The Masked Slave Arrives

The floor lead caught Yan Chi by the sleeve before he had finished his second circuit of the terrace, took one look at his clean kitchen whites, and steered him back through the staff door with a grip like a crab's claw.

"Whites are for the corridors," the floor lead said, already pulling a bundle from a cedar chest stacked with them. "The first bell's about to ring. After the first bell, everyone on the guest floor wears the theme, staff included. You walk out there dressed like a temple novice and some merchant will think we're mocking him." He shoved the bundle into Yan Chi's arms. "Change. Fast. Mask stays on."

The theme uniform turned out to be a pair of black silk trousers and nothing else worth naming. Yan Chi stepped into them in a cramped dressing alcove that smelled of starch and other men's sweat, tied the drawstring, looked down, and understood at once why the floor lead had not bothered to explain.

The trousers had been cut open at the crotch on purpose, a neat oval window of nothing framed by stitched black piping, so that the only thing between his cock and the eyes of Jinling's elite was a pair of thin cotton underwear the color of weak tea. Cool air found the tender skin of his balls through the gap.

His cock lay against the cheap cloth in plain outline, and he knew without testing that once the heat of the hall got to it, the cloth would hide nothing at all. A face mask covered the rest of him, plain black, eyes only. That part was easy. Every waiter wore one.

Anonymous service, anonymous stares, anonymous flesh if some game needed an extra prop. He picked up a tray, settled his breathing, and followed the line of other half-dressed waiters back out into the light.

Wang Xuan had arranged all of it with the oily confidence of a merchant heir who treated rules as suggestions to be bought with wine, and then had vanished into the guest preparations, laughing about how his brother would learn real culture before the academy ruined him.

Yan Chi had sent Qiuyu and Dongyu home before dusk, and now, walking out onto the guest floor with his cock framed in a silk window, he was glad of it. Beautiful twins drew eyes, and eyes asked questions, and questions were how masks slipped.

Alone meant fewer people who could look at a waiter's jaw and think Yan. Alone also meant he could stare at whatever he liked without two jealous young women whispering into his ears.

The Merchant Association's celebration mansion opened into a single enormous floor under rows of high lanterns, and in the half hour since he had first walked onto the terrace, it had changed. The low tables had been pushed back to the edges.

In their place stood the night's real furniture, scattered across polished wood that shone like dark still water: ramps built for crawling, padded tables sized for bending, a raised platform with two lacquered boxes for drawing lots, a ring of stools around a small stage, and racks of toys along the walls that Yan Chi understood without needing to read the labels.

Incense drifted from bronze burners shaped like coiled carp. Perfume rolled off the guests in layers. Beneath both, faint and animal and growing, lay the smell that every rich room grew by the second hour: aroused bodies, sweat, oil, cunt.

Along one wall stood the male waiters with their drink trays held at chest height, all of them trying very hard not to look as though they were counting tits, and all of them failing.

From the far entrance, the waitresses arrived.

Yan Chi's cock stirred so hard it pressed the tea-colored cotton out through the window of his trousers, and he had to shift his tray lower to hide it, which did nothing, because hiding things was not what the uniform had been designed for.

There were perhaps twenty of them, young women in their twenties, and they wore eye masks and almost nothing else that mattered. Two parallel leather belts ran across each woman's chest, one above the breasts and one below, cinched tight so that they squeezed the flesh between them up and forward while leaving the full swell of it completely bare.

Warm skin bulged between the straps. Nipples stood stiff in the incense-thick air, some pressing against the lower edge of the upper belt, some fully free. A matching collar circled every throat, and from it a single vertical strap ran down between the breasts to join the upper belt, like a leash that had decided to become fashion.

Below the waist they wore leather trousers and high wooden heels, and the trousers had been cut away at the crotch and the rear so thoroughly that only a threadbare scrap of underwear pretended to cover anything. Through that scrap the shapes of labia showed plain.

Between the cut-away leather the bare cheeks of their asses rolled with every heeled step. On more than one of them the scrap was already dark at its center, a damp coin of arousal that its owner did not trouble to hide.

They were beautiful, and they knew it, and they walked as if the hall belonged to them. Every male guest in sight of the entrance was visibly hard within three breaths of their arrival, and not one of them pretended otherwise. In the demonic lands, staring was manners.

Yan Chi adjusted his tray and told his cock to behave. His cock ignored him and kept pressing at the silk window like a prisoner at a cell door.

Then the guests began to arrive with their slaves, and the hall filled.

