In Human Skin

by Akemi Homura-san

In January, a.t.b. 2010, Empress Marianne vi Britannia, Knight of Two and His Majesty's favoured consort, was assassinated at her residence in the Imperial Villa at Aries. But for Justine and Juliette vi Britannia, her daughters, this proves to be a blessing in disguise... Surrounded by old foes and sheltered by new and unexpected allies, their tale heralds the dawn of a new era.

47. Short Hair

Mongolia, Chinese Federation, March a.t.b. 2016

Mortality was one of those things soldiers just didn't talk about. It was the sort of thing that was just known, a boundary that the spoken word was not allowed to cross. It manifested itself in so many ways, from all of their drinking, to the rampant smoking, the occasional drug use, and the unimaginable amount of money they spent on 'pleasurable company.' To be a soldier was to be deeply unwell as a person—to have that lack of self-preservation, that peculiar form of psychosis, trained into them if it wasn't already there, and reinforced if it was; but even once that was done, once they had the reality of their own disposability branded into their brains, they still didn't like to think about it. The jokes about metal men and automatons, the glib treatment of personal property when it came to subjects like inheritance, they were all painting over the fundamental issue with a layer of mirth, like drawing a rug over an indelible blood-stain on the floorboards. If there was anything they could do to avoid confronting the truth that they were disposable, that they were going to die, and die in droves, one could set their watch by how readily soldiers dove head-first into it.

Xingke lacked that luxury. For years, the fact of his mortality, the fact that either he would perish in battle, or his body would finally fail and kill him, had been as readily apparent to him as his own arm; much like his possession of an arm, it had been the case for so very long that he'd ceased to have an opinion on it. He had an arm, and so he would use it to perform tasks—in a decade, though probably much less, his body would shut down, and he would be a corpse, so he would serve his vile taskmasters until that time came. It had become simply the way things were. When he had finally been captured right alongside the rest of the rebellious nobles the High Eunuchs had sent him to aid, with a Knight of the Round and two of her protégés at the head of the victorious host, Xingke hadn't given his new situation much thought—for it mattered not to him whether his capture meant that he would return to Luoyang in failure, or if the Britannians would see him tortured and executed in retaliation for his deeds, for all that he had been but an instrument, and not the architect. Neither would avert the fact that his days were numbered, that the future was something for other men, and not him—for Li Xingke was a man without a future.

The fact that his capture had gained him more than he had ever dreamed, had given him his life back in one fell swoop, was as miraculous and wondrous as it was deeply, existentially terrifying. It had occurred to him more than once since he'd been released to return to Luoyang, to report to his (former) masters, that ultimately, he hadn't been spared the anguish of other soldiers, so much as been made to experience it in reverse, that he had known that he was a dead man walking and now had to grapple with the fact that he was being allowed to live, that he had been given life, freely and without obligation. He'd never realised just how much of his sense of purpose was entangled with his implicit knowledge and understanding that he was terminally, incurably ill, not until the fact that that had never been the case, that he'd been cured, threw the entire thing into sharp, stark relief. He almost didn't know what to do with it, and it frightened him to an extent that he didn't even know was possible, in ways that he'd never imagined to exist.

But even in his moment of fear, he had not been abandoned. His salvation had come from what was perhaps the unlikeliest of places, and so, too, had his new purpose for the life that had been returned to him. The same hand that had pulled him from the grave kept hold of his and pulled him forth, to teach him once again what it meant to walk abroad, to look forward into a future he had never dared to think he might well have—and while his primary allegiance was, of course, to the Tianzi, now and always, the fact remained that not even she had extended such kindness to him, though he had no doubt that she might have, were she more than a bauble in the hands of malevolent, paranoid, power-hungry slug-people.

The High Eunuchs had taken the news of his failure relatively well—that is to say, they hadn't done a great deal to invest in the noble rebellion's success in the first place, wanting, amongst other things, a way to get him out of their proverbial hair for a while, and they had significantly more important problems that they needed to attend to urgently—and he'd earned a dismissal, little more than a slap on the wrist, back to 'his' fortress-estate in Mongolia, his post as Warden of the North, as a consequence. He was extraordinarily fortunate, it seemed, as his fellow 'wardens,' a collection of glorified feudal warlords who governed the zones of the Chinese Federation and operated with relative impunity under Luoyang's supreme authority, took the Prime Minister of Britannia's master-stroke as an indication of blood in the water, and began to militarise rapidly, gathering their nepotistically-loyal chunks of the Ever-Victorious Army to them in their dominions under the excuse of preparing for war against the E.U. It allowed for Xingke to do the same in plain sight without provoking suspicion; he got a good chuckle (one of his first that didn't have him coughing up blood) out of the irony of the fact that the corruption and hunger for power that he'd so despised for so long were now tools in his arsenal that he could wield to his advantage. Truly, politics was an ugly game, but there was a bleak sort of humour that could be found in it, if one but knew where and how to look.

If there was one truth to how the Chinese Federation operated on a day-to-day basis, it was this: that whatever illusion of stability existed within the country was a direct result of the High Eunuchs playing the different warlords they had created against each other. Xingke wasn't blind to this: no sooner had he begun his ascent through the ranks, for reasons that had only just recently become clear to him, and so still had the power to sicken him on the spot, than did he notice this trend. The High Eunuchs were poor statesmen, and projecting a centralised authority over the vast expanse of the empire they governed was beyond what they were capable of accomplishing, alone and most certainly together; but they knew, at the very least, that the weakness of their governance would spawn either constant rebellions or regional warlords that they had to negotiate with. The wardens were their answer to this—that instead of letting said regional warlords rise organically, men that they considered controllable for one reason or another, such as Colonel Ren, General Cao, and, until recently, Xingke himself, were planted into different provinces of the empire that the Chinese Federation pretended not to be with the tasks of overseeing, maintaining, and supplying their own parts of the Ever-Victorious Army, as well as the unofficial tasks of maintaining civil order, enforcing taxation, and disposing of any and all would-be challengers to their power, and by extension, the power of the High Eunuchs in Luoyang. Of course, having so many warlords in their proverbial courtyard had an enormous amount of potential to backfire, and so the High Eunuchs made sure to stoke and aggravate little antagonisms between the wardens, while forbidding them from engaging in open armed combat against one another, so that none of them could dispose of their fellows definitively, and the orchestrated infighting could continue to keep them busy focusing all of their ambitions upon each other, instead of turning their attention to the grand prize that was the capital.

It was an equilibrium that, by nature of its enforcement, begat stagnation—a perennial stalemate to keep all of their hands tied at once—but it had endured for decades, since it was impossible with the already depleted resources of the land and the relatively primitive nature of the technology that was available to them for any one warden to gather to themselves enough military force to fend off all of the other wardens at the same time, once they descended upon anyone who saw fit to strike out, and Luoyang gave their rivals carte blanche to 'punish their defiance.' Xingke, with his new liege lady's help, had taken steps towards ensuring that he would be the first, but there were certainly many steps left to go before they were ready for any kind of coup, the armed conflict that would result from attempting to topple the High Eunuchs one that required a great deal of planning, preparations, personnel, and, of course, materiel.

That was why he was out here, braving the strength of the Mongolian sun as it shone down upon the defrosting steppe. It had been a harsh winter—Mongolian winters often were—and so he had had to delay the task of calling his troops together under the auspices of a semi-annual troop report, which would then be sent to the magistrates in the capital, and also to the Ceremonial Guard, obsequious lap-dogs of the Eunuchs that they were, until now. It was standard practise, he knew, to falsify such troop reports, for a warden to doctor their numbers so as to conceal a chunk of their materiel that they wished to keep secret from their fellows, but he had never before had cause to get in on that particular bit of chicanery—now, however, he found that such reasons abounded.

"How many Longdan do we have that survived the winter?" he asked over his right shoulder, all of the forces under his command arrayed before him as he stepped from out of the shade cast by the outer gate of the citadel he'd been given, a ruined, desolate thing that he'd spent years renovating to bring it to a point where he might consider it up to snuff.

"Forty-three," Hong Gu, one of his oldest allies and closest friends, responded in a low rumble, his thick bear-paw of a hand with fingers like sausage links stroking through his ridiculous-looking long black moustaches and equally ridiculous goatee, his hat, which strongly resembled an upturned rice bowl in both its shape and its white colour, shielding the bare skin atop his bald head. His stocky build and rotund belly made him look like a very specific archetype of a character from the tales they were told as children, to the point where the other children in the village they'd both come from had mocked him and called him 'Dong Zhuo' at seemingly every opportunity—Xingke, of course, being his accompanying Lü Bu—and it was this resemblance that caused many others over the years to misjudge quite thoroughly the manner of man that he truly was, or to otherwise underestimate him; but Xingke and he had been together through thick and thin, to the point where the trust between them didn't need to be spoken, and the underestimation with which he, that is, Hong Gu, was saddled had become the sturdy man's most potent weapon. "The cold ruined much of the coolants, warped the barrels, or otherwise caused serious structural damage to the rest that required that they all be decommissioned immediately."

"I believe you must have miscounted, Gu," Xingke threw over his shoulder, brown eyes meeting his forest-green pair in a meaningful bit of nonverbal communication.

To his credit, Gu only furrowed his brow for a moment, before comprehension dawned in a flash of semi-flustered acknowledgement at the 'error.' "I… Yes, yes, of course! Of course I did. Silly me. Perhaps the mechanics were simply overly-optimistic. This has not been the first time that their ambitions have been what threw my reporting off. You cannot have more than two dozen functioning Longdan here—I'd surely recommend that you file to order enough of them from the factories to replenish your numbers, in the wake of all this devastating weather we've been having for the past several months up here…"

"It's a good thing that all of our Gun-Rus have miraculously escaped unscathed," Xingke added into the air before him, knowing that Gu was going to make sure to put all of this into the troop report. "I should certainly hate to have to file the paperwork to replace those from the factory lines down south, as well…"

The stretch of ground across which they walked was a single lane amidst the vast collection of force that he'd gathered here to him today, rows upon rows of glorified conscripts standing in orderly ranks, clad as they were in tan-green fatigues and bulky, dark green armoured plating, alongside a decently-stylised but constricting design of helmet that was fastened atop each and every one of their heads, as he walked among them, a good chunk of them double-checking their grips upon their assault rifles as he approached. Behind him and to Xingke's side, then, were two others—Zhou Xianglin, who hadn't grown up in the same village as them, but certainly in the same broader region of Federation territory, her long auburn hair fastened into the likeness of the spokes of a wheel for some reason, and Hong Gu himself, who might have resembled a bodhisattva carved from stone if only he smiled more often than he'd had reason to in recent years—who'd chosen to accompany him, determined as they'd proved themselves to be to get themselves wrapped up in whatever grand conspiracy Xingke was now ensnared within; and further down the line, there were rows upon rows of Gun-Rus, cheap and cost-effective death traps that had been assigned the utterly incongruous title of 'Dragon Cavalry' (which was entirely too pompous for anything its pilots most often called a 'wheeled coffin,' or a variation thereupon), and towards the rear of the assembly were the massive mobile artillery-pyramid land fortresses that were meant to be the Federation's answer to the Britannian G-1 Bases, the Longdan.

The sun on high was a welcome balm, even as the cloudless sky rendered it very nearly intolerable in all its strength, and in this land beyond the gate of his citadel, technically upon the steppe as they were, the winds, which were equally as strong as the rays of the sun on high, blew heavy through the tall grasses that surrounded them, and the mockeries of flags that were hoisted on tall flagpoles above them fluttered and snapped, as if the gusts and the gales were very nearly enough to see the fabric tatter and tear itself apart with their sheer force.

Not too long ago, this was a site of tedium, not a place of honour. The troop inspections themselves, he had no quarrel with, for while they were often extraordinarily laborious, they were nonetheless a deeply necessary element of command, a requirement to keep an accurate accounting of any army's readiness for a war, and he understood this deeply. He took his job as the Warden of the North, as a battlefield commander and a general besides, very seriously, for all that he sometimes felt that he was the only one amongst those scoundrels and incompetents who made up the bulk of his peers who did so—he had studied the strategies of Napoleon and Wellington (one of the few men to have ever dealt the former emperor a defeat in a field battle), read Vom Kriege and the Strategikon, consulted both the Comte de Guibert's writings and, perhaps painfully predictably, those of Sun Tzu, which had proven instrumental as recently as Mao Zedong during the Imperial Reformation, and so could not be avoided in good faith; he had won multiple victories on the field to earn both his proverbial spurs and the unfaltering respect of his men in the process, and so he'd had it hammered into his skull over the years exactly how important this part of the art of war truly was. No, his issue with this situation, historically, had been that the High Eunuchs were so very corrupt and so willing to try to cultivate allies to get one over on their fellows by giving out absurdly potent economic kickbacks to well-resourced low-bidders that oftentimes, the equipment that made it out of the factories down south and into the hands of masses of conscripted soldiers was of such comedically shoddy quality that it was usually difficult to tell the difference between equipment that was 'working as intended' and equipment that even their manufacturers would declare to have genuinely malfunctioned. Not to mention, the callous comments of the High Eunuchs hadn't exactly helped matters, pointing out as they did that if even thirty percent of their armies possessed functioning guns, they would still roll over all the other ground forces of their rival empires through sheer force of numbers—which, while, technically speaking, was indeed very true, was also a demonstration of a distressing, though not at all unsurprising, level of casual disregard for the lives of their soldiers.

His section of the Ever-Victorious Army was made up of hard-working soldiers, one and all—he had become a war hero, a living legend, in their eyes at a relatively young age, and they laboured valiantly to be worthy of his command—but with so much malfunctioning and defective equipment that was the crop reaped from all the favouritism, opportunism, and petty sabotage that was endemic to the way that the government of China and its imperial territories operated, it had been a long time since even they were enough to make what they were into a force that he could be proud to command.

But all that changed today.

Because at the end of the long assembly, with all the three quarters of a million infantrymen, half a million cavalrymen, and over a million technicians, gunners, and other indirect combatants working both on the 'maintenance', or what little of it there actually was, of the Gun-Rus, and the operation and maintenance of his fleet of Longdan, stood a motley crew of former mercenaries, ex-military personnel, and one woman with shockingly bright white hair and piercing, glacial blue eyes.

"Xianglin," Xingke asked his second, flanking him just over his other shoulder, and at the sound of her name, her austere face, which belied her age with its seeming youth (she was a year younger than him), turned to him, all four of the tails into which she'd styled her straight chestnut-brown hair, alongside a long bang-tail of some design (frankly, the hairstyle baffled him, and he suspected that that was about half of the reason she insisted on keeping it) bobbing with the motion. Her dark, blue-green eyes glittered with intelligence as she looked to him for further orders. "You have the financial side of this handled, yes?"

"Yes, sir," she replied, nodding as they walked. "If anyone goes digging, there'll be zero evidence of us having dealt with anyone beyond the usual black market channels—the triads and so forth. Just the usual run-of-the-mill embezzlement and smuggling operation."

"Good," Xingke said, nodding in turn; the three of them had agreed that it would be best to mask the upcoming event as a transaction funded by embezzled finances, one of the multitude that was something of an open secret amongst his fellow warlords, so as to conceal outright the truth of the matter, particularly the identity of his primary benefactor. "Then we can finally proceed…"

That was the last thing he was able to say before they entered the earshot of their contact, whom he had been informed was an arms dealer—or rather, she was an arms manufacturer with a significant degree of experience when it came to the nuances and procedures of gunrunning and general death-peddling; she was an odd one, certainly, being neither particularly tall nor otherwise imposing, but his instincts still insisted to him that this was someone who was to be handled with a great deal of care, and, given that a swordsman either lived or died by the degree to which he could trust his instincts, Xingke took care to heed the caution they were advising, motioning to the other two to let him do the talking.

"Miss Hekmatyar, I presume," Xingke called out, hoping that she could understand his Britannian.

"You presume correctly," she replied in perfect Mandarin—the predictably-chosen lingua franca of the Chinese Federation. She extended a bare hand from the pockets of her fur-lined white coat for him to shake, and greeted him politely and gregariously. "A pleasure to meet you as well, Li Xingke."

"The pleasure is all mine," Xingke responded, swapping his languages with an accompanying rush of relief at not having to wrangle a coherent sentence out of the self-contradictory nightmare that was the Britannian language. He took her hand and shook it, and as he did, he said, "If nothing else, it's good to be able, at long last, to put a face to the name…"

"So, you've heard of me?" she asked, tilting her head slightly, her thin lips set into a soft grin.

"I was assigned to investigate who it was, exactly, who was using Hong Kong as their main export point to the Philippines' gunrunning circuits some years ago," Xingke explained, and perhaps he was half reminiscing right then. "The name that happened to pop up most often in my search for the footprints and paper trail of the true culprits, of course, was yours."

"Well then! I'm certainly glad to see that I had managed to leave such a strong impression on you!" Hekmatyar jibed gently.

