Trace

“Spare me! Please, I’m begging you, spare me!”

The voice was young. A boy’s, by the sound of it, and about my own age. But I did not lower the spear.

Carelessness is forbidden.

On a battlefield the ones you must be most wary of are children, old men, and women. None drew a man’s pity more readily than they did. An appeal to your humanity, a few tears, and any heart was bound to waver. That was the very moment the enemy aimed for. A moment’s carelessness took a life. So you never let appearances take you in; if anything, they called for more care, not less.

Braced for a surprise attack, I asked.

“Are you a survivor from this merchant company?”
“Spare me, please— hurgh! I’m begging you, please spare me.”

The boy shook from head to foot, retched, and repeated the same words. His wits hadn’t come all the way back yet.

Common enough.

A man who took a shock he could not bear would lose his memory, or let his mind go altogether. At Blood Sand Plain I saw more of them than I could count, and I was no different myself.

The day I first killed a man came back to me. The feel of a body coming apart and the raw stink of the blood that poured out of the wound were ghastly enough to make my skin crawl. Close my eyes and the dead man’s shade appeared; catch so much as the smell of food and the sickness came up. It took a fair while before I came back to my right mind. This boy too would come round in time.

But there’s no room for that right now.

I had to know whether the boy in front of me was a real survivor or an assassin playing one. I had seen too many deaths to take a man at his word. I brought the spear tip up under his throat.

“I asked who you are.”
“Spare me… Please, I’m begging you… hng…”
“I will count to five. If you have not answered me properly by then, I will take you for an enemy and kill you.”

I pressed the spear closer as I said it, and the keen blade settled against the skin of his neck.

“Hiik!”

The boy sucked in a breath, his face gone white. I paid it no mind and counted.

“One. Two. Three…”
“I’ll— I’ll talk! I’m an escort runner with the Jiangsu Merchant Company! My name’s Asaeng and we were on the road to Guantao when—”

Words came pouring out of him, rambling as he went. I heard him to the end without lowering the spear.

“So you are telling me someone appeared and killed them all?”
“Yes— hah— that’s— hah— ri— hurgh.”

Asaeng, as he had just named himself, rolled his eyes back as though they might turn clean over. Sheer terror had him hyperventilating. Wheezing and gulping at the air the way he was, left alone he looked ready to stop breathing altogether.

Not an act, then.

Neither the shaking nor the ragged breathing looked like a lie. The boy was a real survivor. I lowered the leveled spear, came down off the horse, and took hold of him.

“Get hold of yourself and breathe slowly.”
“Haaugh— hah— hnngh…”
“Do as I say. Draw it in deep, let it out slow. Again. In. Out.”

As I spoke, I breathed my true qi into him. Only then did his breathing settle, little by little, and color crept back into a face that had gone bloodless. I fetched the water flask hung at the horse’s flank and handed it to him.

“Drink.”

The boy all but snatched the flask and gulped the water down. With his throat wet he seemed to revive a little, and he looked up at me on the edge of tears.

“Are you calmer now?”
“Thank you for sparing me…”
“By the look of it you’re the only one left alive. Am I right?”
“Yes… He killed every one of them.”

Him?

Did that mean the killer was a single man? I put it to the boy again.

“You are saying the culprit was alone?”
“Yes.”

At that I swept the scene again. I counted the swords and sabers scattered across the ground. Nine in all. That meant at least nine of them had been martial artists who knew how to handle a weapon. That was a lot of guards for a merchant company of twenty-odd men, but with bandits swarming everywhere of late I guessed they had brought more than they needed.

A second-rate master at the very least.

He had wiped out the whole company single-handed, nine fighting men included. No third-rate fighter came anywhere near that.

I stood, then crouched down in front of one of the bodies. The chest had been torn brutally open and was soaked with blood, and the wound showed through the ripped clothing.

That isn’t the mark of a blade.

It wasn’t a cut and it wasn’t a tear. By the way it was caved in, I took it for an impact wound. I pulled the corpse’s clothing aside for a closer look.

“…”

A contusion, as I had thought. But not from a simple blow. The print of a hand stood out clearly on the skin.

And then something stranger caught my eye. Dark red veins spread out from the handprint, winding under the skin, and the shape of them looked for all the world like a snake burrowing its way through the body.

I have heard of a martial art that leaves a trace like this.

Black Snake Palm.

A demonic art. It drove demonic qi into the meridians and inflicted a fatal internal injury. At Blood Sand Plain I had heard where the name came from. The place it struck was left marked as though a dark red snake had crawled across it.

Strange.

The Demonic Cult vanished without a trace after the Orthodox-Demonic War a hundred years ago¹. Since then, no one on the orthodox or unorthodox side had ever turned up a sign of them. I went back over my past life’s memories and found no word of the cult resurfacing there either. If they had stirred, someone among the countless men pouring into Blood Sand Plain would surely have mentioned it. But I had heard nothing.

Then what was this trace, here and now? Remnants of the cult? Or the mark of the Demonic Cult moving in secret through the gangho? Or was it neither, just something I did not know about?

While I was sunk in thought, a trembling voice came from behind me.

“That is, um… I saw him. The culprit.”
“You saw him? Do you remember his face?”
“No, he had his face covered with a mask, so I couldn’t see it. But he had a red headband tied around his head.”

The moment I heard that, my brow drew tight.

A red headband.

