“Ho! Stop There! Oh. It Is Just You.” That was Windstopper’s voice. He had fallen asleep at the door but someone had roused him. He still sounded drunk and the room was still dark…

  And spinning, I realized as I sat up.

  “Is he in there? I need to speak with him now.” Was that Noble Lion?

  I tried to rise from the bed, but found a weight upon my chest. The weight groaned.

  “Where are you going?” said River. I hadn’t remembered going to bed. And I certainly didn’t remember her coming with me. He we… No. We were both still dressed in our evening attire.

  “It’s ok, Windstopper” I shouted toward the door, lighting a candle from the writing desk. “I’m up. Let him in.”

  I pulled the covers over the still-sleeping form of River and moved to the reception area of my quarters, where I heard the door creak and Noble Lion’s face came into view by the light of his own taper. In the flickering shadows, it looked lined and tired, a glimpse into what he might look like when his youth and vigor had faded.

  “Are you ok?” he asked.

  “Me? I think so. Why? What’s happened?”

  “You need to come with me,” he turned toward the door and paused, “Bring your sword.”

  “What?”

  Noble Lion strode the edges of the room as if looking for something. I only now realized that he was in his bedclothes, but carried his sword and scabbard in one hand as if he hadn’t had time to tie on a sash.

  “Lion, what are you talking about? What are you looking for?”

  “Someone tried to kill me in my sleep. If it hadn’t been for… Well, the point is, they failed. And now there’s more fighting throughout the palace.”

  “What? That doesn’t make any sense.” I shook my head, trying to clear it from the fog of wine and sleep. “Things were stable… Why now?”

  “We need to go. There’s still a chance we can stop them, but I can’t do it on my own.”

  “What? Stop who? No, look, if there’s fighting within the palace I need to be here.”

  River was sitting up in bed now, inky black robes from last night still blending into the darkness around her. “If something’s happening I need to get back,” she said. “The concubines will be counted.”

  River seemed to have grasped the situation much quicker than I had. I looked from her to Noble Lion and back. There was no arguing with either of them, but…

  “Windstopper! I need you!”

  Pounding footsteps, heavy breathing. “Yes.”

  “I need you to escort River back to her quarters. Make sure she gets there safely no matter what. And stay with her if it doesn’t seem safe.”

  “But… I Am Your Body Guard.”

  “And I’m telling you that if she gets hurt there will be nothing left of me worth guarding.”

  The big man appeared as confused as ever. It seemed sleep and wine were slowing us all down.

  “Sparrow, really. I’ll be fine on my own. He should be with you.”

  “Go with River. That’s an order, Dian Wei.”

  Windstopper’s eyes flared. He nodded.

  “We’re running out of time,” said Lion.

  “I’m ready,” I said as River took off with Windstopper in tow.

  “No you’re not,” said Lion, handing me my sword.

  I held it in one hand just as he did, as the two of us sped down the hallway. I had to trust that Lion knew where he was going, because I certainly didn’t. Even if I had been sober and well-rested, I still wouldn’t have been able to make sense of the maze that was the palace, even after all these weeks.

  “Do we have any idea what the fighting is?” I panted. Sporadic sounds of fighting and other more terrifying noises wafted down the dark corridors.

  “No. But it's coming from the Couch of Five Dragons.”

  I shook myself, trying to remember my court lore. Everything was named dragon-this or heaven’s-that. “The Emperor’s bedchamber?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just say that!”

  We skidded to a halt before a large set of double doors bound in gold and iron. Five golden dragons adorned it, each with a different set of gemstones for eyes, as if the powers of the five planets protected the threshold.

  Clearly their powers of protection did not extend to Imperial Grand Marshals, because Oxblood, head of the Tan Ox clan and brother to the Ox Empress, lay in a pool of blood in the hallway. Or at least his head did. A trail of inky black viscera led to the doors as if the grisly trophy had been needed for something up to this point, but had eventually been discarded.

  “Sealed tight,” I said, putting my weight against the doors.

  “Stand back,” said Noble Lion, and I could immediately sense his yellow aura flowing around him, into the earth beneath us. I backpedaled until the ground shook so violently that it was all I could to keep my feet. The floorboards beneath us bowed and cracked, then shattered entirely as blocks of stone rolled up from beneath Noble Lion, cascading forward into the dragon door, and culminating in a great spar of earth that forced its way between the two doors, driving them apart like a wedge through firewood.

