News of 01
When morning came, Yinyue thought the situation calmed down, blissfully unaware the night's calm brought the dawn of a storm.
The sun began its majestic rise across the mountain ranges. Its rays spread a gradient of yellow, orange and pink shades over the deep indigo hues of the clear skies, turning it into a lighter shade of blue. Another day arrived.
The fresh, cool mountain air swept past, sending a chill down her spine. She felt uneasy, but it wasn't her wounds bothering her.
Her pace quickened when she walked out of her compound housing towards the end of the village where the heated stables were. Her men stabled their horses, including her war steed, there.
Silence filled the village. It looked abandoned, yet it wasn't. No sounds of children playing. No villagers wandering around doing their morning chores. Gates, doors and windows of the houses she walked past remained bolted.
All villagers kept themselves indoors. The faint sounds of wooden bowls and people murmuring behind closed doors gave them away.
Mingyi must have ordered it, she thought.
In the past, Mingyi opposed any involvement or fraternising between her men from the Dayan military and the Qisha syndicate. He held an influential elder rank in the syndicate and many would still take his words into consideration. Including her maternal grandfather.
The Qisha syndicate could help covertly but never publicly. Mingyi and her grandfather, Hua Dushen, made that compromise for a strategic reason — to preserve an exit route for survival into other nations.
Empires and kingdoms both rise and fall in the Central Plains. None existed forever. Despite the ass kissing greeting of 'ten thousand years' by the Imperial Court Official, the longest Empire in history survived only for over a thousand years before its eventual breakup.
Creation of the underworld syndicate was how her maternal clan's fallen noble house survived that said empire's destruction.
A series of loud, shrill cries from above jolted her out of her thoughts. She raised her face to the skies. A soaring speck of brown circling in the skies caught her attention.
Yinyue felt butterflies fluttering in her gut at the sight of the peregrine falcon. Appearance of the falcon never brought good news. It was a harbinger of all bad news. The Qisha syndicate only released this bird in urgent situations.
She watched E-sha coming out of his compound with a thick, handling glove several paces in front.
He nodded to her and whistled aloud with his gloved arm outstretched. At the signal, the peregrine falcon dived towards him so fast that Yinyue thought a collision of bird and man might happen.
With its wings open, it landed with grace onto the padded glove with its talons, planting them into the pads to stabilise itself. Unlike the golden eastern eagles, which slapped her handlers silly with their wings when they didn't get a reward, the placid peregrine falcon folded its wings and stayed still.
Maybe it's time to change messenger birds.
Its big brown eyes looked at E-sha with great patience as he fiddled with the rolled up message tied to its leg.
He lifted his arm and the peregrine falcon hopped onto his shoulder. His fingers unrolled the cloth with a message. The faint smile on E-sha's face waned into a grave look.
"What is it?" Yinyue asked, out of curiosity.
E-sha pursed his lips and glanced at her, shaking his head. Instead of speaking, he offered her the message.
"Keep calm when you read it," he mumbled with a deep sigh.
Yinyue knit her eyebrows. What did he mean by that? She took the message from his hand and read.
'01's group dead. All bodies except 01's recovered. Tracks of blood on the edge of the mountain. 01's sword found. Survival unlikely. Assailants are Seventh Prince. Around a 100. Also dead. Injuries inconsistent with ours weapons. Poisoned, but not with ours. Suspect third party.'
Yinyue stared at the cryptic words. Her hands trembled from the violent surge of emotions, both disbelief, anger, and grief. She didn't believe the words and her eyes fell on them, re-reading each script by script. A hidden message must be in between the words. A code, perhaps?
But the red seal on the cloth was real. It came from the Qisha scout party. They went to investigate the mountainside near Yandi under the pretext of collecting herbs after hearing news from others.
She re-read it again, crushing the cloth in her clenched fists.
"C-can it be a code?" She asked E-sha, holding some hope that the news wasn't real.
E-sha shook his head again, but whispered as softly as he could. "They don't send codes like this. Especially with the script 'death'. I…"
His voice trailed off.
She took several deep breaths in, shaking her head. "B-but they were supposed to return…they said they cleared…"
She witnessed men dying under her command in battles of hundreds, possibly thousands, in this lifetime. Expected deaths she could steady herself for. Hard to swallow, but no one could say what may happen amid storming a city or fighting marauding tribes.
But these men died in an attack when they made their return to Yandi. She never expected them to be wiped out. Especially 01.
She never prepared herself to lose 01. Even in the battlefields whom he followed her into. She sought to repay him for what he did in her first life.
Her eyes reddened and teared up. Tears rolled down her cheeks, more out of a swelling anger than the grief of loss. Drops dripped onto the ink on the cloth, causing it to smudge.
"They haven't found his body," she said.
E-sha nodded. "Maybe someone found him? They suspected a third party."
"Can you send a message to the rest?" Her voice trembled as she struggled to suppress her emotions. She wiped away her tears quickly with her sleeve.
No point in crying or fretting. She needed a clear head to think about her plan to exact revenge on the seventh prince, Grand Prince Huqi. And she thought of an idea.
"Tell me your message and I'll send one back."
"Tell them to look for 01. If he's alive, I want to see him. If he's dead, I want to see his corpse. And if they find the seventh Prince's men hanging around, kill them. If they find the trading boat which ferried his men…leak it to the ears of the Simurg. If not, still leak it to them," she said and took a deep breath to calm her tumultuous emotions down.
"Very well." E-sha bowed.
Only Huqi possessed access to a waterway to transport so many assassins on the trading boat.
The mention of poison, not of Qisha's, made the Simurg a likely suspect in the demise of Huqi's large squad.
After all, the Xirong Empire viewed the waterway near Huqi's territory as theirs. Not shared.
If the Xirong Empire found any evidence of Huqi's assassins being ferried, they would sink all the trading boats departing Huqi's territory without a word.
Without evidence, the Xirong Empire may create problems like demanding to inspect the boats. Or still sink them. Not her problem.
Yinyue didn't want to deploy this tactic because it affected the Dayan residents living in Huqi's territory.
However, Huqi hit beyond her threshold of tolerance. An inferno of discontented residents can start from a small spark of fire. To start the fire, reduce his access to resources for his residents. Let the Xirong be the fuel for Huqi's blazing demise.
Any chaos in his territory would be the distraction she needed to kill him.
Only a dead Huqi behaved well.