"Indeed," Xingke rejoined drily, looking the slight, ghostly pale woman up and down, before letting his gaze slip to the rest of her squad of bodyguards. He was surprised to see one of his countrymen standing alongside the rest of her aforementioned motley crew, which, he was willing to bet, had experiences that ran the gamut of just about every military and paramilitary force the world over, but that surprise subsided, and in its place, he was simply glad that at least one of them had managed to escape the decrepit nightmare that was their own homeland, satisfied as he was that he'd pledged his fealty to the sort of woman who'd save a life, the life of a former foe, in technicality if not in truth, simply because she believed that he should make the choice to pledge himself to her freely, and of his own will. Perhaps there was hope for both of them yet. "Her Highness chooses her allies well—provided, of course, your current capabilities measure up to what they were then."

"Oh, believe me, Li Xingke," Hekmatyar replied with a menacing, vulpine grin, leaning up and into his face as she spoke. "I'm leagues beyond where I was back then."

"Then I look forward to working with you," Xingke shot back gamely. "Now, shall we take a look at what you've brought us?"

Hekmatyar leaned away from him again, her previous vulpine grin subsiding into an affect that was much more conventionally professional. "Indeed. Let's get down to business. Lehm?"

One of the bodyguards, a tall, grizzled, ageing man with light grey, almost white hair, square-jawed and plain, his face covered in close-shorn stubble, took the lit cigarette from between his lips and tossed it down onto the ground, stomping it out with the heel of one of his combat boots to make sure it didn't catch; then, he stepped forward, his clothes a liberal interpretation of Britannian NCO service dress, his grey eyes shining in the light of the sun on the steppe, and reached behind them, bringing out a low crate that they all had been standing around, and popping it open with relative ease. Xingke took a step forward, but even at a distance, he could see the rows of Britannian standard-issue combat rifles that lay dormant within—blocky, sturdy-looking things, rather far afield of the glorified Great War-era relics that the High Eunuchs thought to supply them with. The grizzled man, Lehm, reached in and picked one up, lifting it as if he meant to use it as Hekmatyar stepped in to show off what she'd brought them.

"This is the Steiner B-15 All-Purpose Combat Rifle," she began, gesturing to the gun with a flick of her wrist. "Currently a state-of-the-art ballistic weapon issued to Britannian regulars in the Imperial Army, it features both an electromagnetic guiding rail inside of the barrel and a piston motor behind the chamber instead of gunpowder to accelerate its ammunition up to a maximum of seven hundred metres per second. As the internal rail is made of sakuradite, it's super-durable and extremely resistant to atmospheric variance, achieving a consistent standard of performance in virtually all climates while also being practically immune to the mechanical stresses that are the leading causes of weapon malfunctions in the field."

"May I?" Xingke asked, holding out his hands for the rifle.

"Of course," Hekmatyar allowed with a nigh-inscrutable smile; and at her permission, Lehm came forward and gave the gun over to Xingke's grasp. It was a bit heavier than he was used to, but not so much so that he thought he might struggle to lift it when awash with exhaustion and numb fingers—a marvellous piece of military hardware, to be certain. "Ammunition, of course, is normally sold separately."

"Naturally," Xingke acknowledged with a half-smile and a nod, before handing the weapon back to Lehm. "So, how many did you bring?"

"In this run? Four hundred thousand, or thereabouts," said Hekmatyar, her brow furrowing a little as she tried to make sure she remembered. "The rest will be en route in the coming weeks. Filling an order this large isn't easy, you know—especially not when you want to make sure it keeps relatively hush-hush."

"I'm sure that Her Highness appreciates your efforts, Miss Hekmatyar," replied Xingke. "As do I."

"Well, the guns took a bit of doing to get manufactured in time, given that it's been a standard-issue weapon for the past four years," the arms manufacturing magnate admitted, folding her arms across her flat chest as she spoke. "The body armour, on the other hand, was far easier to get off the books. We're already in the midst of full-scale production in an effort to retrofit the entire Imperial Army, so if we overestimate figures here or there, we've covered our tracks. Ugo?"

A big, blocky brick of a man, standing at over two metres tall, well-built and sun-kissed—Sicilian, if Xingke had to guess—stepped forth from the group, dressed in a Euro-style polo shirt and a pair of denim jeans, his black hair shorn close to his brick-shaped head, with its near-comically strong jaw, prominent Roman nose, and small, beady grey eyes, pulling another crate, about the same size as the first, along behind him in what Xingke couldn't help but identify as a Herculean feat of strength, without more than a grimace of effort. He dropped it before Xingke, and popped open the top of the crate itself, motioning with a jerk of his powerful chin for Xingke to take out part of the merchandise himself. Following the instruction given, Xingke dutifully reached in, and brought out…a breastplate of some sort? Single pairs of pauldrons, cuisses, gauntlets, and boots followed, all made of a flexible material that resisted in his hands like plastic, but seemed to be of much sturdier and more comfortable construction, and when he once more reached his hands in, he pulled out what looked to be a roughly-sized black body-suit, made from a material he'd never laid his hands on before. This, more than the others, caught his attention, and he turned to the arms dealer to ask her, "What…is this material, exactly?"

"The woman who invented it called it 'nanomail,'" Hekmatyar replied, cocking an eyebrow with a smirk at what he'd chosen to fixate on. "It's extremely lightweight and features an exceptional capacity for shock absorption, far and beyond the next-most modern innovation in body armour technology. It's not the best when it comes to preventing actual penetration, but of course, that's what the armoured plates are for. And, perhaps best of all, the nanomail suit is capable of resizing itself to fit the wearer with the press of a button, sealing itself to the wearer's body in record time."

Xingke nodded absently, setting the marvellous piece of technology gingerly to the side, along with all the rest of the black plates that made up the armour, before seizing upon what was, in his estimation, the least-surprising piece of this entire ensemble—the one-way lens strip that he remembered most strikingly of the nascent Dread Legionaries, back from the site of Santa Anna's doomed stunt on that fateful field. "And you said that the Britannian Army is being retrofitted with this gear as we speak?"

"Correct," Hekmatyar replied. "The armour Her Highness has purchased on your behalf, the armour that you hold in your hands—the Camelot Arsenal X-01 Personal Defence System—has been approved for standard issue by the Britannian Department of War. Production is already in full swing, but as I've said, if a few things go missing along the way, that's only to be expected. This is, after all, the first new design that HCLI will be unveiling, so a few minor kinks in the road are an inevitability."

"And if that raises any alarms with your War Department?" Xingke challenged, his brow cocking as he placed the black and red helmet down upon the retracted top of the crate alongside the rest of it.

"Her Highness and the Minister of War have…an understanding, as far as I can gather," the young woman said, shrugging her slender shoulders. "But whatever the details of that understanding might be, if it warrants scrutiny from the home front, then we'll handle it. After all, you'll recall, I trust, our initial topic of discussion."

"Of course," he replied, nodding. The Hekmatyar fortune, built from generations of arming distant forces for foreign wars… "Then I suppose we have quite a bit of work ahead of us. Hong Gu, have you selected the men you need for the supply squadron?"

"Of course, Lord Xingke," Hong Gu replied, inclining his head to avoid bowing at the waist.

"Then I suggest you call them forth so we can proceed with distribution," Xingke commanded over his shoulder, before returning his attention to Koko Hekmatyar. "You've done well for us, Miss Hekmatyar. I'll be sure Her Highness hears how well myself."

"Oh, it really was no trouble," Hekmatyar replied with false modesty, brushing it off. "In fact, since we're already here, I figure my squad might as well help out with the distribution ourselves, and make sure that it goes as smoothly as possible."

"That would certainly be appreciated," Xingke agreed, though not without suspicion. "But we have little enough in the way of refreshments here, and I would not want to be known to be a poor host…"

"Then it's a good thing we've brought a few of our own," Hekmatyar countered effortlessly, and in a moment, Xingke grasped the greater game that was now afoot. Her Highness is assured of my loyalty, but cannot be so certain about the loyalty of those under me. Clever…

"As you will," said Xingke with a nod. "If you will excuse me, Miss Hekmatyar, I must make ready to depart for Luoyang on the morrow. My presence has been requested in the Vermilion Forbidden City. In the meantime, I think that you will find my most trusted subordinates, Hong Gu and Zhou Xianglin, to be more than capable of seeing to your affairs in my stead."

"Of course, Lord Xingke," Hekmatyar replied with a cryptic smile, bowing at the waist. "I imagine that we'll have plenty of time to get acquainted in the future, now that we're on the same side…"

"Rest assured, Miss Hekmatyar," said Xingke, returning her bow. "I feel much the same."

---

Xingke sighed, placing his ebony chopsticks down upon the table, and looked up from his bowl of rice. "Whatever you're going to say, say it and be done with it."

Xianglin looked up at him in surprise, her firm, blue-green eyes widening around the mouthful of horse-meat and rice that bulged out her cheeks. It would have made for quite a comical sight, were Xingke not already annoyed. She pointed to herself with a free finger on the hand holding her rice bowl, before she put it down, put her chopsticks down, chewed and swallowed. When at last her mouth was clear, she asked aloud, "Me?"

"Do you see anyone else around us who seems to be thinking about anything other than food?" asked Xingke, making sure that his sarcasm was felt as well as heard.

Hong Gu, who was sitting between them at the third end of the triangle the trio formed around their round dining table, swallowed his mouthful of food, and patted his belly. "You can't think healthy thoughts on an empty stomach, Xingke."

He waved his other friend off dismissively, albeit good-naturedly, and refocused his attention upon Xianglin, sighing again. "Yes, Xianglin. I can practically hear you thinking from across the table. If you've anything you wish to say to me about our guests, I would hear it spoken aloud instead of leaving it to fester. Now, out with it."

Her expression shuttered, becoming immediately quite severe, as she folded her hands on the table in front of her, interlocking her fingers as she visibly chose her words. "Lord Xingke, I know that you feel that you owe…some manner of debt to this Britannian princess…"

"She was actually quite insistent that I owed her no debt whatsoever," Xingke could not help but to interject, emphasising the point in hopes that it would at last get through to his friend and subordinate.

"Be that as it may," she stressed—and if Xianglin was anyone else, Xingke was sure that she would have started gritting her teeth in frustration. "She's Britannian, sir. Are you really sure that trusting her is at all wise?"

"She's come through for us so far," Xingke pointed out, gesturing to the world beyond the window of their dining chamber, where the distribution of Britannian weapons, armour, food, and medical supplies continued apace. "I would have thought that your misgivings might be quelled once she proved to be more than mere empty words…"

"They are, to an extent," Xianglin replied sharply. "But not enough, not by half. She could still very much be setting us up to take the fall. What if she's only using you to gain control of the Federation's lands and resources? What will become of you once she has that in her grasp? What about our oath to rescue the Tianzi from the High Eunuchs' grip? Does that oath, does our cause, even mean anything to you anymore? How can you serve the Tianzi while you hold dual loyalties to this Britannian princess? With respect, this entire situation puts me ill at ease, sir."

"She has sworn to aid our cause, Xianglin," Xingke pointed out.

"She's Britannian, sir," Xianglin huffed. "Her words are worth less than the air they took to say."

"Not her, Xianglin," Xingke replied patiently. "She is different. She's not like the other Britannians. Trust me, I've had the dubious pleasure of interacting with quite a few."

"How can you be sure of that, sir?" Xianglin pressed, undeterred.

"Because she asked for my allegiance," Xingke replied, "and not the bought-and-paid-for loyalties of any of my peers, who would certainly have been much easier to bring onto her side, the opportunity that my presence in Area Six presented notwithstanding. If she was like the others, she would never have even bothered. Hell, she might even have dispensed with dealing with any of us and went to the High Eunuchs directly. Ancestors know that Britannia has power aplenty to offer them that they would salivate over. But instead, she saved my life, informed me of the…the designs that the High Eunuchs had in store for me, and asked for my loyalty in exchange for her aid. If she is seeking to use me up and throw me away when she's gotten the Chinese Federation under her heel, she's choosing an awfully strange method of going about it."

"I meant no disrespect, Lord Xingke," muttered Xianglin, lowering her head in contrition.

"Not to me, you didn't," Xingke sighed, shaking his head. "But to the princess, Xianglin, you most certainly did. And all I can say to that is…you'll understand when you meet her. Trust me on that."

"Must be quite a woman to have grim old Xingke jumping to her defence like this," chuckled Hong Gu, patting his belly for emphasis.

"Don't be ridiculous," Xingke scoffed. "She's much too young for me. Barely more than a child, to be perfectly honest. And besides, even if that wasn't the case, she's already married."

"To a woman," Hong Gu scoffed.

"Well, she is Britannian," Xingke shrugged. "That means something to them. And I imagine that it's part of why she had some very choice words to say about Confucius…"

"Blasted foreigners…" Hong Gu scoffed under his breath, shaking his head as he reached out to one of the dishes for a cut of ox tongue. "I hope you know what you're doing with that one, Xingke…"

"The guns, armour, bullets, bandages, and provisions that just came into our stocks tells me all that I need to know, Gu," said Xingke, leaning back in his own chair with a huff, before his eyes dropped onto the spread, the braised duck liver in particular. He was conflicted for a moment—clearly, this conversation was a necessary one, and would only become more difficult to have the longer he put it off, but damn it all was he hungry… He compromised with himself, leaning forward and taking about half as much as he wanted of the dish from the platter, so as to maximise the amount of time in which he could speak. "I know that you don't trust her right now, and I'm not enough of a fool to ask that of you. I ask instead that you trust in me, that you trust that I know what I'm doing."

"We do, Xingke," Xianglin sighed, dropping the formalities for a change. "We always have. I think I can speak for both of us when I say that neither of us would still be here if we didn't. We're just asking that you go into this with open eyes, and be careful."

"That's all I seek to do, Xianglin," Xingke replied softly.

"Then we will be behind you to the end," Xianglin told him with a firm nod; she then returned to the task of stuffing her face with food, and Xingke, after permitting himself a small smile, at last did the same.

Silence, save for the clattering of chopsticks and the sound of mastication, fell upon the table. Only as the contents of the bowls between the three of them continued to empty, until only the smallest morsels and scraps remained, did any of them raise even a word. And this time, it was Xianglin. "So, Lord Xingke, it's your turn to speak. What's the plan?"

Xingke stilled, his brow furrowing. That…wasn't a question he'd thought to ask himself until just now, and he actually felt rather silly for the oversight. "There…isn't one. Not yet. At least as far as I know."

"So, we're arming our men with Britannian-made arms and armour…for the sake of it? Or for our health?" she quipped, a current of frustrated concern running strong beneath her sarcasm.

"Communication has been sparse, though regular," Xingke explained, pushing his empty bowl aside and setting his elbows upon the table, threading his fingers together as he leaned forwards. "My impression is that Her Highness is bolstering her information infrastructure here, embedding more of her spies and her agents in more and more key positions, making sure she has all the eyes on the ground that she needs. That Koko Hekmatyar arrived with the promised materiel demonstrates that she knows enough about the current situation to feel confident about opening a corridor to get these bullets and bandages into our hands, so that, to me, speaks of a willingness to move whatever design she's working on to the next stage, whatever that is. I expect that I'll be hearing from her somehow within the next few days at the latest. Then, we'll start to get together and go over what our next steps need to be."

It was clear to him that neither Xianglin nor Hong Gu were particularly thrilled with what he had to say to them, but there wasn't all that much that he could tell them past that, and they knew it; moreover, he was sure that they had realised, as he had, that they had sailed gracefully right over the Rubicon. Even had he thought to rescind his pledge of allegiance to Princess Justine right that moment, that he had had even as much of an association with her as he had up until that very instant would have been grounds, in the eyes of the High Eunuchs, to order his complete and total destruction. And with him, so too would Xianglin, Hong Gu, and anyone of note under his command find that their lives were suddenly forfeit. They had no choice, in the end, but to hang with the princess, or most assuredly, they would all hang separately, if not worse.

They broke apart to go to see to their own tasks afterwards, Hong Gu to work on formalising all the documentation necessary to see this duty of theirs performed, that they should give the High Eunuchs a full accounting of the men and materiel available to them, ostensibly so that, in the event of military action between any of the three major empires of the world, either directly or by proxy, the government in Luoyang would be able to make the proper preparations, while Xianglin conferred with Xingke's officer corps to organise their new materiel, and the training schedules necessary to ensure that their soldiers were at least familiar with the use of these new Britannian weapons. As for Li Xingke, his docket was shockingly light that day, what with the fact that the lion's share of what he'd had to attend to recently revolved entirely around the details of that day's visit from Miss Hekmatyar, and now that it had come and was in progress, it left him with a block of what was essentially free time to think, which was something he wouldn't say that he needed now, exactly.

It was an uncomfortable note that kept ringing in the back of his head, Xianglin's questions. He had expected Hong Gu's disdain—neither he nor Xianglin had ever had the chance to travel outside of the lands of the Chinese Federation, and so while they might have heard that some things were this way in the other nations of the world, and that other things were that way, they would have had no ability to know what that meant, had no ability to see it in action—and he'd thought himself to be exactly as prepared for Xianglin's suspicion, but that latter part had never come to pass. She had needled him in places where he had not been expecting anything of the sort, and now that he left the dining chamber to traverse the halls of his fortress in an aimless meander, the points of puncture began to smart. For how could she ask that of him, really? How could she doubt that his commitment to aiding the Tianzi, to empowering her, to freeing her from the grasp of the High Eunuchs, whose tyranny she felt more intimately than any other single citizen of the Chinese Federation, was every bit as steadfast as ever? How could she ask him if the promise he swore to the girl on that day, years ago now, that he would help her see the world that existed beyond merely the bounds of the Vermilion Forbidden City, still meant anything to him?

