The VIP Circle

Yan Tian led his slave toward a cluster near the center of the floor, where the evening's true powers had already gathered.

They were easy to pick out, even masked. Xu Jie, the spice merchant, had a long narrow face that no mask could shorten and a slave at his feet with silver chains across her hips.

Huang Qi of the clothing guild had the kind of face that looked evil even when it smiled, and the mask did not help. Zhao Yan, the jeweler, was fat and wore so many rings and pendants that he chimed when he laughed.

Liu Jun of the food trade had a waxed mustache that curled out past the edges of his mask like two black hooks. Wang Fengrui had already drifted over with his brown-haired beauty and his son.

And in the middle of them, with the broad, easy stance of a man who had nothing to prove, stood City Lord Zhang Haotian, built like a fortress in a dark crimson robe that strained across the shoulders. The muscles of his forearms showed even through the sleeves.

At his side stood a slave who drew almost as many stares as Yan Mei had, a tall red-haired young woman with skin pale as cream and freckles across her bare shoulders. Her nipples had been pierced through and fitted with small golden plates, and when she shifted, the plates caught the lantern light.

A plug sat in her ass, its base a polished ruby, and she stood beside the city lord with her hands loose at her sides and her head high.

The VIP circle made room for Yan Tian without anyone appearing to make room, which was how power always moved.

"Patriarch," said Zhang Haotian, without saying a name, and inclined his head the exact degree that one great man offers another. "I had heard you never brought anyone to these."

"I had heard you never left early," said Yan Tian, and the circle laughed, and the city lord laughed loudest, and then all of them looked at the woman at the end of Yan Tian's chain.

Yan Chi drifted closer with his tray, because a waiter with wine could stand anywhere, and refilled Huang Qi's cup without being asked so that he could stay within earshot.

Yan Tian held out his cup without looking, the way great men always hold out cups, and Yan Chi's stomach turned to ice. He stepped in and poured. The plum wine ran dark and steady into the porcelain, and he kept his eyes on the stream and his breathing slow and his waiter's shoulders rounded in the humble slope of a man who carried trays for a living, and he did not look up at the lacquer mask above him.

He could feel his father's attention pass across him the way a cold draft passes across a room, touching the plain black mask, the bare chest, the trousers with their silk window, and moving on without catching on anything. A waiter was furniture.

Yan Tian had never once in his life looked at furniture. The cup lifted away, and Yan Chi stepped back with the jug held against his chest and his heart hammering so hard he was sure the whole circle could hear it.

It was not his father who looked twice.

Yan Mei's masked eyes had followed the jug as it withdrew, the way a slave's eyes are trained to follow her master's cup, and then they dropped, as if by accident, to the waiter's crotch. Yan Chi saw it happen.

He saw her gaze land on the silk window and the tea-colored cotton behind it, stretched taut over a young man's cock that had been hard since the waitresses walked in and was harder now than it had ever been, the head pressing out a dark wet coin at the tip.

He saw her look for one breath longer than a modest woman would have, and he saw the faint flush under her veil deepen. Then her eyes lifted away, unhurried, to the city lord's crimson shoulder, and she shifted her weight from one hip to the other, and her thighs pressed together under the sky-blue silk.

She had not recognized him. He was sure of it. She had seen a nameless young waiter with a stiff cock in a theme uniform, the kind of young man who served a hundred parties a year, and she had looked.

Yan Chi retreated two paces into the waiters' line, set his tray against his hip, and discovered that he could not stop smiling behind his mask.

Up close the woman on his father's chain was worse for his composure, not better.

Lantern light lay on the gold suns over her nipples and on the fine chains that ran from them to her collar, and every breath she took made the chains shiver and the plates sway, and with them the heavy white flesh of her breasts.

Her skin had a faint flush rising from the tops of her breasts to the base of her throat. The sky-blue scrap at her crotch had darkened in a shape Yan Chi could have drawn from memory, the outline of two plump lips pressed against wet silk.

She stood with her weight on one hip, her hands folded loosely in front of her, the very picture of a well-trained slave, and her eyes behind the blue silk mask moved across the circle in small careful flicks. They stopped on Wang Xuan. Yan Chi saw her shoulders tighten.

Wang Xuan was staring at her ass, of course. He had shifted half a step to get the angle, the way he used to shift at banquets to watch her climb the steps to the high table, and now he had the full view of round bare cheeks and the jewel winking between them.

His mother-slave was kneeling forgotten at his ankle with her cheek resting against his knee. His mouth hung slightly open. He looked, Yan Chi thought, exactly like the child who used to sneak into the Yan kitchens to steal sesame cakes, except that the child had grown fat and rich and was now looking at a plugged ass with the concentration of a scholar reading a forbidden scroll.

Yan Mei turned her face a fraction away from him and her flush climbed into the line of her jaw under the veil.

She remembered him small. That was the trouble. She remembered him at seven, round as a dumpling, howling in the plum orchard with blood on both knees because he had followed her son up a tree that neither of them was big enough to climb.

She remembered kneeling in the grass in her good robes with the two of them sniffling in front of her, cleaning grit out of the scrapes with a wet handkerchief, telling them both very sternly that young masters of great families did not climb plum trees, and then giving them each a candied plum anyway because they had stopped crying.

