"Brother Yang, I have to say — you're far more elegant than Xiao Taohong from Wan Hua Lou. Don't you all think so?"
"Absolutely. And frankly, that complexion puts hers to shame entirely. So pale, so tender—"
"Hu Laosan." Yang Qiu, face-down on the cart with his bandaged backside elevated at an angle that preserved absolutely no dignity whatsoever, raised one hand and extended a single finger in Hu Laosan's direction. "Three words. Go. To. Hell."
The resulting laughter rolled across the convoy and bounced off the surrounding hillsides, carrying far enough that the scouts ahead probably heard it. Ma Kui laughed so hard he had to hold onto the side of his cart. Even Bingwen — who considered himself Yang Qiu's closest friend and had made a genuine effort to be sympathetic — was covering his mouth with both hands and failing completely.
Yang Qiu put his hand back down and stared at the road passing slowly beneath the cart.
The dart, at least, had not been poisoned. That much had been established after a deeply undignified examination that Yang Qiu had no intention of thinking about further. A few days of rest, they said. He'd be fine. Just rest, keep it clean, try not to sit.
Try not to sit. He was on a cart. For three days.
What spectacular luck.
Yang Qiu had catalogued his grievances over those three days with the thoroughness of a man who had nothing better to do. Arrived in 1911. Nearly killed by a machine gun within the first twenty-four hours. Subsequently struck in the posterior by a blowgun operated by a Miao man who had apparently wandered into the battle out of pure curiosity, done his damage, and fled at top speed. And then — the crowning humiliation — the subsequent medical assessment had required an audience.
On the positive side of the ledger: he was alive. He had five thousand silver dollars pressed against his body in Du Laoliu's old money belt, which he had appropriated without ceremony and had absolutely no intention of returning. And he had two Mauser C96 pistols — the real article, not copies — along with a respectable quantity of ammunition. The Mausers had kept him pleasantly occupied for the better part of two days, turning them over in his hands during the long hours on the cart, examining the action, the balance, the markings. In his previous life he had been a serious collector. Here, apparently, he was a serious owner.
Two days of not sleeping over a pair of antique pistols was, by almost any reasonable measure, not a proportionate response. Yang Qiu was at peace with this.
As for the staring — and there had been staring, consistent and unsubtle, from every man in the convoy — he had stopped noticing it around day two. He'd done more embarrassing things in his previous life without half as much justification. A winter survival exercise in particular came to mind, involving considerably less clothing and considerably more snow, and he had emerged from that with both his dignity and a commendation. He would emerge from this too.
He raised his head and looked ahead.
Chengdu.
The mountain gate was visible now, rising against the late afternoon sky, and Yang Qiu found himself sitting up despite everything and actually looking. He'd never been to Sichuan in his previous life — the timing had never worked out — and the Chengdu that existed in 1911 bore no resemblance to anything in his memory. No concrete, no glass towers, no elevated expressways threading between office buildings.
Unlike Shanghai or Guangzhou — cities that had already begun trading their bones for steel and glass — Chengdu had held its shape, stubbornly and beautifully intact.
What he saw instead was something older and quieter: layered rooflines in the traditional style, the accumulated texture of centuries of settlement, architecture that had grown from the landscape rather than been imposed upon it.
He'd known, intellectually, that industrialization had cost the country a great deal of its built heritage. Seeing it intact — seeing what had been lost — landed differently than knowing it.
He filed the feeling away and said nothing.
Xiao Anguo had learned from the ambush. Scouts rode ahead at intervals now, clearing the road well in advance, and the convoy moved with a watchfulness that it had lacked on the journey out. Whether Du Laoliu's thorough defeat had genuinely frightened the Gelaohui's armed elements or whether they simply had no appetite for a second attempt at this particular column, the remaining miles passed without incident.
Du Laoliu himself — along with the surviving bandits, bound in a coffin at the rear of the convoy — had accepted the advice of Yang Qiu and Ma Kui after some discussion, and would be handed to Zhao Erfeng rather than disposed of in the mountains. Cleaner.
Less likely to cause problems for the Hubei New Army later.
The city gate soldier who greeted them, however, immediately caused a different kind of problem.
He was a cheerful man, the gate soldier, with the particular good humor of someone who deals in other people's news and enjoys it.
He smiled at the convoy, made a show of recognizing them, and said warmly: "You must be the new army brothers who wiped out those rebels in Guang'an! You've made the government troops proud." Then, still smiling: "Though I heard someone's put ten thousand silver dollars on the table — recruiting fighters from all over to find you and finish the job."
The smile didn't waver even slightly.
Yang Qiu was off the cart before the sentence finished.
