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The much-hyped Heroes Conference turns out to be a dud for the first three or four hours. The advance notice, the encomiums from leaders of the Five Lakes Alliance, the posters hung in every town for miles, had made it seem like the greatest thing since someone thought up the idea of putting Wolong mixed nuts in a take-away sack.
The last part of the conference gets more interesting, and more to the point quite blood-soaked, as they spirit away Zhang Chengling and then Wen Kexing kills a few dozen of the warriors in attendance while Gu Xiang watches, giggling.
Of late Zhou Zishu has come to realize that Wen Kexing has a bloody streak a few miles wide. Not that he didn’t already know that Wen Kexing is a skilled warrior, albeit one who uses techniques all over the map, to the point where it’s impossible to place his sect through mere observation of technique, but for fuck’s sake, what’s so funny about murder and bloodshed?
He even asks that last bit out loud, not necessarily expecting a lucid answer.
He gets one, though.
“The look on that asshole’s face a second before the arrow hit him was worth waiting through Gao Chong’s agonizingly interminable speech on morality,” Wen Kexing says, tossing a walnut into the air and deftly catching it in his mouth. “I mean, they were so busy killing each other that I was barely needed in the melee.”
The four wanderers are lounging around in a forest yet again, perched on handy logs of various sizes, before a cheery little fire even though the sun isn’t down yet. Chengling wasn’t safe with those bastards; he had to be taken from them. Zhou Zishu has no qualms about the rescue part. It’s all the blood. He’s seen the insides of more than enough people to last several lifetimes, much less than two or so years he has left in this one.
“Does it mean so little to you when people die?” he asks, drinking wine. He can no longer tell if it’s the good stuff or the crappy stuff.
“Only bad people,” Wen Kexing replies with a disturbingly sweet smile.
Chengling says, “Uncle Gao was not a bad person.”
Wen Kexing ignores the interruption. He’s focused on Zhou Zishu. “The wide world is full of humans. Who cares when a few die?”
“What if someone laughed at your death?”
“No doubt someone will sell tickets to that event. I wish them luck and riches.”
“What about those men in the street when we sat on the roof with our wine?” Zhou Zishu adds. “Were they bad?”
“Those who fight and kill for a living are bad, would you not agree?”
“You ask me to judge? That was my own profession, once.”
“Oh, you are different, a-Xu, you have a kind heart beneath it all.” Wen Kexing reaches for Zhou Zishu’s face and his hand gets batted away.
“Don’t touch me,” Zhou Zishu says testily. “You’re like an octopus, more hands than required.”
“You didn’t mind when it was a-Xiang.”
“She’s a cute girl.”
“I’m cute.”
Zhou Zishu rolls his eyes.
Wen Kexing smiles and fans himself gently.
The thick skin of this one! Zhou Zishu thinks. Does nothing make him feel shame?
“Dear one, can you honestly say that you have never killed anyone who was not bad?” Wen Kexing asks.
Okay, that’s awkward, getting called out on one’s own hypocrisy. By a weird stroke of fortune, just at that moment there’s a disturbance in the surrounding forest, like a turbulent wind rustling high in the trees, and then something breaks cover like the Monkey King on a mission from Tripitaka, but it’s only Ye Baiyi Making an Entrance.
“Did I frighten you?” Ye Baiyi says gleefully.
“Oh, please,” scoffs Wen Kexing, throwing a walnut at him.
“Truly,” says Zhou Zishu, “for a moment, I thought you were actually Sun Wukong.”
“Liar,” says Ye Baiyi, dusting off his robes.
“I was scared,” Chengling admits with admirable honesty.
“You would be, you stupid boy!” Gu Xiang hollers, pinching Chengling’s cheek. “Everything scares you!”
“Ow! What was that for?”
The two start slapping at each other until Wen Kexing intervenes with a click of the tongue and a gentle, “Behave, children.”
Zhou Zishu sometimes feels he has suffered the greatest demotion in the history of martial arts – from Lord of the Window of Heaven to scout troupe leader, trailed by a motley ensemble of oddballs and ne’er-do-wells, wandering aimlessly across the countryside, seeking redemption before he dies horribly. And doing a bad job of all of the above.
Undoubtedly he deserves it, all of it.
There are notes on the trees, slips of pale parchment hanging from branches like blown cherry blossoms. Chengling finds the first and reads it aloud:
“Maple leaves red all over the mountain; Golden blooms prevail over the night-wind. The old cicada’s song turns languid. Oranges tangy like balls of gold. Lovely, those rows of wild geese, Spreading dots in the distant sky.” He frowns. “Is this poetry? What is it doing here? Look at this one, Master Uncle.”
