Chapter 37 of 90
Table Nine
Li Yutang was so angry he could barely see.
He strode out of the City Lord's Mansion that afternoon with his saber banging against his hip and his jaw clenched so tight it ached. A day and a night of planning. Silver for the liuzi. Silver for the salt. Ten witnesses drilled until they could recite their lines in their sleep. And all of it—all of it—torn to pieces in a single morning, because a fat merchant from the capital had come waddling through the door with a salt seller in tow.
Shi Dacheng.
He said the name to himself like a curse. That fat pig had known him for years. Had eaten at his table, drunk his wine, bought his protection on the roads. And he had walked into that room and taken the useless cousin's side.
By evening, the rage had cooled into something harder. Li Yutang knew where to find the man. Everyone in Nalan City knew where to find Shi Dacheng after dark.
He went to Heaven Lust.
Shi Dacheng was sitting alone.
The private room on the second floor was a wreck of empty jars and picked-over bones. Li Yuguo and the old men from the capital had gone half an hour ago, singing, arm in arm, out into the lantern-lit street, with the little white-haired maid trotting along behind them. Now there was only the merchant, his belly propped against the edge of the table, his fat fingers turning a wine cup round and round while he stared into it.
He was thinking about Li Yutang.
He had known the man a long time. Long enough to know that Li Yutang never forgot an insult, and never forgave one. This morning, Shi Dacheng had offended him badly. He had done it with his eyes open. He had weighed it, the way he weighed everything—on one side, the captain of Nalan City, who could make the southern road very dangerous for a merchant who displeased him; on the other, Li Yuguo, who had pulled eighty thousand taels' worth of miracles out of thin air and showed no sign of stopping.
It had not been a hard choice. A merchant went where the money went. But now he would have to pay for it, somehow. Li Yutang would want his pound of flesh.
Unless, thought Shi Dacheng.
He stopped turning the cup.
Slowly, very slowly, a smile spread over his round, sweating face. It was a small smile. A wet one. It made his little eyes almost disappear into the fat of his cheeks.
Unless I give him a different pound of flesh.
The door banged open.
"How dare you."
Li Yutang stood in the doorway with his hand on the hilt of his saber. His handsome face was white with fury.
"How dare you go against me, Shi Dacheng. In front of the County Lord. In front of my own men."
"Oh! Lord Yutang!" Shi Dacheng heaved himself half out of his seat, beaming, spreading his hands as if greeting a long-lost brother. "Come, come, sit down. Sit here. Let me explain. Here—wine. The good jar."
Li Yutang did not move.
"Come now," said Shi Dacheng, and poured anyway. "You understand a businessman's mind, don't you? I'm making a great deal of money because of that boy. A great deal. I can't just let him be dragged off to the headsman. It's nothing personal. It's only silver."
He pushed the cup across the table.
"But don't worry," he went on, lowering his voice. "I haven't forgotten my friends. And I have something—the perfect thing—to take this anger right out of your mind."
Li Yutang sat down, slowly. He did not touch the cup. "What?"
Shi Dacheng leaned closer.
He knew Li Yutang's secret. He had known it for years. Everyone with eyes did. The way the captain's gaze followed the County Lord across the courtyard. The way it slid down her back, and rested, and stayed. Li Yutang had lusted after Nalan Meng's body for as long as Shi Dacheng had known him.
And now Shi Dacheng had a very dark idea.
He could not tell Li Yutang the truth, of course. Not about the debt, or the contract, or the waitress who came every midnight to the second floor in a mask. That was his own private treasure, and it was worth far too much to give away. But he did not need to tell him the truth. He could still put Nalan Meng in front of him. He could make her serve him, as a customer. And he could fulfill the longest-held wish of his old friend's life without his old friend ever knowing it.
"Forget about Yuguo for a while," he said softly. "Come to my Heaven Lust tonight. Late. I'll arrange a girl for you." He paused. "A girl with exactly the same figure as Nalan Meng. So that you'll feel as if you're playing with Nalan Meng herself."
