Bloody Robes

Xie Bian wanted desperately to stick his head through the gap and have a look himself, but Fan Wujiu was already moving down the walkway.

"What do they need protection from?" he asked, chasing him and his long legs.

"We won't find it in the same room they're sleeping in," he said, opening doors at random and closing them after a single glance inside. They were now deep into the servant's quarters. The construction wasn't as sturdy, and the paneling on the walls was coming away from extensive water damage.

With each step, the old wood flooring whined like a great beast breathing. Xie Bian kept looking over his shoulder, afraid that one of the sleeping servants would overhear and come chasing after them.

Fan Wujiu kept opening doors and finding nothing inside, but the deeper they went the more conspicuous the absence of any other servants became. The Wei family must be overworking those four unfortunates half to death, maybe it was them they needed protection from.

The next door Fan Wujiu tried to open didn't budge. He tried again and it only rattled in place.

"You think this is it?" Xie Bian asked, resting his palm against the door. There was nothing unusual about it.

"It's locked," Fan Wujiu said, "from the inside. Whoever locked it must have left through the window. We are on the ground floor, it wouldn't be hard."

"Then we get in through the window," Xie Bian said.

He realized his mistake when he saw Fan Wujiu's tiny smirk. "Good idea, you go around and unlock the door for me."

Xie Bian left through the sideways door to the courtyard, holding back his grievances and letting them simmer. It took him a long time to make his way around the pavilion, he got turned away twice trying to find the right window and almost slipped trying to reach the window once he did find it.

After some struggle he managed to unlatch it and hoist himself through and into the room. He landed with a thud on a dusty floor. There was no light in the room beyond the wan moonlight streaming through the open window, Xie Bian couldn't see much. At first glance it looked like an empty room like the many they had passed through.

Beyond the vague shapes of two closed chests, he couldn't see anything worth locking it up over.

He walked to the door and raised his eyebrows at the chains keeping it shut.

"I'm inside," he said, speaking into the gap between the door and paneling so that Fan Wujiu could hear him.

"Unlock the door."

Xie Bian tugged on the chains. "It's going to be a lot of work," he let the sentence taper off suggestively. "You should make it worth my while."

"We don't have time for this." His voice was muffled by the closed door, but the annoyance was clear as water.

"It's the middle of night and everyone is asleep, I think we have a lot of time."

He heard a taxed exhale from the other side of the door. "What do you want?"

"Admit that you are no better than Wei Xiangsi. Admit that you would be courting me as well, if you had anything to do it with."

Xie Bian grinned at the heavy silence that followed. He could almost picture Fan Wujiu's disgruntled expression.

"Just repeat after me: I think Xie Bian is extremely attractive and a very competent Underworld General. I want to buy him jade hairpins and new robes."

Predictably, there was no answer, but sooner or later Fan Wujiu had to give in. Xie Bian just had to wait him out -- and as he'd said -- he had time.

"Not going to say anything? What's the matter, afraid of the truth?"

A noise outside the window drew his attention. He looked in time to see Fan Wujiu gracefully jumping over the sill.

Xie Bian made a face at him. "You are no fun! No fun at all!"

Fan Wujiu ignored him and made straight for the two chests. As expected, they were locked. He drew two talismans out of his sleeve and sent them zipping through the air, they stuck to the front of the chests and threw open their lids with a dull clang.

"Were you a cultivator when you were alive?" Xie Bian asked, looking at the neat calligraphy on the two rectangular talismans.

"What do you think?" Fan Wujiu said, walking past him to peer inside the open chests.

"I think that's no answer at all," Xie Bian said, but Fan Wujiu was no longer listening. His gaze was fixed on the contents of the two chests, red eyes flying between one and the other.

Xie Bian joined him, peeking over his shoulder with trepidation. There wasn't much light in the room, but the dark irregular stains on the plain cotton robes were unmistakable.

Fan Wujiu pulled out one of the robes to inspect more closely. "Dried blood."

Xie Bian looked into the other chest which was filled with more bloody robes. Scouring through its contents he realized the bloody robes didn't all belong to the same person. The sizes were all different with both women's and men's robes mixed in.

"We're looking for three missing souls, but there are at least ten bloody robes here," Xie Bian said.

"Not every robe might mean a dead person," Fan Wujiu started, but didn't sound fully convinced himself.

Xie Bian thought it was too big a coincidence to be unrelated to their case. "These are plain robes, servants robes. Do you think this is what's left of what should have been the Wei family's full staff?"

Fan Wujiu nodded. "It's possible. We're looking for three missing souls, and might have stumbled on many more deaths. That complicates things."

Xie Bian saw another option. "Wouldn't someone back in Youdu be able to track down at least one of the souls that made it through so we can interrogate it, before it drinks Meng Po's soup?"