Through the City

They left the mansion an hour later in a party of five: Yan Tian and Yan Mei, Elder Xuan Wu and Xuan Wei, and Grand Elder Yan Li walking a little apart with his hands clasped behind his back.

Han Fei came with them as well, a half-step behind his master in the place of a disciple and attendant, not counted among the five, his eyes bright with leftover appetite and a lively curiosity about what the morning might bring.

Two of the mansion's guards followed at the rear. It was a deliberately small escort, enough for convenience and far too few to make a procession of it. None of them needed protection; a single flick of cultivation from either of the two senior men could have emptied a street.

The escort was theatre, a way of saying to the city, look how casually we stroll with our guest through Jinling, and everyone who saw it would understand exactly what it meant.

The Yan family grounds ended quickly, and the city began almost at their front gate. Market roads ran down the hill between rows of tiled roofs, and the air was full of the smell of fried dough and roasting chestnuts and the sharp green tang of spirit herbs from the apothecaries' stalls, and the morning crowd of commoners and lesser cultivators was already pressing through the streets about its business. Within a dozen steps of the gate, heads began to turn.

It would have been impossible for them not to. Two women were walking down the middle of the road in clothes that barely deserved the name.

Xuan Wei went first, shameless and smiling. Her nipples were belted in thin red cloth and her panels swung with every stride, and her bare thighs flashed in the sunlight, long and pale and smooth. She walked as though she were proceeding down the aisle of a throne room to receive the applause that was her due, her hips rolling, her breasts lifting and settling in a slow, heavy rhythm.

Half a pace behind her own husband walked Yan Mei, forced into the matching design.

Her heavier breasts shook with every step she took. They rose and fell and swung a little to either side, so full that the wider strips across her nipples failed utterly to make her decent, and the chains between them chimed faintly against her skin. Below the gold of her waistband, the bare cheeks of her ass flexed on either side of the panel that had sunk out of sight between them, rising and falling in turn, the white flesh quivering a little each time her heel struck the road.

The two guards walking behind her watched those moving cheeks with open hunger. They silently prayed for a strong gust of wind, or a stumble, or one hard clear bounce that would show them everything at once.

The commoners stared, and the soldiers at the gate posts stared.

A vendor of steamed buns standing at his cart dropped a bun into the dust of the road and did not notice that he had done it. A woman hanging washing from an upper window stopped with a wet sheet in her hands and stared down at them, and then called sharply into the room behind her, and a moment later two more faces appeared at the window beside hers.

Grand Elder Yan Li walked through the stares with his own private aim burning clean and cold in his chest. He wanted Yan Mei exposed to the citizens of Jinling. He wanted her to feel what it was to be seen like this, by the cobbler and the water carrier and the beggar at the corner, by every common man in the city who had ever heard her name spoken with reverence.

For year upon year, Yan Tian had been so proud of his wife's beauty, so careful to keep it close and show it only at a distance, as a lord shows off a jewel he will never let anyone else hold.

Let every man in Jinling see now what all that pride had been hiding beneath its silk. Elder Li glanced at Xuan Wu, walking at his ease beside his wife, and saw in the old man's face that he understood exactly. Exhibition had always been one of the elder's hobbies. He meant to enjoy this as much as anyone.

Yan Mei kept her eyes fixed ahead and her face perfectly still.

She had threaded a fine line of qi through the strips across her breasts as they left the gate. It was a thin trickle of her own power woven into the silk to keep it pinned in place against her skin, because she could already feel how hard she was bouncing.

The heavy weight of her breasts lifted and dropped with every step. Her nipples dragged against the inside of the wider strips each time, back and forth, back and forth, until they were swollen and stinging and so sensitive that every footfall sent a small hot spark down through her belly. The threat of a slip was so constant that she could not let her shoulders loosen even for a moment.

Holding the qi there took more concentration than it should have, because her mind kept slipping away from it.

