Chapter 83 of 98
The Barbarian Lord's Hall
The plan was going smoothly.
Smoothly enough that it frightened Li Yuguo a little. He had written too many stories. He knew what it meant, in the middle of the second act, when everything went smoothly.
He sat in Yan Qiu's chair with Yan Qiu's face on and listened to the mine go on around him. Tock. Tock. Tock. A hundred and more of his own people with picks in their hands and crystal dust in their hair, pretending to be slaves. Two of his best men at the tunnel mouth in barbarian leathers. A hole in the back of the mountain that led to the trees.
And a Martial Soul barbarian in a hall down in the village, who would come up here sooner or later to fetch his slaves.
They held their council in the little room.
Six of them, crowded among the rock and the torchlight. Li Yuguo in the overseer's chair. Guan Yunfan against the wall with his arms folded and his one eye half closed. Ximen Lang squatting on his heels by the pole where the collars had been chained. Li Yutang, standing, with his thumbs in a dead guard's belt. And on the bench at the side, close together, Nalan Meng and Yun Xianchen in their clinging silk.
"We can't go at them head on," Li Yuguo said. "Not in the village."
"No," said Ximen Lang. "Luo Jin's at Martial Soul. Under him there are four chieftains, and every one of them is half a step from it. If even two of them stand together, we lose half our people before we reach them." He scratched a rough map in the dust with a pick handle. The lord's hall. The market. The gambling house. The chieftains' longhouses up the slope. "If they come at us all at once, we lose all of them."
"Then they don't come at us all at once," said Guan Yunfan.
"One by one," Li Yuguo said. "The lord first. Then the chieftains. Quietly. Each one alone. When they're gone, the rest of the village is just men with axes. Then we take it."
Nobody argued. It was the only plan there was.
Li Yutang was not listening.
He was nodding at the right places. He was frowning at the dust map when the others frowned at it. He even said, once, "The market's too open," which was true, and which Ximen Lang agreed with.
But his eyes kept sliding sideways to the bench.
To Nalan Meng.
She sat with her knees together and her hands in her lap and her face turned toward her husband, listening. The silk lay on her like water. It had been made to cling, and it clung—to the full round swell of her breasts, to the deep curve of her waist, to the flare of her hips on the bench. And under the silk, drawn on her body in fine bright lines, the chains. He could trace them with his eyes. The ring at her throat. The two strands running down. The way each strand split into three over the soft swell of her breast and framed the nipple—the nipple itself, pressing up stiff against the thin silk. The ring at her waist. And the single line, running down from it, over the soft low curve of her belly, to vanish between her closed thighs.
He knew exactly where that line went. He had seen it, in the mine, from two arm's lengths away. Sunk between her cheeks. Lying in her pussy.
In his head, he reached out and hooked one finger under it. And pulled.
He imagined it very clearly. He had always had a good imagination for her.
The silk sliding off her shoulders. Her looking up at him with that cold face of hers, the one she had worn for him for years, every time he came near. Brother-in-law. As if it were a word for something on the bottom of her shoe. And then the cold face breaking. The way it had broken at the merchants' party when she knelt between his knees in her little white mask and her lips went down over his cock. He had lasted less than a minute. He was still ashamed of that.
Next time, he would last.
"Yutang," said Li Yuguo.
He looked up. They were all looking at him.
"The gambling house," Li Yuguo said patiently. "You've been to it. Is there a back way?"
"Ah. Yes. Through the kitchen yard." He bent over the map and pointed with his toe, and his face was perfectly serious, and his cock was hard in his stolen leathers, and he went on imagining.
The sun moved over the mountain. The torches burned down and were replaced.
A few hours after noon, the two men at the tunnel mouth came running in.
"The lord," one of them said, breathless. "Coming up the track. Alone, with two of his house guards. He'll be here before you can boil water."
Everyone moved.
Li Yuguo stood up out of the chair and looked at his wife.
He did not have to say anything. She understood. So did Yun Xianchen. They looked at each other once. Then they both stood up, and let the robes fall.
The silk slid off their shoulders and down their bodies and lay pooled around their feet on the stone. And there they were again. Gold on white. Throat-ring, waist-ring. The fine chains crossing their breasts, which bounced free into the torchlight as the silk let go of them and settled, heavy and full, with the three small strands framing each pink nipple. The two little useless cloths. The line between their legs.
In the room, nobody breathed.
Six men had been sitting with them for hours. Talking about war. And every one of those six men forgot about war entirely for the space of a breath, and looked.
Nalan Meng's face was red. Yun Xianchen's was redder. Neither of them covered herself. There was no time for it. And there was no point.
This is a uniform, Nalan Meng told herself, very firmly. A disguise. Like his mask. She bent and picked up the collar chain, and fastened the collar at her throat herself, with her own fingers. Her hands were quite steady. Her pussy was not. She felt it clench, once, when the cold iron closed around her neck.
They went to their places.
Luo Jin came into the mine like a bear into a sheepfold.
He filled the tunnel mouth. He had to stoop under it. Then he straightened, and the light of the crystal walls fell across his scarred face, and every man in the cavern bent a little lower over his pick.
Li Yuguo came forward to meet him in Yan Qiu's body, with Yan Qiu's broad smile.
"Lord," he said, and bowed.
Up close, the man was worse. Seven feet of muscle and fur and old scars. He walked like an animal—not a man pretending to be fierce, but a thing that had never in its life needed to pretend. The ground seemed to give a little under his feet. And his Qi. Li Yuguo had felt Martial Soul pressure before, from far off. Never this close. It lay on the skin like the heat from a forge door.