In the country around Guantao I know very well whose mark that headband is. It belonged to Duho and his men, the very people I was riding out to find. The red headband was the sign of the bandit gang he led.

A scene from my past life came back.

I never killed those people. Neither did my men. We just had rotten luck and got hung with the blame.

I remembered his voice clearly, the grievance he poured out every time he got drunk.

Did Duho lie to me?

I do not think he is that sort. The Duho I knew would have said so to your face if he had killed men, and been proud of it. And there were lines he would not cross. He never touched innocent folk, he said, and never plundered; all he had done was squeeze a heavy toll out of a few merchant companies of bad character. All of it from his own mouth, of course.

But I believe him.

The Duho I knew was no good man, but he was not the dregs of humanity either. He was no saint, but there were limits even he wouldn’t cross, and he knew what loyalty meant. So I believe him. And if everything he told me was a lie, then he will pay for it.

For now: the culprit is either someone inside the bandit gang, or someone disguised as one of them.

There was no other explanation: he’d worn the red headband on purpose, to make sure his identity would be noticed. He had masked his face to hide who he was and then left behind a mark anyone could read. The contradiction was plain.

Whatever the bastard intended, one thing was certain. He was driving the blame onto Duho’s gang.

I’ll have to hurry.

Let this run on and Duho and his men would be put down as they were in my past life, and dragged off to Blood Sand Plain. Before that I had to catch the true culprit and clear the false charge hung on him.

I picked up a saber lying on the ground.

And I began to dig.

Before long a wide pit lay open. I gathered up the scattered bodies, laid them in it, and covered them with earth. I could have left them as they were and ridden on, but then they would plainly have gone to feed the wild animals. I could not leave men who had died wronged in a place that was not even a battlefield.

The vengeance I will see to myself. Rest easy now.

I prayed for their souls.

“Hng…”

Beside me, Asaeng, the only survivor, broke into tears again. After a short silence for the dead, I put the boy up on the horse.

It was time to head for Guantao.

Half a day later I reached Guantao, in Hebei Province, at last. The city commanded the road linking Shandong and Hebei and stood as a center of trade besides, so in ordinary times its streets should have been packed with merchant companies and travelers coming and going. But the air hanging over Guantao now was anything but ordinary.

Government troops posted at the city gate checked everyone through under a hard watch. Every face going in or out was dark. Because of the killings of late, most likely.

I rode up and joined the line of people waiting before the gate. When my turn came, a soldier spoke in a stiff voice.

“Show me your identity tablet.”
“Here.”

I drew the tablet from inside my robes. Meanwhile another soldier searched the baggage hung at the horse’s flank. He finished, said there was nothing amiss, and handed the tablet back to me.

“There are killings going on inside Guantao at present. Do not go about at night.”
“Understood.”
“Let him through. Next.”

At the soldier’s word the way opened, and I took the boy in with me.

Inside the walls it was much the same. Streets that ought to have been overflowing with life were dark and sunk in on themselves.

I went straight into an inn. I told the server to give us two rooms, then turned to Asaeng.

“I’ve paid for a few days. Rest here, then make your way back to the Jiangsu Merchant Company.”
“Thank you, Great Hero. I won’t forget this kindness.”

I pressed silver into the boy’s hand and took a seat on the inn’s ground floor. I was drinking tea when a man came over.

“Would you be young hero Yang?”
“I am.”
“The Bureau Head asked me to tell you that the matter young hero Yang requested has been seen to.”

The man drew a letter from inside his robes and held it out. The seal stamped on the envelope was the Shandong Escort Bureau’s. Before I set out I had asked its head for something, and it seemed that had been settled.

“Please give the Bureau Head my thanks.”
“I will. Then, by your leave.”

The man gave me a brief cupped-fist salute and was gone.

The hardest problem was solved.

I got up and went straight for the magistrate’s office.

The gate there was under the same hard watch as the city gate. Troops stood guard at the entrance, and a number of armed soldiers moved about busily. I went up to one of the soldiers on the gate.

“I’ve come to see the magistrate.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I do. Here is the letter I am to hand over.”

I took the bureau head’s letter out of my robes and handed it to him. The soldier checked it, nodded, and answered.

“Wait here a moment.”

He went inside, came back out a short while later, and handed the letter back.

“The magistrate says to come in. This way.”

I followed him in. Inside was worse than it had looked from the street. The soldiers’ eyes had a keen edge to them, and the air pressed as though something big might break loose at any moment.

The soldier stopped in front of a door.

“Magistrate, I have brought your visitor.”
“Send him in.”

I opened the door. Inside, a middle-aged man was working through a great stack of documents.

The magistrate of Guantao.

“A kid?”

His face twisted the moment he saw me. Then he set down the document in his hand with a testy snap.

“You are the one who asked to see me through the head of the Shandong Escort Bureau?”
“I am.”
“Is Bureau Head Jo making light of me…”

He spat that out to himself, loud enough to be heard, and then addressed me. His displeasure was plain.

“What is your reason for asking to see me? If it is some trifle, you had best prepare yourself.”

He pitched his voice low, and the eyes on me were sharp. He looked worn to the bone by whatever was happening in Guantao. I did not look away from his stare; I met it straight on.

“I will speak plainly. These killings that have been happening around Guantao of late — I will settle them for you.”
“What?”
“I give you my word on the name of the Yang manor.”