The wind carried the stink of rotting mulch and wet pine across Kuyao. Mo Jiyue, her crippled legs long numb beneath the heavy wool blanket, watched the imperial entourage from her makeshift cot in the center of the muddy square. Three months past, this settlement had been a scatter of huts and fallow fields. Now, watchtowers pricked the sky, and every villager moved with the grim efficiency of a soldier. The banner of the Ministry of Censure, a stark black serpent on a field of bruised purple, flapped against a sky the color of old lead. Duan Wujiu dismounted, his tall frame cutting a severe silhouette against the desolate backdrop. His armor, burnished obsidian, seemed to absorb the meager light. A tuft of dyed horsehair swayed from his helmet. His riders, cloaked in the same oil-rubbed wool, kept their stirrups squared and steady. Wujiu scanned the spiked ditch and ditch-banks, then settled his stare on Jiyue. No pity, only cold assessment. “Commander Mo,” Wujiu’s voice rasped like iron dragged across river gravel. “Your dispatches regarding the Rot are… vivid.” Jiyue met his stare, a faint, almost imperceptible tremor in her hands the only betraying sign of the biting cold. “Survival is arithmetic, Inquisitor. The rot secures our perimeter, for now.” She indicated the surrounding lanes, where figures wrapped in grease-stained hemp shuffled along the drainage trenches, two of them coughing dryly. One man, huddled by a fire, exposed a patch of skin on his neck – a mottled, purplish lesion that seemed to pulse with an unnatural heat. Wujiu’s eyes narrowed, lingering on the villager. His retainers shifted, pommels clinking against leather scabbards. “Your couriers wrote of putrid nodes, fever, and scarlet sores weeping black drainage. Highly contagious. Highly fatal. Why are you outside the perimeter ditch?” “Because I am immune,” Jiyue stated, her voice calm, devoid of inflection. Her right hand, concealed beneath the blanket, moved with practiced ease. Beneath her fingernail, a tiny, almost invisible blade glinted. “And because I have information you need more than you fear my touch.” Wujiu’s lip curled in a skeptical half-smile. “Information? From a cashiered officer exiled to an unmapped ditch? What ledger could you possibly hold that the capital lacks?” “Reconnaissance on the northern steppe riders along the Jade Peaks pass,” Jiyue replied. “Their vanguards are sounding the ravines. Not for livestock, but for an army before the thaw.” Wujiu’s impassive mask cracked for a moment, a flicker of surprise in his eyes. He took a slow step closer, his gaze sweeping over Jiyue’s face, searching for a lie. “Proof. The steppe clans have not united their banners in forty seasons.” “They’re not. And I have their troop numbers, their supply lines, their projected routes. More than your Imperial scouts, I’m willing to wager.” Jiyue watched him, reading the micro-expressions that even the ruthless Inquisitor couldn't entirely suppress. He was intrigued. He was wary. He was desperate for any advantage. She paused, letting the silence stretch, punctuated by the mournful wind. Then, with a deliberate, almost theatrical motion, Jiyue extended her right hand from beneath the blanket. The small blade, barely visible between her thumb and forefinger, flashed. Before the mounted men could shift their reins, she drew the iron edge across her own skin, parting the surface in a clean red seam. Her hand didn't tremble. She held it out, letting a single, fat drop of blood well up and then fall to the mud, instantly absorbed. Leather creaked as the horsemen jerked their reins backward. Even Wujiu himself stiffened, his eyes fixed on the oozing wound. “Explain yourself,” he demanded, hand dropping to the pommel of his saber. “My marrow carries no sickness,” Jiyue said evenly. “Proof that the contagion spares me, and proof that my dispatches reach your hand uncorrupted. Deliver sixty sacks of millet to this redoubt. In return, I surrender the mountain route charts.” As she spoke, a young woman, barely out of her teens, stumbled from a nearby hovel, wracked by a violent cough. Her face was pale, but around her mouth and nose, angry red lesions had begun to spread, almost like a grotesque mask of raw flesh. Her eyes were glazed, unfocused. She collapsed in the mud, spitting a mouthful of dark phlegm that shimmered with an unsettling, oily sheen. Two of the forward outriders yanked their bridles, their mounts skittering sideways into the slush. One gagged audibly. Jiyue’s gaze remained on Wujiu, a ghost of a challenge in her eyes. “Deal?” Wujiu inspected the curdled discharge on the ground, then Jiyue's sliced hand. The arithmetic favored caution: losing ten riders to pestilence served no purpose when an unmapped pass lay open to horse archers. His decision was swift. “Sixty sacks of millet. Delivered before dusk. And I expect the full tally of border outposts alongside your explanation.” He pointed a finger at her. “I’ll be back. And you *will* talk.” With a clipped command to his men, Wujiu turned, his black cloaks swirling. He wheeled his mare toward the gate, gesturing once to the rear files, iron hooves tearing the frozen loam as they galloped south. The moment the last black cloak vanished over the rise, the coughing girl in the mud pushed herself up, a wry grin on her face. Her lesions, Jiyue noted with approval, looked particularly convincing today. Suo Ning, Jiyue’s loyal lieutenant and closest friend, emerged from the shadows of a watchtower, a dark bundle under her arm. “He bought the whole performance, Jiyue. He turned tail at the sight of boiled plum starch.” Jiyue wiped her palm on a scrap of cloth, the cut already closing, a superficial nick disguised with makeup and a trick blade. “Panic distorts risk assessment, Ning. He will provision this compound as long as he calculates quarantine is cheaper than burial details.” She looked at the departing dust cloud, then at the huddle of villagers now emerging, their faces less desperate than before. “One month’s grain. It buys us time, but not enough.” Suo Ning knelt beside her, unwrapping the bundle. Inside, layered molds of cured pine sap and vulcanized tree resin rested among coils of oiled twine. “So, the next consignment?” Jiyue picked up a small, empty wooden bowl. Into it, she poured a thick, dark red liquid from a stoppered vial, then added a pinch of powdered pigment, stirring it with a twig. The mixture glistened, eerily lifelike. “The northern muster is genuine. Suo Ning, you cross the river tonight wearing the tax collector’s brow and cheek molds. Every measure of grain stolen from the provincial storehouse keeps our quarantine staffed. Human beings are simply set pieces in this valley, and we require more lumber.”

The Crimson Barter