  The essence of Earth usually didn’t fare so well against the essence of Wood, but in this case, Noble Lion was more than capable of overpowering an inanimate object. The man could build a fortress anywhere, and I mean anywhere, even right up through the middle of an Imperial hallway, so long as there was an earthen foundation somewhere below.

  Metal screeched. Wood groaned. Finally the gilt hinges gave way and the doors crashed to either side, splintered, leaving just enough space for us to force our way between wood and rock. Noble Lion led the way, swordpoint first and I followed just behind.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  I had to admit, the moniker Couch of Five Dragons made complete sense now, but why a child needed to sleep on a bed of silks the size of a river barge, I did not know. The most important thing, though, was that the Emperor himself was nowhere to be found.

  There was a clinking sound coming from one end of the room, but all the lamps within the Emperor’s bedchamber had been snuffed.

  “Your majesty?” Noble Lion hazarded.

  The clinking stopped. Something moved in the darkness, not small enough to be the Emperor, not slender enough to be the Empress.

  There was a barely audible hiss. “We need to flee.”

  “We need to find it,” snapped the response.

  I pinpointed the sound and dashed for it. The moment I did, I realized the folly of attacking before knowing my target. The shape that tried to bolt for the door was too large, too wide to be a single being, yet still, as I closed on it, it seemed to unfold further like a sail. And when I crashed into the creature, bringing it to the ground, it writhed in my arms, and I could not discern limb from torso in order to pin it.

  I saw the flash of a knife, and on instinct I grabbed for the wrist that I knew must be there.

  I caught it mid-thrust.

  My own scabbard slid off and the creature was not so lucky. As I raised by sword high, I finally saw the glint of a pair of inhuman eyes, and brought my blade down upon them.

  I felt the familiar bite of metal through bone, and came up covered, not in blood, but in black ichor as the creature writhed on the ground without its head. Finally, Noble Lion was by my side fumbling with a lantern, as I stumbled backward.

  In the flickering light I could see the robes of an Imperial attendant but even as I watched, the stump of a scaly neck retreated within the disorganized folds, and a second head emerged.

  “Please…” clicked the second head.

  Noble Lion reached forward and tore the black-stained silk so that the creature was lying naked before us. It tried to half-slither, half crawl away, but Lion punched his sword down through a serpent’s tail, pinning it to the floorboards. The head screamed. It was human above the neck, but aside from that I scarcely knew what I was looking at.

  “What is it?” I asked, grimacing at the confusion of ichor and scales.

  “One of the Ten Imperial Attendants,” said Noble Lion, then no doubt noticing how the serpent’s body forked like the juncture of a tree branch, he directed the lantern toward the head I had split. “Or Two of them. But neither are the Chief Attendant.”

  He twisted his blade in the serpent’s tail and the man’s head whimpered and pleaded.

  “Where is the Emperor?” Noble Lion growled.

  “Long gone. Please…” It sniveled. Had it not just been complicit in the abduction of a child, I might have felt bad for it; it was not so terrifying naked and injured in the light. What’s more, I recognized the man’s face from the night Imperial Marshal Oxblood had spared them. Though upon reflection, all I had seen that night was a human head in a mass of silk.

  In this sick twist of events, this creature and its cronies had repaid the Imperial Marshal’s mercy with more bloodshed. So when Noble Lion repeated his question and twisted the blade, I did not stop him. There was no room for softness with the Emperor missing.

  “You’re down to your last head, creature,” I added, when the creature only simpered and begged. “Tell us. Where did you take him?”

  “Across the river by now. We know nothing…”

  “Why are you still here, then? You must have known there would be a search.”

  “Our task was the seal. But it is missing. Missing… we could not face the others without it. Where, oh, where-”

  Noble Lion’s blade flicked out and took off the creature’s second head. The forked serpent’s body writhed and trembled, then coiled in on itself and went still.

  I stared at it for a moment longer, before wiping my own blade and searching for where I had flung my sheathe in the heat of battle. When I returned to Noble Lion, I half-expected to find that it had all been a drunken nightmare and that I would find two human bodies lying in a jumble where we had slain them. But the scaly corpse was as confusing as ever in its pool of dark fluids.

  “A shapeshifting Mandate?” I asked as Lion still looked on, stunned.

