Chapter 105: Rancor, Part Twenty-One: 8

Lan Xichen said, ‘Sect Leader Jin… might you explain how this came to be?’

Jin Guangyao said nothing, and the knuckles of his fingers were faintly going white.

Wei Wuxian said, ‘It would seem Sect Leader Jin does not intend to speak.’

He raised a hand, and at once a naked female corpse appeared beneath it; laying his palm upon the pitch-black crown of her head, Wei Wuxian said, ‘But just because you won't speak, does that mean I have no way of knowing?’

The instant the Empathy took hold, before he had even opened his eyes, Wei Wuxian found himself wreathed in a cloud of powder and rouge so thick it filled the nose, and a coy, simpering voice issued from his own mouth: ‘…her? Oh, she was eager enough to marry. By the time she met that man she was already past twenty, no longer young, and in a few more years her looks would be gone for certain, so she staked everything, scolding and all, on bearing a son. Wasn't it just her way of getting out? But that still depended on the man being willing to take her.’

He opened his eyes, and what lay before him was a great hall that could fairly be called sumptuous, broad and spacious, a dozen or more large round tables set within it, each one ringed by drinkers and by several women of no small charm, some with a fragrant shoulder bared, some with their cloud-coiled hair loosed and tumbling, some seated upon a guest's knee, some tipping wine into another's mouth, every last one of them wearing the same honeyed, wine-flushed look.

A single glance told you what sort of place it was.

Wei Wuxian thought, ‘So the one burned to death within this Guanyin Temple was a woman of the pleasure quarters. No wonder these Resentful Spirits are all naked; they must every one of them be courtesans and the men who came to them.’

A drinker beside her laughed and said, ‘A son's a son, your own flesh and blood. Surely the man would want him?’

The woman said, ‘She claimed herself that the man was some great personage of a cultivation house, and a house like that is bound to have no shortage of sons; when a thing's in plenty it loses its worth, so why would he spare a thought for this stray one out here? She waited and waited and no one ever came to fetch her, so of course she had to raise him herself, and raise him she did, for fourteen years.’

Several of the drinkers said, ‘A great personage? Is there really such a thing?’

The woman said, ‘Aiyo, what would I gain by lying to you about a thing like this? Her son's right here with us now, running errands. There, that one,’ and the woman twisted her waist about and waved at a boy bearing a tray, ‘Little Meng! Come here!’

The boy did indeed come over and said, ‘Anxin-jie, what is it?’

In that instant Wei Wuxian understood everything.

A cluster of drinkers looked Meng Yao up and down with appraising eyes, and Meng Yao asked again, ‘Is something the matter?’ Anxin laughed and said, ‘Little Meng, are you still studying those things of yours these days?’

Meng Yao started and said, ‘Which things?’

Anxin said, ‘Why, the things your mother had you learn, the painting and calligraphy, the manners, the swordwork and cultivation arts… how are you coming along with them?’

The words were scarcely out before the drinkers broke into snickering, as though they found it all hugely comical. Anxin turned her head and said, ‘Don't you laugh, every word's the truth. His mother raises him like the young master of some wealthy house, teaches him to read and write, bought a great heap of sword manuals and secret tomes, and means to send him off to school besides.’

A drinker said in astonishment, ‘Send him to school? Did I hear that right?’

Anxin said, ‘You did! Little Meng, tell these gentlemen, did you or did you not go to the schoolhouse?’

A drinker said, ‘Does he still go now?’

Anxin said, ‘Not anymore. He went, came back after a few days, and wouldn't go again for anything. Little Meng, was it the studying you didn't like, or the place?’

Meng Yao said nothing, and Anxin laughed her tittering laugh, poking him on the forehead with a finger painted bright red, and said, ‘Little fellow, sulking, are we?’

She poked hard, and a faint red mark was left in the center of Meng Yao's brow, like the lingering ghost of cinnabar. He touched his forehead and said, ‘No…’

Anxin waved a hand and said, ‘All right, all right, never mind, off you go.’ Meng Yao turned and took a few steps, and she plucked something from the table and coaxed, ‘Here, have a piece of fruit.’

Meng Yao turned his head back, and the fruit, green and glistening as if about to drip, struck him on the chest, fell to the ground, and went rolling away. Anxin scolded teasingly, ‘How could you be so dull, can't even catch one piece of fruit. Pick it up, quick, don't let it go to waste.’

Meng Yao tugged the corner of his mouth. He must have been fourteen by then, but whether on account of being so slight and small he looked no more than twelve or thirteen, and such a smile upon his face made one strangely uneasy.

He bent slowly, picked up the fruit, wiped it on the front of his robe, and his smile deepened: ‘Thank you, Anxin-jiejie.’

Anxin said, ‘You're welcome. Go on and do your work properly.’

Meng Yao said, ‘Call me if you need anything.’

After he had gone some distance, one drinker said, ‘If my son were in a place like this, I'd take him home no matter what.’

Another said, ‘Is his father truly some great personage of a cultivation house? To buy a courtesan's freedom and leave her a sum to raise the boy, surely that's easy enough? A trifle, a flick of the hand.’