The merchants came first, men who wore their wealth like armor and their ownership like perfume, and each of them brought at least one beauty on a chain. The doorway became a parade of provocation: thin golden chains strung across bare breasts, scraps of silk that covered a nipple and nothing else, waist cords hung with tiny bells, butt plugs topped with jade or pearl or polished garnet winking between bare cheeks, nipple plates of gold and silver catching the lantern light.

Some of the slaves were plainly mortal, plush-bodied pleasure-house beauties who thrived in the trade. Some were cultivators in their own right, women with strong straight spines and auras that pressed faintly on the air, wearing their collars the way a proud woman wears a jeweled choker.

All of them walked like women who expected to be looked at. Yan Chi served wine and used every bow as an excuse to look. Round bare asses swayed under waist ornaments. Underwear darkened.

A slim slave with silver bells at her ankles walked past so close to his tray that he caught the scent of her cunt through the thin cloth between her legs, sweet and sharp, and nearly tipped a cup of plum wine down the front of a jade merchant's robe.

A few steps away he saw Wang Xuan.

The fat young master stood near a pillar with a drink in one hand and a chain in the other, and on the end of the chain knelt his new mother-slave, the full-bodied one from the sofa, her mature curves arranged in merchant scraps.

Wang Xuan's greasy grin was not hidden half as well by his mask as he probably believed. On his right stood an older, fatter man in expensive layered robes of plum and gold, his chest hung with so many enchanted ornaments that he looked as if he could have walked through an ambush and come out the other side with his tea unspilled.

Rings as thick as knuckle-guards circled every finger. His smile was the smile of a man who bought people. Yan Chi did not need the mask removed to know him. He had seen that smile at a dozen association banquets, beaming at his father across the table. Merchant Association leader Wang Fengrui.

Yan Chi's eyes slid down to the slave at Fengrui's side, and jealousy hit him like an open-handed slap.

She was dressed to show almost everything, and to show it as property. Two narrow strips of cloth ran down from her collar through the middle of her chest, one on either side of her breastbone, framing her breasts without covering them at all, so that two full, white, rose-tipped mounds sat bare between the strips like fruit on a dish.

The strips ran on down over her belly and merged at the very top of her mound, where they became a single narrow band that covered the beginning of her slit and left the plump rest of her lips open to the air. From behind she looked naked.

The band did not continue up over her ass; it ran between her cheeks and ended in the base of a plug seated in her anus, so that every step she took tugged the toy and every sway of her hips announced who held her chain. A thin waist chain glittered at her middle.

Brown hair fell in a shining sheet down her bare back almost to the small of it. Behind her mask her eyes were calm and dignified and not at all empty. She was no frightened toy.

She stood at Fengrui's side with her chin level and her spine straight, as if being displayed beside the richest merchant in Jinling were a position she had won rather than been given, and every passing guest measured her.

Not only Fengrui. Half the merchants and great guests in the hall had brought beauties who could have bankrupted a lesser clan, and the hall had become a paradise built for men who could afford to buy shame and call it celebration. Masks hid names. Auras and bellies and the shapes of shoulders betrayed the famous anyway.

Wang Fengrui was recognizable. His son was recognizable. Voices carried over low drums and a flute melody so sweet it was almost filthy. From a side stage near the toy racks came the first wet sounds of the evening, where somebody had apparently decided not to wait for the bell.

Yan Chi kept his waiter's head down, his tray level, and his eyes busy, and catalogued every curve in the room.

A ripple went through the hall from the main doors, the kind of ripple that runs through still water when something heavy enters it, and Yan Chi turned with his tray like everyone else.

A tall man in a black robe walked onto the guest floor with the unhurried authority of a man who did not need to announce himself, and a woman walked beside him on a chain.

The man's mask was dark lacquer worked with a single silver line across the brow, and it hid nothing that mattered. Yan Chi knew those shoulders. He knew that walk, the way the weight settled into each step as if the floor ought to be grateful. He knew the aura that pressed faintly against every cultivator in the room and made the weaker ones lower their eyes without understanding why.

Patriarch Yan Tian. His father. The chain in Yan Tian's hand was silver and two meters long, and it ended at a collar of sky-blue leather and gold around the throat of a woman whose body made the entire floor stop breathing.

She wore a veil of pale gauze over the lower half of her face and a mask of sky-blue silk over her eyes, and the rest of her was a lesson in how little a costume needed in order to stop a room.

Gold nipple plates, shaped like tiny suns, gripped her nipples and dangled from fine chains that linked across her chest to the collar, so that her full, heavy breasts were bare and framed and faintly lifted, swaying with each step and making the gold flash.

