BST - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: I'll Give It My All

Borrow his head... for a bit?

If the head is gone, can the person still live?

Sima Daozi's pupils contracted. "You mean to kill me?"

"How dare you!"

Even though the Heavenly Screen had already told the world that he, the Prince of Kuaiji, had wrested power from His Majesty's hands and committed all manner of wicked deeds, making him intolerable to the new sovereign, he had never imagined that the first to move against him would be Wang Shen'ai, the Crown Princess.

That the one who spoke up first now was she, and not Wang Xun, made Sima Daozi realize almost instinctively that the one who had truly made this decision to kill was Wang Shen'ai.

This child, no more than thirteen!

His voice turned harsh and sharp. "Does the Crown Princess imagine that with my head in hand, you can deliver a token of submission to that future Emperor Yong'an? The Wang Clan of Langya has long been bound inextricably to my Sima clan. If the Jin dynasty collapses, you too will..."

"Who says we must be buried along with you?" Wang Shen'ai cut him off, firing back the question first.

"Imperial Uncle, you are indeed the pillar of the imperial clan, but do not forget, the appearance of the Heavenly Screen is not necessarily good news for that future Emperor Yong'an."

"With the Wang Clan of Langya making its choice clear at this moment, it can hardly be called opportunism. It may even be coming to his aid in his hour of need, wouldn't you say?"

Wang Xun said nothing, but nodded at her side.

Just look at Sima Daozi, who wanted to slaughter indiscriminately before he had even settled on a target. That would scarcely be an isolated case.

Once the Yong'an Emperor's identity came to light, the dangers he faced would be no fewer than those of the present.

If the Wang Clan of Langya was willing to take a gamble and fight first for a chance to prove its loyalty, then any scheme they might hatch later, or even a turnabout strike against that Emperor Yong'an, would become far easier.

As Wang Shen'ai had said, now was not the time for them to be smooth and cautious and stand idle.

Killing Sima Daozi, the advantages far outweighed the drawbacks!

"You have already lost the most important mandate of heaven, so there is no need to struggle." Wang Shen'ai's voice was flat, yet the next instant after those words she raised her hand.

She could no longer be bothered to listen to Sima Daozi's nonsense. Since keeping him alive was of no use, she would simply kill him.

The crossbowmen Wang Xun had summoned were all personal retainers of the Wang Clan of Langya. Their reverence for the Eastern Jin imperial house was slight to begin with, let alone for the Prince of Kuaiji before them.

The instant Wang Shen'ai raised her hand, more than a dozen feathered arrows leapt from their strings.

Amid the sharp whistle of arrows slicing through the air, a voice broke off abruptly. "You cannot..."

No. There was nothing that could not be done.

Sima Daozi's eyes went wide.

The arrowheads had buried themselves in his chest and forehead, leaving only the fletching quivering outside.

All doubt and defiance turned to ash in that moment and scattered on the wind.

The last shred of his awareness fled swiftly, leaving him unable to tell whether the dismemberment by five horses the Heavenly Screen had spoken of would have been the more brutal end, or whether this death was the more wretched.

But beyond all doubt, his earlier struggle to survive and all the arrangements he had made had lost every scrap of meaning.

His body, even before the breath had left it, crashed heavily to the ground.

Barely half a day had passed since the death of "Emperor Xiaowu," Sima Yao.

Wang Shen'ai tilted her head back, straining to shift her gaze from the bloody scene before her to the painted beams and rafters overhead, yet that acrid stench of blood still forced its way into her nostrils.

Earlier, when Sima Yao had been smothered to death by Noble Lady Zhang, the darkness of night had hidden most of it. Nothing like now, where the scene of a man's death lay so plainly before her, and one she herself had set in motion.

Had she not gone without so much as a bite of food since the night before, she would long since have retched from the nausea.

Yet the sting of her fingertips pressing into her palm reminded her again and again that, at least for now, she could not show the slightest weakness and endanger her own chance of survival.

She could not.

Her face still wore its earlier indifference. Hands clasped behind her back and her breath held, she walked out of the great hall, and only when the scene before her became the garden outside did her breathing come easier.

