The leather parted with a wet snap, and the blood rushed back into Meng An's hands like a tide of needles. He bit down on the groan, grinding his molars against the bronze blade still sealed in his gum, and worked his fingers until they were fingers again and not dead appendages. The bonds at his ankles took longer. The knots were soldier's knots, tight and clever, but the blade from his mouth sliced through the thong with three careful sawing motions, and then he was free.
The stockade was still dark, but the darkness was thinning. Through the gaps in the logs he could see the first true grey of dawn seeping into the central clearing, and with it the shapes of the hunting camp resolving from shadow into substance. The platform with its bronze horns. The silk banners, now stirring faintly in a breeze that smelled of wet moss and horse dung. Beyond the platform, a cluster of tents had risen during his captivity—not the rough hemp shelters of soldiers, but pavilions of waxed silk in colours that had no business in a forest: cinnabar, imperial yellow, a deep violet that would have cost a county magistrate's annual salary. Lanterns glowed within, their light the warm, buttery colour of expensive oil. A voice was singing something in the old Chu style, high and plaintive, accompanied by the plucking of a zither.
Meng An catalogued the camp with the cold, depthless attention he had learned in the southern jungles, where a broken twig could mean the difference between an ambush and a grave. Two sentries with halberds patrolled the perimeter, their pace lazy, their attention directed outward at the forest rather than inward at the stockades. Four horses were tethered near the tents, their coats groomed to a liquid shine. A cookfire was being kindled, and the smell of roasting meat drifted across the clearing—pork, he thought, or perhaps dog. Not the millet gruel of the peasant. The hour of the goat was perhaps two hours away.
He searched the stockade for anything that could serve as a weapon. The bamboo slips he had already gathered and tucked into the waistband of his absent trousers, a thin armour of bureaucratic evidence pressed against his skin. In the corner where the wall met the earth, half-buried in mud, he found a digging stick. It was a length of hard mulberry wood, sharpened at one end and fire-hardened, the kind of tool used by the forest folk to pry tubers from the ground. The point was dulled with use, but the haft was solid and the balance was good. He hefted it, and the weight of it in his palm felt like the ghost of a crossbow stock.
The sentries would see him if he tried to climb out. The gate of the stockade was roped shut from the outside. But the mud beneath the rear wall was softer than the packed clay at the front, and the logs had been driven in haste rather than set deep. He knelt, worked the digging stick into the earth at the base of the largest log, and began to lever.
The log gave with a groan that seemed impossibly loud, but no one came. He worked faster, prying a gap wide enough to wedge his shoulders through, and then he was out, crouching in the wet undergrowth at the edge of the forest. The mist was lifting from the ground in ribbons, and the trees ahead were old—ancient figs and camphor, their roots sprawling across the forest floor like the knuckles of buried giants. The canopy was dense, the light beneath it a perpetual green twilight. He rose and ran, low and silent, into the trees.
The first horn sounded as the mist burned off. It was a single, sustained note, blown on a bronze instrument that had been tuned to carry through the valleys, and it was answered almost immediately by a second horn somewhere to the east. Then a third, and a fourth, until the forest was ringed with the voices of the hunt. Meng An had climbed a fig tree that overhung a narrow ravine, and from his perch he could see the beaters moving through the undergrowth below—peasant men in rough tunics, armed with clappers and drums, driving the quarry toward the centre of the enclosure. They were methodical, unhurried. They had done this before.
The hunters came behind them, mounted on small, sturdy horses bred for forest work. There were six that he could see, perhaps more further back. They wore hunting tunics of quilted silk and leather bracers, and their hair was bound up in the topknots of the gentry, fastened with pins of jade and silver. Two of them carried crossbows—not the heavy military models Meng An had used in the south, but light, elegant weapons inlaid with mother-of-pearl, their trigger mechanisms of polished bronze. The others carried spears with tassels that fluttered as they rode, red and gold, the colours of the imperial house.
Meng An watched them from the fig tree and felt a stillness settle over him. Not the stillness of fear—he had been afraid in the stockade, and that fear had burned itself out like a fever. This was the stillness of the killing ground, the cold, weightless clarity that descended in the moment before an ambush was sprung. He had felt it at Shentian, when his unit had lain in the mud for six hours and then risen as one to slaughter three hundred rebels. He had felt it at the ford of the Xiang, when he had put a bolt through the eye of a war elephant and watched it fall like a mountain collapsing. It was a gift, and a curse, and it had never failed him.
He descended from the fig tree and began to prepare the ground.
The ravine was a natural choke point, its walls steep and slick with moss. At its narrowest point, where the beaten track crossed a stream, he strung a trip-rope woven from the fibrous inner bark of a mulberry sapling, anchoring it to two trees and concealing it with ferns. He sharpened the digging stick further, carving the point to a wicked taper with the bronze blade from his gum. Then he settled behind a screen of ferns and waited.
