Seven-Storey Pavilion

They walked back through the forest together in the slanting late-afternoon light. For the first part of the way neither of them said anything at all. The path ran downhill between the old oaks and the rust-barked spirit-pines, the needles springy underfoot, the air cool and resinous and full of birdsong, and they could see no sign of Cao Ning anywhere ahead of them. She had either run or flown. Yan Chi suspected she had flown.

It was Wang Xuan who broke the silence, as Yan Chi had known he would. He lasted until the first glimpse of Jinling's walls through the trees, and then he sidled closer on the path and said in a low, conspiratorial voice, "Did you see it?"

Yan Chi kept his eyes on the road. A long moment passed.

"It was an amazing view," he said.

Wang Xuan let out a breath like a man releasing a prayer, and slapped Yan Chi on the back so hard he staggered. "I knew it! I knew you saw it. Your face, brother! Your face when she turned around! You looked like a thief with both hands in the treasury!"

He laughed, a great booming merchant laugh that scattered birds out of the branches overhead. "But I saw it first. From underneath. I'm only saying, for the record. I saw it from underneath, in the water, the whole way across, with the light coming down through it like a temple window."

"You nearly died for it."

"I would die for it again," said Wang Xuan, with complete sincerity, and then, after a thoughtful pause, "but preferably in a bath."

They came out of the forest onto the willow road and walked the rest of the way to the western gate in companionable, guilty, delighted silence. The sun was setting behind them now, and their two shadows stretched long ahead of them on the dust, one lean and one round, like a brush stroke and an ink blot.

At the gate the guards glanced at Wang Xuan's still-damp hair and the lake weed caught on his shoe and decided it was not worth asking. Jinling closed around them again: noise and smoke and lantern light, the clatter of carts, the evening crowds pouring out of the markets toward their suppers.

Wang Xuan led him east, through streets Yan Chi had never walked, into a quarter of the city where the houses grew taller and richer and the lanterns hung thicker and redder with every turn.

"You've never been to the Jade Fragrance Pavilion," Wang Xuan said, when Yan Chi admitted it. "Of course you haven't. You were a recluse before, brother, everyone knew it. You hardly left your courtyard. Then all of a sudden you're beating Yan Jing in front of the whole branch, and now you're skimming across lakes like a dragonfly." He grinned. "I like the new you. The new you is the kind of man who should know the Pavilion."

"Tell me about it, then."

Wang Xuan told him with the enthusiasm of a scholar describing a beloved classic. The Jade Fragrance Pavilion, he explained, was not a brothel the way the cheap wine-houses by the river docks were brothels. It was an institution. It belonged, in everything but name, to Grand Elder Zhang Yueying of Jade Serpent Peak, one of the most feared women in the main sect, and the women who worked there were nearly all her disciples, or disciples of her disciples, cultivators of the yin arts.

They were not there only for gold. Every man who lay down with one of them gave up a little of his yang essence in the act, and the women drank it and grew stronger, and what they drank built Jade Serpent Peak's strength year after year.

"So they cultivate on us," Yan Chi said.

"They cultivate on us," Wang Xuan agreed happily. "And we pay them for the privilege. And it's still the best bargain in the city." He lowered his voice.

"And there's another thing. Men talk in bed. Every merchant, every official, every inner disciple who drinks too much and lies down at the Pavilion tells his woman things he would never tell his wife. Zhang Yueying knows everything that happens in Jinling a day before the City Lord does. My father says that's the real reason the Pavilion exists." He shrugged. "My father says a lot of things. Here we are."

The Jade Fragrance Pavilion rose at the end of a broad street paved with green stone, and Yan Chi, who had grown up among the halls of the Yan mansion, still stopped walking to look at it.

It was seven storeys tall, a slender tower of dark lacquered wood and pale jade-green tile, each roof curling up at the corners into the shape of a serpent's head with a lantern hanging from its open jaws. Lanterns hung everywhere, red and gold and pale jade, so many that the whole building glowed in the dusk like a lamp itself. Music drifted down from the upper floors, a zither and a flute twined together in a slow, lazy melody.

A scent rolled out of the open doors into the street, jasmine and sandalwood and something warmer and muskier beneath them, a smell that went straight past Yan Chi's nose and into his belly. Two guards stood at the gate in green silk, broad men with swords on their hips and the quiet stillness of Qi Consolidation cultivators, and they bowed to Wang Xuan by name.

Inside was a wide hall lit by a hundred hanging lamps. The floor was polished black stone that reflected the lamplight like still water. Low tables stood scattered across it among screens painted with coiling serpents and blossoming plum, and at the tables sat men of every kind: fat merchants in brocade, lean cultivators in sect robes, a pair of grizzled officials with their caps set aside, a young man who could not have been much older than Yan Chi blushing furiously at a woman who was feeding him grapes.

