V2 Chapter Nineteen: Correlations
It took two full days for the dagger hall to provide the requested documents. Qing Liao spent the majority of that time practicing in the archery hall or curing hides in the textiles pavilion. Stilling his mind to meditate and cultivate proved too difficult. Each morning he appeared at the dagger hall for a practice session, acting on Chen Chao's suggestion that a subtle reminder would be wise. It did not make for a pleasant delay, but no cultivator, no matter how powerful, could make a clerk's pen move any faster. Attempting to bypass them would only take longer, their knowledge of the hall's inner workings could not be acquired in mere days.
Liao had hoped that the information he requested would make it easy to identify the killer, but when the documents arrived it took no more than a quick glance to recognize that it would not be so easy. Carefully, he took the scrolls and laid them down along the floor of his hall, staring at them over and over. One of the names listed on the cheap rag paper was responsible for eight deaths, but it certainly did not jump out from amid the scribbles. It was a puzzle, and he did not consider himself skilled at those.
He had hoped that most of the servants could be removed from the list simply by time. A considerable amount of which had passed since the demon horde incursion. He'd expected the number who had served the dagger hall continuously since then to be small. In this he was mistaken. Servants, as it happened, rarely changed workplaces. They might change tasks, especially as they aged, but it was common for them to remain tied to a single space, under the control of a single elder, for life.
This left several dozen male servants of the right age and experience to be the murderer.
"How do we find the right one?" He asked Chen Chao, quickly running out of ideas.
"What moves a man to kill?" She questioned in reply. "And not once, but over and over again?"
"I don't know." Liao had no idea. Murder was not unknown to him, but those few cases he had heard of in his life were village tales and all seemed tied to simple explanations. "Greed, jealousy, rage, these things drive men to kill, but almost always only once. Eight times, and all women? I do not know. They did not even look especially similar." He had considered that perhaps the killer's murderous desire might be tied to some specific appearance, slaying them upon refusal of his advances or some such trigger, but the descriptions of the victims displayed no such commonality. "Eight girls, all from servant families, reasonably young and superlatively pretty, but they had nothing else in common."
"Nothing?" Chen Chao blinked repeatedly in order to gather her center before she summoned the will to contest that statement. "Every one of them was a cultivator's mistress. Surely that matters?"
This time, it was Liao's turn to register surprise. He turned and looked at his maid, studying the pretty face. Looking past the lines imposed by age, he recalled the girl who'd first joined his bed when they'd both been foolish and hesitant teenagers. "Doesn't every pretty girl have a cultivator to support her?" he wondered aloud.
"No," Chen Chao shook her head rapidly. "Not at all. It is only common for those of us who choose personal service. Those who work for the sect, not a single cultivator, they mostly marry other servants. To bond with a cultivator, that is a choice. Most avoid it, knowing it means they will never marry. Taking a lover, outside of service, it is unwise, there are no rules or protections, unless it is an elder, but none of these girls were with elders. Think, the sect provides every new initiate with a servant intended to catch their eye and suit their manner, and they choose very carefully. What kind of man seeks a lover beyond what he already has?"
"Oh," Liao realized, with a sudden surge of shame, that he had missed a piece. Every cultivator had the power to fill their personal staff with bedmates, if they chose. They could also spend their nights with dancers in the city, men and women trained in the arts of carnal pleasure, so long as their funds held out. Anyone who pursued physical satisfaction beyond such avenues would seem to possess a rather overwhelming hunger for the pleasures of the flesh. Though Liao found the idea rather alien, he knew there were cultivators like that. Some even favored the chase over any acquisition of the prize.
Thinking on this, trying to place his mind in the proper frame, he formulated a possibility. "Is the killer after the girls for himself then? Is he slaughtering out of jealousy, some belief that all the women in the world are his to claim?" There were characters like that in some stories, men possessed of an endless greed to take every woman they found attractive as a possession. He had never thought of such fables as real but supposed it might be possible.
"No," Chen Chao shook her head. "If there truly was such a miserable wretch working within the dagger hall, everyone who know of him. Girls talk," she explained with a weak smile. "But this man remains hidden. He is nothing so obvious as a true letch. Maybe, he might even be married." She scowled, clearly upset at the idea of a wife who might miss such horrors in her husband.
