The Zhu Father and Daughter (2)
When Gongsun Dajing asked whether they had any support coming, Jin Myeong answered.
"I sent a trustworthy eunuch to the Directorate of Ceremonial, but he likely hasn't arrived yet."
"Understood. Your warning alone has been of great help."
"Assassins will have hidden themselves in the inn right beside Yuwol Pavilion, and in the tea house across the street as well. Those two shops have never once closed their doors."
"Indeed! As expected of the Directorate of Palace Attendants—you're thoroughly versed in the affairs of the main avenue. Excellent!"
Gongsun Dajing felt as though he had been granted the aid of heaven itself.
In their present predicament, the young eunuch was heaven and the spirits combined, and the information he had passed along was a treasure beyond any price. Without it, they would almost certainly have walked straight into catastrophe.
"You overpraise me."
"Those bastards. To dare attempt the assassination of His Highness the Crown Prince. Any other time I would have told you to get yourself clear—but given the circumstances, I shall have to accept the help of a eunuch of such formidable skill. To think you stayed behind alone to aid us. You have my thanks. This Qianhu and his guards shall never forget this debt."
"No—this humble servant—!"
Hearing Gongsun Dajing's sound transmission, Jin Myeong froze in dismay.
He had known full well what was coming and had planned to play dumb, pass along the warning, and slip away at a convenient moment.
No, you—hah. These people are misunderstanding me again.
He had never imagined the man would simply demand his help outright.
He was alone, and standing in the very heart of the enemy formation besides. Gongsun Dajing knew that perfectly well, and still he was asking him to throw in his strength. That was as good as telling him to go and die.
"Truly, the loyalty of the inner court is everything they say it is. It is a virtue we outer officials ought to take as our model. I shall be sure to report your devotion to His Highness the Crown Prince and the Commander. What is your name, inner court official?"
Gongsun Dajing was an orthodox martial officer, a man of chivalrous bone, and he was genuinely moved. He believed the young eunuch meant to hurl himself into danger for the Imperial House, the way eunuchs always did.
There was something incomprehensible about the fearlessness men like that showed in a crisis. When a dynasty fell, when the heavens themselves were overturned, everyone else fled—yet the eunuchs remained at their sovereign's side until the end, and died with him.
This young eunuch's righteousness and loyalty are extraordinary. To be that fearless—is it because he is young? He puts this official to shame. If I fail to protect His Highness today, I will bury my bones beside that eunuch.
It was a thought that would have made the man in question shudder down to his marrow. Stirred to his core, Gongsun Dajing awakened the true qi in his body.
Kindling his fury toward the assassins, he advanced slowly into the space where the Huntian Miri Kill Array lay coiled.
"What is he talking about?"
I had been planning to warn them and get out.
It was absurd. He was so deadly serious about it I couldn't even argue.
I'm tangled up in this. Damn it.
I had already told them I belonged to the Directorate of Palace Attendants. If I just bolted now, innocent eunuchs would pay for it in blood later.
Should I have just hidden and given the warning from cover? Then again, a man like Gongsun Dajing wouldn't have believed it.
And then the blood would have really flown.
Either way, it looked like I was going to spend myself on a job with precious little payoff. If I rescued the Crown Prince single-handedly, Zhao Zilong-style, that would be one thing—but a contribution this size wouldn't even get me a top-grade spiritual elixir.
Worse, I was starting to worry I might end up with Zhu Gaochi's hook through my nose. Zhu Gaochi was too sickly; that wouldn't do. His eldest, Zhu Zhanji, would be the better bet.
When an emperor died, the eunuchs he had employed became kites with their strings cut. Put bluntly: would the next emperor trust the eunuchs who had served his father, or the ones he himself had employed? The latter, obviously. An emperor and his eunuchs were bound by personal affection.
Anyway—whoever the bastard is who sent me here, I'll find him. I swear I will.
He had to be at least Grand Eunuch rank, which meant he sat above even Yun Bong and old lord Yi Gwak.
That was a problem for later. Right now I had the mess in front of me to deal with.
I moved toward the cloth shop, putting on a diligent show of sweeping. More precisely, I moved toward the woman who had been planted there for over two hours.