The kick was not his finest moment, and he acknowledged this internally even as he delivered it. The gate soldier folded with a sound of surprise and indignation, and Yang Qiu stood over him breathing through his nose, performing the mental arithmetic of a man who has just realized that ten thousand silver dollars is a significant fraction of Sichuan's criminal population motivated and looking for his face.
He had to defect.
He had to defect immediately.
Right now.
Today.
The convoy entered the city under the stares of Chengdu's residents — some curious, some hostile, most simply watchful in the way that people in turbulent times learn to watch things — and made its way to the Sichuan Governor's Mansion.
Yang Qiu was still calculating his options when the gates opened and he stopped thinking about anything except the spectacle in front of him.
His hand went to his pistol.
Nearly a hundred armed soldiers had poured out of the mansion, flanking a procession of elaborately dressed local gentry who moved with the collective self-importance of men attending something historic.
At the center of all of it, moving at a comfortable pace and wearing an expression of mild, pleasant satisfaction, was an old man in official robes — the rank badge on his chest marking him as senior enough that no one in this courtyard was looking at anyone else.
Yang Qiu's hand dropped.
Zhao Erfeng.
He'd known, abstractly, that this was where they were headed.
Meeting the Governor-General of Sichuan had been the objective of the entire mission. But knowing something and seeing it were different experiences, and the man who stepped forward now — slight, elderly, smiling in the way that powerful men smile when they have arranged for things to go the way they want — looked nothing like the figure that history had eventually labeled Butcher Zhao.
He looked like someone's grandfather.
Yang Qiu thought about the upcoming Chengdu massacre and kept his face neutral with some effort.
"Your Excellency Zhang." Xiao Anguo stepped forward smoothly, a soldier who understood the arithmetic of rank even when it surprised him. "Xiao Anguo, commander of the Eighth Garrison of the Hubei Army, pays his respects."
"Well done, well done — I've been waiting." Zhao Erfeng's tone was that of a man receiving welcome guests at a private dinner.
Zhao Erfeng's warmth was the most unsettling thing about him. The easy smile, the familiar tone with Xiao Anguo, the grandfatherly patience of a man receiving welcome news — none of it matched the historical epithet that Yang Qiu carried in his memory like a cold stone: Butcher Zhao. For a moment, looking at this slight, pleasant old man in his official robes, he almost doubted it.
Almost.
Then he remembered what was coming — the specific shape of what this smiling grandfather would do to this city — and felt something rise in his chest that was equal parts rage and helplessness, his hand moving almost unconsciously toward the pistol at his belt before he caught himself and let it fall.
He glanced past Xiao Anguo at the coffle of bound prisoners at the convoy's rear, and something briefly crossed his eyes — satisfaction, perhaps, or calculation — before the warmth settled back over his face. "I heard you encountered rebels in Guang'an. Some men were killed?"
Xiao Anguo had spent enough time navigating official conversation to answer without hesitation. "Reporting to Your Excellency: I cannot speak to whether they were rebels or not. They blocked the road, killed my soldiers, and I captured them and brought them here for Your Excellency to decide." No mention of Gelaohui. No mention of Tongmenghui. Just the facts, placed carefully, with nothing attached to them.
Zhao Erfeng's smile didn't change. "Hmph. Traitors." He gestured, and soldiers from the Governor's Office moved efficiently through the crowd to take custody of Du Laoliu and the others. "I'll submit a memorial to the court. The Emperor will decide." His gaze swept the convoy, deliberate and searching. "Now. Where is this young hero Anguo mentioned — the one who took the bandit leader himself?"
Yang Qiu's skin prickled.
He had a sudden, powerful desire to become architecturally indistinct. The courtyard held dozens of gentry and hundreds of soldiers, all of whom now turned to look for the same person he was trying not to be. Xiao Anguo, to his credit, looked briefly apologetic — clearly recognizing that his dispatch had contained more personal detail than was strategically wise — and then, with the expression of a man who has run out of alternatives, reached over and moved Yang Qiu firmly to the front.
He had no choice but to bow.
"Yang Qiu, courtesy name Chenhua, pays his respects to Your Excellency the Governor."
Zhao Erfeng stopped him before he could complete the full courtesy, which in itself was a statement. He looked Yang Qiu over with the attentive thoroughness of a man who assessed people professionally — the height, the bearing, the bandaged arm, the youth beneath it — and appeared pleased by what the sum added up to.
"Good." He said it simply, as though the word contained everything. "A man who walks alone into a lion's den and brings the bandit out by the collar. Is that not so?" He turned to the assembled gentry with the practiced ease of a performer who knows his audience.
The response was immediate and enthusiastic. Several of the scholars went considerably further than the occasion required — Huo Qubing was invoked, the Yang family generals received a mention, someone produced a comparison that Yang Qiu lost track of because he had stopped listening and started smiling in the fixed, slightly desperate way of a man who has just identified the shape of a trap and cannot see the exit.
