Chasing the Phoenix (28 page)

“That is also at our direction. The verses put words of love into her mind, and so, inevitably, her thoughts move yearningly toward you.”

“It sounds almost sensible when you say it,” Prince First-Born Splendor said. “Even though I know better.”

They two were sitting in the conversation park, watching laborers measure out the foundations of the Infallible Physician's mansion. The maple trees had begun to turn color early and were as crimson as the swans swimming serenely on the koi pond. A sudden breeze blew a swirl of black petals from a nearby rose tree. When Darger remained silent, the prince growled, “It maddens me to think of her sitting by his bed every day.”

“Then rejoice. The ceo has left his sickbed and resumed his role as the Hidden Emperor's chief subordinate.”

“Will White Squall stop seeing him, then?”

“Of course not. That would be contrary to our plan.”

Prince First-Born Splendor stared down at his clenched fist. “There must be more we can do. I cannot just sit and worry.”

“Well … there is an action you could take. But I fear you lack the resolve.”

The prince opened his hand and then looked up from it. “I have struck men for saying less. But as I need your help, I shall keep my anger in check. What any man can do, I am capable of. Try me!”

“White Squall seeks to make you jealous. You must in your turn make her jealous.”

“How? There is no woman who could possibly compare with her. She would not believe me capable of looking at anyone else.”

“By wooing the one woman she respects—Ceo Shrewd Fox.”

“It is an ignoble deed to court a woman falsely.”

“Would you kill a man if that was what winning White Squall took?” Darger asked. “Then break a woman's heart. It's a lesser crime and a far more common one anyway. They almost always get over it.”

“If I must, I must,” Prince First-Born Splendor said. “But you must first swear, by whatever foreign abominations you have for gods, that you will arrange for me not only White Squall's love and subservience but also that I will not have to serve a day as the emperor in the furtherance of your schemes.”

Darger sighed. “Yes, I can get you what you want by arranging for Powerful Locomotive to be disgraced and exiled and then convincing the Hidden Emperor that your service was so great as for him to grant you Southern Gate as an independent country. You will have to wait until we have conquered Twin Cities and the Republic of Central Plains, fought our way to the Pacific Ocean, conquered the coastal powers, and taken the city of North, of course. But that is merely a matter of time. It is changing White Squall's heart and ambitions that will be difficult, delicate work.”

But Prince First-Born Splendor was no longer listening. He stared blindly, nobly, into the sky and said, “If I thought she was sleeping with him, I would kill him with my own bare hands.”

*   *   *

THAT NIGHT,
White Squall slipped into Darger's rooms. He heard the sound of clothing falling to the floor and opened his eyes to see her standing before his bed, clad only in moonlight and shadow. She looked as cold and desirable as a goddess.

“What in heaven's name are you doing?” Darger asked.

“Everyone, yourself included, speaks of your tremendous intellect. Yet you still ask questions like that.” White Squall lifted the sheet and slid into bed alongside Darger.

“Our affair—delightful, meaningful, and indelibly etched upon my soul though it was—is over. Further, you are being fought over by two of the most powerful men in China, both of whom are murderously jealous. How can you possibly be here?”

With a sigh, White Squall snuggled into Darger's arms. “I can't sleep with Prince First-Born Splendor, and the thought of having sex with Ceo Powerful Locomotive disgusts me. That leaves only you.”

“Consider the many virtues of abstinence! If you were discovered in my bed, both of your would-be lovers would undoubtedly team up to kill me.”

“Then I think you'd want to make me happy,” White Squall said. “So that I wouldn't, out of frustration, drop hints in front of either of them. Now the first thing you should do to make me content is…”

 

13.

The trust to be placed in the powers of heaven is boundless; all others must reconcile their debts with gold and silver.

