The Eastern Depot's Founding, the Brocade Guards (2)
Jin Myeong's lips curved into a smile of quiet triumph.
Hadn't Noble Consort Wang said as much yesterday? That they had clamped her mouth shut so thoroughly she could not so much as breathe a word about her own symptoms. Still, just to be certain, he had asked Jo Sik to look into it. And sure enough—there was no examination record for Noble Consort Wang.
Do these people take me for a drooling idiot?
If Noble Consort Wang had not already gagged herself, they would surely have spent last night covering their tracks—silencing witnesses, scrubbing records, the whole tired routine. That was precisely why Jin Myeong had found Huang Yan's methods so laughably stale. When something this explosive could come back to haunt you, would you really skip the most basic follow-up?
If you're going to be stupid, at least don't be greedy on top of it.
This was exactly the kind of situation that made Jin Myeong consider Huang Yan a fool. If you were going to start something, you ought to game out the likely scenarios beforehand and check every necessary detail with obsessive care. Instead, Huang Yan had probably figured that as long as he got Gong Jun—the physician who had actually examined her—to testify, whether by sweet-talking him or by threat, that would be enough.
The sloppiness of it was almost insulting.
"The Supervisor is right. Where is the record?"
Jin Myeong's bearing was so utterly unshaken that a gleam of interest rose in the Yongle Emperor's eyes. Anyone who was not a complete imbecile would have seen that this was not the posture of a man telling lies. And the logic was sound besides. One look at the written diagnosis and prescription—every finding, every medicine, recorded without omission—and the matter would be finished.
"Th-that is… in this subject's judgment, the Consort seemed unwilling to have the matter known, and so this subject, of his own accord, did not record it."
Gong Jun, clumsy as it was, showed a flash of wit. He could hardly stand before Noble Consort Wang and admit that she herself had forbidden any record, so he took the next-best path and claimed the decision as his own. There would be trouble for it, yes—but far less than the crime of reporting a falsehood to the throne. He knew perfectly well it would not hold. He knew the staff of Jangan Palace would never corroborate him. He was a drowning man clutching at straws.
The truth was, Gong Jun had thought a few words would settle the whole affair. He had never expected Jin Myeong to demand the examination records. Summoned in such a rush, he had not even thought of them.
"B-but—the inner attendants and court ladies of Jangan Palace will know! They know full well that this subject visited several times!"
The moment the cornered Gong Jun invoked Jangan Palace, Senior Lady Chaeryeong and Attendant Eunuch Deok Heum sprang forward and bowed their heads, without waiting for the Emperor to even turn.
"Chaeryeong, Senior Lady of Jangan Palace. This humble maid knows nothing of it. She has never seen such a thing."
"Deok Heum, Attendant of Jangan Palace. This humble servant likewise knows nothing of it. He has never seen such a thing."
And then, without anyone asking, they laid it all out in succession. Both of them, as expected, denied Gong Jun's every word.
The court ladies and eunuchs who served a palace hall lived and died with its mistress. Noble Consort Wang had charged them most solemnly the day before—and besides, who was Jin Myeong? He was the benefactor who had saved lives that had very nearly taken the long road alongside the Consort herself. They knew perfectly well that telling the truth would put him in danger. There was no chance they would do it. The best thing was for the whole matter to be buried. If it was not, corpses would pile up in the palace like a mountain.
Neither of them could understand what Huang Yan, Gu Ryun, and Gong Jun thought they were doing. A vicious rumor that should have been covered up even if one had heard it—why on earth were they spreading it?
"Senior Lady Chae! Attendant Deok! This old man clearly—!"
"Your Majesty, this humble concubine likewise has no idea what Gong Jun is talking about."
Gong Jun was pouring every ounce of grievance and desperation into his appeal to Chaeryeong and Deok Heum when Noble Consort Wang stepped forward and cut the matter clean. She spoke briefly on purpose. The longer one talked, the more gaps appeared.
Jin Myeong's voice had slipped into her mind only a moment before, a thread of sound no one else could hear.
"Your Highness, simply say you know nothing of it. This humble servant will handle the rest."
And so she had done exactly as instructed—short, simple, and nothing more.
Hah…!
The situation was so grave that even that brief sentence had set her heart hammering. But the effect was devastating. The Yongle Emperor's suspicion and fury, which had been trained on Jin Myeong, swung around at once and locked onto Gong Jun.
"Y-Your Majesty!"
Two smoldering flames of eyes bore down on Gong Jun, who lay trembling on the floor. A sovereign must carry weight. The Yongle Emperor raised his rage in silence. The high spirits that had come with naming Noble Consort Wang as Empress had curdled in an instant. And when he had first heard the vicious rumor, Worthy Consort Kwon—long since pushed from his thoughts—had risen unbidden, and with her the grief and agony of those days, vivid as if they had never left.
This is treason.
