Preparations (2)
The woman who had slipped out of her own residence made her way through the streets toward the home of Wang Yun, Intendant of Henan.
Wang Yun had drawn Ding Yuan's wrath, and only the intercession of the court's ministers—and of Emperor Liu Bian himself—had let him keep both his head and his post.
"Come in, come in. To think you would come seeking me out..."
"It has been far too long, Lord Intendant."
Wang Yun's guard had hardened of late, thickened by Ding Yuan's reckless career of indulgence and extravagance, yet at the sight of the woman who had come to him, that vigilance eased—if only for a moment.
She wore nothing of ornament, unassuming as befitted a scholar, and yet her features were striking—keen, intelligent, remarkably fine.
A loyal official who had stayed behind out of concern for the Son of Heaven, even as the court's bureaucrats fled the capital in droves to escape the atrocities of the wanton, cruel Lord Ding Yuan.
Imperial Attendant Xun You, courtesy name Gongda—a woman who would one day be counted among the three great strategists of Cao Cao's armies, second to none in strategy and the art of war.
A strategist of the Yingchuan Xun clan, famed for its learning, she seethed at Ding Yuan's tyranny and had been watching ever since for her chance to put a knife in him. He Yong, a lifelong friend of her kinsman Xun Shuang, had moved first—his attempt had failed, and he had died miserably at the tyrant's hands.
So Xun You had not gone home. For the sake of avenging her beloved kin and mentor, and of rooting out the man who toyed with the imperial house, she remained in Luoyang.
But Ding Yuan, wary after several assassination attempts and uneasy over Lu Bu's wavering heart, had swollen the force of bodyguards around him, and chances to strike from within were slow to come. And so Xun You had planted spies among those very guards and bent her efforts to unearthing the weakness he kept hidden.
Seated across the table from one another, the two began their secret parley.
"What brings you to me?"
At Wang Yun's question, Xun You spoke.
"I believe I have found a thread that may lead us to Ding Yuan's destruction."
Wang Yun's eyes went wide and he shot up from his seat.
"Is that true!?"
"Please, compose yourself. One never knows who might be listening."
Ever since Ding Yuan had bared his true face, Wang Yun had been a man under watch; it was only Xun You's thin pretext—that outwardly she served the Grand General faithfully, and had come to sound out the old minister's heart on his behalf—that let this meeting happen at all.
She soothed the old man, who trembled with excitement at the thought of a thread that might kill the traitor, and Wang Yun dropped his voice to a murmur.
"Then tell me."
To Wang Yun, who had served the Han with a dog's and horse's devotion, Ding Yuan's rise was nothing less than a dark chapter in his own history.
"Lu Bu."
"Lu Bu?"
At the name, Wang Yun's face curdled with distaste.
"...Why? What has Ding Yuan's adopted daughter to do with any of this?"
Wang Yun's distrust of Lu Bu ran deep. A man whose devotion to justice and Confucian propriety bordered on the suffocating, he regarded her with profound wariness and no small measure of contempt.
She had, after all, spared Ding Yuan—whom Han Yeong had lured into a trap and all but slain—on little more than a whim, and the calamity that whim had visited upon the Son of Heaven and Luoyang had earned her the bitter resentment of every official at court. In Wang Yun's private judgment, being Ding Yuan's adopted daughter as she was, not a single soul in Luoyang thought well of her.
True, when the White Wave Bandits and the Black Mountain Bandits lately set upon the people, she had put a stop to the plunder—but the gentlemen and famed scholars of the Central Plains dismissed it as posturing and sniped behind her back. What did it matter, after all, if the arsonist who had set the forest ablaze belatedly felt a pang of guilt and dashed a single bowl of water on the roaring flames? Nothing changed.
Such was the lens through which most of the notables remaining in the capital viewed Lu Bu's conduct. In a word, they called it image-making.
'Once, I confess, I took an interest in her—we hailed from the same Bingzhou soil...'
Now she was nothing more than the loyal hound that had delivered unlimited power into Ding Yuan's hands.
"Spurned and slighted as Ding Yuan has treated her, your Lu Bu refused the General Who Pacifies the West's overtures and chose the wicked adoptive father in the end."
Lu Bu was a riddle—nursing her grievances against her adoptive father, yet serving him with unbroken fidelity to the last.
"That is precisely it."
Xun You leaned on the point.
"Hmm? What do you mean?"
"Lu Bu pours out her loyalty to Ding Yuan, yet Ding Yuan—the man whose life she saved—smiles on her to her face while quietly guarding against her, edging her toward the door."
He had failed to win a single engagement against Han Yeong and been maneuvered into retreat by guile; then Cao Cao, the very man he had trusted, had dealt him a devastating blow. In times like these, the first duty of any commander is to tighten discipline within and prepare against enemies without—yet Ding Yuan's attention was fixed on one thing alone: making sure Lu Bu never rose to a higher title.
He had granted her a single request in repayment for his life, and even then he would not lift a finger against the plundering of the White Wave and Black Mountain Bandits, insisting it lay beyond his authority.
"The more stubbornly she serves him, the deeper his hostility and suspicion of her have grown since he took power."
"Hmm... Go on."
Wang Yun listened, a low hum of thought in his throat. It was proof enough that Ding Yuan had never once seen Lu Bu as a daughter of his own—she had been a political instrument, and nothing more.
"From what I have learned, Ding Yuan clashed little with Lu Bu in his days as Governor of Bingzhou. The estrangement began only recently, with the Black Mountain Bandits and the affair at Mengjin Port."
