Threads 190 Concert 2

The old manor lay deeper in the forested hills, whatever ground which may have once surrounded it long reclaimed by nature. Her first glimpse of the building itself had come through one of the winking wisps which she had sent out to survey as they entered the woods.Through it, she had spotted a crumbling stone wall at the top of the ridge.

They had left the wagon behind and followed the patchy gravel path up toward the manor. Given its age and abandonment, the manor was in surprisingly good condition. The garden wall stood mostly intact, and inside, although the grounds had been overgrown by leaves and vines, the building itself formed an arch shape with two wings built out from the central structure. One of those wings had wholly collapsed under the weight of a massive fallen tree, but the rest was still recognizable.

Burnt, sagging, and rotted, but recognizable.

Ling Qi grimaced as she peered down into the scum covered pool that had once been the garden pond. Zhengui, still shrunken, stood at her side, peering around in curiosity. She took his lack of agitation as a good sign. There probably wasn’t anything truly nasty here.

“Ugh, what a dump,” Hanyi said, kicking a stone into the goopy pond.

“But it’s a dump that might have some treasure,” Sixiang said cheerfully.

“I guess so,” Hanyi said dubiously.

“We do have the right of salvage, but I wouldn’t expect too much.” Bao Qian bustled through the crumbling gates to stand beside them. On his back was a bundle of wood stakes roughly the size of fence posts, each carved with identical formation arrays.

She had been recently studying formations, so she could easily divine their purpose. The stakes helped mark and contain an area in order to prevent any spiritual pollution from escaping. They would have to be placed at various geomantically significant points. Normally, the process to divine such positions was quite lengthy and tedious, but her own knowledge of the liminal realm made it much easier to divine such points.

Ling Qi shaded her eyes as she looked up, squinting into the shadows that lay beyond the second floor window. The fact that she couldn’t immediately see through them told her the darkness was unnatural.

“I’m surprised the barbarians left the place standing at all,” she mused.

“The fragmentary tribal alliances left in the Great Khan’s wake did not have the might to raze all in their path to the ground,” Bao Qian said, starting down the path toward the front doors. “They were dangerous and deadly, but not so overwhelming that they could act with impunity.”

Nudging Zhengui with her foot, Ling Qi took Hanyi’s hand and began to follow after him. Wisps carrying her vision darted out among the weeds, spooking the muddy crawling things that lurked there. “I’m still surprised that things remained so bad. Even really neglectful rulers should have been woken up by Ogodei, shouldn’t they?”

“I can only speculate,” Bao Qian warned, testing his weight on the sagging wooden steps. Ling Qi mounted them without a single squeak or groan. “But the destruction of the southern counts left the region unadministered, and the sects aside, the Hui refused to parcel out the land they had gained to the remaining counts.”

Ling Qi wrinkled her nose as the scent of mildew and wood rot reached her. A wave of her hand kicked up a breeze, pushing the scent away as she peered through the broken doors. Insects and other scuttling things scattered before her searching eyes. “If they had time to absorb it, that much land would give them an advantage over the counts who were left.”

“Just so. Those old villains feared and despised their own vassals more than any foreigner,” Bao Qian agreed. “I can put myself in the mind to understand it, but all the same, I find them a contemptible lot.”

Ling Qi considered Hui Peng and his overweening arrogance, maintained even when nearly all else had rotted away. She doubted every Hui had been the same, but if he had been of average sort…

“I suppose so,” Ling Qi mused as they stepped inside. Haunting noises echoed in her ears: soft sobs, the crackle of flames, and the clash of flesh and metal. At her side, Zhen hissed and snapped forward to devour a squirming worm spirit that had been caught between bent floorboards and Hanyi peered in the direction of the ghostly sounds, looking vaguely hungry.

<A little hauntings are not really much of a spook for us, huh?> Sixiang thought.

It wasn’t.

“If you would, Miss Ling, the ritual song I provided?” Bao Qian shifted the weight of the stakes on his back. “We’d best start in the basements, I think.”

Ling Qi nodded absently and gestured, materializing her flute from storage. Bao Qian had given her a simple piece to memorize. It was meant to pacify the unquiet dead until their remains could be dealt with. Ina ruin this old, such spirits could no longer simply be put to rest but, this would keep them from interfering with their work.

The melancholy strains of the funeral song echoed through the halls, and they set off.

“Sad though it is, I do like this song,” Bao Qian said. “There is a polished elegance to works so old.”

Ling Qi nodded faintly, not needing to actually physically play the flute for something so simple.

“It is a curious thing. It feels almost like a lullaby in construction,” Ling Qi analyzed, listening to the sounds merging from the flute in her hands and the rhythm in her spirit as she flexed her qi to create the sounds.

“I’m surprised you weren’t already familiar with it, to be honest.” The rotted floorboards creaked under Bao Qian’s weight as they traveled down the ruined hall. “It’s rather common among the funerary cults in the south of the province.”

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“I’ve never attended a funeral, aside from the ceremony for the war dead at the Sect,” Ling Qi replied. “My musical education is really just what my mother taught me in the time she could spare, Master Zeqing’s teachings, and self experimentation.”

They paused at a crossing in the halls. Bao Qian tapped his foot against the floor and nodded toward the left. She followed after, stepping around a patch of wet black mold. “Mm, that is a shame. The Emerald Seas has very rich musical traditions, more so than any other province.”

<Well, you’ve got good taste,> Sixiang appeared, affecting a haughty sniff.

“There is a reason spirits of your kind are more common in these parts!” Bao Qian laughed. The cheerful sound seemed muted by the soft music and chilled atmosphere, but not by much.

“That’s quite a claim,” Ling Qi said curiously. “Why do you say so?”

They stopped, having reached the broken frame which had once held the door blocking the steps of the basement from sight. The steps were carved from stone and shone in the light of her wisps as they darted downward to explore the space. Shadows, insects, and minor faeries scattered in their wake.