Tian’s hand flew out, three invisible darts twisting through the air. The yin dart hadn’t taken too long to cultivate, and it made controlling the formation easy. Two yang darts pierced through the brush-wielder's eyes and buried into his brain. The yin dart pinned his throat shut. Just in case.
Hong was taking a life with every step, her spear lashing out, ignoring or crushing defenses and finding a head or heart with every blow. No fierce war cry, no offer of surrender. The penalty for banditry was death. So was the penalty for heresy. This was plainly both.
Tian whipped the rope dart around, the heavy dart shattering skulls, the barbed rope sawing apart flesh with every backwards pull.
“Leave one alive. Find whoever looks like a strategist, and leave him alive!” Tian yelled. There had to be someone here who was the brains. He hoped it wasn’t the one who had been waving the brush around.
One person managed to block a single blow from Liren, barely forcing the spearhead to one side with his saber, losing a big piece of flesh in the process. She kept charging in, slamming a kick into the bandit’s hip. Tian could hear his bones shattering through the screams. Two quick strikes with the shaft of her spear and his arms were ruined. Then she was on to the next bandit.
It took all of two minutes to clear the main hall. Tian rushed out and checked the barracks. Women with iron collars on their necks and few clothes on their bodies were on a single long chain bolted to the wall. The remnants of a cook fire burned in a hearth. They looked a bit better than the kids in the hall, but not much better. Tian ripped the chain off the wall.
“I will free you properly in a little while. The bandits are dead. Don’t run around. Don’t hurt yourselves. Eat if you can. Drink if you can.”
He rushed out again, back into the main hall. The paper had caught fire. Hong was standing well back, her spear low and ready. She hadn’t set the fire. Dark red tinged with black, slowly rolling up the rough paper. The squiggling lines thrashed around, like they were trying to get away. No use. The fire ate the whole of it.
Tian squatted by the surviving bandit. “Look at me.” The man thrashed, paying Tian no mind. Tian slapped him and grabbed his hair, forcing his head around. “Look at me! Do you recognize my uniform? Ancient Crane Monastery. You are dead, and you know what we do to heretics that we take alive. But I will let you die quickly if you tell me everything that went on here. Start with your name. Who are you?”
“You don’t care. You don’t care who I am!”
“Answer me, or I will kill you in front of the women and then ask them. And I won’t let you die fast.” Hong’s voice was so cold it burned.
“Gou, Great Chief of the Yellow Banner Brotherhood. That’s who I am. That’s who I am!” He had a big jaw, Tian noticed, with a little dimple in the middle. Wide shoulders, scarred and calloused hands. He looked the part of a bandit chief.
“What kind of heretical thing were you doing here?”
“Heresy? What heresy?” The bandit spasmed. His breathing was coming harder. Tian noticed his legs weren’t moving. He grabbed a piece of the man’s thigh and twisted hard. No reaction. They didn’t have long to interrogate him.
“You know what heresy!” Tian hissed.
“It’s only heresy if the rebellion fails. If it succeeds, we are the noble vanguard!” The bandit’s eyes turned bright, opening wide, a rictus grin pulling the corners of his mouth up towards his ears. “Not bandits, loyal supporters, who were there during the true Emperor’s exile. That’s who we are! YOU are the heretics!”
Tian and Hong shared a look. “Insanity.” Hong’s voice shivered, the rage shaking the air.
“Beats starving to death while the magistrate gets fat. And not a single person ever mourned a merchant. I hear they never miss a meal up on the Mountain. Sounds nice. I wouldn’t know what that’s like.” The bandit’s burning eyes and lip splitting smile never wavered. “Oh. Oh what good brothers! You shouldn’t have waited for me, I’d have caught up in no time.” The bandit spasmed a final time, and the light left his eyes. Tian checked the pulse, glanced over at Hong and shook his head.
“You want the kids in the cage or the women penned up in the barracks?” Tian asked.
“Poor choice of words.”
“Yeah.” Tian rubbed the back of his neck. “Take care of the women, they probably won’t talk to me. I’ll get the kids out, find out how long they were here. I might be able to help them forget, if it hasn’t been too long.”
Hong nodded and started to turn towards the hole where the door had been. Then turned sharply back and looked more closely at the cage where children had been burned alive.
“Look. Look!” She hissed and pointed below the cage. There was a wide, flat plate made of fired earth set into the ground, an inch tall lip running around the edge. There was a short barrel near the dish. Tian gave it a sniff, and nearly fell over from the stench. Sharp, bitter smells, and something rotting.
“Ink. They were using the ash and mixing it with whatever was in the barrel and making ink to write on that big paper!” Her fury shook the air. Tian could feel the fire qi roaring around her, yang blazing, hating the corruption and the darkness.
Tonight would be a bad night for both of them, but especially for her. Tian would have to ease her through the collapse. Yang burned so fiercely, but not for long. When it was extinguished, yin filled the void, all out of balance.
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“We will find out what was happening here. Tend to the women, Sister. I will do what I can for the children.”
It wasn’t much. They had been taken. They were shoved into the cage. They weren’t given food or water. No point, as the bandits explained. Then they were made to watch. They didn’t understand what was being said. Something about greeting the true emperor and condemning the false one. They wanted to go home. They were scared. Many were simply catatonic.
Tian did his best to estimate their weights and then combined two powders from his stores of medicine. Used properly, compounded carefully and fed to a cultivator, they would ease anxiety enough to allow a good night’s sleep. For mortals, they confused the memory and made people pass out. Even a small amount could potentially be permanently damaging.