The first hunter came through the ravine alone, a young man with a wispy beard and a necklace of polished turquoise. His horse was a grey mare, skittish, and she shied at the stream crossing. The young man kicked her forward, laughing at something someone behind him had called, and then the trip-rope caught the mare's forelegs and she went down screaming, and the young man was thrown headlong into the stream.
Meng An was on him before he could rise. The digging stick drove through the back of the hunter's neck, severing the spine with a sound like a green branch snapping. The mare thrashed in the water, her leg broken, and Meng An silenced her with a second blow. He was sorry for the horse. He was not sorry for the man.
He dragged the body into the undergrowth and stripped it of its weapons and its clothing. The hunting tunic was quilted silk, the colour of dried blood, and it was embroidered on the breast with a stylized tiger. The belt was leather, tooled with a pattern of interlocking squares, and from it hung a short bronze sword, a knife, and a pouch containing dried dates, a small jade seal, and a tally-stick of bronze. Meng An examined the tally-stick. It was the length of his middle finger, cast with the insignia of the Commandant of Justice and inscribed on one side with a column of characters: "Season of the Black Hare. Twenty points. Hunter of the First Rank, Lord Cheng."
Points. The word was the same one the bailiff had used when tallying the harvest tax. Meng An turned the stick over. The reverse was blank. He pocketed it and moved on.
The second hunter found his companion's body before Meng An was ready for him. He was older, with a scar bisecting his left eyebrow and a mouth that was thin and cruel. He did not scream or call for help. He dismounted, drew his sword, and came through the ferns with the slow, deliberate pace of a man who had killed before and was not afraid to kill again. Meng An retreated deeper into the ravine, drawing him on, and when the scarred hunter stepped onto the patch of loose scree above the stream, Meng An braced the digging stick against a root and let the man impale himself on it. The point took him in the throat, just below the jaw, and he went down without a word, his sword still in his hand.
Meng An knelt beside the body and removed the tally-stick from the belt. This one was inscribed: "Season of the White Serpent. Thirty-five points. Hunter of the Second Rank, Lord Ji." A second tally was wedged behind it, older, the bronze green with patina: "Season of the Red Crow. Twelve points. Initiate." Meng An added them to his pouch. Then he searched the scarred hunter's clothing more thoroughly and found, folded inside the breast of the tunic, a square of silk on which someone had drawn a map of the hunting enclosure. The stockades were marked with small red squares. The central camp was a circle. And at the edge of the map, in a hand so fine it might have been a woman's, were written the words: "The Assistant Magistrate sends his regrets. He will attend the banquet."
Meng An studied the map for a long moment. The Assistant Magistrate was named You, a descendant of the You Jing who had authored the doctrine of deliberate release. He had signed the review that declared Meng An's sister a voluntary absconder. He had approved the transfer of specimens to the hunt. And now he was attending a banquet.
The hunting horns were closer now, and the beaters' drums were steady, unhurried. They would find the bodies soon. Meng An hoisted the two dead hunters onto his shoulders, one after the other, and carried them to the fig tree where he had hidden earlier. He looped rope around their ankles and hauled them up until they dangled from the lowest branches, their arms swinging, their fine silk tunics stained dark with blood. It was a message, and he intended it to be read.
He took the crossbow from the younger hunter's horse—a light, elegant weapon, but serviceable—and a quiver of ten bolts. He took the sword from the scarred hunter's body. Then he turned and walked into the forest, heading west, toward the county seat, where the Assistant Magistrate was preparing his banquet and the law was preparing its excuses.
Behind him, in the clearing, the horns faltered. A voice cried out, high and shocked, and then another. The hunt had discovered its own reflection. The mist was lifting, and the sun was breaking through the canopy in columns of golden light, and Meng An walked through it all with the stillness still upon him, the tally-sticks clicking softly in the pouch at his side, the names of the dead already fading into the forest's eternal green.
In the central camp, the Chief of the Hunt sat in his pavilion and dictated a memorandum to a trembling clerk. The bamboo slip was found centuries later in a latrine pit beneath the ruins of a Han dynasty archive, its lacquer flaking, its script still sharp with panic:
"To the Commandant of Justice, in haste. The game has turned. Two hunters of good family have been slain within the enclosure by a specimen of the latest intake, a discharged soldier whose file shows service in the southern campaigns. The specimen is at large and believed to be armed. The tally-sticks of the deceased remain unrecovered and may fall into improper hands. The circuit inspector arrives in five days. I need not remind the Commandant that the activities of this club have been, by long and careful practice, knowingly unreported. The doctrine of deliberate release extends its protection over us, but only so long as the knowledge remains contained. I urge the dispatch of a pursuit unit before the trail grows cold. Let this matter be sealed."
The clerk bound the slip with silk cord and sealed it with wax, pressing the Commandant's tiger into the cooling resin. Then he ran for the post-horses, and the Chief of the Hunt poured himself a cup of wine and stared at the silk walls of his pavilion, waiting for the sound of hooves.
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