Book 4: Chapter 49: The Need of the Moment
Sen resisted the urge to roll his eyes and darted into a narrow space between buildings. It wasn’t even really wide enough to qualify as an alley, but it was big enough for him to fit and wrap himself up in shadows. Then, he climbed the wall and rolled over the edge of the roof. He waited there as people frantically searched the alley below. Sen had grown increasingly tired of this nonsense. Ever since he’d killed the four cultivators in the park, the Shadow Eagle Claw Syndicate had been making attempts on his life. They ranged from the serious to the stupid, but they were all aggravating. There was a part of him that was tempted to simply kill them all, but the very idea made him feel tired. On the other hand, he thought, these people aren’t any better than bandits on the road. If I keep letting them go without consequences, any harm they do from here on out is at least partially on my hands.
Sen tried to weigh the karmic consequences. Was killing them worse than letting them go? Would their cumulative harm over the course of their lives ultimately be a greater karmic debt than the karma he would accrue by ending them now? As always, the truth of Karma was beyond him or likely anyone to fully measure. He could only make the best choices with the knowledge and insight he possessed. On balance, anyone willing to try to murder someone on nothing but orders was probably a terrible person. More to the point, they would try to murder him if they got the chance. His ability to escape didn’t make them any less guilty of their intention to murder him. With a little huff of resignation, Sen cycled for earth qi and let it slowly filter into the stone of the buildings. With a wave of Sen’s hand, the people in the narrow alley below were pierced with dozens of narrow, razor-edged spikes of stone that they could not avoid or flee from.
He extended his senses just long enough to confirm that no one had survived. He absently used wind qi to retrieve anything of value from them before he sank their bodies into the ground and sealed them in rock. He let his head drop back against the roof and took a breath.
“You’re not as sneaky as you think you are,” said Sen.
When no answer was forthcoming, Sen threw a small pebble at the woman hiding a roof over from him. It landed less than an inch from her foot.
“Yes,” said Sen. “You.”
He heard a sharp intake of breath before the woman stood up.
“How did you know?” she demanded.
“I never didn’t know,” said Sen, opting to keep the answer obscure and as frustrating as possible.
“You killed them,” she said.
“Yeah. I’m going to kill you too,” said Sen from his sprawled-out position.
He supposed he couldn’t look any less threatening. Of course, not looking like a threat and not being a threat were wholly different propositions.
“You weren’t killing everyone before.”
“You all clearly didn’t appreciate that mercy. You kept coming. So, now, I’m just going to kill all of you.”
“What do you want?”
Sen waited until she looked at him again before he incinerated the vial in his hand. Her eyes never left his hand as he plucked a third vial from the belt.
“You’re going to tell me everything about your organization. How it’s structured. Who’s in charge. Where you keep things. Everything.”
“I’ll be dead before we get through all of that.”
Sen destroyed the third vial and plucked another one from the belt. “You’re assuming that I care if you die. I don’t. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, there will just be more lackeys tomorrow. In short, right now, the only person on this roof who cares if you die is you. So, I suggest you talk quickly.”
The woman’s words came haltingly at first, like she was having to force them out. As the pain from the poison ramped up, though, the words started pouring out of her. The only interruptions came when she spasmed in pain and seemed to lose track of everything else in the world. Sen encouraged the outpouring of speech by occasionally destroying another vial. He’d figured out which one was the antidote based on small changes in her expression every time his hand got near it or hovered over it. Still, she didn’t know that he knew, so it worked pretty well as an encouragement. Sen learned a lot in a very short period of time, even if it was a struggle for him to maintain his indifferent demeanor. He didn’t usually go in for torture and, whatever he might have thought at first, the amount of pain that the woman was in amounted to torture.
When it got bad enough that the woman simply couldn’t string sentences together anymore, Sen dropped the belt onto her. She fumbled at it until she got the right vial and tipped it into her mouth. Sen understood how such things worked well enough to know that she wasn’t going to be useful again for a while. Instead, he crouched down next to her. He waited until she met his gaze with her bloodshot eyes.
“I don’t want you to mistake this for mercy. You’re going to take a message back to your masters for me. Pack up and leave. The Slovenly Chicken Foot Gang is done in this city, one way or the other. If they make me do it, I’m adopting a scorched earth policy. As for you, if you think what you just went through was bad, I have things lying around that would make that seem like a restful nap. If I ever see you again, I’ll make you eat one of those things. Then, I’ll hang your blackened, rotting corpse from a wall as a warning to everyone you know and love. Do you understand me?”
The woman was shaking, and Sen didn’t think that it had anything to do with the residual poison. He gave her a smile that would offer no comfort.
“You can just nod,” he said.
The woman’s head started bobbing up and down so fast that it looked almost comical. Sen stood up and walked over to the edge of the roof. As he was getting ready to make the leap back to ground level, the woman worked up the nerve to speak.
“Who are you? Who are you really?”
Sen paused. He’d been resisting it for a while, but the world had a way of making you do things you didn’t want to do, become things you didn’t want to become. Sen decided this was just one more of those things. However much he tried to resist it, he kept finding himself drawn into situations that called for him to be something, if not precisely better, than more than Lu Sen could be on his own. He kept needing to be the kind of larger-than-life person that only existed in a story. He supposed that it was convenient that he had just such a story right at hand. It wasn’t really relevant that he was learning to hate that persona as much as he hated killing. It was the need of the moment.
“Judgment’s Gale,” said Sen, and then dropped from the roof.
