Chapter 7: The Hotel

Gambling Snake sat resting in his hotel room, his eyes closed. He had not slept all night. His gun lay within reach, and he was positioned to watch both the room's only window and its door.

The room was very cheap. On the ground floor, facing away from the light and shaded by trees outside, it was cold and damp in winter and buzzing with mosquitoes and flies in summer. It never got any sunlight. Supposedly, a murder had taken place there; there had even been rumors of a haunting.

Gambling Snake hadn't chosen it for the price. Keeping a low profile was what mattered, so one room was as good as another. A roof to shelter him from wind and rain, four walls to stop bullets—that was enough.

It had been three days since he fled his home—or rather, left the life of an ordinary person behind. It felt as though he were back in his days with Qianming. He remembered going on assassination missions to distant prefectures and commanderies, often spending weeks or even months in places like this, staying awake night after night, always on guard against someone breaking down the door or a few grenades flying through the window.

Gambling Snake was a Strong-rank ability user, but his ability rarely came into play in combat. He relied almost entirely on his skills and experience as an assassin.

From childhood, he had shown exceptional aptitude and talent. More valuable still were his innate composure and ruthlessness. By fifteen or sixteen, the assassin's craft was in his blood, a matter of instinct. He had mastered assassination techniques, responding to the unexpected, and adapting on the fly.

That night, Gambling Snake had deceived Jordan. There had been no poison, and therefore no antidote. He really had been bluffing. Yet that bluff had made Jordan do something for him.

As Gambling Snake had said, it really was a simple task. Through Jordan, he sent Gilson II a message much like the one the man had heard seven years earlier: “I'll come for you again, and take your life.”

That night, Jordan had not only withdrawn his men and let Gambling Snake go, but had also contacted his master just hours later, eager to pass on the message. Then he waited for Gambling Snake to keep his promise, get in touch somehow, and tell him how to neutralize the poison.

Jordan waited three days. Nothing unusual happened to his body, but the count's questions and sinister tone kept him on pins and needles all day long. Gambling Snake hadn't contacted him. In fact, he'd vanished without a trace.

By then, Jordan was beginning to smell a rat. Had he been bluffed?

But by the time he worked it out, it was too late. The man was gone, the deed was done, and Jordan had managed to get on everyone's bad side. He had failed his mission, earned no credit whatsoever, and lost his master's trust into the bargain.

Of course, blaming everyone and everything would do no good. At heart, Gary Jordan was merely an opportunist, perfectly composed when gambling with other people's lives, but a coward when his own was at stake. A pretender like him was bound to show his true colors when he met someone like Gambling Snake.

And just who was Gambling Snake? He'd been hanging around Qianming's casinos since his teens. He'd seen plenty of gamblers. He'd even met Wang Xu. Trash like Jordan thought he could take him on? He was a clown making a spectacle of himself, courting his own destruction. With a few words, Gambling Snake had him wrapped around his little finger and got himself out of danger without lifting a hand.

So, although their ability ranks were the same, their actual competence was worlds apart. If Qianming's leader had the talent to govern a province, Gilson II had only enough to lead a band of mountain brigands. That gave some idea of the difference between their subordinates.

Speaking of gifts for command, there was another man in this world whose talents could encompass heaven and earth. This time, however, he'd sent a fellow whose seediness could encompass heaven and earth. That fellow was currently pressed against Gambling Snake's door, listening with his ear to it.

Gambling Snake found it rather funny. It was early morning, and although Zuo Dao was tiptoeing outside the door without making much noise, the shadows of both his feet were clearly visible moving beneath it.

The door suddenly opened from inside. Zuo Dao jumped. He hadn't heard Gambling Snake approaching at all.

Zuo Dao was dressed from head to toe as a priest and held a Bible, though he still wore his ponytail and little round sunglasses.

Gambling Snake, meanwhile, wore a black suit, with sunglasses covering his eyes in the sunless room, his hair slicked back without a strand out of place, and a gun in his hand.

