Chapter 39 of 90
The Mass Burial Mound
The Mass Burial Mound was the darkest place in Nalan City.
Years of famine had turned the city into a purgatory on earth, and in purgatory, people died every day. They died in the slums and in the gutters, in doorways and under bridges, curled up in the dust with their ribs showing through their skin. And when they died, this was where they came.
Here, a human life was worth no more than a blade of grass. Perhaps less. Grass, at least, grew back.
The lucky ones were buried. A shallow scrape in the hard red earth, a few handfuls of dirt, a stone if someone cared enough to carry one. But most were not lucky. Most were simply carried out of the city on a plank or a door or a pair of thin shoulders, and dropped here, and left. And at night the wild dogs and the hyenas came in from beyond the Great Wall to eat them.
White bones lay everywhere. Skulls stared up out of the scrub. Rags of clothing fluttered on the thornbushes like flags of a defeated army—a child's sandal, a woman's headscarf, a strip of blue cloth that had once been someone's best robe. The ground was lumpy with old graves and new ones, and in places it had sunk, and in the hollows the earth was dark and wet and stank.
And it was not only famine that had filled this place.
The horse thieves used it too. When they killed someone—a merchant on the road, a farmer who would not give up his ox, a girl who fought too hard—this was where they threw the body. It was a natural hiding place. No one investigated corpses here. No one counted them. A dead man in the Mass Burial Mound was just one more bone among ten thousand.
It was the sin of Nalan City. The source of it. The root.
That was why Li Yuguo had not simply opened his bracelet and poured out food for the common people the day he got rich. He had thought about it. He had lain awake thinking about it. But as long as the root of the evil was still in the ground, food given to the people would only be taken from them. Stolen on the road. Snatched in the alleys. Fought over until the strong had it all and the weak were dead anyway.
Hunger could turn a kind man into a devil. He had written that line himself, years ago, and thought it sounded clever. Now he had seen it. A starving man would snatch the bread out of another man's mouth and not hesitate for a moment. That was not wickedness. It was only human nature.
So first, the root.
It was a gray morning. Low clouds hung over the hills, and the light that came through them was flat and colorless and gave no shadows. A hot wind was blowing in off the wasteland, carrying the smell.
Li Yuguo stood in the middle of the Mass Burial Mound with the King of Thieves at one shoulder and Jun Xue at the other.
Guan Yunfan had his mask on and his hand near his knife. Jun Xue had both her hands pressed over her nose and mouth; her eyes above them were huge and wet, and she kept very close to Li Yuguo's side, close enough that her sleeve brushed his. She had been in a cage on the road. She had seen bodies before. But not like this. Never this many.
"You can wait by the road," Li Yuguo told her quietly.
She shook her head hard. She did not leave.
At their feet lay a long bundle wrapped in an old straw mat, tied at both ends with rope.
They waited.
A carriage was coming up the track from the city.
It was a very fine carriage—far too fine for this place. Black lacquer and red silk curtains, gilt fittings on the wheels, a pair of matched bay horses with tassels on their bridles. It was one of the carriages of Heaven Lust. It swayed and jolted over the rutted track, scattering a flock of crows that rose screaming from something in the scrub, and came to a stop at the edge of the burial ground.
A breath of perfume drifted out of it as the door opened. Sweet and heavy, like crushed peonies. Here, among the dead, it smelled almost obscene.
Bai Linglong stepped down.
She was wrapped in a plain gray cloak with the hood drawn up, as if that could hide her. Under it, he glimpsed the yellow velvet skirt. Her face was paler than it had been last night, if that was possible, and there were dark smudges under her eyes that no paint could cover. She had not slept either.
The stench hit her as her foot touched the ground. He saw her flinch. Saw her frown, faintly, and press the back of her wrist to her nose.
But she did not stop. She came straight across the broken ground toward him, stumbling a little on the stones in her thin embroidered slippers, and stopped in front of him.
"I'm here," she said. Her voice was steady. Barely. "Where is my brother?"
"Right here," said Li Yuguo.
He crouched and untied the ropes, and drew back the straw mat.
It was a corpse that had only just been dug up. Guan Yunfan had found it before dawn, in a shallow grave near the eastern edge of the mound, exactly where Li Yuguo had told him to dig. The earth had kept it better than the open air would have. The body was nearly whole. Young. Thin. A boy of perhaps fifteen or sixteen when he died, in the rags of a farm boy's clothes.
And his left leg had a twist in it. Below the knee, the shin bent a little sideways, at an angle no straight bone would take. It was an old break. One that had healed crooked, years before he died.
Bai Linglong saw the twist.
Her mind went blank. He watched it happen—watched the color leave her face, and the light leave her eyes, as if someone had blown out a lamp behind them.
She could not believe it. She would not believe it. The younger brother she had thought about every single day for three years, the one she had sung for and smiled for and lain down for—
That leg. He had fallen out of the old persimmon tree behind their house, when he was seven. She had carried him home on her back. The village bonesetter had been drunk. It had never healed straight, and he had limped ever after, and the other boys had called him Crooked Crab.
