After extracting that promise from Genyou, he went right back to playing his flute. The melody was so serene as to calm the most turbulent of hearts.
Despite Genyou proclaiming him a future “mighty emperor,” Gomei’s chances of assuming the throne were extremely low. The crown prince’s loss of vision had ushered in a flood of princes looking to take his place. In the past, only the Gen-hailing Empress Souen had appeared capable of deposing Gomei, but she was now deeply indebted to the Palace of the Golden Qilin—at least as far as appearances went. Slowly but surely, the princes and consorts of the other clans went on the attack.
A few of the princes took each other out. Within three years of Gomei going blind, the ten sons were reduced to half their number. Another two years after that—the year Genyou turned nineteen—the remaining princes banded together to get Gomei disinherited, hoping to leave the position of crown prince vacant.
“How long do you intend to let a blind man serve as crown prince, Your Majesty? It would disgrace the Kingdom of Ei to have an emperor incapable of seeing the subjects he’s meant to lead.”
“You claim he is pure of heart, but that’s all in the past. Now bereft of eyesight or intellect, our ingrate of a brother has begun to question your benevolence. He suspects that you intend to keep him locked up in the Kou Palace for the rest of his life, and his paranoia has turned him resentful.”
“Gomei masterminded our brothers’ many untimely deaths for fear of being usurped. If left unchecked, that madman may come for Your Majesty’s life next.”
The three men came up with the most convincing lies they could and reshaped their father’s image of Gomei. What they had initially presented as conjecture was soon dressed up as fact and, rattled from losing his sons in quick succession, the emperor fell for their slander. The empress declined to set the record straight. Ostensibly, she had refrained from going after Gomei for the past five years, but she was still out to make her own son crown prince. The wily woman chose to bide her time and let the arrogant princes run free.
And then, on the day of the Repose of Souls Service five years after Gomei was blinded, the tragedy unfolded.
Where did Brother go?
Clad in his ceremonial robes, Genyou was looking everywhere for Gomei, his impatience evident. His urgency stemmed from the fact that at a banquet the previous night, he’d overheard the older princes getting up to their old tricks of bad-mouthing Gomei to their father.
The emperor had probably been too deep in his cups for his own good. Either that or the dam had finally burst on his mounting suspicions. Whatever his reasons, he had summoned a sorcerer—one who had been arrested as part of a crackdown on the Daoist arts—to the banquet.
Coward that he was, the emperor persecuted anyone who might threaten his reign. The dungeons were currently filled with sorcerers, con artists claiming to be cultivators, and political adversaries he had framed. Among those, he had picked out a sorcerer who boasted of knowing various forbidden spells and ordered him thus: “O wretched sorcerer, if you are truly capable of magic, prove it to me by killing the traitorous Gomei within three days and three nights. Succeed, and I shall acknowledge your Daoist arts as a boon to the state and spare your life.”
The emperor feared Daoist cultivators as advocates of a dangerous ideology, but he was skeptical as to whether magic was real. He likely didn’t expect the sorcerer’s assassination of the crown prince to succeed. Fed up with his ever-growing paranoia and ever-heightening fear, he’d simply put the decision on someone else—the way one might turn to fortune-telling for guidance. For the sorcerer’s part, after all the torture he’d been through, he had jumped on the offer without a second thought.
Genyou was beside himself with worry. That day just so happened to be the Day of Ultimate Yin, which would mark the first total solar eclipse in several decades, so tensions were high as the imperial palace headed into the Repose of Souls. No one else was particularly concerned with the crown prince, who had announced his absence from the event a good deal in advance, but Genyou had shrugged off the page urging him to head to the ceremony venue and kept searching for his brother.
I couldn’t find him anywhere in the main palace. He wasn’t in the Kou Palace or the mausoleum either, so that leaves Sunlit Bliss Hill.
It was incredibly dangerous for Gomei to climb a hill all by himself when he couldn’t see. With all the security personnel focused on the ceremony and the emperor, he would have little hope of fending off an assassin.
Still, the major ceremony probably served as a reminder to Gomei that no one needed him anymore, so he very well might have sought a distraction behind the scenes. Just imagining what he must have felt as he left to “watch” the solar eclipse was enough to put Genyou on edge. He bounded up the stone steps, dodged branches and leaves, and pushed his way through the grass.
After continuing up the path for a while, Genyou finally heard the notes of a flute coming from the summit and picked up his pace. He had come to the right place. As he scoured the area, using the music as his guide, he saw the ground around his feet grow dim.
The sound of the flute abruptly stopped, and Gomei’s voice rang out, “Who goes there?!”
Genyou looked up with a start. The sorcerer really had come after his brother.
“Brother!”
Past the trees, the sun’s outline was being eaten away. The eclipse had begun.