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. An appeal to your humanity, a few tears, and any heart was bound to waver; that was precisely the opening 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. He didn’t seem to have his wits 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 had seen more of them than I could count, and I had been no different myself.

The day I first killed a man came back to me. The feel of a body tearing open and the raw stink of the blood pouring from the wound had been ghastly enough to make my skin crawl. Whenever I closed my eyes the dead man’s shade appeared, and the mere smell of food brought the sickness up. It had taken a fair while before I was in my right mind again. This boy, too, would come round in time.

But there’s no room for that right now.

Whether the boy in front of me was a real survivor or an assassin playing one, I had to be sure. I had seen too many deaths to take any man at his word, so 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—”

He poured out the words, 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.”

The eyes of the boy who had just named himself Asaeng rolled back until they seemed about to turn clean over. Sheer terror had him hyperventilating, wheezing and gulping at the air so hard that, 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.”
“Haakh— hah— hnngh…”
“Do as I say. Draw it in deep, let it out slow. Again. In. Out.”

As I spoke, I sent my true qi into him. Only then did his breathing settle, little by little, while 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 my eyes over the scene again. The swords and sabers scattered across the ground came to nine in all, which meant at least nine of the dead 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 had heard of a martial art that left a trace like this.

Black Snake Palm.

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

Strange.

The Demonic Cult had 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, and going back over my past life’s memories, I could not recall a single 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. 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.

Around Guantao, I knew very well whose mark that was. The red headband was the sign of the bandit gang Duho led, and Duho and his men were the very people I was riding out to find.

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 did not think he was that sort. If the Duho I knew had killed men, he would have said so to your face 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 believed him.

The Duho I knew was no good man, but he was not the dregs of humanity either. He was bad only in moderation, and he knew what loyalty meant. So I believed him. And if everything he had told me was a lie, then he would pay for it.

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

Otherwise he had no reason to go out of his way to wear a red headband that gave his identity away. He had masked his face to hide who he was and then left behind a mark anyone could read, which was a plain contradiction.

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

I’ll have to hurry.

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

Picking up a saber that lay on the ground, I began to dig. Before long a wide pit lay open, and 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. It sat at a strategic point linking Shandong and Hebei and was a center of trade besides, so in ordinary times it would have been packed with merchant companies and travelers coming and going. Now, though, the air hanging over the city was anything but ordinary.

Government troops kept a hard watch on the city gate, checking everyone who passed through. Every face going in or out was dark, most likely because of the recent killings.

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 while another soldier searched the baggage hung at the horse’s flank. Once he had finished and declared nothing amiss, I got the tablet back.

“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 subdued.

I went straight to an inn, told the server we would take two rooms, and 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 you requested, young hero Yang, has been seen to.”

The man drew a letter from inside his robes and held it out. The envelope bore the seal of the Shandong Escort Bureau. 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. With that, the hardest problem was solved.

I got up and went straight to the magistrate’s office. Its gate was watched as closely 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 guards 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. It was worse inside than it had looked from outside. The soldiers’ eyes had a keen edge to them, and the air hung heavy, 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 a fool of me…”

He spat the words out to himself, loud enough to be heard, then addressed me with open displeasure.

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

His voice was low and his eyes on me were sharp. Whatever was happening in Guantao seemed to have worn him to the bone. Without looking away, I met his stare 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.”