He was careful. He made sure there were no mistakes. They would experience enough horrors when they returned to the ruins of their home.
Tian buried his face in his hands. The women had been here for too long. His medicine couldn’t help them forget. How were they even going to get all these people back to safety? Take one of the boats from the dock and forcibly clear a way through the marsh?
“They have been here for months, some of them.” Hong had come back without him noticing. “One of them is from the same village as the kids. Apparently,” her face twisted “There was some debate about whether she was too old for the sacrifice. They decided they could always sacrifice her later if necessary.”
Tian slowly closed his eyes and rubbed the spot between his brows. “Does she want the drugs?”
“No, actually. She says she never wants to forget. She remembered what happened to her village. She watched it all. She says… she will be a living memorial.”
Tian didn’t have the heart for even dark humor. He just sat in the ruins of the hall, feeling lost. Hong shook her head. “The women are gathering up all the food they can find and stripping everything from the barracks. We should clear the other buildings. We might find some clues.”
“Can’t leave without the storage rings.” Tian chuckled grimly. “Actually, do they have any?”
“The one with the paint brush and the chief does.” She nodded.
“You take ‘em. Actually, you do the searching too. I’m going to stay with the kids, just in case.” Tian waved her on. “Grab the brush, the jar, all the… tools too. It’s evil stuff, but someone back at the Monastery will know what to make of it.”
“The Monastery?"
“This isn’t a bandit suppression job anymore, Sister.” Tian met her eyes. “It’s not something small scale either. This is part of something bigger. We need to contact Elder Rui, and let him take charge. I’ll write my father, too.”
Before they left the fortress, Tian took a sip of water from a water barrel, then immediately spat it out again. The roots had been cut away here too. Whatever that meant.
They did wind up taking a boat back, only reaching the town they had stolen the doctor from after sunset. The doctor had been brought back, along with the stabilized wounded. Tian made a point of pressing some of the recovered gold into his hands. Discreetly. He didn’t know what this town was like. The new wounded were turned over to the town and their surviving kin. Tian didn’t know what else he could do. It just didn’t feel like enough.
“We heard rumors, you know.” The town mayor kept bowing to the immortals, his pudgy body and round head rocking back and forth, trying to hide his utter terror under flattery and polite words. The magistrate was nowhere to be found, nor was the local prefect. Tian wasn’t much interested in mortal systems of administration, but over the last year he had learned a little bit.
The mayor was nominated by the town and approved by the Prefect, who was the lowest rung administrator under the Department of State. The Magistrate was appointed by the Ministry of Justice, technically below the prefect in rank, but in practice not someone anyone could bully. The fact that both imperial appendages were missing was an alarming sign.
“Rumors?”
“Kids going missing. Villages being destroyed. More the former than the latter. Naturally such rumors are quite… impossible…” The mayor’s brain caught up with his mouth and he froze with panic. Tian sighed.
“When did the Magistrate and the Prefect vanish?”
“Vanish? They had urgent business in Bluestone City, they left this morning sharing a carriage. I am sure they will return immediately once they hear you are looking for them!” The mayor was babbling.
“Return to your people, Mayor. You have more than enough to trouble you. No need to worry further about us.”
They were traveling downstream now, moving fast on the water. Tian and Hong decided to spend the night at the Lone Saber Academy. The grim smile on the old master’s face drained away when he heard their report. He left them with a spearplay manual and a muttered apology about the lack of fish. He would write some of his old brothers. Perhaps they heard something.
The wellwater here was quite fresh and pleasant, Tian found.
After a simple dinner, the two retired to their cells. Tian lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He didn’t think of anything much. Nothing wanted to stay still in his mind long enough to be properly examined. After an hour or two, he gave up and went to see Liren.
The cell doors were not tightly fitted. It was easy to find her room- it was the only one with a sliver of light shining out under the door. It wasn’t that she couldn’t stand the dark at all, she had told him once. She just found it much more comfortable to sleep with a light on.
“It’s that moment between sleeping and waking. When I’m awake, I’m not afraid. My perception art gives me excellent dark vision. When I’m asleep, well, I’m asleep. But when I’m falling asleep, if it’s dark, I start feeling helpless. I come awake with jolts, never managing to fall asleep. When I wake up, there is that moment where you are still sorting everything out and it’s all dark and the blankets are trapping me…”
Tian nodded and didn’t ask for any elaboration. She had taught herself the trick of calling his mind back when he became lost in the desert. Not because he asked, just because she could and it’s what a good sister should do. So Tian learned how to compound a crude version of the medicine she took for anxiety, made sure her light array was never damaged, and didn’t invite her flying on the Crane. He only wished he could do more.
He could tell by her breathing she was still awake. He knocked gently on the door. Not wanting to disturb the sleeping cultivators, they stepped out into the cold moonlight.
“Did you find anything during your search?” Tian asked.
“More than I would like.”
“Anything to explain what they were doing?”
Her face twisted in the moonlight. “They were filing a petition.”
Tian gave Hong a dark look.
“They were filing a petition. To the Celestial Emperor. I’ll show you the… notes is all I can call it, it’s barely a page long.” She looked sick.
“A petition to the Heavens. To do what?” Tian thought his voice was calm.
“They want to replace the Emperor. They want the Gods to replace him, since they can’t themselves. So they were sending a message.”