The spot she was standing in was the supreme position of the Huntian Miri Kill Array. The place where the formation's commander stood.
Meanwhile.
"Your Highness, listen only. There are enemies outside. This subject and the guards will drive them off. Remain in the imperial carriage."
Preparations complete, Gongsun Dajing sent the transmission into the carriage, to Zhu Gaochi.
Tap. Tap.
Zhu Gaochi understood, and lightly stamped his foot twice. Message received.
For all that he had been praised since boyhood for a mind sharp as a blade, the Crown Prince only flinched for a fraction of a breath, and gave nothing away.
"Come here, my daughter. Shall Father hold you? Once you're grown and we find you a husband, you'll start treating your old father like a stranger, I expect."
A parent's love for a child is a bottomless thing. Zhu Gaochi set Princess Ju Jeong-won on his knee.
If the worst came, he would not send his child ahead of him. Even if a blade found them, the father would take it first. That was all it was.
"This daughter will live with Father and Mother forever."
"Hahaha! We shall see, then—whether my daughter's word holds true or not. Hah!"
Inwardly he was taut with dread, but he let none of it show. He stroked his daughter's hair with careful hands.
If only this body hadn't lost its martial arts.
The reason Zhu Gaochi suffered a bloated frame and a host of lingering ailments was a qi deviation he had taken in his youth. Twenty years ago, when his father—then the Prince of Yan—had raised a civil war against the Jianwen Emperor, Zhu Gaochi had been holding the princely mansion against Li Jinglong's great army when the accident struck.
He had barely kept his life. His martial arts were gone, and in their place came wasting thirst, obesity, and a litter of lesser sicknesses. Famous physicians, martial masters, spiritual elixirs—they had tried everything. The martial arts were beyond recovery.
Zhu Gaochi let out a quiet breath and braced his daughter's back with a firm hand as she perched on his knee.
"Give the signal, Qianhu."
"I will. Including myself, ten will remain to guard the imperial carriage. Eight will strike. With you here, one of those eight can cover the rear."
"…A sound judgment. Do not forget that assassins are hidden in the inn and the tea house as well."
"As if I would. Then—I leave it to you!"
Jin Myeong and Gongsun Dajing finished their exchange of sound transmissions and moved into a posture of counterattack.
They had already identified the Huntian Miri Kill Array the assassins had laid. If they struck first, they could seize the initiative. The unknown was how many killers were concealed on the second floors of the inn and the tea house.
Ten zhang. Nine. Eight…
The imperial carriage bearing the Zhu father and daughter rolled slowly toward the Huntian Miri Kill Array.
And then—
When they reached four zhang, a single zhang short of the formation's three-zhang killing radius—
"Inner court official! Now!"
Gongsun Dajing's transmission hit Jin Myeong.
Then—
Long sabers of the Jinyiwei elite cleared their scabbards as one.
Clean steel met sunlight, and the blades flared with a hard, dazzling glare.
Saber and body became one. Three-foot blades charged with saber-qi screamed across four zhang as if it were a single stride.
Blade-Body Unity!
The assassins, witnessing a Blade-Body Unity that crossed four zhang as if taking a single step, paled in horror and tore their weapons free to counter—but they were already too late.
Steel rang. Then came the wet punch of blades finding flesh, again and again.
Screams tore short and died. The assassins were spitted on saber-points in a line, or had their weapons smashed from their hands by saber-qi so ferocious it could not be met. What followed was a one-sided slaughter. Blood fountained from throats and hearts and bellies, from limbs sheared clean away. In a single breath a wind of blood filled the avenue.
Assassins were specialists in ambush. Even at the same realm, the forms they practiced and the way they used them could not stand against orthodox masters. Simple arts built on straight lines and raw speed—refined, at most, over a few decades—could not match orthodox martial arts that had been honed in the hands of successive grandmasters for tens or even hundreds of years. That was the natural order of things.
"How?"
The woman leading the assassins—Hong Yehua, leader of the Saltian Gate—stared in shock as her subordinates went down like rotting sheaves of straw.
They had been a single zhang from springing the trap. A reaction that fast was impossible unless the Jinyiwei had known in advance. To pick their positions out of a crowded street as the carriage approached, to form a surprise-attack plan and execute it—without the carriage even stopping? Unless someone had been watching them the whole way, turning it over in their mind…
Their information had leaked. That much was certain.
