Tian watched his darts flock around the courtyard. They would hide in a bush like sparrows, then swirl up to perch under the eves. They twisted and knotted around themselves, as though they were hunting for mosquitos in the morning light. They were a glorious mishmash of colors, sizes and shapes, some not even visible to the naked eye. Tian thought he had the “Swallows” part of Imperial Heavenly Swallows down. Ditto “Heavenly-” controlling a flight of darts with his qi, turning them into an attack formation merely with his will, seemed quite heavenly. The “Imperial” part was lacking.
“It lacks imposingness. It lacks the arrogance and domineering-ness that I associate with the word “Imperial.” I tend to use it in sneaky ways. Also, I have the feeling the creator of the art probably used very fancy materials for her darts. Probably inlaid with gold or something.”
Or something. It’s inherently contradictory- a concealed weapons art that moves in flocks and is supposed to be domineering and imposing.
“So it’s flawed?”
Well. Yes. But not for the reason you are thinking, that’s not actually a flaw. You feel constrained by the contradiction. A hidden dart versus imperial dominion. But that’s not what the creator was thinking. She was thinking that she was the absolute ruler of whatever her qi touched. She held the power of creation and destruction within that sphere. Her power was so absolute, even the birds and beasts were obedient to her will. If she wanted something gone, heavenly swallows would descend and obliterate it. Simply part of the scenery, or invisible, until they descended and tore apart whatever displeased her. The contradiction is the point, not a flaw.
Tian looked up at the swaying trees, still damp from last night’s pounding rain. The heat was already rising. It would be a muggy, unpleasant day in Burning Flag City.
“What are you looking for?” Liren asked.
“Inspiration. Moral clarity. The heavens opening, celestial scholars and generals descending and solving all my problems. Usual sorts of things.” Tian kept his eyes moving from cloud to cloud. Just because it wasn’t likely didn’t mean it was impossible.
“That would be nice. I keep coming back to the notion that I could take charge, which means I should be the one calling the shots. Then I remember that our seniors worked very hard to ignore everything the mortals did, for admittedly mostly bad reasons, but I’m starting to see more and more of their point.” Liren’s voice was calm, almost eerily unaffected. “I don’t even know where to begin a moral analysis of this, and my solution to most problems is ‘Stab it.’ My toolbox has exactly one tool, and it’s a spear.”
“You should give yourself more credit.” Tian shook his head.
“Zihao, one of the overwhelming traits of excessive yang is a desire to do. To rush out and take charge. I have, for years now, just shut up and followed your lead on… heavens, so many things. And it’s because you are always thinking of finding ways to do things that you shouldn’t be able to do. You are actively hostile to having only one solution to problems.” She laughed. “I picked up a spear, because when you are a six year old girl, other than a crossbow, a spear is about the best weapon you could pick. You picked up rope darts because you wanted to be able to grab things.”
Tian waited for her to finish. His heart hurt to hear her speak this way about herself. Did she really let him take charge? She did, but it wasn’t all the time.
“I wanted to solve the problem of killing my enemies. You wanted to solve the problem of living. So now what the hell do we do? How do we avoid choking on mortal air, without becoming our scumbag seniors?”
“There is another wrinkle to this. We don’t have a job here. We are mercenaries hired by an ancient being on a mountain behind a ward in the middle of the country, with instructions to protect his infinitely removed grandson from the Heavenly heretic who is, intentionally or otherwise, after his life.”
“One way to put it.” Liren shrugged.
“So what part of that talks about taking charge of the defenses of Burning Flag City? We don’t have a shred of legal right to do anything here. And we have never given a damn about that, and I don’t intend to start now, but the City Lord worked his whole life to get that job. The City Protector did too, as did the Censor, the Red Plumed General, all of them. All jobs with chains of responsibility up and down, bound up by laws and duties and, and… and all that. They have a job here. That job includes being responsible for answering the question “What do we do with the wounded people of the Broadsky Kingdom who have been turned into weapons by the Yuu and used to attack the city?”
“But our fist is bigger, so we could make it our decision.” Liren shook her head slightly. Tian could only sigh and nod.
“Yeah. I know how they are going to resolve this.”
“Oh?”
“The second they chose not to die, the second they picked up a ladder and advanced on the city, they were rebels and traitors, acting in service to the enemy in wartime. Never mind letting them die, just executing them would be excessive mercy. They should be made examples of, as should at least three generations of their line.” Life seeped out of Tian’s voice, turning flat and dead. “There will be no punishment by the Imperial Court for being ruthless. There would certainly be one for mercy.”
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“Just a shame about the damage to morale.”
“Yeah. Shame.”
They fell silent once more. They were the strongest people in the city, and they felt helpless. The mortal air was choking them, and there was nothing to do except sit, and endure.
The City Lord was, in a way, better than Tian gave him credit for. He sent the Magistrate, along with several guards, to interview captured “rebels.” They confirmed what had been suspected- the villages had been captured first, then used as human shields and hostages to assist the Yuu in taking the forts. The whole thing built like a landslide, going faster the more people were captured.
