Chapter 67: The Five Warlords |
The horse stopped at the garrison gate.
I crossed the bridge with the scrolls in my arm, took the path along the western bank, and reached the garrison just as the courier was being shown inside. He was a lean man with the green sash of the Western Reaches under his cloak and a thin film of road dust on his face. He had not dismounted. Fei Liao met him at the door, took the sealed scroll from his hand, and waved him toward the stable for water and rest.
Fei Liao saw me and lifted the scroll.
"Squad Captain. Come."
I followed him into the back room. He cracked the seal on the table and read it through before folding it back again.
"We mobilize at dawn the morning after tomorrow. The Hekou militia, cultivators of your choosing, and a baggage train of livestock and rations are bound for Chianji village, and we rendezvous with Commander Xu at the Outer Garrison the afternoon of the second day."
"Understood."
"I will address the militia at first light."
"They will be there."
"Work from tonight. I will show you when there is time."
He looked at me a beat longer than the question needed, then nodded and turned back to the courier's scroll. I went home and slept what was left of the night.
Fei Liao gave the order at the first notch of the morning.
He stood at the porch of the garrison with the militia in formation in the commons, the Pei households at the western bank, the Luan at the eastern, the Tongshan refugees and the regulars in the middle. The disciples stood at the eastern edge of the formation behind me. Bolin stood at the western edge with the rest of the cultivators of the academy at his back.
Fei Liao did not speak long.
"We mobilize at dawn tomorrow. We march to the Outer Garrison to join Commander Xu and the Western Reaches Army for the campaign on Meishan, with the Hekou militia and the cultivator squad travelling under my command. The remaining cultivators of the academy will stay to defend the village. We move out at first light."
He stepped down off the porch, and the formation broke apart.
It was a clipped order, the way Fei Liao gave most orders.
He came over to where I was standing.
"Pei. Walk with me."
We walked toward the bridge.
"Pick your squad," he said. "Whoever you take to the Outer Garrison is your squad for the campaign. Everyone else stays in Hekou. I want a defensive layer here in case anything comes at the village from the south or west while we are away."
I nodded my head. "I will pick four of our most promising students. I will not need more than that."
"Just the five of you?" Fei Liao perked a brow.
"Five cultivators can move quicker and stealthier than a dozen or more," That was part of my reasoning. The other part was that based on Wei Bolin's notes, the other students would only be a hinderance. I needed to trust my back to those I considered powerful enough to do so.
He looked at me sideways as we crossed the bridge.
"You are leaving behind your senior cultivator, Wei Bolin."
"Bolin is the only one who can lead and organize cultivators in defense better than anyone else I have."
Fei Liao nodded, accepting my reasoning and finding it sound.
He left me at the bridge and went back toward the garrison.
I found Bolin at the clinic.
He was at the cabinet, sorting tinctures into a travel kit that he had been preparing since before the courier had reached the gate. He looked up when I came in.
"I will need an extra few jars of the bone-knit and twice the willow bark we usually carry. The Outer Garrison's stores are good, but they will be stretched thin when ten thousand men are billeting through."
"Bolin."
He stopped, set the tincture jar on the cabinet shelf, and turned to face me. His face was crestfallen already.
"You are leaving me behind, aren't you?"
"You are staying with the village."
He did not say anything for a long beat.
"Why?"
"If the Qinghe try anything while the militia is gone, the village will need a cultivator who can hold the line and lead the rest of the academy in defense. That cultivator is you. There is no one else in Hekou who can do that."
"The disciples can do it."
"The most promising disciples are coming with me, all four of them, and they are my squad."
He sat down on the stool at the cabinet and looked at the floor. I anticipated that he would be upset, especially since me and him had grown close since Hao was unconscious. I could truly say that Bolin was like a brother to me, and it wouldn't feel right leaving him behind, but it was what was best for the village.
"I want you to keep the village alive while I am gone. If a Qinghe raiding party crosses the western ridge while we are at Meishan, the man standing in the commons calling formation has to be you. There is no other man it can be."
