The night wind blew beneath the eaves, still carrying the faint reek of blood from far off. Squire Zhu and the others, having just witnessed what had happened, did not look particularly warm. Earlier, Ning Yi had revealed his identity to Squire Zhu and asked for his cooperation; that Squire Zhu had agreed was one thing — after all, Zhu Family Manor had no way back at this point, and one more ally was always better than none.
But now that matters had actually begun, there was much to sit down and think through, and much to discuss. Zhu Long’s question was not unreasonable. Truth be told, though the Liangshan bandits could be counted as tough men in this fight, it was impossible that not a single one of them valued his own life. If they had truly wanted information, separating the prisoners and interrogating them one by one would have been enough — the enemy would have told them whatever they knew, and even the commanders might not have chosen to hold out to the death. That Ning Yi had gathered them all together in the square to question them one at a time was precisely what had given these men reason to hold out — Liangshan’s rebellion rested on nothing but a sense of brotherhood and loyalty, and no one wanted to be seen betraying that in front of his comrades.
Still, Zhu Long’s challenge was direct, and Ning Yi’s answer, in turn, was simple.
“Intelligence… who needs their intelligence? Brother Zhu misunderstands.” Ning Yi smiled, then cupped his hands toward Squire Zhu. “The night is still young, Master Zhu — if you would, please gather the manor’s literate men, the ones with the stomach for blood, and bring them here to watch and learn how interrogation and record-keeping is done. It’ll come in useful later.”
Blood still stained him at that moment, and his face still carried something of the coldness from the killing just past. Though he smiled gently, no one dared look down on him. Squire Zhu nodded. Only after a moment did he finally raise his head and look at Ning Yi.
“Master Lei, using this method to turn two hundred-odd men against each other — this old man admires it. But even so, what does it do for my Zhu family’s war? You are a court official who has only now, at this late hour, revealed himself — clearly you mean to use my Dulong Ridge as a spear to wield. Am I wrong to say so, old man that I am!”
This, now, was the true accusation. As a man of the court, to have lain hidden here so long before finally showing himself was clearly to wait until the fighting reached a point of no return, so that Dulong Ridge would grind down Liangshan’s strength while the court reaped the profit afterward. Under the weight of that accusing gaze, Ning Yi, still smeared with blood, cupped his hands with an easy smile, his tone light.
“Master Zhu already knows the answer in his heart — that’s for the best, isn’t it!”
Squire Zhu suddenly threw up a hand. “If you men of the court truly meant to root out these bandits, why not send a great army! While they attack my Dulong Ridge, if you struck with soldiers from front and back together, you could deal Liangshan’s bandits a decisive blow! Where is the Wu Rui Battalion’s army right now!”
As Squire Zhu pressed his questions, Zhu Long too was already glaring at Ning Yi, his whole body radiating hostility. Ning Yi looked at him and smiled. “Master Zhu, are you joking with me? A moment ago you said you understood the truth of things — and now you say something like this? What kind of fighting force does the Wu Rui Battalion even have — you know that better than I do. Attack from both sides? If we did that and got picked off piece by piece, I’d say that’s the more likely outcome… or, put it another way: suppose we really did drive off this Liangshan attack — do you think, three months, six months from now, they won’t come again?”
“If joining forces means being picked off piece by piece anyway, how much longer can my Zhu Family Manor hold out as things stand! If you want my Dulong Ridge to commit its strength, you must first drive off this present disaster — otherwise, once my Zhu Family Manor falls in a few days, what will you even be able to do, other than have used the lives of my three manors to wear down a little of Liangshan’s strength?”
As the two spoke back and forth, something occurred to Zhu Long, and he suddenly looked up. “Could it be that you mean to use my Dulong Ridge, my Wanjialing, as bait — so that the Wu Rui Battalion can strike Liangshan by surprise, raid their base while they’re distracted? If this is truly some scheme to save Zhao by besieging Wei, that news should have reached us by now — or are you truly using my Zhu Family Manor as an expendable pawn?”
That Zhu Family Manor could not hold out much longer was a feeling that had not yet spread widely, but at the very least, among the Zhu family themselves, everyone already understood this in their hearts, and at present they were exhausting every possible means simply to preserve themselves. If the army was going to slip off to profit from Liangshan while using them as a sacrifice, one could well imagine how they’d feel about it — and honestly, this was exactly the sort of thing the Wu Rui Battalion really might do. But having asked this, Ning Yi could not help but laugh.