Nobody knew exactly how many had been killed. The Yuu had taken care to break up families, and captured soldiers were scattered, mixed with strangers to keep them from organizing resistance. The number of captured and killed was unknown, but enormous. So the Magistrate declared those captured by the Yuu traitors, and dead. The penalty of familial extermination naturally must be enforced, and the order was issued. However, given that the families were likely already dead (see- the previous judicial finding) active enforcement of the penalty would be suspended until such a time as a proper investigation could be launched.
In the meantime, military exigencies required that examples be made of the rebels, and deterrence established, without damaging the overall military situation. This limited the available manpower and physical supplies for mass executions. For example, the amount of oil required to boil all the captured rebels would utterly deplete the military reserves needed to defend the city. Similarly, burning at the stake would devastate the fuel reserves, and while it was theoretically possible to impose the penalty of five horses upon the rebels, given the number of executions to be conducted, the necessary number of horses would turn their vital cavalry into half-trained infantry for an indefinite period. A reasonable alternative had to be found, and was.
The captured rebels would be beheaded, buried without an intact corpse in a mass grave, their names unrecorded. Never to be listed on a memorial tablet, never to receive incense or the worship of their descendants. Junior officers had very quiet, very firm conversations with the soldiers selected to be executioners, explaining in no uncertain terms that they were doing the captives a favor. They were told exactly why this was happening. It didn’t make them content to do the work, but it became… acceptable.
Kill ten, then rotate out for the next fellow. The prisoners had paper masks over their faces. They were gagged and bound, bent over a chopping block by convicts already in the cells. The heavy ax rose, then fell. The head was carried off in a basket, the body dragged away on hooks. Then the next prisoner was brought in, and the cycle repeated.
The bloody ax rose. The convicts tied the paper over prisoners' faces. The blood on the execution block never had time to dry. The executioners felt like they were cutting their own necks, again and again and again. The Heavenly Immortals sat in a garden, and did nothing. They sat, meditated, and watched the sky. Unable to decide what sign in the heavens would have told them this was coming.
The Yuu didn’t seem to have siege engines beyond the ladders. Everyone assumed they had a battering ram somewhere, but the consensus was they didn’t have catapults or ballistae. Partially due to the sheer quantity of heavy timber required, but much more so because the engineering required to build siege engines was remarkably complicated and those with the requisite skills were tightly controlled. Even operating the equipment took a surprising amount of training and technical knowledge. Not the kind of thing a trooper would know, nor something that could be recreated just by observing completed war machines.
Tunnelling was likewise discarded. The Yuu were a lot of things, but “good miners” weren’t among them. Nobody in these parts were, and even if they were, they would need to dig a miles-long shaft. Simply impossible.
“What about using spirits?” Liren asked.
“If they could have, they would have. Why mess around with siege ladders if you can flatten a stretch of wall and ride through it?” Tian shook his head. “Not all the tribe’s shamans can make use of spirits, and of the ones that can, clearly, there are stronger and weaker ones. At the very least, you and I would probably have taken our chances fighting anyone below the Heavenly Realm who was not from West Town Outer Court, back when we were level Seven of the Earthly Realm.” The corner of Tian’s mouth twitched, as though a grin was trying to escape.
“What chances? We’d have won.” Liren’s casual shrug would have seemed arrogant on almost anyone else. Tian knew she was simply stating a fact. “So most of the shamans can’t use spirits, and most of the ones who can are bandit grade. There are just comparatively a lot of them, and they are a hell of a lot more unified and organized than our cultivators.”
“Right.”
“So that leaves attacks on the city’s morale. Starvation. Disease. Politics. And betrayal.” Liren tapped the butt of her spear on the ground, then sighed. She adopted a ready stance, then started thrusting. It was the same thrusts Tian had seen her practice tens of thousands of times before, but he could see each repetition got her full attention. Each thrust was learned from. Adjustments so minor that he couldn’t even perceive them were slowly accumulating. Each muscular contraction was being carefully monitored, calibrated and refined.
Tian spread himself widely, trying to study medicine and palm arts and dart arts and staff arts and history and ethics and acupuncture and flute playing and tea. Liren studied the spear. She meditated with her painting. And that was about that. Everything extraneous wasn’t cast away, it was never picked up in the first place. To achieve her life’s purpose, she must master the spear. The Saintess back in the Six Turns Caverns said that Liren’s path would be a narrow one, filled with slaughter. Tian sometimes wondered if the Saintess wasn’t the cause of that narrowing path, her gift of a mighty spear art guiding Liren away from all the possible other paths she might have walked.
“How would you get through a wall that is yards thick, with a heavy iron-bound gate backed up by steel portculuses?” He asked.
“Easy. Stab it, smash through the wall, kill, repeat as needed.”
“How would I?”
“You would ask someone to open it. You would sit and wait at them until someone finally came out to chase you off, or they finally invited you in. Probably the latter.” She gave him a dark look.
“How will Wuusan open the gate?”
“The same way he has opened every gate that blocked his way so far. Mental pressure, followed by bribery. He doesn’t need the whole city to submit. He just needs someone to open the gate, and disrupt the city’s defense. Once he’s inside the walls, he loses the mobility advantage, but he’s got the numbers to flood the city. It would cost him massively, but he’d do it. Burning Flag City worth paying a heavy price to take. As a symbol, it’s worth almost any price.” Liren carefully thrust out, recovered, and made ready to thrust again.
“A traitor.” Tian sighed. “One of our own will open the door, and let the wolves in.”