In Bingzhou, where foreign tribes crossed the border year after year and bandit gangs prowled at will, Lu Bu's strength had been the one thing keeping his influence alive. One might read it this way: with his authority still frail in those days, he had avoided strife deliberately, the better to keep the woman docile and under his thumb. But the moment he rose to the summit of the military in Luoyang and held power enough to toy with the Emperor himself, the woman whose merits had built his fortune found herself despised a little more each day.
"If Ding Yuan merely wished to use her, he could simply post her back to Bingzhou—the frontier must be held against the tribes, after all. Yet by my intelligence, he is watching for his chance to be rid of Lu Bu altogether."
"What? He means to destroy the adopted daughter who handed him his power?"
Wang Yun could scarcely make sense of it. To the people of Luoyang, Lu Bu and Ding Yuan were one and the same; but to Ding Yuan himself, she was nothing less than the chief architect of everything he had gained. And even were she nothing more than a political tool, she was still his daughter by adoption—to seek her death?
For a man who had raised Diaochan as an adopted daughter and loved her as his own flesh and blood, Ding Yuan's unnatural conduct lay beyond comprehension.
"My belief is this: Ding Yuan harbors some shameful secret he cannot allow Lu Bu to discover. He has judged that if it ever reaches her ears, his life will hang by a thread."
The intelligence was fragmentary, pieced together from her spies' reports—but assembled, it told her at least this much: Ding Yuan was hiding something from Lu Bu. Wang Yun, once hailed as a talent fit to aid a king, grasped at once where she was going.
"You mean that if we can lay hands on the secret he is hiding from her—"
"Yes. Lu Bu would turn her back on him. And more than that, I believe she could become the very blade that takes his head."
It would not be easy, of course. Ding Yuan was burning every document connected to the matter, burying it with all the cunning he possessed; unearthing it would take a very long time indeed. But even at the cost of time, exposing the man's weakness was surer ground than hurling another desperate knife into the dark.
Her mentor and her kin had already thrown their lives against the wall of guards surrounding a man who trusted no one but himself; Xun You had no intention of adding her own name to that list through sheer recklessness.
"...I follow your reasoning. But tell me—would Ding Yuan have left any record of his shame?"
For all that he seemed to live by brute instinct, Ding Yuan had seized power with a meticulous hand; the man was an old fox.
'He will surely have destroyed every paper that could be turned against him...'
Xun You swept the worry aside with disarming ease.
"Have no fear. Among those I know there is one with a rare gift for imitating another's hand. Once the secret is ours, we need only forge the documents in Ding Yuan's own script."
Evidence could always be manufactured; what mattered was the content. And one of her dear friends had already gone to serve the Prince of Fufeng and taken a commission under Han Yeong—through him she could open a line to Han Yeong and set the stage for the moment when Lu Bu's blade would fall.
"That is why I mean to win over the men closest to Ding Yuan and draw out whatever can be turned against him. Might I ask you to provide the wealth required to buy their loyalty, Lord Intendant?"
"...Very well. Do as you see fit. Whatever you need, you have only to name it."
And so the two joined hands, approaching Ding Yuan's commanders one by one, slipping them quiet bribes, and laying the first stones of trust.
Meanwhile, as the rift widened between the army under Lu Bu's command and the bandit gangs that made up the rest of their host...
Wang Kuang, Governor of Henei, whose name rang across the realm as a youxia—a wandering knight-errant—raised an army tens of thousands strong to reclaim the Emperor.
At the news, the bandit chiefs who had climbed to high office through their compact with Ding Yuan came running to him in a panic. General of the Guards Zhang Yan and General of Chariots and Cavalry Guo Tai pushed unceremoniously into the Grand General's residence, urgency written across their faces.
Ding Yuan, the treasures of the imperial house already in his grasp and savoring every moment of it, asked with studied nonchalance.
"What is it?"
"Governor Wang Kuang of Henei has raised an army!!"
"They say his host numbers in the tens of thousands!!"
Wang Kuang, master of Henei Commandery, was a knight-errant whose fame rested on the fierceness of his chivalric spirit—and a loyal servant of the Han.
With Fang Yue at the head of his vanguard, he was marching south toward the capital's outskirts, and at the news Zhang Yan and Guo Tai had come straight to Ding Yuan. Henei bordered Bingzhou, and the two bandit chiefs had crossed swords with his forces before; they knew exactly how strong Wang Kuang's army was.
Ding Yuan, however, only turned the news over in his mind, and a countermeasure took shape.
"...General Zhang Yan. You will take the field."
Zhang Yan's face froze.
"Why me, of all people?! Send that mad bitch instead—the one who's been thrashing our soldiers half to death in the name of 'keeping the peace'!"
The madwoman in question, of course, was Lu Bu.
"It cannot be helped. You are none too pleased about her authority growing either, are you?"
Every time Zhang Yan's or Guo Tai's soldiers plundered in Luoyang, she marched out with her own personal officers and troops and clamped down on the capital's order with an iron hand. Their comrades had protested, of course, loud and indignant—but no one had the audacity to cross the woman hailed as Unrivaled Under Heaven, and since her crackdowns had been sanctioned as just, they could only squirm and seethe.
'Ugh, if it weren't for that mad bitch, he'd be nothing at all...'
At Ding Yuan's words, Zhang Yan swallowed his resentment at being ordered about like a common underling—and complied.
Ding Yuan's arrogance was manufacturing enemies all on its own.
Even as a war poised to shake the whole realm bore down upon them, Ding Yuan's camp knew no harmony and no unity—only cracks, spreading wider by the day.