Anxin said, ‘How can you take everything that woman says for truth? Believing half is too much. The great personage was her own telling too. If you ask me, like as not he's just some merchant with a little money, and she's blown it up several times over…’

Just then a shriek came down, the sound of cups and dishes shattering on the second floor, and a qin came tumbling out through the air to land in the center of the hall with a great crash, breaking into four pieces and five, startling the revelers at the nearby tables into a torrent of curses. Anxin nearly fell too, and screamed, ‘What's happening up there!’

Meng Yao cried, ‘Mother!’

Anxin looked up to see a burly man dragging a woman out of one of the rooms by her hair. Anxin clutched the drinker beside her, her voice somewhere between excitement and tension, and said, ‘She's at it again!’

Meng Yao rushed up the stairs; the woman was clutching her scalp and frantically hauling her clothes back up over her shoulders, and the moment she saw Meng Yao running over she cried, ‘I told you not to come up! Go down! Go down at once!’

Meng Yao went to pry the patron's hand loose and took a kick to the belly that sent him tumbling down the stairs, drawing a chorus of cries.

This was the third time Wei Wuxian had seen him kicked rolling down a flight of stairs.

The woman let out a great ‘Ah!’, and at once she was seized by the hair again, dragged the whole way down the stairs, stripped of her clothes, and flung out into the street, where the man spat upon her bare body and cursed, ‘An ugly thing making such a fuss, an old whore still fancying herself fresh goods!’

The woman lay cowering in the middle of the street, not daring to rise, for the slightest move would lay her bare to every eye. The passersby were both amazed and excited, half wanting to go and half to stay, half to linger, pointing and nudging, their eyes alight. The gate of the brothel filled too with the women from within, tittering low, and like Anxin gloating to the patrons at their sides over what this wretched old woman's story was. Only one girl twisted away out the door, stripping off the gauze robe that had been thin enough to begin with, half of a snowy, ample bosom bound in a bright red bodice and a waist drawn exceedingly slender, so striking that everyone hurried to look at her. The girl spat and railed, ‘Look, look, look, look at your mothers! As if you're fit to look at me? A look costs money, so pay up! Come on, pay!’

As she cursed she did indeed put out her hand and demand money from the gawkers on every side. The crowd thinned a little, and she tossed the gauze robe she had peeled off over the woman, wrapped her up, and bore her staggering into the hall, chiding all the way: ‘I told you long ago to mend your ways. Putting on airs for whose benefit? Tasted the bitterness now, haven't you, that'll teach you to remember!’

Wei Wuxian thought, ‘This girl's face is oddly familiar. Where have I seen it before?’

The woman said softly, ‘A-Yao, A-Yao…’

That kick left Meng Yao a good while unable to gather himself, sprawled on the floor, half-risen and no further. The girl took one of them in each hand and hauled mother and son up and away. A drinker beside Anxin said, ‘Who's that beauty?’

Anxin spat out two melon-seed husks and said, ‘A famous shrew, that one. Terrifying.’

One man said in disappointment, ‘That's the celebrated courtesan poet Meng Shi of years past? How did she come to this?’

Anxin put on a smiling face again and said, ‘Just so. She had to go and bear a child, and what woman's worth looking at once she's borne a child? If not for scraping by on the last of that so-called “talented lady” renown of hers, there'd hardly be a soul left willing to grace her with a glance. If you ask me, it's all that bit of book-learning that ruined her.’

One drinker agreed heartily and said, ‘That it is. Folk who've touched a few books always carry that inexplicable air of lofty purity, always loath to let go of that one cherished notion.’

Anxin said, ‘If she could keep herself fed on what she read, then I'd have nothing to say, but it's nothing more than a hook to draw men in. Let me put it ugly: we're all whores here, so what makes you nobler for having read a little? What's all the lofty airs for? It isn't only outsiders who look down on her, just see whether the other sisters here are fond of her or not. The patrons who come to a place like this might now and then fancy a delicate, demure girl of fifteen or sixteen, for the novelty of it. But what's the sense in asking a man to pay to look at someone past her bloom? She lost her shine long ago, everyone knows it, she's the only one who still can't see it…’

Just then someone tapped Anxin from behind, and when Anxin turned her head, there stood the girl from before, who raised her hand and brought it down in a slap.

With a crack Anxin took the blow, stood stunned a moment, then flew into a fury: ‘Bitch!!!’

The girl said, ‘Bitch!!! Wagging that tongue all day long, has it got nothing better to do?!’

Anxin shrieked, ‘What I say is no damned business of yours!’

The two women grappled together in the ground-floor hall, nails and teeth both, tearing at each other's hair and cursing with mouths full, with things like ‘I'll claw your face to ribbons before long’ and ‘nobody'd take you even if you paid them’, language too coarse to bear hearing. A good many of the women came to pull them apart, saying, ‘Sisi! Stop it!’

Sisi?

At last Wei Wuxian remembered why that girl's face had struck him as familiar. Add seven or eight knife scars to this face and was it not the very woman Sisi who had come to Lotus Pier to inform?!

