Shadows of the Imperial Palace, The Eunuchs (2)
For a single heartbeat the hall hung in a daze — then that silence froze solid.
Has this bastard lost his mind? Damn it! He's ratting out his superior?
Wang Zhen, who had been clinging to the hope that none of this was really happening, was so rattled he could barely think. He had never imagined a novice eunuch — freshly made, barely through the gates — would come out swinging like this. What the hell was he supposed to do now?
He flicked a glance sideways, and sure enough: Yun Bong's face had gone rigid as stone.
Han Feizi? That Han Feizi?
Yun Bong was every bit as stunned. He had been nodding along, tossing out praise about how sharp the question was, making a show of knowing the answer — and it wasn't even from the Four Books. It was from the Han Feizi.
That little snake was trying to keep a brand-new novice in his place, and now look! What a disgrace!
One glance at Wang Zhen standing there, stammering without a word to his name, was enough. The novice's answer had been right. And the reason Wang Zhen had drawn his question from the Han Feizi instead of the Four Books was obvious: he was jealous of a newcomer handsomer and more striking than himself.
A eunuch who'll be buried apart from his Treasure even in death! He's barely set foot in the palace — and he's already pulling a stunt like this?
A eunuch who'll be buried apart from his Treasure. There was no fouler curse you could throw at one of their kind. When a eunuch died, his Bao — his Treasure — had to be buried with him. Only then, they believed, could he be reborn in the next life as a whole man. To every eunuch alive, that Treasure was worth more than anything but life itself. Which meant Yun Bong, right now, was furious. Wang Zhen's cheap trick had humiliated him in front of half the Directorate.
"What's this? The little eunuch pulled a fast one?"
"He figured Novice Zhang wouldn't know it. Wanted to crush him before he could sprout."
"Is he even fifteen? Got some nerve, doing that with the Gonggong sitting right there."
"He might not walk out of this. You think Gonggong Yun's going to let it go? A junior just made a fool of him."
"Shh! Keep it down! He looks ready to kill someone — if you're unlucky you'll get dragged in with him."
The whispers were right. The Directorate of Ceremonial had become a hall of chaos. Yun Bong's face was ice. Wang Zhen didn't dare meet his eyes, and neither did anyone else. The silence that followed was so thick it hurt to breathe.
That was when Jin Myeong opened his mouth.
"It would seem you briefly confused it with the King Hui of Liang chapter in the Mencius, Gonggong. That chapter also discusses a sovereign's qualifications and his duties, does it not?"
He brought both hands together and raised them before his face in a formal salute, the question aimed squarely at Yun Bong.
Yun Bong's expression, puzzled for a fraction of a second, lit up at once. Twenty years in the palace had taught him to read a man's intent in a single breath.
"Ah! That's it! Yes! This official briefly confused it with the King Hui of Liang chapter of the Mencius. At any rate — a pillar who will carry our kind into the future has arrived. Passed! Novice Zhang will henceforth discharge his duties in the Directorate of Ceremonial."
The look Yun Bong turned on Jin Myeong was as warm as if he were gazing upon the savior of a hundred years. How could a novice who hadn't even reached twenty be this sharp? He had read his superior's predicament, and in that sliver of a moment he had even carved out an escape. Yun Bong felt as though he had just unearthed a treasure worth raising with everything he had — for the sake of the eunuch world itself.
All this time he had taken Wang Zhen for that treasure. But look at what the boy was doing at the height of his youth: pure venom. You could argue the nerve itself was useful — but nerve without political sense or judgment was nothing but arrogance, the kind that dragged a man and his entire organization into the fire.
There was nothing more to see. Yun Bong made up his mind on the spot. Jin Myeong would be placed in the Directorate of Ceremonial, the highest of the Twenty-Four Directorates and the organ that oversaw all the rest. The Grand Directors there would dote on him. That much was certain.
"Yes, Gonggong! This humble one receives your command."
"Oho! Picked up the speech already, have we? The remaining novices will receive their bureau assignments shortly. Rest for now. Eunuch Wang — you will come with me."
Yun Bong's gaze, still fond as it lingered on Jin Myeong's deep salute, turned to frost the instant it reached Wang Zhen.
And with that, Yun Bong, the other eunuchs of the Directorate, and Wang Zhen vanished into the inner hall.
A short while later.
"F-forgive me, Gonggong! This humble servant was momentarily confused. I would never—!"
Inside the hall, Wang Zhen had already rolled up his robes to expose his calves and launched into his excuses, mixing in a lie — that he hadn't done it on purpose, that he had simply mixed the texts up.
He never finished the sentence.
"Hyaaah!"
CRACK!
