The Eighteenth Year of Yongle (10)
The wind thinned to a dying whistle, and the white powder that had been spinning through the air settled upon earth stripped to the raw.
At the heart of it, a crater five zhang across—nearly fifty feet—had been torn into the ground. Two men occupied opposite edges of that pit.
"Kh-cough…!"
On one side, Gong Jeong-mun knelt, coughing blood.
"Hhgh…!"
On the other, Jin Myeong lay sprawled, a groan leaking through his teeth. Neither man had been wounded so grievously that he could no longer move.
The greater damage, of course, had fallen on Jin Myeong—the weaker of the two.
It was the product of the blast born when the Extreme Heaven Palm, carrying a full jiazi of internal energy, collided with Gong Jeong-mun's Blood Death Bow—and of one further explosion stacked atop that force.
"Khnn…!"
A thread of fresh crimson smeared Gong Jeong-mun's lips, his true qi thrown into chaos.
The result was unexpected. Gong Jeong-mun was the clearly stronger man. The Extreme Heaven Palm might well be the finest palm art under heaven, but Gong Jeong-mun possessed more than two jiazi of internal energy and had reached the Late Stage of the Peak Realm. That he had taken a shock of this magnitude was strange. As Jin Myeong currently stood, he had nothing on Gong Jeong-mun save the speed of his hands and the swiftness of his movement.
So how had it come to this?
"You… you despicable bastard. A martial artist, using…"
In the instant after the collision, Gong Jeong-mun had nearly blacked out from a rage he could not contain. Even now, the fury boiling in his chest ran hotter than the turmoil in his meridians, and he was having a harder time mastering his temper than his internal injuries. The wounds were not the real problem. He was a hair's breadth from losing his mind.
"You used a Heaven-Shaking Thunder."
The reason Gong Jeong-mun had been reduced to this state was simple. After the Extreme Heaven Palm and the Blood Death Bow had clashed, the retreating Jin Myeong had hurled a Heaven-Shaking Thunder at Gong Jeong-mun as the old man came driving in again.
To be precise, it was a species of Heaven-Shaking Thunder: a Cavalry-Breaker Divine Pomegranate Shell. An egg-sized iron sphere shaped like a pomegranate, packed with gunpowder, its fuse stripped out.
"…You vile cur!"
In the martial world, orthodox, unorthodox, or demonic alike, the use of gunpowder or poison was regarded as the base, cowardly work of assassins. It was precisely for that reason that the Tang Clan, for all the formidable power it wielded across Chengdu and the rest of Sichuan, had never been counted among the Five Great Clans of the martial world.
Hidden weapons were one thing—the world was crawling with arts for throwing and flying blades, and no one much cared. Poison was the problem. Even poison, though, was treated with a certain grudging tolerance. Gunpowder was not. The use of gunpowder was held to be the supreme disgrace a martial artist could commit, and to fall victim to it was a humiliation in its own right. The prevailing custom, accordingly, was that any disciple who employed it would be expelled by his own sect on the spot and listed as a public enemy of the martial world.
Gunpowder was also fiendishly hard to obtain. The court controlled both the method of its manufacture and the circulation of the finished product with an iron hand. Most of the stock that assassins handled had been smuggled in through foreign channels—and anyone caught using smuggled powder faced, at minimum, death by the blade, and at worst the extermination of three clans and nine degrees of kinship. Unless a man already lived with his guts hanging out of his belly, he rarely touched the stuff.
There were questions of stability and practical use as well. Anything with enough explosive force to harm a Peak Realm master was large, and heavy. Portability was abysmal. The decisive problem was that gunpowder was sensitive even to a slight shock. For martial artists who traded true qi and protective energy in the course of a fight to carry Heaven-Shaking Thunders on their persons was tantamount to announcing that they intended to blow themselves to pieces without ever noticing.
Guns? Among martial artists of the First-Rate and above, whose eyesight and true qi had reached a certain threshold, not one feared a firearm. Gong Jeong-mun's true qi had been thrown into chaos only because he had failed to predict the blast. Had he seen it coming, a small Heaven-Shaking Thunder would have been stopped with a modest barrier of qi or a film of protective energy, as easily as breathing.