All at once he felt a scorching wave surge into his face, the whole hall swallowed in a breath beneath a sea of crimson flame. Wei Wuxian wrenched himself free of the Empathy at once!

Opening his eyes, Lan Wangji said, ‘Well?’

Lan Xichen too said, ‘Young Master Wei, what did you see?’

Wei Wuxian drew a breath, settled his mind a little, and said, ‘I'd guess this Guanyin Temple is the place where Sect Leader Jin grew up.’

Jin Guangyao gave nothing away. Jiang Cheng said, ‘The place he grew up? Wasn't he raised in a…’ He had been about to say, wasn't he raised in a brothel, when all at once he too saw it, and said, ‘This Guanyin Temple was once a brothel, and he put it all to the torch and rebuilt it into a Guanyin Temple!’

Lan Xichen said, ‘Did you truly set the fire?’

Jin Guangyao said, ‘I did.’

Jiang Cheng sneered, ‘How readily you admit it.’

Jin Guangyao said, ‘Things being as they are now, one thing more or one thing less, what's the difference?’

After a silence Lan Xichen said, ‘Was it to erase the traces?’

Though many knew that Lianfang-zun had grown up in a place of the pleasure quarters, it was a curious thing that after all these years most still had no clear idea which brothel he had actually come from. Everyone understood in their hearts that Lianfang-zun must have worked deliberately behind the scenes, but few would ever have guessed that he had simply burned the place of his birth and upbringing to clean ash.

Jin Guangyao said, ‘Not entirely.’

Lan Xichen let out a sigh and did not press on. Jin Guangyao said, ‘Won't you ask me why?’

Lan Xichen shook his head, and after a long while answered, though not to the question, ‘It was never that I didn't know the things you had done. It was that I believed you did them out of some hidden hardship.’

He said again, ‘But you went too far. And I… no longer know whether I should believe it.’

There was a deep weariness and disappointment in his voice.

Outside the temple thunder and rain crashed together, wind leaking through the crack of the door, and amid that desolate, keening howl Jin Guangyao suddenly sank to his knees.

Everyone was startled, Wei Wuxian, who had just stripped the sword from his waist, no less so, and they saw Jin Guangyao say weakly, ‘Er-ge, I was wrong.’

‘…’ Hearing this, even Wei Wuxian felt embarrassed for him, and could not help saying, ‘Er, look, whatever it is, don't talk, just fight properly. Can we just fight?’

This man's face changed at a word, his knees folded at a word, without a shred of dignity or command to him. An unspeakable look crossed Lan Xichen's face as well. Jin Guangyao went on, ‘Er-ge, you and I have known each other many years, and whatever else is said, you know how I have been toward you. I have no more designs on the seat of Chief Cultivator, the Stygian Tiger Seal is utterly destroyed, and after tonight I will cross the seas to Dongying, never to return in this life. For the sake of all that, grant me a way to live.’

To cross the seas to Dongying was, plainly put, to flee. Put that way it sounded shameful enough, but Jin Guangyao was famed for being supple and ever-shifting, sooner bending than breaking, never meeting force with force where softness would serve. The Lanling Jin Clan might yet crush one house or two, three or four, by sheer strength, but should every clan great and small unite to march against him, repeating the fate of the Qishan Wen Clan of old, it would be no more than a matter of time. Better than dragging it out to that day was to withdraw at once, ride out the storm, preserve his strength, and perhaps one day find the chance to sweep back and rise again.

Wei Wuxian said, ‘Sect Leader Jin, you say the Stygian Tiger Seal is utterly destroyed, might you bring it out and let me have a look?’

Jin Guangyao said, ‘Young Master Wei, the restored piece is not the original after all, its uses are limited. It is wholly spent now. And how heavy the malice in that thing is, you above all know best. A useless relic that has lost its function and brings nothing but bloody calamity, do you think I would still keep it at my side?’

Wei Wuxian said, ‘That I wouldn't know. Perhaps you could find yourself another Xue Yang?’

Jin Guangyao said, ‘Er-ge, every word I speak is true.’

His words were earnest and sincere, and ever since taking Lan Xichen captive he had indeed treated him with courtesy throughout, so that here and now Lan Xichen truly could not turn against him at once, and could only sigh, ‘Sect Leader Jin, when you insisted on staging such a great calamity at the Burial Mounds, I told you then that there was no need to call me “Er-ge” any longer.’

Jin Guangyao said, ‘This business at the Burial Mounds was my mind led astray by demons, a grievous wrong, but I have no road left to retreat by.’

Lan Xichen said, ‘What do you mean, no road to retreat by?’

Lan Wangji knit his brows slightly and said in a cold voice, ‘Brother, do not waste words on him.’

Wei Wuxian put in a reminder as well, ‘Sect Leader Lan, remember how you cautioned Sect Leader Jiang? Do not waste words on him.’

Lan Xichen knew well how formidable Jin Guangyao's mouth could be once it opened. Yet at the mere hint of some hidden matter he could not help wanting to hear it, and Jin Guangyao had seized on exactly this in him.

He said in a low voice, ‘I received a letter.’