The merchant came the next morning, just after the hour of the dragon, while the dew was still drying on the flagstones and the heat had not yet climbed over the courtyard walls.
He did not come to the city hall.
Nalan Meng had made sure of that. She had sent Xiaocui to the gate at dawn with a quiet message for the gatekeeper—if Master Shi of the southern merchant group calls, bring him to my rooms, not to the hall, and tell no one—because the city hall was a place of clerks and petitioners and open doors, and the business she had with Shi Dacheng was not the kind of business a city lord could bear to have overheard. She had spent half the night composing what she would say. She had spent the other half staring at the canopy of her bed.
Now he sat in her receiving room, on the chair she had set out for him, and she stood.
She had not meant it to be that way. She had meant to sit across from him at the little rosewood table, as an equal, as a lord receiving a guest. But when he came in, he had simply lowered himself into the best chair—the carved one with the cushion, her chair—and spread his fat thighs and settled his enormous belly over his belt with a long, satisfied sigh, and rested his ringed hands on the armrests like a magistrate on a bench. And somehow, by the time she had finished pouring the tea, she found that there was nowhere left for her to sit except the hard stool by the window. So she stood.
He did not touch the tea.
"City Lord," he said. His voice was pleasant. His small eyes, sunk in their folds of pink flesh, were not. "I think you know why I'm here."
"I know."
"One million taels of silver." He let the words sit in the air between them, heavy as a stone. "To rebuild the wells. To feed the relief kitchens. To repair the south wall and pay the garrison. To revive your fallen city." He smiled. "Very admirable, I'm sure. And today is the last day of repayment."
Nalan Meng's hands were folded in front of her, the right one gripping the left so hard that her knuckles had gone white.
She did not have it. She did not have a tenth of it. She did not have a hundredth. The treasury of the City Lord's Mansion held exactly fifty taels of silver—the fifty she had taken back from her husband two days ago—and a stack of ledgers that grew more frightening every time she opened them.
There was one way she could have found the money. She knew that. She had known it for months. She could write to her father. To her brothers. The House of the Third Prince was rich, richer than any merchant in the south, and General Changsheng would have sent the whole million on the back of a single courier without asking a question, because she was his ninth daughter and he loved her.
And then every one of her eight brothers and sisters would know that the youngest—the one who had made her name on the battlefield before she was twenty, the Luo Sha Nv, the prodigy—had been given a city of her own and run it into debt to a fat southern merchant within three years.
She would rather have cut off her own hand.
"Well?" said Shi Dacheng. He tilted his head. "Are you even thinking about paying it back, City Lord? Or should I start thinking about other ways to settle things?" He leaned back in her chair, and it creaked under him. "Don't force me to make this public. I would hate to have to go to the magistrate. Post the contract on the city gate. Let all of Nalan City see what their lord has signed her name to." He sighed theatrically. "People are so unkind about debts. They wouldn't understand."
The words went into her like a blade.
She was a city lord. She was proud. Her pride was the spine that held her straight. And she could see it—could see it so clearly that it made her skin crawl—her own contract nailed to the great gate on City Gate Avenue, under that plaque with her family's name in gold. The porters reading it. The women on the balconies. The beggars in the market who had eaten from her relief kitchens. The city lord owes a merchant a million taels. The city lord is a debtor. The city lord is no better than a gambler.
They would not understand that she had done it for them. Nobody ever understood.
A shiver ran through her—through her skin, into her bones—a thrill of pure, cold shame so intense that for a moment she could not breathe.
"Please," she heard herself say. Her voice was low and rough. "Give me more days. A few more days. I will pay you in full."
The hot sting behind her eyes took her by surprise. She blinked hard. It did not help. She could feel her eyes filling, the tears welling up and standing in them, blurring the fat pink shape in her chair, and she hated it, she hated it, she had not cried in front of another person since she was eleven years old—
Shi Dacheng watched the tears gather in the eyes of the most beautiful woman in Nalan City, and something warm and slow uncurled in his belly.
He had come prepared. Oh, he had come very well prepared. He had been preparing for this morning for a year.
"I'm afraid," he said gently, "that I can't wait even one more day."
He reached into his sleeve and drew out a folded document of heavy paper, sealed in red, and laid it on the rosewood table beside the untouched tea. He unfolded it with a care that was almost loving. Her own signature sat at the bottom of it, bold and black, beside the vermilion print of her seal.
