Heavenly Gambling House

The noise of the Heavenly Gambling House poured down its front steps and out across the square like heat from an open furnace, a roaring confusion of rattling dice and slapped cards and men shouting over one another, and Yan Mei felt it break against her bare skin before she had even set her foot on the first stair.

She had known of the place for years, the way every respectable wife in Jinling knew of it, as a name spoken by husbands in the tone they used for things that were not discussed at dinner. She had never imagined she would see the inside of it.

Up close, it did not look like a common gambling den at all. The building rose five storeys above the square in tiers of dark lacquered timber, its green-tiled eaves curling up at the corners, its great doors bound in bronze and its pillars inlaid with gold, and the two guards who stood on either side of the entrance carried an aura that pressed on the air so heavily that no ordinary thug in the city would have dared to spit on the steps.

This was no tavern for drunk merchants to lose their wages in. The house was controlled, people said, by powerful figures in the main sect, and backed by names that made even the elders of branch families careful with their tongues.

Elder Xuan Wu had stopped walking at the edge of the square and was looking up at the signboard with an expression of simple, almost childlike pleasure.

Everyone who knew anything about him knew of his weakness for gambling, and the pause was answer enough. He did not say a word of explanation. He simply turned toward the doors and climbed the steps, and the rest of them followed without anyone asking whether they would.

Yan Tian's mouth tightened for a single breath and then smoothed again. Yan Mei felt her stomach drop away inside her like a stone falling into a well.

Beside her, Xuan Wei's eyes brightened with frank delight, and Elder Li's thin smile grew sharper, and Han Fei, trailing a step behind his master, cracked his knuckles one after another like a young fighter stepping into an arena.

The gate guards bowed to them as they reached the top of the steps, each bow measured precisely to the strength of the aura it was addressed to, so that Xuan Wu received the deepest and Han Fei the shallowest. Just inside the threshold, attendants in plain black came forward bearing lacquered trays, and on the trays lay rows of masks.

They were smooth and black and fitted to cover the upper half of the face, from the brow down to the cheekbones, leaving the mouth and chin free. The house required them of every guest.

So many people of high standing passed through these doors, the attendant explained with a practised bow, that the house preferred that their names and influence be left outside, so that a game of chance did not turn into a quarrel of politics.

Each of the six of them took a mask and put it on.

Yan Mei settled hers over her face with fingers that were not quite steady. She felt its cool silk lining against her brow and the faint scent of sandalwood trapped in it, and the narrow eyeholes framing her sight so that the hall beyond became a bright slot of gold and movement.

With her face hidden, her body seemed suddenly louder. She felt the strips across her nipples more keenly, and the chain between her breasts, and the damp silk between her thighs, as though the mask had taken her face away and left only flesh for anyone to read.

She understood with a strange jolt that from this moment on, no one in this building would know who she was.

The thought should have frightened her more than it did. For her entire adult life, her name had walked in front of her into every room like a herald, and it had protected her as surely as any armour.

Men looked at Lady Yan Mei, but they looked with care, because behind the name stood the family head of the Yan branch and his Heavenly Realm cultivation and the long memory of a demonic clan for insults. Inside this mask she was no one.

She was a body in red scraps with a black silk face, and whatever was done to her here would be done to a stranger. She did not know whether that made her safer or the exact opposite, and the not knowing sat in her stomach like cold iron as she followed the others across the threshold.

The two guards from the mansion were stopped at the door and turned back. Yan Mei saw the regret plain on their faces as the women they had been staring at all morning passed on into the golden light and the noise without them.

Then the house swallowed her.

Inside, the noise was a storm, layered and endless: dice clattering in cups and cards slapping down onto felt and men bellowing their wins and cursing their losses, waitresses laughing too brightly as they wove between the tables with trays held high. From somewhere across the floor came a wet, rhythmic smacking sound from a raised stage that Yan Mei refused to look at.

The hall stretched away in every direction under a ceiling hung with a hundred lanterns. The tables sprawled across it in loose clusters, some hosting ordinary games of dice and cards and some hosting games that were not ordinary in the least.

