Chapter 45 of 90
Keep Your Word
"Good," said Li Yuguo. "Then keep your word."
He tossed the five ingots up once in his palm and caught them, and they clinked.
"Because if you'd sold him out the moment you saw five hundred taels," he said, "I'd have killed you first."
He said it with half a smile. His eyes had narrowed a little—just a little—and something had come into them that was as sharp and still as a hawk's on a high branch. It was not a look anyone in Nalan City had ever seen on the King of Soft Rice's face.
The big man saw it. And for the first time since Li Yuguo had walked into his courtyard, he was wary.
He had been in a great many fights. On the river, in the reeds, in the back alleys of a dozen towns. He had broken heads for money and broken them for fun, and he had learned the hard way, the way all men like him learned it, how to tell a dangerous man from a loud one. That experience was speaking to him now, low and urgent, at the back of his skull. This one is not simple.
But he had a reputation. And forty men were watching.
"You'd kill me?" He sneered, showing his teeth. "What the hell!"
"What's your name?" said Li Yuguo.
"I… my name's Niu Er." The big man thrust out his chest. "What's it to you? You got an opinion about it?"
Li Yuguo smiled.
"I like you," he said, and meant it. "You're a man of your word, even when it's stupid. So here's my offer. If I beat you, you come and work for me. And I'll keep you safe for the rest of your life."
As he spoke he spread his hands, open-palmed, generous. The sun came slanting in under the edge of the sail-cloth roof and caught him from behind, and for a moment it looked—to the bandits standing around the courtyard, to the frightened farmers in the pens—as if there were a ray of light shining on his head.
Niu Er laughed in his face.
"Fine! And if I win, those five hundred taels belong to Laozi!"
He snatched up a mace from where it leaned against the stolen chair—an iron-headed thing as long as a man's arm, studded with blunt flanges, that must have weighed half as much as Li Yuguo did—and roared, and charged.
Li Yuguo saw it at once.
The way the big man moved. The way his weight went down into his hips as he came, the way the mace came up over his shoulder in a single unbroken line, the faint shimmer of Qi along his forearms, rolling under the skin like heat off summer stone. Niu Er was not just a strong man. He was a Martial Warrior. A trained one. The real thing.
And Li Yuguo was a Martial Teacher.
The gap between them was obvious. To him, if to no one else.
So he did not hurry.
He took one step back to set his feet. He clenched his right fist. He breathed in, down into his dantian, and felt the Qi gather there, hot and coiled and eager, the way the King of Thieves had made him practice it a thousand times in the courtyard of the guest house. And as the mace came down at his head, he did not dodge.
He punched it.
Around the courtyard, everyone was staring.
"Is he crazy? The boss's mace is no joke!"
"His hand's finished. Useless. What a pity…" One of the bandits shook his head, almost sadly. "I heard he's the King of Soft Rice of Nalan City, but he's still got some balls on him. At least when we took the villagers, he had the guts to come and get them back himself. Not like those corrupt officials who just watch people die and don't lift a finger."
"Yeah. What a pity."
The bandits were not blind. They had seen what he had done—walked in alone, paid instead of killed, fed instead of beaten—and they admired him for it, in their way. But every one of them was sure, absolutely sure, that he could not survive this blow.
"Huh…"
Li Yuguo let out his breath. His eyes went wide.
His fist met the mace.
Cannon Fist.
There was a sound like a bell struck with a hammer—a deep, flat, ugly bong that went right through the timber floor and into everyone's teeth. The iron head of the mace bent. Visibly. Folded back on itself around the shape of his knuckles, the flanges crumpling like wet paper. And the force of the punch did not slow down at all. It went through the iron, and through the haft, and took the whole mace with it, and slammed it straight back into Niu Er's face.
The big man left the ground.
He spun. Up into the air like a top, his arms and legs flying out, turning over and over—once, twice, three times, like the propeller of some mad machine—and then came down with a flat, wet pop on the beaten earth, and lay there like a dog flattened by a cart.
He did not move.
One punch. That was all it had taken. Niu Er was out cold, sprawled on his back with his eyes rolled up, and one of his front teeth was lying in the dust a foot from his ear.
The bandits' mouths fell open, one after another.
Nobody spoke. Nobody breathed. They stared at their boss, flat on his back, and then at the soft-faced young man standing over him, shaking out his hand.
Niu Er was the tyrant of the water village. He shouted five and drank six. He had broken more heads on this river than any of them could count. And in front of this King of Soft Rice, he had not been able to fight back at all. Not a single blow. One punch, and he was gone.
Such ability. Such violence. For a while, every man in that courtyard felt afraid.
The bandit with the gap teeth—the one who had stuffed his silver into his trousers at the gate—was clutching his trousers now with both hands. He was trembling.
"If we hadn't picked up the money just now," he whispered. "If we'd chosen to fight Dad instead… we'd… we'd all be…"
"Finished," said the man beside him. "We'd all be finished. Big Brother Niu Er's a Martial Warrior! A real Martial Warrior!" Everyone around them was nodding. Everyone was saying the same thing.
Li Yuguo squatted down beside the big man.
He took a small pill from his sleeve—a plain brown thing, a recovery pill bought from Alimama for a handful of coppers—and pushed it between Niu Er's slack lips, past the gap where his tooth had been, and patted him under the chin so that his jaw shut and his throat worked and the pill went down.
For a breath, nothing.