He held the grief, the pain, and the fury in check for a moment and turned the matter over. An imperial physician of all people, coming forward with a tale that would send shockwaves through the court—and presenting as truth a lie he could not even prove. That meant purpose. This was someone's scheme to drive a wedge between the Imperial House and the Directorate of Ceremonial, and Gong Jun had most certainly been put up to it.
"Sa Hapji."
"Your Majesty."
At the Emperor's summons, Sa Hapji, Commander-in-Chief of the Brocade Guards, answered at once.
"Interrogate Gong Jun and Gu Ryun. This is a ploy to set Us against the Directorate of Ceremonial. Deal with them severely until they confess the full story and the hand behind it."
"I receive the command! Qianhu Gongsun Dajing—escort Gong Jun and Gu Ryun to the prison immediately!"
Sa Hapji clasped both hands before him in a martial salute, then turned the order on Gongsun Dajing without a breath's delay.
"Your Majesty! Spare us! We are innocent!"
Gong Jun and Gu Ryun, about to be dragged to the infamous prison of the Northern Zhenfusi, cried out in the same voice, pleading for their lives. The instant the Emperor's command fell, both men looked straight at Huang Yan.
Grand Eunuch!
"Gonggong! What is this humble servant supposed to do now? Gonggong!"
They pleaded silently for rescue, but Huang Yan turned his eyes away.
Goddamn it. They were all in it together. If I'd known it would go like this, I should have summoned them last night and gone over it.
Huang Yan swallowed his regret. Afraid that word might leak from Gong Jun or Gu Ryun, he had waited until morning and then shoved the whole thing forward in a rush—and this was the result. Pushing so hard, he had never even thought of things like examination records.
That one. That cunning little eunuch bastard is a problem at every turn.
The disaster had sprung from his own foolishness in refusing to trust the people he used, and yet he laid the cause at Jin Myeong's feet. Foolish, as ever. A man who could not even trust Gu Ryun—who had once been registered under his own Name—and still reached for something so large. The greed of it was almost comic.
Then the Yongle Emperor, the fury on his face banked for the moment, turned to Huang Yan.
"Huang Yan."
"Yes, Your Majesty!"
"Should a matter of this kind arise again, consult the Grand Director."
The rage had receded, but the weight in every word had not. This was a man who could kill with the question, Is he still here? A master of coded imperial speech—every syllable had to be heard, turned over, and heard again. What had been left unsaid after consult was unmistakable: there will not be a second time.
"Y-yes! This humble servant has committed a death-worthy crime. Forgive me, Your Majesty."
"Confine yourself and reflect."
Sensing that his head might roll if he so much as breathed wrong, Huang Yan dropped flat to the floor—and his face twisted. To be told to consult Zheng He meant that from now on, whatever the matter, he would need Zheng He's confirmation first. For a Brush-Holding Grand Eunuch, it was a blow to the pride.
But what of it? It was the Emperor's command.
The urgent business was shutting Gong Jun's and Gu Ryun's mouths. The torture of the Brocade Guards' Northern Zhenfusi was not something that could be described in words. In a state where you wanted to die and could not, under torture that had no bottom and no end, you ended up confessing even things you did not know. That was the Northern Prison. If he did nothing, his own name would come out of Gong Jun's and Gu Ryun's mouths. It had to be handled cleanly.
No helping it. More money going to those Brocade Guard dogs.
A little silver changing hands was the only real problem; the method itself was simple. Pay off the technician doing the interrogation. Have him kill them as if by accident—or cut out their tongues so they could never speak. That would do it. And the money was embezzled state funds anyway, so it was hardly worth grieving over. Keep it and it was his; spend it on someone else and he could play the generous official with the dynasty's own coin. That was all there was to it.
I'll bow my head this time. But next…
The vicious rumor had been a matter of genuine weight, and he himself, as Brush-Holding Grand Eunuch, held the right to report directly to the Emperor. Zheng He would not be able to come down on him too openly over this. Once he had cleaned up Gu Ryun and Gong Jun, Huang Yan thought, he would keep his head down for a while and wait for the next opening.
That was a miscalculation.
"Well done, Myeong. Demanding the examination records was the winning move."
"You're too kind, Gonggong. Do you intend to just leave Brush-Holder Huang be?"
"What do you think?"
Jin Myeong had no intention of letting it end here. Neither did Zheng He.
"This humble one will look into whether Brush-Holder Huang has any connection to Suchengye."
"Good. That is my thinking as well."
Forgive him? A eunuch had dared step outside the fence of his own kind and take another eunuch's life in his hands. The eunuch clan had been made a laughingstock before every civil and military official in the court. The thought struck Zheng He and Jin Myeong at the same moment, and as if by agreement they both looked out across the plaza.
"Honored ministers of every rank—you may withdraw."
Zheng He spoke in a voice like a blade. Jin Myeong swept a gaze as cold as frost across the assembled officials. We saw you. The way you swarmed in the moment you thought your chance had come. We saw it very well. A spectacle, and one he would enter, line by line, in his private ledger.
The civil and military officials, grasping the meaning well enough, coughed into their sleeves and found something fascinating in the distant hills.
