Dice and Cards

The private sitting room behind the great hall smelled of sandalwood and warm plum wine, and when the last servant set down the last jug and bowed his way out, the heavy door closed behind him with a deep muffled thud that seemed to seal the four of them inside the lamplight like insects in amber.

Yan Tian had always liked this room. It was the place where he received the guests he did not want overheard, panelled in dark cedar so thick that it swallowed sound, with a low table of black lacquer in the middle of the floor and silk cushions arranged around it, and oil lamps in bronze stands that threw a warm amber glow across everything and left the corners in shadow.

He had settled treaties in this room and ended rivalries in it. Tonight he sat on the cushion at the head of the table with a cup of wine in his hand and his wife at his side, and across from him sat Elder Xuan Wu with his own wife, and Yan Tian could not have said with any certainty which of them was the host.

For a while they spoke of ordinary things, the way men of the demonic clans always did before they spoke of anything that mattered. Xuan Wu talked of the politics of the main sect, of which peaks were quarrelling this season and which Grand Elders had withdrawn into seclusion, and of the condition of the mountain roads to the east.

Yan Tian answered him in kind, with news of Jinling and the merchant houses and the border skirmishes in the south. The wine went down steadily, and the words grew looser as it did, and somewhere around the fourth jug Yan Tian found that he and the old elder had settled into each other's rhythm with an ease that unsettled him.

They understood power in the same way. They understood that it was the only language that the world ever truly listened to, and they spoke it fluently, and in the warmth of the wine it was almost like talking to an old friend.

The two women sat beside their husbands and supported the conversation with smiles and small murmured comments, and refilled the cups when they emptied, and in the lamplight their nearly naked bodies gleamed like polished ivory.

Yan Tian kept looking at his wife. He could not seem to stop. Yan Mei sat on her cushion with her knees folded under her and her hands in her lap, and the thin red strips across her breasts rose and fell with every breath she took, and the lamplight slid across the bare full curves of them and pooled in the hollow between them where the little chain ran down to her waist.

Her face was composed, her smile perfectly gracious, but he had been married to her for more than twenty years and he could see the tension knotted in her shoulders and the faint flush that had not left her throat since she walked into the banquet.

Elder Xuan Wu was looking at her as well. He had been looking at her all evening, openly and at his leisure, the way a man looks at a dish he has already ordered, and now he let his eyes travel slowly across the room, across the wine and the lamps and the bare rising and falling of Yan Mei's breasts, and set down his cup with a small decisive click.

"This is pleasant," he said, "but I find that conversation always tastes better with a little game to season it. Do you play dice, Family Head Yan?"

Yan Tian's fingers tightened very slightly around his cup. He had known something like this was coming. He thought he had probably known it from the moment Yan Mei walked into the great hall in clothes that matched Xuan Wei's, because he had heard the stories about this elder long before tonight, the same as every family head on the eastern side of the sect had heard them.

Xuan Wu's favourite game was known in more mansions than polite people liked to admit, and in certain branches of the main sect, men spoke its name the way they spoke the names of poisons, as something useful and dangerous and best left to whoever already knew he was going to win.

"I have played," Yan Tian said carefully. "Though I suspect not the way you play it, Elder."

Xuan Wu laughed, a dry, pleased sound, and reached into his sleeve. The rules were simple, and he explained them with the relish of a man describing a favourite meal. There would be two dice in a glass, and one man would shake them and set the glass down with its contents hidden, and the other would call the total as either small, meaning six or less, or big, meaning seven or more.

Then the glass would be lifted. And there would be a pack of cards, each one with a penalty written on it, to be drawn whenever a round was lost.

The twist, the one that had made the game famous and infamous in equal measure, was that the penalties did not fall on the men who rolled. They fell on the women who belonged to the man who lost. A husband's pride became the wager, and his wife's body became the board on which it was played.

Yan Tian heard his wife draw a small sharp breath beside him. He knew how it worked among their kind. A challenge from a higher authority could not be refused without a duel, and a duel against an inner elder of the main clan, the junior brother of Grand Elder Lan himself, was only a polite way of committing suicide.

Yan Tian stood at the fourth stage of the Heavenly Realm, and he was the strongest man in the Yan branch by a wide margin, and he could feel from where he sat that Xuan Wu was beyond him by a distance he could not even properly measure.

The only theoretical escape was to win a fight he had no chance of surviving. This was the cruel arithmetic of the demonic sects, and Yan Tian had lived by it his whole life. Only the will of the strongest was final.