Then she heard footsteps catching up behind her.

It was Wang Xun's voice. "Does the Crown Princess think we should, as the Heavenly Screen said, have Sima Daozi torn apart by five horses?"

Wang Shen'ai turned back in astonishment. "Is my clan uncle truly so cruel and ruthless?"

Wang Xun choked for a moment: "..."

No! The one who had first wanted to kill Sima Daozi was Wang Shen'ai, not him. At most he felt that if a thing was to be done, it ought to be done thoroughly. Where on earth did this "cruel and ruthless" come from!

At the very most he was simply going along with the turn of events.

Besides, hadn't Wang Shen'ai reminded him herself? At a time like this, political maneuvering was not merely useless; it had to be abandoned altogether.

Wang Shen'ai drew a deep breath. "No need. Have someone bring me the Prince of Kuaiji's head; I have other uses for it. Besides, I must trouble my clan uncle with two more things."

Wang Xun nodded. "Tell me."

Too much had happened in one night. Even with Sima Daozi dead, Wang Xun felt only helpless and exhausted. And though he knew that, as an elder, he ought to think for himself, he still followed Wang Shen'ai's arrangements. The more he watched her, the more he found her trustworthy.

Whether this subtle change was a good thing or a bad one, he could not say. He could only take it one step at a time.

"Earlier Sima Daozi said he had already sent someone to assassinate Liu Laozhi. Whether or not he is the great general Liu mentioned in the Heavenly Screen, I must trouble my clan uncle to try your utmost to save him. He may be of great use to us."

"Also, though Sima Daozi is dead, his accomplices are still alive. We must summon reinforcements as quickly as possible."

Those who had proven useful today and followed orders numbered only two or three hundred, far from enough to bring all of Jiankang under control.

Crisis could descend again at any moment. She had no wish to kill one Sima Daozi only to lose her own life in exchange.

At last, the nauseating stench was swept away by the autumn wind in the courtyard. Wang Shen'ai closed her eyes. Her cheek twitched briefly as her teeth clenched, and when she opened her eyes again, calm had returned. "These two matters I leave entirely to my clan uncle. I..."

"I must go see someone now."

Someone who seemed to hold little say in the palace, but who, now that Sima Daozi was dead, had become all the more important.

---

Thud!

Li Lingrong knocked the sandalwood brocade box before her to the floor and stumbled back several steps.

The head inside the box rolled out with a dull tumble, tracing a streak of blood across the palace carpet.

She stared, eyes wide with disbelief, her gaze shuttling between the head on the floor and Wang Shen'ai's face before her, and very nearly lost consciousness to the violent wave of dizziness, toppling where she stood in a dead faint.

The shrieks of the palace servants nearly pierced her eardrums, and, trembling, made her realize that what she was seeing was no hallucination.

"You killed him..."

Li Lingrong's mind told her she ought to do as she had before, when she had rushed at Noble Lady Zhang and slapped her, that she should knock this murderer in front of her to the ground. Yet a bone-deep terror and helplessness had glued her feet to the floor, unable to move so much as a single step.

All that burst from her lips was one cry of shock: "Why did you have to kill him!"

Wang Shen'ai raised her eyes, and two lines of clear tears slid down her face.

Li Lingrong: "...?"

Wait. She was the one who had done the killing; what was she crying for!

Before the rebuke could even leave her throat, the young Crown Princess before her had wiped her tears away with her sleeve and was crying all the harder, as though the one who had lost a loved one were not the Empress Dowager Li Lingrong before her, but she herself.

Wang Shen'ai forced down a swallow, but at the thought of the trouble she was now in, the tears flowed only more fiercely, and her voice brimmed with grievance: "Was it that I wanted to kill him? With the Heavenly Screen as it is, Imperial Uncle was bound to die sooner or later; better that his death be worth something."

"You..."

With a pair of red-rimmed eyes she talked straight over what Li Lingrong had been about to say: "The Empress Dowager rose from among the poor, so you ought to know what a tempest of popular fury this talk from the Heavenly Screen will stir across the four seas once it spreads, and what a laughingstock the late emperor will become!"

Li Lingrong stood rooted to the spot.