Yun Bong's cane landed before the words were out of his mouth.
"Ghh—!"
Wang Zhen's calf split open. A line of red welled up and spilled. When Yun Bong had even drawn the black bamboo cane, no eye in the room could say — the strike was simply too fast to follow.
It was the martial art that vied for the title of fastest under heaven: the eunuchs' own Sunflower Manual. To be precise, the Sun Moon Sect's version of the Sunflower Manual. Before the Eastern Depot had been founded, it was practiced by the eunuchs of the Directorate of Ceremonial, by those assigned to the halls of the imperial clan and the consorts, and by every high-ranking eunuch of the fifth rank and above.
Yun Bong had no intention of killing him, so there was no inner force in the blow.
"Ghh! G-Gonggong! F-forgive—!"
What remained of a eunuch once you stripped away power and dignity — when the Founding Emperor's dying decree had capped their highest rank at the fourth grade? Mercy? Not a chance.
Any veteran eunuch would have seen it: Wang Zhen had cooked up that question to keep Jin Myeong down. But because there was a sliver of a chance he had genuinely mixed the texts up, as he claimed, Yun Bong stopped short of taking his life.
"You little—! You've barely set foot in the palace and you're already pulling this cheap stunt? And I was going to make something of you!"
CRACK!
Another line of blood opened across the calf.
"Nngh! I am sorry! Forgive me, Gonggong!"
Wang Zhen took several more strokes before he was finally let go. That he was not thrown out of the Directorate entirely was a mercy granted only because, for the past half year, he had been the finest eunuch of his cohort.
Tsk, tsk. Pitiful. Truly pitiful.
The crack of the cane and Wang Zhen's groans carried clearly to my ears.
Wang Zhen. Little Zhen. What did I tell you? Live honestly, I said.
I was laughing on the inside. I couldn't help it. I had just remembered the very first thing Wang Zhen had done, in the life before my regression, once he became Grand Director of the Directorate of Ceremonial.
The moment he rose to command of ten thousand eunuchs, Wang Zhen had ordered every man in the Directorate to read the Han Feizi. Eunuchs, he said, were meant to govern the court and its officials. He had even administered exams down as far as the Supervising Directors.
So how could I not know the Han Feizi? I had crammed it until my eyes bled, same as he had — dreaming of wearing a Grand Director's hat myself.
"Incredible! Novice Zhang! Really, incredible!"
"Whoa! What's the Han Feizi? If it's not the Four Books, is it one of the Three Classics?"
"Novice Zhang, I'm from Guangdong—!"
"I'm from Fujian—!"
While I was privately enjoying myself, the novices crowding around me were enough to make my head spin. They were angling to get in good with a future candidate for Grand Director of the Directorate of Ceremonial.
Whether I would even still be in the palace by then was another question. But these boys were not entirely ignorant of how eunuchs survived. They had at least a rough idea of what the Directorate of Ceremonial was.
How powerful was it? Powerful enough that when a Directorate eunuch walked past, eunuchs from every other bureau bowed their heads — even if they were the older men. In later years the custom would spread until other eunuchs were bowing to children from the Inner Study Hall. And the Directorate of Ceremonial was the only bureau with no cap on the number of Grand Directors. A handful of the very highest posts had limits. That was all.
Which meant that a Directorate eunuch who kept his nose clean and remembered to breathe would make fourth-rank Grand Director. There were so many seats that promotion came faster there than anywhere else.
"Jin Myeong of the Zhang family, from Yingtianfu. A pleasure."
"So brilliant, and humble on top of it!"
A few of the novices had already turned into outright devotees.
Humble? Please. Was I supposed to ignore them when they came to introduce themselves? We nobodies have to get along.
And so I had gone straight into the Directorate of Ceremonial.
The world isn't fair, you say? What of it. That's just what happens when a man is this damn good.
That evening, in the quarters of the Directorate eunuchs.
Wang Zhen — who had tried a cheap trick on Jin Myeong that morning and paid for it dearly — sat with a handful of eunuchs who followed him. They all had the refined, almost pretty looks that marked a man as belonging to the Directorate of Ceremonial.
"I say, Brother Wang. You're not simply going to sit there and swallow it, are you?"
The eunuch who had powdered over his somewhat dusky skin was Yang Gwang, from Fujian on the far southeastern coast.
"The brat's six months our junior and he doesn't even know enough to be scared of his seniors. We've got to show him what's what."
The boy a half-span shorter than the rest, compact and delicate, was Zhao Gou, from Guangdong.