In short, gunpowder was no panacea.
But whatever the customs of the martial world, and whatever its atmosphere, it was all the sound of a dog chewing grass to Jin Myeong.
Jin Myeong was a eunuch. He was not a martial artist.
"Kh-hk…! Who… who ever called this Gonggong a martial artist?"
From the day he had entered the palace and taken his place in the Directorate of Ceremonial, Jin Myeong had prepared for precisely this kind of moment—the possibility that a grave internal injury, or the exhaustion of his true qi, would cause the Huanxu to slip. The Cavalry-Breaker Divine Pomegranate Shell had been his last hidden card for that contingency, and this time it had earned its keep.
Haah… I didn't want to have to use this.
He would catch some censure, of course, for drawing gunpowder so freely. But compared to having his intact manhood exposed and Yuwol Pavilion wiped out to the last soul, it was a bird's foot of blood. He had seen the Gong-eun Snow Lotus Thread with his own eyes. It was not far. Until he became a Grand Eunuch and wound Zhu Gaochi or Zhu Zhanji so tightly around his finger that he could commit any crime without punishment—until he obtained the Gong-eun Snow Lotus Thread and achieved Body Metamorphosis—he had to survive by any means necessary.
"This Gonggong is a eunuch."
Jin Myeong drawled it from where he lay.
Who handled the gunpowder of the Great Ming? The eunuchs, and no one else. Among the Twenty-Four Directorates of the Imperial Palace, one of the subordinate offices of the Armory Bureau—which oversaw weapons of war—was the Gunpowder Bureau. The Ming had entrusted gunpowder to the eunuchs, and the firearm battalions were led not by military officers but by eunuchs, separately from the regular army. The stuff was that important, and so it had been placed in the hands of the men the Emperor trusted most. It was a window onto the faith Ming emperors placed in their eunuchs.
"…A eunuch! You're saying you're a palace eunuch?"
"That's right. I told you when I ordered you to kneel. This Gonggong. Hhgh…! Don't make me talk. I'm busy."
Jin Myeong sneered up from the ground at Gong Jeong-mun, who had gone slack-faced at the word eunuch, and at once began to circulate his art.
He drove the method through his meridians—not to mend the wreckage of his insides, but to hold the Huanxu in place before the disguise slipped, before the people rushing toward them arrived, he had to settle even a fraction of the chaos in his true qi.
Was his internal injury so severe that he had to circulate a heart method at once? Not in the least. He was doing it to keep the Huanxu from coming apart.
My face…!
A prickling ran through his features and his manhood. There was no mistaking it. The Huanxu had slipped, or was about to. It was a crisis more severe than even the moment of collision with Gong Jeong-mun's iron bow.
And then—
"Director Jang!"
"Jang Jinmyeong!"
With a complete absence of timing, Gongsun Qianhu, Zheng He, the eunuchs, and the guards came pounding across the snow.
Three hundred feet. Two hundred. A hundred…
The distance closed at a terrifying clip.
Those damned fakes!
The eunuchs, in particular, were monstrously fast. The Grand Eunuchs were outrunning even Zheng He. The movement art of the counterfeit Sunflower Manual could not match the Sunflower Water Form, but it was still far swifter than any ordinary body technique.
Just a little more… just a little!
Fifty feet… thirty!
Too late. There was not enough time.
No! Too late—!
He had not yet settled enough true qi to hold the Huanxu. Chief Scribe Eunuch Wang Guitong and Junior Brush-Holding Grand Eunuch Yi Gwak landed in front of him.
"Director Jang! Are you all ri— wait! Your face…?"
Jin Myeong's eyes met Wang Guitong's dumbfounded stare, and his heart slammed into a gallop.
A short while later.
"Your Majesty. In obedience to your command, this servant has brought the traitor."
Gong Jeong-mun, having abandoned any thought of flight, was made to kneel in the middle of the snowfield with his pressure points sealed. He had not even finished gathering the true qi thrown into chaos by Jin Myeong's Extreme Heaven Palm and Heaven-Shaking Thunder. Resistance was meaningless. He had already confirmed in the forest that Zheng He, with his Three Yang Divine Art, was no opponent to take lightly.
