Chapter 66: The Crimson Lotus [ PS BONUS ]
The capital had a thousand quiet places to do business and a hundred loud ones. The loud ones were better.
Lord Zhao’s sedan chair stopped at the rear gate of the Crimson Lotus, the largest of the lacquered houses on the upper bend of the river. The lanterns above the gate burned the dull pink of the second hour of the night, when the houses had already collected their first round of patrons and the second round was paying for the discretion of not being seen. Two attendants in silk took him through the side passage without asking his name. The Crimson Lotus did not require names from men who carried the gait of imperial messengers. It required names only from men who could not pay.
Zhao climbed the back stairs to the fourth floor. Music drifted up the stairwell - a pipa, two voices, the low laughter of patrons three floors below. By the fourth landing, only the bass thump of the drums came through the boards under his feet. The corridor at the top was lined with carved doors no patron of the house would ever knock on twice.
He was let into a private salon at the end of the hall.
The room ran wide, screened on three sides in patterned silk and lacquered deep red. Two long couches against the walls. A low table at the centre with a small clay teapot steeping, two cups. A bowl of pickled apricots no one had touched. In the far corner, at a depth the lamps did not reach, a white silk screen stood between two pillars, folded into the shadow at this hour the way furniture folded into shadow when it was not the furniture you were meant to be noticing.
Zhao did not look at the screen.
Two men were waiting for him.
The first was an old man in a robe so quiet it would not survive in any room less carefully lit than this one. Black trim. White hair tied in the simple knot of a sect elder. He occupied the low table with his palms flat on his knees, the posture of an elder who had been receiving guests for forty years. Zhao would have called him a senior elder of the Blood Fang Sect. Zhao would have been wrong.
The second was Cao Yan.
He was sprawled on the longer couch with one boot up on the armrest and the other crossed at the ankle, a flask of wine balanced on his sternum. His robes were the dark plum-violet of his sect, unwashed down the collar, ash on one cuff. His hair fell over his shoulders the violet of bruised plums, unbrushed, a few darker streaks running through the temple. The whites of his eyes were not white. They were the red of a man who had bled too far inside himself for the red to fade, the iris a small black coin at the centre of each, a thin radiant ring around the pupil pulsing in time with a heartbeat that was probably no longer entirely human.
And - the part of his face the empire still talked about in low voices fifteen years on - the centre of it was open air. Where a nose should have been was a flat plane of scar tissue, the cartilage taken with a single Skyedge cut on a dark evening fifteen years past, by a patriarch who had not chosen to take the rest of the head only because he had a different errand that night.
Cao Yan tilted the flask without sitting up.
"Zhao."
"Commander."
"You are early."
"The road was kind."
The old elder at the table inclined his head a degree.
"Lord Zhao. Sit."
Zhao sat. He did not have to be told twice.
The elder’s name was Mu. Zhao had been doing business with him for nearly two years and had grown to read him as the senior face of the Blood Fang Sect - the elder who fielded the orders, who handled the coin, who arranged the introductions. Mu was the table. Mu was the door. Zhao had never asked what was behind Mu, because Zhao had been raised in a court where asking what was behind a door was the fastest way to find oneself behind one.
Mu poured tea for him with the precision of a man who had poured many cups in his life.
"The order."
Zhao set the lacquer message-case on the table between them.
"His Highness writes that the chicks who refuse to sing along must be silenced. Another is to be planted in their place. The work has been postponed twice. It will not be postponed a third."
Mu opened the case with two fingers. Read. Closed it. The room absorbed the necessary information for the length of half a breath.
"It is understood, Lord Zhao."
"His Highness also asks. The Emperor, he wants to know about his father."
Mu’s face did not move.
"Three months at the outside. Some less at the inside. The physicians have stopped using the word recovery in his presence. The Yu-faction has begun moving its accountants toward defensive positions. The Censor’s office is preparing a list of pardons."
Zhao drew a slow breath he did not allow any part of his face to register. The Second Prince would need this regional matter closed and the seal of Skyedge in the right hand before that corridor opened into a throne room.
Mu watched Zhao count this in his head without commenting. When the room had absorbed all the information it was going to absorb, Mu turned a single degree on his cushion.
"Cao Yan. The order is yours."
The man on the couch tipped the flask of wine into his mouth, swallowed, and pushed himself onto one elbow.
"You are telling me," he said slowly, the smile climbing the absent part of his face with a patience that made Zhao’s tea cool a full degree, "that the order is to ruin the bastard who took my nose?"
"That is the order."
"That is a beautiful order, Mu."
He swung his legs off the couch with the loose efficiency of a man who had been waiting many years for a particular set of words to be spoken in the right sequence. The radiant ring around his pupils brightened by a fraction. The red of his sclera drank the lamplight.
He turned the smile toward Zhao.
"And Lord Zhao. You will tell your prince that Cao Yan would have done this without his orders. Tell him the Second Prince paying for the privilege of letting me take fifteen years’ worth of breath out of one man is the most generous gift his treasury has paid out this year. And tell him also that the Blood Fang Sect is grateful to be the convenient name on the report when the report is written. We always are."
Zhao kept his back straight. The pressure in the room had climbed the way pressure climbed in a room when a Foundation Establishment cultivator stopped pretending he was sitting comfortably.
"Understand your position, Cao Yan."
"My position is sprawled on this couch."
"Your position is contracted to fulfil an order. You know the terms of the contract."
"I do."
"Then go, fulfill it."