The front panel of her skirt fluttered against the bare lips of her pussy as she walked, lifting away in the breeze and settling back, lifting and settling, each brush of the silk a teasing little touch. The rear panel stayed buried in the cleft of her ass no matter how small she made her strides, and the cool morning air touched the exposed halves of her cheeks like fingers.

She could feel the guards staring behind her. She could feel Elder Li's gaze on her like a hand held an inch from her skin.

He wants all of them to look at me, she thought, and the understanding was worse than the looking itself. Because Tian'er was proud. Because my beauty was something private. Because humiliation always tastes better when a whole city can share the plate.

She passed a teahouse with its shutters thrown open to the street, and the conversation at every table inside it stopped at once, as cleanly as if someone had cut it with a knife.

Faces turned toward her from the shadowed interior. Cups halted halfway to lips. Somewhere a pot went on pouring until the tea ran over the rim of a bowl and across the table, and nobody moved to stop it.

A young man at the nearest table, a junior cultivator by his robes, stood halfway up from his bench to see better. His eyes went to her breasts and stuck there, then dropped to the damp red silk between her thighs and stuck there instead. His companion caught his sleeve and pulled him down, and then leaned out past him to look himself.

She heard someone say her name, low and disbelieving. Then another voice repeated it, and then a ripple of it moved away from her down the street ahead, travelling faster than she could walk.

Lady Yan Mei. That's Lady Yan Mei. The family head's wife.

By the time they had passed the next corner, there were people already standing in doorways waiting for her, shopkeepers and porters and housewives with baskets on their hips. They had been waiting because someone had run ahead to tell them she was coming.

She had walked these streets a thousand times. She had ridden through them in a curtained litter on festival days and been bowed to from both sides of the road.

She had bought silk at the shop on the next corner since before Yan Chi was born. The old silk merchant who stood in its doorway now with his mouth hanging open had once told her, with a courtly little bow, that she was the only woman in Jinling for whom he would cut his finest bolt at cost.

He did not bow now.

He stared at her breasts with his mouth open, at the heavy pale swell of them and the hard points pushing up through the red, as though he were measuring them for a gown. Then his eyes went to her hips as she passed, and to the bare white thigh flashing at the open side of her skirt.

When she had gone by, she felt his gaze drop to her ass and stay there. She could feel exactly where it rested, on the left cheek and then the right, following the roll of each one in turn as she walked, all the way to the end of the street.

She could feel, to her horror, the faint dampness beginning to gather against the silk of her front panel as she walked. It started as warmth. Then it became a slickness, a slow seep that made the silk cling and release and cling again with each stride, so that the cloth kissed her folds every time her thigh swung forward.

She knew that if it went on long enough, the thin cloth would cling to her and darken and show the whole city exactly what was happening to her under it.

She pressed her thighs together as she walked and tried to think of nothing at all. Pressing them together only squeezed the wet silk tighter against her, and she had to stop and breathe for a moment in the middle of the road before she could go on.

Xuan Wei walked ahead of her as though the stares were applause.

She paused at a jeweller's stall to admire a hairpin. She leaned across the counter to do it, slowly and deliberately, so that her bare breasts swung forward over the trays of rings, hanging heavy and pale above the glittering gold with their thin red strips pulled taut. One nipple very nearly brushed a tray of jade bangles.

The young apprentice behind the counter went crimson to the tips of his ears. He tried to name a price and his voice cracked in the middle of it. Xuan Wei laughed at him, a warm, throaty laugh, and paid him double, and slid the pin into her hair and walked on with her hips swaying.

When a pair of burly porters stopped dead in the road to gape at her, sweat shining on their bare chests and their loads forgotten on their shoulders, she blew them a kiss. One of them walked straight into a post.

Elder Xuan Wu walked as though the morning were a winning hand that had been dealt to him card by card. He strolled with his hands loosely clasped behind his back, nodding pleasantly at the sights that Elder Li pointed out to him, the old drum tower and the canal bridge and the temple of the river god, and he did not look at any of them for long.

Every few steps his gaze slid sideways to Yan Mei, to the bounce of her breasts and the flash of her thighs and the bare swing of her hips, and each time it did, his smile deepened a little more.