Zhao Gou of Guangdong had been chosen for the Directorate on the strength of those fine, petite looks. Yang Gwang of Fujian — Fujian being the finest producing region of eunuchs in the empire — had been chosen for his feminine gestures and his lovely voice. Wang Zhen was from Yuzhou, northwest of the capital; his looks were a step behind, but his gift for the written word had carried him in.
Wang Zhen, Yang Gwang, and Zhao Gou: the top three of the cohort selected half a year ago. In other words, the three who already had future eunuch power reserved in their names. Fifteen years old, the same age, stuffed full of ambition, and thick as thieves.
"Brother Zhao's quite right. If you're going to put a creature down, you do it at the start. Leave him be and he'll climb until he thinks the sky itself has no ceiling."
Yang Gwang nodded, falling in with Zhao Gou.
"I don't like it, but he's in the Directorate now, which means he'll learn the Sunflower Manual. Once he has that, putting him in his place won't be nearly so easy."
Zhao Gou had a point. Jin Myeong's arrival and Wang Zhen's stumble had left them all uneasy, and they knew it.
Now that they had begun martial training, they had learned that comprehension — the gift for circulating true qi, for grasping the principles of a technique — mattered just as much as the bones and sinew you were born with. For three young men rated a plain Average, that was not a comforting thought.
The one mercy was that even the best of their cohort had only been rated Upper-Average, and by a slim margin. No one had been rated Superior.
Still. A novice only six months their junior, outstanding in looks, already lettered — and what if his martial gift turned out to be outstanding too? If he were some thirty-year-old relic it wouldn't matter. But he was only four years older. If he ever caught them, they ran a real risk of being reduced to his lackeys.
"I never thought the novice would come at me like that. No fear at all. He landed a clean hit. I'm embarrassed for you to see it, Brother Yang, Brother Zhao."
Wang Zhen ground his teeth, the morning's humiliation still burning. Just picturing Jin Myeong's handsome face made his blood rise. He should have been showing off in front of the Directorate's eunuchs — instead he'd been caned until the skin of his calves hung in tatters. After half a year of nothing but triumph since entering the palace, Jin Myeong had stamped the first and deepest stain on his record. He wanted to tear the man apart.
The wound salve on his calves stung.
"Embarrassed? Don't be. The brat has simply studied far more than anyone expected. Do as Brother Zhao says. Crush his spirit now, at the start, and even after he learns martial arts he won't dare throw his weight around."
Yang Gwang, who had watched the man he thought a genius walk into that blunder and had been genuinely shocked, was more than eager. Illiterate himself, he had all but deified Wang Zhen's gift for letters and his brilliance at court maneuvering. The gap between them, as he saw it, was not something looks or gestures or any other little trick could close.
And that same extraordinary Wang Zhen had tried to trip a novice — a boy whose manhood had only just been cut away — with a literary snare, and had nearly taken a tour of the Yellow Springs for it. Yang Gwang had ridden Wang Zhen's coattails to one success after another for the past half year. He could not simply sit and watch his cohort-brother fall.
"Well said, Brother Yang. And Brother Wang — we have to block that arrogant novice's Under Name as well."
Zhao Gou, of the same mind, added his voice.
Under Name meant the placement of a novice, once his basic education was complete, beneath a high-ranking eunuch of Supervising Director or above. Which high-ranking eunuch it was made all the difference. Catch the dragon's tail, or catch a snake's. The more gifted a novice, the more brilliant his scores, the more likely he was to be taken Under Name by a powerful Grand Director — and the crumbs that fell from that Grand Director's power, promotions and wealth alike, fell with him.
What Zhao Gou was arguing, in short, was that they had to stop Jin Myeong from being taken Under Name by Zheng He, Grand Director of the Directorate of Ceremonial and the foremost of all eunuchs, or by any other influential Grand Director. The three of them had themselves been placed Under Name with Duty Grand Directors — a full grade below the Grand Director, the Superintendent, and the Brush-Wielding Grand Directors.
"Fine. Let's go. To the novices' quarters."
Persuaded by Yang Gwang and Zhao Gou, Wang Zhen made his decision. They would break Jin Myeong's spirit. It was something he and his cohort-brothers had gone through themselves as freshly selected novices, a custom as old as the palace. He felt no qualm at all.
"Let's go, Brother Yang."
"Yes! Come on, Brother Zhao."
"Let's go!"
Wang Zhen at the head, the three of them left their quarters, the rest of their Directorate cohort falling in behind. They had the slightly bent waists of eunuchs, both hands folded neatly, the quick short steps — but there was something in the pace, faster than usual, that spoke of confidence and resolve.
A bold, ambitious resolve: to properly wreck not only the insolent novice they had seen that afternoon, but every last one of the new eunuchs with him.