A stronger man could take anything he wanted from a weaker one, his land or his treasure or his wife or his daughter, and the weaker man could only decide how gracefully he would hand it over.

He looked at Yan Mei. He looked at the thin red strips over her nipples, and at the shame in her eyes, and he heard himself say, "I accept, Elder. It would be my honour."

Yan Mei lowered her eyes. She did not argue, because she could not, and because she was the wife of a family head and knew exactly what he had just weighed and why. But her hands had tightened in her lap until the knuckles stood out white, and Yan Tian could see her pulse fluttering fast in the side of her throat.

Xuan Wu smiled like a man unwrapping a gift he had wrapped himself. He laid the cards on the table in a neat stack, and he told them with obvious pleasure that he had arranged them by weight, the lightest penalties at the top and the heaviest at the bottom, so that the game would grow more interesting the deeper they went.

Then he dropped two ivory dice into a small glass, covered its mouth with his palm, shook it so that the dice rattled sharply against the sides, and set it upside down in the middle of the table.

"Your call, Family Head."

Yan Tian's throat was dry despite all the wine he had drunk. He looked at the upturned glass for a long moment.

"Big," he said.

Xuan Wu lifted the glass. A four and a five lay on the lacquer.

Relief flickered through Yan Tian before he could stop it, and he despised himself a little for how much he felt it. Across the table, Xuan Wei reached out with her painted nails and turned over the top card, and held it up in the lamplight so that everyone could read it.

Remove one piece of clothing.

She reached up to the two thin strips of red that crossed her breasts and simply pulled them aside, and her breasts spilled free, full and heavy and pale, with nipples that had already drawn up tight and dark from the cool air and the wine.

It hardly made any difference to how much of her was on display, since almost everything else had already been bare. And yet seeing her completely topless, sitting there with her breasts bared across the table from him and a cup of wine held lazily in her hand, made Yan Tian's cock stir under his robes.

She was stronger than he was, a main-clan cultivator in her own right, and she was another man's wife, and the stiff dark points of her nipples drew his eye.

Yan Tian took the glass himself for the second round. He shook it until the dice clattered and set it down, and Xuan Wu called big without even appearing to think about it, and when Yan Tian lifted the glass, a one and a three looked up at them. He had won again. He felt his mouth begin to curve into something like confidence, and a small cold voice at the back of his head told him that it was much too early for that.

Xuan Wei drew the second card and read it aloud with a little smile.

Let the opposing player play with your breasts for one minute.

She rose without ceremony, walked around the end of the table with her bare breasts swaying, and sat down on the cushion beside Yan Tian as casually as if she were sitting down to a meal. On his other side, he felt Yan Mei go very still.

He took Xuan Wei's breasts in both hands. They were large and firm and warm, heavier than they looked, and they filled his palms with a ripe yielding weight that was different from his wife's in a way he could not have described but felt immediately.

He squeezed and kneaded them and ran his thumbs across the stiff nipples, and then, because a single minute was far too little time for politeness, he leaned down and took one nipple into his mouth and sucked on it hard.

Xuan Wei smelled of ginger and amber, a dry, expensive scent that rose from her skin with the warmth of the lamps, and under it of the wine on her breath. A small tremor ran through the muscle below her ribs when his thumbs passed over her nipples, the only sign that she was not made of stone.

Xuan Wei's expression barely changed. She sat with her chin lifted and her eyes half closed, calm and almost bored, as though having a family head's mouth at her breast were nothing more remarkable than a cup of tea.

When the minute was up, she rose and walked back around the table to her own cushion with his spit still shining on her nipple, and settled beside her husband, and smiled at Yan Mei.

Xuan Wu took the glass. He shook it, set it down, and waited. Yan Tian called small, and the dice came up a six and a five.

It was the first loss, and Yan Tian felt it land in the pit of his stomach like a stone dropped into a well. He turned his head and looked at his wife, and she looked back at him for a long moment before she reached out with a hand that was visibly shaking and turned over the next card.

Be spanked on the ass by the opposing player.

Nervousness passed over her face like a cloud across the moon. But she rose. She walked around the table to where Elder Xuan Wu sat waiting, smirking up at her with the patience of a man who had been looking forward to her ass since the afternoon in the courtyard, and she stood in front of him with her back turned, and after a moment she bent forward and braced her hands on her knees.

