Chapter 48 of 90
The Poison Emperor’s Trap
They walked along the garden path in the moonlight, under the bare branches of the plum trees. Li Yutang kept a polite step between them. He took a little lacquered pot out of his sleeve and held it out to her—a cooling salve, he said, for the cheek—and she took it, and held it in both hands, and did not open it.
"What do you think of Li Yuguo?" he said.
Xiaocui was a clever girl. He was right about that. She had seen long ago how much the Lord Commander hated his cousin. Everyone in the house had.
"If it weren't for that King of Soft Rice," she said, low, "I… I wouldn't have been hit…"
"Then tell me." Li Yutang smiled. It was a smiling tiger's smile, gentle and patient, the kind a tiger turns on a shivering lamb. "Li Yuguo and I. Who would be the more suitable husband for the County Lord?"
Xiaocui ducked her head. She did not dare look at him. "I—I don't know…"
"No. You know."
"This…"
Xiaocui gritted her teeth and lifted her eyes to him, with great difficulty. She looked around first—carefully, the way servants learn to—and made sure there was no one else in the garden. Then she spoke.
"The Lord Commander is not only handsome," she said, "but highly skilled in martial arts. In character, in reputation—you're several times nobler than the King of Soft Rice of Nalan City. There's no comparison at all. If you became the young lady's husband, Nalan City would surely get better and better…"
"If I were her husband," said Li Yutang, "you'd never carry another tray. You'd have a place in my household. Your own rooms. Your own maid, to fetch your tea. And no one in this mansion would ever raise a hand to you again."
He glanced at the red mark on her face. He did not touch it.
Xiaocui's whole body trembled. She looked up at him, and her eyes were bright with something like wonder.
"My lord—you mean—"
"Yes. I want you to help me." The corner of Li Yutang's mouth rose, very slightly, and what was in it was pure poison. "And in helping me, you'll be helping yourself."
At dawn the next morning, Li Yuguo and the King of Thieves left the city by the north gate and went into the woods.
They had followed the tracks of the black star horses out past the last of the farms, where the road turned into a cart track and the cart track into a deer path, and the hills began. It was not hard. Whoever had come this way had not been trying to hide. Every few hundred paces there was another withered patch in the grass—a circle of gray, dead stalks, as if something had breathed on them.
Li Yuguo had slept for perhaps an hour. In that hour he had dreamed of Uncle Zhong's bandage.
The trees thickened. The light went green. And about the third hour after dawn, a faint violet haze began to gather between the trunks ahead, so faint that at first he thought it was only mist off a stream.
"Brother," said the King of Thieves sharply. "Hold your breath—"
It was already too late.
He did not remember falling. He remembered the haze, and a smell like crushed violets and old copper, and then he was on his knees in the leaf-litter with his wrists bound behind him and his head swimming. The King of Thieves was beside him, bound the same way, cursing steadily under his breath. Men in dark green robes stood around them in a ring—a dozen, more—with curved swords at their hips and gray cloth masks over their mouths and noses.
Poison Guards.
And something was growing on his head.
He could feel it. A weight, pressing on his scalp. A soft, spongy, faintly warm pressure that had not been there before, as if something had rooted itself in his hair. He rolled his eyes up and saw, at the very top edge of his sight, the curve of a cap—violet, glistening, freckled with pale spots.
A mushroom.
There was a mushroom growing out of his head.
There was a dark shadow approaching between the trees.
It came slowly. It turned out to be a man in his thirties, tall and long-limbed and very thin—so thin he looked like a skeleton draped in a coat. Everything about him hung loose. His sleeves hung loose. His robe hung loose. His joints seemed to hang loose from each other, as if he might come apart and collapse in a heap of bones at any moment.
"Old thief," said the shadow, smiling. "It's been a long time."
The King of Thieves ground his teeth together. His eye went round and blazing. "Old poison! You son of a bitch!"
"Hahaha! Still so full of fire. Good. Good. It'll be over soon." The man came out of the trees into a patch of sunlight. And in the light, his skin had an unhealthy sheen to it—a faint, waxy lavender, like the skin of a man three days drowned.
Li Yuguo looked at him, and a line of plot rose up in his memory from somewhere very deep.
