Chapter 24: Wei Chu (13:00-14:59) Part 3
Translator: DragonRider
When Mag’er entered the next room, his subordinates had pulled the two women up. He glanced outside, and then pointed at Wen Ran, “Take her.”

“How can you tell which one is the daughter of Wang Zhongsi?” His subordinates were a little surprised.

Mag’er touched We Ran’s soft neck, put his fingers to his nose and sniffed, saying indecently, “I found that senior official’s daughter smelled good the time I caught her. So does that woman, but her fragrance is lighter.”

The men laughed, knowing that he had special fetish for women, so he was very sensitive to certain details. Spices were rare on the prairie and only noble women could afford them.

“What to do with the other one?”

“Kill her in the next room, and also the spy. Right now,” gesticulated Mag’er at his throat with a hand.

The door was slammed open again. Zhang Xiaojing looked closer and saw a woman was pushed in by Turkic wolf guards.

She was not Wen Ran, but had similar figure and wore same Hu robe. The silver inlaid hair ornament dangling by her cheeks and phoebe hairpin anchored on bun indicated that she was of noble family, otherwise, how could an ordinary woman afford such expensive accessories? She should be the real daughter of Wang Zhongsi.

Zhang Xiaojing soon concluded that they should have been kidnapped by the Turks at the same place. However, these vulgar Turks didn’t know hair accessories and had the two confused.

A Turkic wolf guard pulled out his sharp knife toward Wang Yunxiu. Being gagged, she couldn’t make a sound, and desperately wriggled her body, lucky enough to escape the knife aiming at her throat, but was cut in the shoulder with blood spattering everywhere. The Turk, ashamed of his failure, reached out to slapp her in the face to calm her down.

Before he got started again, the sound of flapping wings came from outside the window, and then several larks flew off. Mag’er looked at them sternly, motioning them not to move, and then he walked quickly to the window to overlook the front yard.

Trees swayed along with hurried footsteps, as if there were large crowd approaching.

Mag’er turned back and called his subordinates in. He had seven subordinates, three of whom were killed by Zhang Xiaojing, one took an arrow in the leg, and only three were able to move. With no time to sigh, Mag’er quickly said to them in Turkish, and the three men hurried away with commission.

Mag’er glanced at Zhang Xiaojing and Wang Yunxiu, and then turned to leave, leaving them alone. Soon from the next room came the panic cry of Wen Ran, it seemed that they were going to take this “Miss Wang” away only.

Shortly after dozens of snaps of fingers, the door of Mind Training on the ground floor burst open and a dozen of men crowed in. They rushed to the main hall and stopped abruptly. He saw only a wolf guard, with his thigh injured, leaning against a huge double-ear copper censer, holding two crossbows to the door, and another two crossbows on the ground.

The wolf guard was also confused. He had thought the intruder were Zhang Xiaojing’s associates, at least the Forbidden Guards. But these men wore embroidered cloth on one shoulder, revealing their tattoos like young loafers in the capital Chang’an.

After standoff for a while, an impatient young loafer shouted and went forward holding a big stick. The wolf guard promptly raised his hands and shot an arrow at the youth’s forehead. Other youths were alarmed and quickly stepped back. Then three arrows flied and hit three men in succession.

“He’s out of arrows!”

Somebody shouted. The young loafers rushed to him one more time. The wolf guard had no choice but to lie on the floor and endure their kicking and punching. Unlike the Lubi Army, these youths were obviously disorganized. As soon as the wolf guard was knocked down, more than twenty men swarmed in the main hall.

Having looked around on the ground floor, the young leader pointed at the stairs, motioning to some people to go upstairs. Soon from upstairs came the news that they got it! He hurried up the bamboo stairs, ran across the corridor, and saw two people being trapped in a room on the first floor. The man was tied to the pillar, and the woman, seventeen or eighteen years old, fell to the ground.

The leader was delighted to find she was the only woman in the building. It couldn’t be wrong this time.

The Fires kidnapped a woman today and she ran away halfway. According to the gang members chasing her, the woman was taken to this mansion by unidentified Turks. The Fires had always regarded Wannian County as their turf; how could they accept being mugged in their own place? So, the leader gathered a group of rogue youth to take the woman back.

The leader immediately asked four men to take the woman away. As for the strange man, it was none of their business.

He watched the escort leave and suddenly felt very happy for this landmark achievement in the Fires. The young leader strolled up the high gazebo on the second floor, overlooking for a moment. The splendid scenery of Qu River was clear even from a distance, which got him to sigh, “Rich people are fucking living it up!” After enjoying the view for a while, he walked slowly down the stairs with his hands behind his back, learning the manners of a gentleman.

Suddenly, the young leader felt something unusual under his feet. He looked down and saw a brown stream, with pungent odor, flowing down the stairs to the ground floor.

He stooped over to finger the fluid and was surprised to recognize it as castor oil. How came such stuff appeared in an empty house? The young leader looked up and saw several pottery pots hanging in the four corners of the beams. The openings of the pots were tilted and were pouring oil downstairs. Seven or eight turbid streams flowed together on the ground floor to form a pool of oil.

