Chaos was a flood, and Bai shu, in a final, desperate act of his former self, was trying to build a dam with pebbles of logic.
While the streets of Anping descended into a maelstrom of shrieking fear, a human torrent of panic, he found himself moving against the current. His mind, a tool meticulously trained for two decades to seek order, to find patterns, to construct logical frameworks, rejected the pandemonium.
It was an unacceptable variable, an error in the equation of the world. There had to be a path, a solution that did not involve the crude, irreversible finality of violence.
As people scrambled to barricade their homes with furniture and carts, or fled toward the southern gate in a futile, desperate hope of escape from a town now completely encircled, Bai Shu pushed his way through the panicked crowds with his eyes fixed on the governor's mansion. He was a man with power and ability.
The mansion, usually a place of quiet, bureaucratic lethargy and the soft rustle of official documents, was in a state of controlled panic. Guards with fear widened eyes and sweat slicked hands stood at the gates, their spears trembling slightly, their authority dissolving in the face of the terrifying scene on the hills.
Inside, the atmosphere was even more anxious.
Officials in fine silks rushed through corridors, clutching scrolls and shouting contradictory orders. Some were arguing about troop dispositions for a military that barely still existed, while others were trying to hide treasury records.
It was the death sentence. Bai Shu, using the residual authority his scholarly reputation still afforded him, managed to bypass the frantic aides and gain an audience with Governor Bai himself. He found the governor in his private study, not directing a defense, but staring out the large window toward the northern hills with half empty wine jug on the table beside him.
"Governor," Bai Shu began, his voice breathless from his struggle through the crowd but firm with conviction. "There is still time. We must negotiate. We must send an envoy."
Governor Yan, a portly man whose face was usually a mask of political calculation, turned from the window. His eyes were bloodshot and profoundly weary, stripped of all artifice.
He gave a short, bitter laugh that was closer to a cough. "Negotiate? Scholar Bai, do you see a delegation of diplomats out there?
Do you see envoys carrying gifts and proposals? I see a pack of wolves waiting for the shepherd to fall asleep. What do you propose we offer them? Poetry? A well reasoned argument on the virtues of peace and the Mandate of Heaven?" His words were steeped in a sarcasm so bitter it was almost despair.
"We offer them submission," Bai Shu pressed, stepping forward, his own desperation making him bold, after all surrender better than death.
"A complete and unconditional surrender. We offer them the town's granaries, a tribute from the treasury, our formal, public acknowledgment of Li Wei's authority. It is a bitter price, a humiliation, but it is better than annihilation. The histories are clear: a wise ruler accepts a temporary loss to preserve the lives of his people. We can appeal to Li Wei's orders . An intact town that pays taxes and provides supplies is far more valuable to his campaign than a pile of ashes and corpses."
He spoke with the earnest, and passion of a man who truly believed in the universal power of his words, his hands gesturing as if shaping the very air into a logical, inescapable conclusion.
The governor walked slowly to his desk and poured himself another cup of wine, his hand shaking so much that some of the dark liquid sloshed onto the polished wood.
He drank it down in one gulp, grimacing as it went down. He then fixed Bai Shu with a look of profound, almost cruel pity. "You are a good man, Scholar. Your heart is pure. And for that reason, you are a fool. You live in a world of ink and ideals, a world where men are swayed by reason and precedent. I live in a world of ambitious men and sharp steel. Your world is a beautiful fantasy. Mine is the grim reality waiting outside that window."
He leaned forward across the desk, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial, chilling whisper. "Do you know why Li Wei is here? Not for our grain, which would barely feed his army for a week. Not for our pathetic tribute, which he would see as an insult. He is here to make a statement. He is marching on the Imperial heartlands, and every town he passes is a message. It is a message to his rivals in the north, a message to the other warlords in the south, and most of all, a message to the Emperor himself. A town that surrenders shows he is a conqueror. A town that is razed to the ground, its people butchered without mercy, shows he is a god of destruction, a man to be feared above all others. Fear is his primary weapon,Scholar. It marches ahead of his army. He doesn't want our submission. He wants our screams to echo all the way to the capital."
Bai Shu felt a cold dread seep into his bones, a dread that threatened to extinguish the fire of his conviction. The governor's words were a brutal counter-argument, one based not on historical principle but on a terrifyingly plausible reading of a cruel man's mind. "You cannot know that for certain,"
he insisted, his voice weaker now. "It is cynical speculation. To not even try... to condemn us all without making the attempt is the true folly."
"Try?" The governor's voice rose, cracking with strain and fury. He slammed his cup down on the desk. "Try? I sent a messenger under a flag of truce two hours ago, as soon as the vanguard was spotted! A brave man, a captain of my own guard. I offered them supplies, gold, anything to pass us by. His head came back in a box thirty minutes later. They planted it in the middle of the northern field, halfway between our wall and their lines. It's out there right now. A warning. A statement. That is Li Wei's negotiation." He gestured vaguely toward the window, his face a mask of defeated rage.
"Go look for yourself from the ramparts if you don't believe me. Go see their answer written in my captain's blood."
The air left Bai Shu's lungs in a silent rush. The world tilted, his carefully constructed arguments, his faith in reason, his entire intellectual edifice, crumbling into dust. He had been in his library, formulating syllogisms and citing precedents, while men were being decapitated.
The naivete he had been accused of by the farmer was not a simple misjudgment; it was a fatal, arrogant blindness. He saw it now in the governor's exhausted, cynical eyes. This was not a debate. It was a sentencing. The verdict had already been delivered.
"Your books have failed you, Scholar Bai," Governor Yan said, his voice softening slightly, the cruelty of his pity returning. It was the pity of the damned for the newly damned. "There is no chapter in your classics that can help us now. There is no principle of harmony that applies to a wolf in a sheepfold.Go home. Be with your wife. Close your door. Find your cellar. Pray to whatever gods you believe in. That is all the 'reason' that is left to us."
Dismissed, broken, Bai Shu stumbled out of the mansion and back into the chaos of the streets. The governor's words echoed in his mind. He was a child who had just been told that the monsters he read about in stories were real, and they were at his door, and they did not care for his clever words.
He saw the townspeople now not as a panicked mob, but as people who had understood a fundamental, brutal truth that he, with all his learning, had missed: when the wolf is at the door, you don't reason with it. You hide from it, you fight it, or you die. He arrived home to find the heavy wooden door already barred, Lian's doing.
She let him in, her face pale but resolute. She didn't ask where he had been or if he had succeeded.
She saw the answer in the utter devastation in his eyes, the collapse of his entire being. The hope he had carried out of the house was gone, replaced by a hollow, terrifying emptiness.
"Help me move the cabinet against the door," she said simply, her voice a small, solid thing in the terrifying silence that was gathering around them, a silence that seemed to emanate from the northern hills.
He obeyed without a word, his body moving mechanically. The weight of the heavy rosewood cabinet felt real, tangible, a stark contrast to the weightless, useless words he had tried to wield. As they worked together, straining against the wood, the frantic, chaotic tolling of the watchtower bell suddenly stopped. It was not a gradual slowing, but an abrupt, shocking cut, as if a rope had been severed by a sword.
The silence that followed was absolute, profound, and more terrifying than any sound that had come before.
It was the silence of the inevitable.
The waiting was over.