Legend of The Young Master

Chapter 176: Xilai

Siege of Yushan Jia's Notes :

The woods around us are silent. Do monsters mourn? The day before yesterday, Young Master won a great victory over the Enemy. He led most of the company south, where Master Jin had located a convoy approaching us. It was a hard hit, but the Young Master and our group ambushed the enemy from the rear and annihilated them.

The Young Master believes we killed upwards of five hundred of the enemy, including four great monsters, to wit, three great Stone Demonic Trolls and a Demonic Behemoth. The men say the Young Master's Dao protector killed the Behemoth himself, and that it was the greatest feat of battle they had ever seen. Yesterday, the group stood alert all day, waiting for attacks that never came.

Warriors slept at their posts, fully armed. Many farmers and several pavilion elders say this will be the end of the siege—that the enemy will slink away. The Pavilion Mistress has called a meeting of all the members.

✶ ✶ ✶

The Pavilion Mistress had a long, low table brought in, and Wuyi thought it might be the longest he'd ever seen—it stretched across the Great Hall from the ornate incense burner to the raised platform, providing enough space for thirty men to sit together on cushions around it. But there were not thirty men around the table. There were just six. And the Pavilion Mistress.

The six were Wuyi himself, sitting comfortably on a cushion, and Yun Ming, sitting upright on another; Master Zhenying, who by virtue of saving almost half his convoy had suddenly become the representative of all the merchants, took another cushion, and Shen, as the lead warrior of the Bridge Castle, sat with his head propped on his hands.

Jin sat separately from the other men, a self-imposed social distance. And the monk Zhen, sat with an ink feather and scrolls, prepared to copy their decisions.

The Pavilion Mistress sat to Wuyi's right, flanked by two pavilion attendants, who stood. Wuyi understood that the two silent figures were her Right Hand and Mistress of Novices, the two most powerful segments in the pavilion. Elder Yueli and Elder Qiao.

When all the men had settled, the Pavilion Mistress cleared her throat. "Young Master?" she asked. He changed his comfortable posture and sat straight up. "Right," he said. "We are now, at long last, under siege. Our Enemy has finally realized how few we are, and has sealed the roads." He shrugged.

"Frankly, this is a harsher defeat than any we have suffered in the field. Enemy should have thought, after yesterday's incredible stroke of luck—"

"The work of Heaven!" Master Zhen Ying said.

"The Enemy should have assumed," Wuyi went on, "that we had a large group and a lot of Qi warriors to pull off such a coup. Instead, he used the night to push in all our outposts. I lost three good men last night." He looked around.

The cunningly hidden heavy large crossbows in the dead ground hadn't been cunning enough, and now Chaoxiang, one of his Qi adepts, as well as his attendants and archer were dead, and Young Baoji, as his second attendant was known, was weeping his guts out in the infirmary.

"More men than we lost in yesterday's fight," he went on.

The other warriors nodded.

"On a more positive note, Master Zhenying brought us a dozen warriors and sixty archers".

Though these archer were of very variable quality, and every one of them ran yesterday, at one point or another. Every one but one, Wuyi remembered sourly. Guan fought to end and He had not yet condescended to open an eye.

"My members are not mere archers," Zhenying said. Wuyi sat back, assessing the man. "I know they are not," he said. "But for the duration of the siege, Master, we must treat them as one." Zhenying nodded. "I, too, can swing a sword." Wuyi had noticed that he was carrying one, and reports had it that the merchant had acquitted himself well.

"So," he went on, "we have forty warriors well enough to wear Qi armors, and our Qi initiates; call it sixty Qi warriors. We have almost triple that in archers, thanks to the better farmers and the caravan groups." He looked around. "Our Enemy has at least five thousand, swamplings, duskreavers, allies and men taken together."

"Good Heavens!" Shen sat up.

Yun Ming looked as if he'd eaten something foul.

Jin nodded when Wuyi looked at him.

"Can't be less, given what I saw this morning," he said. "The Enemy can cover every road and every path at the same time, and they rotate their forces every few hours." He shrugged.