“Hard pass,” says Ye Baiyi.
“I think it sounds pretty!” counters Xiang.
“Yes, who asked you, old ghost?” says Wen Kexing. He steps forward and snatches the parchment from Chengling’s hands. “Is this addressed to you, foolish boy?”
“Um, no?”
“Then leave it be!”
Zhou Zishu finds another note tied to a low-hanging limb. “Frail willows float like gossamer, the narrow bridge at dusk—“
“Not aloud!” snaps Wen Kexing.
“Why not? It’s addressed to me.” Zhou Zishu grins and feints away when Wen Kexing tries to grab it out of his hands.
“Look, there are poems everywhere!” Gu Xiang cries, clapping her hands together, leaping up to grab more and bring them down. “Come here, silly boy,” she calls to Chengling. “Read them to me!”
“Don’t you know how to read?” Chengling asks bluntly.
“Why should I?” Xiang pouts, stomping her foot. “How dare you make fun of me!”
“I’m not, I just—“
She shoves him to the ground and thrusts the pieces of parchment at him and watches over his shoulder as he reads quietly.
Ye Baiyi just stands there with his arms folded, like this is the best entertainment he’s seen in decades.
Wen Kexing’s ears are turning red.
Zhou Zishu reads another out loud:
“Autumn brings fragrant rice-wine newly brewed.
In winter’s heated rooms my face glows with wine.
I may enjoy the fruits of all four climes
And every dainty of eight seasons too.
The silk sheets and quilts of the bridal eve
Best the mendicant’s life of Buddhist chants.”
“Wow. Now I’m impressed,” Ye Baiyi snickers. “Did you write that yourself? Sheets of the bridal eve, nice touch.”
Wen Kexing looks like he might explode, so Zhou Zishu draws him aside, but gets his hand shoved away.
“They’re just teasing,” he says, but he’s amused.
“They were for you,” Wen Kexing hisses, “Not everyone.”
So this thick-skinned gremlin can feel shame. Good to know.
“Why did you hang them on the trees?”
“It seemed romantic!” Wen Kexing blows a tendril of hair out of his eyes, clearly exasperated. “I have never in my life encountered someone as annoying as you. I ask you, are you entirely immune to my charms?”
Well, that’s pretty funny, considering he’s not even remotely immune to Wen Kexing’s charms. Maybe he’s the first person who ever gave him this much trouble. Maybe the only reason he’s managed to resist Wen Kexing this far is that his own senses are failing him – touch, hearing, sight, taste. He has trouble imagining what a full-blown charm offensive would feel like if his senses were firing on all cylinders.
“You know I’m dying, right? Picture this as me doing you a favor,” he says aloud. “Stop wasting your time and seduce someone else.”
“How cruel you are!” Wen Kexing says sharply. He glares. Getting nothing more than a mildly raised eyebrow from Zhou Zishu, he stalks off.
Ah, so the gremlin can also be tormented. He’s still a cypher; well, more than ever now. And calling Zhou Zishu annoying? Really? As his master used to tell him, it’s all about perspective. He smiles just a tiny bit and makes sure that no one sees him hiding the poems in his sleeve.
Wen Kexing gets over it, as he does with everything. His shamelessness resurfaces. Just as well they can all have a laugh, because there’s always death and horror waiting around the next corner. Indeed, a mere day later, Wen Kexing is digging graves for the Four Sages of Anji, his hands trembling with rage as he scrapes at the earth with one of the sage’s swords.
That night he gets truly fall-down drunk. Perhaps he’s missing Gu Xiang, who went chasing after the soft-hearted heir to the Gentle Wind Sword Sect once she tired of Chengling’s poetry declamations. There’s no reasoning with Wen Kexing now that his pet is gone, but Zhou Zishu foolishly tries nonetheless.
“It matters who does the actual killing,” he says, aiming for softness. They’re sitting inside a shabby, abandoned house. It’s a nice change from the forest floor. The bedding was crawling with vermin so they had thrown that out earlier and prepared to sleep on the wooden slats of the beds. In the main chamber, they light a fire in the brazier to heat water. They even find a sealed container of tea, so it’s fresh even if it’s peasant stock.
Wen Kexing isn’t interested in the tea. He slops wine all over his stunning lilac robes – somehow still pristine after a day spent tossing mangled corpses into the hole he’d dug. “As wise as are the words of the lord of an organization of talented assassins, I’m really too drunk to be lectured at just now.” He drops the empty bottle on the table; it rolls around like a child’s spinning toy and stops. “I killed them. The sages.”
This is startling. “How?”
“It was my fault, I made it happen. Not all my plans turn out well. I sow discord gladly, but sometimes it backfires.”