But finding out how they had been exposed was a problem for later. It was already too late—yet she still had to signal the second unit hidden in the tea house and the inn.
Hong Yehua's hand went to the fold of her robe, where the signal whistle waited.
And in that exact instant, something carrying killing intent smashed into her.
She did not even have time to see what it was. The world flashed white in front of her eyes. That was all.
"Hh— wh…? Gkk—"
She wanted to speak, but her voice would not come. It had to be because of that sharp little sting she had felt a heartbeat before. Sure enough, when she touched her throat, hot blood was pulsing out in thick gouts.
Who?
She looked for the owner of a strike so fast she had not even begun to react—and there, astonishingly, a single zhang in front of her, stood a young eunuch, smiling at her in brilliant white.
Twenty, if she was being generous. Look wherever she liked, there was no other killer. That shining white smile was the proof.
You? You?
She could not believe it. He was the same one who had kicked up that ridiculous storm in front of Yuwol Pavilion a short while ago—that seedless man, surrounded by beautiful women. A greenhorn eunuch whose scab had not even healed over the place where they had cut his manhood away. He had been standing apart from his fellows, sighing his lungs out; she had taken him for a boy being frozen out after the scene he had caused.
And that boy had been a eunuch who practiced martial arts.
The sweeping eunuchs were supposed to be the lowest of the low. She had heard that the Sunflower Manual the eunuchs cultivated was unreasonably fast—but she had never imagined it could be this fast. It felt like being struck by the Form-Shift Instant Displacement that masters of the Transcendent Realm displayed.
Then it was you? The Huntian Miri Kill Array—
Only then did Hong Yehua understand why the killing had gone so wrong. Why the Jinyiwei had known the Huntian Miri Kill Array in advance and broken it. The one variable she had never accounted for. The young eunuch standing in front of her.
As if he had read her heart, the young eunuch's sound transmission arrived at precisely that moment.
He was beyond me…
A young eunuch who even knew the Heavenly Net Blood Shadow Array. Hong Yehua had no choice but to admit that the man who had taken her head was no ordinary person.
Mock me all you like. It's already too late. Even if I die, She is still—
With her last thought, Hong Yehua pictured the woman who would be watching all of this from somewhere unseen. Then she slid down the wall of the cloth shop and sat, her eyes still open.
Meanwhile, inside a pavilion that looked down on the street at an angle, a man and a woman were watching the scene the bloodbath had left behind. Their faces were indifferent, as if this were a sight they knew well.
"Strategist. How did those dogs of the Imperial Guard know?"
The middle-aged man with an indigo cloth bound across his brow, his hair drawn up into a topknot and pinned, was the young woman's escort. He stood with his arms crossed and a sword tucked in the crook, and glanced sidelong at his superior—the wisest and most beautiful woman he knew.
"The commander was Gongsun Dajing, was he not? They said he was one the Jinyiwei poured their heart's blood into raising. He is rather capable. I had thought it would be enough."
The strategist who answered him was a woman of striking beauty. Thick black hair swept to one side and falling to her waist, a face white as snow against that darkness, long lashes, and half-lidded eyes that seemed slightly closed—together they gave her a mysterious, almost dreamlike allure.
"What are your orders, Strategist?"
"Gongsun Dajing noticed. It is a failure. But we should still leave them a warning. Send in the second unit as well. Everyone we planted on the escape route—all of them. We will cut our own tail while we are at it."
"As you command!"
"And that eunuch. Secure information on the one who dealt with Hong Yehua. That eunuch is the key. He is the one who warned Gongsun Dajing. He ruined the work of the Covenant. He will pay the price."
"As you command!"
The woman acknowledged the operation's failure and, in the same breath, ordered every remaining subordinate thrown in under the pretext of cutting their tail. The middle-aged martial artist answered without a flicker of hesitation.
"The Sunflower Manual… Truly, there are no empty reputations in the jianghu. This woman's eyes could not keep up."
"He cannot reach the Transcendent Realm. A half-measure, nothing more."
"That is true enough. Let us go."
"Yes, Strategist."
The ruthless pair rose from their seats, as if there were nothing more worth seeing.