And the women. They moved among the tables in silks so fine they floated, green and white and palest rose, slit and sheer and draped to show a shoulder here, a long bare thigh there, the full side swell of a breast, and they all moved with the same unhurried, flowing grace, like water finding its way downhill.

Every one of them was beautiful. Every one of them, Yan Chi realized with a small shock, was stronger than him.

A woman came across the hall to meet them. She was older than the others, perhaps forty, with a calm, lovely, knowing face and her black hair coiled high with jade pins, and she wore a gown of dark green silk that covered her from throat to ankle and was somehow more alluring than any of the bare thighs around her. She bowed to Wang Xuan like an old friend.

"Young Master Wang. Twice in one week." Her voice was warm and amused. "Your father will think we have kidnapped you."

"My father thinks I'm at my tutor's," Wang Xuan said. "Madam Qin, this is my sworn brother, Young Master Yan of the Yan branch. It's his first time."

Madam Qin turned her gaze on Yan Chi, and for a moment he felt weighed, measured and filed away, as if she had looked straight through his skin and read the stage of his cultivation off his meridians. Perhaps she had. Then she smiled.

"The Yan young master," she said. "Who beat his cousin in the family courtyard. We heard." She bowed to him, a shade deeper than she had bowed to Wang Xuan. "Welcome to the Jade Fragrance Pavilion. Please, sit, and choose at your leisure."

She led them to a low table near a painted screen and set a tablet of polished jade in front of them before she withdrew. Carved into its face in elegant gold characters, beside small painted portraits of women, was a list. Yan Chi read it and felt his eyebrows climb.

[Qi Refining courtesans — 10,000 gold] [Qi Consolidation courtesans — 100,000 gold] [Heavenly Realm — 2,000,000 gold. By appointment.]

He did the arithmetic twice. A hundred thousand gold was more than many merchant families in Jinling earned in a year. The Yan branch kept its accounts tightly; his own monthly allowance as young master, which he had thought generous, would not have bought him the Qi Refining tier.

Wang Xuan did not even look at the tablet. He caught the eye of a passing attendant and held up two fingers with the casual air of a man ordering tea.

"Qi Consolidation," he said. "Two."

"Brother," Yan Chi began, "I can't—"

"You can't, but I can, and I'm paying." Wang Xuan waved his hand. "My father's gold has to be good for something. You nearly drowned trying to save me."

"I didn't, actually. She saved you. I waited in the reeds."

"You nearly thought about drowning trying to save me," Wang Xuan said magnanimously. "It's the thought that counts."

The two women came down the stairs a few minutes later, and every man at the nearby tables turned his head to watch them cross the hall.

The first was tall, nearly as tall as Yan Chi, slender and long-limbed, with black hair worn loose to her waist and large, very dark eyes, black as ink, tilted at the corners. Her lips were full and stained a deep berry color, and she wore a sheath of white silk so thin that the dark points of her nipples showed through it and the long bare line of one leg flashed through a slit that ran from her ankle to her hip.

She looked about twenty-six. She walked straight to Wang Xuan, slid into his lap as though she had been born there, and took his round chin between her finger and thumb.

"Young Master Wang," she purred. "You came back for me."

"Ruolan," Wang Xuan said, already dazed. "I've had a terrible day."

"Then I'll make it a better night."

The second woman was smaller and rounder, with thick chestnut hair caught up loosely at the back of her head so that tendrils of it fell around her face, and warm brown eyes, and a wide warm smile that dimpled one cheek. She looked perhaps twenty-four.

Her gown was pale rose and wrapped loosely at the waist, and it fell open a little at the top as she bowed, enough to show the deep shadowed valley between two very full breasts. Her aura was quiet and deep, like a still pool, and it pressed on Yan Chi's senses with the unmistakable weight of a realm far above his own.

"Lianhua," she said, and sat down beside him rather than on him, close enough that her thigh pressed warm against his. She studied his face with open interest. "Your first time here. And not your first time with a woman, I think. But nearly." She tilted her head, and her smile deepened. "You have a strange qi, Young Master Yan. Very dense, for your stage. And very hungry."

"Is that bad?"

"No," said Lianhua. She picked up his hand from the table and laid it on her thigh, over the rose silk, and slid it slowly upward. "Hungry is good. Come upstairs."

They climbed to the third floor together, the four of them, along a gallery where the lamps were dimmer and the music softer and the air thick with incense. Behind the sliding doors on either side Yan Chi could hear sounds that made his cock harden against his trousers: a woman's laugh turning into a moan, the rhythmic creak of a bed frame, a man's low voice saying something urgent, the unmistakable slap of skin on skin.

