White Horse Manor was the Li family's private holding. After years of building and remodeling it no longer lived off the fields; it was more like a modern country resort, a place kept for the amusement of Chang'an's wealthy and mighty.
Chang'an had no shortage of pleasure houses and gambling dens. To pry silver out of men whose wealth rivaled a nation's, one naturally had to put on tricks and novelties no other place could offer.
Xiao Ting had turned up unannounced, and it was his first visit. Li Tianyu knew well enough that this young master's brains were no match for his station, but precautions were precautions all the same; he took Xiao Ting only to the main residence, where beauties and good wine kept him company. It was not much different from any ordinary place of amusement, and there was nothing worth mentioning in it.
Deep in the manor, in one of the gardens, a rockery built of rare stones stood rather elegantly. Around it paced a number of sword-carrying guards, their bearing contained but far stronger than the guards at the manor gate.
At the foot of the rockery was an opening. From time to time people in fine silks went in, and a faint clamor could be heard drifting out — from underground...
"Father, do you think that Eagle-Finger Rambler will come today?"
In the vast underground palace beneath the rockery, many people sat in the private boxes around the perimeter. In the center was a martial arena ringed with thick railings, so that it looked like an enormous cage.
Zhu Chenglie, his face ashen, sat outside that great cage, looking left and right without pause.
Zhu Manlong sat in an armchair holding a teacup, Zhang Chao beside him. Enforcers in guard's garb filled every corner of the underground palace.
Hearing his son's question, Zhu Manlong gave a faint snort: "With your father and Master Zhang here, it's a sure bet he won't be leaving again."
Zhu Chenglie nodded, looking uneasy. Perhaps it had to do with the old saying, 'Do no wrong, and no ghost will knock at your door' — a man with a guilty conscience naturally starts seeing ghosts everywhere.
From the huge cage in front of Zhu Chenglie, beast roars came again and again. A yellow-striped tiger prowled and roared behind the iron bars along the cage's wall, its crimson pupils full of the savagery of hunger as it swept its gaze over the many sources of shouting outside.
The men seated in the boxes around could not be seen, but Zhu Chenglie recognized a few of the voices — all wealthy magnates of Chang'an, who at that moment were tossing gold and silver ingots into the steward's tray with a fair bit of excitement, shouting:
"Hurry it up, hurry it up..."
Hurry up and do what? It was Zhu Chenglie's first visit, but he had already guessed.
The Zhu family ran a martial academy, supplying guards to many a great house, and it had done dirty work for those houses too — seizing land, jumping men in the dark with clubs, that sort of thing. At a drinking party last year he had run into Li Tianlu, and after a few dealings Li Tianlu handed him a lucrative job: grab a few nobodies and send them out to White Horse Manor, the kind the authorities would never look into.
White Horse Manor was a farm, so Zhu Chenglie assumed some landlord wanted hired hands for the fields and gladly agreed. The Zhu family backed any number of gambling dens in the city, and every day there were gamblers who lost everything, ended up in debt besides, and were at daggers drawn with their own families, with no one to care what became of them.
When a man couldn't pay what he owed the gambling dens, Zhu Chenglie simply brought his men to tie him up and deliver him to White Horse Manor. Over a year of it, not one person had gone to the authorities.
Zhu Chenglie had made a good deal of silver from it, and had always wondered why the Li family didn't just pay wages and hire farmhands — until today, when he finally understood: every one of the men he had sent had gone to meet the King of Hell.
This underground palace was an underground gambling den. Man against beast, with bets on the outcome.
The starving tiger in the cage was not big — a two-hundred-jin cub or so — but small or not, a tiger was still a tiger. Zhu Chenglie knew he had no hope of fighting one alone. And how were a pack of gamblers too broke to fill their bellies supposed to fight it?
Down in the cage things were not yet ready, but Zhu Chenglie truly could not sit still. The men were the ones he had caught, after all.
But hired muscle had hired muscle's rules. Whatever the money man wanted done, once the Zhu family took his silver they saw it through; they had no right to interfere.
"Awoo—"
A deafening tiger roar rang through the cage. The yellow-striped tiger thrashed furiously behind the iron bars, kicking up clouds of dust.