"If you're going to kill me, then kill me," said the King of Thieves. "Why drag it out? If you kill me, I won't even blink!"
"Good. Then I'll grant your wish."
This was one of the Ten Emperors. The Poison Emperor. His loose coat hung open at the front, and his bare chest was netted all over with veins—fat, purple, branching veins, standing out from the skin like the roots of a tree. Just looking at them made Li Yuguo's scalp prickle.
The Poison Emperor turned his head and looked at him. He licked his lips. His tongue was purple too.
"You must be Li Yuguo," he said. "The one who's been in the limelight lately. The famous King of Soft Rice of Nalan City."
"Since you know I'm the consort," said Li Yuguo, "let me go!"
The Poison Emperor was stunned for a moment.
Then he burst out laughing.
"Interesting! Do you know what this Emperor likes to do most of all? Torture and kill noble young masters!" He leaned down, close, until Li Yuguo could smell his breath—sweet and rotten, like fruit left too long in the sun. "A while ago I caught the young lord of Qingyu City. The city lord's own son. This fellow liked to molest good women. Girls from the market. Farmers' daughters. So I put a red-blooded centipede down his trousers. Guess what happened?"
Li Yuguo's scalp went numb. Every hair on his body stood on end.
He understood, very clearly, how dangerous this man was. If he kept shouting about his rank, the Poison Emperor would kill him for the pleasure of it. Rank was nothing here. He was nothing here. If he wanted to live, he had to find the weak place in the man's heart and strike at that.
And he had to do it fast. Because the poisons this man carried were everywhere—in the air, in the earth, in the mushroom on his head. There was no guarding against them.
"The thing that prince used to ruin people," said the Poison Emperor, "melted into water. Tsk, tsk. It was a sorry sight. A blood debt, repaid, for all the girls he'd destroyed!"
"So ruthless. So murderous." Li Yuguo spat on the ground between the man's feet. "No wonder you poisoned a whole city. What a poisonous devil. A wicked demon of misfortune."
The violet mushroom was growing.
He could feel it. Bigger and heavier with every breath, pressing down on his skull, and with every breath, something in his mind was being eaten away, little by little. The edges of his thoughts had begun to blur.
He knew roughly what this thing did. It tortured slowly. It fed on the mind. In the end, the man it grew on either died, or lived on as an idiot, drooling, not knowing his own name.
"What do you know?" the Poison Emperor roared.
His face had gone dark. All the laughter was gone from it.
"Do you know that every person in that city was cursed? Every one! If the curse had broken loose, every one of them would have become the walking dead!"
"Even so," said Li Yuguo sharply, "it won't change the fact that you killed them."
"Stinking brat. You're courting death." The Poison Emperor straightened. His eyes had gone red at the rims. "Good. Since that's how it is—the white-haired girl is yours, isn't she? Then I'll feed her a test poison, right in front of you, and torture her alive while you watch. And after that I'll start on you. From the soles of your feet. Inch by inch. Three days and three nights of corroding, and at the end, your whole body will fester and you'll die."
Li Yuguo did not doubt for one moment that he would do it.
To the Poison Emperor, he was just a worthless life. They were all worthless lives.
At exactly that moment, an arrow came out of nowhere.
It hissed past the Poison Emperor's ear and buried itself to the fletching in a tree behind him. Every head in the clearing jerked up—and only then did they see the shadow. It was standing at the very top of a tall pine at the edge of the clearing, on a branch that should not have held a squirrel.
Nalan Meng.
She had a longbow in her hand and a long spear across her back, and she was wearing bright silver armor that flashed in the sun. The wind had caught the hem of the crimson skirt under her armor and was whipping it up and back, high above the branch, so that for an instant the clean white of her underclothes showed beneath it against the sky—and it only made her look fiercer, a war goddess on a treetop with the wind in her skirts.
Her beautiful eyes were cold. Her lips curved very slightly. As they watched, she slung the bow over her shoulder and swept the spear down into her hand.
"Sister-in-law!" cried the King of Thieves.
"Sister-in-law?" The Poison Emperor narrowed his eyes. "Could this woman be the Ninth County Lord of the Third Prince's house?"
"You're just a poisoner," said the King of Thieves proudly. "And my sister-in-law is the number one expert in Nalan City! Head to head, she's stronger than me!"