Li Yutang stared at him.
Then he laughed. A short, ugly bark of a laugh.
Who does he think he's fooling? A girl with the same figure as Nalan Meng? As if there were girls like that lying around in every wine house in the kingdom. As if a body like that—those breasts, that waist, that ass—could be found in the bottom of a cup.
But even as he thought it, he felt his cock stiffen in his trousers. Just the thought. Just the words.
As if you're playing with Nalan Meng herself.
"Are you sure, brother?" he heard himself say. His voice had gone hoarse.
"Of course!" Shi Dacheng spread his hands. "You already have Heaven Lust's VIP 2 token, don't you? Tonight I'll upgrade you." He reached into his robe and drew out a token of deep red jade carved with three lotus flowers, and set it on the table between them. "VIP 3. You can ask the waitress to sit down with you. Sit beside you. On you, if you like. And enjoy her body as much as the rules allow." He smiled. "Bring your servants, too. A gift like this is better shared."
Li Yutang's hand closed over the token.
When the captain had gone, Shi Dacheng sat for a long while alone in the wreck of the private room, and his face slowly twisted into an expression that no one who knew him as the jolly fat merchant would have recognized.
Nalan Meng, being played with by her own brother-in-law.
He was a little afraid. If Li Yuguo ever found out about this, there would be trouble. That boy had a way of finding things out. But he was sure—almost sure—that it would never come to light. The mask would hold. It always held.
He licked his lips and poured himself another cup.
Nalan Meng did not know what she would face tonight.
She only knew that it was midnight, and that the debt was still there, and that she had to go.
She put on the mask in front of her bronze mirror. She felt the formation catch—that cobweb tug across her features—and watched her own face slip away into a stranger's. She drew up the hood of the gray cloak. She slipped out through the side gate of the mansion and along the dark streets, the way she had come two nights ago. Last night she had lain awake until dawn telling herself that she would never go back.
She went back.
At the doors of Heaven Lust, the guards did not stop her this time. They only looked at her, and smirked, and stepped aside to let her through. That was worse, somehow. It meant she was expected. It meant she belonged here now.
The curtain. The narrow corridor. The changing room, with its perfumed air and its heaps of silk cushions and its wooden box waiting on the table with her number painted on the lid.
She slipped the iron ring onto her finger first, the way the rules required, and felt her Qi drain away into nothing, like water down a hole. Then she opened the box.
Tonight's costume was different.
She lifted it out piece by piece and laid it on the cushions and stared at it, and her face burned under the mask.
The top was not cloth at all. It was two small plates of polished metal, silver-bright, each one no bigger than the bowl of a spoon, curved to fit over a nipple. That was all. They hung on a web of fine silver strings that went around the ribs and over the shoulders and held each little plate exactly in place—in the middle of each breast, over the tip, and nowhere else.
Below that, there was a pair of panties. If they could even be called that. A thread of string around the hips, and from the front of it, running down between the legs and back up between the buttocks, a single strand of small, smooth, creamy pearls.
And over the hips, a skirt—if it could be called that either. Two little panels of white silk, as thin as mist, hanging from the waist-string, one in front and one behind, like the loincloth panels the cultivators of ancient paintings wore. They were barely the width of her hand. They did not reach halfway down her thighs.
She understood immediately what the pearls were for. They did not cover anything. They were not meant to. They were only there to make her pussy and her ass look more obscene—and to touch them.
She put it on.
The metal plates first. They were cold. She gasped when the first one settled over her nipple, and felt the tip tighten against the polished silver at once, shrinking and stiffening into a hard little point under the metal. She tied the strings with shaking fingers. When she looked down, she could see how little they hid. Her breasts were enormous around those tiny spoons of silver—full and round and heavy, bare from every side, rising out of the web of strings like two ripe white peaches in a net. The plates only drew the eye to the one place they covered. Every breath she took made them shift. Every movement made her breasts sway, and the little plates slide, and she knew—she knew—that one careless step would be enough for a nipple to slip out from under the silver altogether.