He took that in and looked up at me.
"You picked the right call. I do not like being by your side, but it is the wise choice."
I bowed my head to him. "Thank you for understanding."
"Then I will have my kit packed by sundown and yours ready before the morning, and I will walk you to the bridge at dawn."
"Thank you, Bolin."
He nodded, turned back to the cabinet, and did not say anything else.
I left him there.
Suyin was in the back room of the clinic with Hao.
The afternoon light came in at the south window. She had moved her stool to the side of the bed where she could rest her hand on his wrist while she read, and a book of Mother Pei's herbs was open on her lap. She looked up when I crossed the doorway.
She closed the book and laid it on the floor at the foot of the stool. She lifted her hand from Hao's wrist and held it out to me, and I crossed the room and took it, and I sat on the edge of the bed beside my brother.
"How long will you be gone?" Suyin asked me.
"I do not know. Two quarters at the least, three if the campaign goes long, more if there is occupation work after Meishan."
"And if there is no after Meishan?"
"Suyin...."
"Tell me, Liang. Do not soften it."
"I don't know how long I will be gone. I will not lie to you about that. Taking Meishan is a large undertaking, and there may be complications along the way."
She held my hand against her cheek. The afternoon light caught the curve of her jaw, and she did not speak for a long time.
When she did, it was softer than she usually spoke.
"Promise me that you'll come back to me."
I gave her a reassuring smile. "I promise."
She nodded against my hand.
I leaned across the small distance between us and kissed her. She kissed me back without releasing my hand. It was longer and more tender than any kiss we had shared before. She leaned into it more and brought her hands around my neck, and the kiss became more intense. I planted a kiss on the nape of her neck, and she gave a pleasant sounding sigh.
When she drew back, she rested her forehead against mine.
"Stay with me tonight."
"I will."
She closed her eyes and nodded.
I turned my attention to my brother and rested my free hand on Hao's hand, over the back of it where his fingers had spread for Suyin a week ago, and I opened my cultivation.
The Qi at his crown was completing its second rotation.
I had read the first rotation a week ago, and the second was not the same. The first had been the work of a cultivator at the threshold, while the second was the work of a cultivator going through. Whatever had broken open in him was nearly knit, and the knitting was the last thing the body had to do before it awoken once more.
He is going to wake. The moment is days away, perhaps a quarter, and I will be long gone by then.
I closed my channels.
"Suyin. Hao is going to wake soon, I cannot tell exactly, but my gut says very soon."
Her eyes studied Hao's body.
"How sure are you?"
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
"As sure as I have been about anything."
She put her free hand on Hao's chest, over the heart. She left it there a beat.
"When he wakes, the first thing he is going to do is ask where I am. The second thing he is going to do is try to come after me."
Suyin shook her head. "He cannot. He will not be strong enough."
"He will not be strong enough, and he will not know he is not strong enough, and he will get out of the bed and through the door before you can stop him. I know my brother. He would walk to the Outer Garrison on a broken leg and a half-knit channel if he thought he could find me. Tell him I am coming back and that I asked him to wait. If he tries to leave anyway, you have Bolin to help you stop him."
Suyin nodded, though she seemed amused at the thought of having to hold Hao back from running after me. To me, Hao was far too special to throw away his life in a conflict like this.
"I will tell him."
She lifted her hand from Hao's chest and put both arms around me, and I put my arms around her, and we sat like that with my brother sleeping between us until the afternoon light had moved across the south window from one side to the other.
WARNING - SEXUAL CONTENT -
She kissed me at the threshold, and we walked together to Suyin’s small home beside the western bank. The door slid shut behind us with a quiet click. A single lantern burned low on the table, casting warm amber light across the woven floor mats and the simple furnishings she kept meticulously neat.
Suyin turned to me. The tenderness from earlier had burned away into something fiercer. Her dark eyes held mine as she reached up, fingers tracing the line of my jaw.
“Liang,” she whispered, voice husky. “No more waiting. I'm ready.”