"If you can't pay," he said, "then, according to the contract, you'll have to work for me. In my bar." He tapped a line near the bottom with one thick finger. "Heaven Lust."
Nalan Meng stared at the page.
She had not read that line. She remembered signing it—a long, hot afternoon in the city hall a year ago, the drought just beginning to bite, the relief kitchens running out of rice, her head full of numbers and wells and children's faces. She remembered the merchant's smooth voice explaining the terms. She remembered the brush in her hand. She had read the sum. She had read the date. She had read the interest and thought it fair.
She had not read the last clause, written in a smaller hand at the very bottom of the third page.
Her whole body went cold.
Heaven Lust. She knew the name. Everyone in Nalan City knew the name. It was the largest of the wine houses on City Gate Avenue, a three-story palace of red lacquer and gold lanterns, and for the past few days the rumors about it had been running through the city like fire through dry grass. Even the maids were whispering about it. Outfits, they said. New ones. Strange ones. Foreign clothes from some distant country no one had ever heard of, made of cloth so thin it was like wearing nothing, cut so short and so tight and so shamelessly that the men who had seen them came out of the bar with their faces red and their eyes glazed, and went straight back in again the next night.
A chill went down her spine and pooled somewhere low in her belly.
"Please," she said again. Her voice cracked. "Just a few more days."
She did not want to become a waitress. A shameless bar waitress, carrying wine to drunk merchants in some foreign rag. Or—and the thought was worse, so much worse—whatever else this man might decide to make her do.
Shi Dacheng smiled. It was a creepy smile, wide and wet and pleased, and it showed all of his small yellow teeth.
"I don't think so," he said. "Just come to Heaven Lust tonight. At midnight. Come and meet me." He leaned forward. His voice dropped. "Unless, of course, you'd prefer that I reveal all this to everyone."
He did not give her a choice. He had never intended to.
Nalan Meng stood in the middle of her own receiving room with her hands clenched in front of her and the tears standing in her eyes, and felt the walls of the trap close around her—quietly, completely, from every side at once. She had walked into it a year ago. She simply had not seen it until now.
"…All right," she said.
Her voice was barely a whisper.
The pig-faced merchant's face lit up with joy.
He had heard it. The most beautiful woman in Nalan City, the proud Luo Sha Nv, the prince's daughter on her blood-bay horse, standing in front of him with wet eyes and saying all right. It was sweeter than any wine.
He pushed himself up out of her chair.
He came toward her slowly. One step. Two. His belly swayed, his rings glittered, and the smell of him came ahead of him—sweat and sandalwood and garlic—and Nalan Meng's body went rigid. Her heart was pounding. What is he going to do? What is he going to— Her hand twitched toward the empty place at her hip where her sword should have been. She had left it on its stand. She could not have used it anyway. Every muscle in her was screaming to step back, and she stood her ground, and she hated herself for not knowing whether it was courage or fear that held her there.
He raised his hand.
She flinched.
He reached past her face—so close that she felt the heat of his fat fingers by her cheek—and into the pouch at his belt. It was a dimensional pouch, small and plain, and when his hand came out of it, he was holding something black.
A mask.
It was made of some dark, supple material like lacquered silk, molded to cover the upper half of a face—the brow, the eyes, the bridge of the nose—and worked across its surface in a fine pattern of black-on-black flowers. Faint lines of silver light moved beneath the pattern when it caught the sun, like veins.
"Don't worry," Shi Dacheng said. He held it out to her. "I have to think of your reputation too, City Lord. This is a disguise mask. A magic tool. Put it on, and it shifts the face. Nobody will be able to recognize the person wearing it. Not your servants. Not your garrison." His smile widened. "Not even your husband."
Nalan Meng took the mask.
It was cool and light in her hands. She could feel the faint hum of the formation woven into it, prickling against her palms.
She had been worried about exactly that. Out of everything—the shame of it, the clothes, the drunk men—what had frightened her most was being seen. Being known. The city lord, in a bar, in some foreign rag. And now here it was: a way to hide.
A small, treacherous wave of relief went through her.
She despised herself for it.
"Midnight," said Shi Dacheng, and bowed—an exaggerated, mocking bow, his belly folding over his belt—and waddled out of her receiving room, humming.
She did not rest that day.
She went through the motions. She heard petitions in the city hall. She read reports from the relief kitchens. She rode out to the south wall to inspect the repairs and stood on the parapet in the furnace heat with her hands on the hot stone, looking out over the cracked fields and the dry riverbed and the shimmering road, and saw none of it.
