Chương 13: Politick

Iudex Ryuga had not been having a pleasant few days. Ever since that incident with the Snake Flower idiots in his village little under a week ago, he had been on edge. It was always a bad sign when their young disciples, full of youthful arrogance and superhuman invulnerability, came down to cause trouble. But this time, something was different. Nobody had spoken little of the incident outside of hushed whispers, but whispers are like little birds.

They travel very far, very fast, and their twitterings can reach your ear if you listen for them, if you're not careful at least. And apparently, if the rumours were to be believed, it was Master Amon who had driven them off. He was of two minds on that. On the one hand it was good the little bastards had been driven off and finally given a taste of their own medicine. On the other, it would be very bad news for Tiode if a cultivator with a bruised ego came back to Tiode looking to cause trouble.

And yet nothing had happened, and so Ryuga had spent the last few days living on the knife edge of anxiety, waiting for something to happen. He sat at his desk, bathed in the warm twilight of sunset, and stared absently at the paperwork on his desk. There was work to be done, there was always work to be done, yet he found it a challenge to focus on any of it. The door slid open, and his clerk Marumi walked in with a small stack of letters clutched in his hands.

"Security messages from Low Moon, Iudex." He was a young man, having been Ryuga's clerk for only a few years, and he moved with an energy that Ryuga envied.

"Set them in the usual box," Ryuga said, his voice low and cracking. Marumi complied, setting the small stack in the box labelled 'unsorted', and then he stood back to adjust the creases from his black and silver robes.

"It's... well, not good news. A group of bandits have been roaming the highlands, evading imperial enforcers, and even besting them in a few skirmishes. It's believed they might be coming south... toward Tiode, eventually." Ryuga glanced up at his clerk, his fingertips pressing briefly to his bottom lip.

"Any idea of their numbers? Does the group have a name?" he asked.

"Ah. Well, they believe it may be a gang of just under thirty men. They have had some losses with the imperial army dogging them. But they are not a normal bunch. They say they're being led by a cultivator, or possibly a yokai, a man by the name of Inumi. They're called the Black Dogs, according to reports."

"Mm. Bandits and criminals love their absurd names." He reached up with his free hand, slowly clenching and unclenching his fist.

"Can we expect any reinforcements from Low Moon? We don't exactly have many soldiers of our own."

"They're sending a detachment, but it could take a few days for them to reach us. Ideally, it would be enough to ward off any attacks." He turned away slightly, rubbing at his clean-shaved jaw.

"Though I'll be honest, sir, and say I don't much like all the uncertainty about the reinforcement we're supposedly going to get. Maybe we could ask that Master Amon to lend a hand, eh?" Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Ryuga was silent for some time, and then he slowly turned to face his clerk. His expression was blank, but there was a hardness in his eyes that made Marumi wilt a bit.

"What was that?"

"It's just... w-well, since he dealt with those lads from the Snake Flower-" He fell abruptly silent as Ryuga lifted a finger.

"Do not say that out loud. Never, ever say that out loud, Marumi. Do you understand me?"

"S-sir?"

"Nobody in Tiode knows anything about that incident, and nobody saw a thing. We do not need rumours to circulate about that bloody business, and certainly we don't need people from that sect turning their eyes upon us. I need you to understand this, Marumi, the risks inherent in all this." The ego of a cultivator was a fragile thing, for all their superhuman might. They were lucky there had been no reprisals against Tiode, whatever had happened beyond the border of the village.

But if rumours were to circulate about a Snake Flower getting a beating from someone in Tiode... well, someone from their mountain could come sniffing around, eager to teach the 'mortals' that nobody was allowed to brazenly slander their sect. Ryuga clenched his jaw, cords flexing on the sides of his thin neck. That damned Amon... he knew the foreigner would be trouble, but he wouldn't have thought he'd try to pick a fight with the Snake Flower Sect.

Perhaps he'd been well intentioned, the girl who ran the general store for her father had apparently been under attack. Even so... it was saving one person and potentially putting the whole village at risk.

"I..." Marumi swallowed, his tongue briefly darting out from between his thin lips.

"I'm not sure I follow, sir, I thought you hated the-""I do hate them. Of course I do. Looking after Tiode is my business but I'm helpless against those fools whenever their younger members seek to cause trouble. Even so..." He sighed, rising from his chair with a little effort. That was the troubling thing about getting old, it was a little harder to get up each year.

"Even so, antagonising them directly would be far worse." There were stories about such things, mainly up in Cathaya, where hotheaded young masters would raze entire villages who lacked the means to defend themselves. If you were so arrogant as to defy the heavens, why let destroying an insignificant village trouble your thoughts? And yet there had been no reprisal, not even murmurings of one, or so much as an angry letter from the grandmaster of the Snake Flower Sect.

Part of him wanted to confront Amon, to ask him directly what had happened, but then another part of him wanted to at least maintain a sense of deniability about all this.

"What I want you to understand, Marumi, is that nobody saw anything. Nobody at all. I don't want rumours spreading, certainly not to any outsiders visiting Tiode. It's for our own safety." Marumi nodded slowly.

"Of course, sir." Frankly, the threat of an angry Snake Flower was far worse to Ryuga than the threat of the bandits roaming the countryside. He supposed, if worst came to worst, he could ask the foreigner for aid. He'd had a feeling about the man when first they met, the subtle power that circulated around him despite the foreigner's best efforts to smother it. But there was more to it than that. Ryuga knew a killer when he saw one.

It was something in their eyes, the hardness of a man who knew what it was to take the life of another. But what could he have done? Trying to bar him from buying land in Tiode would have doubtless ended badly.

"I er... should perhaps head home, sir," Marumi said, looking to the sunset beyond the window.

"It's late, and all."

"Aye. Good work today, Marumi. And please, remember what we talked about." The slim man scurried from the room, leaving Ryuga alone with his thoughts. He reached for the small stack of letters he had been given and started to leaf through them one by one, but his mind was focused elsewhere. He'd have to speak to Amon at some point, he knew, and the longer he put it off the harder that was going to be. Great Goddess, what had he done to warrant this millstone around his neck?