The kids weren’t okay, but they weren’t dead either. Tian could feel the recoil of the spell flushing away whatever foulness was done to them. Something broke inside the tall wine jugs. It was the oddest feeling that something he was certain of without consciously thinking about it, was missing. He wanted to investigate, but the kids took priority.
It wasn’t like there was anyone left alive to stop him. The inn emptied in a rush as soon as the array was broken.
“Reporting to the Immortal, I had heard rumors about the Copper Roof Inn, and particularly about its famous Three Fairies Wine. There was another rumor that the notorious bandit Zhou the Blood Red Saber would come and drink here after a raid, and spend the night too, if the raid went very well. Word got around to a lot of us that he was going to be here tonight. Five hundred pieces of silver for his head. Not something I can pass up. Or let someone else walk away with, begging your pardon.”
Tian and Hong delegated talking to the mortals to Daoist Lan. She looked senior enough to get serious answers, and while the mortals might not understand what had gone on in the dining room, they understood who healed them afterward. Daoist Lan was having to spend a lot of time raising mortals kowtowing in thanks for the “Immortal’s life-saving favor.”
She’d had a lot of practice.
“Any reports of people just going missing? Or the fact that there are no kids in the village?” She asked. The scarred martial artist she was interrogating rubbed the stubble on his head awkwardly.
“Well. Putting it politely, but after three weeks on the road surrounded by other rough men, all I saw was women and booze. I haven’t heard anything about missing kids. Are there missing kids around here? I bet a bunch of us would be willing to help search.”
“No need.” Her voice became distant, and terribly cold. Tian laid the first of the children on the floor in the hall, away from the bloody dining room.
“There are twenty nine more down there. Hong is giving the conscious ones some water while I bring them up. They were enchanted. They are suffering from some kind of yang qi depletion, as well as starvation and exhaustion. Beyond that…”
“That is more than enough!” Lan rushed over and started pulling out medicine. “This won’t be healed quickly. This kind of long term depletion takes months to recover from. Years for the mental damage. You-” She pointed at the martial artist. “Return to the village and tell the villagers that their children have been rescued, and they need to come collect them.”
“Yes, Immortal!”
When the searching was done and the villagers were interviewed, and everyone was as healthy as they were going to get in the short term, a depressing picture emerged. The blind elder was known simply as Ren. He was born in the fishing village some hundred years ago, but had been recruited by a wandering immortal.
He didn’t return for his parent’s funerals, or the funeral of his brothers or sister, or his grand-nephews and nieces. He never swept their tombs or made offerings on the anniversary of their deaths. One day he was simply back, blind now, yet rebuilding the ruined coaching inn outside the village faster than a team of skilled carpenters.
He threw a feast. Everyone was invited. The wine flowed like water. When they woke, the children were gone. He claimed they were called to greater things than life in a fishing village. That their futures would be honorable and assured. There were some who disagreed. Blindness was no impediment to crushing objections and objectors alike with a single hand.
Run to the nearest town? And tell who? Ask them to do what? Who could interfere with the whims of an immortal? All they could do was pray he was telling the truth.
When Tian searched Ren’s ring, they found a token for the Heavenly Note Sect, a minor, and as far as he knew, entirely non-heretical, sect within the Broadsky Kingdom, along with all the random odds and ends cultivators collected in their rings. Most importantly, they found notes.
The heavens treat human lives as nothing more than straw dogs. The sage treats human lives as nothing more than straw dogs. The Human Emperor rules over chaos and villany, yet the Celestial Emperor does nothing. Is this the same Celestial Emperor who spent more than three cycles of the universe to achieve true understanding of the Dao? He would not permit this. The liars in court must be blinding his eyes with incense smoke and deafening his ears with their false prayers.
The visitor said that the mountains hide a true oracle. Perhaps I can tempt them out with my music. Divination has its price, but so what? What is the truth of the world worth? Whatever it is, whatever little glimpse of true reality this Ren can see, will be enough. I will gladly pay.
They opted to sleep in a peasant’s hut that night. Nobody wanted to sleep in the inn, though Tian had a feeling the ordinary wine, food and fixtures would all be gone within a few days. Neither fishermen nor martial artists were squeamish, once they got over their initial shock.
The notes were mostly about hunting for the legendary oracle that supposedly lived around Grey Spire Mountain. Nothing in them about wine or welcoming a new emperor, or why these emperor-obsessed heretics were so determined to make kids part of their sacrifices.
He caught Censor Henshen before he went to bed. “Censor, why were you so much more concerned by a petition than the slaughter of peasants in your jurisdiction?”
The Censor visibly controlled an urge to wag a finger at Tian. “Forgive my impertinence, Immortal, but those peasants were not under my jurisdiction. The censorate has no administrative power. None. Likewise, we have no administrative responsibility. The peasantry is entirely, therefore, outside the scope of our duties.”
“So what do you do? Combating corruption is all I know about your role. Well, that and the shocking corruption in the Censorate.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Censor Henshen ignored everything past the first sentence. “The role of the Censorate is supervisory. We are the Emperor’s eyes and ears, and where necessary, his hands, within the Civil Service. We also have the sole and exclusive responsibility for correcting the Emperor on the very rare occasions when he errs in matters of duty or virtue. It is our proudest honor.”
Tian blinked. That wasn’t quite how his books had it. Generally, any mention of a Censor admonishing an emperor ended in the Censor’s mutilation and banishment. Or their immediate and colorful execution.