Cultivators did not marry. Sect law even, for a reason Liao had never been able to fathom, prohibited such legal formalization of relationships. Living in such a world, he had slowly lost touch with the preeminence of matrimony among ordinary families. Many of the servants did marry, among themselves, and those who did so wore their hair carefully arranged so as to make this obvious to all. Cultivators occasionally conducted affairs with married servants anyway, but if discovered such liaisons carried severe punishments for both parties.
"I see," slowly, he tried to piece together the killer's nature while accounting for this different perspective. "So, the murderer does not want these girls for himself." He accepted Chen Chao's knowledge of her world as strong evidence. "But he must have a reason, and it must be based in romance, or at least lust." There were no male victims. That was not simply circumstance. A man who killed out of rage or some inexplicable murderous compulsion would surely target men at least some of the time.
"Yes," Chen Chao nodded in agreement. "It must be something similar. Jealousy, yes," she contemplated aloud, voice rushing from one thought to the next. "But not on his own behalf. Maybe he hates all cultivators and wants to take something from them. I know of all the girls he killed. They were all very young, not even twenty, and they had no prior lovers in the sect. Maybe," her eyes darkened. "He had some mad idea of purity. A madman might try to save them from the eyes of a cultivator. Some men in our families try to hide their children from the sect, wanting to preserve them for marriage instead."
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A dark thought, but one Liao found made a degree of sense. He could think of many reasons why a servant might come to hate the sect and all cultivators within it. Unable to strike out at that target, turning his blade on their lovers instead represented a certain crude plausibility. It was like killing a man's livestock or burning his house rather than striking at him directly. Hatreds within the sect also sometimes took this form. Law prohibited cultivators from killing one another, since every hand was needed upon the Starwall when the hordes came, but relatives and descendants did not possess such protections.
Yet, something about that deduction felt off. The killer possessed a qi-empowered weapon. A blade dangerous enough that, should he come upon an initiate in their sleep, he would have a real chance of striking a lethal blow. This too, sadly, was not unknown. Mistreated servants had been known to poison or stab their masters.
Carefully, Liao read over the list of names again, mind triggered by something he'd read in a handful of profiles. "What if," he scrambled along the length of the scroll, searching for the correct entry. "The motive is not rage, but grief?"
"Grief?" His maid responded with puzzlement. "What kind of grief?"
"Normally, cultivators outlive their servants." Those words had to be squeezed out, hard, in this company, Liao managed to gather sufficient excitement to push ahead. "But not always, not when a demon horde comes." Losses in the most recent incursion had been light, but there had still been nearly one hundred deaths. "Those servants in the households of those cultivators who fell in the fighting are not discarded," he considered this a kindness by the sect. "They are reassigned." There had been a small number of servants listed on the scroll, but only one that matched the other considerations they'd come up with. He scrambled about, trying to find the name again. "What if one servant, having suffered such a loss, wished to visit it upon others?"
"You mean this one, Deng Sheng?" Chen Chao placed her finger directly upon the listed entry. "The personal valet of Aning Suying, who died fighting the demon horde. He entered the service of the dagger hall afterward. I remember her," the maid explained, slightly wistful. "She was one of the chief beauties of the sect, and he is a very handsome man. There was always gossip, whispers that he was foolish enough to fall in love with her." She scoffed audibly.
That was a well-known tragedy. The sect accepted that cultivators and servants would share each other's beds, but love would always end in tears. Both sides were encouraged to avoid anything beyond the physical.
Liao took the sheet from her hand. Deng Sheng was thirty-seven years old. He had been the personal valet of Aning Suying from the moment she became an initiate. Prompted now, he recalled that face. A body refining realm cultivator a mere four years his senior, she had been a truly stunning beauty, the type to turn every head, male and female alike, when she entered a room. Of all those who fell during the incursion, she had been among the most widely mourned.
The sect certainly had no shortage of hypocrisy when it came to beauty. She had fallen to a single blast of superheated air from the Fuming Shade as he battled Akiray.