The truth was that if the King of Thieves had not been ambushed in the haze, he would not have been worthless against the Poison Emperor. He could have fought him for a while, at least.
The Poison Emperor snorted coldly. "Old thief, I'll deal with you later. But don't worry. This Emperor won't kill you so easily. Because this Emperor still needs you to find my poor helpless sister!"
"Don't even think about it!" When his wife was mentioned, the King of Thieves began to shake with fury in his ropes. A cold wind had started up in the clearing. It went whistling between the trunks, shaking the branches, bending the grass flat.
The air was thick with killing intent.
"What a lively day," said Nalan Meng from her treetop.
There were shadows under her eyes. A faint, bruised ache sat at the hinge of her jaw from the night before, that she had told herself she would think about later, or never. She did not think about it now. She lifted her chin and pointed the spear down at the Poison Emperor.
"First the Thief Emperor. Now the Poison Emperor. Could it be that the Banquet of Ten Emperors is being held in our little Nalan City today? If so, this little girl really can't bear it. Ten great gods—our little temple's too small for you!"
The Poison Emperor laughed. "The little girl has a bit of her father in her!"
"You know my father?" Her eyes narrowed.
"Know him? I poisoned a great many people for him, once upon a time. A pity, though. One bad move, and he never got to sit on the throne." The Poison Emperor shrugged. "Not that your father ever wanted it. He preferred the battlefield. The throne meant nothing to him. And what a pity that Li Guangyi—who stood with your father as one of the two heroes of Haotian—produced such a worthless prodigal son!"
As he said it, he glanced at Li Yuguo. His eyes were full of contempt.
Plainly, the Poison Emperor already knew a thing or two about the state of Nalan City.
"Even if he's a prodigal," said Nalan Meng, "he is still the consort of my house. In this world, only I get to teach him a lesson. I can beat him. But it's not your turn!"
She dropped out of the sky.
The spear came first—speared down out of the treetop like a dragon diving out of the clouds, straight at the Poison Emperor's heart. Its head flashed with cold light. Its force seemed endless. The wind of its passing tore at the grass on either side of the clearing in two long gusts.
The Poison Guards looked at each other and drew their poisoned swords and stepped in to shield their master.
But the Poison Emperor flung out his sleeve. "Everyone, back! This Emperor wants to taste the royal battle technique for himself!"
He brought his hands together before his chest. Between his palms, a sphere appeared—a ball of swirling, purple-black murk the size of a man's head, roiling in on itself like a stormcloud seen from above.
He glared. "Poison Sutra! Hundred Poisons Return to the Spirit!"
And he pushed it out at her.
The sphere flew, trailing purple vapor. Nalan Meng saw it coming. In mid-air, she stepped onto a willow leaf.
A single leaf, swirling past on the wind. She set the toe of her boot on it as if it were a stone, and pushed off from it, and flipped over backward in the air, her body arching gracefully through a full turn above the sphere as it passed beneath her.
It was a beautiful movement. And it saved her life.
The venom ball sailed past and struck a stand of dwarf trees at the edge of the clearing. Boom. More than ten of them, little gnarled things no taller than a man—and as everyone watched, with their own eyes, they began to wither. The leaves curled and blackened. The bark split. The trunks sagged. After a few breaths, there was nothing left of them but a stand of pitch-black dead sticks.
A butterfly drifted down onto one of them. The moment its feet touched the black wood, its wings shriveled. It fell.
No human body could bear that poison. Even a glancing touch would be the end.
Nalan Meng landed lightly in the grass and came up wary. Every muscle in her body had gone tight.
"Good girl. You really are talented." The Poison Emperor laughed. "When I think that a woman as gifted and beautiful as you is married to a useless thing who only knows how to eat soft rice—it really is a waste. A real injustice. Too bad I already have a wife. Otherwise, if you were willing to come over, it wouldn't be unthinkable—"
"Shut up, Bei Ya!"
She hurled his name back at him like a stone. Bei Ya—the name the Poison Emperor had been born with, that no one alive had dared to use to his face in twenty years.
Li Yuguo did not understand why Nalan Meng had come to save him. He did not have time to understand. She was here, and the fight had started, and he could not waste it.