All she could see was the bar.
A city lord. The lord of Nalan City. Serving in a bar. Serving drinks to her own people. To the merchants she taxed and the officials she commanded and the cultivators she had faced down at the city gate. Bending over their tables. Carrying their cups. Letting them look at her.
She went back to the mansion at dusk and ate nothing. She heard her husband come in from somewhere with the scarred one-eyed man and go off to his room at the back of the house. She thought, for one wild moment, of going to him. Of knocking on that door and saying, Yuguo, I'm in trouble.
She thought of his face. The soft white face that had never once in all their years together been anything but a burden to her.
She did not go.
At midnight, Nalan Meng put on the mask.
She had changed out of the crimson silk into the plainest thing she owned: a long dark-gray cloak with a deep hood, over a simple dress of black cotton. She had tied her hair back tight. She had left the helmet and the great sword in her chamber. When she fitted the mask over her face in front of her bronze mirror, the black flowers cooled against her skin, and she felt the formation catch—a faint tug, like cobwebs settling over her features—and the woman in the mirror was suddenly someone else. The same body. The same eyes. But the face around them had gone vague and strange, its lines slipping out of focus every time she tried to look at them directly, the way a word slips away when you stare at it too long.
She slipped out through the garden gate at the back of the east wing, where no guard was posted, and went down into the dark city.
Nalan City at midnight was a different place from Nalan City at noon. The heat had finally loosened its grip, and a faint, dry wind moved through the empty streets, rattling the shutters, stirring the dust. The moon was low and orange. Dogs barked behind walls. Her footsteps sounded very loud on the packed earth. She kept to the shadows and walked fast, her hood pulled low, her hands fisted in the folds of her cloak, and every time a shutter banged or a cat leapt from a wall her heart jumped into her throat.
City Gate Avenue was never truly dark. Even at midnight, lanterns glowed along it. And at its center, Heaven Lust blazed like a lantern itself—three stories of red lacquer and gilded eaves, every window lit, strings of red silk lanterns swaying from the upper balconies. Music spilled out of it. Laughter. The clink of cups. And under all of it, so faint she could almost pretend she did not hear it, a woman's voice rising in a long, breathless cry and breaking off.
Nalan Meng stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at it.
Then she went up to the main door.
Two guards stood on either side of it, big men in leather armor, each leaning on a long spear. Their faces were flushed with wine and boredom. When she came up the steps into the lantern light, they straightened.
"Hey, mister." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Where can I find the owner of this bar? I have an appointment with him."
The guard on the left looked at her.
He looked at her for a long time. And then, slowly, his face split into a creepy, gap-toothed smile.
"Not just anyone can walk in and meet the owner," he said.
Nalan Meng frowned. What? Shi Dacheng had told her to come. He had told her midnight. She opened her mouth to say so—and then she realized that the guard was not looking at her face at all.
The mask hid her face. It did nothing at all to hide the rest of her.
And the rest of her could not be hidden. Not by a cloak, not by plain cotton, not by anything. She had thrown back her hood to speak to them, and the cloak had fallen open at the front, and beneath it, the simple black dress clung to her like a second skin—over the full, heavy, high-set curves of her breasts, which pushed the cotton out so far that it pulled tight across them; over the narrow waist; over the long line of her hips. The night wind had pressed the thin cloth against her, and she had not worn a breastband beneath it—she never did under the crimson silk, and she had not thought—and in the cool night air her nipples had tightened into two hard little points that stood out against the black cotton as plainly as if she had painted them there.
The guards' eyes were fixed on them.
"But," said the guard on the right, licking his lips, "if you can give us something… maybe we can let you in."
And he looked, very deliberately, at her round breasts.
Fury went through Nalan Meng like a lightning strike.
Her fist clenched at her side. She could have killed them both. She could have done it without even breaking a sweat—stepped inside the first man's spear and broken his neck with her palm and put the second through the door before he could raise his weapon. The Qi was there, coiled in her dantian, roaring to be let out. Her whole body ached to do it.
And she could not.
If she fought here—on the steps of Heaven Lust, under these lanterns, on City Gate Avenue—everyone would know. The mask would not hide a woman who fought like the Luo Sha Nv. And Shi Dacheng would have his excuse. The city lord broke her contract. The city lord assaulted my men. And by morning her name would be nailed to the city gate.
She hesitated.
And in the hesitation, the shame came in.