Chapter 6: The Witch Doctor

In the carriage.

Shan Yiqiu leaned against a cushion, keeping some distance between himself and Xie Hansheng.

The exchange outside had not touched him at all. The moment he stepped into the carriage, whatever had been on his face drained away like a tide going out, leaving nothing behind, the whole effect very relaxed and detached.

Xie Hansheng felt the gentle sway of the moving carriage and his body instinctively avoided the protective runes carved into the sides of the compartment.

The interior was quiet. Seeing that Shan Yiqiu showed no sign of speaking, he opened first.

“Where are you taking me?”

Shan Yiqiu had his eyes closed and seemed to be on the verge of sleep, yet his answer came quickly.

“To the execution ground.”

There was no way to tell whether he meant it or whether it was simply a poor joke tossed out without thought.

Xie Hansheng was quiet for a moment and pulled at the corner of his mouth.

“Your Excellency the Enforcement Officer, what happened to that widely praised kindness of yours?”

Shan Yiqiu finally opened his eyes and looked over with an expression that was almost a smile.

“Do you think I’m kind?”

A small crystal lamp hung from the top of the carriage. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Its light was dim and yellow and fell between the two of them, dividing the space into areas of interlacing light and shadow.

Even across a distance of less than a meter, the way the light and shadow cut across Shan Yiqiu’s features made his face look somehow not entirely real.

Xie Hansheng noticed again that this enforcement officer’s eyes were not a pure, deep black but carried a trace of warm brown in them, though in the light at this moment even that warmth seemed frozen.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Xie Hansheng said plainly, his gaze steady and unevasive.

“But the people outside all praise you that way.”

A single accommodating word would have softened the atmosphere and might even have bought him some goodwill, and the cue for it was right there, yet he simply would not say it, stubborn as permafrost stretching a thousand miles and the rock deeper still.

Shan Yiqiu did not take offense, instead he let out a low laugh.

He shifted into a more relaxed position and tucked half his face into the shadow of the cushion, leaving only the eyes and the corner of his lips where the smile lived.

“Commander Xie,” he said, his tone easy, “we have known each other for several years now. I have always wanted to know why you always seem to have a problem with me. We got along perfectly well before.”

“I don’t have a problem with you,” Xie Hansheng answered quickly, almost like a reflex.

“And we never got along.”

“Is that so?”

The smile in Shan Yiqiu’s eyes deepened and his brown eyes caught a subtle gleam in the dim light.

“I have a feeling you’re cursing me in your head right now… something like, hypocrite? Sanctimonious? Or some other choice word?”

Xie Hansheng: “…”

Xie Hansheng: “No I’m not.”

Cornered, he looked away and turned his gaze out the window at the dark streets flowing past.

Faced with his refusal to engage, Shan Yiqiu accepted this with equanimity and let Xie Hansheng sit with it a while longer before speaking again.

“Your current situation makes it difficult for you to go to a regular hospital. I have a friend who can help you with your wounds.”

“My wounds don’t need attending to,” Xie Hansheng said.

“They’ll heal on their own quickly enough.”

“I’ve heard that various substances were injected into you without any clear purpose, and nobody knows what other effects those compounds might produce,” Shan Yiqiu said.

“It would be best to have you examined. I didn’t go to all this trouble just to fish out a walking invalid.”

He said all this trouble, yet from the time he had come to the cell to see Xie Hansheng, to the issuing of the execution order, to Xie Hansheng walking out of the prison, fewer than twenty-four hours had passed in total.

All the trouble required for Shan Yiqiu to achieve, within twenty-four hours, something the Holy Court had no precedent for, and pull a transformed creature out of prison.

A creature who had, moreover, witnessed the inhuman experiments being conducted within the Holy Court itself.

Xie Hansheng thought of the document he had taken into his own hands. Perhaps Shan Yiqiu’s reach had long since extended into places beyond his power to imagine.

The conversation came to a stop somewhere in the unfinished thoughts of each of them.

The carriage rolled on for a while longer, then finally came to a halt at the entrance to a quiet alley.

Shan Yiqiu pushed the door open and stepped out first. The few enforcement officers who had followed moved soundlessly to fan out and seal off both ends of the alley entrance. Once it was confirmed that no stray eyes remained, Shan Yiqiu came back to the window of the carriage and bent his fingers to knock twice against the frame.

Xie Hansheng, who had been waiting near the door, jumped down from the carriage. His feet met the cold, damp stone and as he straightened, the movement reached the foreign object deep in his spine. The nail drove a fraction deeper into the bone with the change in posture, sending waves of sharp, grinding pain through him.

Xie Hansheng’s step paused for a moment, then he straightened his back and his expression returned to normal.

He looked around and recognized where he was.

The residents of this area turned over at a remarkable rate, because the environment was too loud and too chaotic for any respectable person to stay long. The ones who settled here were mostly those who operated in the grey zones; smugglers, underground sorcerers, alchemists running unorthodox experiments, and fugitives with nowhere left to turn.

The enforcement authorities generally turned a blind eye to the place, but if anyone ever looked seriously, nine out of every ten households would be making a trip to a cell.

Xie Hansheng had not imagined that the friend Shan Yiqiu had mentioned would be living somewhere like this.

He confirmed it, “Your friend lives here?”

Shan Yiqiu adjusted his coat and nodded without any sign of embarrassment.

“Yes.”

Xie Hansheng frowned.

There were questions that probably shouldn’t be asked, but he could not help himself.

“Is this friend of yours operating legally?”

At this, Shan Yiqiu glanced over at him and told the plain truth.