Han Fei, following behind his master, had given up any pretence of looking at the city.

He walked with his eyes on the two women's asses, Xuan Wei's tight and swaying and Yan Mei's fuller and heavier, rolling with a reluctant rhythm that was somehow even more obscene than his mistress's strut. He kept his hands clasped in front of his robes to hide what the sight was doing to him.

When one of the guards at the rear muttered something under his breath to the other, the disciple glanced back with a grin of perfect sympathy.

Yan Tian walked beside his wife and did not look at her at all. He looked at the city instead.

He looked at the faces of the men who had turned to stare as she passed, the merchant in his doorway and the porters in the road and the junior cultivator at the teahouse table. He studied the naked want on every one of them with an expression so carefully empty that only someone who knew him very well could have seen what was moving behind it.

He walked as though he were still deciding how much of this new hunger he was willing to claim in daylight.

Each stare that landed on Yan Mei seemed to land on him as well, and none of them hurt him the way he had always imagined they would. They went into him instead like strong wine, warm and dizzying, and spread outward from his chest into every part of him until he could feel his cock stirring under his robes in the middle of the public street.

Once, near the canal bridge, a gust of wind came down the water.

It caught the hanging panels of both women's skirts and lifted them high, and for one long, breathless instant half the street saw everything.

Yan Mei felt the cold air rush across her bare pussy and her bare ass at once. It was so sudden and so complete that for a heartbeat she seemed to be standing naked in the middle of Jinling with her whole body open to the sky. The front panel flew up against her belly. The rear one pulled free of her cleft and snapped out behind her like a flag. The breeze slid between her thighs and over her damp, swollen folds, cold enough to make her gasp.

She heard the gasp go up around her, a ripple of breath drawn in by a hundred throats.

She caught at the front panel with both hands to hold it down. Then she had to snatch one hand back up to her breasts as her concentration broke and the qi holding her strips in place guttered and nearly failed. One strip slid. For a heartbeat the hard pink tip of her left nipple was bare to the street before her fingers found it and pressed the silk back down.

Xuan Wei did not reach for her skirts at all.

She only laughed. She turned in a slow circle in the wind with her arms spread wide like a dancer, her panels streaming, her breasts lifting with her arms, so that the whole street could see her bare pussy and her bare ass from every side.

When the gust had passed and the panels had settled again, Yan Mei found that her face was burning so hot she could barely see. Her husband had stopped walking. He was standing very still beside her with his breath coming fast.

He did not say anything. After a moment he simply walked on, and she followed him, because there was nothing else to do.

"There is a place," Elder Li was saying pleasantly to Xuan Wu a little further on, as they turned out of the market road into a wider avenue lined with red lanterns, "that I think might interest you, Elder. It is something of a local institution. The Heavenly Gambling House. Every man of means in Jinling passes through its doors sooner or later, and they say that some of the games played on its upper floors are not found anywhere else in the eastern provinces."

"Games," Xuan Wu repeated, in a tone of polite and very lively interest. He glanced over his shoulder at Yan Mei, and then at her husband, and smiled. "Do you hear that, Family Head Yan? You know how much I enjoy a game."

"I know," said Yan Tian.

Ahead of them, at the far end of the avenue where it widened into a paved square, a great building of five storeys rose above the surrounding rooftops, with eaves of green glazed tile curling up at every corner like the tails of dragons, and a huge lacquered signboard hung above its doors with the characters for Heaven and Fortune picked out in gold leaf a full arm's length high.

Even at this hour of the morning, men were going in and out beneath it in a steady stream, and from somewhere inside came the faint sharp rattle of dice, and a roar of voices rising and falling like surf.

Yan Mei looked up at the signboard, and at the dark doorway beneath it with the noise rolling out, and the qi that she had threaded through the strips across her breasts trembled for a moment before she caught it and pulled it tight again.

Xuan Wei slipped her arm through hers, exactly as she had done the evening before on the way to the banquet, and smiled at her with real warmth.

"Smile, Sister Yan," she said. "Everyone is looking at you."