He nodded at the King of Thieves.
The King of Thieves understood at once. His bound hands turned behind his back—one finger, curling—and around that finger something thin and bright uncoiled softly, glittering like a strand of spider silk, and in a single flick it parted the rope on both their wrists.
And Li Yuguo ran.
He ran straight for the tents—three dark-green canvas tents pitched under the trees at the far side of the clearing. Xue. You can't be hurt. You can't…
Behind him, Nalan Meng was struggling.
Not because she was outmatched. She was faster than the Poison Emperor, and her spear reached further. But she had to be safe every single moment—a hundred percent safe, with every step—and there were poisons everywhere, in every breath of air he breathed out, in the sleeves he flicked at her, in the grass where his feet had trodden. She had to spend half her strength just avoiding them. She could not get even half an inch of advantage.
And she saw Li Yuguo running away from the fight.
For an instant, she was stunned. She felt her heart contract.
The moment he's out of danger, she thought, he runs to save the little white-haired girl. She bit her lip. Of course he does. She's a child, and she's helpless, and she's his. And I'm—what? A woman who's beaten him for three years. Why would he stay for me? It hurt more than she had expected. Is it because I was too strict with him? Because I hit him so often?
"Concentrate on your fight!"
The Poison Emperor had seen her eyes move. There were three poison darts in his hand. He spun—his whole loose body whirling around once like a top—and they flew from his fingers at Nalan Meng in three streams of light.
Shh-shh!
Only two sounds. Because the third dart had already buried itself in Nalan Meng's thigh.
Her face changed. She jabbed two fingers into the acupoints above the wound, sealing it, and felt the poison stop and gather there, cold, a lump of ice under the skin.
The Poison Emperor laughed with pride. "My realm is higher than yours. My poison is stronger than yours. That is my Star Marrow Poison, little girl, and this Emperor carries no antidote for it. In three hours, there'll be nothing left of your legs but the bones. What a pity—such beautiful long legs!"
"Even if I die," said Nalan Meng, "I'll drag you down and bury you with me!"
And she came at him faster than ever.
The Poison Emperor had never seen a woman like this.
The women he had known cried when they cut a finger. This one had a lump of Star Marrow Poison sitting in her thigh, and she was getting angrier.
"Hah! Look at the bloodline of my five-clawed golden dragon!"
Nalan Meng threw down her spear. She curled her hands into claws—and behind her, rising out of the air, the shadow of a great golden dragon appeared, coiling, its five-toed claws spread wide, its eyes burning.
The Poison Emperor's face changed completely. "It really is—it really is the rare five-clawed golden dragon bloodline!"
Her claws were sheathed in the condensed edge of her Yuan power, sharp enough to tear iron. She lunged for his throat.
The Poison Emperor gritted his teeth and pushed both hands out. "Poison Barrier!"
Black smoke and poison gas came billowing out of his sleeves in a great choking wall, and Nalan Meng had to break off and twist away and come at him from another angle, and another.
Li Yuguo had found the tents.
He tore open the flap of the first one. Inside, in the green gloom, a small figure lay on a blanket on the ground with her hands tied in front of her and her white hair spread out around her head.
Jun Xue.
Her eyes were closed. A faint purple tinge had crept into her skin, all over—her cheeks, her lips, her small hands—like a bruise spreading under the surface. She was breathing, but only barely. She had been poisoned, and she was unconscious.
He cut her bonds with the little knife from her own shoulder bag. He picked her up. She weighed almost nothing. He carried her out of the tent, holding her against his chest, and turned toward the clearing—
And saw how bad it was.
Nalan Meng was in terrible trouble.
She had forced her bloodline awake to kill the Poison Emperor quickly. But a bloodline burns in the blood—and as she urged it on, the poison in her thigh was riding that blood straight through her body. He could see it. A dark, purple shadow spreading up from the wound under the skin of her leg, branching like a tree. If she went on like this, she would die too.
He was poisoned. The mushroom on his head was still growing; his thoughts were going soft at the edges.
The King of Thieves was poisoned.
Jun Xue was poisoned, limp and purple in his arms.
Damn it, he thought. This Poison Emperor is truly vicious.
He held Jun Xue tighter, and looked at the man with the purple veins, and began, very fast, to think.
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