She remembered his mother laughing about it with her over tea. That child had grown into a man who now stood an arm's length from her bare ass, eyes glued to the plug she was holding inside herself with a thread of qi, and the gap between those two pictures sent a hot, dizzy rush through her that she did not know where to put.

It was not entirely shame. That was the worst of it. Her cunt clenched on nothing beneath the silk, and she felt a fresh slick of wetness spread under the scrap, and she knew without looking down that the stain had grown.

Yan Tian's thumb moved once on the chain. It was nothing, a small stroke along the links, and it reached her through the collar like a hand on the back of her neck. She drew a slow breath, let her shoulders loosen, and lifted her chin the half inch that turned embarrassment into display.

"A remarkable piece," Wang Fengrui said, his eyes moving over her with the expert appetite of a man who priced silk by touch. His brown-haired slave stood at his elbow with her bared breasts framed by their strips, and she was looking at Yan Mei too, with a frank, measuring interest that one beauty gives another. "Where does a man find a slave like that, Patriarch? I've had agents in every market from here to the southern coast for twenty years, and I've never seen anything close."

"You haven't looked in the right places," said Yan Tian.

"Then tell me which places."

"No."

The circle laughed again. Zhao Yan's rings chimed. Liu Jun stroked one hook of his mustache and stared at the gold suns. Xu Jie's long face showed the thoughtful look of a man trying to estimate a price, and Huang Qi licked his thin lips and said something under his breath to his own slave that made her giggle.

Zhang Haotian said nothing at all. He simply looked at Yan Mei's ass the way a man looks at a horse he intends to ride, his big arms folded across his chest, and when Yan Mei felt the weight of that gaze and glanced at him, he smiled under his mask and let her see it.

Somewhere above them a bronze bell rang once, deep and long, a note that seemed to settle into the floorboards and hum there.

The hall changed with it. Music lifted. The drums found a slower, heavier rhythm. Lanterns over the play areas brightened one by one as hidden attendants trimmed the wicks, so that the ramps and tables and boxes and stages swam up out of the shadows like islands rising out of a dark sea.

Guests who had been standing in polite clusters began to move toward them with the eager restlessness of men who had been waiting all evening to stop being polite. Somewhere a woman laughed, high and delighted. Somewhere else a hand cracked on bare flesh, the first of the night, and the sound drew a cheer.

"Well," said Fengrui, rubbing his ringed hands together with a click like dice in a cup. "Shall we begin with something light, gentlemen? Something to stretch the legs before the serious business."

"You have something in mind," said the city lord. It was not a question.

"The ramp." Fengrui pointed with his chin toward the long low structure at the edge of the floor, three parallel tracks of polished wood, each a little wider than a woman's shoulders, rising gently over a hump in the middle and down again to a finish line painted in red lacquer. Small gold bells hung from posts along the sides.

"A slave race. Three tracks, three slaves, on hands and knees. First across the line wins, and the plug stays in the whole way. If it drops, she's out." His smile widened. "And the loser's master hands her over for a little correction. Shall we say three strokes, from the winner's master?"

A murmur ran around the circle, the murmur of men who liked the idea very much and were working out whose slave would lose.

"Three," Zhang Haotian repeated, testing the number in his mouth. He looked at the red-haired beauty at his side, then at the brown-haired one at Fengrui's, then at Yan Mei, and his gaze stayed on the last. "I accept. My slave will run."

"Mine as well," said Fengrui, without needing to look at his own.

Every eye in the circle turned to Yan Tian.

Yan Tian looked at the ramp, then at his slave, then at the city lord, and something moved behind the lacquer mask that might have been amusement and might have been hunger. "She'll run," he said.

Yan Mei's breath caught, very slightly. Yan Chi heard it from where he stood with the wine jug. Then she bowed her head, the obedient bow of a well-trained slave, and when it came up again her shoulders were square.

Yan Chi refilled Zhao Yan's cup so fast he slopped plum wine over the fat jeweler's rings, apologized in his best waiter's mumble, and drifted after the circle as it moved toward the ramp, with his cock so hard in its silk window that it had begun to ache.

His father had just volunteered his mother for a crawling race in front of half of Jinling's merchant elite, with the city lord's hand waiting at the end of it. The System had not said a word, but a faint electric pressure sat behind his eyes.

The ramp drew a crowd fast. Word of a VIP race moved across the hall the way gossip always moves in rich rooms, faster than servants, and by the time the three slaves had been led to the start, there were men three and four deep along both sides of the tracks and more pressing in from behind, cups in their hands, cocks out of their robes in more than a few cases, eager eyes fixed on the three bare asses lined up at the start of the tracks.

Waitresses slipped through the press with trays balanced on their palms, their leather-framed breasts brushing guests' arms, and nobody watched them now. Every gaze in the crowd had gone to the start line.

An attendant in a black mask unhooked each slave's chain from her master's hand and gave her a light touch on the shoulder to show her place. The red-haired beauty took the left track. Fengrui's brown-haired slave took the right. Yan Mei, who had been led to the start last, was given the middle, which meant that she would crawl with a rival on either side and every eye in the crowd able to compare her to both.