Swords From the East by Harold Lamb

pillar, Mingan observed the Servant of Mercy advance soundlessly to the bed, feel of it, and peer around the ill-lighted chamber. The quilts in which the boy had slept were still warm.
    "Wan sui-live for a thousand years!" the executioner whispered. "Ye Lui Kutsai Mingan, Bright One of the North, Prince of Liao-tung, it has been decided that you must go in this hour to the guests on high, to face the honorable ones, your exemplary ancestors. Are you afraid?"
    Mingan had seen two of his kindred take the happy dispatch by poi son put into their wine cups, and he was afraid. The tall man was listening again, his head on one side. And then he was moving toward the balcony, where he had heard the prince breathing. From his right hand hung the loop of a silk cord.
    The boy's body did not move, but his mind probed for the reason of his death-secret, and bloodless, by token of the strangler's cord.
    His uncle, the emperor, had never noticed him; his father and his Liaotung mother were dead: Chung-hi, the heir and son of the emperor, was his classmate-a powerful youth, given to brooding and superstition.
    Chung-hi had been good-natured with Mingan, had gone on escapades with him, when the two princes went out incognito and joined the ranks of the court troupe of actors, or played on the ten-stringed lute in the gardens of the courtesans.
    Now Mingan's studies were at an end, and his tutors had announced to the emperor that Mingan was a little inclined to shirk his books for the hunting chariot, at night, when he climbed down from his room, and drove his matched horses out of the walls of Taitung. He was expert in swordplay, well versed in the wisdom of the sages, and in history.
    An old proverb came into his mind as he pondered. "A hunted tiger jumps the wall," he said in a low voice.
    The Servant of Mercy stepped through the window, made the triple obeisance of respect, and paused.
    "An intelligent man recognizes the will of the heavens," said he.
    "Panthers," rejoined Mingan steadily, "eat men in the northern mountains, and," he added reflectively, "panthers eat men in the southern mountains too. Yet it is written in the books that for everything there is a reason."
    He perched himself on the railing by the pillar.
    "Tell me who gave the order for my death. I will never speak of what you say."
    The Servant of Mercy moved a little nearer, and the ghost of a smile touched his thin lips. No, Mingan would not speak hereafter. Yet now!
    "Pledge your slave," said he, "that you will make no outcry, and I will relate the cause of my coming."
    "I pledge it you."
    "Then, 0 prince of Cathay, look into the sky behind you and see the cause."
    Mingan turned a little, so that he could still watch the man in white. Hovering at the horizon was a red moon, as if a film of blood had been drawn over a giant eye of the sky.
    Miles distant, outlined against the moon, Mingan could trace the line of the Great Wall. That night he had dreamed of the wall. Standing alone on the summit, he had labored at casting down rocks at a mass of beasts that had run in from the vast spaces of the steppe and the desert of Gobi, to leap and snarl at him-the beasts changed to a pack of horsemen clad in furs, figures that grinned at him and rode their shaggy ponies up the sheer side of the wall-
    Mingan knew now that he had been thinking of the men from the country of the Horde that lay even beyond the hunting-preserves of the emperor. He had often been tempted to drive his chariot out to the steppe to catch sight of these barbarians, who-his tutors said-were no better than beasts. Perhaps-
    "What mean you?"
    He slid his boots from his feet and braced his toes in the lacquer work of the balcony.
    "Your birth-star, ill-fated one, shines in the favorable constellation of the Lion, betokening power and success to you. The star of the dynasty of Cathay has entered into the region of ill-omen, foretelling disaster. So that the prophecy of the stars may not be fulfilled, your death