Then the panties.
She stepped into the string, drew it up her thighs, settled it on her hips. And the strand of pearls slid up between her legs and pressed itself into her.
She bit her lip so hard she tasted blood.
The pearls were cool and smooth and hard. They nestled into the soft cleft of her pussy—between the lips, not over them—and lay right along the tender slit, and when she straightened, the string pulled tight, and every pearl rolled against her. One pressed right on the small sensitive bud at the top. Another lay against her entrance. The rest ran back along her perineum and up into the crack of her ass, and one of them sat right against the tight pucker of her asshole.
She took one step. The pearls rolled. A hot, helpless jolt shot up through her belly and made her knees go weak.
This is shameless, she thought. This is completely shameless.
Last, the two white panels of silk. She tied them on, and looked at herself in the long mirror.
The silk did nothing. When she stood still, the front panel hung just low enough to hide the pearls; the back one just barely covered the crease where her ass met her thighs. But when she moved—even a little, even turning to look at herself—the panels slid. They swung to the side with every step. And when they swung, everything behind them was there to see: the white round globes of her ass, bare, bouncing, with a strand of pearls sunk deep between them.
It was more erotic than yesterday's. Far more. Yesterday's black string had at least been clothing. This was jewelry, hung on a naked woman like ornaments on a tree.
She looked at the stranger's face in the mirror—her masked face, vague and unfamiliar—and held onto it with everything she had. The mask was her only shield. As long as it stayed on, she was not Nalan Meng. She was nobody. A body in silver and pearls. That was the only thing keeping her on her feet.
She drew a breath that made the metal plates slide, and went out to the hall of the second floor.
In the corner of the hall, at a low table half hidden behind a screen of carved sandalwood, Li Yutang was waiting.
He had brought two of his men with him: Zhao and Liu, his most loyal servants, who had been with him since he was a boy and would have buried a body for him without asking whose it was. They sat on either side of him on the long cushioned bench, stiff with excitement, each of them clutching a cheap VIP 1 token that their master had bought them that evening for the occasion. Li Yutang had the red jade token in front of him on the table.
He was waiting for the girl Shi Dacheng had promised him.
He did not really believe it. But his cock had been half hard ever since that conversation, and he had not been able to make it go down.
Across the hall, Shi Dacheng's manager—a thin, oily man with a mustache like two strokes of ink—had received his orders. Send the new girl to table nine. The merchant himself had already left for the night, smiling.
When Nalan Meng came out onto the floor, the manager was waiting for her.
"Table nine," he said, and pressed a little slate and a stick of chalk into her hand for the orders. "Corner. Behind the screen. Go."
She went.
The pearls rolled with every step. She walked carefully, slowly, trying to keep her hips still, and it made no difference at all; they pressed and slid and rubbed against her, and by the time she had crossed half the hall, she could feel a slow, shameful warmth beginning to gather between her legs. Men turned to look as she passed. She felt the white panels of silk swinging behind her and knew exactly what they were seeing.
She came around the edge of the sandalwood screen, and saw who was sitting at table nine.
Her face went white.
Under the mask, the blood drained out of it so fast that she felt dizzy. Her knees nearly gave way. For one terrible moment, she was crumbling—literally crumbling, all the strength going out of her legs at once, her body swaying, the slate slipping in her fingers.
Li Yutang.
Her brother-in-law. Her husband's cousin. The captain of her own garrison. The man who stood at her right hand in the war council every month. Sitting at a VIP table on the second floor of Heaven Lust, with two of his servants beside him, looking up at her.
The mask.
She remembered it. She held onto it. The mask is on. He doesn't know me. He can't. He can't.
She forced herself to breathe. Forced her spine straight. Forced her legs to hold.
What is this shameless bastard doing here?
She would take the order fast. She would go away. She would not come back.
