"Hey, Wen!" Pocapetl waved as Wen stumbled down the stairs into the semi-basement main room of the wine-shop. "Have you heard the news? Chin's escaped again!"
"Why doesn't anyone just execute the big idiot?" Wen asked, taking up the cup Pocapetl offered him. "Why do they insist on gloating at him? It only makes the man angry, and gives him time to break loose of whatever they've bound him with."
"You're sure right about that, barbarian Bloody Sheet."
"Oh, stop. I don't need that from you."
"You have a reputation now," Pocapetl said. "Don't you want to revel in it, just a little?"
"I want to be The Notorious Wen, frightful pirate" he replied. "'Bloody Sheet' Wen sounds like somebody's wedding night."
"That's going to be notorious and frightening for some people." Wen turned to see Yin Fengzi sitting at a corner table. By herself. This, Wen decided, was promising. He took his cup and walked to her table. "If you must," Fengzi said. Perhaps not too promising, Wen thought.
"I want you to know that what you had me do the other day was a perversion of everything my studies have been about," she said once he'd settled into a chair. "The Way is about seeking oneness with the universe, not about playing vulgar market-place tricks on the gullible."
"You are absolutely correct," Wen said. "I am sorry to have forced you to act in a way so contrary to everything you have been taught."
She laughed. "Stop it," she said, between giggles. "I'm trying to be angry with you."
"You'll never succeed, Lady Fengzi. Might as well not try." He took a sip of mescal, then nodded at her. "You have to admit, it was fun."
"It was very clever," she said. "I realized that, once I'd figured out what you were doing. And why. Though I have to admit that the 'why' was mostly a guess."
"Probably not far off," Wen said. "I've never seen the point in violence for its own sake. My parents taught me, at a very early age, that the threat of violence is often much worse than the act itself."
"So you were seldom spanked?"
"Never the need for it," he admitted. "I always capitulated at the threat."
"And then went ahead and did what you weren't supposed to, in spite of the threat."
"Well, I said I didn't like violence; I didn't say I was a stupid child."
"Something Chin Gwai doesn't seem to have learned until it was too late." She took a solid slurp of her own mescal. It seemed to affect her not in the least. So much, thought Wen, for my plans to get her drunk and compliant.
"Chin Gwai," he said, pausing to take another drink himself, "is everything I hate about—well, about everything. He killed your guards for no good reason, and probably made a dozen enemies in the process. He would have killed you, simply because of how and where and to whom you were born. He wants to kill Prince Zhu Yizan, not because Yizan represents anything bad, anything that needs replacing—though he does—but because when he goes to sleep at night Chin dreams himself in Zhu Yizan's place! And from what I've seen he's doing all of this at the whim of his ancestors, or at least at the whim of what Liang Sheng told him his ancestors wanted. So far as I know he never seems to have spoken with them directly, and if anything obeying your ancestors based on nothing more than hearsay is worse."
"Is it wrong to want to change Fusang?" she asked, smiling wickedly.
"That's not it, not at all! It's not that he wants to change Fusang that I object to; it's that he wants to 'change' Fusang without changing anything beyond the name of the man at the top."
"Whereas you want more."
"Of course I do! Don't you?" Wen took another drink; liquid splashed down his chin and onto his tunic. "The rules, the way things are: you weren't allowed to study, though you are clearly suited to it. Had you been dutiful you'd have been married by now to some dull-witted idiot who'd ignore you most of the time and make you unhappy the rest of the time, and whose mother would make you miserable every living moment! I saw what marriage did to my mother, Fengzi, and I hate that!"
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