I looked down at the invitation then back up at the feast, held in the palace’s Garden of Lasting Peace. I was certainly in the right place; this was where the Emperor would have held his midday banquet. The invitation had certainly been sealed by Emperor Shining Light. But…

  “You don’t see the Emperor anywhere do you?” I asked my loyal bodyguard.

  “A Little Boy In A Big Hat. No I Do Not.”

  I grimaced. “No Ox Empress or ministers either.”

  Dreadwolf sat at the head of the table, surrounded by men who looked more like bandits, in their furs and armor, than like the people who should be running the Land Under Heaven. As soon as we filed into the garden, gauntlets clamped down on our shoulders and began to lead us.

  “Is This The Brawl.” asked Windstopper, three burly wolves trying to move him to no avail.

  “No, Windstopper. Let them lead you.”

  As soon as I said that, my bodyguard relented. The three men at his back had been putting so much of their weight into him, they almost fell over as he moved. The rest of the attendees got the same treatment, greeted by armored guards and bodily forced to their assigned seats. Noble Lion and White Stallion were placed to one side of me.

  “Mm,” said White Stallion, being shoved into her seat like a prisoner. “So this is how they do things in the Wolfswood.”

  “I doubt it,” said Noble Lion, resisting slightly less and maintaining his dignity that much. “But this is how the wolves act in the henhouse.”

  I had to agree. There was no art, no subtlety, no cleverness to this seating arrangement as there had been in the Imperial Marshal’s game – or rather, the Ox Empress’s.

  “I think the sentiment is pretty clear, wouldn’t you say?” said Noble Lion, “We are hostages. We do as he says, exactly as he says. He knows who our friends are. He knows where the coalitions will form.”

  Stallion grunted an agreement. “The Marshal was firm. Maybe even inflexible. But this is plain tyranny.”

  “And now we all know it before even the first round of wine is served,” said Noble Lion with a look of disgust.

  An armor-clad man filled all of our cups up past the brim, stumbling and sloshing as he did so. As soon as the drunk server moved on, Noble Lion thrust the cup away from him on the table.

  “There’s no subtlety to it,” I added, “but it is still a game board. And now we know that much more about the man who set it for how he set it.”

  Just across from me was Uncle beside Snow Fox, with a few other older lords.

  I spoke low so my voice could only be heard by my allies beside me. “A man of my own clan and he sets him across from me, with the old guard. While the young lords are positioned together. He knows more about palace politics than we gave him credit for.”

  “We let him dig in,” said Lion.

  “As opposed to what?” asked Stallion. “Assembling an army and charging the walls? We didn’t have a choice.”

  Remembering those sixtyspan walls, I had to agree with Stallion. You had to defeat the Imperial army in the field or not at all. And even that hadn’t worked out so well for the Yellow Scarves. “We can’t solve this with soldiers anytime soon,” I said, turning my attention to the lords arrayed around me.

  As I looked over my Uncle, looking tired and worn out since the affair with the Ten Imperial Attendants, and the old wizened statesman beside him, in the silver-white of the Trapper clan, I saw, to my horror and for the first time since witnessing the slaughter at the Gray Dowager’s estate, the Demon.

  He was the height of a crag, as wide as a cliff-face, and every bit as big as my bodyguard. After seeing him in the darkness of the city street, I had thought him an older man, some cynical assassin, an old hat at murder, but looking upon him now, I saw that he was no older than me. He was a born killer just entering his prime. Suddenly I did not feel so safe if this were to turn into a tavern brawl.

  It was also not lost on me that he wore shimmering black silks as he had on the night of the slaughter, not the white of his liege-lord, the venerable Snow Fox. And the Demon’s cuffs were trimmed in red as if flaunting the perpetual blood on his hands. I didn’t quite understand the purpose of such a get-up, but it put a pit in my stomach nevertheless.

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  I also recognized, at that murderer’s hip, the very sword that had ended the line of the Gray Moon-Moth clan, for it had been etched into my memory that night.

  Hadn’t I vowed to River that I would kill this man with my own hand? Looking at him now, I couldn’t see how that would ever come to pass.

  I found myself staring, and when the Demon looked over at me, I was struck by such powerful fear I could neither speak nor look away. Noticing my regard, he snorted and tossed an iron pendant at me, clattering across the table past the porcelain.

  THE DEMON

  RANK 12: Leader of the Professionals on the Flank

  WORTH: 600 dan

  CLAN: Trapper | STAR: Unknown

  FATE: Iron-Fire “Flaying”

  MANDATE: Terror

  I couldn’t move to lift the pendant. I couldn’t move to lift my wine cup. I could do nothing but stare at the strange pendant so long as the Demon’s eyes pinned me to the spot, gripping me with his immeasurable power.