I answered her with a kiss that started deep and hungry. She rose onto her toes to meet me, hands fisting in the front of my robes. The moment our lips met, our qi stirred. Mine a steady river of gold-threaded strength, hers a vibrant, blooming forest green that curled and twisted like living vines. They brushed against each other even before our bodies fully touched, sending sparks of shared sensation racing along my meridians.
We shed our outer robes together, fingers clumsy with urgency. Her hands pushed my inner tunic open, palms gliding over my chest. Everywhere she touched, my channels flared to life, drinking in the warmth of her cultivation like parched earth after rain. I pulled her against me, one arm around her waist, the other sliding up her back beneath her thin shift. Her skin was fever-hot, and when I brushed the sensitive points along her spine, she gasped into my mouth as her own qi surged in response.
We sank to the floor mats together. Suyin pushed me onto my back and straddled my hips, her long hair spilling over one shoulder like ink. The thin fabric of her remaining clothes did nothing to hide the heat of her core pressed against the hard length of me. I sat up to meet her, mouth claiming hers again while my hands explored her body and cupping her breasts, thumbs circling the stiff peaks until she moaned and rocked against me.
“Liang… I can feel you,” she breathed against my lips. “Your Qi...it’s reaching for mine.”
I could feel it too. As desire built, our energies began to entwine. The sensation was intoxicating.
I flipped us, laying her gently on the mats beneath me. I kissed down her throat, across her collarbone, then lower. When my mouth closed over one nipple, sucking and teasing with teeth and tongue, Suyin arched with a sharp cry. Her fingers tangled in my hair, guiding me as her qi pulsed wildly. I slid a hand between her thighs, finding her already slick and ready. Two fingers traced her folds before slipping inside, curling gently. Her inner walls clenched around me, hot and velvet-soft, and her cultivation energy flared so brightly I felt it ripple through my own channels like a second heartbeat.
“Inside me,” she demanded, voice breaking with need. “Now, Liang. I want all of you.”
I shed the last of my clothes. She opened for me, legs wrapping around my waist. The first slow push into her drew twin groans from us both. She was impossibly tight and wet as a river. As I sank deeper, our qi fully merged into a blazing storm of energy that surged through every meridian we possessed. Pleasure magnified tenfold. Every thrust sent shared ecstasy racing along our connected channels, feeding back into our bodies until I couldn’t tell where my pleasure ended and hers began.
We moved together with fierce rhythm. Suyin met every stroke, nails raking down my back, heels digging into my hips as she urged me deeper. The wet sounds of our joining filled the small room alongside her breathless moans and my low growls. I captured her mouth again, tongues tangling as I drove into her with increasing intensity. Her breasts pressed against my chest, nipples dragging with every movement. I reached between us to rub the sensitive bundle of nerves at her apex, and her entire body seized.
Her climax hit like a thunderbolt. Her qi exploded outward in a brilliant bloom of green light that flooded my own channels, dragging me over the edge with her. I buried myself to the hilt and pulsated deep inside her as our merged energies thrashed and sang.
We rode the aftershocks together, slow grinding thrusts drawing out every last spark until we were both trembling. I collapsed beside her, pulling her into my arms so her head rested on my chest.
Suyin traced lazy patterns over my heart with her fingertips, her voice soft and sated. “I’ve never felt anything like that… It was like our souls were intertwined.”
I kissed her damp forehead. “They were, and they always will be.”
She smiled against my skin and nestled closer. The lantern burned lower as we lay tangled on the mats, skin to skin, qi quietly entwined, stealing every moment we could before dawn tore us apart.
Dawn came.
The Hekou militia was in a column at the head, the baggage train behind them with twelve oxen and twenty goats and sacks of rice and millet on the carts, and the four founding disciples and me at the rear.
Bolin stood at the western edge of the bridge with the academy cultivators behind him, a slip of paper in his hand and a charcoal stick at his ear. Suyin stood at the porch of the clinic. Pei Tao stood at the front of the Pei households with Pei Mei beside him. Gao Shu stood at the edge of the academy yard in her father's forge apron with her own charcoal stick, watching.