While a considerable number of Eastern Depot operatives and Jinyiwei tended to comrades dead or gravely wounded, those who remained formed a ring around the Yongle Emperor and Gong Jeong-mun. The Jinyiwei took the outer circle; the Eastern Depot, the inner.
"What is your name?"
Seated at the due-north edge of the concentric rings formed by the Eastern Depot and the Jinyiwei, the Yongle Emperor put the question to Gong Jeong-mun, who knelt at the center.
"What would the likes of you want with my name? Just take my head."
"Kiiyaaat!"
Hai Shou, the Joseon-born Chief Attendant Eunuch who served at the Emperor's side, bristled with fury at Gong Jeong-mun's insolence and started forward—then checked himself at the Emperor's word and withdrew.
"Enough. Let no one insert himself into the exchange between Us and this traitor."
"Then We shall ask again. Why did the Blood Death Archery Corps of the demonic path take aim at Our person?"
"Ha-ha-ha! Do you truly not know, that you ask?"
"We ask in order to confirm."
The four characters spilled from Gong Jeong-mun's mouth as if muttered, and a stir ran through the circle. It was as well that the Yongle Emperor had forbidden anyone to intervene. Had he not, they would have torn the man limb from limb on the spot. It was a crime of that magnitude.
The Jingnan Campaign. Three full years of war between the Yongle Emperor and the Jianwen Emperor. Under the Yongle reign, those four characters were a thing that must be neither spoken nor heard. To let them pass one's lips was a capital crime for which three clans would be slaughtered to the last child.
And yet the Emperor's expression was calm beyond belief.
"It was a matter of Our own house. And it is past."
"It is a matter of my house as well—and it is not past!"
Gong Jeong-mun had been staring at the Emperor's feet with the eyes of a man who had already given up. At that, his head snapped up. Whatever resignation had been there was gone. A mad light slicked his gaze.
"A matter of your house?"
The question came not so much from bewilderment as from curiosity. Gong Jeong-mun answered it one character at a time, and then bent his ear for the Emperor's reply.
"The. Yangzhou. Gong. Family."
"The Yangzhou Gong family… We do not recall it."
The answer that came back was a complete betrayal of everything Gong Jeong-mun had hoped to hear. The tone was utterly indifferent. Simply: We do not recall it.
How could he have? Even at the time of the Jingnan Campaign, they had been a merchant house with a history of less than twenty years.
"You do not recall it? You were the one who slaughtered them. You were the one who entered them in the Register of Traitors…!"
"That All Under Heaven should remember Us is only proper. We are under no such obligation. We are the Son of Heaven."
"Hold your tongue! You dog! They were ordinary people who had never held a sword! And you killed every last one of them! Aaaaaah!"
The fury that surged up in Gong Jeong-mun tore out of him as a shout, and that shout was a scream knotted with old blood. A cry with blood in it.
The Yangzhou Gong family was not a house Gong Jeong-mun had founded. It was a house his son had built. Gong Jeong-mun's son had been born with a deformity of the blood vessels that made the practice of martial arts impossible, and so he had wished to live an ordinary life. Heaven is fair, they say. In place of a martial artist's gift and a robust body, Heaven had given Gong Jeong-mun's son the talent of a merchant. How was a man who had never earned a coin in his life supposed to have founded a clan?
"Superintendent of the Eastern Depot."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Do you know of it?"
The Yongle Emperor asked it while watching the screaming Gong Jeong-mun, his face still indifferent. The Register of Meritorious Officials recorded those who had rendered service to the throne. Its opposite, the Register of Traitors, recorded rebels and their associations. The two men who had both registers committed to memory were the Grand Director of the Directorate of Ceremonial and the Commander-in-Chief of the Jinyiwei. Sa Hapji had held the command of the Jinyiwei for less than three years. The question went to Zheng He.
"The Yangzhou Gong family. Clan Head Gong Sun-uk. They supplied military grain and treasure for the Reduction of the Princes."