His pupils shrank sharply, and he hurried down the stairs, shouting as he ran, “Kill him. Hurry up!” Before the words were finished, he slipped on the castor oil and fell downstairs. The young loafers didn’t hear the warning, but instead laughed at his embarrassing state.

Just then, the injured wolf guard, who had been badly beaten, took out a Huo Zhe Zi (paper rolls for making fire) from his arms, blew it hard, and then threw it on the oil. The fire met oil and suddenly burned up with a whoosh, the flames quickly spread along the oil line over the entire ground floor like dancing golden snake.

As the loft was made of bamboo, the walls, pillars, and stairs were ignited instantly, and large and small fire mushrooms emerged from the wood seams. The former elegant and comfortable place suddenly became a fire house in the Buddhist scriptures.

The young loafers were stunned and wanted to flee. However, the crowed all packed to the narrow door and blocked the exits. The raging oily fire swept over and swallowed the people who had not escaped, leaving only the desperately struggling figures.

On the first floor, Zhang Xiaojing felt that there was a steaming heat rising under his feet, and heard wild shrieks and howls, knowing that the intruders must have been trapped by the wolf guards.

Since wolf guards had chosen it as a shelter, they must have been prepared. This bamboo building was hung with castor oil cans. Once an irresistible foreign invasion, they would knock over the cans, waited time to ignite them, and then quickly fled away. Long Bo had always come over here to make preparation.

Zhang Xiaojing knew that if he stayed here any longer, he would be burned to death. He had been quietly twisting his wrists, and the rope had been loose enough that he would only have to scratch it a few more times to break free. At that moment, the edge of the floor made a sharp sound of friction, and the whole loft trembled slightly. Then every joint of the whole house began to creak.

“No!” Zhang Xiaojing thought. These wolf guards were so ruthless that they not only prepared castor oil in the house, but also virtually connected few tenons and support beams between the ground and the second floor. Once a big fire broke out, the entire loft would soon collapse; even if the people in the building were not burned to death, they would be crushed to death under the ruins.

Because he had a missing finger in his left hand, unable to untie the rope round his wrists, he had to desperately bow his body and batter his buttocks against the floor. The bamboo loft adopted the Bridged-House design, both of its floors were embedded on the wooden frame with bamboo plates, and was not strong in itself. Zhang Xiaojing turned into a sledgehammer and kept striking its fragile support. Only if he crashed the floor down before the whole loft collapsed, would he have a chance to escape.

Under continuous attack of Zhang Xiaojing’s buttocks and the flames below, the floor soon made a wailing sound. It sank abruptly at one end, and then the main part tilted downstairs with a crash, forming a sloping slide in the fire.

Unfortunately, the pillar that Zhang Xiaojing was tied to didn’t break, but stuck in the middle and lifted him in the air. Zhang Xiaojing struggled for a while, in vain, so he hurriedly adjusted his posture and aimed the rope on his wrists at the rising flames.

The rope was made of snake vines from Lingnan, stout but not fire-resistant for having been soaked in oil. It would burn when meeting flame. Zhang Xiaojing, enduring the pain of burning his wrists, burned the rope thoroughly, and then he struggled hard one time, twice, and finally broke it at the third attempt.

But he didn’t have time to be glad, and immediately stepped on the unburned sloping floor, ran forward, covered his face with his elbows through several burning walls, rushed to a flaming window, and jumped out. The burning panes were so fragile that Zhang Xiaojing crashed straight through it. Upon landing, he rolled on the ground a few times to smother the flame on his body.

The next instant, the main structure of the loft crashed down with flying sparks, lying in burning woodpile.

Zhang Xiaojing gasped on the ground. His eyebrows and hairs were charred, his wrists were burned, and there was a terrible long wound on his waist, which was scratched by a bamboo thorn of the frame when he jumped out of the window.

Shortly afterwards, a shuffling of feet was heard from outside. Zhang Xiaojing thought there was still enemy and raised his reluctant neck to have a look, and then his shoulders relaxed.

It was a large number of Lubi soldiers in brown armor from Jing’an Department rushing into the backyard. When the Lubi Army saw the fierce fire, they spontaneously dispersed without waiting for an order, clearing a fire line around the Mind Training pavilion to prevent the fire from spreading.

A strong figure came over and helped Zhang Xiaojing up, apologizing for his late, but the words were spoken in a lukewarm tone. Zhang Xiaojing gazed at him and recognized him as Cui Qi. Ignoring his injured body, he grabbed Cui Qi’s arm, “Did you see anybody else when you came in?”

As Cui Qi didn’t trust this Mr. Zhang, he only flicked his chin, “A few idlers of the Fires!”

“The Fires?” Zhang Xiaojing heard the name and flashed a significant glint in his single eye.

As Cui Qi stood aside, Zhang Xiaojing saw several surviving young loafers crouching on the ground, frustrated, being kept by some steel knives. They probably had just escaped the fire and bumped into the Lubi Army.

Zhang Xiaojing shouted, “Come on, beat the Jiuguan drum now! The wolf guards have just left, and must be somewhere around!”

Hearing the words “wolf guards”, he immediately barked a series of orders at the deputy besides him as cruel glitter burst out of Cui Qi’s eyes.