his foster-son come, and would have called out to him to be gone at once. He would have said this was a woman of the martial Confucians of Qin She, that this mad nun was unlike any he'd met before, that were the old recluses of Yuegong Mountain to come out and face her all together she might not lose. But the Emperor was there at his back, and so he bit through his own lip and held it in.

Chen Dasheng swiftly leveled his saber at the very front, no trace of fear on his face. Instead he reached out and caught his own robe-front, and said to the brothers: "Brothers, how many idle days has it been now?"

Behind him Tong Jintai and the others laughed: "Nigh on a year of good food and good drink, brother!"

Chen Dasheng laughed: "Then let's sweat some of the fat off!"

That said, he caught his robe-front in his hand, and with one great rip tore his own clothes off.

Tan the Second had drilled his men hard and given them no armor. The Long Saber men had always gone to a fight in a rag of broken mail and a loincloth, no more.

And as seven strapping lads, big and small, stood there bare, the mad nun who had turned the place over half the night gave one shrill and piercing cry: "Yang Zao!! You are shameless!!"

That cried, the nun flung up her sleeve to cover her face and sprang away in a flash. She was well off into the distance, and still she cursed back in her fury.

"Yang Zao... you have no shame!!!"

She... just left?

The men in the courtyard stared, and looked at one another, all in a daze.

Chen Dasheng, rather sheepish, rubbed at his bare chest. A gust of autumn wind went by, and he gave another shudder.

What was that about? All these days living free in the palace on the Emperor's bread, he'd been longing to show his master a little real skill. He'd not even got the stance up, and she was gone?

All around was still. It was a long while before there came a thud. The Emperor had sat down on the ground. He sat there dazed a moment, and then, none knowing why, he covered his face and began to laugh.