Zhou Zishu has no idea what Wen Kexing means. Plans? What plans? “You have no fault in their deaths. Be at peace.”
“You cannot know that. You cannot know the depths of me.”
“If I’m your soulmate, should I not know?” He seats himself next to Wen Kexing, keeping the teapot handy. He can still feel the warmth of the tea. Maybe, just maybe, this is the time he can learn more of the Mystery Man, when he’s so inebriated. On the one hand, it’s not gentlemanly to take advantage in this situation, but on the other hand, that wouldn’t stop Wen Kexing should their positions be reversed, so he’s not going to waste time feeling like a jerk about it.
“I will not judge you, whatever you say. Whatever you have done. Take off your mask and let me know you for yourself.”
Wen Kexing chortles and wags a finger in Zhou Zishu’s face. “No no no, you’re not going to fool me into that.”
“Do you not trust me?”
Wen Kexing appears to consider the question. He grabs the next available wine jug and tries to decant it into a cup, flooding the tabletop instead. “It’s not a matter of trust, it’s that you are so good, you have no idea what you are saying. If I tell you how evil I am, you will be so sickened that you will forsake me forever.”
Zhou Zishu takes the wine jug from him and pours what is left into the cup, then sets down the jug and hands the cup to Wen Kexing, not letting go until he’s sure that Wen Kexing has a good grip on it.
“I’m certain that my own soul is as disfigured as yours,” he says, thinking of the innocents whose deaths he is responsible for: a child here, a princess there. His own greeting gift to his future sister-in-law was a vial of poison that he more or less forced her to imbibe in front of him. That he didn’t know who she was at the time offers no exoneration; he knew, at least, that she was an innocent who had the misfortune of being related to the wrong person.
Wen Kexing says, “Do you know what you’ve done to me? I wasn’t looking for you. I don’t even deserve you. I am ugly beneath the skin, while every part of you is beautiful,” he adds as he throws back the wine in the cup, then slams the cup hard onto the table. A moment later his head smacks down next to it.
Zhou Zishu seeks and locates a pulse in his neck. He’ll get sore from sleeping in that position, but it’s surely a less painful form of self-punishment than the Nails of Torment. He rests his hand on one of Wen Kexing’s. There he sits until the fire in the brazier turns to embers.
Minutes (or perhaps hours) later, Chengling runs into the darkened room and skids to a stop. “Is Uncle Wen okay?”
“He passed out, he’ll be fine tomorrow.”
Ye Baiyi strolls in behind the boy. “Couldn’t hold his liquor in the end, eh?”
Zhou Zishu rises to his feet and shushes them gently. “Why are you two up? Come, let’s leave Uncle Wen to his rest.” He guides them away.
Chengling takes his hand as they walk down the hallway towards the bedchamber. “Old Monster was telling me a bedtime story.”
“Oh? That sounds nice,” says Zhou Zishu. He’s surprised; he didn’t expect such thoughtfulness from the martial arts master. Also, he probably should correct his disciple on the topic of using inappropriate terms to address elders, but right now he's distracted, his mind on the passed-out man in the other room.
“It was horrible.”
What? “Shidi?”
Chengling looks like he’s been scarred by the experience.
Zhou Zishu turns on Ye Baiyi. “What did you tell him?”
Ye Baiyi looks vaguely abashed. “I just told him the one about the Lord of Ghost Valley and how he skinned the previous Lord alive and then took his skin to wear. And how he ate the corpses of his own parents.”
“I’m afraid to sleep now,” says Chengling. “Will you stay with me tonight, shifu?”
“Of course, go lie down and I’ll be there soon.” Once Chengling is reasonably out of earshot, Zhou Zishu turns on Ye Baiyi. “Are you trying to give him nightmares on purpose?”
“He needs to learn about bad people if he’s going to be a sect leader.”
Zhou Zishu glowers. “You can sleep in the woodshed tonight.”
Ye Baiyi's lip curls as though to say, make me. But he goes off to do whatever immortals do when they’re on their own time.
Zhou Zishu watches him depart, then goes into the bedchamber and lies on a pallet near Chengling, who, like tired children everywhere, has managed to fall asleep immediately. The boy mumbles in his sleep but doesn’t wake.
Zhou Zishu has trouble sleeping. At midnight the Nails torment him more than usual; he struggles to align his qi with his meridians. He’s glad that the other two grown men are elsewhere and that Chengling sleeps so soundly.
He ponders, yet again, what Wen Kexing wants from him. More than lust, less than love?