  He was… so low in rank. Well, higher than me, but still, for one so obviously Mandated by Heaven he should have been at least on par with Stallion.

  And the pendant said that the star he had been born under had never been recorded, which could only mean he had been so lowborn that his parents had not even bothered looking up at the sky on the night of his birth. Despite all this, the power rolling off of him in crippling waves was inescapable.

  Power transcends birth. Power transcends rank. If this man is not a Hero of the Times by the time all is said and done, then no one should be.

  Even as I thought it, The Demon's iron pendant began to change before my eyes, glowing red-hot as if newly forged until the words had melted away and rewritten themselves. Now it read:

  THE DEMON

  RANK 999: Hero of the Times

  WORTH: 500,000 dan

  CLAN: Howling Demon | STAR: Red, Silver, & Black

  FATE: Iron-Fire “Flaying”

  MANDATE: Terror

  Having just seen this writing, or perhaps its opposite when I had earned my Son-of-Heaven Saber, I recognized it for what it was. It was the projection of a Mandate, possibly from the person I had dubbed the prankster, or more likely one with a similar power. Whoever they were, were they saying that the Demon's rank was false? No, merely temporary. They were saying that whatever the Demon's current rank or standing, his true worth, his true power was the greatest in the Land Under Heaven, and before long his pendant will reflect that. Even as I watched, the glowing red writing faded and then there was nothing more than a mundane Rank 12 iron pendant sitting on the table before me.

  Only once the Demon took the pendant back and his attention rolled away from me to resume his drinking was I able to collect myself enough to move again. No one else seemed to have noticed the exchange, nor the strange changing pendant.

  I found my own cup in my hand, and it was all I could do to keep myself from shaking as I brought it to my lips and drained it.

  When all the lords have been interred in their seats, there were no speeches. No opening ceremonies. But suddenly Dreadwolf halted in his boisterous carousing with the wolves next to him and bellowed, “In the name of the Emperor! DRINK!” with his cup held high.

  The garden went silent as his wolves all drained their cups and a few lords took chaste sips. But that did not please the wolf. He made a motion, and on the “insistence” of the armed and armored wolves at their backs, everyone at the banquet tables drank until their cups were empty.

  Everyone except Noble Lion, who had not moved.

  The drunken server in armor nudged my friend beside me, who only inclined his chin, refusing to acknowledge the brute. Another nudge. Noble Lion remained stoic.

  Suddenly there were five guards around Lion, grabbing him by the shoulders and arms and chin and forcing his hands to his cup, then bringing it to his mouth, splashing the wine across his face as much as in his mouth.

  Noble Lion coughed and sputtered, all dignity gone. When he recovered his eyes blazed.

  But the wolves had already moved on, like bandits who took what they wanted and melted into the trees. It had all happened so quickly it was hard to believe it had happened at all. In the Imperial gardens, before all the assembled lords, no less. Dreadwolf at his head table was already joking and jostling and wrestling with his wolves at his table, as if they hadn’t even noticed the whole affair, until…

  “In the name of the Land Under Heaven! DRINK!”

  I, for one, didn’t bother trying to resist. What was a little wine?

  This time Noble Lion spun on the five men he knew would be closing in on him. He fixed them with such a stare, while the dust beneath his feet began to swirl, that the five of them halted. But they held his gaze and thrust another overfull cup into his hands.

  Noble Lion held their gaze, took it, and drained it, never breaking eye contact.

  The drunken-armored-server grunted and smiled, then receded to the edge of the garden.

  Noble Lion took his seat beside us once again, looking stricken.

  “So he wants us drunk,” Stallion drawled. “What’s he going to do? Kidnap the Emperor?” A bitter laugh.

  “Would make killing off the other warlords that much easier if we didn’t have our wits about us,” I said into my cup.

  “Coulda done that already,” said the warlord in white, nodding over our shoulders. “Besides, I fight better after a few, anyway.”

  I could not say the same. We all still had our swords at our hips, Stallion with her long curved blade, Lion with his bejeweled straight-sword, me with my new Son-of-Heaven Saber. Though thinking about how I had earned my splendid sword, shame burned in my chest for what I had allowed to happen to the Imperial persons thereafter.

  A wolf now sat where the Emperor should, and that animal commanded us all like a king of old. I could only imagine how he must be handling the Imperial family behind closed doors.