Chapter 35 of 90
Silver as a Shield
Li Yutang was one.
Xiaocui was another.
If it had not been for the two of them—for their contempt, their sneers, their endless small cruelties, year after year—would the original Li Yuguo ever have given up on himself so completely?
Of course, the Li Yuguo standing in this room now was not the one who had lived here before. He was the author. The creator of this world. He had made every one of these people out of ink and late nights and instant noodles. But he had inherited the old Li Yuguo's memories along with his body, and the memories were very clear.
Xiaocui was vicious. Especially her mouth. Whatever was ugliest to hear, that was what she said. If Nalan Meng had not stopped her now and then, she would probably have cursed eighteen generations of Li Yuguo's ancestors by name.
And it was not only her mouth. Foot-washing water in his tea. Little stones in his rice, so that he cracked a tooth. Sewing needles hidden in the folds of his clean clothes, so that he stabbed himself putting them on. Mud in his boots. His one good robe "accidentally" dropped in the latrine. Day after day, month after month, small enough that no single one of them was worth a fuss, until even a sane man would have gone mad under them.
And the most outrageous part was how good she was at disguising it. In front of Nalan Meng, Xiaocui was always sweet. Always pitiful. Always the poor, loyal little maid, wronged and weeping, bullied by the brute of a husband. And Nalan Meng had always believed her.
So the original Li Yuguo had swallowed all the sins. And he had grown more and more violent, more and more bitter, until he was exactly the monster Xiaocui told everyone he was.
Li Yuguo straightened up from where he had crouched beside Jun Xue, and turned to face the room.
"Have you all forgotten," he said, "what I was doing all those days I spent out in the city? Among the three religions and the nine streams?"
"Who doesn't know?" Xiaocui snorted. "The King of Soft Rice. Using his wife's name to cheat and swindle his way all over Nalan City—"
"Xiaocui."
Nalan Meng did not raise her voice. She did not need to.
"Don't talk so much," she said.
The maid's mouth snapped shut. For an instant her face went perfectly blank with shock.
"Yes," she said, and lowered her head. "This servant is sorry, County Lord…"
But under her lowered lashes, her eyes were burning. The County Lord rebuked me*? For* him*?* She hated Li Yuguo, in that moment, more than she had ever hated anyone in her life.
Li Yuguo was surprised too.
In all his inherited memories, Nalan Meng had never once rebuked Xiaocui on his behalf. Not once. Her attitude toward me really has changed, he thought. Otherwise, she'd never have done that.
He clasped his hands behind his back.
"I wasn't fooling around," he said. "I was investigating the market."
"I know that solving the poverty of Nalan City can't be done overnight," he went on. "There are so many people here. Suppose we turned every coin in the treasury into grain and handed it out—how long do you think it would last? A month? Two? It's nothing more than tearing down the east wall to patch the west. To really solve the problem, we have to solve it at the root. And to do that, first you have to find out what Nalan City is actually good for."
Nalan Meng's hands curled into fists at her sides.
"You mean," she said slowly, "that all the times you went to the gambling dens—all the times you bullied decent people—it was all for Nalan City?"
"Think about it carefully, County Lord." Li Yuguo spread his hands. "If I wanted to get into the circles of those merchants, and I went in as a good man—honest, upright, proper—do you really think they'd accept me? Merchants trust men who share their vices. I had to keep getting close to them, the same way they get close to each other: over dice, and wine, and debts." He paused. "And in all that time, in the whole of Nalan City—have I ever taken a single life?"
Nobody answered. Because the answer was no. For all his sins, the King of Soft Rice had never killed anyone.
"I did what I did because I was investigating. I made friends among the three religions and the nine streams. Otherwise, where do you think I would have found an opportunity like this?" He nodded at the silver on the floor. "It took me a great deal of hard work to find that liuli merchant. And because of him, I've made a great deal of money."
It was not his knowledge of the future that Li Yuguo trusted most. It was his mouth.
Years of writing serials, day in and day out, had given him a very neat tongue. He had spent half his old life arguing with readers in comment sections, inventing excuses for plot holes, justifying the unjustifiable at three in the morning. Turning black into white and white back into black was a simple matter for him. He could feel the room bending under the words, the way a branch bends under snow.
"Then why didn't you tell me where the money came from?"
Nalan Meng's voice had changed. The anger was draining out of it, and something more uncertain was seeping in underneath. Because what he said was reasonable. So reasonable that it was almost impossible to fault.
"I was afraid of frightening you," said Li Yuguo. "You've already got a fixed idea of me in your heart. You think I'm useless. You think I'm a waste. If I'd suddenly shown up with this much money, wouldn't I just have been piling more suspicion on my own head?"
He looked at the silver at his feet, and at Li Yutang, and back at her.