“As if I’m not tired enough of living, to try something like that…” He reached up and rubbed his forehead. “Ha… We can’t even beat them head-on, and you think we’d go raid their home base and turn them into a desperate army fighting for their lives? These rebels have families too — if something like that happened, the more than twenty thousand men out there, even if they couldn’t match those Jurchen fighters up north, could still walk straight through the Wu Rui Battalion without the slightest difficulty. Within half a year, they might well sweep across half of Shandong. And when Song Jiang goes to declare himself emperor, this would be his most capable fighting force — he’d be holding our hands, thanking us…”
He lowered his head, laughing as he said this, and when he raised it again, his expression had turned completely cold.
“I won’t beat around the bush any longer, Master Zhu — let me lay it out for you honestly. I can mobilize the Wu Rui Battalion, but they can only fight one major battle at most, and you know full well what their fighting strength is. Whether it’s raiding Liangshan’s base or attacking from both sides to relieve your siege, neither solves the problem. When Liangshan comes again, you’re finished.”
“But if the army doesn’t come, my Zhu Family Manor may die right now!” Squire Zhu stared at him.
“At the very least, I’ll die alongside you,” Ning Yi replied calmly. “If they don’t die, we do. Which leaves only one option: this time, we make sure Liangshan’s men all die right here — scatter and wipe them out in one stroke.”
Zhu Long roared, “What nonsense are you talking!”
“Nonsense, exactly!” Ning Yi flicked one hand, and Zhu Long, almost by reflex, stepped back half a pace, half expecting the madman from the courtyard earlier to lunge and hurt someone again. “The Wu Rui Battalion fears death — and don’t you, just the same! If you want to say fighting Liangshan is the court’s responsibility, fine, you’re right — go ahead and curse them for it! But what good does that do! Right now… Master Zhu, you should at least understand this much: if Liangshan doesn’t die, you will. Let me ask you this — if Dulong Ridge’s siege were lifted, and there really was a way to put Liangshan to death, would you be willing to send out your troops, to truly fight, just once…?”
Ning Yi looked at him, then continued, “As for the Wu Rui Battalion’s troops, I can’t manage them — it’ll have to rest on you.”
Squire Zhu said, “You mean… you truly have a plan?”
“Only a possibility. I’m already working on it,” Ning Yi said, gesturing toward the courtyard behind him. “Whether it works, Master Zhu, you can judge for yourself. If nothing comes of it within three days… well, I’ll die here with the rest of you either way. I’ve killed these men — Liangshan won’t let me off for it, and neither will they let Zhu Family Manor off, however well you treat the survivors, they’ll be sure to wipe out the Zhu family in the end… Think it over, the two of you. I’ll go wash up first.”
As Ning Yi walked past father and son, Zhu Long thought a moment, then turned back and could not help asking, “Do you really believe this will work? Even if you get every last thing out of them, even if you manage to turn every one of them to our side — that’s still, what, a hundred-odd men at most! You think Liangshan has no way to counter that? I’ll tell you — if they lie to you, you won’t even be able to tell within two or three days!”
In the lamplight, Ning Yi turned back and smiled.
“Honestly, Brother Zhu, you’ve got it backward. Whether they tell the truth, whether they come over to our side, whether…” He spread his hands, his gaze cold, speaking each word distinctly, “None of it matters to me at all.”
…
The night deepened further. The battlefield reeked of blood, the stench of corpses, the smell of things burnt.
The summer heat was fierce, and the lingering odors from days of continuous fighting had grown, in this steamer-like weather, nearly unbearable. On the small paths near Zhu Family Manor and Hu Family Manor, columns of men moved silently in the darkness, and at the far edge of sight lay the celebratory bonfires of the Liangshan army camp.
From within the marching column, weeping occasionally drifted out.
The day’s fighting had not been as bloody as a large-scale pitched battle would have been, but the comings and goings still left behind bodies that could not be recovered in time. At night, once the Liangshan attacks stopped coming, people from the manors would go out to carry back the bodies as best they could, and would also use the cover of darkness to continue laying bamboo spikes, traps, and caltrops, hoping for more room to maneuver in the next day’s fighting.
Of course, such work was not entirely without risk even at night — Liangshan had plenty of manpower, and now and then a commander leading three or five hundred men would raid under cover of darkness, and even without any terrain advantage, their high morale alone was enough to scatter the manor’s fighters. In the early nights, quite a few women had still gone out to collect corpses, but after several such raids, some had been killed, others captured on the spot and dragged back to the Liangshan camp. On nights when one drew close enough, one could sometimes faintly hear the women’s wailing cries. Several men of the manors, unable to bear this humiliation, had charged toward the Liangshan camp under cover of night, only to be shot down before they even arrived.
