“Soon!” thundered the voice.

Xie Caiji shot up in bed and clutched at her chest. She could feel her heart pounding, even as fear writhed inside of her like a parasite that no medicine could kill. She hadn’t had a peaceful moment of sleep since she’d finally come face to face with Judgment’s Gale. All cultivators were frightening with their inhuman speed and their qi magic, but the nobility had come to their arrangements with the sects. Quiet deals to help keep the worst from happening. Those deals had made her feel safe and protected. She didn’t feel safe anymore. They had all been so sure that the stories about the man were exaggerated. That he couldn’t possibly be as powerful as the tales made him out to be. The sects they’d reached out to had seemed almost eager to face him. They assured her that no core cultivator could face their massed strength, let alone the nascent soul cultivator they had hired at crippling expense.

It seemed like a perfect idea. The king was popular but weak. Xie Caiji even had a soft spot for Jing. She’d watched him grow up, after all. He’d been a diligent, studious boy, and unfailingly polite. She’d even hoped for a time to marry one of her granddaughters to him. She’d been so happy when she heard Jing cut down his bastard of a father. The old king had been a brute and a bully with only the thinnest veneer of civility plastered on top. She’d never suffered directly at his hands, but she knew people who had. She’d honestly wondered if Jing had been the product of some illicit dalliance on the part of the queen. To be fair, she still wondered that, but she’d never dare voice it now. Not with him sitting on the throne. In truth, she felt some gratitude that Jing had done what no one else could, but gratitude only went so far, and politics was politics. That cultivator friend of his had prevented more than a few more direct ploys from moving forward. No one had been willing to tempt his wrath. Of course, he was also far away in the north doing whatever cultivators did when they abandoned civilization.

When word had gone out that Jing had sent for his friend while all those foreign representatives were here, she knew she had to act. She had to make the king look weak not just at home, but to the kingdoms across the mountains. If she could erode his reputation, make his most-feared ally out to be a paper tiger, her house might be able to take the throne without bloodshed. While a strong king could do as the kings had always done and discourage invasion, a weak king would invite it. She could have leveraged that threat to force a quiet little abdication followed by a very public coronation, and the House of Xie would take its rightful place as the royal family. Except, Judgment’s Gale had not been a paper tiger. He had been a dragon pretending that he was only a tiger. The stories had started to trickle back from the tiny number of survivors about the merciless slaughter that had come at his hands. She had laid all her increasingly desperate hopes on Tseun Rong.

In truth, when she had seen a clear sky turn that unholy color, watched as that unnatural lightning filled the sky and then crashed down to the earth, she had known. The silence from their contacts had merely confirmed it. It seemed that judgment had been passed on Tseun Rong, and he had been found less than worthy. She had prayed to the fickle heavens that her family name had not been whispered to that man. She had pleaded with the gods to intervene and let her avoid meeting him. Once more, it seemed the stories held true and that the heavens loved that man more than anyone else. He hadn’t been in the city a day before they were in the same room with him raving about all the people he had to murder just to get there. Her blood had gone cold when his gaze had landed on her. Then, finally, it seemed the heavens were granting her prayers. Jing had dismissed them.

She’d underestimated Judgment’s Gale again. She’d assumed he was a blunt instrument, incapable of subtlety. Little more than a snarling beast that Jing could direct at his enemies. Not that snarling beasts weren’t a terrible danger, but they could be managed. Instead, he’d let her think she would get away, let her feel the tiniest brush of safety like the traces of a light breeze across her face before he pounced on her. He’d seemed huge from across the room, impossibly tall, and heavily muscled, but she had not appreciated his size until he stood over her like an executioner. It had been like facing a mountain that had no love for her or anything she had ever touched. All of those quiet deals with the sects that made her feel safe meant nothing when faced with that man, who belonged to no sect, who swore allegiance to no one, save perhaps legends even more terrifying than he was.

She had tried to deny, to do something, anything that would sway him. But the clever words that were so valuable at court, a skill she had worked a lifetime to master, were brushed aside before she could even begin. He knew she was guilty. He’d already decided her fate. He was resolve incarnate, and he was coming for them. For a few desperate moments, she’d considered appealing to Jing before the futility of that struck her. If she’d attacked another house that way, or the king himself, there wouldn’t have been enough proof for him to act. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t know and, if he knew, there was no reason to stop his friend from taking a revenge that, loathe as she was to admit it, she had earned.

“Soon,” she whispered.

She’d been trying to think of something, to plan some way for them to survive the storm that was going to descend on them. There was no hope for her. She was an old enough hand at the bloody side of politics to recognize that truth. She could run but that wouldn’t stop a man like Judgment’s Gale from finding her. Her death was a simple matter of when. She had reached out to the sects hoping to leverage those quiet agreements to procure protection for the rest of her family. She had been met with stone-faced refusals and admonishments not to rouse the anger of legends in her next life. She had tried to send people away. If she could at least get lesser members of the family away, the House of Xie might survive in some fashion, but that effort had been stopped cold. Cultivators that no one knew had stopped those carriages and ordered them back to the manor on the authority of Judgment’s Gale.Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

It had been silence in the days since then. A terrible, gnawing silence that had infected the entire manor. The servants did not speak until directly addressed. The family members moved past each other without seeming to see each other. They all knew that doom approached. They could feel it like rain in the air or like insects crawling over them. They were all waiting for a headsman, a headsman in blue robes. It almost came as a relief to Xie Caiji when a massive noise from the front of the manor caused the very walls to tremble. It was wood splintering and the inhuman wail of metal shearing as it was pushed beyond its limits. She lowered her head briefly and then rose from her bed. She dressed carefully even as the sounds of fighting and dying rose from the courtyard. Servants raced in and out of her room, telling her things that didn’t matter anymore. It all amounted to the same thing. Death had come for the House of Xie.