—
THE
SAYINGS OF THE
PERFECT
STRATEGIST

THE ARMY
that marched out of Crossroads was far superior to the one that had marched in—and not only because it was now greatly enlarged by the absorption of Shrewd Fox's soldiers. This was an army that had experienced miraculous victory after miraculous victory and confidently expected this string of unlikely events to continue for as long as it took. The Immortals had been daunting before; now they were terrifying to behold.

Down the river they traveled, pausing briefly at every town and city to claim the district for the emperor and accept as tribute all available boats. This made their progress increasingly rapid as fewer troops were forced to use the river road and those who did arrived at the end of a day's march to find that the waterborne troops had already made camp for them.

Soon it would be possible to move the entire army via the river fleet, letting the Long River carry them all the way to the Pacific with infinitely less difficulty than their earlier treks had taken. But first the Immortals would have to face Twin Cities and the Republic of Central Plains, which after the abrupt collapse of Three Gorges had, as Shrewd Fox predicted, hastily if belatedly joined forces.

There were several places en route where one or the other of their enemies might profitably have engaged them militarily. But the lure of a battle where all the disadvantages belonged to the Hidden Emperor's forces was too great. Similarly (the emperor's scouts and spies reported), no effort was being made to prevent the Immortals from putting in at their chosen encampment, lest they rethink their plans. Though gun emplacements had been built downriver, to prevent them from changing the terms of engagement should the Hidden Emperor's letter turn out to be another of the Perfect Strategist's famed ruses.

The Dog Pack had, naturally, acquired several luxury houseboats, giving themselves the most comfortable transport on the river. And so Surplus found himself seated under a canvas sunshade near the prow, smoking cheroots with Aubrey Darger. Surplus enjoyed the enforced idleness, since he had a talent, as his friend had not, for inaction. But he regretted its necessity, for, pleasant as the river voyage was, while he was on the boat he was not so much
in
China as watching it float by. He was passing through lands he might never revisit, and a part of him yearned to explore them, discover their scents and colors, and learn their songs and stories and what sorts of lies the old men there told in the teahouses.

“I swear,” Darger said, “it's like looking after schoolchildren. Except that children have the good grace to be uninterested in sex. And their death threats are rarely to be taken seriously. And they don't have armed warriors at their beck and call. It's a wonder that I have the time to wage a war at all.” He took a long draw on his smoke. It came from a case of pedagogical cheroots that the Dog Pack had liberated from a tobacconist's shop in one of the towns they had passed through, from which, after long indecision, Darger had (as Surplus had known he would) opted for an anthology of classical poetry. For his part, Surplus was smoking a history of the Southern and Northern Dynasties period. As they smoked and talked, tailored mosaic viruses made their way through the blood-brain barrier and unpacked the texts encoded into them directly into his frontal lobe.

“What new developments prompted this outburst?” Surplus asked.

“Oh, Powerful Locomotive is thumping about, complaining that our battle plans are insufficiently bloodthirsty and that White Squall refuses to see the sensitive, caring side of his nature. White Squall keeps demanding that I change First-Born Splendor from the charming, cultured prince of a minor kingdom she fell in love with into an ambitious, power-seeking courtier very much like Powerful Locomotive. The prince, meantime, believes me capable of turning the human tiger that is White Squall into a mewling lap kitten. When I asked him how things were going with Shrewd Fox—”

“Did I hear my name?”

Shrewd Fox came up the companionway steps from below and took a seat. Terrible Nuisance popped up to offer her a cheroot. She chose an analysis of the Battle of Red Cliffs and then, when he glared at her, gave him a small coin so he'd go away. “I had to drop out of the poker game,” she said. “I was losing too much money, and the girl who was dealing kept laughing at my misfortunes.”

Surplus could not keep himself from smiling. “You let Little Spider deal? Then you deserve whatever befell you. The family is training her to be a pickpocket. She has very nimble fingers.”

“To answer your original question, we were just talking about Prince First-Born Splendor,” Darger said.

“That fop! I never met anyone quite so annoying. Why is he always underfoot?”

“He is flirting with you, Shrewd Fox,” Surplus explained.