"What would you like to eat?" she asked. Her voice came out level. Distant. Not hers.
Li Yutang was staring at her.
He had seen her coming across the hall, and he had stopped breathing.
It's her.
That was his first thought. Not she looks like her. Not she resembles her. It's her. Every curve of the body walking toward him was the same. He could not be wrong. He had stared at Nalan Meng every day for years—stared at her in the courtyard, on the training ground, on the walls, on horseback—memorized every line of her, every sway of her hips, the exact roundness of her breasts in that crimson silk, the exact shape of her ass when she bent to pick up her sword. And this was it. The same breasts, heavy and high and full. The same impossibly narrow waist. The same long legs. The same ass, round and ripe and perfect.
Even her hair was the same. The same black, the same length, gathered back the same way into a long tail that swung against her bare back.
Only the mask stopped him. The face behind it was vague and strange, and slipped away every time he tried to look at it.
Shi Dacheng must have done something, he thought. Some trick. Some makeup. Some girl he found and dressed her hair and painted her up to look exactly like…
He did not care.
He was extremely happy.
She was standing right in front of him in a few strings of silver and pearls. Her breasts were swaying with every breath. The little metal plates were the only thing covering her nipples, and they were slipping; no one could know when one of those nipples would come sliding out from under the silver. And below, the little white panels had swung aside as she came around the screen, and he had seen—everything. The pearls. The pale bare mound. The white thighs.
His cock was rock hard. So were Zhao's and Liu's. He could see it in their laps, tenting their thin cotton trousers.
He ordered for three. Wine, roast meat, dumplings, whatever she wrote down; he barely knew what he said. She turned and walked away.
He watched her ass the whole way.
The back panel of silk swung to the left, then to the right, then to the left again. Under it, her bare white cheeks rolled with each step, round and soft and jiggling, and between them, he could see the strand of pearls disappearing into the cleft.
Li Yutang's breath was coming fast.
Nalan Meng walked back across the hall with her face on fire.
She could feel his eyes on her ass. She could feel them, the way she had always felt them.
She had always hated him for that. Since the first day she came to this city as a bride. Li Yutang's gaze, sliding down her back while she was walking away, resting on her ass and staying there. She had sensed it every time; her cultivation was too high not to. She had never been able to do anything about it. He was at the same level as her, nearly. He was in charge of the army. He was her husband's family. And a look was not a crime.
And now she was walking in front of him with her ass bare. Showing it to him. Letting him see everything he had ever wanted to see.
If not for the mask, she would have died.
She took the order to the kitchen. She waited. She made herself breathe. The pearls throbbed between her legs. When the tray came out—a jar of wine, three cups, a platter of sliced roast pork, a basket of dumplings—she carried it back across the hall, around the screen, to table nine, and bent over to set it down on the table.
She straightened and turned to go.
"Wait."
Li Yutang held up his hand. In it was the red jade token, carved with three lotus flowers.
He was smiling. It was a perverted smile, wide and wet, and his eyes were burning.
"Sit down," he said. "Here. Beside me."
Nalan Meng stood very still.
VIP 3.
She trembled. She could not help it. A tremor went through her whole body from the inside, as if something in her chest had cracked.
VIP 3 means he can make me sit with him. And VIP 2 means he can touch my breasts. And my ass. She knew the rules by heart. She had read them a hundred times. And I have to sit. I have to let him.
And the servants. She looked at them—Zhao, Liu, she knew their names, she had seen them carrying Li Yutang's armor across the courtyard a hundred times—and saw the cheap tokens in their fists. VIP 1. Breasts.
How did they even get those? she thought wildly. How did servants get tokens?
It did not matter. She was confused and frightened and her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat—but she could not delay. Not for a moment. If she refused, she broke the contract. If she broke the contract, she would be exposed. And if she was exposed—if the mask came off, here, in front of him—
Then Li Yutang would have the biggest piece of dirt on her that any man had ever held. And no one knew what he would make her do with it.
She sat.
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