And yet, Xianglin's pointed questions and sharp tongue would not have rattled him as much as they had if there'd been no validity, no truth to the questions she posed—or to the implicit claims she made with them. For indeed, what did this mean to him, this oath that he'd sworn to this Britannian princess? What if it came into conflict with the oath he'd sworn to the Tianzi, in spite of both of their efforts to the contrary, forcing him to choose between his divided loyalties? He'd spoken truly of the princess to his friends—if it was indeed her conscious desire to betray him and cast him aside at some point in the future, she'd chosen the most perplexing way possible of accomplishing it—but accidents happened, didn't they? Plans, whether they were resourced properly, properly constructed, and properly-executed or not, had a tendency to result in at least a few unexpected outcomes, just due to the changing situation for which the plans were built; she certainly had no intention of betraying him, but the act of sabotaging his goals would hardly have required her to, would it? And more to the point, what did this mean about him, that he was willing to strike what the rest of the world might have considered to be a Faustian bargain in the truest sense possible, for the sake of freeing the Tianzi? Was that still truly his goal? Or had his desperation to accomplish his goal corrupted the perceived nobility of his cause, and the lengths he went to to further it?

If the choice came between his oldest loyalty and his newest, the latter of which had, in the most literal of senses, returned his life to him, for all that the former had spared his life, only to doom him, albeit very much inadvertently, to one lived in the shadow of death, branding the stain of ignominy into his soul, which one would Li Xingke wind up choosing? For all that he had told himself that this changed very little, save that it put him so much closer to his goal than he could ever have accomplished on his own, was that truly the case?

If he was being honest with himself, if it came down to it, he had no way to be certain, should things go poorly and he was forced to make a choice, which of his divided loyalties he would sooner champion. That uncertainty, in the end, was an issue unto itself.

Deep in his own thoughts as he was, he almost didn't notice the person he was all but walking into until he was right upon her—a tall, shockingly well-built and well-endowed woman, black of hair with one amber eye, the other being concealed behind the sterile white pad of a medical eyepatch, a face that was, in all honesty, more handsome than it was beautiful (though that detracted very little from how attractive she was), and well-formed, well-toned biceps that made the black muscle-shirt she wore cling to her chest like a second skin. Below the belt, she wore a pair of trousers that looked like it had been a set of fatigues at some point and black combat boots, and her legs were positioned in a stance that signalled to Xingke that she was fully prepared to fight and kill at a moment's notice; and when he looked back up to her face, she smirked at him. "You're the big man in charge, yeah? Li Xingke?"

"I am, yes," Xingke replied with a nod, nonplussed but rallying.

"Name's Valmet," the woman introduced herself.

"…A pleasure to meet you," he said after a moment's awkward silence.

Perplexingly, she grinned. "You know, you're probably the first person working for the princess I've met who didn't seem to have my entire service history memorised. It's actually pretty refreshing, come to think of it…"

"I'm…glad to have done that for you, I suppose," Xingke said neutrally. "Though, in fairness, I'm a late arrival, it seems, to this grand alliance that Princess Justine seems to have built…"

"Mm. Could have something to do with it, I'll grant you," Valmet shrugged. "That all aside, I heard a fair bit of tell that you're a dab hand with a blade. Favouring the jian?"

"Your sources aren't wrong, whoever they are," Xingke admitted. "I don't think it'd be hyperbolic, in fact, to make the claim that I'm probably one of the most proficient swordmasters in the entirety of the Ever-Victorious Army."

Valmet whistled lowly. "Any chance you'd wanna mosey on down to the courtyard for a spar, show off how good you really are?"

That hadn't been what he'd been expecting, certainly not from Hekmatyar's squad of bodyguards. "I certainly wouldn't be opposed to it, though I admit, I would have to question your motives in offering this."

"That's pretty simple, actually," Valmet said, rolling her shoulders and stretching. "See, I've started feeling a bit stiff, and the cup of Koko's squad doesn't exactly runneth over with other CQC specialists for me to knock the rust off with, so I've gotta take my opportunities where I can find them. That, and you've got a look on your face like you've got an awful lot of heavy thoughts knocking around up there. Between you and me, Xingke, in my experience, there are few cures for that more reliable than going for a round or five in the ring."

In the ordinary course, perhaps Xingke would have thought it prudent to exercise greater suspicion; but in his current state and the current circumstances, all he could think to reply with were mildly different variations of 'fuck it, why not.' So, in response, he shrugged. "I could certainly go for a round."

Valmet smiled broadly, reaching over and patting him on the shoulder with enough force to stagger him slightly—years upon years of poison quite literally devouring him alive, surprisingly, wasn't the sort of thing a body could entirely recover from overnight—and praised him. "Atta boy. I'll meet you in the inner courtyard in five? Gotta give you a chance to grab your sword and all…"

"That sounds acceptable," he said with a nod, before moving to step around her. "Now, if you would excuse me, Miss Valmet…"

"Sure thing," she replied, and let him pass, swaggering off in the direction he'd just come.

The route to his rooms wasn't a long one, not by any stretch—he was familiar with all the corridors, after all, that had been built into the original structure purely for the use of discreet servants—and so it was hardly a challenge to swing by there, grab his jian, belt it, and make it to the courtyard the woman specified well before the time limit was up; and already, there were a few people standing there by the sidelines, as if waiting to watch the match to come, Koko Hekmatyar foremost among them. That came as a bit of a shock, given the fact that the distribution process would be ongoing for the remainder of the day—guns, armour, ammunition, food, and medical supplies for a force even a fraction of the size of Xingke's was far from a small or minor haul—but the majority of her squad of bodyguards was absent, in fact nearly all of it, so he supposed that she merely trusted in them enough to delegate the work. There were, Xingke knew, a fair few competing schools of thought on that, with the overall divide being between those who believed that good delegation was the mark of an effective leader, and those who believed that knowing well the plights that a commander was inflicting upon their subordinates was necessary to avoid losing touch with the realities of their soldiers' tasks; Xingke himself, of course, leaned closer to the former ideology than the latter, but he'd also always ensured that he led from the front when it really counted. Xingke imagined that he and Miss Hekmatyar were alike in that regard, at least—though obviously, he couldn't know for certain, not right at that moment, at any rate.

"So, level with me, here," Valmet called out to him, her voice carrying shockingly well. "On a scale of one to ten, how out of practice are you?"

"About a three, I'd say," he judged, drawing his jian and settling into his stance. "I train twice a day, and drill thrice, but there's a limit to how ready I can be without adequate sparring partners."

"I imagine that won't be a problem for you for very much longer," said Valmet, drawing her combat knife from her belt and brandishing it as she lowered herself into her stance, as well. "Princess Justine's got a fair few heavy-hitters under her belt already. You'll be in good company."

"Hopefully, I'm in good company already," Xingke quipped, bringing his blade into a ready position and brandishing its tip.

"Flattery will get you into surprisingly many places," Valmet shot back, bringing her combat knife in line as well as she prepared to engage. Then, she looked down at the knife in her hand, and then over to Xingke's jian, and, after a moment of thought, shrugged again, and turned to one of the onlookers, who was a member of Xingke's Sword Guard, trained entirely by both him and Xianglin, and called out, "Hey, you! Topknot! You got an extra one of those?"

She gestured to Xingke's jian with her combat knife, just to make sure that there was no way that he could mistake what it was that she was requesting of him. Still, he stood there in shock for a moment, as if he couldn't quite understand what he was being asked, and it took a moment, embarrassingly, for Xingke to figure out what the problem could be.

"The lady is asking if you have a spare jian for her use," Xingke explained in Cantonese—members of his Sword Guard were usually from the south, particularly Guangdong and Guangxi, so he used it instead of Mandarin for communicating with them—and comprehension dawned in the young man's eyes. He went into the shadows around the courtyard for a moment, and came back, then, with a spare jian in hand, which he presented to Valmet with a bow.

"Thanks," she replied, not appearing bothered in the slightest by the fact that she knew by now that he didn't speak her language. Xingke translated the statement of gratitude, and the top-knotted swordsman, the second son of the Xi family, bowed to him in turn, and retreated to the sidelines once again. Valmet took her combat knife back to her belt and sheathed it, before drawing her borrowed jian, and, after testing it out for any irregularities with a few wheeling swings, mimicked Xingke's stance. "Now we can get started."

Xingke felt his eyebrow raise despite himself. "Do you even know how to use that thing?"

"I know the basics," she shrugged. "Typical wisdom is that the pointy end goes into the opponent. I feel pretty confident that I can work out the rest from there."

Hong Gu would be put off by this woman's irreverence, but Xingke only shook his head, bemused. He'd been sent to deal with quite enough people with zero respect for the culture of his homeland—eight of whom now governed it, of course—over the duration of his career that it no longer fazed him. And perhaps there was even something to her boast there, since he seriously doubted that Koko Hekmatyar would risk travelling in the company of any less-than-perfect bodyguards. "So be it, then. On your cue."

"Koko!" Valmet called out, her single eye fixed upon him.

"Five," the woman in white called out with an eye-roll. "Four. Three. Two. One. Zero. Begin!"

The jian was an old weapon, and the art of its mastery was just as old. As a one-handed weapon, it lacked the leverage necessary to spring into any considerable amount of explosive cutting power, at least from a position of rest. As he stepped forward, and shared in a beat-salute with Valmet, tapping their blades into each other for a moment before they began in earnest, he wondered if she understood that already; and if she did not, he wondered how long it would take for her to learn it. Hers struck him as the sort of lethality that came from being a quicker learner than most, and in having a talent for thinking on one's feet, and he observed this in action when, less than a heartbeat after he began circling her, she returned in kind, circling each other in the opening steps of the steel-dance, which concerned itself chiefly with the understanding of how to spot and exploit openings. Already, he saw that she knew some fundamentals that were universal to all disciplines of bladework, to allow one's sword to be defence as well as offence, to use one's weapon in the pursuit of guarding one's body, and presumably, to defend and strike in the same motion, played like a chord on a pipa. He saw her eye following his blade as he began to wheel it, keeping the jian in as close to a state of constant motion as could be managed.

For there was a trick to the wielding of a jian, which explained, in his mind, the circuitous motions of its parries and blows: cutting power, not from leverage, but from momentum and torque.

When he struck, it was with a dazzling flourish, wheeling into a chop. The jian was just as artful in motion as it was deadly, and it struck true here again, batting aside her attempt at a parry and striking at her forearm in a warning blow, drawing a gush of blood from the limb. He retreated, and did not follow through on his advantage, for this was a friendly spar, and the drawing of blood on its own had won him the first of their bouts.

Thence came another lesson, another trick: that the lack of leverage dictated defence as readily as it did attack, and the nimble blade was to be as wheeling in its deflections as it was its blows.

He watched as it clicked for Valmet, as well, and her pensive frown at her injury shifted into a grin. "So, that's how that goes…"

"Indeed," Xingke replied gamely, keeping his blade between her and him, even while it was pointed at her. "Shall we go another round?"

"You bet," Valmet agreed, stepping forth and readying her own jian, and while in the last bout, she'd grasped the weapon with her index and fourth fingers primarily, as befit arts where the dexterity behind the cut came largely from the direction of a second hand, for which the jian lacked much of any space, now she grasped the hilt with her middle two fingers, affirming in Xingke's eyes that she had already begun to learn. It had been one of his few joys back when his days had been numbered, taking time out of his days to see to and nurture the skills of his Sword Guard, both old and new, and he found, to his relief, that the new extent of his life had not by any means dimmed the enjoyment he got out of instruction, even in such an informal setting as this one.

They circled each other again, their blades wheeling in searching scans of each other, ready to snap into a blow at the drop of a hat, and as Xingke let his reflexes guide his body into the motions—for beyond merely being wheeling, defence with the jian was as much of a full-body endeavour as attack—he started to lose himself in the natural rhythm of bladed violence.

He gave Valmet this much: she was possessed of exceptional instincts, and whatever she'd managed to glean from her observations of him she soaked up like a sponge. Even as they circled each other, he saw how her technique grew more and more refined by the moment, progressing in mere seconds as much as his Sword Guard would be able to manage in a brisk month of intense training, and the sight of it impressed the warden greatly. When she lashed out with the jian, testing his defences, she maintained proper momentum, such that Xingke actually began to feel pressed—something that even his Sword Guard had yet to draw out of him, even with all the time and effort he'd spent training them, and how much they'd progressed in their own masteries of the weapon. Their weapons clashed against each other, each putting their bodies into their efforts to ward off the other's hostility, and as it progressed, their footwork began to grow more complex. A grounded stance, after all, could only generate so much force; and moreover, a few of the advanced patterns of the art, patterns that Xingke only very rarely had any occasion to use, required that he rely on the balance of a single foot to generate enough force to cut, while also misdirecting his foe.

When he followed through, her parry was insufficient; the jian parted the cloth of her trousers, and left a red path against the pale flesh of her thigh.

"I could have tipped you over there," she pointed out as they parted.

"You could have tried," he corrected her. "And in so doing, you would have exposed yourself."

"…Fair enough," she conceded begrudgingly.

"Not to mention, I'm much more firmly-rooted than you might think like this," he said, taking once again the same one-legged position from before, and repeating the pattern.

"Hm. I'd like to test that out, but, well," said Valmet, gesturing to the gash in her thigh.

"The perils of sparring with live steel," Xingke nodded. "I know them all too well. You should get that tended to as quickly as you can manage."

"Oh, I intend to," Valmet assured him, with a quick and indicative glance towards the sidelines. And indeed, there stood Koko Hekmatyar, frowning at her bodyguard. "Else, I'd never hear the end of it."

"Be that as it may, thank you, Valmet," Xingke said, sheathing his jian and stepping forth, extending his hand. "It was a pleasure to spar with you."

"I'm sure it was," Valmet quipped right back, clasping his hand while retaining an impressive degree of composure even as the wound on her thigh bled freely. He hadn't so much as clipped her femoral artery in that exchange—his target had been her outer thigh, not her inner, and he had more than enough control to be at no risk of cutting beyond that by accident—but even though it wasn't 'severed artery' levels of bleeding, not by any means, that was still quite a lot of blood that she was losing. He doubted any but the most veteran of his students would have held up nearly so well as she in a similar situation. "Though, since we're going to be seeing each other a lot over the coming months and years, why don't we make this a regular thing?"

"It would be my honour," he replied, and found that he meant every word of it. There was a form of excitement that came with sparring with an opponent who learned so quickly, and he hadn't known that he had missed it quite so dearly. Other things tended to take precedence when one was aware of the proximity of their own death, after all—and he sincerely doubted that he could have experienced this pleasure at all, were he not in this moment assured of the restoration of his own health and longevity. He bowed, and then brushed her off. "Now, about your thigh…"

"Already on it," she said, sheathing her own jian. Then, she looked to the other side of the courtyard as if seeking out someone specific, and called out, "Hey, Topknot! Think fast!"

She threw the jian, then, and the young man in question scrambled to catch it, but already, she had started to limp away, her employer intercepting her midway and helping her off the courtyard, the sight one that was possessed of a degree of casual intimacy that had the gears clicking together in Xingke's mind. He recalled the subject of discussion at the meal only a little while ago, then, and chuckled to himself, shaking his head.

Ah, I see, he thought to himself. Britannians…

---

Once upon a time, the city of Luoyang, straddling the Luo and Yi Rivers, had been the seat of power for the Xia Dynasty, an age so far into their distant past that much of what was known about it was as much myth as it was fact. It was the eldest of the Four Great Ancient Capitals, and had served as a capital to more than half a dozen different dynasties over the course of its life, and so it only made sense that, with the Qing Dynasty a smoking ruin following the horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Imperial Reformation, which had resulted in the current state of the Chinese Federation, had decided that the symbolism of the city of Luoyang made it an ideal capital for the rebuilt government.

Of course, Xingke would have known none of this in the ordinary course—the preponderance of the citizens of the empire that was ruled from the Vermilion Forbidden City were destitute peasants who toiled in the oft-futile pursuit of subsistence, and as such, had neither the time nor the appetite to learn much about their own history; and while this was much more the case for the zones that were within the borders of what had historically been the territory of the imperial dynasties than it was for the zones outside of it, like India or Mongolia, Xingke and just about everyone he knew had been born right smack in the middle of this mess of crippling poverty, such that he hadn't even learned to read or write his own name, not until his encounter with the Tianzi that had so fatefully set him upon his path. She had done what she could to teach him, and in the places where she was unable to help, the High Eunuchs had arranged for him to be taught. That made a great deal more sense to him now, knowing as he did that they had been plotting to use him up and kill him from the very beginning, but at the time, he remembered that he had wondered why they took the time to mould him into a weapon, given the fact that they were so paranoid that they surely must have at least considered how he could be turned against them.