This. This was the problem. He could feel it settling around him like a net.
Yang Qiu stood in the center of it all — lauded, celebrated, compared to dead generals — and felt not pride but the particular discomfort of a man being fitted for a target. Every word of praise was another nail. Every nodding scholar was another person who would remember his face. He entertained, briefly and with some relish, the image of drawing the M1911 and introducing Zhao Erfeng to the terminal end of a .45 caliber argument.
It was a satisfying thought. It lasted approximately two seconds before the arithmetic killed it — a courtyard full of soldiers, the Hubei New Army blocking every exit, and the small practical detail that shooting the Governor-General of Sichuan in front of a hundred witnesses was less an assassination and more an elaborately staged execution with himself as the primary subject.
The only institution that might conceivably shelter him afterward was the Tongmenghui, and that particular door had been comprehensively closed the moment Zhao Erfeng finished his speech.
The Governor-General of Sichuan was not praising him because he was moved by heroism. Zhao Erfeng was a man who had spent decades managing an ungovernable province through a combination of force and strategic demonstration, and he had just been handed a very useful piece of material: a young soldier, visibly brave, with a good face and a bandaged arm, who had ridden into a firefight and come out the other side with the bandit leader under his arm.
The optics, Yang Qiu thought miserably, were excellent.
"Someone — bring the rewards." Zhao Erfeng waved a hand, and an aide materialized with envelopes of silver dollars wrapped in red paper. Yang Qiu glanced at Xiao Anguo, who gave him the very slight nod that meant take it, there is no other option.
He took it.
Zhao Erfeng watched this with visible satisfaction, and then — because he was a man who understood that a moment of authority, properly extended, multiplies itself — he spoke again.
"Chenhua, you need not worry about your future. I will write to Lord Zhang personally. I will also memorialize the Emperor on your behalf. A talent like yours should not be wasted in an ordinary soldier's rank." He paused, letting the gentry murmur appropriately. "Furthermore — I will announce this to all of Sichuan. Let every man know: anyone who captures a rebel alive may present themselves here, and I will receive them personally. Three hundred silver dollars per capture. Learn from Chenhua. Let his example show the way."
He was finished. Completely, thoroughly, elaborately finished. The Tongmenghui was out of reach, his anonymity was gone, and Zhao Erfeng — who could have simply taken the guns and sent everyone home — had instead decided to build a monument out of him in front of half of Chengdu's gentry. If you wanted to establish authority, old man, why did you have to use my face to do it? Accepting this reward wasn't an honor. It was a branding iron.
The Qing government had a long tradition of extracting maximum propaganda value from minimum material — a single skirmish could be inflated into a campaign, a captured bandit into a suppressed rebellion. Given that tendency, Yang Qiu's name would be on notice boards from Chengdu to Wuchang within ten days. Yang Qiu, loyal hero of the dynasty. Yang Qiu, slayer of rebels. Yang Qiu, the face of Qing resolve in Sichuan.
Bingwen told him afterward — in the tone of someone delivering news they know will not be well received — that Zhao Erfeng had also taken the opportunity to crack open one of the ammunition crates in full view of the assembled gentry, displaying the thousand new rifles with the casual confidence of a man who wanted everyone in the room to go home and think carefully about their options.
Yang Qiu had already composed the wanted poster in his head. His own face, rendered in rough woodblock print on red paper, surrounded by the kind of men whose tattoos told detailed autobiographies. The characters beneath, bold and unambiguous:
Yang Qiu — Lackey of the Qing Dynasty. Ten thousand silver dollars.
His right hand was moving toward his pistol before he consciously decided to move it — the old man's back was right there, the angle was clean, and some part of him had already done the arithmetic and arrived at now — when a sound reached him.
Quiet. Almost delicate. A single soft exhale of contempt, precisely placed, carrying the specific chill of someone communicating I see exactly what you're doing without the inconvenience of words.
It stopped him the way ice water stops a fever dream — instantly, completely, the heat draining out of his intentions all at once.
Yang Qiu's hand went still.
He turned his head slowly. The crowd shifted and milled in the way that large groups do, and in the movement he caught a glimpse — blue short jacket, a figure moving with unhurried purpose through the press of bodies, there and then not there, swallowed by the crowd in three steps without looking back.
He hadn't been seen by accident. Whoever that was had positioned themselves specifically to be in his sightline at that exact moment. They had watched him move his hand toward the pistol, and they had made certain he knew they were watching.
He was being tracked.
The Governor-General's voice continued behind him, warm and authoritative, the courtyard's applause rising and falling on cue. Yang Qiu stood in the middle of it with his hand empty and his mind running very fast through a set of calculations that all led to the same place.
He needed a different plan. He needed it soon.