The clatter of chains came from a gate on the wall side of the cage.
The men seated in the boxes around at once began to shout; several potbellied old squires even stood up at their box windows, parted the beaded curtains, and watched.
Click—
With the sound of machinery, a gate in the wall opened, and two ragged, hunched men were shoved straight out. One of them was Sancai, the hired hand from the Sun family's shop.
"Let me out—!"
"Help—!"
Cries for their mothers went up. The two men scrambled up off the sandy ground and turned to run back, but the gate had already shut, so all they could do was throw themselves against it, weeping and howling, not daring to look at the iron bars beside them.
Perhaps to improve the pair's odds, a saber and a long spear were tossed out from behind the bars.
Outside the cage, the steward raised a brass gong and struck it: "Dang—"
"Begin!"
Clatter, clatter—
The iron bars rose slowly. The yellow-striped tiger, starved for three days with saliva dripping from its jaws, clawed frantically at the bars, trying to squeeze itself out.
"Damn it, pick up the damn knife!"
"Kill that crawling thing and I'll reward you a thousand taels!"
The shouting rose like an ocean tide. Everyone stared, not blinking.
Inside the cage, the two ragged men first crawled about on the ground hunting for some way out. Then, seeing the yellow-striped tiger's head already pushing out from under the iron bars, the will to live in a desperate corner gained the upper hand; the two ashen-faced men scrambled and rolled to snatch up saber and spear, and pressed themselves, trembling, against the edge of the cage.
"Go at it together!"
"How do you fight it split up? Go together, butcher it like a pig — get around behind it, one thrust and it's done..."
The spectators on all sides leaned on the railings, urging them on with anxious, excited shouts, looking for all the world as though they wished they could trade places and go in themselves.
"Awoo—"
With a tiger roar that rang through the whole underground palace, the yellow-striped tiger broke free of the cage. Its paws struck the sand, throwing up dust and a muffled thud, and it sprang nearly a zhang, reaching the edge of the cage in the blink of an eye.
"Ah—"
Screams rose at once.
The little courage the two men had scraped together was gone the instant they saw how savagely the starving tiger moved; they thought only of scattering and running. The slower one had four furrows torn across his back, so deep the bone showed; he managed one despairing scream before his neck fell into the tiger's jaws and the sound cut off short.
Sancai, the one left, had long since been frightened clean out of his wits. He even threw the saber to the ground, caring only about running as far from the great tiger as he could.
Having killed one man, the starving tiger had no intention of stopping to take a blade. It gave chase, relentless, and lunged at Sancai.
"What're you running for, you turtle's bastard! Hack it with the knife!"
"Useless trash — I've got a hundred taels riding on the two of you..."
Curses and jeers rose on every side.
Gamblers scraping a living at the bottom of the city were mostly idle good-for-nothings. They couldn't outrun an ordinary grown man, let alone a tiger.
Sancai had hauled sacks for half a year, and the Sun family's shop kept a good table; oddly enough, that now made him fast. But unless he could kill the yellow-striped tiger, speed would only buy him a few more breaths.
Zhu Chenglie, already burdened with a guilty conscience, truly could not watch any longer: "Father, have the steward stop it. This is no man fighting a tiger — this is taking human lives for sport, and it'll cost us a heap of karma."
Zhu Manlong held his teacup and said nothing.
Beside him, Zhang Chao's eyes were indifferent: "Life and death are fated. A man brings it on himself — whose fault is that?"
"Help—!"
Inside the cage, Sancai howled and wept like a madman, his legs a blur, trying to put some distance between himself and the fierce tiger closing in behind him.
It was no use.
The spectators around had already risen, cursing as they went, plainly none too pleased with the show.
Just as the yellow-striped tiger sprang, its blood-soaked jaws about to close on the back of Sancai's neck, a thunderous shout suddenly rang through the underground palace:
"You dead beast!"
The voice was like a bursting thunderclap, drowning out nearly all the clamor in the hall and echoing through the underground palace.
The teacup in Zhu Manlong's hand trembled slightly. His hawk eyes snapped hard and sharp, fixed on the stone passage entrance of the underground palace...