Chapter 125: Good Pup
Now it was only the two of them, Xuan and the old man, alone in the lamplit office.
[ You’re sure about this? ] Mira asked from the back of his skull.
’Course I am. It’ll be fun, and he can’t lay a finger on me anyway, so quit fretting. We’ve got the whole thing on a string.’
[ It’ll be quick, so don’t go soft on the guard for one instant. ]
’Understood, I won’t. Right. Here we go.’
Xuan swept a corner of the overseer’s table clear with one arm and perched himself on the edge of it, ankles crossed, easy as a man waiting on his tea to steep. Wei and Kai would be up top by now, watching the night, which meant nobody breathing was around to see what came next.
Han Ying stood across the room from him, ten paces off, dead still, the spear nowhere in sight.
Without warning, Xuan let go of the centipede’s hold.
The instant the leash slipped, the elder moved. The spear was in his fist and the ten paces were gone in one stride, the head howling toward Xuan’s face faster than most men could even flinch.
Xuan didn’t so much as blink. He watched the whole of it unspool with the calm of a man at a play he’d already read the ending to, watched the spearpoint scream in and stop a finger’s width shy of his eye. He could feel the old man’s breath gusting hot through bared teeth. But the body driving that spear had seized rigid a hair too soon, unable to shove the point one more thread forward, because Xuan had woken the centipede back up in the same heartbeat, its grip clamped around the body and nothing else. The mind inside it was free. The body was not.
"BASTARD!" The shout tore out of Han Ying even as his arm hung locked in the air. "You think I don’t know what you’ve done to me? You filthy fucking maggot, I’ll gut you where you sit!"
Xuan laughed in his face.
The veins down the old man’s forehead stood up and throbbed, rage with nowhere on earth to spend itself. "What’s so funny, you little brat? I’m telling you, the second I’m loose from this—"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say. Go on, give it a try." Xuan cocked his head, lazy about it. "Though I’m guessing you already had a go and got exactly this far. You know, I don’t get the attitude. I’ve hardly done a thing to you. Made you put down, what, fifty of your own brothers? That’s the whole of it. Not so much when you sit with it a minute." He opened his hands like a man reasoning over wine. "Call it divine retribution. What you pour out comes back around, doesn’t it?"
Han Ying’s mouth cracked open for another volley, and nothing came of it, because Xuan shut it for him.
"You know what," Xuan went on, swinging one boot, "let’s find that mouth a better job than cursing me."
What the old man’s body did over the next stretch would gnaw at his pride to the end of his days.
The spear lowered itself out of his grip and clattered to the stone. The body stepped back and stripped itself robe by robe, methodical, until it stood in nothing but a loincloth, the single mercy Xuan extended on the firm grounds that he had no wish to look at the alternative. It began to dance. It sang along, a wobbling, off-key little reel, arms flapping, knees pumping, the most graceless jig any Foundation elder had managed in fifty years of breathing.
Han Ying’s lips shaped the words against his own will, and behind his eyes the man himself watched every degrading step of it, wide awake, wholly aware, a prisoner at his own performance. The lone thought left rattling around in his skull was a flat, hollow kill me, please.
Xuan let it run a little before he waved it dead. The novelty of a near-naked grandfather capering wore through fast. A pretty girl, he caught himself musing, would have been an entirely different—
[ Reel it back in, Xuan. ]
’Right. Fair enough.’
He brought the body to a halt. Han Ying stopped mid-step and folded straight down onto his knees in front of the desk, the spear a forgotten thing on the floor behind him.
"So." Xuan looked down at him. "Do you follow where you are right now, or not yet?"
"Son of a b—" Han Ying got that far before his own hand swung up and cracked flat across his face, hard enough to snap his head sideways.
Xuan smiled and asked it again, word for word. "Do you follow where you are right now, or not yet?"
The old man spat the same answer through reddening teeth, and this time the left hand came around and split open the other cheek.
"I swear, I will never understand the egos on you people in this martial world," Xuan murmured, half to himself. "I could finish you where you kneel, and here you are, still playing the hard man."
He asked a third time, with a touch more imagination behind it. Marrow Dragon hissed free of her sheath, and he lowered her down between the old man’s spread thighs until the cold of the steel came to rest against the bare stones Han Ying had been left with. With the edge kissing the most delicate parcel of land the elder owned, Xuan put it to him one more time, pleasant as a host. "Do you follow where you are right now, or not yet?"
Han Ying nodded. Quick, small, and eager, a very good dog all of a sudden.
"There we are, now you are behaving like a good pup." Xuan drew the blade back and laid her across his knee, and the savage cheer drained out of his voice into something flatter and colder. "Now. You and I have a conversation to have."