“Is that what it is? Far too subtle! He should simply come up to me and tell me what he wants. Then I can tell him no, and we'll both have saved ourselves a great deal of trouble.”

“It is my understanding,” Surplus said, “that he doesn't actually want anything from you, but is merely trying to make Cao White Squall jealous.”

“Ah. Well, that's better. People should have sensible motives.”

“What do you make of him as a commander?”

“I know that sort of man: courageous in battle, chivalrous in victory, stoic in defeat. He rides always to the fore of his men, and his gallantry is unsurpassed. While fighting, he looks as dashing as an oil painting. But I'd rather have one good mud slogger than twenty of his kind. Wars are not won by heroes but by disciplined soldiers with a decent appetite for survival.”

“And Cao White Squall?

“The cao is made of better stuff. Unimaginative, but often that's a good thing in a subordinate. She knows how to obey an order. I wager that she would willingly go to her death if the order came through the proper chain of command. The Hidden Emperor chose well when he promoted her.”

“How about Powerful Locomotive?” Darger asked.

“Ceo Powerful Locomotive is an insecure man, and therefore he mistakes pigheadedness for firmness and brutality for strength. He has every quality one wishes for in an enemy and none of those one desires in a friend. In the right hands, he would make a good second-in-command. But he has risen too high for that. You dare not leave him behind in charge of a captured territory, for his ambition will fill his mind with resentments and imagined slights, and sooner or later he will rise up in rebellion against you. You dare not demote him, for then he will be like a sword with a hairline crack, ready to break in your hand at the worst possible moment. He is in all ways a liability to you.”

“What would you do with him if you were in my place?” Darger asked.

“Kill him. I advise you do it quickly, though. The man is unpredictable.”

“My friend Aubrey, though in all other ways perfectly admirable, is a merciful and tenderhearted man and thus highly unlikely to stoop to murder simply for the sake of convenience.”

“Such was my analysis of him, too. However, he asked and I answered,” Shrewd Fox said. “Much as, when the Hidden Emperor asked me the other day whether the plan for the coming Battle of Three Armies was your creation or my own, I told him the truth.”

For a long moment, nobody spoke. Then Surplus said, “I'm going to presume that was a joke.”

“Oh, no. I really did.”

“That was an incautious act on your part,” Darger said.

Shrewd Fox looked amused. “Was it? Why?”

“Is it possible that you don't know that the emperor is”—reflexively, Surplus looked about him and lowered his voice—“not entirely predictable?”

“Mad as a drunken bandicoot is what I've heard. But I took that chance. The one thing the Hidden Emperor values most from a subject is straight talk, and so I gave him the information he wanted, along with my best analysis of his chances, the strengths and weaknesses of his army, and the character of all his commanders. (He suggested that you two were treacherous but useful, by the way, and I agreed.) It was risky, but I wanted something from him.”

“Being present at the defeat of your enemies, you mean?”

“That and one or two other things.”

But press her though Surplus and Darger might and did, on that subject Shrewd Fox would say no more.

*   *   *

THE MOOD
was cheerful when the boats put in at the grassy fields south of Opera and the Immortals began to pitch camp. They might have been roustabouts raising the tents and wrangling the animals for a circus that would entertain adults and fill children with awe and wonder, rather than combatants preparing to kill and maim as many human beings as possible in as efficient a fashion as could be arranged. “You and the Perfect Strategist have ruined this battle for the family,” Fire Orchid told Surplus. “Nobody is willing to bet against us winning, no matter what odds Trustworthy Mule offers.”

“Such are the horrors of war,” Surplus said. “Perhaps I could come up with a game of chance from the Land of the Green Mountains of the West for the family to introduce here.”

“Oh, teach your grandmother to steal eggs! Anyway, we've already got a cricket-fighting ring. Little Spider paints a tiny gold copyright sign on the back of one and everybody bets on it because they think it has special genetically modified powers. Why are you spending so much time with Shrewd Fox? Is our marriage in trouble again?”