'Easier said than done.'
Words to live by.
It is easy to say that it's time for the Hound's Master to join the stage. Easy for me to acknowledge that the preparations I've carried out are going to have to be enough, because there's nothing that, at this stage, I can add to them.
Easy bordering on trivial to know that this is it. That there's no more stalling. That we have gone too far for me to tell Xia that maybe there's something else to prepare for. That we should wait for the next gathering of loose-lipped nobles so we can be sure this is the best place to strike at on our first outing. That maybe she's underestimating how much I could contribute to this play if I had just a tad more training. If I had true power to bring to any fight.
If I could do something other than be the mind she wants me to be. The planner, thinker, and investigator.
If I had strength. True strength.
The kind that would allow me to stand by her side.
It's easy, oh so easy, to say that… that I will one day be able to…
To do something other than stare at her, mesmerized, the golden flames leaping around her frame telling me of the bond that ties us, that allows me to perceive much more of her than the brigands she's fighting against ever will.
That I see a light shaped by her will, her heart, her… soul.
That I see her. Xia.
But, at this moment, she's my Hound.
And it's not easy. My heart's pounding, and my breath barely heeds my instructions to cycle in and out in regular alternation of cool inhalation and heated exhale. My skin is clammy, and the cloak around me feels suffocating and, at the same time, not enough to stave off the night's cold.
But.
Xia.
And so, it's not easy. It's the furthest thing from easy I've ever faced.
But, when she leaps away from the brawl and toward my hiding place, pulsing the flame on her right hand thrice… I still move.
The crates are stacked high enough that a single leap gets me on top of the wall. I stand with my feet astride, but not far enough to open my pauldroned cloak. Just enough to make it willow around my ankles, still obscured from view, still hidden enough to disguise my inexpert stance and weight distribution, to allow me to fake ease and confidence only granted by my white porcelain mask.
"Hound, stop playing around," I say.
No.
The Heavenly Hound's Master says.
I have rehearsed. I have read and recited ominous monologues and speeches, modulating my voice and cadence well into the night, trying to find just the right register that surges from the depths of my chest and resonates behind white porcelain, my throat adding just a hint of breathy roughness that made Xia stare right at me for uncomfortably long the first time we tried this scene.
I am still caught between solemnity, dread, and ridicule.
"Who the fuck—" one of the kidnappers facing Xia says, looking away from her just long enough to take in my overly dramatic entrance.
The edge of Xia's open hand catches him on the nape, and he crumbles.
"Aw, come on, Master! We have to show these… gentlemen whose toes they have stepped on, don't we?" she says, bouncing on her own bare toes, her tail flicking side to side with unrestrained enthusiasm as she alternates between shooting me a radiant smile and looking at her three remaining opponents, such as they are.
My eyes narrow. Unnecessary. None of it shows past the thin slits in my mask.
But… I am getting into character. And I am no actor. So… every little bit helps.
"Enough. You have wasted enough time already. Put them down, or I will."
She shudders, her shoulders rising high enough to cover where her human ears would be, and she turns to fully face the three increasingly unnerved men.
"I'll have to cut this short," she tells them. "You don't quite deserve the alternative."
And she launches.
A man steps back, twin butterfly swords held in a high guard.
Xia disappears from his view, and he blinks, barely managing to look down in time to see her on the floor, pivoting around her left hand and lashing out in a scything kick that crumbles his knee and disables him, likely permanently.
The remaining duo sticks close together, both of them holding staffs at the ready in converging long guards.
Xia rushes them.
The one to the left thrusts, his weapon pushed by his rear hand and sliding through the loose grasp of the front one, and Xia doesn't even slow down when she slaps the attack aside hard enough to force it to block the rising sweep of the other man.
I barely manage to follow her next maneuver, when she sidesteps and then leaps forward, right against the man to the left's face, a genuine smirk showing a glint of white fang that distracts me from how she grabs the staff between his hands with her left and away from them with her right, getting far more leverage than the original wielder before she shifts her body to her backfoot and wrenches the piece of wood out of his grasp.
A single half-step back, a twirl of the weapon around her body, a tilt of her hips, and the staff comes crashing down on top of a now bleeding man's head.
The last one backpedals, frantically trying to regain a stable long guard.
Xia advances. Slowly. Hunger in her eyes.
He stops fleeing. But only because there's a wall at his back.
"Well?" she says. "Do you surrender?"
He nods. And keeps nodding.
Xia tilts her head.
"And the people you kidnapped? Did they surrender?"
He freezes.
"See, Master is… Master. He has given me instructions. Orders. I just had to send a message. But maybe… maybe you and your people are somewhat daft? Maybe you won't understand any message that isn't loud enough?"
The man's staff clatters to the floor, wood rattling on rounded stones for entirely too long before it rolls away.
"I… I understand. I will… I will send any message… that you want me to send, Lady—"
"I am no lady. I am my Master's Hound."
