Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

I wanted to describe that scene with a bit of detail in order to explain the noise that hit us on the wall, bouncing back and forth from towers so we got echoes as well: laughter mixed with howls of recognition, and jeers and catcalls. It wasn’t until I had climbed almost to the level of the grand warden’s quarters that we could hear a different sort of sound, and even then it took a while to realize the screams weren’t screams of laughter. Master Li sharply squeezed my shoulder, and I grabbed a pair of balusters and hauled us up so we could peer over the balcony through the tall window into the room where we had eavesdropped on Li the Cat. Just as I did so the grand warden came running right at us, but he didn’t see us. His eyes were glazed with shock and terror, and he was screaming his head off, and I gulped hard when I saw what was following him.

Second of the sketches of demon-deities the Celestial Master had shown us had been Chu-K’uang, “mad dog,” which had been depicted as a dog with no head, and here it was. The grand warden turned at the last moment and raced back into the room, and as the stalking beast turned to follow I got a close look. The head hadn’t been cut off. Hair grew smoothly over a strong thick neck that ended in nothing. It was as though it had been born with no head, yet I was clearly hearing barking. How could it bark with no head?

For that matter, how could it bite and chew and rip and rend with no head? When I raised up a bit higher I could see farther into the room, and I was looking at the remains of the grand warden’s bodyguards, who looked as though a tiger had ripped them to pieces. Blood was everywhere, lakes of it, and most of the dead men seemed to have had their throats ripped out. The barking was louder. The headless creature wasn’t chasing the grand warden, I suddenly realized, it was herding the grand warden, and it backed him against long thick curtains at another window, and the curtains pulled apart. I stared at a disembodied dog head, huge, mouth gaping, teeth dripping red, and then the head lunged and the teeth snapped together and the Grand Warden of Goose Gate departed the red dust of earth, very messily.

Something else was in the room. A dark shape was standing at the far window. It stepped into moonlight as it reached the sill, and it turned and looked right at us. Once more we were gazing at a creature that was half man and half ape, grotesque but unquestionably real, with a silver-gray forehead and bright blue cheeks and a crimson nose and a yellow chin. In its hand was the cage Master Li so badly wanted, and with one smooth movement it was over the windowsill and down the wall and gone.

A bright flash blinded me. My eyes slowly cleared, and I gazed around and there was no dog’s body, and there was no dog’s head, and howls of laughter were lifting to the sky where a great white crane was slowly flying away across the face of the moon.

Master Li had me haul him up over the balustrade and then he slipped down from my back and walked into the room, avoiding the blood as much as possible.

“Sir, the cage is already gone!” I said urgently. It felt strange to shout when I wanted to whisper, but the laughter from the courtyard below made whispering useless. “I can’t possibly catch that creature! It goes down walls as fast as I can run on a flat field, and how can I fly up and catch a crane?”

“Ox, stop driveling,” he snapped. “I know the cage is gone, but we’re damn well going to get something out of this!”

He looked this way and that, standing on a dry patch of floor that remained like a narrow island in a sea of thick gooey red, and then he turned and pointed.

“Get those curtains. Spread them across the floor to the conference table so we won’t leave sandal prints.”

“Yes, sir.”

I did as I was told, and the old man walked over a path of green damask dragons that looked quite pretty with the crimson background, silver moonbeams, and golden candlelight. At the low jade-patterned table he searched beneath the end where the tea brazier stood, examining every inch of the thick fur rug, and then he picked up some tiny things and grunted in satisfaction.

“When the bell sound announced a message coming from the cage, the grand warden and Li the Cat jumped like rabbits,” he said. “I was almost sure the warden dropped something, and he did. Praise the gods for sloppy cleaning maids.”

He had some shavings from that cake of tea and one of the uncompressed leaves, and he put them in a compartment of his money belt. His wrinkles were squeezing so tightly around his eyes that they resembled the pattern on the ball of one’s thumb seen through the lens of a Fire Pearl, and as usual he was considering problems I wouldn’t even see until it was too late to do anything about them.

“Murder is not easily dismissed if the victim is Grand Warden of Goose Gate,” he said, thinking aloud. “Li the Cat won’t be a problem. The slayings are grotesque and the cage is gone. He knows very well that two other mandarin accomplices have been impossibly murdered and robbed of cages, and his first instinct should be to get the hell out and hurry home and see that nothing weird is taking place with his own cage, or with the other members of the plot. The problem will be the senior members of the grand warden’s staff, who must prove they’re faithful and efficient if they hope for future appointment. They’ll launch an investigation that will hold us here three months, and if we escape before the bodies are found they’ll charge us with murder and send the whole army in pursuit.”

The wrinkles squeezed tighter, and then relaxed as he came to a decision. He pointed and said, “It will have to be a tiger after all. Get that, and keep your sandals out of the blood.”

The walls were partially covered with animal skins. One of them was from a large tiger, complete with head and paws, and the old man had me take it down and neatly cut off the paws, and then hang it back up so the mutilation was as unobtrusive as possible.

“Nobody looks closely at such things. The upper classes say, ‘Ah, a tiger skin,’ and leave it at that, and for every servant who says, ‘Didn’t that thing have paws?’ there’ll be two who’ll say, ‘You’re crazy,’ “ Master Li said confidently.

He spread curtains until he had a path to the little door that led to the central tower, and he breathed a long sigh of relief to find the door unbarred on the inside and easily opened with a lock pick.

“Ox, dip those paws in blood and give us the clear tracks of a homicidal feline,” he ordered. “Make it look as though the tiger ripped the curtains down while chasing men around the room, and plant prints over them. Don’t forget bloody prints on the corpses, and work your way backward to this door. I’ll return as fast as possible.”

So I did as I was told, all the while wondering how on earth he planned to get away with it. Tigers don’t swim moats and climb sheer stone walls and make their way through crowded courtyards and palaces, but I knew better than to say it was impossible. If Master Li thought it could be done, it could be done. I was able to cheer myself up with that thought, but I wouldn’t then have believed how easy it was going to be and what an extraordinary turn of luck would come with it.

I was just admiring my handiwork when the little door to the central tower opened and there stood Master Li, as I expected, and someone else I most certainly did not expect. The old man had brought the bandit chief’s daughter. She had not been considered well enough to attend a play that might last more than three hours, and her eyes widened as she saw the carnage. Then she hissed and reached into her robe and whipped out a very efficient-looking dagger, and the next thing I knew the point was pressed to my throat.