Fei Liao raised his hand, and we marched.
We reached the Outer Garrison on the second afternoon.
The road from Hekou ran west along the river, climbed a low ridge, and dropped into the broad valley where the garrison sat on a rise above the river bend. I had never seen the place. The map at Fei Liao's table had been a square with crossed lines and a label.
The garrison was the size of a small city. A square palisade of timber a thousand paces on a side enclosed a parade ground large enough to hold a full battle formation, with longhouses on the eastern wall, stables on the south, a quartermaster's complex at the west, and the commander's hall at the center. Three temporary camps of tents had been raised outside the palisade, each large enough to billet a thousand men.
Beyond the temporary camps, on the broad flat ground east of the river bend, the Western Reaches Army was assembling. Eight thousand men were visible from the ridge, with spearmen in green sashes drilling along the eastern flank, heavy infantry with banded armour and short swords on the southern flank, and cavalry on the open ground to the north.
This is what Commander Xu has been moving while the village was running the academy.
Behind me, Lin Zhi drew a slow breath, Mu Renshu's shoulders set forward, Cao Yan said nothing, and Sun Hai did not speak either. We descended the ridge toward the gate.
Administrator Wen met us at the western gate. He had a list in his right hand and three runners standing at attention behind him.
"Lieutenant Fei Liao. Squad Captain Pei. Welcome to the Outer Garrison. Your column will billet at the south camp, your livestock at the western paddock, and your baggage at the third warehouse. Your militia will be integrated into the mid-line infantry under the Yangu and Tongshan banners, while your cultivator squad billets inside the palisade in the eastern longhouse. Commander Xu will see you in the commander's hall before sundown."
He did not waste a word. He passed the column's assignments to his runners, who moved off to organize the billeting, and the column began to flow into the garrison without anyone needing to be told twice. He turned to me.
"Squad Captain Pei. Your scrolls."
The binding formation scrolls had been in the inner pouch of my cloak since the morning we left. I had not expected him to know about them. I drew them out.
"How did you know?"
"We have eyes everywhere. Commander Xu would like them on her table before she sees you. They will be returned to you afterward, with or without her notes."
I handed them over. He bowed once and walked off after his runners.
We followed our column inside.
The commander's hall was a single long room at the centre of the palisade, with a heavy table at one end and a map of the eastern reaches pinned to the wall behind it. Commander Xu stood at the table with two scrolls open under her hands and Administrator Wen at her left shoulder, the binding formation scrolls laid on the table beside her.
She looked up when we came in.
"Come in and have a seat."
We sat.
She read from a third scroll without looking up.
"Prefect Shen administers Meishan from a hilltop walled town on the southern bank of the Black Stone River, with a garrison of two thousand regulars and a militia call of perhaps eight thousand more if he could raise them. He has been moving the bulk of his command north into the Cao interior for the past two quarters, because one of the Five Warlords of Cao has been threatening the northern provinces and The Lord Of Qinghe has ordered him to reinforce the front. He has taken his regulars and three quarters of his militia call, leaving Meishan defended by a holding force I estimate at six hundred."
"Six hundred against ten thousand," I said. "It should be an easy undertaking."
"Yes, it should."
Fei Liao set his cup down. "Mutual war is keeping Shen pinned this long? One of the Five Warlords must be giving him a real fight to hold his regulars in the north this many quarters."
I leaned forward. " What are The Five Warlords?"
Commander Xu looked at me. "You do not know the term?"
I shook my head.
She set the scroll down.
"The Cao territories to the north are divided into five quadrants. Each quadrant is governed by a warlord. The five warlords made a pact, roughly ten years ago, to wage mutual war against one another."
I held her eyes.
"How does one wage mutual war?"
A small smile touched the corner of her mouth.