Then Niu Er's eyes snapped open.
"Wah!" He came up off the ground like a frightened horse. "Waaah!"
He scrambled backward on his heels and his elbows, then got his feet under him and ran—straight to one of the wooden pillars that held up the roof—and threw both arms around it and hid behind it. He was more than two meters tall. The pillar was about as wide as his head. He peered around it at Li Yuguo with his eyes bulging in pure horror.
"D-don't! Don't come here!"
Li Yuguo sighed.
"According to our agreement," he said, "you work for me now. So—tell me. Who's the man who wanted me? Who's paying five hundred taels?"
"It's Zhang Wei!" said Niu Er at once, from behind his pillar.
"Zhang Wei?"
"Li Yutang's lieutenant."
That voice came from above. The King of Thieves dropped down out of the rafters and landed in the middle of the courtyard without a sound, light as a cat, and straightened, and brushed off his cloak.
"So," he said. "This is tied to that turtle's grandson after all."
Niu Er saw him.
And Niu Er's whole face changed. The horror went out of it. His mouth fell open. He let go of the pillar.
"That's—that's not—" He took a step forward, staring at the cloak, the mask, the hood. At the shape of the man. "You're the King of Thieves. Guan Yunfan. Guan—Brother Guan!"
The King of Thieves frowned at him. "Who are you?"
"You forgot!" Niu Er was coming at him now with his huge arms out, and his eyes were wet. "Ten years ago! When you were passing through Nalan City—there was a beggar boy, by the east gate, starving. You gave him a steamed bun. You didn't even stop walking. And he lived. That was me! I didn't know who you were until later—years later—that you were the famous King of Thieves!"
And he threw himself down on his knees in the dust and wrapped both arms around the King of Thieves' legs and hugged them.
"Brother Guan! So you're here! Why didn't you say so before? If you'd shown up earlier, I wouldn't have cared about Laozi Zhang Wei, or Li Wei, or Impotent Wei, whoever—none of them matter as much as Brother Guan!"
The King of Thieves looked down at the two-meter bandit chief clinging to his knees, and then over at Li Yuguo, and his single eye was so pained that Li Yuguo nearly laughed out loud.
"From now on," said Li Yuguo, "you'll send every one of those villagers home. Then you'll come and help us dig the canal. All of you. Understood?"
Niu Er let go of the King of Thieves' legs and turned and knocked his forehead on the ground. "This Niu Er will follow the instructions of Big Brother."
"Take the money." Li Yuguo tossed him the five ingots, one after another. "And have a good meal with your brothers. A real one."
Then he walked over to the bamboo pens and began cutting the ropes himself.
The villagers had seen everything. Clearly. Every moment of it, from inside their cages: the stranger who had walked in alone, the silver on the ground, the punch that bent iron, the bandit chief hugging a pillar. And when the ropes came off their wrists, they came stumbling out of the pens and fell down in front of him, one after another, sobbing. Men and women both. They held onto his sleeves. They knocked their heads on the ground and thanked him over and over, until he had to pull them up by the arms and push them toward the gate.
The King of Thieves was not watching them. He was standing at the edge of the courtyard with his arms folded, looking out over the river, toward the fields.
"It feels like something's wrong," he said.
"What?" Li Yuguo looked at him.
"I mean—the water thieves here aren't strong. You saw them. A pile of rotten shrimp." He frowned. "So why would Li Yutang send them to loot? If he wanted to hurt you, he has better tools. Horse thieves. His own men. Why these?"
Li Yuguo opened his mouth.
And closed it.
And all the color went out of his face.
"They're bait," he said. "They were sent to draw us off. Me, and you. Because they knew I'd come myself. And they knew that if I came, I'd leave Xue behind to help with the wounded—" His voice cracked. "So they could take Xue'er away!"
"Aiyaa—these turtle's grandsons!"
The King of Thieves swore. He swore with real feeling. He was fond of Jun Xue. He had been fond of her from the first day, when she had stood in the alley with her thin arm held up for Ye Qiong to see, shaking like a leaf and refusing to step back. She was loyal to Li Yuguo the way a blade is loyal to its edge, and the King of Thieves understood that kind of loyalty better than almost anything else in the world. The three of them had been together every day since, like an elder brother and a younger brother and a little sister. And now she was in danger.
He was angry. Truly angry.
They ran.
All of them—Li Yuguo and the King of Thieves in front, and Niu Er and his water bandits pounding along behind with their harpoons, and the freed villagers stumbling after them as best they could—back along the riverbank, back over the rise, toward the fields.
They saw it from the top of the rise.
It was a mess. Worse than the morning. Worse than anything. The ditches had been kicked in and the earth thrown everywhere. The little lean-to where they had left the tools was a heap of broken sticks. There was blood on the ground. A great deal of blood, splashed across the dry earth in dark, wide, sticky patches that the flies had already found. And there were bodies.
Devastation.
"B-big brother—" Niu Er had come panting up behind them, and stopped dead, and gone gray. "These—these aren't what we did. You know that. You know. We're water bandits, all of us, but we don't—we can't do anything like murder—"
His voice was shaking. He had finally had a chance to wash himself clean and come over to Nalan City's side, and now there were dead people lying in the fields. If Li Yuguo decided that Niu Er was the murderer, he would have no way to argue. Not a word. He had been the one with the harpoons. He had been the one who came down the river that morning.
It was iron reality. Iron and blood.
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