Chapter 126: Above Him
Han Ying was afraid now. Whatever swagger had ridden him before had run out of him, every last drop, somewhere between the cold of a blade against his stones and the memory of his own legs carrying him through a near-naked jig he had never asked them to perform. That pair of indignities had done what no threat on its own could manage: it spun the old man’s outlook a full half-circle, and dragged his manners around with it.
Now. You and I have a conversation to have. The words kept circling the inside of Han Ying’s skull. ’He wants to talk,’ the elder thought, fast and low. ’So I work the moment. If there’s a road through this where I keep breathing, maybe even win a little slack on the thing nesting in my head, I find it now.’
"Of course, Young Master." His voice came out smooth and eager, a wholly different instrument than the one that had been cursing Xuan’s bloodline a few breaths back. "Whatever you’d care to discuss. I’ll give you anything you want to hear."
Xuan clocked the swing in him, the whole personality changing its coat mid-sentence. ’Looks like he’s worked out where he stands.’
[ So it does. ] Mira, dry. [ I doubt he’ll trouble himself to lie now. And your father’s nowhere near, in case you fancy learning a few things while the door’s wide open. ]
A fair point. Lin Zhen would have gone white at half of what Xuan meant to ask.
"Right." Xuan held his perch on the edge of the desk, one boot swinging, in no hurry at all. "Where to begin. Let’s try this. Why was it your lot who left me crippled?"
"I know nothing of that." The answer came quick, no flinch under it. "Put the bug to work if you doubt it, but I’ve no notion whose hand it was. If an order like that ever ran through Blood Fang, it never reached my ears. Nobody told me a word."
Xuan held quiet and gave the centipede a squeeze, the mental version of laying a thumb on a man’s windpipe to see what leaked. The same answer came back, unbent. Truth. He shelved the dead end and pushed on.
"Fine. Try another. How deep does the Second Prince’s hand reach into Blood Fang? And while you’re there, why was this pit running on a skeleton crew tonight? Where did everyone wander off to?"
"The Prince has a fist around the sect’s throat, Young Master. There’s no kinder way to put it." Han Ying spoke to the floor as much as to him. "As for tonight, the bulk of the men were pulled out on a job a few days back. They shouldn’t be long coming home."
"A job where?"
"North. A sect up that way."
"North of here." Xuan turned that over. "Which one?"
"A small local outfit. Nothing with a name worth carrying around."
"And what were they sent to do to it? How many marched out?"
Han Ying spread his empty hands, and there was real regret in it, the regret of a man who badly wanted to be useful and could not. "That I can’t hand you in any detail, Young Master. I was posted to the other mine, not this one. I only caught the shape of it secondhand. A job up north, the better part of the garrison, home before long. The fine print never crossed my desk."
Xuan leaned on the centipede again. Truth again. He let it lie, and filed the rest away, a small sect to the north and a column of Blood Fang gone to lean on it. A thread for another day.
"There’s a name on damn near every page in that office," he went on. "Elder Mu. Who is he, and what’s he to your sect?"
"Mu sits above me." No hesitation. "Far closer to the Prince than I’ll ever stand. He’s the seam between Blood Fang and the Second Prince’s people. He carries the Prince’s wants down to us, and our reports back up to him. Past that, I can’t give you much. He doesn’t share his business with men at my level."
So Mu was the hinge. Find him, and you found the door to whatever had been whispered into Madam Mei’s ear. The trouble being that the door stood somewhere deep inside a prince’s apparatus, which was the precise wall Kai had wanted to run his head into. Xuan kept that to himself.
"The vein at the bottom of this place," he said. "The Dragonvein. Where was it headed, and who was it feeding?"
"I couldn’t name the end of that road for you." Han Ying’s mouth twisted. "But the Prince has been hoarding for a good while now. Metal. Men. Grain. If you put a blade to me to wager, I’d say that ore went where the rest of it goes. Weapons. The war the whole continent can feel rolling in and nobody at the top will say out loud."
That tracked with everything else, and Xuan filed it beside the rest.
"Once Blood Fang works out these two mines have gone dark," he said, "do they come to take them back? With what?"
"Honestly? No." Han Ying said it plainly, a man giving an unwelcome truth because lying cost more. "These were yours to start with, not ours. We took them while your sect was flat on its back and your patriarch was in the capital. Now you’ve torn them out of our hands again, and the man is back. Blood Fang won’t burn a single disciple coming for two mines out in the sticks while the Prince has bigger irons in the capital fire. You’re more bother to take back than you’re worth to hold."
The best news he’d heard all night. The mines were theirs to keep.
"Madam Mei." Xuan watched the old man’s face as he said it. "What did your people put in front of her to turn her? Was that Mu’s doing, or someone over his head?"
"There I’m no use to you, and the bug will tell you the same." Han Ying met it without dodging. "That bargain was struck well over my station. I knew the woman fed us. The price she took, and the hand that set it, I never learned. Mu, the Prince, someone above them again, I couldn’t tell you."
Xuan pressed the centipede a third time. Truth, flat and frustrating. Another wall, and Kai’s real answer sitting somewhere behind it.
"Who actually runs Blood Fang?" he asked. "And how strong is the top of it?"
"The patriarch, and the two grand elders who stand beside him." Han Ying paused, and something almost like respect crept into his ruined dignity. "Nascent Soul, Young Master. All three of them."
The number went through Xuan and lodged there.
Nascent Soul. A realm so far above his own Qi Refining Seven, so far above even his father’s, that the gap stopped being a distance you could count in stages and became a different category of thing entirely. The Cao Yans and the mine elders, the men they had been butchering all night, those were the sect’s hands and feet. Its head lived in a tier Skyedge could not yet lift its eyes to. He kept his face shut over it and tucked the fact away cold, the way you tuck away the depth of water you have no intention of drowning in.
"You said the Prince spends you on his squabbles," he said. "How close is the capital to open war?"
"Close enough that he has us holding ground for him outside the walls, Young Master. Mines. Roads. A hand on the throat of every regional sect he can reach, ours included." The elder’s voice dropped. "A man doesn’t build all that to keep the peace. When the old Emperor finally lets go of the world, the Prince means to already have his fingers around everything that sits past the capital’s reach. We’re part of how he keeps his grip on it."
So the board ran a great deal wider than two holes in a mountain. Xuan turned it over, layering it onto everything else, and was reaching for the next question when Mira cut across his thoughts, brisk.
[ Hold that. Movement up top. A column on the western track, coming in at a steady clip, and not slowing for anyone. That’ll be your friend’s lost garrison, home ahead of schedule. ] A beat. [ And your brother’s already halfway down the tunnel to tell you about it. ]
’How many?’
[ Hard to count clean from in here. More than a handful. Ten, near enough. You’ve got moments, Xuan, not minutes. ]
He moved on it. No time to walk Wei and Kai through why a Blood Fang elder was kneeling half-stripped in the overseer’s office, so he had Mira put the man back together fast. Han Ying’s hands jerked through the motions, hauling his robes back onto his shoulders in stiff, puppet-clumsy tugs, and Xuan steered him upright behind the desk with a fistful of ledgers shoved into his grip, the very portrait of an elder sorting through a dead mine’s books. By the time boots came hammering down the passage, the room held nothing stranger than two men buried in paperwork.
Kai came through the doorway first, his mother’s blade still in hand, Wei a stride behind him and breathing hard.
"Xuan. We’ve got company." Kai’s eyes swept the office once and snapped back. "A column coming up the western track, and they’re not slowing for anything. The ones they marched off on that job. They’re back."
