The Brand
“I report to the sect leader: when this disciple and several junior brothers hurried at word to the mouth of the pass on the back mountain, junior brother Xie was already lying on the ground covered in wounds, his breath failing, all but dead.”
Lu Zhuobai spoke respectfully, facing the high seat, in the great hall of the Hidden Snow Sect’s main peak.
Having set out Xie Heng’s condition briefly and to the point, he paused deliberately, and his tone turned heavy, as though he truly grieved over the injuries of the “junior brother” he spoke of.
“And junior brother Zheng Nanlou was standing at his side, holding the sword he carries, with blood all over his hands……”
Zheng Nanlou paid little attention to any of it, and only stood in silence behind him.
In the instant Lu Zhuobai had appeared with his men, Zheng Nanlou had understood the whole shape of this business.
Lu Zhuobai must have gone first to the newly recovered Xie Heng and told him, in that habitual gentle manner, that Zheng Nanlou had saved him.
Xie Heng was certain not to believe it, and under his repeated questioning Lu Zhuobai would have mentioned, as though in passing, that inside the cave that day and outside it he had seen only Zheng Nanlou, which was why he supposed Zheng Nanlou had saved him.
That one sentence was enough to make the already suspicious Xie Heng surer of his own guess, and as he had never had much brain, it took very little stirring before he came to Zheng Nanlou’s door to settle it.
Lu Zhuobai would have thought it through beforehand. The best case was that Xie Heng won, and Zheng Nanlou took a thorough beating; badly hurt or half crippled, either would do as a lesson, and it would also vent his own resentment at having been played in the Sunken Sword Abyss.
After that he would step in and punish Xie Heng suitably, and the matter would be closed.
The worst case was that Xie Heng proved useless and Zheng Nanlou won; then he would “happen” to arrive with the patrolling disciples and pin on Zheng Nanlou, on the spot, the charges of assault and injury and of seizing an artifact. Once the matter went to the sect’s rules, Zheng Nanlou would have to be punished one way or another.
That way he could press forward or fall back as he pleased, and could not come off worse either way.
“This is what this disciple and the other junior brothers saw together. I ask the sect leader to decide.”
While he was thinking all this, Lu Zhuobai had finished his sincere and feeling report and lowered his head slightly, apparently waiting for the answer from above.
Into the silence, Zheng Nanlou suddenly spoke:
“Every word senior brother has just said accuses me of assault and of seizing an artifact. But all you saw was senior brother Xie lying gravely injured, and me standing at his side.”
He did not speak quickly, and deliberately worked a little timidity into his voice, and yet every word was clear enough for everyone present to hear plainly.
“I would ask senior brother, and the others as well: which of you saw with his own eyes that I struck him and did him injury, or that I seized senior brother Xie’s sword?”
Lu Zhuobai turned to look at him, his brows drawing tight, something like heartache passing through his eyes:
“Junior brother Zheng, even now you insist on quibbling. Even if no one saw you strike, the blood on your hands is not false, surely.”
The movement laid his face perfectly clear before Zheng Nanlou, and in that instant it struck him that Lu Zhuobai and Wangyu were not alike in the least.
Even the brows and eyes that everyone called similar were nothing of the kind.
How had he ever mistaken the one for the other?
If one went into it properly, the “cold” beneath Wangyu’s warm surface was more an indifference that looks down on the dust of the world and raises no ripple.
Because he stood high enough, everything looked the same to him.
The gaze he turned on all living things was forever clear and free of impurity, like a glacier silent for ten thousand years, still perfectly transparent within.
He could never have worn the expression Lu Zhuobai wore now, mixed of calculation, of anger, and even of malice.
Lu Zhuobai was fated to be nothing but a clumsy imitation.
In a shadow no one could see into, Zheng Nanlou smiled at Lu Zhuobai.
The smile was very brief and very faint, and yet it was like a wisp of ghostly fire flashing past, lighting that expressionless face all at once.
“Senior brother has not even a witness. Do you mean to convict me on one side’s word and a set of wild guesses?”
He lowered his head again and spoke as though he truly were helpless at being misunderstood:
“I was passing the mouth of the pass just now and saw from a distance that senior brother Xie had fallen. Fearing something had happened to him, I ran over without stopping to think, to see how badly he was hurt.”
“The blood on my hands got there when I was trying, in my haste, to stop his bleeding. As for the sword, I only saw it lying to one side and thought to put it away for senior brother Xie.”
Zheng Nanlou’s defense, which turned black into white, was delivered with real conviction, filled with exactly the right measure of grievance, alarm and bewilderment, as though he truly had suffered some enormous injustice.
Inwardly, though, he could not help laughing coldly. For all Lu Zhuobai’s careful scheming, he had never reckoned that after taking up “The Clear Snow Reflection Art” Zheng Nanlou would improve so fast, far past anything he expected, enough to beat Xie Heng senseless, so that this final “conviction” lacked the one thing that mattered most: the injured party himself.
To pin such charges on him with nothing but conjecture and secondhand evidence was a fool’s daydream.
Since the man wanted to frame him on bare words, he could hardly complain at having his own method turned back on him.
Zheng Nanlou had always been very good at putting on a show.
