Chapter 14- The Winecellar of the Copper Roof Inn

Tian and Hong didn’t wait around for a demonstration of what the waiters were going to do with their pig butchering knives. Hong slapped the blades out of their hands, unfortunately breaking quite a few of the hands in the process. Once they were all herded together and restrained, the immortals conferred. It was agreed that the waiters were enchanted, because they weren’t animated corpses or controlled by gu, or puppets.

“What a strange array. Technically an illusion array, I think, but one aimed at manipulating emotions working with the erhu. It limited our ability to sense their immortal breath until we were right on top of them too. I wonder where he got it?” Tian muttered.

“Search me. He doesn’t look like one of the Five Elements Courtyard people. Presumably heretics have their own array makers. We’ll figure it out. Right now, we need to fix these waiters.” Hong said.

“Mmm. I’ve never seen someone enchanted before. I’m quite eager to learn how to cure them.” Tian nodded at Hong. “Go on.”

She stared back at him.

He made a little encouraging gesture. She spread her hands and gave him a look he could feel through her veil.

“You are the doctor-in-training. I thought you knew how to cure it.”

“Me? How would I know? You have that pointy stick array breaking technique. Just poke them.”

“You can shut down qi around you by gibbering at the air. Why can’t you just shout in their ear for a bit?”

“Because if it disrupted all qi everywhere, I would explode? As would everything around me?” Tian thought he sounded very patient.

Their productive conversation was interrupted by the sound of someone being violently sick, and the soft sobs of a child. Tian and Hong turned around. Censor Henshen was rubbing Little Treasure’s back and trying to comfort him with Daoist Lan. The remaining survivors were looking around the charnel house restaurant. Not all could keep their composure.

“Hey, Brother?” Hong softly asked. Tian didn’t need to hear the rest of the words. Their footprints were clear on the floor. Like tidy stamps showing where they went, dipped in blood.

“We sneer at the cold hearts in the Monastery, and then we go right ahead and ignore the mortals too. I’ll meditate on it.” Tian sighed and started rushing around the room, pulling out bandages and such herbs as could be used for mortal medicine. It wasn’t much, but he was slowly stocking up. He found himself tying a lot of tourniquets very, very quickly.

“Censor Henshen, Little Treasure, how are the two of you doing? Any feeling of lightheadedness? A strong urge to sleep?”

“Yes to both.” The Censor’s voice was higher pitched than his usual high voice, and quite sharp. He caught himself and added. “Thank you for your concern, Immortal Tian.”

“I’m. I’m okay. Thank you, Immortal Tian. Are you and Immortal Hong okay?” Treasure tried to sound composed with a snotty face and runny eyes. Tian didn’t look away from the tourniquet he was tying. The man would have to learn to live without an arm, but with a bit of luck, he would live.

“We are okay. It’s unpleasant to hear, but you get used to these sorts of scenes as you walk the road to immortality. Not that it doesn’t leave a mark on you. It does. But you learn to deal with it. You see a nightmare. I just see a mess, and people that need my help.” Tian kept his voice calm. “Speaking of, Daoist Lan, have you entered the Medicine Formulating Halls yet? Or, dare I hope, the Hospital?”

“Yes. To both. Damn me for a fool and a coward, yes to both. Sorry, little boy. Stay with this nice man. Aunty Lan needs to go to work now.”

Tian heard the crisp sound of two hands slapping a face, and hurried footsteps. “Usual triage. far left is-”

“No need to explain, Fellow Daoist. With your permission, I will lead from here.”

“Please.” Tian nodded. He was a firm believer in not overestimating oneself, and while she might not be a fighter, Daoist Lan had half a century of medical training more than he did.

There weren’t many living wounded. The array worked as a counterpoint to the music being played by the blind cultivator. Yang qi was excited in the diners. Anger flushed the blood and flesh with vigor. The qi was then drained away. Running down the gutters into whatever lay below. The ones who fainted were lucky, in a way. They didn’t get cut up by their fellow diners. The ones who did often lacked the strength to keep their hearts beating.

Daoist Lan and Tian neatly split the work- she got people stable, he kept them alive long enough for her to stabilize them. It worked better than Tian hoped. This was entirely due to Daoist Lan, and his speedy hand with a tourniquet.

Daoist Lan had more than adequate medicine for mortals. She was lightning quick tying off spurting veins and arteries with specially treated thread. She even knew how to use long tweezers to reach inside the muscle, pull out the severed arteries to where she could work on them, and then tie them off. Tian watched her as carefully as he could manage. Every move she made was worth more than a sack of spirit crystals to him.

One of the casually awful things Tian had learned working at the hospital was that blood vessels could contract when cut, making them impossible to reach. Blood shooting out of a mass of muscle, tendon, facia, with no way to stop it other than a tourniquet or the most brutal of emergency surgery… always horrible to see, even if you had seen it before. He had seen doctors fish out the arteries with tweezers before. None did it as fast as Daoist Lan. Tian learned a lot watching her. He had learned an awful lot, observing doctors, but her deft hands were a revelation.

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“Not for nothing are the doctors of the Bamboo Medicine Hut revered. My thanks, Daoist Lan.” Tian bowed to the doctor after the last patient was stabilized.

“For what? You two figured out what was happening and broke the spell. That’s what saved us. Damn me for a fool! Damn me for a fool and a coward! I was so bound up in the thought of what those vile men intended, so tied up with the fact that I, that, I, I… didn’t even hesitate. I didn’t even hesitate, it was like all the times I practiced and I didn’t even think about it I just stabbed and it went right in, went right in, it’s not supposed to go in like that, the skull is there to protect the brain, it’s not supposed to go in like that-”

“Sister Liren, please!”

“En. Daoist Lan. RETURN.”

They managed to get the doctor settled down eventually, and encouraged her to talk. Daoist Lan roamed the Broadsky Kingdom, offering her services to mortals and immortals alike, for whatever they could spare or nothing at all. In this way, she said, she cultivated both her skills and her heart. Her living expenses were covered by missions from the Bamboo Medicine Hut.

She was coming back from a caravan escort mission. Part of the arrangement had been that she provided healing for the caravaneers and their mortal families, all of which had gone quite well. Until it hadn’t, and the chief guard fell out with the caravan master, resulting in the whole shipment being stranded in a village upriver. She was making her way down to Bluestone City to beg the Ancient Crane Monastery to send someone over to collect the shipment and deliver it the rest of the way.

She had reasonably high hopes. Quite a few of the ingredients were for medicines intended for the Monastery. It was just bad luck that she was in the inn tonight. Worse luck that she ran into three fellows she had met over the years in unfriendly circumstances. She hadn’t panicked, though. She had trained.

One of the consequences of Tian and Hong’s demonstration with Elder Feng was that the disciples of the Bamboo Medicine Hut understood just how utterly incapable they were of anything resembling actual fighting. So they talked to their guards, who were understandably kind about their employer’s deficiencies, and suggested a simple remedy.

Don’t learn how to fight. It’s a full time job, and they aren’t suited for it. Learn how to run, and learn one attack. Just one. One thing that you can do instantly, without thinking, in any circumstances. Practice it obsessively. Doctor Lan chose a simple sword thrust. It worked. And now she had to live with that fact.