"You can watch the swamplings digging trenches out beyond the range of our ballista crossbows. It's like watching termites. There are," he shrugged, "a great many termites."

Wuyi looked around. "In addition, we have another hundred merchants and merchants' folk, and four hundred women and children."

He smiled. "In the East, I'd be sending them out right now, to fill the besieger's lines with useless mouths."

He looked around. "Here, they'd literally fill the enemy's bellies, instead." No one appreciated his humor.

"You can't be serious!" said the Pavilion Mistress. "I am not. I won't drive them out to die. But the merchants and their people must be put to work, and I'd like to assign a dozen archers and two Qi warriors to training them. If we cannot be rid of these useless mouths, we must make them useful. We have about forty days' food for a thousand mouths.

Double that at half rations."

"And we have all that grain!" the Pavilion Mistress said.

"Grain for two hundred and eighty days," he said.

"The king will be here long before then," the Pavilion Mistress said firmly.

"Great day to you," said a voice from the door, and Xilai, a Qi master, came in. He was the reason the caravan survived as long as it did. Just like Guan, he had joined the caravan in the middle of the journey. When the attack happened, he had held the enemy alone until the caravan had moved ahead, only to get ambushed again, but to their luck, they were saved by Wuyi and the group.

Xilai smiled around, a little unsure of his welcome. "I received your invitation, but I was in the midst of a dissection of a demonic. You, my lords, have a plentiful supply of candidates for dissection." He smiled. "I have learned some exciting things."

They all stared at him as if he was a leper newly arrived at a feast. He pulled out a cushion and sat.

"There were rats in the grain, by the way," Xilai said. "I've disposed of them. Do you know," he asked, his eyes on the Pavilion Mistress, "who the leader of the Enemy is?" She flinched.

"You do, I see. Hmm." The old Qi master didn't look nearly so old. One could say he was more than seventy. But to unknowing eyes, he looked closer to forty than seventy.

"I remember you, of course, my lady." The Pavilion Mistress trembled—just for a moment—and then forced herself to look at the man. Wuyi saw the effort it took. "And I you," the Pavilion Mistress said.

"Well, three cheers for the air of dangerous mystery," Wuyi said. "I for one am delighted you both know each other."

The Qi master looked at him. "This from you?" He leaned forward. "I know who you are too, Youn Master." Every head in the room snapped to look—first at Wuyi, and then at the the old man.

"Do you really?" asked the Pavilion Mistress, clutching the enchanted necklace around her neck. "Really?"

Xilai was enjoying his moment of drama; Wuyi could see it. He wished he knew who the old charlatan was. As it was, he fingered his dagger he couldn't afford being disclosed specially when the dark figure was knocking on his consciousness everyday.

But seeing Guan here, there was a possibility that his Yuanjing heritage might be disclosed to this old man.

"If you really know and reveal me, I swear before the heavens you believe in, I will cut you down right here," Wuyi hissed.

Xilai laughed and shook his head. "You, and all the rest of you together, couldn't muss my hair," he said. He raised his hand.

Warriors were all on their feet, weapons in hand. But then he shook his head. "Everyone!" he said. He raised his hands. "I beg your pardon, Young Master. Truly.

I like a little surprise. I thought, perhaps—

but please, never mind me, a harmless old man."

"Who the hell are you?" asked Wuyi, across his bare blade. The Pavilion Mistress shook her head. "He is Xilai, the King's Alchemist and advisor. He broke the enemy at Chiavin. He bound the former King's advisor when he betrayed us."

"Your lover," Xilai muttered. "Well—one of your lovers."

"You were a foolish young man then, and you still are in your heart," the Pavilion Mistress settled primly back into her cushion.

"My lady, if I am, it is because he has fooled me for years," Xilai said. "I was not as victorious as I had thought. And he is still with us." Xilai looked around the table. "The Leader of the Enemy, my lords, is the former King's advisors. The most powerful of my faction to arise in twenty generations." He shrugged. "Or so I suspect, and my guesswork is based on observation."