By the time she finished dressing in her finest robes and jewelry, the battle was over. There were no more screams, no more clashing blades, just an oppressive absence of noise. She walked past weeping servants and cowering family members. She murmured what quiet comforts she could to the servants. They were innocent in all of this. She glared pure disdain at the members of her family who cowered inside. Family members who had been all too happy to accept the benefits of membership, but apparently found the cost too high when things went bad. As if cowering would help. As if cowardice would stay the hand of a man like Judgment’s Gale. He was the cultivator who had faced down a small army of other cultivators and lived to tell the tale. No, she did not imagine he would find cowardice a good reason to let people live. As she approached the door, she was astounded to see a young man, a boy really, who had not abandoned his post. He was ashen-faced, terrified, but he had stayed at his post. She stopped next to him. If only more of her blood was this stalwart. She reached out a hand and cupped his cheek. His eyes went very wide.

“You’ve been brave enough for one day,” she told him. “Go be with your family now.”

Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes, and he nearly fell over his bow was so deep.

“Yes, Mistress Xie. Thank you, Mistress Xie.”

The boy turned to go, hesitated, and then went over to the door. He looked at her for approval. She smiled at him and nodded. The boy opened the door for her. That’s likely the last time anyone will ever open a door for me, she thought. Xie Caiji stepped through the door, and it took all of her self-control not to gasp. There were bodies everywhere. House guards who had fought a hopeless battle to the last. She couldn’t even find it in herself to be angry with the handful who had surrendered. They looked ashamed, but she didn’t understand why. One look at the pristine blue robes that adorned the towering figure of Judgment’s Gale said all that was needed about how hopeless that battle had been. Better if they had all surrendered, she thought. The cultivator turned his icy eyes on her and she was frozen in place. He stalked over to her and it felt like a tsunami was about to crash down over her.

“Call them out. All of them,” he ordered her before his eyes fixed on something over her shoulder.

She found the will to turn her head. That brave boy who had opened the door for her was standing there, tears in his eyes, locked in place. She turned her face back to the cultivator she had so foolishly enraged and saw something she had never expected to be there. Pity.

“I’ll spare the children,” he told her in a low voice.

An awful fist that had been wrapped around her heart loosened the tiniest bit. The children will live, she thought. She didn’t know why he was choosing to spare them and, with death so close at hand, she didn’t care why. She’d witnessed enough people lie over the years to recognize the truth when she heard it. She issued the order to the only person she could, the boy. He nodded jerkily and ran back inside. It took a while and a booming threat from Judgment’s Gale for everyone to straggle out of the building. Xie Caiji simply stood there, doing her best to keep her head held high. She would not cower in the final moments, nor, it seemed, did Judgment’s Gale wish for that. He just stood there, silent, impassive, and utterly terrible. After the cultivator had done something that she felt but didn’t understand was he satisfied that everyone in the manor was now present in the courtyard. It was only then that a figure stepped out of a nearby shadow. She recognized the man, the cultivator bodyguard that Jing had hired from only the gods knew where. She held a brief hope that this was some kind of reprieve, until the man took out a scroll, and unrolled it.

“In this year of, oh I’m not reading all of that,” said Chan Dishi, his eyes flickering down the scroll. “This decree hereby dissolves the House of Xie. All noble titles current and hereditary are withdrawn from the Xie family. All assets, holdings, and titles of nobility once held by the House of Xie are hereby transferred to the newly established House of Lu, and its patriarch, the cultivator Lu Sen, known as Judgment’s Gale, the Hand of Chaos, Heavens Scouring Blade, the Storm’s Wrath, the—”

The words faded to nothing as Xie Caiji felt like her entire world had just dissolved around her. She had misunderstood what she was dealing with so profoundly that she had to lock her jaw shut to keep from bursting into hysterical laughter or incoherent screaming. Judgment’s Gale had come to kill the House of Xie, and he had done it more thoroughly than she had ever imagined possible. She had imagined naked bloodshed, which might still happen, but not this. Even if he did let the children live, they would live as peasants. As orphans. No titles. No protections. The House of Xie, one of the proudest, most powerful houses in the kingdom, had been reduced to nothing. It was an exasperated burst of words that brought her out of her trance.

“How many names do you have?” demanded Chan Dishi as he waved the scroll at Judgment’s Gale.

“I don’t actually know,” said the man.

Chan Dishi shook his head before he glared at the collected members of the former House of Xie.

“He gets everything. You get nothing,” announced the man, before he handed the scroll to Judgment’s Gale and walked away.

The blue-robed cultivator eyed the scroll for a moment before it vanished into a storage treasure. He fixed his eyes on Xie Caiji.

“Now, let’s talk about who knew.”