Spirit stones lay heaped on the felt in glittering hills. The air was thick with wine and perfume and sweat, and the sharp metallic tang of active talismans hung over everything like the smell before a thunderstorm.

The heat of it closed around her bare skin at once. Within ten steps she could feel a fine sweat beginning at the small of her back and under the heavy curves of her breasts, where the strips pressed, and in the crease of her thighs.

New arrivals always drew attention in a place like this. These new arrivals drew it the way blood in the water draws sharks, and it was not because of the old powerful aura rolling off Elder Xuan Wu. It was because of the two women walking beside the men.

The masks only made it worse.

A beautiful face half hidden became a mystery, and the mystery turned the women's shameless outfits from a scandal into an invitation. Heads turned at table after table as they passed. A dice cup stopped in mid-shake. A card player laid down his hand face up without noticing and his opponents did not notice either.

Men stared openly at Yan Mei's nearly bare breasts, at the heavy sway of them beneath their thin red strips and the pink edges of her areolae showing at either side. They stared at the panels clinging between her thighs. They stared at the long, shameless stride of Xuan Wei beside her, and back again at Yan Mei, comparing them the way buyers compare two horses at a fair.

Yan Mei felt the stares slide over her body like oil. They pooled in the hollow of her throat and ran down between her breasts and gathered, warm and heavy, at the damp silk between her legs.

Han Fei, walking behind the two women, watched the stares with an almost proprietary pleasure.

He had been his master's disciple for six years. In that time he had followed Elder Xuan Wu and his wife through a great many doors like these, in a great many cities, and he had learned that there was no entertainment in the world quite like watching a room full of strangers discover what Xuan Wei was.

But he had never before seen a room react the way this one was reacting to the Yan family head's wife.

The men looked at Xuan Wei and grinned. They looked at Yan Mei and forgot to breathe.

There was something about her, some quality of untouched dignity that clung to her even now, half naked and masked and walking with her ass bare. It was in the straight line of her back and the careful set of her shoulders and the way she held her chin up while her breasts bounced in their strips. It made every man who looked at her want to be the one to strip the last of it away.

Han Fei knew exactly how they felt. He had spent the night with two lovely maids who would do anything he asked, and he was still thinking about the wet patch he had seen on Lady Yan's little scrap of silk at the banquet.

This was a house famous for fulfilling desire while hiding identity, and the two of them looked like desire itself, masked and half naked and walking in on its own legs.

Elder Xuan Wu drifted across the floor like a man shopping for sin, pausing here and there to watch a game for a moment before moving on, until at last he stopped beside a table near the middle of the hall, and his mouth curved in recognition.

Four men sat in chairs around the table, and four women stood behind them, one behind each chair. A dense crowd had packed in close behind the women, peering over their shoulders and grinning and openly adjusting themselves through their robes.

The game in progress was already vulgar enough to make Yan Mei's throat close.

As they arrived, one of the standing women had her head tipped back and her lip caught between her teeth. A stranger from the crowd stood behind her with his hand thrust down the front of her dress. Yan Mei could see the shape of his knuckles moving under the thin fabric as he squeezed her bare breast, the flesh bulging between his fingers, and then the little jerk of the cloth as he found her dark nipple and pinched it hard.

The woman's breath came out of her in a shiver.

The crowd around them counted the seconds under its breath, a low, greedy murmur like a congregation at prayer.

It was the fourth and last round, Yan Mei gathered from the murmuring around her. When it ended, the stranger drew his hand out of the woman's dress with a lingering slowness, and the players rose from their seats and stood away, and a set of empty chairs waited.

Elder Xuan Wu liked this game. Yan Mei saw it at once in the set of his shoulders and in the slow pleasure spreading across the lower half of his face beneath the mask. Games of this kind were his favourite of all, luck wrapped around lust, with rules arranged so that any refusal would look like cowardice.

He sat down in one of the empty chairs without asking permission of anyone but his own appetite.

