THE HOUR OF THE RAT
1620 Words
Wei Liang spent the rest of the day pretending everything was fine.
He was an actor. He was good at this.
He sat through two more court sessions behind the silk screen and nodded at the right moments and pressed the imperial seal on documents he didn't fully understand and smiled at Lady Shen Wei's signals like a man who had not just received a death threat rolled up inside a garrison report.
By evening he had almost convinced himself.
Almost.
"You're doing the face," Chu Minjae said.
They were in Wei Liang's chamber. Chu Minjae was eating again some kind of palace dumpling that he had acquired through means Wei Liang didn't ask about. He was pointing at Wei Liang's expression with the dumpling like it was evidence.
"What face?"
"The face you made before the Dongping theatre incident. Right before everything went completely wrong."
"Nothing went wrong in Dongping."
"Wei Liang. The stage caught fire."
"The stage caught a little fire."
"HALF THE THEATRE….."
"Minjae." Wei Liang grabbed his arm. "Lower. Your. Voice."
Chu Minjae pressed his lips together. Breathed through his nose. I looked at his dumpling like it was the only stable thing in the world.
"What did you do," he said quietly.
"Nothing."
"Wei Liang."
"I have a meeting tonight."
"What kind of meeting?"
"The kind where I meet someone alone at midnight in an abandoned armory after receiving an anonymous threat."
Chu Minjae put the dumpling down.
He had not put food down voluntarily in the entire three years Wei Liang had known him.
This was how Wei Liang knew he was truly frightened.
"You have to tell Lady Shen Wei," Chu Minjae whispered.
"The note said not to."
"The note from the man who wants to destroy everything said not to and you're listening to it?"
"If I tell Shen Wei she'll send guards and Feng will know and then he goes straight to Varek and….."
"Three hundred thousand people. Yes I know the number Wei Liang, we all know the number." Chu Minjae grabbed his arm. "This is a trap."
"Probably."
"Definitely."
"Most likely."
"WEI….."
"I'm going anyway." Wei Liang looked at him steadily. "I need to know what he actually wants. And I need to know alone because the moment anyone else is in that room the conversation changes." He pulled his arm free gently. "I know people Minjae. It's the only thing I'm genuinely good at."
Chu Minjae stared at him for a long time.
Then he picked up his dumpling.
"When you die," he said miserably, "I want the gold robe. The one with the dragon on the left shoulder."
"I'm not going to die."
"Wei Liang's left shoulder Wei Liang. Not the right. The left."
---
The Hour of the Rat was two hours past midnight when the palace fell into its deepest silence.
Wei Liang moved through the servant corridors the way Haoran had shown him that morning, a map pressed into his hand during a fake document exchange, casual and quick, barely a second of contact.
Third left. Down the stone stairs. Past the old kitchen. The armory is the iron door at the end.
He wore plain dark clothes borrowed from Chu Minjae's servant trunk. No crown. No robes. Just a young man moving quietly through the dark which was something he had been doing since he was twelve years old and considerably easier than being an emperor.
He found the iron door.
Pushed it open.
---
The old armory smelled like rust and old war.
Weapons lined the walls that nobody had touched in years. Shields stacked against stone. The torches were unlit except one a single flame in the center of the room casting everything in sharp orange shadow.
General Feng Baolin stood in the middle of it all like he had been carved there.
Black robes. Hands clasped. That face still, watchful, giving absolutely nothing away.
He looked at Wei Liang the way chess players look at an unexpected move.
"You came alone," Feng said.
"You asked nicely," Wei Liang said.
"I asked with a threat."
"Like I said."
Something shifted almost imperceptibly in Feng's expression. Not quite amusing. Not quite respectful. Something between the two that hadn't decided what it wanted to be yet.
"Sit," Feng said.
"I'll stand."
A pause.
"Very well." Feng moved slowly around the perimeter of the torchlight. Not pacing. Thinking. "You are not the Emperor."
Wei Liang said nothing.