In the years since, Deng Sheng had neither married nor entered the service of another cultivator. He worked mundane tasks in the dagger hall and lived alone in a loft in Starwall City. He had no surviving family, an oddity among servants. They were generally well-connected within a network of entwined families. "It must be this man," Liao whispered. "He is killing these girls, making other cultivators suffer as he has suffered." A sickening thing, but any serial murderer surely possessed a truly twisted relationship to the dao.
"Sir, I believe you," Chen Chao agreed somberly. "There are always whispers surrounding those who lose their cultivators. It rarely ends well, such loss. Many kill themselves. The hordes strike hard among our families." Sadness radiated through her whole body. "And one who found the weapon you said he had might well believe the goddess meant for him to pass judgment. But," she paused and her eyes dropped to the floor. "This proves nothing."
"Proof?" Liao paused. His thoughts came to a sudden halt, disrupted. Chen Chao's expression was utterly severe. She was not jesting. He believed she would never do so in such a case as this. Despite that, he found the objection somewhat ridiculous. Deng Sheng was the killer. He was certain of it, no one else made sense. Dragging the man before an elder would suffice to secure a confession. Surely that was enough. "What need is there for proof?"
"There are rules, laid down in the ancient agreements between our ancestors and the Twelve Sisters," Chen Chao's expression was as hard as it had ever been. Liao had never seen this formidable, uncompromising side of his maid before. "They are as old as Mother's Gift. You cannot simply declare one of us a murderer. This charge, and any other that demands the life of the criminal, requires a trial. Being mortals does not make us fools, nor does it mean we consent to everything the sect declares."
A sour taste filled Liao's mouth. He had not meant to imply that, but it had simply felt natural. Having it tossed back in his face, forced to chew through the shame of the assumption, allowed him to believe it.
A series of agreements, of rules, between the Twelve Sisters and those who would serve them across generations, that made sense. Immortals enjoyed stability and hated dealing with minutia. Just as they allowed others to run the pavilions, they would value a system that spared them the need to sit in judgment over criminals. He suspected that he, like most of the sect's members, had no idea what these rules were, having never done anything contrary to them, but they were surely recorded in the archives. Doubtless the servants knew exactly where the lines were drawn, what they could and could not do.
Once again, he was deeply conscious of having broken through barriers. Leaning through a window to witness a part of the world he was not meant to see.
"Proof then," it was pointless to challenge the need, so he moved ahead instead. "The dagger will serve, it is distinctive." The smith who forged the weapon had died over a century ago in a failed tribulation, but the sect armory preserved a detailed description in addition to the counterpart dagger. No mortal had the right to carry a knife that burned to the touch. Liao looked over to his maid, studying her face carefully. "Is it against the rules to search his loft?"
"It is," Chen Chao noted quietly, whispering now. "But sir, you are very quiet. Could you not manage that without being noticed?"
This thought skittered across Liao's mind, furious and compelling. Sayaana had trained him in the arts of stealth. Those lessons would be worth little if he could not manage to get in and out of a building unnoticed by mortal observers. He would be able to find the dagger easily, it possessed a bound spark of distinctive qi. Even hidden in some concealed compartment or hollowed out beam he could locate it in seconds once close enough.
It would be a violation of this man's home, such a secret search, but Liao did not hesitate. He was certain, bound to a confidence born of intuition, that this was the right name, the right servant. The compromise, overruling one rule in order to enforce a greater one, was made without hesitation. "I should, yes," he told Chen Chao. "But I will need your help. It will have to be done at night, at some time when Deng Sheng is not at home."
In the city, during the day, there would simply be too many eyes. "And I cannot pretend to be a mortal." He knew it would not work, not anymore. The years as a cultivator had changed him, he'd seen it during visits to his parents. He no longer stood like a mortal or moved like one. There was also Sayaana's circlet, an item too valuable for any mortal to possess, that he would never willingly remove.
"You will have to act as my spotter. Are you willing to take the risk?" Liao did not want to put his maid anywhere near this monster, but he dared not add another to their circle.
Chen Chao never hesitated. She merely nodded in silence, resolve firm upon her face.