The sight of the two of them standing in the doorway was somewhere between funny and bizarre. It had the feel of a Buddhist monk visiting a nightclub to solicit alms.

They looked at each other for a few seconds. Zuo Dao's expression changed several times, as though he couldn't work out how to say hello. Gambling Snake simply stared him down, his face expressionless, though he had far more questions on his mind than Zuo Dao did.

Two minutes later, they were sitting inside. On the small table between them sat a glass of milk Gambling Snake had poured for himself and the “Bible” Zuo Dao had been holding.

“It's been quite a few years.”

“Yes. How have you been lately?” Zuo Dao actually tried making small talk with Gambling Snake.

“Fine all these years. Just not lately.” That answer was true enough.

Zuo Dao said, “An old enemy's come knocking.”

“You saw the news and guessed my cover would be blown, so you turned up?”

“Mm... Actually, someone just asked me to deliver something to you.” Zuo Dao was making it quite clear that once he'd delivered it, he was gone. He definitely wasn't getting mixed up in this mess.

“Oh? Who?” Hearing that someone had sent Zuo Dao made Gambling Snake curious again. Had his brothers in Qianming asked him to come? But Zuo Dao seemed thoroughly unreliable. If the organization had learned he was in danger and felt duty-bound to help, surely they would have sent one of their own.

“I'm not entirely sure myself,” Zuo Dao replied.

“You don't know who sent you?” Gambling Snake sounded like a teacher questioning a schoolchild who had worked out that one plus one equaled three.

“Tian Yi. Ever heard that name?”

“Never.”

Zuo Dao had more or less expected that answer. He continued, “He runs a bookstore.”

“This bookstore owner asked you to bring me something?” Gambling Snake asked. “What does he look like? How old does he seem?”

“Looks under thirty. As for his face... It's hard to describe a man's looks. I mean... hmm... he's like a movie star who's taken off his makeup, smoked a few joints, and hasn't slept for days.”

Gambling Snake really couldn't remember anyone like that, so he dropped the subject and asked instead, “How did you find me?”

“By looking, of course. I went to your house first. It had been turned upside down, and they'd left a few hidden lookouts around it on twenty-four-hour watch. Luckily, they weren't watching closely enough. I spotted them, but they didn't spot me.” Zuo Dao paused. “I suppose they thought you were unlikely to walk back into their trap, so they were just going through the motions. Hmm... Then I started checking the transport network, hotels, inns, guesthouses... You know, describing it to you now, it suddenly strikes me that I was thinking very much like a cop... Anyway, my investigation turned up more than thirty people moving around Winnipeg with false papers over the past few days. Then I checked them one by one. My luck wasn't bad. You were the twelfth.”

Gambling Snake was skeptical. “I'm using a temporary false ID made with source code stolen from the Empire's ID generation program. It's something like a newborn baby's legal ID data with my photo and age attached. Unless you check with the commandery government where it was generated, you can't tell it's fake. Otherwise, it passes as legally valid on any online system for a month. Even the police couldn't investigate that thoroughly.”

Zuo Dao answered with a single sentence. “I invented that kind of ID card myself when I was nine.”

Gambling Snake nearly crushed the glass of milk in his hand. He took a sip to steady himself. “Are you joking?”

“No. Actually, they're not hard to make. It's much like cracking a game. Get hold of the source code and you could do it too. Pity I couldn't patent it, or I'd have been rich long ago. People all over the world make these cards now. It's nothing new.”

Zuo Dao wasn't someone you could take at his word. Telling barefaced lies without batting an eyelid was his specialty. Yet this didn't sound like a lie. Counting back, these temporary false ID cards really had begun to grow popular almost twenty years ago.

Gambling Snake found that, once again, the conversation had reached a dead end. So he asked, “What was it that Tian Yi wanted you to bring me?”

Zuo Dao's expression changed. As though telling a ghost story, he lowered his voice, leaned closer, and pushed the Bible across the little table toward Gambling Snake. “Look for yourself. Look closely!”