"And look," he said softly. "I was right."
Nalan Meng's heart trembled.
He was right. If he had come to her with sixty thousand taels and said I earned this, she would never have believed him. Never. She would have done exactly what Li Yutang was doing now. She would have looked at that pile of silver and thought salt, or robbery, or worse.
She had misjudged him. The thought sat in her stomach like a stone.
"And how do you prove the salt has nothing to do with you?"
Li Yutang's voice cut across the room. He had recovered himself; the smile was back, a little stiff at the edges.
"Liuli alone won't clear you. A man can sell liuli and salt."
Li Yuguo looked at him with open disgust. He was about to answer—
When there was a commotion at the door, and a group of people came crowding into the corridor outside.
At their head, beaming, his round belly preceding him through the doorway like the prow of a ship, was Shi Dacheng.
Behind him came a portly gray-bearded man in a merchant's cap that Li Yuguo did not recognize, and behind him came Wang Youcai and three other well-fed elders of the capital merchant guilds, all of them looking around the wrecked guest room with great interest.
Shi Dacheng put his hands together and bowed to the room at large.
"I can prove it!"
"You are…?" Nalan Meng stared at him. She had not expected this. Neither, by the look on his face, had Li Yutang.
"Just a humble businessman from the capital, County Lord." Shi Dacheng bowed again, lower, his chins folding over one another. "I went out shopping this morning, and I happened to run into the shopkeeper of the salt shop on West Street. And the shopkeeper told me—" he gestured to the gray-bearded man, who bowed nervously "—that last night, a man came into his shop and bought a great deal of salt. Neither more nor less than ten sacks of it."
"Brother Dacheng!" Li Yuguo laughed out loud.
Shi Dacheng waddled over and clapped him on the shoulder, and as he did, he leaned in close and murmured, out of the side of his mouth:
"The King of Thieves told me."
So that was it. Guan Yunfan had come to see Li Yuguo at dawn, as he'd promised—and on his way across the rooftops, he had seen Li Yutang's men gathering in the courtyard and heard enough to understand what they were planning. He had not woken Li Yuguo. He had gone straight to Shi Dacheng instead, to work out a countermeasure. And the two of them had dragged the salt merchant here.
The salt merchant was licensed. He held an official permit. He sold salt the legal way, with the state's seal on every sack. And he had received a very generous gift from Shi Dacheng that morning, so naturally he was very willing to help.
He looked along the row of ten frightened men against the wall, and raised a trembling finger, and pointed.
"That one," he said. "Him. He's a local liuzi. He's the one who came into my shop last night and bought the salt."
Li Yutang's heart lurched in his chest.
He gritted his teeth.
And then, without saying a word, he stepped forward, drew the great saber at his waist, and swung it.
It was not a duel. It was not even a fight. It was a butcher clearing a block. The blade came out of its scabbard in a ringing arc of steel and swept along the line of ten men against the wall, and the first man's head jumped from his shoulders before he had time to understand what was happening. The second raised his hands. The blade went through his hands and into his chest. The third turned to run, and Li Yutang cut him down from behind, and kicked him into the fourth, and killed them both with a single stroke.
It took no more than three breaths.
Ten men who had bought salt for a few coppers and a promise lay dead on the floor of the guest room. Their blood ran out across the boards and mixed with the spilled wash-water and pooled around the scattered silver, turning the bright coins red. The sacks had split open. Gray salt lay strewn across the corpses like frost.
High on the roof beam, hidden in the shadows of the rafters, the King of Thieves frowned.
He could have stopped it. He could have saved them—some of them, at least. But to save them, he would have had to show himself. And to show himself now, in front of Li Yutang and the whole household, was to give away everything. It would have been unwise.
He watched the tenth man fall, and his jaw tightened, and he did not move.
"Aaaaah!"
The maids were screaming. Two of them fled out into the corridor. One fainted dead away against the doorframe and slid down it. Xiaocui had both hands clamped over her mouth, her eyes huge, all the color gone from her round face.
Li Yuguo did not scream.
He clenched his fists at his sides until his nails bit into his palms, and stared at Li Yutang.
He killed them all. Just like that. Ten of them.
Dead men tell no tales. That was the whole point. Now there was no one left to say who had given them the salt, or who had paid them, or who had told them what to say. Truly worthy of Li Yutang. Vicious to the bone.
Li Yutang shook the blood off his saber, and his face rearranged itself into an expression of wounded innocence.
"Ugh." He spat on the nearest corpse. "Bah! So these bastards were deliberately framing my good brother! Death is too good for them! Bah!"
He spat again, and looked around with honest outrage, for all the world as if he were the one who had been deceived. Anyone who didn't know the truth would really have believed that the good General Li Yutang had simply listened to slander, misunderstood his cousin, and lost his temper when he found out.