No, what he knew of his homeland's history now, he knew only because Princess Justine had given him access to a vast library of such information, using her agents as intermediaries. From what he had been able to gather, she'd taken it upon herself to arrange the information into a remedial format personally, so as to prevent him from being overwhelmed by the enormity of the undertaking—a consideration for which he grew increasingly more grateful, as the broad and often sordid expanse of his homeland's history began, at last, to become known to him. He'd devoured the texts like he breathed them and not the air in his lungs, and yet still, the pile of his ignorance seemed to remain immovably interminable in its vastness. He was a little awed by it, in fact; he'd known that this was old ground beneath his feet, had felt it many times over the years, but he'd had little appreciation for just how old it truly was, until Princess Justine had decided that his ignorance was entirely unacceptable. And while he hadn't been wholly ignorant of the stories of his homeland's past before—hence how he had known that when the other children had called Hong Gu 'Dong Zhuo,' they had been mocking him for his portliness—he'd had no context. Dong Zhuo and Lü Bu, in his mind, along with Cao Cao and the rest, had rested in this timeless floating-state, where he could not have known if they were only a hundred years dead, or two hundred, or five hundred, or so on. And without that context, all of those dead men were little more than fairy tales, stories they recalled from childhood and discarded as they grew older, rather than a record, however dubious in its truth, of events that had taken place upon the very ground he now walked.

It was a struggle, now, not to gawk as he disembarked from his transport, and beheld the mixture of ancient history and modern politics that made up Luoyang's current face, in a way that it hadn't been when all he'd known of the place was the plight of a powerless girl in the hands of eight conniving, greedy slugs; but this was hardly his first time having to play politics, not the first time he'd had to conceal things from the High Eunuchs in their own seat of power, and his sudden knowledge of the city all around him was not even amongst the most difficult secrets he'd had to keep off of his face in their presence, in the grand scheme of things. His nerves, at the very least, were steady.

His transport arrived by rail—a privilege of his status, given that rail lines were reserved for military use by the High Eunuchs' will—and when he disembarked from the train onto the barren platform just a bit beyond the walls of the Vermilion Forbidden City, he did so armed, and with his Sword Guard in tow. This was an official summons for all of the wardens, after all, and so he was required to bring them with him as his only companions. This was not nearly so vexing to him as it might have been before—it allowed him to have an excuse regarding why neither Gu nor Xianglin were accompanying him, as they otherwise would have and had in the past, giving him an extra layer of cover to conceal the distribution of Britannian goods to his northern fortress, which, for obvious reasons, would need to be hidden from the High Eunuchs for as long as possible. He left the question of to what end he was concealing it, and for how long he would have to do so, from his mind; he hadn't yet come to an answer on that front, and deliberating over it in full view of so many hostile eyes was courting disaster, plain and simple. Instead, he kept his eyes forward, and took his first steps towards the lion's den.

It was early in the morning, the sun rising slow and gluttonous over the Vermilion Forbidden City's imposing walls, so Xingke cut a brisk pace, keenly aware that the Ceremonial Guard, accustomed as they were to all the creature comforts that the capital had to offer those in the High Eunuchs' favour, were likely to be far less diligent than they ought to have been, and perhaps would appear later in the day, drowsy in the bracing morning air as they had been in the past. And true to form, as he followed the path into the walls of the massive structure that was the seat of power for everything wrong with this country, two red-robed men in steel kettle hats and gorgets lounged lazily against their posts, wiping sleep out of their eyes, with their ji both propped up over their shoulders and against the wall behind them. Once, he would have found it quite disgusting indeed, that he knew that he could cut apart these sycophantic bottom-feeders with all the ease of carving a cake, but he was glad of it now, and only too happy to avail himself of their deficiency as he and his bodyguards passed through their checkpoint as they sprung to life and scrambled to attention, a sloppy attempt to appear like anything other than what they were—the treacherous, loathsome attack dogs of even more loathsome half-men.

He was not the first to arrive, he knew; even had he left a day before any of the others, that wouldn't have changed the fact that he was among the furthest away from Luoyang of all his fellow wardens, so they would naturally already be here. Here, too, was he glad of the earliness of the hour: of his contemporaries, only General Cao, perhaps, possessed the diligence to be awake and about, while the others were varyingly known to have availed themselves of the comforts, both legitimate and not, of their own positions, lining their own pockets and stuffing their own faces even while those who lived upon their lands starved, and he doubted sincerely that their excesses would have led to them becoming early risers. Thus, he and his guard saw themselves across the expanse of the empty pathways of the massive palace unmolested, and were soon inside of the palace proper, where Ceremonial Guardsmen seemed to be crawling out of the woodworks already.

Someone's kicked the hornet's nest, Xingke thought to himself with some measure of surprise; as all in their service, regardless of circumstances, came to understand quite quickly, the Eunuchs' paranoia was the stuff of legend even at the best of times, but this heavy a presence of Ceremonial Guard still struck him as deeply irregular. Was Princess Friederike that successful in getting under their collective skins, that they still jump at her shadow nearly a year later…?

"Halt!" called one of them, trotting over with his partner. And then another pair joined, and another, until they all reached Xingke and his Sword Guard, surrounding them on all sides and levelling their ji, as if they thought they could do any serious harm to them before Xingke killed them all. He'd only gotten better as his health improved, after all, but even half-dead, this many of them would hardly have been able to give him any trouble on his own. "Identify yourselves! And state your business!"

This is theatre, he sighed to himself in realisation. An amateurish attempt at intimidation, to say the least, and considering the fact that the Ceremonial Guard were already a band of amateurs and scoundrels, Xingke felt that that said a fair bit on its own, that he would see fit to remark upon it, even privately. "I am Li Xingke, Warden of the North. I come to answer Her Majesty the Tianzi's summons, and I bring with me one-fourth of my Sword Guard—forty blades in total."

The Ceremonial Guard held them at ji-point for a while longer, with neither Xingke, nor indeed any member of his Sword Guard, so much as raising their hands in the universal gesture of surrender; and when their presumed commander, the man who had called out to Xingke and stopped him, raised his weapon, and thus prompted the others to follow suit, a high, wheedling voice called out to them, raking its painted nails down the soft tissue of Xingke's mind. "How uncouth of you, Xingke, to call upon us at such an hour!"

"I prefer to arrive early, Zhao Hao," Xingke replied, biting down on the urge to sigh in frustration. It had been his goal to avoid exactly this, and now these incompetent buffoons had pinned him down just long enough for their corpulent master to waddle his way over to them, getting Xingke in his sight. This creature he called 'Zhao Hao' was perhaps the most detestable of all eight of the High Eunuchs, already a disgusting and loathsome group all on their own, for he was so wearily often their spokesperson, and very often their brains—he'd certainly seen enough of the creature against his own will over the years for Xingke to know that he was the centre of their sadism, though certainly not its point of origin. "There is much to be done even during these official summons, and every moment I am diverted from my post at the northern border, the more likely it becomes that our neighbours may seek to test our defences. I should not like to linger for longer than I am needed here on account of that. Surely you can understand that much, as a man of duty yourself."

"Xingke, Xingke, always such a boor," Zhao Hao simpered, his painted, arrogant face twisting itself into a condescending sneer. "But fine! I suppose we did summon you. Guards, return to your posts."

With that, at last, the red-robed Ceremonial Guard shuffled off back to the shadowed nooks and dark crannies they'd crawled out of (like termites), and Xingke was left with his Sword Guard behind him, and one of his most hated enemies before him. His hand itched for the hilt of his jian, the urge at least twice as strong as before, now that he knew what Zhao Hao and his co-conspirators had been plotting, but this was a desire that Xingke had mastered long ago, and that mastery served him well even and especially now, such that he gave off no physical indication that he was as close as he was to drawing his blade and splitting this bloated cockroach in half. It would only take a moment, he knew, but he stayed his hand: he had no plan for what would happen after that, and as that knowledge had stayed his hand before, it also stayed it now.

But you also don't know what the plan is up north, do you? a treacherous part of his mind began to whisper into his ear. You have no true knowledge of Her Highness's designs, but that didn't stop you before. It hasn't even stopped you since. So why should it stop you now?

That was a more difficult urge to force down, tasting like bile in his gorge, but force it down he did, and all without Zhao Hao being any the wiser—that was the thing about slipping an errant compliment into a conversation with a High Eunuch, that regardless of how insincere the compliment was, they would still be preening over it for hours on end thereafter. It was a useful, if admittedly extremely distasteful, method of misdirection, to say the least.

And because he knew it was expected of him, he asked now, as he had so many other times before, long before he had learned what repugnant designs these wretched creatures had planned for him and his body, "How fares Her Majesty, Zhao Hao? Is she well?"

"Mm? Oh, yes, quite well," said Zhao Hao, though the comment was as off-handed as always. This, at least, brought some hidden relief to Xingke, that the stir that had been kicked up months ago, a storm the Prime Minister of Britannia had set into motion, and that had only intensified in the time since, hadn't yet drawn the High Eunuchs' suspicions from their usual targets—chiefly, each other. But the fat half-man then turned away from Xingke, his slippers padding along the rich red silk of the carpet, set against grey granite tiles that had been smoothed and buffed out until each shone like polished marble, and Xingke was at once reminded that their servants, cronies, and assorted bodyguards lurked behind every immense wooden pillar, sanded smooth and painted an even red, capped with figured gold at both the foot of each pillar, and where each pillar met the high, vaulted ceilings, tall enough for four Gun-Rus to stand stacked atop each other; he would be ill-advised, to say the least, to say anything, even if he was under no greater scrutiny than usual. It wouldn't do, after all, for any blunder on his part to cause that to change. "I imagine you'll want to speak with her at some point, as usual?"

Xingke would like to say that he was kicking himself for not noticing the sleaze in Zhao Hao's tone earlier, that he had merely been blind to the open and nefarious implications, over which the High Eunuchs were surely gloating; but the reality was that he now understood how it had slipped past his notice. Because he heard it now, but it was threaded through with a strong cord of impersonality that had thrown him off the proverbial scent until now. And thus, any and all doubts as to what the High Eunuchs might have wanted to use him for, whether the fate that he had been told they had in store for him was true, to the extent that they even existed in the first place (they did not), evaporated into dew upon the steppe beneath the summer sun. But again, it would not do for him to rouse Zhao Hao's suspicions, and so he narrowed his eyes, just as he'd always done, and said, "Yes, very much so."

"Then we'll see if that can be arranged, I suppose," the Eunuch replied airily, dismissively, waving him off with a garishly corpulent hand, a palm twice as big as it ought to have been capped with ten stubs in place of fingers, all peeking their way out of the sleeves of lavish, billowing silk robes. "Now, I'm certain that there's some crucial matter of state to which you could be attending instead of bothering me, so get to it, why don't you…"

Xingke didn't feel the urge to point out that Zhao Hao was the one whose gang of trained monkeys had accosted Xingke, and not the other way around—but he certainly wasn't too proud to admit that he did indeed think it. Still, he was glad to be as alone as he could be within the walls of the Vermilion Forbidden City at long last, and once Zhao Hao was out of earshot, as well as out of sight, Xingke gave a signal for his Sword Guard to follow him as they proceeded deeper into the complex, their hands lingering near the hilts of their blades all along the way. After all, for all that Luoyang was technically neutral ground, the previous display was in and of itself enough of a show of force to serve as a demonstration of why keeping on one's guard within these walls could well be a matter of life and death, for all that Xingke knew that any threat to his life that might arise in the near future certainly wouldn't be from the Ceremonial Guards' skill at arms.

The high ceilings continued throughout the majority of the buildings in the complex, most of which were designed with opulence instead of residence in mind—and not for the first time, Xingke was struck by the thought that, while the High Eunuchs had historically surrendered their capacity to sate their carnal lusts for the sake of power, it seemed as though the level of excess to which they indulged all other vices more than made up for that one's lack. There were buildings dedicated to drink and food, to the consumption of opium and cocaine, barracks littered intermittently about the complex along with an overworked brothel for the sake of the Guardsmen, as well as the visiting warlords (Xingke had never himself partaken, knowing as he did that it was a minority of the women 'working' there who were there by choice, but he had always heard that the High Eunuchs made certain to keep the whorehouse stocked with all the best-fed women that could be found amongst the peasantry), and Xingke's own favourite haunts whenever he was called here, to occupy his time between tedious, performative meetings and his semi-regular visits with the Tianzi—halls of doctored records, and carefully-curated collections of books of all approved stripes. It was a running joke between himself and his friends, who were also his technical subordinates, that in another, better world, he might have been a schoolteacher or university professor, like what they had in the E.U. and, at least to some extent, in Britannia.

It was an irony he had grown to appreciate, in a gallows humour sort of way; because here and now, in this disaster of a world into which he'd been born, it was the very curiosity that made him so effective in warfare that had nearly gotten him killed on multiple occasions before the Tianzi had singled him out, and with that act, put him under the scrutiny of the High Eunuchs. He hadn't known peace since before he knew what the word meant—none of them did—and so he had turned his attention to war, partly as a way to find a means of slaking his nature, but mostly as a method of survival.

It was out of one of these haunts, these buildings filled with meticulously-crafted lies in the guise of seeming-truth, that a familiar face came, followed by his own guard, who were armed in like fashion to the Ceremonial Guard, each of their ji sporting a tassel of uniform colour dangling down from it. General Cao was one of the few of his peers whom Xingke didn't actively detest; the Warden of the East, whose fortress straddled Liaodong and looked out towards the Pacific territories that were formerly the domain of their old and defunct national enemy, the Empire of Japan, now all provinces of the Holy Britannian Empire, was as honourable a man as the High Eunuchs could stomach in their service. With a blocky face and commanding dark eyebrows, long, straight black hair, and a well-groomed, albeit strange-looking moustache, he seemed to resemble most closely a tiger given human form, and the rest of his powerful, brawny frame backed that appearance up to the utmost degree. He was tall, though not taller than Xingke, but rather broader than him, an immovable wall of dense muscle crowned with a stern face and a thunderous brow above his small, quite narrow black eyes, which seemed to shift suspiciously this way and that near-constantly. Maroon robes that were decorated with swirling white-and-gold cloud designs concealed the bulk of that musculature from the untrained eye, however, leaving behind merely a stocky, sturdy-looking man who much preferred to keep his large hands hidden in his even larger sleeves as much as could be managed, and a cap sat upon his head as a means of protecting some measure of his hair, the sacred nature of which he held more seriously than a great many of their peers could ever have been bothered to. Those eyes flicked his way, then, and widened a bit when they caught sight of Xingke, before Cao turned his Spear Guard to approach Xingke's procession, a clear indication that the man wished to talk. Xingke, being unopposed to this, made no motion to prevent; his Sword Guard, commensurately, stilled in good order and formed up in a way that would make sure that he remained adequately guarded, while not hampering his ability to make conversation with one of his first true peers.

"Xingke," Cao called out when he grew close enough, his head inclining in a little half-nod that was as close as a man like Cao ever got to a friendly smile. They were not friends—neither man would consider sharing that much of his life with the other, Xingke was sure—but in the midst of the assorted scoundrels to share their rank, their stewardship over both the lands and peoples of the Chinese Federation, and the ranks of the Ever-Victorious Army, they'd had no choice but to find allies in one another enough times in the past that their mutual respect for one another had evolved into a certain level of cordial regard.

"Cao," Xingke returned the greeting, nodding in response.

"You're looking well," said Cao, peering up and down at Xingke. "Far better by half than I should have thought a man who was a prisoner of the Britannians might. I confess, when news came to us that you had been captured, I cannot imagine that I was alone in thinking that you were likely already dead."

"Britannians, as I understand, don't kill their prisoners when they're subjects of a sovereign power, though you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise," Xingke explained, and while in anyone else, he would've taken note of the insinuation, Cao had never been one for such subtleties. He was a blunt instrument, but he was aware of his limitations. "The line was blurred somewhat, given that I was tasked with aiding members of their rebellion, for whom Britannia has no mercy to spare whatsoever, but they made sure that there was no harm that could come to me in their custody. I was released when it was determined that it was the terms of my orders that Britannia found objectionable, and that I was not to be held culpable for carrying them out in these circumstances; thus, here I stand."

"Here you stand, indeed," said Cao, his voice gruff and more than half a growl, even while at rest. "Has your time amongst the Britannians given you any insights into why we've been called here? We aren't due for a conclave until midsummer."

"Who truly knows what it is our masters seek to accomplish on a daily basis," Xingke said, shaking his head. "Perhaps they only wish to remind us of just how swiftly they can bring us to heel, or perhaps this is but a single part in their latest squabble amongst each other."

"Hmph," Cao huffed in thought, clearly troubled. "I imagine that much will become clear as we get closer to them calling us together to address us as a group…"

"One can only hope," Xingke sighed in return, resigned to not knowing, at least for now.

"Will you walk with me, Xingke?" Cao asked, turning partly away from him. "We have not spoken in quite some time, and thankfully, I had the foresight to bring a Xiangqi board along with me, thinking that I might encounter you here…"

"I might be amenable to a game or two," Xingke agreed after a moment. "Though perhaps it would be wise to postpone that at present. There's no telling when we might be summoned…"

"A prudent observation," replied Cao, nodding gruffly. "Or when we might encounter our fellows."