“At the moment, the least legal entity in my vicinity is you.”

There was nothing Xie Hansheng could say to that.

Seeing him go quiet, Shan Yiqiu was satisfied and led him deeper into the alley.

The cold, damp stone path gleamed with water in the dim light, and the low buildings on either side had their doors and windows shut tight, with the occasional gap opening and closing in the shadows as someone peered out.

The air carried a stale, rank smell.

They stopped before a door at the very end of the alley.

The wooden door was worn and pitted, with no marking of any kind on it, and the brass handle had rusted nearly to ruin. Shan Yiqiu raised his hand, made a fist, and knocked three times firmly on the door.

There was complete silence inside the door, and no response came for a long time.

Just as Xie Hansheng was beginning to think no one was inside, the door was yanked open from within.

A scrawny old man, thin as a dry branch and wearing a wrinkled sleeping robe, leaned out.

His hair was white and sparse, and on top of his head sat an extremely peculiar hat. Around the brim, a ring of small bones had been attached, processed to a white finish, and from their rough shape they looked very much like the front leg bones of a cat or dog.

The old man’s gaze went first to Shan Yiqiu, his expression quite composed, with nothing more than a trace of irritation. But when his eyes shifted to Xie Hansheng beside him, those cloudy eyes opened wide in a sudden jolt.

His lips moved, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, as if some words were rolling around in his throat, but in the end he just took a step back, making room for the doorway.

“Come in.”

……

Stepping into this house required a certain mental preparation, because you never knew what your next step might land on.

The old man was a master of spatial management, having made use of every inch of his limited space to the utmost, with objects piled in no particular order, some stacked all the way to the ceiling.

Old texts, dried herbs, glass vessels and metal instruments of every shape sat in no discernible arrangement, and a few scrolls of parchment had been stuck into a crucible with suspicious metallic residue on its surface. Skeletal specimens of cats and rabbits were everywhere, some assembled whole, some scattered in corners.

Shan Yiqiu, without changing his expression, kicked a wooden box that had ended up under his foot to one side, then dodged a glass bottle hanging down from the ceiling, turned back and signaled to Xie Hansheng to watch out for the half-jar of liquid swaying near his hand.

Ahead of them, the old man walked with his muscles pulled tight and the nerves of it written all over his steps, turning to look over his shoulder every few paces with the manner of someone following not two people but a wild beast that might lunge at any moment.

Xie Hansheng, by contrast, was the more unruffled one, surveying the chaos of the collection around him with equanimity and even pausing a few extra seconds to look when they passed a shelf full of colored crystals.

They made their way with some difficulty through the mountains of accumulated clutter and came to a room that was relatively clear.

The room was divided by a heavy curtain stained with something indeterminate. The area behind it allowed a vague glimpse of a simple cot.

The old man stopped here, rubbed his gaunt palms together, looked at Shan Yiqiu first, then turned to Xie Hansheng and said quickly.

“You… go wait inside for a moment.”

Whether Xie Hansheng had spotted something during the tour just now, or simply couldn’t be bothered to argue, he gave a nod, lifted the curtain, and went in.

The instant the curtain fell, the old man shook from head to toe as though he had just set down a thousand-pound weight, or as though a venomous snake had sunk its teeth into him.

He did not look at Shan Yiqiu at all and turned away in rapid steps. Shan Yiqiu followed without hurry.

They had barely reached the outer room piled with clutter when 9653 piped up.

[He is going to give you trouble.]

Sure enough, the moment the old man reached a spot relatively far from the inner room, he turned on the spot, grabbed Shan Yiqiu by the arm, hauled him into a corner, and hissed in a rapid, breathless whisper.

“Enforcement Officer! I never said I would help you with this!”

“Help me with what, exactly?”

Shan Yiqiu let himself be grabbed and asked back in a natural tone.

“I told you I had a patient who needed some help with his wounds, and you agreed.”

“You call that a patient?!”

The old man’s voice pitched upward slightly with agitation, then he crushed it back down at once. His gaunt fingers trembled as he pointed toward the inner room.

“The scales on his neck are barely hideable anymore! Where did you get him from?!”

“The Silent Chamber,” Shan Yiqiu said plainly.

“Just brought him out.”

The old man: “…”

He was speechless at the overly direct and shocking answer. His mouth was agape, and he couldn’t make a sound for a long time. Only his fingers, which were gripping Shan Yiqiu’s arm, kept chattering, and his knuckles turned white from the force.

He held it in for quite some time and finally squeezed three words up from deep in his throat.

“…Xie Hansheng?”

It seemed the old man had heard about the incident that had befallen the former Knight Commander.

Shan Yiqiu nodded.

The old man released the arm he had been holding and rubbed his face.

“You just brought him here like that? Brought him here, to me?” He asked in a suppressed voice.

“Is there a problem?”

“Are you genuinely not understanding this, or are you pretending? [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] He has transformed!”

The old man lurched to his feet, waving his thin arms, not daring to raise his voice, reduced to urgent gesturing.

“Do you know what that actually means? The darkness has worked its way into the cracks of his bones! Right now he looks like a person, but the next second he could turn into something that only wants to tear living things apart! You put him here with me, and if he suddenly… I mean, on the off chance! What do you do? What do I do?!”

“He did not attack me,” Shan Yiqiu stated the facts.

“The journey was perfectly quiet; and besides…”

He paused and, after careful consideration, arrived at his conclusion.

“I believe he is quite rational at present.”

The old man looked at him the way one looks at a person who has lost their mind.