"I have served Zhen Kailong for twenty two years," Feng continued. "I have stood beside him in four battles. I have watched him eat, argue, laugh, and grieve. I know every line of that man's body language like I know my own sword." He stopped. I looked directly at Wei Liang. "You walk almost correctly. The voice is impressive. The court sessions behind the screen were smart." A pause. "But you looked at the throne room ceiling when you first walked in."
Wei Liang kept his face neutral.
"The Emperor never looked up," Feng said quietly. "Not once in thirty years. He already knew what was up there. He built it." He tilted his head. "You looked up because you were genuinely amazed. Because you had never seen anything like it." Something crossed his face. "That is not something a man can fake."
Silence stretched between them like a rope pulled from both ends.
"What do you want, General?" Wei Liang said.
Feng looked at him for a long moment.
Then he said something Wei Liang had not expected in any of the fourteen scenarios he had prepared for.
"I want the truth about how the Emperor died."
Wei Liang blinked. Just once. "He died in his sleep. Lady Shen Wei……"
"Lady Shen Wei," Feng interrupted quietly, "is the most accomplished liar in Jinhara's political history. Which is genuinely impressive given the competition." He clasped his hands behind his back. "Zhen Kailong did not die naturally. I know this because three days before his death he sent me a private message. One line." He reached into his robe and produced a small folded paper. Hold it out.
Wei Liang crossed the room. I took it.
Unfolded it.
Four words in the Emperor's hand.
Someone inside wants everything.
Wei Liang stared at it.
"He knew," Feng said. "Someone was going to kill him. He knew and he told me and before I could act he was dead." His voice remained perfectly level but something underneath it had edges. "Lady Shen Wei told the council it was his illness. Natural causes. She sealed the body chamber within the hour and had him prepared for burial before any independent physician could examine him." He paused. "That is not what innocent people do."
Wei Liang folded the paper carefully.
His mind was doing things. Running fast. Building. Connecting.
"You think she killed him," Wei Liang said.
"I think she knows who did," Feng said. "Which in my experience amounts to the same thing."
Wei Liang looked at him. "And you're telling me this because…."
"Because you are sitting on his throne," Feng said simply. "Which means either you are part of it or you are as much in the dark as I am." He studied Wei Liang's face with those blade sharp eyes. "And everything about you tells me you are very much in the dark."
A long silence.
Wei Liang made a decision.
"I don't know how he died," he said. "I was told of natural causes and I was given thirty days and a pardon and I took the deal because the alternative was execution." He met Feng's eyes directly. "That is the truth."
Feng looked at him for a long time.
Then slowly .. "I believe you."
"You believe me."
"You have the face of a man who is terrified and trying very hard not to show it. Guilty men don't look like that. Guilty men look like they're managing something." He tilted his head. "You look like something is managing you."
Wei Liang almost laughed despite everything.
"So what now?" Wei Liang said.
"Now," Feng said carefully, "you continue doing what you're doing. You hold the throne. You sign the treaty. You keep the empire stable." He paused. "And quietly, very quietly, we find out who killed the Emperor."
"And if it's Lady Shen Wei?"
Feng's expression didn't change.
"Then we deal with that," he said, "when we know for certain."
Wei Liang nodded slowly.
He turned to leave.
"Wei Liang."
He stopped.
He had not told Feng his name.
He turned back slowly.
Feng was watching him with an expression that was almost almost something warm underneath all that iron.
"He left your name," Feng said quietly. "In a second message I received the morning after his death. Just your name and one instruction." He paused. "He said you should protect him."
The room felt very still suddenly.
"The Emperor," Wei Liang said carefully. "Left my name."
"Yes."
"Before I was arrested."
"Three weeks before."
Wei Liang stood in the old armory with the single torch throwing shadows across everything and felt the floor shift slightly beneath him like something enormous had just moved underneath the world.
The Emperor had known.
I had planned.
Had chosen him.
This was never an accident.
He walked out of the armory into the dark corridor.
Stood against the cold stone wall.
Breathed.
Then from the shadows at the far end of the corridor a figure stepped forward and Wei Liang's heart nearly left his body entirely.
Princess Zhen Lihua stood ten feet away wrapped in a plain dark cloak, her hair loose, her eyes wide and locked directly onto his face.
She had followed him.
She had heard everything.
- Writer