Xuan Wei stepped up behind him and stood there without a single question. She rested one hand lightly on the back of his chair and set her feet a little apart, her hips cocked, her breasts lifted proudly in their red strips, as though she had been born for exactly this position: the beautiful partner with her body offered to the public, waiting for whatever the cards demanded of it.

The lanterns overhead poured their light down over her. It gleamed on the curves of her breasts and on the gold of her waistband, and lit the faint wet shine already beginning on the inside of her thighs.

Then Xuan Wu turned his masked face toward Yan Tian and Yan Mei. The look was an invitation, and it was also a test.

Everyone at the table could see how shameless the game was. But for the sake of respect, and for the sake of not refusing an elder of the main clan in a house packed full of watching demonic cultivators, Yan Tian pulled out the chair beside Xuan Wu's and sat down.

Yan Mei had no choice except to follow him.

She took her place standing behind her husband's chair, so close that her bare thighs brushed the carved wood. The lacquer was cool against her skin. Her breasts rose and fell much too visibly beneath the anonymous black of her mask, each breath lifting them against their strips, and she felt the whole crowd behind her lean in.

She could feel their breath. Warm, wine-sour gusts of it on her bare shoulders and the nape of her neck and the exposed curves of her ass, as though a dozen mouths were hovering just behind her, waiting.

They were excited at once. She heard it in the sudden swell of whispering around her. Two new beauties entering a body-parts game was the sort of news that travelled across a gambling floor faster than a winning streak.

Elder Li and Han Fei had no partners to stand behind them, so they did not take seats. They stood among the crowd instead, behind the women, masked and watching. Two more pairs came forward to fill the remaining chairs.

The first was a sharp, clever-looking man in his middle years, with a mature woman in a close-fitting one-piece dress who still kept a fine figure. The second was a fat old man dripping with rings, with a much younger woman standing behind his chair, beautiful enough that the mismatch made the crowd snicker.

Yan Mei judged her to be twenty-two or twenty-three, a grown woman with a cultivator's straight back and a courtesan's painted mouth, and she wore the look of someone who had played this game many times before and been paid for every one of them.

So there were four men seated and four women standing, and the cards were waiting.

A house man in black came to the head of the table to explain the rules to the new players, in a voice that was bored with repetition and bright at the same time with professional filth.

"Each round ends with a winner and a loser among the players. The loser chooses one part of his own partner's body. The winner chooses any person he likes from the crowd, and that person may play with the chosen part for five minutes. Four rounds are played. You may choose only from these five parts: the breasts, the buttocks, the anus, the pussy, and the mouth. No part may be chosen twice."

Yan Mei's nerves spiked so violently that her fingertips went cold.

She heard the list again inside her head, slowly, each word a door that opened on its own kind of public shame. Breasts. Buttocks. Anus. Pussy. Mouth.

She stood behind her husband's chair with her nearly bare breasts at the eye level of the seated men and felt the attention of the crowd stroking over her skin like hands she had not invited.

In front of her, behind Xuan Wu's chair, Xuan Wei looked almost bored. Almost, except for the faint wet sheen that Yan Mei could already see beginning at the edges of her front panel, and the way her nipples had drawn up so hard that they tented the thin red strips.

Xuan Wei had played worse games than this one, and Yan Mei had not. What had happened in the sealed sitting room last night had been a catastrophe. This was the same catastrophe with an audience of a hundred strangers.

Yan Tian did not turn around. He spoke very quietly, so that only she could hear him over the din.

"Endure it."

It was not comfort. It might have been strategy. Or it might have been hunger, wearing strategy's mask.

The crowd pressed closer instead of drawing back. Men leaned in over the women's shoulders, someone laughed, and somewhere at the back a spirit stone clinked onto a side table as the first bets were laid on which of the two new beauties would break first.

The house man dealt two cards face down to each of the seated players. It was a game of pure luck, as he explained with a little flourish of his wrist, with no skill to it whatsoever. The lowest card on the table lost, and the highest pair won.

They turned their cards over.

In the first round, the clever-looking man held a pair of kings, and Elder Xuan Wu held the lowest card on the table, a miserable three.