What happened after Xie Heng woke could wait until later. For the present, at any rate, Lu Zhuobai need not imagine he would walk away untouched.
So he raised his head and looked past Lu Zhuobai’s shoulder at the sect leader seated above:
“Since entering the sect this disciple has, by his own reckoning, kept faith with his own heart, cultivated quietly, and contended with no one. I would ask senior brother Lu: what is your intention, that today you are so eager to lay the crime of “maiming a fellow disciple” upon me?”
When he had finished, the great hall was silent.
It was a long while before a voice came from the high seat, and it only said, slowly:
“Lu Zhuobai.”
Lu Zhuobai turned at once to explain. “This disciple only saw junior brother Xie so gravely hurt, and in the urgency of the moment……”
But the sect leader did not hear him out, and cut him off:
“As the sect’s eldest senior brother, you met with a matter and did not investigate it, did not look into its source, and rushed to convict a fellow disciple of a grave crime on conjecture. Your heart was rash and your conduct went beyond your place.”
“But as this is a first offense, you are sentenced to face the wall at the Cliff of Reflection for three days, to clear your heart and wash your thoughts, and to consider well.”
With the sentence handed down, Lu Zhuobai knew there was nothing left to argue, and bowed to the ground at once, seemingly accepting it in good faith:
“This disciple obeys the sect leader’s ruling.”
Zheng Nanlou watched him stride out of the hall, and the sneer in his mind did not lessen by a fraction.
Three days at the Cliff of Reflection? For Lu Zhuobai that was a punishment that neither hurt nor itched, and looked more like protection in another guise.
Sure enough, in this Hidden Snow Sect there was no real fairness in anything that concerned him.
While he was thinking so, the sect leader’s indifferent voice came again:
“As for you, Zheng Nanlou.”
“Xie Heng lies gravely injured and senseless, and the cause is unknown. You are involved in it, and the suspicion has not been cleared.”
“Until the truth is established, you will be held…… in the quiet room.”
Zheng Nanlou’s heart had not yet fully settled before those words snatched it up again. His head came up and he looked toward the high seat in disbelief.
The quiet room?
The name sounded ordinary enough, but in fact it was a cage a hundred times colder and darker than the Cliff of Reflection, cut off from spiritual energy and from the light of day. For anyone put in there, never mind advancing in cultivation, merely staying alive and keeping hold of his wits was difficult enough.
Why shut him up in such a place?
And when his gaze met those eyes on the high seat, which showed neither joy nor sorrow, he realized all at once that from his crippling of Xie Heng the sect leader must have seen that he was practicing some other art.
That Zheng Nanlou was the sacrifice by which Wangyu would slay the beloved and prove his dao was of course known to this sect leader, who saw into every core secret of the sect.
After all, the secret was itself a crucial part of helping Wangyu ascend, and of the Hidden Snow Sect’s great undertaking to come.
To him, any progress on Zheng Nanlou’s part was only a variable that might disturb Wangyu’s final proving, an obstacle that could not be allowed to exist.
He was not out to establish any truth. He meant to use the pretext Lu Zhuobai’s scheme had handed him to snuff out this first sign of Zheng Nanlou slipping free of their control.
He meant to grind him back into the mud.
And if that was so, then Lu Zhuobai’s motive in laying such a snare was probably not so simple as venting his own resentment.
Behind it there might well be instruction from these people of the Hidden Snow Sect.
No wonder he had dared to seize a man without evidence and take the matter straight before the sect leader. It had all been a pretext for testing him.
A fine calculation indeed.
The more Zheng Nanlou thought, the more indignant he grew, until the unwilling fury filling his chest could hardly be held down. He stared at the blurred figure on the high seat and said through his teeth:
“Is the sect leader’s ruling not somewhat partial……”
The last word was not out before a thread of wind drifted into that hall, where the air had gone stagnant.
A soft wind, carrying the clear, cold fragrance of the lush woods at the summit of Yujing Peak.
It came in through the doorway and passed exactly across Zheng Nanlou’s shoulder, as though patting it twice.
Zheng Nanlou turned without thinking, and a plain white corner of a robe, like a butterfly gliding by, came silently to rest before him.
His gaze traveled up along that robe to a face he knew better than any other.
Brows and eyes of a peerless clarity, like a handful of snow fallen into the mortal world from the cold palace of the sky, and at the mouth, as always, a mild smile that seemed warm and was not.
It occurred to Zheng Nanlou, out of nowhere, that at some point Wangyu had become the person he had seen the most times in his short life.
Back in Huaizhou he had met a great many people, mostly in passing; no one ever stopped, and he had never troubled to remember any of them, and those faces had slipped across his mind and been gone.
Now, at the Hidden Snow Sect, facing this master of his morning and night, he had without noticing carved that face firmly into his heart, leaving in the sea of his consciousness a brand that would not be shaken off.
A brand he did not find hateful.
Wangyu, appearing out of nowhere, did not raise his eyes to the sect leader seated above, but watched only Zheng Nanlou, as though in all heaven and earth there were no one else to see.
His lips parted, and his voice, level and without a ripple, carried something that allowed no dispute, and spread clearly through the silence of the hall.
“How my disciple is to be dealt with is mine to decide.”
He held out a hand to Zheng Nanlou and said:
“I am taking you home.”