Over these past several nights, Luan Tingyu and the others had issued strict orders: even manor folk going out to lay traps were forbidden from wandering about after midnight, and those sent to retrieve bodies were, as far as possible, to be men or elderly women only. In recent days, however, the wailing had stopped. It was said that Liangshan commanders like Guan Sheng and Li Kui, making their rounds of the camp, had judged that keeping such women around only stirred trouble and would tarnish the reputation of Liangshan’s good men for bullying women and children, and so they had simply killed the captured women outright, tossing the bodies out of the camp — sparing them, at least, from further violation.
After days of fighting, even the manor folk who came out at night were often wounded, watching the distant lights of the Liangshan camp from afar. Among the crowd, some still managed the occasional joke, but most had fallen silent, gritting their teeth as they laid tripwires and planted rows of bamboo spikes along the roads, hoping they might prove useful someday. The area was vast and the manpower too thin — these efforts amounted to little more than a token gesture, but it was all they could manage.
In the bleak wind, sometimes a woman’s crying would drift up — one of those whose entire family had died, who had come out to search for bodies she could not even find, her mind by now mostly broken. Such women could not be stopped from coming out, however the manor folk tried; their solitary figures could be seen wandering the fields and woods, watched from a distance by others hoping that, once they had given up finding the bodies, they might resign themselves and let go. If there was time to spare after setting the traps, they would try to bring such women back to the manor; if they slipped away, all one could do was hope for them to meet a swift end.
Living in an age like this, even pity for such things could not stretch far enough to cover them all — those driven mad, who had lost their families, were as good as dead already. And on the Liangshan side, few felt much of anything about it, or if they did, only a passing twinge; having seen so much of it, it had come to seem ordinary. Great bowls of wine, great chunks of meat, robbing the rich to help the poor, standing by one’s brothers, carrying out the Way on Heaven’s behalf — could a man who did such things not still be called a good and true hero?
Some had ambition, some sought only pleasure in the moment, some savored the thrill of killing and the glory of holding power, some took pleasure in the sensation of slowly driving an enemy toward the cliff’s edge. Despite the losses of continuous fighting, Liangshan’s momentum and morale had only grown, blazing like the midday sun. Under cover of night, another commander led his troops out again, laughing, to give those ant-like trap-layers a bit of a surprise.
The scattered manor folk fled back in disarray to Zhu Family Manor, and Zhu Long led men out again to bring in the stragglers still unaccounted for. In the darkness came laughter and the massed war cries of Liangshan soldiers. Amid this chaos and darkness, in the small courtyard square, the number of Liangshan prisoners had already dropped by half from over two hundred; now and then a body would be dragged out of the small huts and tossed aside, but the proportion of those killed had dropped considerably — of one hundred men questioned, only eight or nine had been executed.
This kind of interrogation took a good deal of time. Once questioned, the prisoners were led away through a back door and randomly locked into one small room after another, each holding at most three to five men, given food, and forbidden to speak. This particular night’s questioning of the roughly two hundred men, in fact, involved more than a single round.
Wang Shanyue walked past the rooms, listening to the questions and answers drifting out from within, and by now he had come to understand the rough shape of the whole affair. The first round of questions was mostly basic — names, hometowns, how they’d come to Liangshan, which commander they served under, who they knew — followed by a great many questions about Liangshan’s general situation, and finally, prompts for them to volunteer any secrets of their own accord.
Among them, some were willing to answer, some lied, and some were hardened Liangshan loyalists who chose to say nothing at all — but even with these, once they entered the interrogation room, no one forced the issue. The time was simply allowed to pass slowly, and they were led to the back and locked into one of the small cells holding three to five men together. Among all of them, only a handful were killed outright and their bodies tossed out.
Sheet after sheet of “answers” were handed over and sent to a small room on the second floor at the edge of the courtyard. Since changing into fresh clothes, Ning Yi had stayed shut up in that room, organizing these answers one after another, comparing, thinking, and drafting new questions targeted at particular individuals. The workload was enormous; Wang Shanyue, Qi Xinhan, and the others had at one point offered to help, but had only been met with a shake of the head.
“First time doing this — there’s bound to be some trouble. Let me finish this round on my own; I’ll be relying on everyone’s help after this…”
Looking over these questions and answers, Wang Shanyue had begun to notice a pattern. Some of the questions, for instance, were purely fabricated — asking whether there was a small path on the eastern side of the Liangshan camp that could be used for a sneak attack. No such path existed at all, but the way each man answered revealed something of his character: some admitted plainly they didn’t know, some said there was none, and some claimed there was one, describing it in vivid, elaborate detail.