“Subjects have the right to petition the Emperor if they feel their local administrators are failing in their duty. Such petitions naturally pass to us, as they fall under admonishing civil servants. Petitions are quite normal. Petitions written in blood are less normal, but we do get them once or twice a year at the provincial level. They are much rarer at the capital level, as they have to get through several rounds of filtering. The Immortal may not know, but there is an entire department whose sole function is to review the memorials that reach the Emperor.”
“That sounds like a powerful job.”
“Oh yes. So much so that successive emperors have left it a mere rump of its original self. Functionally, it’s an arm of the Department of State. But the point is that there is a mechanism for filing petitions, and the petitions are read. If not by the emperor himself, then by his bureaucrats who will convey the contents to him through memorials so long as the petitions are not utterly absurd.”
Tian put on his patient expression. Censor Henshen got the message.
“This heretical petition violates the core interests of the Censorate as it rebukes the Emperor personally and directly, instead of targeting administrators or ministers. It also infringes on the duties exclusively assigned to the Department of Rituals. It seeks to go over the Emperor’s head, as it were, because it is addressed to the Celestial Emperor. Another thing that is exclusively our prerogative.”
“Wait, the Censorate has the right to rebuke God?” Tian enunciated, trying to understand the madness flowing from the seemingly sane Censor.
“The Censorate initiates the rebuke of the Celestial Emperor after top level consultation and consensus. The instruction is then sent to the Department of Rituals to perform the rite and they read from the memorial we draft for them during it.”
Tian felt the man’s high pitched voice undercut the thunderous declaration.
“Rebuke God.”
“A God, yes. And only the Celestial Emperor. It’s less rebuking and more reminding, obviously. Everything else is handled by the Department of Rituals. All the other ranks of deities below the Celestial Imperial Household, all the way down to local gods.”
“Because he’s an emperor.”
“No, Immortal Tian, because he is our Emperor. The Celestial Emperor, Jade Emperor, call him by whichever title you prefer, received the mandate to govern the Celestial Court from the Dao itself, personified by… well you know all this better than I do.” The censor waved his fingers self-deprecatingly. Tian had the powerful urge to shake him and yell that he did not, in fact, know all this. He controlled it. The Censor continued.
“A mandate from the dao to rule with benevolence, promoting virtue and suppressing vice, loving the people as his children and bringing the blessings of wise governance to the universe. Naturally, the Celestial Emperor has his own Celestial Bureaucracy, and he confers the right to rule to mortal emperors. This occurs in much the same way as we might acknowledge the subordinate sovereignty of a minor kingdom within our borders, or some tribal band or something. In this, our Broadsky Kingdom’s Censorate can be considered a subordinate department of the Celestial Censorate. Theologically speaking.”
“The ink made from the burned bodies of children?”
“Perhaps there is some underlying heretical logic, but from the perspective of the Censorate, they are just being dramatic.”
Tian felt the veins in his forehead throb.
“The wine?”
“From what you described? It is normal for the various regions to send tributes of local specialties to welcome a new emperor. And, of course, wine sacrifices are an utterly normal part of rituals and worship ceremonies.”
Tian sat down on the rough wooden table that was one of the few pieces of furniture in the peasant’s hut. “They are undermining the Kingdom by attacking the source of the Emperor’s legitimacy. Ratting him out to his superior, in the hopes he gets fired.”
“Essentially. And I would have just mailed the evidence along with a memorial to the capital if it didn’t involve heretical immortal cultivators. That adds a significant amount of urgency. But that’s what the problem is.” The Censor nodded, then hesitated. “At least, that’s the part of all this that troubles me professionally.”
“And personally?”
“I’m a married man, Immortal, raising three splendid sons and an equally splendid daughter. I wish the Immortal good hunting, and thank him for his service in ridding the world of these monsters.”
Tian wondered if the world had simply gone mad. That would make sense. He wasn’t crazy, it was the universe.
“I didn’t know you were married, Censor Henshen.”
“Oh yes. The Empress has many maids, all from fine families, and it is her responsibility to find them husbands when it becomes time for them to leave her service. It is common practice to marry them off to, well, men like me. I suspect because we are around so much, she just knows us better. My children are adopted, yes, but I love them with all my heart. As I do my wife. Everyone seems to find that hard to believe, but I do.”
Tian was utterly lost. “Alright. I don’t know why that’s anyone’s business but your wife’s, but what the hell do I know? Censor Henshen do you genuinely believe your department is a subordinate department to a celestial bureaucracy?”
“Absolutely!” He spoke with utter conviction.
“How? Why?”
“Piety is part of my annual performance review. I very carefully keep up with the pronouncements of the Ritual Department, and get top marks for my currently correct beliefs every year. Besides, it’s the most logical answer.”
Tian went to bed. “Bed” in this case being his bedroll inside his tent, inside the hut. He liked the privacy, and he liked its rat-proof nature even more. Liren and Little Treasure were already using the one bed. Little Treasure liked Liren’s night light, and he said, she was warm.
“Grandpa, how much of what Censor Henshen said is true?”
True? Well, none of it. Kind of. And all of it, equally kind of. I can tell you that he is truthfully describing the theological position of the Broadsky Kingdom, based on what we have overheard and read. And you might want to reread some of your history books. Particularly the parts describing a nation’s fate or a fortune-suppressing treasure.
“Grandpa?”
Go to sleep, Grandson. It’s been quite a day. But… hmm. At the risk of being a mean old senior, let me ask you a final question before bed time. You could feel the breath of immortality coming from that blind cultivator once you were inside the array. But did you even once feel the elements move within him? But he was clearly using his magics the whole time you were in the room, so you should have been able to sense it… normally. Yet you didn’t. And if you didn’t, then something very strange happened. Didn’t it?