Gong Jun. Gu Ryun.
Jin Myeong watched that landscape with narrowed eyes, and the two men rose in his mind. The starting point of everything he was about to do was those two, about to be locked in the prison of the Northern Zhenfusi.
A short while later, in the northwest of the imperial palace, at the Northern Zhenfusi of the Brocade Guards.
Twenty-one senior officers of Qianhu rank and above had gathered, with Commander-in-Chief Sa Hapji presiding from the seat of honor.
"Determine whether Gong Jun and Gu Ryun have any connection to other eunuchs. The same for any ties to the civil and military ministers."
"Yes, Commander."
Sa Hapji issued the order from the head seat, his face set like stone, and the senior officers answered as one. He had said other eunuchs. What he meant was the Directorate of Ceremonial, and that was a matter the entire command understood without anyone having to spell it out.
In all the Great Ming there was almost nothing Sa Hapji and the Brocade Guards could not touch—almost. Zheng He and the Directorate of Ceremonial were the exception. And now the Eastern Depot was about to be founded, and they were even handing it command over the Brocade Guards. That would mean the finest special agency in the Great Ming reduced to the errand-runners of lowly eunuchs. Setting all else aside—men of standing, placed under the direct rule of men who had been stripped of everything. It was an outrage beyond language.
The reason Sa Hapji wanted a connection to the Directorate found was precisely to stop that subjugation. Find the Directorate's corruption, and use that corruption as a pretext to check, as far as possible, the expansion of the Eastern Depot and of eunuch power.
"Commander."
"What is it, Gongsun Dajing."
"In this officer's view, the Grand Director seemed unaware of this affair."
"And yet the one who brought the vicious rumor is a eunuch. The one who let that eunuch in is a eunuch as well. The founding of the Eastern Depot draws near—there can be no doubt that a struggle for power among the eunuch factions has begun."
The one who had brought it was Gu Ryun. The one who had let Gu Ryun in was Huang Yan. As the finest intelligence organ in the Great Ming, the Brocade Guards collected information on the eunuchs as well. They already knew that Huang Yan stood opposed to Zheng He.
Gongsun Dajing did not answer. The silence meant he would listen, for now. He had no love for political infighting, for struggles over power. And yet what Sa Hapji intended now was precisely that.
"The Brocade Guards must strike into that gap. Huang Yan is the likely one—but even if it is not him, someone among the eunuchs is certainly involved. And it does not matter whether they actually concealed a poisoning or not."
"Sir?"
Another Qianhu, hearing that either case was the same, could not help but ask.
"If the eunuchs truly hid a poisoning, there is nothing more to say. If they did not, we make it a succession fight—eunuchs gambling the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of palace people to seize power over the Eastern Depot."
The first outcome was the ruin of the entire eunuch clan. The second was that the Eastern Depot and the Brocade Guards would remain separate organizations—or that the founding of the Eastern Depot would be wiped from the board entirely. Either way, the Brocade Guards stood to gain.
"Ah…"
"The eunuchs will come to the prison under the pretext of investigating. Delay them as much as you can, and observe their inquiry with the closest attention."
"Yes, Commander."
"We must not allow the eunuchs to resolve this first. The Brocade Guards will reach a conclusion and report it to His Majesty. We must. Is that understood?"
"Yes, Commander."
Sa Hapji and his senior officers burned with fighting spirit. As orthodox military officers of the Great Ming, they could not—would not—accept being placed under the command of a handful of eunuchs. Not for anything.
Then—
"Commander!"
A sentry's voice carried in from outside.
"What is it?"
"Jang Jinmyeong, Supervisor of the Directorate of Ceremonial, has arrived."
"…Jang Jinmyeong? Already?"
Sa Hapji's expression flickered, as if he had been struck on the blind side. Gong Jun and Gu Ryun had only just been imprisoned. The cell door had been locked a mere half hour ago. This was a raid he had not anticipated in the least—swift as a thunderbolt.
In Sa Hapji's eyes, Jin Myeong was talented, and he had earned real merit, that much was true—but he was still a greenhorn eunuch, short on experience. Zheng He had surely sent him. Why Zheng He would dispatch Jin Myeong on a matter of this gravity, Sa Hapji could not begin to understand.
In any case, the match with Zheng He had begun.
"Let him in."
Jin Myeong entered. And once again, the unexpected: he had come entirely alone. One ordinarily brought a torture specialist, or at the very least an interrogator.
"Commander-in-Chief. Jang Jinmyeong, Supervisor of the Directorate of Ceremonial."
"…Come in. Congratulations on your promotion. But—you came alone?"
Sa Hapji asked it as if to confirm what he was seeing, still faintly bewildered.
"The Directorate of Ceremonial will conclude its investigation before the day is out, Commander-in-Chief."
That he would finish it today, with no further explanation. Meaning he would not be coming back. Sa Hapji and the senior officers sat stunned. Jin Myeong, standing alone among them, was utterly unmoved.
"And this humble servant will be more than sufficient for the investigation."