He almost misses the creepy smiles. At least he knew where he stood back then. At what point had it changed from ludicrous seduction to sincere distress on his behalf? Probably after that embarrassing episode where Ye Baiyi and Wen Kexing had battled each other for the honor of ripping his clothes off in public. He was furious until he saw the stricken look on Wen Kexing’s face, the pity on Ye Baiyi’s. After that night, Wen Kexing forgot to be so outrageously flirty and instead he now spends a lot of his free time – which is equivalent to pretty much all of his time – running after Ye Baiyi and going all fix him fix him fix him you fucking bastard while Ye Baiyi cackles that he can but only if everyone is nicer to him first.
The words of Ye Baiyi offer a tiny bit of hope, although Zhou Zishu could do without the snarkiness. And why does he now cling to hope that he can live? He’s not an idiot. He can be honest with himself. He understands that his fondness for Wen Kexing is turning into something deeper, more profound, more dangerous, more disturbing. There’s no need to be coy about it.
Yet Wen Kexing’s true identity remains hidden to him. He disappears from their little troupe from time to time and reappears reeking of brimstone, metaphorically if not physically. It frightens Zhou Zishu, more than he wants to admit.
“You could have taught compassion to Gu Xiang,” he had said to Wen Kexing after one time when she had run off, laughing gaily at the latest set of corpses with which her master had decorated the walls of a random town.
“Compassion? Really?” Wen Kexing had said in response. “I considered it more valuable to teach her to fend for herself, so that she would not require the compassion of others in order to survive.”
“Don’t you worry about what kind of life she will have?”
“We were not made to be joyful or happy. Everything was taken from me, from her. We do as we must to survive.”
“And are there not others who have suffered as well?”
“Let them look out for themselves. I’m the one who became powerful enough to visit my frustration on others.”
“Does that make it right?”
“I went looking for revenge,” Wen Kexing had told him. “I found you instead.”
In the deepness of the night, Zhou Zishu sighs and twists and turns, remembering Wen Kexing’s words. I found you instead.
He sits up. His meridians have repaired themselves for now. Chengling is snoring softly in his sleep. Crickets chirp. Ye Baiyi sleeps, presumably, in the woodshed.
Zhou Zishu rises silently and goes to the other chamber, where he finds Wen Kexing sprawled across the floor, limbs arranged awkwardly, redolent of wine. Zhou Zishu’s sense of smell is fading fastest of all his senses, but he can still smell this much.
Wen Kexing twitches in a troubled sleep, his breathing uneven. He murmurs agitated words that Zhou Zishu can’t make out, a soft susurration of anguish.
Whatever gods there be, the former Lord of the Window of Heaven prays, have mercy on our mutilated souls.
He tries to rouse Wen Kexing, kneeling close by and shaking his shoulder gently. “Lao Wen, wake up, leave the bad dream behind. Lao Wen, Lao Wen.”
Wen Kexing wakes on a cry of horror, grasping at nothing, up on his knees, looking as though he might vomit. Zhou Zishu takes trembling hands into his own.
“A-Xu, they came for me,” Wen Kexing whispers, coughing.
“It was a dream. You are safe.”
“Don’t look at me. I’m a mess.”
“I won’t look. It doesn’t matter. Come to me. Come.”
Wen Kexing snatches his hands away. “I’m evil, a-Xu. Get rid of me.”
“How could I do that? Come to me.”
Wen Kexing laughs, a nasty, ragged sound. “What did you do wrong, you are surely wondering, to get a soulmate like this wicked one? I pity you.”
Zhou Zishu’s heart is breaking. He opens his arms, unsure of how to touch Wen Kexing. “Please, beloved, come to me.”
Wen Kexing shakes his head, disheveled hair falling over his shoulders. “I’m a bad person, aren’t I, a-Xu? Get rid of me, push me away or I’ll poison you somehow, merely by being who I am.” But he shuffles forward on his knees and drops his head in Zhou Zishu’s lap, his shoulders shaking. If he’s crying, he does so soundlessly.
Zhou Zishu doesn’t push him away, doesn’t let him go. Holds him carefully, like he’s precious. Holds him and rocks him a bit and wonders if this is his own true punishment, even more than the Nails: to love something so broken.
The word beloved had slipped unlooked-for from his lips, yet he doesn’t find it to be wrong. I went looking for death, he thinks, and found you instead. Could it ever have been otherwise?
He wishes desperately, desperately to comfort the damaged thing that has crawled into his embrace. He wishes, more than anything, to start at the beginning and not go down the wrong path this time. He wishes to have found this man before both of them became murderers. He wishes for more than he is permitted to have. Regrets, he knows, will eat one alive. He will settle, instead, for the quiet of the grave, if those he loves can live.
Probably too late for that, of course.