Chapter 64: Chapter 62: The Tent of No-Face

Sitting awkwardly in the silence, Li Baobao’s eyes kept drifting from the tense figure of Ji Ying, to the quiet Liu Xie, and then to the shadowed Rui Yifu. He folded his hands into his lap while staring at a piece of drifting dust above their heads that seemed to flutter in scant sunlight. He felt like his legs were filling with needles. Finally he stood up and looked over at his companions, “uhm, I think I need to get some… fresh air.”

“Well don’t break your neck down the stairs, fatty,” Ji Ying pointed down the stairs.

Li Baobao decided he did not like Ji Ying very much but felt a gross worm of shame at the idea of saying his opinion in return. “I will, I will just be outside.”

Rui Yifu seemed to be completely still, but Liu Xie marginally inclined his head in recognition.

With nothing else being said and Bo still inside Lady Gu’s room, Li Baobao went down the stairs.They were still eerily quiet with the air as cold and stuffy as a tomb. Darkness pooled in random corners which he studiously avoided gazing too deep into. When he reached the doors he pushed them open and stepped outside. The scent of wood whipped him in the face, a shrill wind tugging against him and reddening his nose.

Behind him there was no strange manor hewn into the mountain, just more trees going up the mountain. His knees swayed under him as he turned around, only seeing more foliage. “H-hello!?” He called out in increasing worry. Where did everything go? Where was he?

“Hello?” A woman’s voice called back out to him.

“He-hello! Hello! Over here!” He yelled.

From the obscuring darkness of the trees came two young women, disciples of Lady Gu. One carried a yoke over one shoulder that two buckets hung from, while the other had a small medicine chest on her back. They both looked at him in mild confusion.

“I-I’m lost, you see,” Li Baobao quickly explained while gesturing at the forest around them. “I came here with my friends and-”

“OH!” The girl with the chest nodded, “you’re one of the refugees right? How did you get all the way up here?”

The other young woman quickly made her way over to Li Baobao, taking his arm with her free hand and pulling him along after her. “Come on, we’ll get you back down to the camp! It’s not safe up here you know, it’s archery practice!”

“N-no wait I… archery practice?” Li Baobao looked around again as the other girl also looped her arm around his to march him through the forest. Occasionally he spotted other girls going by, none of them paying any mind to the trio as they trooped down a steep path that seemed to grow out of the clustering trees and uneven ground. He raised his protest a few more times but the girls, misunderstanding, continually told him in polite tons that his friends were right down the mountain and there was nothing to fear.

The trees abruptly broke like waves upon a beach, revealing a wide crescent shape collection of hundreds of tents that hugged close to the bottom of the mountain. The tents themselves were in a thousand different colors and came in stately rigid shapes to uneven masses of fabric and sticks only barely standing upright. The girls practically marched him right into the middle of the mass, with people pausing to look at them with mild curiosity before continuing on with their day. Li Baobao felt very tiny.

“Hey Auntie No-Face, can you help him?” One of the girls turned to a woman all bundled up in blue and grey cloth against the mild cold. She was leaned against one of the nicer looking tents, where the smell of herbs drifted out from it.

“Of course,” she rasped.

“Wonderful! I hope you find your friends soon,” the other girl said cheerfully, before she and her companion went bounding off into the distance, soon lost beyond the people and tents.

Li Baobao wanted to call out to them, to say there had been some sort of misunderstanding, but his voice squeaked out and fell. After a moment he turned to the woman. Her hands were shriveled with age and she fiddled with a small clay pipe, and a mutilated face gazed upon him. He gasped loudly and stepped away before his manners could override him. The nose were two uneven wet looking slits, scarred flesh closely hugged cheekbones and a lipless mouth grinned with freakishly perfect yellowed teeth while milky eyes gazed at him.

“Gave you a fright did I?” She sadly chuckled.

“N-no!” Li Baobao lied, trying to salvage some bit of dignity and manner.

The old woman scrutinized him, “well, lying to an elder isn’t very polite. But I’ll forgive it. How about you come inside?” She pointed into the tent. She somehow spoke clearly despite having no lips.

“Ah, that’s very nice, but actually I need to go back to my friends! They’re way up the mountain visiting Lady Gu and-”

“Yes, yes, come inside!” The woman spoke more insistently, taking Li Baobao’s hand and pulling him inside the tent with her.