Xingke made a noise of agreement, though he hid his amusement; General Cao Cao was perhaps the only man with more cause to hate his fellow wardens than Xingke did himself—his own younger brother, Colonel Cao Ren, a scoundrel of the highest order, being foremost amongst them.

"How fortuitous!" called a mild voice, so charming it was grating, from behind both of them; and in response, both Cao's Spear Guard and Xingke's Sword Guard closed ranks around them, arrayed in defence against the approach of another of their peers: Xu Jingzong, the Warden of Stone, and his Iron Guard, who carried zhanmadao in scabbards upon their backs, but were clad in metal armour, the traditional designs of which didn't fool Xingke in the slightest. "I might have thought to find you here, Li Xingke."

As a rule, the wardens' personal bodyguards were expressly forbidden from bearing just about any kind of modern weapons or armour on the palace grounds; but if there was indeed a single man alive who could have talked the High Eunuchs into allowing an exemption, it would surely have been Xu Jingzong.

A smile that hides a knife, indeed, Xingke mused as he made to address the man.

Xu Jingzong was almost offensively inoffensive in his appearance, neither tall nor short, and slight in build, with a sort of handsomeness that evoked images of an older brother to be looked up to. He kept his black beard well-groomed, but not overly-oiled in the manner of some men, and while he bore a moustache, circling around his mouth to join his goatee, his cheeks were painstakingly shaved, and his hair gathered up into a meticulous, immaculate topknot. But Xingke had always known better than to be unwary of him: his grey eyes saw much, and Xingke knew well of the forked tongue that hid behind the mild purse of his small mouth and moderately full lips. He gave off the air of a stage actor, his every motion a hidden flourish, each word carefully and deliberately chosen, and even his attire, a mixture of greyish-blue and darker blue silken robes, all tailored to cut as unassuming yet august a figure as possible, was itself a piece of mummer's craft, airy garments meant to evoke the arid heat of the southern deserts, the mountains and rivers and jungles of the Militarised Zone of India, over which he ruled. He was not a man that Xingke would ever have thought to trust, an opportunist whose true loyalties were every bit as opaque as the riddles in which he often spoke; and even now that he could conceive of having a use for the man, he knew his tongue was not so silvern as to risk pitting against Jingzong's cunning and wit.

"Xu Jingzong," Xingke responded in kind, albeit a bit perfunctorily, bowing at the waist as the man mirrored the motion. "I admit, I had thought you still abed."

"Had you?" Jingzong countered, a well-manicured eyebrow raising. "Well, I suppose you cannot be faulted for such. My health, you see—I am less a young man by the day, and it behoves me little to conduct myself otherwise. I thought merely that I should see to caring for it before it slips my grasp entirely; thus, I have taken to awakening with the sunrise, or as near as can be managed."

There was no barb that Xingke could detect in that much, at the very least. He wondered, not for the first time, if Jingzong was not in truth a Britannian who had chosen to disguise himself in yellowface, that he could say five hundred things or nothing, and rarely could even his intended audience tell the difference. Still, letting his guard down in any capacity could be a critical error—Xingke's instincts, which had grown a great deal sharper in the aftermath of having had the span of his life restored, insisted that this man had an inkling, at least, of why it was that they had been called here, and was now fishing for something in Xingke in front of Cao. Xingke hadn't the slightest idea, of course, of exactly what it was that was being fished for, and perhaps that was his best defence right now: he could hardly be caught deceiving if he knew not what it was that he ought to be hiding.

"Then I imagine that venturing forth from your own domain as you have must be quite a refreshing change of pace," Xingke settled on at last, giving away nothing below the surface.

"Mm. We shall see," Jingzong replied evasively (as if he was capable of any other manner of reply). "These are strange times in which we're living. It feels almost as if they grow stranger by the day…"

He's suspicious of me, Xingke realised in a flash. He thinks I've done something uncharacteristic. It couldn't be… No. This is a bluff. He wants me to think he knows more than he does, so that he can learn all I have to hide by how I rush to cover my tracks. I cannot afford to gnaw my foot off to escape the trap, here. Calm and collected, like Princess Justine—that's what's needed right now…

"Strange indeed," Xingke said instead of anything incriminating. As if he saw an ally in this man, Xingke said, "It's as if the world is drawing its breath, teetering upon the precipice of some great upheaval. We would do well to keep our eyes open, and our ears attentive…"

It was a delicate balance, to lie without lying; to speak without speaking itself was a difficult art for one to learn, to communicate purely through implication and seemingly-innocuous reference, within which a canny strategist could layer a dozen different messages that meant nothing to those who didn't know how to speak this way, and lying in itself was a tricky skill to learn and hone. But Xingke hadn't forgotten how Jingzong had tested him early into his rise to prominence, and how he had sought to eliminate him until he seemed to understand the role that Xingke was to play upon the High Eunuchs' game board, and so without any visible effort, he dropped that false implication, and watched with the grim satisfaction of an unpleasant but necessary task well-done when Jingzong's almond-shaped eyes widened slightly in acknowledgement. "Too true, too true. I, for one, do not intend for disaster to find me with my back turned…"

"Nor I," Xingke replied, again as if this man was an ally.

"Well, it was certainly a pleasure, Xingke," said Jingzong, bowing again. "But I have matters I must attend to, and they shall not keep for much longer. You have given me much to ponder: perhaps I shall take the time to contemplate your words over the weiqi board…"

"Then may your meditations be fruitful," said Xingke, accepting the implied invitation, and bowing again himself.

When Jingzong and his Iron Guard parted ways with Cao and Xingke, he did so with the ghost of a smile on his face; but Xingke had no intention of getting cut.

"How does one talk to such a man…?" Cao grumbled behind him.

"Practice, my friend," Xingke assured him. "And a great deal of it."

"As with so many things," the man sighed, shaking his head, and Xingke allowed himself a chuff of mirthless laughter.

"Come," Xingke said suddenly, once his mind had had a few moments more to parse all that he had just now heard, and circled back to the first response that Jingzong had given him. "They'll be calling us to order soon. It would not look good for us to be late…"

"As you say," Cao nodded, looking extremely grateful to be back upon the firm ground of definitive instructions. "I shall follow you."

It was as one group, then, that they filed into the great, vaulted and opulent audience chamber where the High Eunuchs would soon address them all; Xu Jingzong had arrived already, his Iron Guard arrayed all around him, and Cao's Spear Guard and Xingke's Sword Guard respectively mimicked the formation, with modifications to allow for the nuances of the weapons they carried, protecting both men from the red-cloak thugs lining the walls and flanking the doors with polearms, while their fellows lurked in the balconies high above them, no doubt with outmoded guns ready to be trained upon the mass of them at a moment's notice.

Next came shrewd Lü Buwei, the Warden of the Seas, and his Tide Guard, who bore guandao, and whose guarding formation was wider-spread than Xingke's Sword Guard, but layered more deeply; the man himself was stroking his own goatee, which fell halfway to his navel, and was oiled and slicked to the point where it seemed as if his chin had sprouted a slender, prehensile tail, his moustache similarly well-groomed for all that, unlike Jingzong's, it did not meet his beard. His thick, dark brows were drawn and furrowed in a portrait of mild stress, but the merchant-turned-warlord was, as always, the very picture of grace under fire; his broad forehead was free of any sweat that might have betrayed his nerves, and the widow's peak of his black hair was as meticulously waxed as always, without even a strand of hair out of place, and his almost outlandish robes, rich blue and plum silk, embroidered with cloth-of-gold into designs of fish and dolphins, bore no sign of being hastily drawn around his large and very slightly rotund form, a body that was given to indulgence, but not excess. His large black eyes sought Xingke out, which Xingke expected—he was, after all, the one who had been clapped in Britannian irons and lived to tell of it—and when they found both him and Cao, the man gave him a small nod, which Xingke returned in kind. He did not like the conniving man, finding him every bit as oily and about half as sleazy as his beard and hair, but at the very least, he knew Lü Buwei to be a man of his word (if only because being known otherwise was bad for business), and he could respect that much about the man who oversaw the vast majority of the Chinese Federation's maritime trade, if nothing else.

After him, then, came Lao Ai, the pompous and preening Warden of the Dragons, a longtime ally of Lü Buwei, ever since the man had apparently done Lü Buwei a favour by seducing the man's young wife in a series of events into which Xingke was not at all keen to pry; and along with him came his Horse Guard, their dao rattling against the bells that also dangled from their belts, making an unholy ruckus as they came in and took up their positions around their master. The Horse Guard, whom to a man boasted that theirs was the greatest skill with a blade in all the world, for all that Xingke knew he would have no trouble rendering them down into stew, if he were to find himself so pressed, left some very significant openings in their own coverage of the man, and Xingke attributed this to the fact that Lao Ai was the most openly favoured of all the wardens, and likely was correct to think that the Ceremonial Guard was more likely to defend him than they were to try to bring him down, in spite of the fact that he'd most likely made them all cuckolds. Lao Ai himself was a rake of the highest order and an unrepentant whoremonger, with the issue of his loins likely a rival to that of the first Mongol khagan, and perhaps it was merely Xingke's intense personal disdain for the man speaking, but he really had no idea (beyond the man's reportedly enormous endowment) how the man could have seduced his way out of even a burlap sack, let alone have taken Lü Buwei's wife, Zhao Yin, into his bed. That said, he was self-aware enough to admit that a great deal of that lack of understanding might have had something to do with the fact that Lao Ai resembled him closely enough that to the untrained eye, they might have appeared as something akin to brothers. Lao Ai had his own hair bound back into a topknot with the remainder cascading down to his shoulders, his countenance roguish where Xingke's was, he could be the first to admit, rather sober, and he employed this to his benefit often, smiling easily and raging every bit as quickly. His eyes were green instead of Xingke's brown, dispelling any actual consideration of shared blood, much to both men's certain relief, and the lack of years of withering at the mercy of poisons had left him with a brawnier frame than Xingke's, for all that they were otherwise about the same height and build, an advantage he made certain to put on display in revealing finery, loose robes, and copious amounts of oil rubbed into his skin to accentuate his muscles, and to highlight the flawless complexion of his skin, a signal of leisure and status and wealth. He looked around, smirking, but scowled when he met Xingke's level look and turned away from him very abruptly indeed.

At the same time as Lao Ai, there came also Yan Dan, the decently-comely yet weak-willed and entirely unassuming Warden of the South, whose Phoenix Guard were amongst the least-skillful of those all of them had brought together under this roof. Identified as they were by their red headbands, most of them walked with their ji as if they had only the most rudimentary of understanding regarding their proper use; it seemed to Xingke, this time as well as on prior occasions, that if anyone had given him as few as twenty of the land's most desolate peasants and allowed him six weeks, he could shape that force to the point where it could wash over the so pompously-named 'Phoenix Guard' (which, unlike with Lao Ai, seemed to Xingke to be merely an honestly bad choice to avoid naming his bodyguard the 'Vermilion Guard'—which, Xingke had to admit, was quite fair) like water into a dry riverbed. Yan Dan himself was no great warrior, nor was he particularly shrewd or conniving, not like most all of the men here; he was personable, guileless, and yet entirely unpredictable on account of that, having managed to weaponise the pity that even the most ruthless of their number felt for him in an effort to keep his position stable with what little he had. His hair was inky black, and his eyebrows were strong and monastic, but he made little use of the command or authority that one could communicate with such features, instead hiding his youthful countenance by stepping like a man who wished that the world entire could simply forget that he had ever existed.

Yan Dan's entrance, fortuitously for him, was entirely overshadowed by Sui Yang, who entered into his wake, a vainer and more vainglorious creature than Yan Dan ever could have been, with a manufactured presence in the room comparable only to Lao Ai's unending arrogance. Sui Yang, Warden of the Sands, was tasked with the governance of the western deserts, out amongst the high mountains and arid plateaus of the lands that had once been Tibet, and when the guards he brought with him were revealed to be garbed in the manner of Xiaolin monks, it was clear that he was boasting the grandeur of his lands, such that there were a group of men of such a calibre who resided within its borders. That he arrived with a jewelled turban upon his head of long, voluminous black hair, that he had attired himself in silk and golden ornamentation, spoke of the fact that his was the land closest to the High Eunuchs' pet protectorate, the Kingdom of Zilkhstan. It was the way of Sui Yang, of course, to flaunt his perceived wealth and influence, to boast of his visions and the grand scope of his ambitions, but his engineering projects, which failed more often than not, had seen to the death and starvation of many tens of thousands of those over which he was charged to govern, and even Xingke could see clear as day that the men guarding him looked upon him as if there was little they would have loved more than the opportunity to gouge out Sui Yang's heart. His moustache was immaculate in its grooming, turned up into twin swirls on either end, and his beard beneath was cropped close to his face, and kept clean in that cut besides, in a way that was reminiscent of some of the beard styles that had been in the past favourites of Bolvona Forgnar, the generalissimo of the so-called 'Land of Warriors'—yet another case of flaunting his ties and his perceived influence—but it did nothing to hide the sharp smugness of his lips, or indeed the shining condescension of his brown eyes as, from beneath a heavy, strong brow, he looked out upon his peers as if the act in itself was sufficient to crown him lord and ruler of all that his eyes surveyed.

And finally, both last and least of their number (though Xingke would be the first to admit that there was more of the personal to his issues here than the objective, as he wasn't even the most iron-fisted tyrant of their number, and nor was he by any means the most corrupt) came General Cao Cao's prodigal younger brother, Colonel Cao Ren, Warden of the West. Unique amongst the assemblage was the brick-faced man's Flame Guard, who bore fire-lances upon their shoulders as they entered around his rotund form, with robes akin to Cao's, red and gold and ivory, his fingers glittering with gaudy rings, and a ridiculous-looking and obviously-imported beaver-fur hat set atop his head to conceal his balding pate, his black hair thinning even now in a way that his older brother's was in no danger of doing—and of course, there was no description of the craven weasel that could be considered complete without making some special mention of the long and preposterous near-stereotype that was his moustache, a pair of whiskers like those of a rat sprouting from beneath his large, upturned nose and hanging in an arc past his square chin, where the first of his gluttonous jowls began. His beady eyes shifted this way and that beneath the sleazy furrow of his heavy black brow, a clear and unambiguous sign of his opportunistic nature, and his men, skilled though they were at pretending at the aesthetics of discipline, were not so adept as to risk fooling Xingke's skilled eyes—thugs, one and all. He would not be surprised if it were to be found that birth rates only remained stable in Ren's mismanaged mess of a fiefdom through virtue of his men's monstrosity.

Yet, at the very least, he was the last to join them; and so, accordingly, Xingke turned, and looked to where the High Eunuchs were sure to emerge shortly, to inform them all of why they had been called all the way back to the capital on such short notice.

As if on cue, from the far end of the audience chamber, which featured twin sets of stairs that came from the upper levels to deposit its passengers upon a raised dais, to which there were no steps to gain entry from the floor upon which they, the wardens, and their bodyguards all stood arrayed, all under the watchful and armed gazes of the Ceremonial Guard, whose rifles Xingke could sense were trained upon them, given how the hairs stood on end at the back of his neck, came the High Eunuchs in procession. From the leftmost set of stairs came effete Gao Hai, withered Cheng Zhong, wizened Tong Lun, and towering Cai Lishi; from the rightmost, then, came simpering Huang Qian, erudite Xia Wang, high-strung Xiang Sheng, and last, but not least, their primary spokesperson, decadent and revolting Zhao Hao.

Their entrance had not gone unnoticed; the room, which had been covered in dull murmurs, lowered itself into absolute silence, as Zhao Hao manoeuvred, with some difficulty, himself to the front of his fellow jackals, clearing his throat in an obnoxiously performative gesture, clasped his large, blubbery, paddle-like hands upon the balustrade that ringed the dais, and addressed them. "I am certain that you are all wondering why it is that you've been called here so suddenly. And leaving aside the fact that it is our clear right, in our capacity as Her Majesty's regents and closest advisors, to call you all to heel whenever it pleases us, for any reason or none at all…there is, in fact, a matter of import we must address with you all."

"It has come to our attention," said Xia Wang, pre-empting the stir that Zhao Hao's declaration was almost certain to cause, if only by a matter of moments, "that there is one amongst you who plots against us in secret, who gathers to himself weapons and war materiel manufactured by a foreign power—specifically, the Holy Britannian Empire."

Xingke felt something in him still, and it was only on account of his abundance of practice, gained by virtue of the fact that he had been plotting against the High Eunuchs in secret for several years already, that allowed him to show no outward signs of his sudden shock—or at least, none that would mark him out from his fellows, many if not all of whom sought to claim ultimate power over the Chinese Federation for themselves in some form or another (for it could hardly be more apparent how long it had been since the High Eunuchs had lost the dynasty the Mandate of Heaven, if indeed it had ever been restored following the Reformation), and were openly, albeit performatively, affronted that any of their fellows could seek to turn themselves against the hand that fed them, while privately kicking themselves for not having thought before of seeking Britannian support for their would-be coup.