"Hound—"
"My Master's Hound. You… You may call me the Heavenly Hound. That, and only that."
"Yes, whatever you want! Just… just tell me what to say!"
Xia smiles.
"Tell them…"
"That I am coming for you," I say.
Most of the guards in this compound are conscious, if injured.
This place is a halfway stop. We know people come and then vanish. We know there's no basement or hidden jail. Carts full of would-be sewer clearers arrive from outside the walls, and some stop in here to clear this little sector of whatever has cropped up in the Jade Hive's waters after going through alchemical laboratories, clinics, and workshops.
Someone always goes missing. Someone always has.
But not as many. Not so fast. Not enough people for even nobles to find it worth commenting.
So. Rumors. Rumors, and bribed beggars, and little else because I'm no magistrate to demand records that have likely never existed or been altered to fit whatever tale the Yuhou clan and their masters have concocted.
I'm not a violent man. No more than average.
But I can't quite conceal the spark of sheer, hungry pleasure that almost overshadows the fear thrumming through my veins.
Xia pretends to be panicked and leaps away from the man slumped against the wall.
Usually, that would be a good place to cower at. Protected at least on one side. That's one of the few lessons from my father that I remember: when outnumbered, walls are your friends.
I spread my cloak open dramatically as Xia races toward me. My right arm sweeps in broad condemnation and talisman-lined fabric flutters in the night's breeze.
The indolent, relaxed hand turns upward and closes into an angry fist, quivering with contained power. Or with nerves and stage fright of the most urgent kind.
I lift my fist in front of my mask, and I slowly open my fingers.
That's when, with my left hand, the one still hidden inside my cloak and tucked behind my back for good measure, I flick open the fire tube that's been tucked in my belt for uncomfortably long.
I drop it, knowing after far too many tests that the short drop will reignite the ember smothered in cotton fibers inside of it, that this ember will turn into a flare hidden by my black clothes, and that it will…
Hopefully…
If I have not messed this up spectacularly…
…
This is taking too—
Sulfur assaults my nose, and orange light roars from down below, theatrical shadows dancing all over my still flared cloak as fire spreads as fast as black powder allows it to.
I almost heave with the release of nervous expectation, but I have to remain standing like the Heavenly Hound's Master would, the center of the spectacle about to—
The corners of the wall explode at the same time, brick, mortar, and plaster raining down on the injured human traffickers littered all over the inner yard.
And the fire advances.
Flames surge in ever-growing waves along the sides of the building, and I stand still, hand dramatically poised, showing the slightest strain as if I'm guiding a technique too powerful for mere foot soldiers to understand.
Xia leaps atop the wall and kneels right by my side, head bowed down, tail… lashing out behind her with undisguised elation.
I keep pretending as men scream and roll away from ruin and blaze. The main building collapses, timber cracking under both the strain of fallen brickwork and the explosives I've painstakingly placed through this entire compound while my lady entertained herself with other men, a phrasing that makes all the more convincing the burst of anger that has my open hand tremble in restrained… something.
"Master…" she breathes out in a quiet awe that I don't know if our audience will be able to appreciate.
Green eyes. Green eyes looking up at me like they did that first night when we—
The last charge goes off, and a pillar of varicolored sparks spirals up and up, far too close to what fireworks usually look like for my comfort, but…
We mean to send a message.
So, I look down with contempt at the screaming, panicked men, and close my cloak with as grand a gesture as I opened it. For a moment, we stand there, Hound and Master, framed by the dark sky and the bonfire beneath us.
Then, without turning away, I step back and I…
Fall.
Which is nerve-wracking. Almost as terrifying as everything else I have gotten up to tonight.
But Xia leaps right after me, shattering the crates under us with a single punch and twisting in mid-air inside the cloud of splinters and flickering sparks to catch me in her arms with the barest hint of strain.
Then, in this undignified position, she runs.
Taking me away in a bridal carry.
I, as any average scribe would in such dire circumstances, blush hard enough that I'm grateful for the porcelain mask hiding at least this much of my shame.
━❖━
"So, then we… ransack the building? Look for a paper trail?" she said, leaning over my shoulder as I sat in front of the map I had traced after a couple of mornings meandering through the lower district of the Jade Hive.
I shook my head, but not because that made it so my face came ever closer to the side of her brocade-clad breasts. Not at all. I was focused on the grave task ahead. On fulfilling my duty as her stalwart vassal.
Truly, duty was the only thing on my mind as Xia came ever closer to study my map and notes, extending her arm around me to underline some key pieces of information.
"Wu?"
"Yes, my lady?"
"You may resume breathing."
"… Yes, my lady."
She smiled something smug and triumphant that called back to mind the indignity I had suffered at her tyrannical hands when her grip on my cheeks had forced my face into the semblance of a far from draconic carp.
Privately, I swore swift and merciless vengeance.