The Reduction of the Princes had been the great endeavor that the Jianwen Emperor, in concert with his civil ministers, had driven forward as a matter of state—and the cause from which the Jingnan Campaign had sprung. Strip the uncles of their private armies and dissolve their princely establishments, all in the name of strengthening the imperial prerogative, and how was the man at the center of it supposed to sit still? Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, had ridden every battlefield at his father's side and done more than any other living man to open the heavens of the Great Ming.
The Yangzhou Gong family had been trampled by Zhu Di's army when it stormed Yingtianfu during the Jingnan Campaign. The estate, together with a household that had numbered in the hundreds, had been reduced to ash. Clan Head Gong Sun-uk's head had hung from Qubao Gate for seven days.
"Did you hear? They sent grain and treasure to those who would kill Us and Our brothers. Ought We to have spared the men who sought Our death?"
"What crime is it to pay taxes to the state? If they had not, would your savage Zhu clan have left my son and my household in peace?"
The Emperor's logic and Gong Jeong-mun's collided, sharp as crossed blades.
And Gong Jeong-mun, for his part, was shaken.
Superintendent of the Eastern Depot! Does that mean the Eastern Depot has already been founded? Is that how they knew our corps was coming?
Superintendent of the Eastern Depot. Those last two words were ones the conspiracy had been treating with the gravest importance of late. A suspicion took him: that the Depot had already been established and at work, and that it had already seen through their design.
"Did the blade that stabbed Us and Our brothers spring from the earth? It was forged from the wealth of the Yangzhou Gong family."
"And that is reason to butcher even the children and the women who had not the strength to hold a single blade? That is why your Zhu clan is unfit! You are a pack of murdering fiends!"
"That is war. Grass is torn up by the root. A blight is purged at its source. You know this principle as well as We."
"Sophistry! Would children and women have cared what the Reduction of the Princes was, or what the Imperial Seal was? What, in the end, is your Zhu clan even supposed to be…!"
The two men's arguments continued to run on parallel lines. Then, without warning, the Yongle Emperor exploded to his feet.
A rolling thunder answered him. The roar struck Mount Baohua full in the face, and the mountain trembled in fear. Beasts cowering in terror hid themselves among the grass and the trees.
The Yongle Emperor's face, which had been so utterly indifferent, and his pupils, shimmered with a golden heat-haze.
The Son of Heaven. Lord of ten thousand li of rivers and mountains. The wrath of a mad dragon.
"The Zhu clan! The Zhu clan!"
Gong Jeong-mun had struck the reverse scale of the mad dragon. The Yongle Emperor had been enraged by those words—that the Zhu clan was unfit, that the Zhu clan was nothing at all.
"You asked what Our Imperial Father and We are? What We have done?"
"……"
"Then We shall ask you!"
Thunder again. The Lion's Roar, which had sunk for a moment, burst forth once more and echoed to every quarter.
"What kind of bullshit is that!"
"When the Yuan oppressed this land and its people for more than a hundred years! What were you—and what did you do?"
"……!"
For an instant, Gong Jeong-mun's mouth snapped shut.
The Mongols and the Yuan had divided the Han into northern Hanren and southern Nanren of the fallen Song, ranked them below even the Semu peoples, and worked them as slaves. Under the Yuan, the Han were goods to be bought and sold. Twenty Han households were made to feed a single Mongol. The right to a Han maiden's first night belonged to the Mongols. The Han were forbidden their traditional surnames and given names, and were made to take names from the dates of their birth. The foremost example was Taizu, Zhu Yuanzhang. Zhu Yuanzhang's original name had been Zhu Chongba—Zhu of the Double Eighth.
"When Our Imperial Father and We—and Our ministers besides—spilled hot blood to snatch the people from the hands of the barbarians!"
The earth shook. The light pouring from the Yongle Emperor's pupils dripped onto the snowfield. The face of Zhang Fu, Left Chief Commissioner of the Central Military Commission, a man who had rolled through long years of war, went grim as stone. From the eyes of the Jinyiwei guards, Sa Hapji among them, the golden vapor of the Nine Dragons Great Net Qi spilled as if a dam had burst.
Then the Yongle Emperor's last roar struck home.
"What, in the end, were you and your martial world?
Where were you—and what were you doing?"