She was not like those noble daughters of great houses. She had read little, and it was only through extraordinary luck, and bearing those two sons, that she had been able to live a settled life.

But she knew one thing. Just as the swallows before the halls of the Wang and Xie never fly into the homes of common folk, so the son of hers who held great power never spared the common people a glance.

After the Battle of Fei River, the court had gradually recovered some territory and carved out several more provinces and commanderies for the displaced, yet the people there had not been re-registered and entered onto the household rolls. Instead the greater part of them had become Sima Daozi's private property...

Some of these things had even been recounted boastfully to her by this very son.

Had the Heavenly Screen left all of that unspoken, it would have been one thing. But now... now it was different!

Wang Shen'ai repeated herself, as though persuading the Empress Dowager, and as though persuading herself, who had steeled her heart to strike: "He was bound to die. The only difference is who kills him."

"But why did you have to..."

"Your Majesty the Empress Dowager," Wang Shen'ai seized her sleeve, every word earnest, "you have already lost a son. Do you wish to lose your grandsons as well? What is wrong with sacrificing a man who is doomed to die anyway to ensure the Crown Prince and the Second Prince survive!"

"If you ask me, we might as well release word abroad that before the late emperor was killed by Noble Lady Zhang, he had already been slain in the Prince of Kuaiji's treasonous rebellion, and that after a night of bitter fighting the rebels were at last put to death. That sounds far better."

Li Lingrong very nearly bit her own tongue, never imagining that Wang Shen'ai could produce such a line.

She dared not look at that head on the floor, its blood already cold. Avoiding those eyes that would not close even in death, she stared fixedly at the Crown Princess before her. "And then what? What of Yuanxian?"

Sima Yuanxian, son of the Prince of Kuaiji Sima Daozi; he was her grandson too!

From the Crown Princess's position, protecting the Crown Prince and the Second Prince made perfect sense, and before the words "he was bound to die," Sima Daozi's death became a matter of course. But what of Sima Yuanxian?

Was she to lose two sons in one night, and now a grandson besides!

She could not be blamed for her partiality. Compared with the simple-minded Sima Dezong and the timid Sima Dewen, Sima Yuanxian could truly be called outstanding in intelligence and firm of resolve, a man of rare talent.

What if...

"Your Majesty, but he is certainly not the future Emperor Yong'an!" Wang Shen'ai poured cold water on that hope.

"If he were, the immortals in the Heavenly Screen would not have reviled Imperial Uncle so, nor said that he made trouble for the Yong'an Emperor time and again."

"The Second Prince is more likely to be that future ruler of all under heaven than he is!"

"To give up one more person and so preserve more people, above all to preserve you and the two grandsons in the palace, is something we cannot afford to hesitate over now."

She choked back a sob, as though she had wrestled her way through an agonizing choice. "Your Majesty, I did not want it to come to this either, but..."

But the times were so, heaven's will was so, and neither of them was anything but powerless before it.

Faced with this volley of words, Li Lingrong's lips trembled, and for a long while she could not speak.

Or rather, with her meager learning, before Wang Shen'ai's relentless pressure she had no means of counterattack at all.

Even though the tears were not yet dry on the other's face and she looked no more than a fragile young girl, Li Lingrong suddenly felt that the eyes before her were harder to meet than those of the dead man on the floor, whose gaze would not close.

"...Then why have you come to me?"

Wang Shen'ai answered through her sobs: "His Majesty has passed away, Imperial Uncle has been put to death, the princes are young, and beneath the Heavenly Screen all sides watch like tigers. I beseech Your Majesty to issue an edict and dispatch the Beifu Army to guard the sovereign! This order must be given by the Empress Dowager."

"I... how would I know how to do that!" Beneath Li Lingrong's already dark complexion flashed a blush of shame, and an even deeper dread.

The Han empress dowagers had held court and acted as regent; she knew nothing at all.

She could not even be certain of keeping her own life. With her life on the line, she had no time to grieve long for her son's death, and did not even know whom to hate.

Wang Shen'ai gritted her teeth and stepped forward another pace. "Then let me do it! With disaster upon us, I am willing to try my utmost."

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