"Rest assured that we are sparing no expense in ferreting out the traitor," said Cheng Zhong. "But if it is found that any of you has ever aided or abetted the traitor, you shall face punishment just as surely as he who would dare to turn his back upon Her Majesty."

Turn his back upon Her Majesty…?

Xingke tuned out the remainder of the High Eunuchs' posturing, noting idly how each of them eyed one another as they spoke, revealing to the observant that they suspected that the wardens were not working alone, and that there were traitors amongst their own ranks as well. He filed that away for later, to be sure, but though he knew that he ought not to allow bottom-feeders like Cheng Zhong purchase upon his mind as a matter of principle, this stirred his already troubled thoughts from where they had briefly settled. Because had he turned his back upon Her Majesty with what he was doing? If he hadn't already, then was he going to before the end?

…Did it even matter?

---

The day had grown long, and morning had given way to midday and then to early afternoon, by the time that Xingke and his Sword Guard were escorted by a troupe of Ceremonial Guard, led by Gao Hai, out of the main buildings of the Vermilion Forbidden City and into the even more secluded parts of the massive palace, a carefully-curated, lush, and walled-in grove, in which the nominal ruler of the Chinese Federation, the figurehead-sovereign of over two billion souls and counting, spent the days of her childhood. The Secret Garden, it was called, and it was here that Xingke had been taken when first an act of mercy had put his life in jeopardy (and the irony did not escape him that twice now, an act of mercy had saved it), where he'd met the Tianzi, Lihua, for the first time, and where he'd resided with her until the High Eunuchs had trained him to the point where they could find some use for him.

Needless to say, it was a familiar path he walked.

His Sword Guard, used as they were to the florid splendour of the Secret Garden, did not gawk, and did not gape at their surroundings; they had the first time he'd brought them, and then never again, making sure to remain both stone-faced and alert in the presence of the Ceremonial Guard and the High Eunuch, as he'd made clear to them in the aftermath the folly that lay in exposing any weakness of any kind to any of those loathsome scavengers. Xingke had no difficulty in doing likewise, keeping his hand near to the hilt of his jian as he walked the familiar path, feeling familiar smooth stones beneath his feet. The Secret Garden was awash with springtime, with budding flowers and falling petals, with carefully-bred birds singing in the trees and the foliage that was ruthlessly policed by the custodians, who were instructed to ensure, for the sake of the High Eunuchs' nonexistent peace of mind, that there was nothing even obliquely edible that grew here. It was a symbolic gesture, in large part, but the sentiment behind it was clear as day: 'you eat only by virtue of our goodwill, and should we will it otherwise, then here shall you starve.'

Xingke wondered if that was how they'd 'taken care of' Lihua's mother, and her mother's mother in succession, all the way to the first, very nearly: that they had starved them in their weakness, bereft even of the child they had borne all too young.

Gao Hai drew to a stop, turning upon his heel and regarding the assemblage, snapping Xingke out of the morbid thought. He smiled a serpent's smile, then, and said, "Here we are. You shall have three hours. I trust that you understand that your guard must remain without?"

Xingke nodded. If he had yet to learn the steps of this dance, then that would have been a personal failing on his part. He slipped the hand signal for his guard to disperse, and though many of them seemed to be less than entirely thrilled to be doing so, every last one of them obeyed without contest.

"Very good," said Gao Hai with a faux-pleasant nod. Then, he removed one of his hands from out of the billowing sleeves in which he had been concealing them, soft hands that had never done a day's work in all of their life, useless for holding a weapon, and probably bathed in milk and honey until any sign of any form of hardship was wiped away, if any had ever been there to begin with, and turned halfway, gesturing towards the edifice beyond where they stood. "Your empress awaits."

Xingke suppressed the urge to shiver as the newfound sleaze of that comment raked its fingers down the fleshy insides of his spine, and only nodded; as he had done so many other times before, he walked past Gao Hai, ignoring the half-man's eyes upon him as he proceeded, and mounted the steps up to the threshold of where Lihua resided, one of the four buildings in the Garden—each of which, of course, she had no other choice but to call 'home', such as it was. He paused at the entrance, momentarily hesitant, but in a moment, he had pushed past it, and gained entry into the building.

The interior furnishings were warm and welcoming, wood and carpet, paintings and panels—all the things a growing girl could want, with bookshelves and art supplies and tea sets, and he knew that deeper in were rooms containing instruments from all over the world, maintained and kept tuned just in case she ever took an interest in learning to play them. Anything and everything to keep her from longing for the broader world beyond the walls of the Secret Garden, let alone the Vermilion Forbidden City; one could imagine, he had thought more than once, how unimaginably unsuccessful the High Eunuchs had been with this.

Xingke passed through the first room, and then the second, keeping his ears peeled for where Lihua might be in the building. At last, he caught the sound of pure, bell-like peals of laughter, bringing a smile to Xingke's face to hear her in such high spirits, and he followed that sound all the way into one of the rooms reserved specifically for entertaining guests, where a low, artisan-crafted mahogany table equipped with a full tea service resided, at which sat not the one he had been expecting, but two young women, who were very different in almost all ways—appearance, demeanour, age…

Xingke stepped over the threshold, careful not to linger, and cleared his throat.

Lihua's head snapped over to him so quickly that he worried her slender neck might snap, her large, ruby-red eyes widening almost to the point where they seemed to bulge out of her elfin face with the sheer force of her excitement. "Xingke!"

He bit back a wince at how her cry had very nearly pierced his eardrum, and favoured the albino girl with a warm smile of his own. "Hello, your majesty. I'm glad to find you in such high spirits—oof!"

The air was knocked out of his lungs, the body of a running thirteen-year-old girl slamming into him at full force, her white-haired head buried in his chest as her slender arms wrapped around him as tightly as she could manage with what little musculature she possessed. Knowing what to do by inference and not by reflex, as one might have expected, Xingke wrapped his own arms around Lihua, rubbing her back in small comforting motions, before looking up from her over to where fifteen-year-old Sumeragi Kaguya sat at the table even still, eyes the colour of imperial jade regarding him soberly from beneath a fine, furrowed black brow. She was sceptical of him—she always had been, truly—but now that he had some inkling of why, he welcomed her suspicion. At the very least, it proved that she had something approaching Lihua's wellbeing in mind, and that was worth its weight in gold in the face of all that he'd learned of late. He nodded towards the former member of the Japanese Imperial Family, and greeted her. "Konnichi wa, Sumeragi-sama."

"Okaerinasai," she replied in turn, and there was a little of that old Imperial Japanese arrogance in how she did not deign to greet him in his mother tongue, as he had in hers. It was a quirk that Xingke didn't think that she was even aware of, necessarily, and it had gone over the years from a point of annoyance, that she could act as if her nation still existed in any tangible sense, including (as he had heard) popular desire to reclaim its sovereignty, and yet retain her imperial affectations, to merely a quirk that he had slowly grown to expect out of the girl.

"I'm so glad you're back, Xingke!" Lihua gushed into his chest, seemingly near the point of tears in the throes of her relief. "Kaguya told me all about the Britannian princess who captured you, about how she murdered her brother. She sounds awful! Horrible! Evil! Oh, Xingke, when I heard that she'd gotten to you, too, I thought she was going to do something to you, that I wouldn't ever see you again!"

"Perish the thought," Xingke replied, pushing past the discomfort that hearing Lihua say such things about his saviour brought up in him. She was a child, after all, and had remained a child long past when she was due to begin maturing, and her cloistering was entirely to blame for it—she lacked all of the memories and experiences that a normal child ought to have had at her age, and by the gods did it show. "I made you a promise, didn't I? Have I ever broken a promise I've made to you, your majesty?"

"Nuh-uh," Lihua answered, shaking her head as she spoke into his tunic. "But still! I was so scared, Xingke!"

"Well, I'm sorry for frightening you, your majesty," Xingke said truthfully. "Would that it could've been helped…"

"It would be helped if someone could put a knife into that detestable woman…" Kaguya muttered, a hair too low for Lihua to catch, given that her ears were muffled with how intensely she was trying to bury her head into his chest, giving him no indication that she was likely to release him from her hold anytime in the near future.

"From what I hear," Xingke floated, nowhere near as willing to allow their visiting deposed royalty to speak ill of her in his presence as he was innocent Lihua. "Someone already tried that, and it didn't turn out all that well for them…"

Kaguya grumbled again, this time too low for even Xingke's ears to pick up, so he let it go for now. His chief concern, here and now, was Lihua and her safety, hoping that spending time with her could help to calm the doubts and misgivings haunting his mind, to remind him of what it was that he was even fighting for, what it was this was all for, really—to create a situation that would allow this girl he loved like his own sister to walk in the sun like a normal child, to make friends and learn about the world, to grow and mature and reclaim for herself the years that the High Eunuchs had stolen from her in their pursuit of power, their one lust that the loss of their manhoods had not taken from them.

"Come! Come!" cried Lihua, prying her face from his chest and pulling him by the arm to the table. Then, when she turned and saw that Kaguya was still there, her excited expression fell from her face, and in its place came mild discomfort and awkwardness. "Oh… Sorry, I lost track of time, Kaguya…"

"It's fine," Kaguya replied with the most passive-aggressive form of imperial grace that Xingke had ever personally witnessed, placing her vessel down upon the table and standing from it. "I really ought to be back anyways, before I'm missed. The eyes of the shinobi are everywhere, and I can't let them catch me in this place, certainly… I'll need to go now if I mean to evade them."

Xingke bit his tongue, seeing no need to mention that she hadn't been nearly so successful in any of her attempts to evade detection as she might have thought. All things in their due time, and all that.

"A-are you sure?" Lihua asked tentatively, trying as she was to be a proper hostess as best she knew how. "I don't think Xingke would mind if…if you joined us…"

"Trust me, your majesty, there are few things I would desire less than to intrude upon your reunion with Xingke," Kaguya replied, her tone perhaps a bit more waspish than was absolutely necessary, at least in Xingke's opinion. Gathering up her presence, she bowed to each of them in turn, and bade them, "Good day. And I will see you another time, your majesty."

"If you're certain…" Lihua nodded, still looking unsure.

But in short order, Sumeragi Kaguya had left the building, no doubt to request escort back to those who had brought her here from Gao Hai and the Ceremonial Guard, leaving Xingke and Lihua alone in this place together, looking upon the table that had been set up, until recently, for tea between two girls. Xingke, looking upon the furnishings, chuckled softly, and said, "While I would love for nothing more than to take tea and rice with you at this table, your majesty, I fear it might be a bit of a tight spot for me, what with my legs and all."

"Oh! Yes, of course!" Lihua exclaimed, all but jumping in place as she grabbed his hand and began to haul him away, as firmly as her much smaller and weaker body could have managed. "I told the servants to set the table in the Turtle Room. C'mon!"

"Alright, your majesty," Xingke rejoined indulgently. "Take care, though, and don't pull on me too hard. I'm much larger than you, and I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself."

She shook her head firmly, her brow furrowing in concentration—or was that irritation? It bothered him that he could no longer parse the difference, though logically, this had to have been a development that was a long time coming, and had nothing to do with how he now served two different mistresses. "I'm not gonna hurt myself, Xingke! I grew a whole bunch while you were gone! See?!"

"I can see that, your majesty," said Xingke, humouring her; and indeed, she was a good deal taller in the doorframe she was dragging him towards than she had been when he left—she was clearly in the midst of some manner of growth spurt, though Xingke would be amongst the first to admit that he hadn't nearly enough of an idea of the female body's proper pubescent development timeline to be able to discern if her growth had come early or late—but that hardly mattered relative to him, especially considering the ten kilos he'd put on since the end of the Peninsular Rebellion, given that she was still far too small to pull him if he dug his heels in and decided to stay put. It irked him, though, how she could still be so fixated on her height at this age, when that was behaviour he was more like to associate with children a fraction of her age; once again, incredulity hit him with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer driving a railroad spike: Did they actually expect me to bed her at some point? They might as well ask me to defile an infant…!

He shook his head, however; it would do him little good to allow the depravity of the High Eunuchs to linger in his mind any longer than absolutely necessary. So instead, he plastered his most winning smile, a piece of mummery he had developed specifically for Lihua, upon his face, and allowed himself to be led through the corridors of the building, up the stairs and to the northward-facing room, with windows that, in this season and the next, would catch far more sun than it would during the winter months. He sensed that it had been chosen in an attempt to make him feel more at home—no doubt she had only just learned aught of the animals who were traditionally seen as the guardians of the four corners of the compass—and this was only more apparent when his nose caught the increasingly familiar twin scents of tsutai tsai and horse meat upon the air as they entered. He guided Lihua in turn, now, to the position of highest honour at the table in accordance with the rules of feng shui, pulling the chair out and helping her get settled upon it, and then he rounded the table again and took up his own position, seating himself at the table.

In the ordinary course, it would be the task of the youngest of the guests to serve the food and tea, of which Xingke could see quite an abundance—as discreetly as he could manage, he cast his eyes around the surface of the table, and was glad to spot a nondescript yet familiar flat, circular tablet, which he took ample note of—particularly when that youngest was also a woman; and yet, as Lihua was technically an empress regnant, and not an empress-consort, it fell to Xingke, whose position was that much lower than hers, even as a warden, given that he'd been born of common blood, to dole out the portions and pour the tea. Unsure as he was of whether or not the High Eunuchs would have the temerity to slip poison into the food that both he and the Tianzi would partake of in equal measure, he was glad to have the tablet close to hand; with a bit of elementary legerdemain, he slipped the tablet into his tea, whereupon it dissolved to the point where no one could have told the difference between this and any other cup of tsutai tsai brewed anywhere from here on to the Mongolian steppe, where its origins lay. He made sure to drink of this first, and then he brought a helping of horse and ox tongue and bamboo shoots onto Lihua's rice, before seeing to his own. "So tell me, if you would, your majesty: how have you been spending your time here while I was gone?"

"All sorts of ways," Lihua shrugged, her nose scrunching up when she saw how many pieces of gai lan he was putting into her bowl, but thinking better of objecting as Xingke raised a brow at her. "I've been practising with the zither recently—Cheng Zhong says that it's the mark of a refined lady, that I can play an instrument and sing—but I've read all the books in here already, twice. It's so boring in here, Xingke…"

"I know, your majesty, I know," he replied, nodding, attempting to console her as best he could. "If it would help, I could try and intercede with Gao Hai and try and get you some more tutors…"

"But all the tutors they get me are mean and boring old men…" she pouted. "They keep telling me that women in politics bring nothing but ruin… But that can't be right, Xingke, can it? My mother was the Tianzi before me, and the people loved her, didn't they? What is the Tianzi supposed to do if not politics?"

Breed a replacement and die young, he didn't answer. But it didn't surprise him that Gao Hai's idea of proper tutelage included a vertical slice of hardline Confucists; their 'lessons', after all, would only serve to reinforce their hold on power, if only by discouraging Lihua and most of her predecessors from making any true attempt to seize it for themselves. "Well, your majesty, you need to understand that because of your position, there are people who will tell you things that aren't strictly true because they want you to do what helps them the most. Part of being a ruler is learning which advice to listen to, and which to ignore entirely. These men might be awful, but they also know a great deal about mathematics and the sciences. Consider, instead, that this might be an opportunity to learn this as well as the subjects: that not all of the information that any man might seek to give you is worthy of your ears."

"Mm," she hummed thoughtfully, picking up her chopsticks and beginning to eat. Partway through, after Xingke had loaded up his own bowl, she asked, "Sho, what wash it like?"

"Finish chewing before you speak, your majesty," Xingke admonished gently.

She pouted at him, but did as she was told, swallowing perhaps a bit more dramatically than the act truly warranted. Before she could demand the answer from him a second time, Xingke answered, "It was in large part uneventful, your majesty. Britannians have strict rules regarding the treatment of prisoners of war who are agents of another sovereign power, so I was kept in a comfortable room and fed regularly, though I was under guard day and night. It wasn't too dissimilar to this, honestly."

Which reflects more poorly upon the High Eunuchs than it does well upon Britannia, Xingke added, within the privacy of his own thoughts. Comfortable or not, a prison cell is no place for a child…

"Kaguya told me that the princess who caught you…that she kidnapped her when she was my age," said Lihua. "Younger, even. And that the princess put Kaguya's brother's dead body down on the table right between them, like these plates here, and told Kaguya that she had to surrender…"

"I don't doubt that she did," Xingke replied in as measured a tone as he could muster, stepping with a great deal of care—this was not ground he cared to be treading, and he cursed Kaguya in his mind that he was in this position, where he had to explain to Lihua what the uglier parts of ruling sometimes entailed. "I was travelling with a number of men who had rebelled against Britannia, your majesty. Did you know about that at all?"

"Nuh-uh," she said, shaking her head. "They told me that you were going across the ocean, that you were gonna be on a mission and that you couldn't come back fast."

"Well, I was there because the High Eunuchs wanted me to help out the rebel Britannian nobles," he continued, keeping an attentive eye upon Lihua so that he could know if he had to censor his words before he said anything that would scar her even worse than Kaguya's retelling of events might already have done. "And after this princess—Princess Justine, to be specific—defeated them in the field, the Britannian forces brought the rebel leaders to her. She executed them right there in the middle of their own palace, which she and her forces had seized. Do you know why she did this, your majesty?"