Not quite privately, I tried to set my mind on the plan.
Or, rather, the plans.
I had thought about trying to follow a paper trail, but I believed it unlikely that our first targets would have any such thing. At best, even if we managed to stumble on some accounting registers or missives before reinforcements or authorities came to investigate our operations, whatever we found would in all likelihood be written in code. And I had no training as a spymaster or codebreaker.
Those were conjectures, though.
And that was all we had.
"Smuggling. Drugs. Human trafficking," she read from my short list of actionable intelligence.
I nodded.
There were other rumors, to be sure. Terrible ones. The kind of thing that made scandalized whispers rise in joyous pitch.
But we knew not enough.
These… These targets were concrete. They tied into things we could intuit, yes, the tangled mess of economic alliances and rivalries that featured the Jinyan clan all too prominently, but they were also unverifiable without access to documents and officials that we couldn't probe without breeding suspicion about what the representative of the Zhinu clan and her scribe were getting up to.
So.
That's not what we would do.
"I think… if I may suggest a course of action, my lady?"
Xia looked down at me, and I ignored the way that her soft, approving smile made me feel.
Just like I wish I could ignore how her cradling my face against her fur-covered breasts is making me feel.
"Okay, far enough," she mutters, distracted, looking around her.
We are in an alley, a dark one, hidden from the people rushing toward the blazing ruin of one of the compounds of the Yuhou clan.
She's still holding me.
Her eyes are closed, her canine ears folded over wild, golden tresses, and her chest rises and falls in steadily more noticeable ways.
"My lady? I think you can let me go now?"
Green eyes snap open.
And she does let go.
For a fraction of a second.
My feet barely touch the ground before her hands slam my shoulders against the wall on the other side of the alley, and she's close. Real close. Closer even than when she's trained me and repositioned my body in ways too uncomfortable to acknowledge.
Like I'm desperately trying not to acknowledge at the moment.
Her breathing is uneven, her eyes are wild, and her lips—her pink, wet lips—are half-open, just enough that scalding air washes over the front of my neck as I swallow frantically and I'm once again thankful for how much my mask hides.
"Wu?"
"Yes, my lady?"
"We did it."
Her eyes sparkle.
And she laughs.
Hushed, trying not to be overheard by anyone rushing toward the scene of our first crime nor by any of the beggars we have paid to be on the lookout for any notable names doing so. Overheard by anyone in the seed of our information network tasked with noting movement, informants, and runners.
But she laughs so freely that I…
That I join her.
She still holds me up, by my shoulders, and I slump against the wall as my nerves finally drain out of me and mirth takes their place. As I join my lady in laughing at something without humor but more than enough joy.
Somehow, my mask comes undone, and I can see her without the filter of thin slits. I can see Xia, close to me, her sharp ears twitching, her tail wagging hard enough that it wraps around her hips as the golden fur of her pelt presses against my black robes and…
She…
She's on her tiptoes. Slightly taller than me.
Her lips are close.
"My lady?" I ask.
"Hound," she answers, barely audible. "Your Hound."
And she kisses me.
Xia kisses me.
My heart thunders in my chest, and that's… the only thing I know. The only thing other than soft lips and my world spinning out of my grasp as her hands go around my shoulders, firm palms pressing on my back, pushing me toward her, forcing me to return at least an ounce of the force she assaults me with.
"My lady—" I try when she relents for a single, gasped, desperate breath.
She shakes her head, obstinate as she ever was when we… when we ran and… and sunlight streaming under swaying branches, and…
Xia.
Xia.
My Xia.
Something pounds against my temples, and a hand on my nape pulls me down as porcelain clatters to the ground.
Mint. There's mint on her tongue.
And that's the last thing I can put into words.
Warmth, softness, Xia.
Hands. Hands up and down. Hair pulled. Lips suckled. Tongues tangled.
She's against the wall. Writhing. Moaning.
I'm above her. Pushing.
A thread of energy thrums.
She whines.
My thoughts try to come back. To fight against the wordless thing, the shortness of my breath, the hunger that calls out to her, that tells me to take, and take and keep taking—
Porcelain cracks.
We stop.
My mask. Yes. My porcelain mask that we dropped.
But we haven't stepped on it.
Slowly, we turn toward the entrance to this secluded, dark alley.
Twin, amber eyes vertically slitted look at us.
A girl. Young. Tawny-haired. Feline ears and eyes.
"Don't… don't mind me. I have heard nothing. Seen nothing," she says, slowly backing away from the cracked pieces of my broken mask.
Xia's left eye twitches.
And, more hound-like than ever, she pounces.
━❖━⧫━❖━
And so, we come to the end of this first arc of The Heavenly Hound's Master. Only about ten thousand more remain.
… That may be a slight exaggeration. A mild one. A hint of hyperbole, if you may.
But, well, if you're eager to know what happens next (https://www.patreon.com/collection/2019062)… You are in good company.
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