The thin rear panel did nothing to hide the full spread of her ass in that position.

Her cheeks were large and round and pale, and the cloth that had been meant to hang over the center of them had slipped aside to one hip. When Xuan Wu hooked a finger under its edge and lifted it out of the way altogether, there was nothing left at all except the fine chain of her scrap of underwear, already nestled deep in her crease.

He stroked her first.

He ran his palm slowly over one cheek and then the other, feeling the warm give of mature flesh and the faint tremor running through her. Yan Tian watched another man's hand move across his wife's bare ass for the first time in their marriage. The elder's fingers sank slightly. The flesh yielded. Yan Mei's breath hitched.

The lamp at the elder's elbow made her skin glow like warmed cream. A single drop of sweat slid from the base of her spine down into the cleft between her cheeks and vanished under the chain.

Then Xuan Wu lifted his palm and brought it down hard on her left cheek.

Slap!

The full round flesh shook with the impact, a heavy rippling quiver that ran across her ass and down the back of her thigh. When he took his hand away, the print of his palm was already blooming red against the white skin.

Slap!

He did the right cheek the same way, harder. Her breasts swung forward under her with the force of it. A small broken sound escaped her throat. The second handprint bloomed beside the first, and Yan Tian's cock throbbed so hard under his robes that he had to shift on his cushion.

Something went through Yan Tian then that he had never felt before. It was sharp and strange and unmistakably wrong, and it did not make him angry, as he would have expected it to. It made his cock harder.

For more than twenty years he had guarded Yan Mei's beauty like the treasure of a vault, and the rule had always been simple: other men could look, and envy, and never touch.

The shadow guards who had stood in the corners of his bedroom had been a private spice, something he had allowed himself in the dark, because their eyes on her had made him feel like a king who owned something no one else could have.

This was entirely different. This was another man's palm leaving its mark on flesh that Yan Tian had always called his alone, and he sat there with his cock throbbing under his robes and could not take his eyes off it.

Yan Mei straightened and walked back to her cushion with her face scarlet and her gaze on the floor. The red handprint stayed in Yan Tian's mind like a brand. So did the heavy bounce of her breasts when the slap had landed.

He won the next round. Xuan Wei drew her card and laughed when she read it, a low throaty sound of pure amusement.

Suck the opposing player's cock for two minutes.

Yan Tian did not need to be asked twice.

He pulled open the front of his robes and freed his cock, and it sprang up already hard and flushed dark from everything he had just watched. A bead of precum shone at the tip.

Xuan Wei came around the table and knelt between his knees and bent over his lap and took him into her mouth as if it were nothing at all.

To her, he supposed, it was nothing. She had clearly done this many times, in many rooms, in front of many people.

She sucked him with a practised, almost lazy passion.

Her tongue worked along the underside of his shaft. Her lips sealed tight around him. Her head bobbed in a slow steady rhythm that had him groaning before the first minute was gone.

Glk.

Glk.

Spit ran down his shaft onto his balls. She took him deeper, throat fluttering, then pulled up until only the head remained between her lips and swirled her tongue around it. He was dimly aware of Yan Mei beside him, sitting rigid on her cushion and watching another woman's head move in her husband's lap, and the awareness made it worse and better at once.

Then the two minutes were over and Xuan Wei let him slide out of her mouth with a wet sound.

A long string of spit stretched from her lower lip to his cock before it broke. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and walked back to her place as though she had just finished pouring tea. His cock stood wet and aching in the open air, and Yan Mei's eyes were still on it.

Yan Mei had not looked away once.

She had sat there through all of it with the handprint still burning on her ass and her hands knotted in her lap, and watched another woman's painted mouth slide up and down her husband's cock barely an arm's length from her knee.

The cushion under her knees had gone warm, and the red print on her bottom throbbed with her pulse so that she felt her own heartbeat there, a slow hot drumming. Across the table Xuan Wu's eyes rested on her face with idle interest, like a man watching a pot come to the boil.

She heard the wet sounds it made.

Glk. Slurp. Glk.

She had seen Tian'er's head fall back and his throat work as he groaned. In twenty years of marriage she had never once seen him with another woman. She had never even let herself imagine it.

Now that she had seen it, she could not stop seeing it, and what she felt was so tangled that she could find no name for any single strand of it.

There was jealousy, hot and sharp and humiliating. There was fear, because she understood far better than he seemed to where a game like this was meant to end.