  “Mandate, alchemy, a curse from Heaven,” he shook himself. “Who can say? But the Emperor is still missing. We must find him. Failing that, his brother. There are no solid claims beyond the two boys, and if they have both been killed…”

  “...the land descends into chaos,” I finished for him.

  “Come,” he said. “We cannot fail.”

  As we ran from the palace, other lords fell in with us, and we shared what little information we had.

  “The Emperor is missing. The Marshal is dead. The Ten have made their move.”

  Stallion had marshaled her own party of lords, and she had found out that the heir, the younger prince, was missing as well. The assassination attempts on the key lords and ladies had all, almost without exception, failed, but they had served their purpose in delaying our martial response, or convincing many of those capable of defending the Emperor to hole up in their quarters and defend themselves instead, as I had first thought to, as well.

  “Uncle! What news?”

  He and Snow Fox joined us at the stables as we all hastily saddled our own horses.

  “Nothing good,” said Uncle, eyes wild and sunken as if he had just lived through his own nightmare. “It's chaos.”

  Snow Fox had more of his wits about him and I helped him saddle his horse as he spoke.

  “The Grand Marshal was summoned to stand before the Imperial throne late last night. We urged him not to go but…”

  “...but it's an Imperial summons,” said Noble Lion, mounting up.

  “It was said that the Ten were willing to apologize to the Marshal,” Snow Fox said as I helped the older statesman mount as well. “But they would not leave the Ox Empress’s side until he had given his word, in person, unarmed and unaccompanied, not to harm them. He entered the throne room alone, against our council.”

  “An obvious trap,” Uncle growled. “Yet still he went. Ten against one, they must have butchered him with daggers. We’ve been fighting through the halls ever since.”

  As I mounted, Uncle reached across the distance between our horses and grabbed a fistful of my robes. “Did you see them Sparrow? Did you see them?! I didn’t think such creatures existed.”

  I removed his hand and picked up Windshear’s reins. “Come. They’ve taken the boys across the river.”

  As we rode out to the Blue River, which edged the City of Lanterns, we took a barge across with all available lords and exchanged more information. There had been those who had first thought to check on the throne, on the heir, on the Ox Empress, or, in our case, on the Emperor’s own bedchamber. Accounts of half-serpent Imperial Attendants were tallied, and it was determined that eight of them had not escaped the palace, a ninth had been caught and butchered in the streets of the capital, but the tenth and final one, the Chief of the Ten in fact, must still be at large with both the Emperor and the prince.

  White Stallion herself had found the Ox Empress beside herself with grief and shame, and in the woman’s state of distress she had spilled everything. In her paranoia, or perhaps on account of her love for her son, the Empress had begun to fear her own brother’s power, and had agreed to assist in the Imperial Attendants’ plot against Grand Marshal Oxblood, but she had not anticipated the Chief of them abducting her son. In that, the Ten had betrayed her as well.

  The sun rose as we neared the far bank, and though every lord was keen to find the Emperor – or at least an Emperor – safe and sound, there was nothing but river and field and small copses of trees as far as the eye could see.

  “They’ll be vying for the honor of being the one to find him,” I whispered to Noble Lion as the ferrymen readied the planks and the lords began to mount up.

  Lion thought about that for a second, and then, leaping into his saddle, he kicked his horse to block the others from the gangway.

  “Let me remind you,” said Noble Lion, lifting his voice for all to hear, “That if we allow both the Emperor and his heir to be taken or slain from under our very noses, there will be a strict accounting. History will remember each and every one of us as the lords who lost their Emperor while they slept.”

  Sufficiently cowed by this, the warlords agreed to work together under the direction of the most senior Imperial Protector, Snow Fox.

  A peasant, having risen early to fish the river, heard the pronouncement and lent his aid. Based on his outline of the countryside, Snow Fox proceeded to deploy every available rider fairly, evenly, and methodically across the surrounding fields, like the grid-work floor in the Hall of Sixty-Four.

  Even the task of finding a lost Emperor – of finding two abducted children – had become a contest for the assembled warlords. And I am ashamed to say that I, too, harbored some hopes of being the one to earn an Emperor’s gratitude. Some harbored more insidious designs.

  Romance of the Three Kingdoms text, but also draw a subtle distinction between the characters who lump all the "eunuchs" into one pack, and those that recognize this as a plot of "the Ten" specifically. In the end, I felt I had to make the real monsters monstrous, while others within the palace are simply caught up in the chaos.