"Because she's the bad guy," Lihua concluded definitively.

"No, your majesty, that's not it at all," Xingke corrected her, shaking his head.

"But she did a bad thing!" Lihua protested. "That makes her the bad guy!"

It seems I must add ethics to the list of lessons I must give her that the High Eunuchs refuse to. "The rules are different for her, your majesty. Yes, if she was a peasant, then what she did would be murder. But she isn't. She was an agent of her nation's laws, and any other princess, or indeed any other noble given the task that she was, would have executed them, too."

"Then isn't all of Britannia the bad guys, too?" Lihua asked, increasingly confused.

"Well, it isn't that simple, your majesty," Xingke sighed. "If Kaguya's brother had lived, and if he'd also had to face a rebellion, he also likely would have executed the rebellion's leaders." If not worse…

"But that can't be right…" Lihua objected. "Kaguya's brother wasn't a bad guy, was he?"

That's very much debatable, your majesty, he didn't say. Instead, what he said was, "Perhaps he was, and perhaps he wasn't. But we know that he was one thing for sure, your majesty: he was a ruler."

"Like me, right?" asked Lihua, visibly and physically perking up at the chance to relate to what he was saying, regardless of the subject matter he was discussing.

"Like you, yes," said Xingke. "You know, the Japanese had a saying, your majesty, before they were conquered by Britannia and turned into Elevens: 'one sword keeps another in its sheath.' Now, do you think you can puzzle out what that means?"

"It means that you can use the one sword to block the other sword from coming out," said Lihua.

"In a literal sense, sure," Xingke allowed. "But really, it's a metaphor for violence. That the threat of violence from a greater power, from the ruler, keeps violence from emerging from the ruler's subjects. That sometimes, the only thing that stops a monster is a bigger, scarier monster. Think for a moment of what two swords can do."

"Twice as much as one sword, right?" she chimed in.

He nodded, taking another bite of his food and reminding her that her bowl existed. Once he was done chewing—his admonitions meant nothing if he didn't demonstrate by example—he continued, "That's right. Well, mostly. But you can see, can't you, how it's better for one sword to stop the other than it is for both swords to be drawn, yes?"

"Yeah, I guess…" Lihua sighed.

"Sometimes that's what ruling is about, your majesty," said Xingke. "Because if you've got a sharp enough sword, you can keep more than one sword in its sheath. But for people to know how sharp it really is, you can't just talk about it, can you? Because you could be lying, couldn't you? Others could choose not to believe you. So how do you show people who don't want to believe you, your majesty, that you're telling the truth when you talk about how sharp your sword is?"

"You gotta cut them," Lihua muttered sadly. "That's the only way they'll believe you…"

"Correct, your majesty," Xingke said. "And that was what Princess Justine was doing. The rebels in her lands had drawn their swords already, and so if she wanted to keep all the rest of the swords in Britannia from getting drawn, she had to cut the men who drew, so that everyone could see how sharp hers was. Do you understand?"

"It's awful, though…" she sulked, staring down into her bowl. "Why couldn't she have asked them not to?"

"I'm sure she would have rather gone about it that way, your majesty," said Xingke. "But you know how Gao Hai doesn't listen to you sometimes, despite the fact that you are Tianzi?"

"Yeah," she replied, her brow furrowing in remembered anger.

"Some men get it in their heads that they don't need to listen to others," Xingke explained. "And in a lot of cases, these men get it into their heads that they don't need to listen to their betters. And so, asking them to put their swords away would have done more than not worked: it would have let them think that the choice of saying 'no' is even a possibility. And when you let them say 'no' to you, then they'll do it. Over and over again."

"So, when they drew, she just cut them down, because by asking them to put their swords away, she would have made it into their choice if they wanted to obey or not?" asked Lihua, eyes widening.

"Yes, that exactly, your majesty," Xingke nodded.

"That doesn't sound very fun…" Lihua sulked again.

"Unfortunately, your majesty, a lot of the time, ruling isn't very fun," Xingke said to her gravely. "It isn't often easy, either. If it were fun and easy, then everybody could do it, and that obviously isn't the case, is it?"

"I guess not…" Lihua conceded.

Then, she got a pensive look on her face—quite a rare expression on her, Xingke had to admit—and she asked him the one question he was perhaps least prepared to receive.

"Xingke," she began. "Do you think…that I can do it? Rule, I mean…"

It was as if Xingke had just been brained with a club. For a number of moments, there were almost no coherent thoughts that floated through the sudden silence of his mind, shocked and stunned as he was by the question, nearly to the point where he dropped his chopsticks.

Because that was the question, right there, wasn't it?

"We live by different rules, my friends and I," Princess Justine had explained, a contemplative look upon her face as she spoke to him, looking off to the side, over into the sea. "We are highborn, children of noble blood; we are born into the games of power, and our very lives are but pieces on that very board from the moment that each of us first drew breath. We do not have the luxury to live and grow as lowborn might; for while we may never know hunger, 'on the heights, the paths are paved with daggers.' Every instant that our hearts yet beat, we are under scrutiny. We live only by dancing upon the edge of annihilation, for what is Britannia but a stage upon which power is pitted against power? This is the life that is lived by those who would rule; we are not children as you would know them."

Could Lihua lead a life like that?

Should she?

Princess Justine seemed to lead that life with some measure of peace with what that required of her; but had not this entire exchange served to prove to him that Lihua was a different creature entirely?

Had he managed, he wondered, to become so very blinded by questions of divided loyalties that he failed to understand that his goals had been at cross purposes from the very first?

Because he couldn't have both, now could he? He could not simultaneously want to put Lihua upon the throne, with all the power that such an office by rights ought to wield, to proclaim to all of China, to all the world, that hers was the Mandate of Heaven, and desire that she should live and learn and love in all the ways that a child her age ought to, now could he? One would necessarily prevent the other, would it not? It wasn't even as if he could try and claim that Princess Justine had been deceiving or misleading him; for had he not seen this very thing play out firsthand, albeit from a sickbed? Britannia was perhaps the greatest and most successful example of the manner of state that he would seek to create with Lihua upon the throne, for all that he would not wish to see its gears greased with the blood of its conquered and dominated peoples: a state where the central authority of the throne was absolute, where Lihua could don the mianguan that was technically hers by right and rule over all two billion souls who answered to the shattered authority of this failed state that was the Chinese Federation.

How could he possibly seek to put her at the head of what he was beginning to understand was truly the building of an entirely new nation out of the decaying ashes of the old, when Lihua was struggling even now to grapple with the realities of rule, that ruthlessness would be required of her, that she might, albeit in due time, be required to do all that Princess Justine had done, and more besides? He thought then of the one woman who had ever held the entirety of China together as the sole ruler, an emperor in her own right; and though he had known of her existence for only as long as it had taken for him to read through a handful of her biographies in the wake of his curing and his release into Princess Justine's allegiance, already he knew that, try though he might, he would find nothing of the woman known only as 'Wu Zetian' in Lihua.

Cruelty was simply not in her nature. And if he sought to place the mianguan upon her head, then it would be that reality above all others that would prove the end of her.

It was in these morbid thoughts, as well as many others of like temperament, that Xingke stewed for several long moments; and when he realised that Lihua still awaited an answer, he gave her a smile that was just as much a grimace, and replied, as diplomatically as we could, "Gods willing, we won't have to see for ourselves for a very long time yet, your majesty."

She seemed happy with that answer, flashing him a shy smile, and went back to eating; he, however, was left to his ruminations in the silent stillness that ensued.

---

For three days were they required to abide within the capital; for three days, they were made to bear up under the weight of the High Eunuchs' paranoid suspicion, Xingke and the other seven wardens. But on the fourth day, at last even the most suspicious of their unmanned masters understood that there was naught to be discerned by detaining them further, and so did it come to pass that by the evening on the fifth day, the sixth since he had made to depart for Luoyang initially, Li Xingke once again disembarked from a train-car, and surveyed the citadel that was the centre of his military power.

As it was technically a military base, the complex Xingke called home for lack of other options was a fair bit distant from the far-flung pockets of civilisation that made its home in the unforgiving clime of the Mongolian steppe, where winters ravaged the plains and hills and caused men to huddle together in a scant handful of cities, spending the rest of the year herding animals upon the rolling grasslands; the citadel itself was a squat yet towering monument to the ugliness that the rule of the High Eunuchs brought with it, but he had done his best to make it liveable, less like a dull block of glorified scrap metal the size of a ziggurat that reached into the skies, surrounded by outbuildings and walls, an out-of-place intrusion upon a place of great natural beauty, for all that there was only so much that he could do. Still, what he had done, he took a great deal of pride in, and so it was with a head held high that he returned from the station, with his Sword Guard in tow, into the hold where his rule was, for all practical purposes, absolute.

The guards at the gate saluted him on his way through, and he saluted them in turn, gaining entrance to the compound, where drills were still being conducted in an ongoing effort to train his soldiers to fight in their new Britannian-made arms and armour, all of which was being overseen by Xianglin, as far as Xingke could tell. That was well; Gu's day in the sun would come when the Gun-Rus were finally scrapped, and in their stead, Xingke's 'Dragon Cavalry' would at last be able to take to the field in Knightmares worthy of their exceedingly pompous title—for in truth, Gu was the more capable devicer of his two subordinates. He swept his gaze back and forth, and when he spotted her across the way, he motioned to her, and she, having caught sight of him, motioned in return, without so much as breaking stride with the drill that she was now personally leading.

Neither she nor Gu would come to him today, however; on the morrow, they would come together, they would debrief, and all that had transpired in Luoyang would come to light, but this night, he knew that they would leave him to his own devices.

Truthfully, Xingke was rather glad to have the extra time to decompress. There was much that had happened and more had changed in the time since he had left this place almost a week prior, and he felt that on some level, he would still be sorting some of it out upon his deathbed some decades hence, gods willing. He dismissed his Sword Guard the moment he was through the door into the main building, and then found his way to his chambers alone, wandering unaccompanied, but not directionless, through the yawning halls where he held power, and men loyal to him guarded the corridors, where the only prying ears were those of his other mistress, the shadowy presence of whom had burrowed itself into the most secure positions of the Chinese Federation with what seemed like less than a pittance of effort, for all that Princess Justine had said that it would be a complicated affair. Still, he did not begrudge her her admonition; he knew very well what it was not to wish to sacrifice difficult-to-replace personnel haphazardly, and ultimately, the difference that such a mild misrepresentation made was negligible at best.

When at last he reached his apartments, at which were positioned two of the members of his Sword Guard whom he had not considered experienced or accomplished enough to warrant taking with him down to Luoyang as part of his entourage, serving their shift of sentinel duty, he nodded to each of them in turn as they snapped to attention and bowed to him; then, he opened one of the doors and slipped his way in, at last alone in the one place where he knew that he could rest.

No sooner had the door closed behind him, however, than did he see it.

It was a curious thing, the device; it was relatively small, small enough that he could just about hold it in the palm of his hand, circular in shape and almost flat besides, with a small series of controls along the sides that he couldn't decipher the function of at first glance, but would no doubt be able to with time, with a smooth, uniform black finish all over the rest of it, and no apparent way to open it up or to disassemble it. He picked it up from where it rested upon his working-desk, and turned it over in his hand, and much like it had been with the neutralising agent in tablet form that he had found on the table in Luoyang, any wonder of how it had gotten into his chambers, when even the neophytes amongst his Sword Guard were more than competent enough not to have missed even a servant trying to gain entry while he was away, evaporated in a moment as he recalled a single word: shinobi.

He looked towards the nearest window, and spied the sun sinking over the horizon as the shadows in his room lengthened and the darkness of night descended rapidly upon the steppe in the world beyond. With a sigh, he resigned himself to dealing with this situation as soon as he could—but of course, that needed for him to figure out what the purpose of the device truly was in order for him to do so, and, thus understanding his task, he set about it, examining the newfound gadget for any indication as to its functionality. But after a brief period of fruitless scrutiny, at the end of which the mechanisms of the technology remained entirely opaque to him, he desisted with a heavy sigh. He was weary from the trip, and wished for little more than to wipe the grime and perfumed filth of Luoyang from his body, and so, with the disc in his hand, he went into his bedroom, tossing it upon his bed, and stripped down to bathe; after that, and perhaps also after sating his hunger, he would devote himself once again to the puzzle the disc presented to him.

The bathroom that was part of his apartments was a utilitarian affair, but that hardly bothered him; it was equipped with both a tub and enough hot water to fill said tub, and so it served his purposes just fine. It was in the northern tradition that he bathed, then, once the tub had been filled with water that was nearest to scalding, scrubbing vigorously to cleanse himself of the stink of the High Eunuchs and their opulent halls; he used not only soap, but salts as well, dousing his skin in mulled red wine after all of it, such that the tub, made up from water that had been used for the washing of rice and then heated, filtered, and circulated until it reached him, was practically unusable afterwards, but as bathing was the end of that cycle, he was content with such an end, even as he ran his freshly-cleansed hair through with essential oils, for it allowed for him to ensure that only the one load of bathing-water should be befouled—he had grown up a peasant, after all, and the frugality of that lifestyle was an enduring trait that few ever unlearned successfully. Though he had water aplenty to waste, it was simply not in his nature to conduct himself in such a fashion.

When at last his ablutions had come to an end, and Xingke had cleansed himself to his satisfaction, he dried himself, and dragged his weary body back into his bedroom, where he garbed himself simply, as he had done since he had been a peasant in truth; but no sooner had he found himself so garbed than did one of the guards at his door knock upon it, requesting his instructions. With a muted sigh, he moved to give them what they asked for, standing in his sitting-room and asking, "What is it?"

"Lord Xingke, one of the servants has arrived with what she claims to be your supper," said one of them, a boy who had come to him from one of the enclave-cities that were sprinkled about the steppe, who favoured his right side and, as far as he knew, still struggled to make up for that shortcoming. "Should I let her through?"

I didn't call for anyone, he thought to himself; but then, he had seen Xianglin, and while it was true that it was more Gu's way of caring to send someone to bring him a meal when he had forgotten to seek one himself, Xingke supposed that Xianglin certainly wasn't incapable of following suit. Feeling safe as he did within the walls of his own citadel—for he never would have even dreamed of being so foolishly lax with his security, were he yet in Luoyang—he nodded, and called out, "Yes, let her through."

The doors opened, then, and in came a maidservant he didn't personally recognise (which wasn't all that surprising, given that Xianglin was the person tasked with vetting the serving staff, just as Gu's task was to vet their custodians, engineers, infirmary staff, and such) who was carrying a tray laden with food into his apartments, upon which he could recognise rice, of course, but also dumplings and buns and stewed vegetables, with a carafe of water and a pot of tea balanced precariously but unwaveringly amongst it all.

The maidservant, for her part, seemed to spot his mild shock in the way that his eyes widened; not at all memorable of stature, she was slight of build, though not ill-fed, with skin a shade or two fairer than he would have expected for someone who hailed from this part of the world. Her grey eyes flicked him up and down as they took in his scepticism, and her small button nose scrunched somewhat at what she saw. "Lord Xingke, it's important to maintain a healthy diet, you know…"

"I…suppose," he replied, taken aback by her admonition for a moment.

Then, she tucked a lock of inky black hair behind her ear, and he understood at once what it was that she was signalling to him, and who, precisely, she was.

"I imagine you didn't go as far as you otherwise would have to disguise your skin tone because you wish for me to know you at a glance," Xingke opined, once the door had closed behind her, as he turned to lead her deeper into his apartments.

Far from looking shocked at his assertion, she gave him a heavy sigh, and then shook her head, her soft features downcast in mild disappointment. "Certainly took you long enough. Though, I'm sure your lacklustre perception can be forgiven in this case—after all, to my knowledge, this is the first interaction you've ever had with one of our number in the field…"

"Correct," Xingke admitted with a mildly embarrassed nod; for indeed, why would a shinobi give to him such a device as the black disc upon his bed and fail to instruct him in its use? The fact that he already had some of these shinobi embedded into his staff was something that Xingke knew passably well already, but the fact that he now had to confront that truth face-to-face, as it were, was another matter entirely.

"Well, I'm sure you'll grow to pick us out more easily in the days and weeks to come…" she sighed aloud, perhaps prepared to be gone already. Within Xingke's room, he had a single table and a set of chairs to take his meals in private, and it was upon this very table that the theretofore-unnamed shinobi laid out the full spread that she had brought up to his chambers, accomplishing that task with a level of sheer speed and precision that he wouldn't have connected with the skills of a shinobi—or perhaps, as he conceded, it was merely that this was not her first mission spent undercover as a maidservant, and so she had learned many of the tricks of the servile trade already. Either way, it was irrelevant—a point of curiosity at best—and so, Xingke did not inquire after the subject; instead, he sat himself down at his own table, and awaited what she had come to tell him, the information he needed to know.

