Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

Master Li seemed to feel a peculiar admiration for the late mandarin, whose career had been amazingly consistent.

“His first post was administrator to the Hu Peh. He arrived during a flu epidemic, during which time that remarkably hygienic tribe fashioned and wore gauze masks,” Master Li said. “His official report stated that his subjects were like human beings except they had nothing but blank spaces between nose and chin; their mouths, he surmised, being placed on top of their heads. He was rewarded by promotion to the land of the Kuang Tung, and it was their ghastly luck that he arrived as they were celebrating their Creation Myth. The official report stated that they would require neither arable fields nor fishing rights, since they existed by eating mud.”

“Sounds like a delightful fellow,” Yen Shih said wryly.

“He got better,” said Master Li. “Ma Tuan Lin was promoted to oversee the Chiao, which led to the massacre of uncounted bewildered grandmothers when he accepted as literal truth a tale designed to make youngsters behave, and reported that the old ladies of the tribe turned into bats at night and flew around devouring the brains of Chinese children. They promoted him to Hainan, and he arrived on the island during a full moon, and one can imagine what moonlight did to Ma Tuan Lin. His official report stated that the girls were actually mermaids who wept pearls instead of tears, so legions of unsavory gentlemen set sail for Hainan to grab girls and make them cry, and I don’t want to go into the disgusting details.”

Master Li had come in sight of the pavilion, and he stopped and waved his hand at it.

“My point is that Ma’s fellow conspirators would scarcely trust a man like that with important documents. My guess is that he was still useful to them, so rather than slit his throat they made sure that he worked on anything connected to the scheme—and that includes the cages—in a place they supervised. His pavilion was right beside the tunnel, giving him ready access to the cave beneath Coal Hill, and that, I’m willing to bet, is where they gave him an office and had somebody search him for sensitive papers before he left.”

“So we’re going back into the cave, to find and search Ma Tuan Lin’s office?” Yen Shih asked.

“Precisely.”

The puppeteer didn’t say anything, but those little lights were dancing deep inside his eyes. I helped him reopen a hole in the weeds covering the tunnel entrance, and we stopped just inside and lit our torches. So far as I could see the tunnel hadn’t been used since the last time we’d been there, and the evidence was fairly good because white dust still covered the ground in the area where something had been chipped from the wall, and we saw no fresh sandal prints. We descended to the path beneath the lake. All I heard was the ominous drip-drop of water trickling from the roof, and the rapid thudding of my heart. The path began to rise toward Coal Hill. As we got close to the cave I heard a sound that resolved itself into laughter, and it was the laughter of men who had triumphed over the problems men are heir to by reverting to bestiality. I can’t describe it. Either one knows that sound or one doesn’t. We extinguished our torches. As we got closer the laughter got louder, and when we peered into the cavern we saw ten men at a table eating a breakfast of roast meat. Dog bones littered the floor at their feet, and dog grease dripped down their jowls, and they roared with mirth as they swapped one stale dirty story after another. The three leaders were all too familiar: Hog, Hyena, and Jackal, who had brutally murdered the little clerk, and I took note of the fact that all the men wore daggers, and there were three crossbows propped against the table beside the leaders.

They were too occupied with greasy dog meat and greasier jokes to notice much else. Master Li promptly slipped into the cave and began crawling between stacks of packing cases, and Yen Shih and I followed him to the back wall. He changed position several times, scanning the ceiling and angles of the walls to judge the acoustics, and then he whispered to us to gather pebbles and take positions where we could throw them through deep shadows back through the tunnel entrance. At his signal the puppeteer and I pitched pebbles, and the rattling sound made the men jerk their heads up and turn their eyes toward the tunnel.

Master Li had his hands cupped around his mouth. He’s tried to teach me how to do it many times, but I have no talent for such things, even though I realize ninety percent of it is getting the listener’s attention focused on the place the sound is supposed to come from. The effect was really remarkable. A high quavering voice seemed to drift from the blackness of the tunnel, a voice I remembered well.

“Give… me… back… my… eeeeears,” wailed the ghostly voice of the murdered clerk.

The thugs sat frozen, dog legs and haunches half crunched between their teeth. Hyena spat meat onto the table and turned to Hog.

“That was Cricket, sure as you’re born,” he whispered.

One of the other thugs jumped to his feet, spilling a wine jar and knocking a platter to the floor.

“Cricket? Cricket? But you said you’d killed the miserable little bastard!” he squealed.

“Give… me… back… my… noooooose.”

Jackal stood up, white-faced, clutching his dagger.

“That’s Cricket’s ghost,” he said flatly. “The little insect’s come back to haunt us.”

The other thugs were standing now, looking at each other for support. Only Hog remained seated as before, at the head of the table, gnawing on a bone.

“Ghost? Your mama raised you better than that,” he sneered. “Don’t you know a dead person’s got to stay in Hell three years before he can return in ghost form?”

“Then what the hell was that!” Jackal shouted.

“Give… me… back… my… eeeeeeeeyes.”

“That’s Cricket. His hun soul got lost,” Hyena whispered. “Can’t you hear? It’s searching for its body, except we cut those parts away.”

“Why couldn’t you have strangled the bastard!” one of the thugs shouted.

“Hun soul, hun soul,” Hog sneered. He made a show of dignity as he slowly got to his feet and picked up his crossbow. “Listen, you ignorant turds, the hun soul lives in the liver and we didn’t touch Cricket’s liver. I chopped out the bastard’s lungs, not liver, and it’s the lower soul that lives in the lungs, and if you think I’m scared of the po soul of an insect like Cricket—”

“Give… me… back… my… luuuuuuuungs.”

Hyena and Jackal were slinking away, but Hog halted them and rallied the troops.

“Alive or dead. Cricket don’t have the guts of a sparrow!” he yelled. “Come on, boys, let’s give that turd something to moan about!”

He charged to the tunnel entrance, scooping up a torch from a bracket on the wall, and after a moment of indecision Hyena and Jackal and the other thugs followed the leader, whooping and cursing to keep their spirits up, whacking the air with daggers. They disappeared down the tunnel shouting, “Show yourself, you coward!” and “I’ll chase your worm-eaten soul halfway to Tibet!” The snap-whang of a crossbow suggested that imagination was providing images to shoot at, and Master Li grunted with satisfaction as he trotted out and started across the cave to the door in the back wall.

“I’ll be surprised if they don’t keep going until they reach the island, and then they should spend an hour or two hacking holes in underbrush,” he said contentedly.

The alchemy laboratory seemed unchanged, but Master Li wasn’t interested in it now. He continued back to another door at the rear, and when he opened it we were looking at a long corridor with little alcoves for offices on both sides.