If this goes wrong, he thought, I won't even see it go wrong.
Luo Jin dropped into the big chair the house guards set for him in the middle of the cavern floor, and stretched out his legs.
The disguised miners came crowding in from the tunnels to make their bows. That was the custom. A hundred of them, more, in rags, heads down. They knelt in rows on the stone in front of the chair. Li Yuguo had told them to watch the overseer and do what the overseer did, and so they did.
"Overseer." Luo Jin's voice was deep enough to feel in the chest. "Where are my slaves?"
"In the cave, lord," said Li Yuguo. "I'll bring them."
He went quickly to the little room, and they were ready.
Kneeling just inside the opening, side by side, in their gold, with their collars on and their chains coiled on the floor in front of them like rope. Waiting.
He bent and picked up the two chains.
Nalan Meng looked up at him. Into Yan Qiu's face, with his eyes in it.
It's all right, he wanted to say. It was not all right. He did not say anything. He closed his hand on the chains and turned, and walked, and felt the small weight of the collars come taut and then follow.
They came out of the little room behind him into the light of the great cavern.
The disguised miners saw them.
They had heard. All of them had heard by now—from the dead guards' talk, from Li Yutang's men in the night, in whispers along the line. The lord's slaves. It's them. They had heard, and they had not believed.
Now they saw.
Their City Lord. The woman who had sat in the crimson robe on the dais of the city hall and given them their orders. Who had ridden at the head of the guard. Who they had followed into the forest to this mountain. Walking across the stone toward them on a chain, barefoot, in a harness of fine gold that hid nothing. Her breasts bare and bouncing with every step. Her face scarlet and lowered.
And behind her, the Ice Fairy of the True Yuan Sect. Untouchable Yun Xianchen. Whom half the young men of the sect had worshipped from a distance, and none had ever dared approach. Naked in gold, on a barbarian's leash.
A shiver went through the kneeling rows like wind through grass.
Every cock in that cavern was hard. They could not have stopped it if their lives had depended on it. Their lives did depend on it, a little. They bent their heads lower over the stone, and their cocks strained against their rags as if they meant to tear free, and they did not make a sound.
Li Yuguo brought them up in front of the chair.
Luo Jin looked them over. Slowly. Up and down. The clean shining skin. The gold lying bright on it. The heavy breasts. He grunted, pleased.
"You kept them well, overseer," he said.
"Thank you, lord."
Luo Jin stood up—the whole cavern seemed to tilt when he stood—and took the two chains out of Li Yuguo's hand into his own.
Li Yuguo's hand was empty. He stood there and looked at it.
Nalan Meng could not lift her face.
She could feel them. Every one of them. The city guards she had drilled on the parade ground. The officers who had bowed to her in the hall. Behind them, the young True Yuan disciples, Yun Xianchen's juniors. All of them kneeling in rows, and all of them looking at her, and she could feel the looks on her skin like hands. On her breasts. On her belly. On the line of gold between her legs.
They know. There was no mask here. No masked party, no pretending. They knew exactly who she was.
And beside her, Yun Xianchen's chain shook very slightly in the lord's fist, because Yun Xianchen was shaking.
They were jealous. She could feel that too. Jealous of the barbarian holding their chains. And under the jealousy, anger, wanting to kill him. She did not know which was stronger. She did not know, either, which was stronger in herself: the shame, or the heat that was gathering low in her belly and spreading down, slow and slick, until she could feel it on the chain.
Luo Jin pulled their chains, and led them to his chair, and sat.
He loosened his leathers. He took out his cock.
It was as big as she remembered. Bigger, in the torchlight, with a hundred men behind her to compare it to. It came out heavy and dark and already half-swollen, thick as her wrist, ridged with veins, the foreskin drawn halfway back from a head as broad as a plum. No man kneeling in that cavern had anything like it. She could feel them knowing it.
Luo Jin looked down at the two of them, and his scarred mouth twisted.
"Do I have to tell you every time?" he said. "Before you suck it?"
They went down together.
On their knees on the stone, in front of the chair. Between his spread thighs. And because the chair was low and his legs were long and his cock stood up out of his lap at the height of their faces, they had to lean forward to reach it—and leaning forward lifted their asses.
Behind them, a hundred kneeling men stopped breathing.
The little white cloths at the back of their waist-rings hung for a moment, and then slid off to the sides as their hips rose. There was nothing left. Two round white asses, lifted toward the crowd, side by side. The fine golden chain running down from each waist-ring and vanishing into the deep soft crease between the cheeks. Lost. Sunk out of sight. And then, as their knees spread a little on the stone for balance, shining out again lower down, where their cheeks parted—pressed into two small pink assholes, lying in the slit of two plump pink pussies.
The whole cavern could see it. Their city guards. Their juniors. Their loyal men.
Nalan Meng put her tongue out, and touched his cock.
It was hot. It was always hot, this barbarian's cock, hotter than a man's skin had any right to be. It tasted of salt and sweat and the musk of the fur he wore. She licked up the side of it, slowly, from the root to the swollen head, and felt it twitch against her tongue and harden, and swell.
On the other side, Yun Xianchen did the same.
Their faces were very close. The cock was between them. They licked it from either side, their tongues sliding up the thick shaft and down again, and sometimes their tongues met at the top, at the head, and slid wetly over each other for a moment before they parted again. Nalan Meng opened her lips and took the head into her mouth, and sucked, and felt it fill her, stretching her lips wide. Beside her, Yun Xianchen moved lower, to the root, and pressed her soft mouth against the base where the shaft came out of the coarse black hair, and licked there.
Luo Jin let out a long breath and leaned back.
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