Going through more than two hundred such sheets one by one, cross-checking them again and again, they moved on to a second round of interrogation and a second round of comparing answers, catching a number of lies in the process, though not all. By the time the questioning was finished, it was already the small hours of the morning and most people had gone to sleep. Ning Yi began summoning the prisoners in small groups of three to five to talk with them in the small rooms.
This time, the conversation was rather different.
“…You picked a good time for your rebellion, but the court won’t tolerate this kind of thing any longer… I’ve come ahead as the vanguard; the Wu Rui Battalion is already on the move… believe it or not, that’s up to you, but what happens next, you can see for yourselves… I’ll give you a way out — all I ask is your help with a few tasks. Do them, and you’ll be pardoned… Your information is all right here. I act on the orders of the current Right Chancellor. Here are the rewards for completing your tasks… Of course, you don’t have to do them either, but once your side’s army collapses like a mountain falling, I can’t say what might happen to you…”
To Wang Shanyue, these words sounded mostly like empty threats and intimidation, but Ning Yi’s expression remained perfectly natural throughout. After finishing, he assigned each man a private task, and even the die-hard ones who refused to say anything were still kept back and detained a while before being led away again.
In truth, Squire Zhu was also watching how things unfolded on this side. Through the entire night, the young dandy called Lei Feng kept his lamp burning without rest; in fact, ever since the second round of interrogation had finished, nearly the entire operation had been carried out by this one young man alone. As for the overall process, Squire Zhu felt he understood something of it, yet could not quite grasp it fully. What surprised him most, though, was that in the small groups brought before this cold, ruthless young man afterward, he seemed to remember every detail about every single one of them, able to recite anything they had said in their answers without hesitation.
He had no idea what purpose could possibly be served by putting these two hundred-odd men through such an ordeal. But the whole process, hour after hour, ran without a single break, as if it were some strange and enormous water-driven mill; in the dim light, the several courtyards seemed almost like a crouching beast, swallowing something down, chewing, digesting — and about to spit something strange back out.
The next morning, as mist rose and the fighting resumed outside, the business in these courtyards finally drew to a close. Ning Yi stepped out of the room and splashed cold water on his face. He had spent the entire night sorting, thinking, writing, and finally talking without pause, and yet even now his face showed little sign of fatigue; if anything, the faint traces of weariness only made his eyes look sharper, deeper.
He went out to meet with Squire Zhu, Luan Tingyu, Zhu Long, Zhu Hu, Zhu Biao, and the others, and once he had said what needed saying, the Liangshan soldiers locked in the small cells were called out and ordered to put their old Liangshan uniforms back on; some were stuffed into sacks, others marched toward the gates of Zhu Family Manor.
On the morning of the fifth day of the sixth month, the Liangshan forces came again to challenge them, and the fighting broke out once more. That day, Zhu Family Manor’s people — already beyond any hope of turning the tide — carried out a strange series of actions that did not draw Wu Yong’s attention until midday, by which point they were already discussing plans to attack Yunzhou and how to celebrate once Dulong Ridge had fallen.
On a road beside Zhu Family Manor, in the morning mist, three men were dumped out of sacks and left lying in a field.
At the eastern gate of Zhu Family Manor, Liu Fu and two unfamiliar Liangshan soldiers were shoved forward; people threw mud at them as, up ahead, someone opened the fortress gate.
“Get out of here!”
Someone kicked them from behind several times, and they staggered forward. With a boom, when the three turned back, the gates of Zhu Family Manor had already slammed shut behind them, and three weapons were thrown down from atop the gate. Looking up, the mist ahead was thinning, and freedom seemed close at hand.
“You’re… trying to drive a wedge between us…” someone cursed from somewhere, but with the sounds of battle already rising on the field, in the end they had no choice but to head toward the Liangshan side.
On the outer wall of the manor, Squire Zhu and the others watched the fighting outside. Beside him, the young man named Lei Feng rubbed his face in the morning breeze.
“Whew… the seed of malice has been planted… now we wait for it to sprout… Master Zhu, I’m going to go catch a nap…”
The others watched his figure sway as he walked off, and an odd, humming tune drifted back on the wind — some half-remembered nonsense song about a black forest, its words trailing off as he forgot the rest.
The wind carried the unending clamor of battle, corpses strewn across the ground, dust and blood still rising.
“…What in the world… kind of person is this…?”