He did not seem in the least disappointed. He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers across his stomach. Behind him, Xuan Wei did not move at all, except that her nipples tightened visibly under their strips, and the crowd saw it and murmured.

Xuan Wu named his own wife's body as calmly as if he were ordering wine.

"Breasts," he said.

The clever man turned in his chair and looked out over the crowd with the leisure of a man choosing fruit at a market stall, and after a moment pointed at a young man near the front with a broad chest and heavily muscled arms.

"You. Play with her tits however you like."

The young man came forward as though heaven had handed him a festival.

He stepped up behind Xuan Wei, which placed him directly at the back of the seated Elder Xuan Wu, who could not turn to see what was being done to his wife. He set both of his hands on her large bare breasts.

They were milky white and heavy, and they overflowed his palms. He hefted them for a moment as if he could not believe their weight, letting them settle and spill between his spread fingers.

Then he hooked his thumbs under the thin red strips and pulled them aside.

Her breasts dropped free. They bounced once, full and heavy, and swayed to stillness under the gambling-house lanterns, and the crowd roared its approval at the sight of them laid bare. Her dark pink nipples were already drawn up tight, standing proud from wide areolae that had puckered in the warm air.

He caught those nipples between two fingers and rolled them.

He tugged on them, drawing them out and letting them spring back, again and again, until Xuan Wei's breath hitched in her throat and her head tipped back against nothing.

"Mm," she said. Only that. But the sound went through the crowd like a struck string.

He had five minutes, and he meant to use all of them.

Before long the pinching had become sucking. He bent over her shoulder and drew one nipple into his mouth and sealed his lips around it, and she arched to give it to him. His tongue flicked across the tip. His teeth grazed it. He let it go with a wet sound and moved to the other, leaving the first one glistening and swollen and darker than before.

Slurp.

His free hand kneaded whichever breast was not in his mouth. His fingers sank deep into the soft white flesh and squeezed, and let go, and squeezed again, leaving faint red prints that bloomed and faded in the lantern light.

Xuan Wei pressed her thighs together. Yan Mei, standing beside her, could see the wetness gathering between them, a slick shine spreading down from the edge of her front panel.

She was enjoying the touch of a stranger in front of a masked crowd, and she was not hiding it in the least, because enjoying it was part of how she and her husband had always played this world.

Elder Xuan Wu sat facing forward the whole time, smiling faintly, waiting.

His cock was plainly hard beneath his robes from imagination alone, a long thick ridge lifting the silk across his lap. Every wet sound behind him made it twitch. Being denied the sight of his wife's breasts in another man's hands seemed, if anything, to excite him more.

Yan Mei could not stop watching.

She stood barely an arm's length from Xuan Wei. She was close enough to hear the wet sounds of the young man's mouth and the small catches in the other woman's breathing. She was close enough to smell the musk rising from between Xuan Wei's thighs, warm and sweet and unmistakable, and she found that she could not look away.

It was not only horror that held her there.

It was the calm on Xuan Wei's face: the half-closed eyes, the faint curve of the painted mouth, the utter absence of shame in a woman who was having her breasts sucked by a stranger in front of a hundred men while her husband sat with his back to her.

Yan Mei had spent twenty years believing that a woman's dignity was the one possession that no one could take from her unless she let it go. Watching Xuan Wei, she began to understand that some women let it go on purpose, and found something on the other side of it.

She did not know whether what she felt watching her was pity or envy. Her own nipples ached under their strips as if they had been the ones in his mouth.

The five minutes ended much too soon for the young man and not nearly soon enough for Yan Mei's nerves.

He let go of Xuan Wei's breasts slowly, one and then the other, as if he were handing back something borrowed. Her nipples were swollen dark and shining with his spit, and faint red fingermarks lay across the white curves where he had kneaded them.

Xuan Wei did not hurry to cover herself. She let the crowd look for a long moment, breathing deeply so that her breasts rose and fell under their eyes, and only then did she hook the red strips back over her nipples with two careless fingers.