"You are right to be confused. My best guess is that it is a means of keeping their borders sharp without burning the territories down. Cao has enemies to the south, meaning us, and they need each other intact to face us. So when they wage war, they do not march armies; they duel. Warlord against warlord, in single combat or with a chosen retinue of cultivators, at agreed places and times. Whoever loses cedes territory by the terms of the pact, the land is not razed, the people are not slaughtered, and only the warlords themselves bleed."
I shook my head, not comprehending how people in this war torn time could hold follow a pact with near religious fervor. "That is not war at all."
"Not in the way we understand it. It is something the Cao invented to live with their own. The terms are renegotiated every year at a meeting in the Cao capital."
Fei Liao spoke before I could.
"What makes them dangerous is that we have no reports on how strong they are as cultivators. A cultivator is said to have the strength of ten men. The Five Warlords of Cao may be far above that. We do not know what they are capable of."
I considered that.
A cultivation dueling system between five warlords for ten years meant five men who had been refining themselves against the only opponents who could match them. Whatever the Five Warlords were, they were certainly beyond what we knew, but I couldn't imagine them being beyond Shan Pei's sister, Zhu Rong. She was a monster beyond anything I had ever encountered. Even the thought of her made me shudder.
And Prefect Shen had been pinned in the north for two quarters fighting one of them.
Prefect Shen pulls his garrison north to face one of the Five. The Cao interior is locked in mutual war and cannot send a relief force south. Meishan is left with six hundred men. The Western Reaches marches in with ten thousand, takes the town in an afternoon, holds it, and Qinghe is within our sights. This what bait looks like.
"This is a trap."
The room went quiet.
Commander Xu did not move.
"Explain."
"Prefect Shen has been pinned in the north for two quarters by a warlord whose strength we do not know. We assume the warlord is winning enough to keep Shen there, though we do not actually know that. Shen could be letting himself be drawn north on purpose, or the warlord could be drawing him north on purpose, or both. The pact between the Five Warlords has held for ten years, which is long enough for any of them to have arranged something with the Lord Of Qinghe for all we know. Six hundred regulars left at Meishan while a Cao warlord engages our enemy's main force, and ten thousand of our men marching toward the town that has been left lightly defended, is not an accident. It could very well be an invitation. The only reason to invite ten thousand men into a town is if you have ten thousand waiting on the other side of the wall, or one cultivator who counts for that many."
Commander Xu did not speak, and Fei Liao did not speak, and Administrator Wen had set down his brush.
After a long beat, Commander Xu nodded once.
"I am glad I brought you, Pei. I share the same sentiment as you, it could very well be a trap. I will not pretend otherwise. The Lord of the Western Reaches has ordered the march and we will march, but we will march with our eyes open."
She turned to the map on the wall behind her.
"Your squad of five cultivators will be held in reserve. You will move with the cavalry on the northern flank and approach Meishan from the upper ridge. If the town falls cleanly, you join the occupation when the morning breaks. If there is a trap waiting for us, then you are our contingency plan, but first, you must take out the watch garrisons to the east and west of Chianji village."
"Understood, Commander."
She tapped the binding formation scrolls.
"This is a very interesting technique that you have come up with. Could you make preparations before we march on Meishan, after you take out the garrisons?"
I nodded my head. I had planned on doing that anyways. "Yes, Commander."
"Good. We strike at the third watch, with the cavalry moving first and the main column following at the half-watch."
"Understood, Commander," We all spoke in unison.
"Dismissed."
We rose. I picked up the binding formation scrolls from the table. tucked them back into the inner pouch of my cloak.
We walked out of the commander's hall into the late afternoon light of the parade ground. Fei Liao stopped at the door.
"You saw the trap before I did."
"I only said what I had seen."
He looked at me a beat longer than the moment needed, the way Commander Xu had looked at me whenever I had impressed her, then he walked off toward the south camp.
I stood at the door of the commander's hall and looked out at the parade ground, where the Western Reaches Army was finishing its afternoon drills and the cavalry was wheeling on the northern flank. The third watch was hours away, and I had work to do with the disciples before we marched.