It was lit dimly by old looking lamps, the kind full of noxious smelling oil Li Baobao remembered faintly from foreign merchant shops. The smell was mostly covered by the numerous herbs and incense hanging from bowing poles or atop small weathered chests. Above was a very small hole, no bigger than his palm, and the sunlight that came in seemed muted.

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There was a small pit in the middle of the tent where dull small chunks of wood sullenly glowed in white ash. The old woman sat beside it, gesturing for him to sit across from her. Well behaved since childhood, Li Baobao did as the elderly lady bidded and sat down. The warmth of the small makeshift hearth soothed aches he did not know he even had.

“No chairs, unfortunately, we could only take so much with us before the armies arrived,” the old woman said apologetically.

“The armies?” Li Baobao fuzzily remembered some sort of strife, but he could not name what it was.

“Yes. The two princes went to war after their father died abruptly, the entire kingdom’s been in a state of terror since then,” the woman answered. “I predicted they would be coming to our town and encouraged people to flee while we still could. I followed my senses and brought us here, and Lady Gu has been quite accommodating to a failed cultivator such as myself.”

Li Baobao’s mouth opened, then he closed it. He did not know much about cultivators or anything like that, it always seemed a bit too much to comprehend and follow. Yet he always imagined them in some part of his mind as fabulously wealthy people in fine clothes with powers like high spirits. The haggard faceless woman in front of him resembled none of that. “Why here?” He eventually asked, speaking the question without thought.

“Well, I came here once a very long time ago when I was still a young woman. I still had my face back then you see, I got to stay with some of the lower disciples for a bit but then I decided to go out on my own,” she explained, holding out her hands over the warm hearth. “I still think about what would have happened if I stayed.”

“Ah,” Li Baobao could not stand any silence in the tent. “Uhm, well, you must have gone back home afterwards right? It was very good you did so-”

“No, I met a man named Wang Huaqing and we went to one of the larger Free Cities,” she sighed and her tone held regret. “It was a nice place on one of the major rivers.”

Li Baobao could not imagine any Free City being ‘nice’. “Oh, I see.”

“You sound doubtful young man. I assure you, this city was far better than the typical hovels. It was known for its libraries and trade, so it seemed natural for people seeking knowledge to go there.” She explained. Her cloudy eyes shimmered with some far off memories. “We spent years there together, studying every book. He seemed quite devout to the Lady of Calm Waters, so I often found us spending hours there as well. I made money as a fortune teller, something I’ve had a bit of a talent of, and I often practiced around and inside her temple.”

“My mother’s family helped found a shrine to the Lady of Calm Waters,” Li Baobao spoke up, trying to find something to add to the woman’s words.

“Ah? Did they now?” She said, her face shifting slightly like it was trying to mimic a look of surprise. “Merchants, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I would abandon that shrine. Topple her temples. She’s a fraud, you see,” she said, holding up the clay pipe to her teeth. Eerie green smoke came from it. “On the night of her most popular festival, everyone was down at the river. Except for Wang Huaqing and I. We were in her temple… and so was she. I was so overwhelmed by her presence I could not speak. She seemed so gentle and smelled like fresh spring water and flowers.”

Li Baobao did not like where this was going. A creeping worm nestled in his heart. He searched the woman’s mutilated face for some sign of madness but all he saw was utter conviction.

“Before I knew it he had stuck me with silencing needles. I could not move, I could barely breathe, and I most certainly could not scream. He peeled off my face and gave it to her. She pressed it to her own and became me.”

“What do you mean?”

“She stepped into my life. Everyone knew her by my name. I was tossed into a river, but he underestimated me,” her fingers were clenched around the pipe. “I survived, only barely. I settled into a new town and became Aunt No-Face. I dared not tell anyone my name, but I’ve told many of my past. None believe it.”

Li Baobao counted himself as one. It felt too bizarre. Why would a goddess steal a woman’s face?

“Now then young man, would you like me to read your fortune?”

“Ah, w-well, I appreciate the offer, but I really need to look for my friends,” he said. He wondered if all of that was just to convince him to pay her to read his fortune in pity.

“They’ll come to you,” she held out her hand to him. “I’ll read it cheap, because you seem a nice young man."

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