Once the tray was empty, the disguised shinobi took it up and bowed at the waist, before launching at last into her explanation. "Her Highness sends her regards. She bids you eat to regain your strength, and when you're finished, press the largest button on the side of the holoprojector, and wait. She'll be with you in short order."

"Thank you," said Xingke with a grateful nod.

"Of course," replied the shinobi; then, with a footpad's step and between one blink and the next, the woman vanished, with only the food remaining as a sign that she was ever there to begin with.

So it goes, Xingke thought; then, he shrugged, picked up his usual chopsticks, and began to eat.

Once he was finished, with every last morsel consumed, he set his chopsticks by the side, and stood from the table to make his way over to his bedspread, where the device, this 'holoprojector', lay at rest. He picked it up, then, and took it over to the desk where he had found it, placing it upon the wooden surface; as a precautionary measure, he poked his head out of his own doors and said to his guards, "You're dismissed for the evening. Go and spend it as you please."

The guardsmen, whom, he realised a moment too late, had not seen the maidservant leaving, and as such, believed that she was still within, accompanying him, looked at each other conspiratorially; then, both of them turned to him and gave him matching sagacious nods before departing from their posts at his door, and rounding the corner at the end of the corridor, taking both of them out of sight and out of earshot.

Well, I suppose there are certainly worse cover stories than me bedding one of the maidservants, he mused to himself ruefully, chuckling without mirth as he closed the doors for the evening, all but certain in that moment that, but for whatever shinobi might have been lurking in the shadows, he was at last alone.

In that solitude, then, with the artificial lights hanging from his ceiling serving as the only source of illumination at this hour, Xingke reached out to the device in search of the largest button upon its side; then, upon finding it, he pressed it, and upon setting it down, he waited a moment, only to realise that he'd put it upside-down by accident the moment that one side of it lit up bright blue. Hurriedly, he flipped it over, and then waited patiently in his seat for the holoprojector to boot up.

Xingke would hardly have called himself an expert when it came to Britannian technology—if he'd been forced to confront a diagram of how this thing worked, and to explain it to someone else, he wouldn't be much longer for this world, certainly—but he'd been exposed to enough of it over the course of his tasks at the behest of the High Eunuchs that he could recognise at a glance what was happening as the minimalist and ultra-modern machine came alive; and while hard light was far from a phenomenon he understood the dynamics of to any appreciable degree of specificity, he'd seen enough keyboards, and certainly more than enough three-dimensional tactical diagrams made from the stuff to understand what he was looking at.

What that hard light then rendered, however? Rather less so.

Bare flesh.

Long, shapely legs.

A bust that very nearly overflowed from the silk robe she wore, and a rear that clearly strained it.

Mussed-up hair.

And a face streaked with smeared and ruined cosmetics, pools of black around her eyes like a panda with tear tracks.

"Ah, Xingke," she began, her swollen lips curling into a charming smile, her voice now hoarse and scratchy. "I've been expecting you. You look well. Are you well?"

Xingke shook his head, trying to clear it. The fact that she was only seventeen years old helped with that a great deal, the sense of wrongness that came with leering at someone who was barely even more than a child, even by Britannia's laws, allowing him to pry himself of the momentary stupor of her unveiled and dishevelled beauty; the moment he returned to himself, his jaw snapping shut, he looked away as swiftly as he possibly could, and made sure to keep his eyes averted. Tightly, he replied, "I'm well, your highness."

"…You seem distressed," she noted, tilting her head to the side—a gesture that seemed oddly avian when she did it—as she blinked owlishly. Then she looked down at herself, as if checking something, and it was that motion that drew his attention to the fact that her hands were bare for the first time he'd ever seen, holding what looked like a cotton pad between her tapered, elegant, black-nailed fingers. "…I don't seem to have forgotten clothes this time…"

"No, your highness, that isn't the problem," Xingke sighed heavily.

She shrugged—he caught her form in his periphery—and brought the pad to her cheek, dabbing and wiping at her face with small, brisk motions, quick like brush-strokes, cleaning away the cosmetics that had run freely down her face. "Suit yourself, then."

There was such an innocuous energy to how she'd said that sentence that it actually made it easier to begin to look back and regard her fully, her cavalier attitude doing a great deal to defuse any sort of tension that her current state of relative undress might otherwise have caused. He wondered, though not for the first time, how, precisely, she managed to accomplish this, but he kept the question to himself—after all, he had his doubts that she even knew how she managed it.

"So, tell me, Xingke: how did you and Koko get on, hmm?" she asked him point-blank, while still in the midst of removing her ruined cosmetics, one cotton-handed brush-stroke at a time. "I know that she can be a little much at first for some people…"

"I have no complaints about Miss Hekmatyar," he replied, shaking his head. "The entire inventory arrived here on time, intact, and undamaged. My soldiers, in fact, drilled with the equipment just today."

"Good," she said, nodding, and he got the strangest impression that there was a mirror she looked into on her end, past where his image was set up. But then, he supposed that if that was the case, he could hardly say that it was all that odd… "I'm glad to hear as much. You'll be working together for a bit longer, like as not, and I would rather two of my most capable subordinates not be butting heads—provided that it can be helped, of course."

"As you say, your highness," he acknowledged with a nod.

"What did the High Eunuchs want, that they called you all hence in such a hurry?"

The question took him aback momentarily. "I'm surprised that you don't have shinobi embedded in the Ceremonial Guard."

She pulled a grimace at that, and shook her head. "I deemed it an unnecessary risk. Almost all that reaches the ears of the Ceremonial Guard reaches the ears of the servants first, and what little the servants cannot hear, you will."

He nodded, understanding at once the calculus behind the decision, before responding, "They called us together because they suspected that one of us—the wardens, that is—was working with Britannia. Arms and armour and such…"

She paused in the midst of cleaning her face for a moment. "…And does that present a problem?"

Xingke snorted. "I take it you're not exactly knowledgeable on how things tend to go in Luoyang, then."

"No, I'm not. Nor do I pretend to be," she replied primly, going right back to her facial cleaning. "If I'm not mistaken, that is what I have you for, Xingke."

"Fair enough, fair enough," he conceded with a shrug of his own. "The other wardens will be caught between acts of performative scandal and privately kicking themselves for not thinking of it first. If worst should come to worst, your highness, this information will merely serve to kick off an arms race, not yet a full-scale power struggle."

"And the High Eunuchs?"

"None of them believe that the unknown warden was acting alone," Xingke informed her. "They've begun to suspect that a second traitor lingers amongst their own ranks. What's likely to follow is a parade of plotting and counter-plotting, and at a conservative estimate, that ought to keep them occupied for the better part of a year, with none of them growing any closer to discovering us."

She raised an incredulous brow. "Is the situation on the ground there truly so dire?"

"Worse, in fact," he confirmed ruefully. "Ever since your elder sister rattled their cages the way she did—nearly a year ago, now—they've been even more paranoid and distrustful than before. I'll admit that I hadn't thought it possible, but…well…here we are."

"So it goes," she agreed, matching his rueful tone with one of her own. "And yet, all the same, this level of internal division can only ever work to our advantage, so I suppose we ought to be glad for it."

Xingke grunted unhappily, but had no recourse but to concede the point. "Unfortunately…"

"Which brings us, at long last, to the critical question," the princess proclaimed, lowering the white pad in her hand, now streaked and saturated with black, before turning to him fully, and asking him directly. "What is it that you want, Xingke?"

Xingke felt his brow furrowing in confusion. "I'm afraid that I don't quite catch your meaning, your highness."

"Well then, I suppose I ought to elaborate," she half-sighed, soaking a fresh and pristine cotton pad with the contents of a nearby bottle, before bringing it up to her face and working away at cleaning more of the runny black rings from around her eyes. "You wished for me to aid you in liberating your homeland from the High Eunuchs. That's a simple enough goal, but there are a number of ways we could go about it, and which one is best depends entirely upon what you envision for the future of your nation. In light of what you've told me, Xingke, I can hardly begin to imagine that raising the Tianzi would even count as an inconvenience, for example. My shinobi are in their proper places already, and we've burrowed fairly deep in our infiltration efforts. It would take only a matter of days to pick off the High Eunuchs one by one, and with a small strike team, I could neuter the Ceremonial Guard with ease. I could leave you and your allies to seize power for the Tianzi, with you as her advisor or regent, in one fell stroke, and with minimal fuss. I could do it within the span of the next week, even, if not sooner. Thus do we find ourselves at a crossroads, Xingke, in which you must now decide, for once and for all, the fate of your nation: do you truly want to place the Tianzi upon the throne in full? To return her dynasty, such as it is, to power, and with her at its head? Is that what you wish of me, Xingke?"

"I—!" he baulked, blinking and physically recoiling from the gravity of the question, now that he at last understood it in full. He felt his eyes go wide, and words failed him, his jaw working soundlessly for a few moments, before he recovered enough of his faculties, including that of speech, to tell her his response. "Your highness, I hardly think I'm qualified to make this decision…"

"The decision is before you nonetheless, and it cannot be deferred," the princess told him, and it felt in that moment as if her tone contained all of the weight of the world, laden into every last word. "Here and now, Xingke. You say that you don't feel qualified? You're certainly the most qualified person who will ever have a chance to make this decision. You have been chosen, Xingke: in you, I saw a leader of men, a leader of mankind. Remember well my words: hesitation is defeat. The moment is now, and your duty lies before you, which no other man alive may shoulder, and it is to answer this question—and know, Xingke, that the absence of an answer is an answer, too:

"Do you wish for Jiang Lihua to rule?"

Xingke sighed, but relented; his second mistress was correct, after all, when she said that he was the only one who would ever be in a position to decide this. That meant that the question was his responsibility to answer, that the choice was his duty to decide; and he had never been one to shirk his duty, nor did he mean to begin now. Thus, did he wish for Lihua to rule?

And if that wasn't the exact question that Xingke himself had been turning over and asking himself in his head for the last few days, ever since the conversation he'd had with Lihua, and been reminded of his original desire: to see her have whatever semblance of a normal childhood she could, to grow up and make friends, and maybe even fall in love someday. It occurred to him in that moment that his knowledge of what ruling would entail for her hadn't originally been in conflict with his desire to see her freed because back in the beginning, when all this started and he made his original promise, it had seemed like the only route that she could take even to begin to grasp at that hope, that getting Lihua out from under the collective thumb of the High Eunuchs was as far as he could even imagine going down that road. And then he'd gone along and acted on it, even later on, when he ought to have known better, because there simply wasn't time. He'd been alone, and all too aware of his mortality—putting the mianguan upon her head, empowering her politically, had been the only way he could even remotely assure her safety after his 'mysterious illness' took his life at last, and so he'd gone along with it, allowing no room for misgivings as to the nature of his course to come into his mind, to be even concepts with which he could grapple therein…

But things were different now, weren't they? His days were no longer numbered, and no longer did he toil alone, directing his subordinates and bearing the sole responsibility for determining their course.

He chortled at himself in surprise and rueful irony for a moment: for what about this situation really was all that different from what he was already doing? He had already been making this decision for all the people over whom Lihua might rule for all the years he had spent working in the shadows, plotting against the paranoid tyranny that the High Eunuchs represented. That didn't change just because he had lucked his way into gaining more options to choose from.

"No," he replied simply, and he'd expected that word coming from his mouth to surprise even him. And to be fair, it did, on some level; but it felt also as if the majority of him knew better.

Perhaps it always had.

"This is almost certainly lèse-majesté to say, but…Lihua isn't a ruler," he continued, high off of the catharsis that finally saying all of this aloud brought forth from the forgotten depths of his soul. "Lihua is a good girl, a kind girl, a merciful girl, who finds it difficult to think to wish ill upon anyone, even those eight by whose will she is kept in that gilded cage. And to be certain, neither the goodness, nor the kindness, nor even the mercy, whether on their own or when grouped together, make her ill-suited to the stresses and trials of ruling, but rather that she can't seem to turn any of these off. Lihua can't even go so far as to comprehend it, being anything other than she is, or acting in any other way, and that's a dangerous problem for a ruler to have. Perhaps the most dangerous, even…

"I refuse to set Lihua up for failure," Xingke concluded, nodding half to himself. "I refuse to set her free of one gilded cage, only to shackle her with another. I won't suffer her to be pulled from the danger in which she currently languishes, only to be placed squarely in the path of the danger that ruling an empire by its very nature produces, even for those who can understand what it means to have to destroy one's enemies such that they may never trouble you again. The dynasty… The Qing Dynasty collapsed the better part of a century ago, and if I may be frank with you, your highness, they'd already lost the Mandate of Heaven for a number of decades before that. That we allow it to be put on display like this, that we reduce its corpse to a mummer's prop, is nothing short of disgraceful. Let it die. Let Lihua's blood haunt her no further. It's been my aim since the very beginning of all of this to set her free from the bloody legacy that claimed the life of her mother, and her grandmother, and her great-grandmother. That path, and the path that would seek to see the mianguan placed upon her head, are at cross-purposes, and always have been. And now that I have been forced to choose one over the other—now that I have the luxury of choosing one path over the other—I will choose the former course, and forsake the latter in its entirety…"

He…hadn't known that he had that many words on the subject in him, truthfully. He felt…scoured, in a way. Galvanised. It was a raw, vacant feeling, but a fulfilling one, all the same. It was…strange to him, really, that he could feel this way.

"Mm. Yes, I had thought as much," Her Highness responded after allowing him a moment of silence in which to better collect himself. "Well-spoken, by the way. Bravo. Truly."

"So…" he began again, swallowing hard and adjusting his posture. "What… What will happen now, your highness?"

"Right at this very moment? Not much, I would imagine. Not in a material sense, at least," said the princess…the loyalty, he supposed, that he had chosen to honour. He'd expected to feel more guilt if he was ever forced to turn his coat, but now that it had happened, it felt almost like this was the side he'd meant to choose, and that it had only taken him a long and winding road to get here. Though, Xingke supposed that the fact that choosing this course better served the best interests of the little girl to whom he had sworn his very first oath likely softened that blow considerably. "It shall be war, you know—shattering the grip of the High Eunuchs about the throat of the Chinese Federation is not the sort of goal that non-violent means can really ever hope to achieve."

"Not just them," Xingke corrected her, shaking his head. "The other seven wardens, as well. Or at least, six out of that seven. Cao Cao is an honourable man. He could go either way."

The princess arched her brow at him—she'd wiped away a little more than two-thirds of the makeup that had coated her face when they began by now, he estimated—and ventured, "A friend of yours, then?"

"I wouldn't quite go that far, not by any means," Xingke considered, shrugging. "The position both of us hold isn't one that's exactly conducive to forming bonds like 'friendships' with one another. But there exists a mutual respect between us, a level of rapport that I don't share with any of the others. He's the only other one I could think of who might find it within himself to put his personal ambitions aside for the good of the common people."

"Then we'll keep that in mind," Princess Justine nodded; then, her swollen lips curled upward into a smile. "According to both Sif and the Grand Marshal, the initial cohorts of the First Legion really ought to be deployed in the field if we want to see how well we've trained them. I'll start cycling detachments of legionaries to bolster your ranks, and to start getting your men up to legionary standard—if it's war we're headed for, it'll be quite a bit more convenient to have a single unified chain of command, so it only makes sense to fold them in together…"

Xingke cocked his own brow. "I take that to mean that this will be part of a larger escalation in your armament strategy, your highness?"

"Got it in one," she replied, smirking deviously. "And you'll be glad to hear that we're about ready to start rolling out the Gekkas, which ought to replace your current Gun-Rus as we slowly bring you all up to speed with regards to modern military technology, especially Knightmare Frames. By the time it becomes enough of a concern, we shall aim to have sufficient personnel from the Order of the Raven on hand to train and integrate your 'Dragon Cavalry' into our own ranks, and that will be that. Oh, and I ought to mention, the good Doctor Chawla has a custom number in the works for you specifically."

"You honour me, your highness," Xingke replied, because he wasn't entirely sure how else he ought to be responding to this. He supposed that he would just have to figure it out along the way.

"Nonsense, Xingke," she scoffed, dismissing him with a flick of her free hand. "If I don't invest in you, if I fail to set you up for success, however can I expect to see you live up to that intoxicating potential I saw in you when we first met? I expect great things from you, Xingke…but I have no doubt that you'll manage to surpass even my lofty expectations."

No pressure, Xingke added silently, nodding in response. It certainly made a good deal of practical sense: of they to whom much is given, much shall be required, and all of that. He hoped only that he proved to be as up to the challenge as his mistress, his liege lady, seemed to believe him to be.

"And chin up, Xingke," she chided him gently, levelling an indulgent look directly at him, sending a wave of gentle reassurance flowing through him somehow. "Your fear and anxiety may well be prudent, as war is so often a horrible thing, and mankind is not meant to be engaged in it, for all that humanity seeks it out, time, time, and time again; but they are unnecessary, all the same:

"For I am the Mandate of Heaven," she declared; and written plain in the haughty curl of her lips and the unmasked intensity of her eyes, Xingke could see the truth of it, there for all the world to see. "And no weapon formed against me shall prosper."

And to that lofty declaration, Xingke knew there to be only a single warranted response.

He bowed his head, did Li Xingke, and he swore to her, "Your will be done…your majesty…"