"Even if they framed him," said Nalan Meng, "there was no need to kill them." Her voice was cold. "What if someone was behind them? Now we'll never know."
"Ah… I'm sorry, County Lord." Li Yutang sheathed his saber and bowed. "It's only that Yuguo is my sworn brother. We may not share a father, but we're closer than brothers. When I realized these ten had been lying, I just—I couldn't control my emotions for a moment. And then I'd already struck…"
He came over to Li Yuguo with an expression of tender remorse and put his bloody hand on his cousin's shoulder.
"Good brother. Your big brother misunderstood you. I'm truly sorry."
A man so despicable, so cunning, and so shameless was rare in the world. Li Yuguo had to admire him, a little. He had written a lot of villains in his life. He had never written one this good.
"All right," Li Yutang called out, turning briskly to the servants, "since it was all a misunderstanding, everyone can go. You—come here and clean up these corpses."
Jun Xue was already at Li Yuguo's side.
She had picked up his outer robe from the end of the mat, where it had escaped the blood, and she held it up for him without a word. Her hands were shaking. He let her help him into it, and when she had smoothed the collar, he gave her shoulder a small, steadying squeeze.
"Dacheng," he said, turning to the merchant, "you're a man of real talent. Let's have a drink. And while we're at it, let's discuss our next piece of business."
"Yuguo…"
Nalan Meng had stepped forward. Her voice was uncertain. Her face was a storm of things she did not know how to say.
"What is it?" said Li Yuguo coldly.
"I…" She swallowed. "I misunderstood you. That…"
"Isn't it the usual thing?" said Li Yuguo. "I'm used to it."
He turned and walked out of the room. Shi Dacheng and the elders followed him. Jun Xue hurried after them, as close at his heels as a shadow.
When they had all gone, the servants dragged the bodies out one by one, and the silver was gathered up by trembling hands into baskets, and Li Yutang strode away with his men to give orders somewhere else.
And Nalan Meng was left standing alone in the middle of the empty guest room, by the bloodstains and the spilled salt, for a long time, without coming back to her senses.
Outside the City Lord's Mansion, the King of Thieves dropped down out of a locust tree and landed beside Li Yuguo without a sound.
His face was dark. "Brother," he said in a low voice. "That servant girl. Do you want me to give her…"
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
"If you do it now," said Li Yuguo, "won't everyone know it was my hand?" He shook his head. "There'll be a chance. And it won't be long."
He had originally meant to put the matter of Li Yutang aside. To deal with Ye Qiong first, and the demon tomb, and the money, and leave his cousin for later. But he had not expected Li Yutang to use such a vicious trick. This time, he had survived it. But who could guarantee there would not be a next time? And a time after that?
He looked down.
Jun Xue was walking beside him with her head bowed. The scrape on her cheek had darkened to a bruise.
"Does it still hurt?" he asked.
She shook her head quickly. "It doesn't hurt anymore."
"You've been wronged," he said, and let out a long sigh.
Jun Xue's head came up. Her pale eyes were wide.
"You… you knew? Everything, young master?"
Li Yuguo smiled. It was not a happy smile.
"Don't forget," he said. "I've lived in that 'home' for years. Everything she did to you this morning—I've had done to me." There was a world of weariness in the words. "Next time she lays a finger on you, you come and tell me. Not because you're a tattletale. Because you're mine, and nobody gets to hurt the people in my house." He paused. "And I'm putting a latch on your door."
Jun Xue's eyes filled. She ducked her head again, quickly, and nodded hard.
"Actually," said Shi Dacheng, "about what you did back there…"
He had fallen into step on Li Yuguo's other side, mopping his face with a silk handkerchief. His voice was kind, and a little worried.
"You showed everyone everything you have. Sixty thousand taels, in front of the whole household. Brother, I'm afraid it's going to bring you a lot of unnecessary trouble."
"I know," said Li Yuguo. "But if I don't do it this way, how do I get that fox to show his tail?"
He had not poured out the silver only to prove his innocence. He had done it to buy time.
Think about it. Now everyone in that house had seen the useless King of Soft Rice with a mountain of money. They would talk. They would wonder. They would watch. And if Li Yutang tried to kill him now—quietly, in the night, with a knife or a horse thief or a cup of poison—it would no longer be a useless man disappearing. It would be a rich man, a man with sixty thousand taels, dying under very suspicious circumstances. Nalan Meng would ask questions. Nalan Meng would want to know where the money had gone. And Nalan Meng would protect the money, even if she would not protect him.
It was a shield. A thin one, made of silver and suspicion. But it would hold for a little while. And in that little while, he could think of the next way to delay.
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