A sky-blue scrap of silk hung from a slender gold waist chain to cover the front of her pussy and nothing else, and it was already pressed into the shape of her lips by the time she reached the edge of the floor. Behind, there was nothing.

A wide, round, flawless ass rolled freely with every step, white as fresh milk against the dark polished floor, and between the cheeks, catching the light every time her hips swayed, sat the jeweled base of a plug.

She walked in sky-blue heeled slippers with her spine straight and her chin high, and if she was ashamed of anything, she was carrying it the way a queen carries a heavy crown.

Yan Chi's cock stopped asking permission and went fully hard against the cheap cotton in his crotch window. The tray in his hand tilted. A cup slid an inch toward the edge and he caught it with a reflex he told himself was cultivation.

He knew those shoulders too. He knew that waist, and the lift of those hips, and the dark sheen of the hair pinned high under the veil. He had watched that ass in a sky-blue robe walk away from him down courtyard corridors for weeks. He had watched it bent over a bathing stool through a crack in a screen. He had been inside his own head with it more nights than he would ever admit to a living soul.

Mother.

Yan Mei. Her name came with a strange double weight. The young man whose body he now wore had loved her plainly all his life, the way children love the woman who tucks them in and scolds them for muddy shoes, and that old heart lurched once in his chest like a dog that has heard its name.

The man who wore the body now had read her name in a System list, had already earned points from her pleasure, and could not stop looking at the plug. Both of them were him. Neither could look away.

The arrival had silenced the floor for a full breath, and then the whispers began in earnest, rising in a murmur that rolled from the entrance toward the stages.

"Who is she?"

"That's Yan Tian, isn't it? Who else walks like that?"

"Then who's the woman? He never brings anyone to these."

"Look at that ass. Heavens, look at it. Somebody pinch me."

"His wife's a Heavenly-realm cultivator. If that's his slave, she'll have the wife's knives in her back by morning."

Two men in the clump nearest Yan Chi had their heads together. One wore a red lacquered mask and an air of unearned wisdom, and he raised his cup toward the newcomer as if toasting a successful theft. "Be careful," he said under his breath, but loudly enough for the gossip to land on four sets of ears. "Masks are masks for a reason. Nobody here says anyone's name, and nobody here guesses anyone's slave out loud. You know what happened to the last man who did."

The other man laughed nervously and drank. "I didn't say a name."

"You were about to," said the red mask, and then he looked at the woman's ass again, and his voice lost its edge. "Not that I blame you. Look at that body. Whoever she is, he must have paid a fortune for her."

Every conversation on the floor eventually folded toward the same conclusion, because the alternative was unthinkable: Patriarch Yan Tian had brought a slave whose body looked very much like his wife's body, and that was the kind of joke only a man of his power could make.

Merchants who had dined beside Lady Yan Mei at banquets stared at the blue mask and saw only an unknown beauty. Men who had spent years being too frightened of Yan Tian to look at his wife for longer than a bow now looked at this slave for as long as they liked, and drank in the plug, and the sky-blue scrap, and the gold suns on her nipples, and did not know what they were seeing.

A few of the waitresses had stopped moving entirely. One of them, a young woman with a beauty spot under her eye mask, whispered something to her neighbor and both of them looked at the newcomer's ass and then at each other.

Across the floor, Wang Xuan had gone very still.

Yan Chi watched it happen and felt his stomach drop. The fat young master's eyes, behind his mask, had moved from the gold nipple plates to the woman's waist to her walk, and stayed there with a stillness that did not belong on that greasy face.

Wang Xuan had known Lady Yan Mei since they were small boys playing in the Yan gardens, when she had scolded them both for climbing the plum trees and bandaged their scraped knees with her own hands. He had looked up to her then the way any child looks up to his friend's beautiful mother.

The man he had grown into had looked at her with a grown man's hunger across a dozen banquet tables since, and had whispered as much to Yan Chi more than once, licking his lips over the curve of her robe and then laughing as if it were a joke.

Now his eyes traced the curve of this slave's hip, and his lips parted, and his hand tightened on his mother-slave's chain until the kneeling woman looked up at him in surprise. Then he shook his head, slowly, the way a man shakes off a dream that is too good to be true.

No. Yan Chi could read the word on him from twenty paces. Lady Yan Mei, proud and cold and immaculate, would never walk naked into a merchant's party on a chain. Wang Xuan laughed at himself, a short greasy bark, and went back to watching the woman's ass with the uncomplicated lust of a man who had decided she was a stranger.