The women led them to the end of the gallery, to a large room with two wide beds set on either side of it and a half-folded silk screen standing between them, painted with a pair of serpents twined together in a long green coil.

"Young Master Wang prefers company," Ruolan explained, with a sly sidelong look at Yan Chi. "He says it's more fun with a brother in the room. Do you mind?"

Yan Chi thought of the shallows, of the look he and Wang Xuan had shared over Cao Ning's head, and found that he did not mind at all.

On the far side of the screen, Wang Xuan was already losing his robe. Yan Chi heard the rustle of brocade and the thump of a heavy body falling back onto a mattress, and Ruolan's low laugh, and then Wang Xuan's voice, hoarse with impatience, saying two words that needed no translation.

"Ass up."

Through the gap at the end of the screen Yan Chi glimpsed the tall courtesan climbing onto the bed on her hands and knees with her white silk shoved up around her waist, her long black hair spilling forward over one shoulder, her narrow hips lifted high. Her ass was small and taut and smooth as polished ivory.

Wang Xuan knelt up behind it with his belly hanging over his thick, eager cock, gripped her slender waist in both hands, and pushed into her in one long, greedy shove that made her arch her back and hiss.

Plap.

Then Lianhua stepped between Yan Chi and the gap and he forgot that Wang Xuan existed.

She untied the sash of her rose gown with one tug and let the silk slip off her shoulders and fall around her feet, and stood in front of him naked in the lamplight. Her body was lush and generous everywhere, a body made for holding: breasts large and full and yielding, crowned with wide, light-brown nipples that were already stiffening in the warm air, a gently rounded belly, full hips, thighs that pressed together at the top.

Between them her mound was smooth and bare. A faint green pattern shimmered on her skin just below her navel, the coiled serpent of Jade Serpent Peak, glowing faintly as her yin qi stirred.

"Let me see you," she said, and undressed him herself, slowly, kissing each piece of skin she uncovered: his throat, his collarbone, his chest, his stomach. When she pulled his trousers down his cock sprang free and slapped against his belly, flushed and hard and already wet at the tip, and she looked at it and her warm brown eyes widened a little, and then she smiled her dimpled smile and went to her knees.

She did not take him in her mouth at first. She held his cock in one small hand and studied it, turning it a little in the lamplight, and then she put out her tongue, and he saw that it was longer than a tongue had any right to be, narrow and pink and very agile. It curled around the head of his cock like a living thing.

It slid down the underside, flicked across the swollen ridge, circled the slit, then wound once all the way around his shaft in a slick, tight spiral and squeezed. Yan Chi's knees almost gave way. Lianhua laughed softly around him and drew back and licked her lips.

"Jade Serpent," she said. "Our arts are mostly in the tongue. You'll see." She rose and pulled him down onto the bed. "But first, inside."

She lay back on the silk sheets with her chestnut hair spread around her head and opened her thighs wide for him, and he saw her pussy properly for the first time: plump and smooth, the outer lips full and slightly parted, the inner lips thin and flushed a dark rose and glistening, the whole of her already slick and shining with wetness.

He knelt between her legs. She reached down and took his cock and guided it herself, rubbing the head up and down through her slit two or three times, coating him, until it found her entrance and settled there, and she looked up at him and nodded. He pushed in.

She was hot inside, hotter than the twins, hot as a bath, and she was tight, and then she did something with her muscles and her qi together that made her pussy ripple around him from the root of his cock to the tip in a slow, squeezing wave, like a throat swallowing. He groaned out loud. On the other side of the screen Wang Xuan was groaning too, and Ruolan was laughing breathlessly, and the bed there was creaking in a hard, fast rhythm.

Plap! Plap! Plap!

Yan Chi began to move. He drew back until only the head of his cock was still inside her and drove forward again to the hilt, and her full breasts bounced with the impact and her lips parted on a moan, and he did it again, and again, finding a rhythm, the deep liquid sounds of her pussy taking him filling the space between their bodies. She wrapped her legs around his waist and dug her heels into his back to pull him deeper.

Her nails raked lightly down his spine. Every time he bottomed out inside her, she rippled around him again, that slow milking wave, and every time he felt something leave him, a thin, warm thread of heat drawn out of his dantian and down through his cock into her, and the green serpent on her belly glowed a little brighter.

She's drinking me, he thought dizzily. She's literally drinking me.

He did not care. He bent and took one of her heavy breasts in his mouth and sucked the wide brown nipple until it stood stiff against his tongue, and she cried out and arched under him, and her pussy clenched so hard around him that he had to stop moving and hold still and breathe, or it would all have been over.

"Not yet," she whispered, stroking his hair. "Not yet, young master. I have something to show you."