Once, long ago, she and her brother had lived in a little mountain village far to the south. Their father had been the village chief. They had had a courtyard with a persimmon tree, and books, and a well. Then the drought came, and the fields died, and the fever took their parents in the same week. And she and her brother, with nothing left but each other, had set out on the road to Nalan City with a column of refugees to find a living.
On the way, the refugee column was attacked. A pack of hungry beasts had come down out of the hills at night—great, gaunt, howling things with burning eyes—and chased them through the dark and torn them to pieces. Dozens of people had died. In the chaos, in the screaming, her brother's hand had slipped out of hers.
She had never seen him again.
Until now.
"How can this be…" Bai Linglong whispered. "How can this be…!"
She screamed.
It was a terrible sound. It tore out of her and went on and on, ragged and raw, and the crows in the scrub rose shrieking into the gray sky. She ran forward—tripped on a stone and fell headlong into the dirt—and crawled the rest of the way on her hands and knees. She gathered her brother's body up into her arms, the dirt and all, and held it against her chest, and rocked back and forth, and wailed like a madwoman.
Jun Xue had turned her face into Li Yuguo's sleeve. Her thin shoulders were shaking.
Guan Yunfan looked away, at the hills.
Li Yuguo waited.
He let her cry. There was nothing else to do. There were no words for this, and he had written a great many words in his life, and he knew that none of them would help.
When her screams had broken down into sobs, he crouched beside her.
"Look at his neck," he said gently.
She did not want to. But she looked.
At the base of the boy's throat, just above the collarbone, there was a wound. Small. Round. Clean-edged. It went straight through and out the back of the neck.
"That's the mark of a spear," said Li Yuguo. "A single thrust, straight through the throat. Clean. Precise. Perfectly placed. In the whole of Nalan City, there aren't more than three people who could make a wound like that."
He held up one finger.
"Nalan Meng." A second finger. "Li Yutang." A third. "And the leader of the horse thieves. But horse thieves would never bother to bury a body. Not even a shallow grave. They'd throw it out in the wilderness and leave it to the dogs."
"What about Nalan Meng?" Bai Linglong's head snapped up. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, and her eyes were wild. "Why not her? Isn't she just as suspicious?!"
"If she had killed him," said Li Yuguo, "then why was his jade token in Li Yutang's hand?"
Bai Linglong stared at him.
He looked at her face, at the beauty there under the dirt, and said it as gently as he could.
"You're very beautiful, Miss Bai. And sometimes beauty is a sin."
Bai Linglong screamed again.
But this time it was different. This time there was rage in it, and despair, and something that sounded like a door slamming shut inside her. She bent over her brother's body until her forehead struck the ground, and stayed there, her shoulders heaving.
She wanted to die. To leave this filthy world, here and now, with her brother in her arms. She had nothing left. Nothing.
But she could not. Because she was not reconciled. Not even a little. She was burning with the unfairness of it.
And what could she do? She was only an ordinary woman. A singer in a wine house. How could someone like her ever stand against a man like Li Yutang?
"What should I do…" She struck her head against the dirt. "What should I do…"
"Help us," said Li Yuguo. "And I'll help you." He held out his hand. "That's a deal."
She looked at his hand for a long time.
Then, slowly, she laid her brother's body back down on the straw mat, and took Li Yuguo's hand, and let him draw her to her feet.
And as she stood, she suddenly felt filthy.
Her whole body. Her skin, her hair, her mouth. Covered in it. Soaked in it. He was my enemy. All this time, he was my enemy. And I served him for three years!
Three years. From sixteen to nineteen. The best three years of her life. The most beautiful three years she would ever have. And all of them had been given to a man without a conscience. She had lain under him. Smiled for him. Thanked him, when he brought her the jade token. Thanked him.
"I'm going to kill him," Bai Linglong said.
Her voice had gone very quiet. Very calm. It frightened Jun Xue more than the screaming had.
"Calm down," said Li Yuguo. "If you go to him now, he wins. He's the captain of the city and you're a woman with a hairpin. You'll be dead before you're through the door, and he'll have you buried right here beside your brother." He met her eyes. "And besides—don't you think killing him outright would be letting him off too cheap? After everything he's done to you? Are you really going to settle for that?"
"Then what should I do…" She was sobbing again, unable to get the words out. "What do I do…"
"Li Yutang colludes with the horse thieves," said Li Yuguo. "He squeezes the honest people of this city and takes his cut of everything they steal. As far as I know, he keeps a ledger. Lists of goods—what the thieves took, what he was paid, who was killed. And those things—" he leaned closer "—those things can show everyone in Nalan City his true face. Let the whole city see that Li Yutang is a dog. A dog that eats people and doesn't even spit out the bones."
He straightened.
"That will hurt him far more than a knife ever could. If he dies now, he might even die a hero. Because right now, in the eyes of the whole city, Li Yutang is a good man. A good general. The embodiment of kindness. The messenger of justice." His voice hardened. "I want them to see him for what he is. And then he can die."
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