Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

“Ox, Yen Shih, I knew Ma Tuan Lin and how he worked, so I’ll do the searching,” Master Li said. “Go back to the main cavern and keep watch—not that I expect our friends to return before I’m done.”

He was right and wrong at the same time. The puppeteer and I were standing in the center of the room looking at packing cases ten or fifteen minutes later, secure in the knowledge that we’d get plenty of warning from the thugs’ voices and footsteps and torchlight, when a sharp clicking sound was followed by the tread of feet, and before we had time to hide a whole new pack of thugs marched out from a doorway we hadn’t seen, concealed in a corner behind cases, and stopped in their tracks and stared at us. They were every bit as nasty as the others, and the leader flushed with anger mixed with blood lust and opened his mouth to yell to his men, and then he gurgled and clutched at his throat and slumped to the floor.

Yen Shih had whipped up a crossbow left leaning against the table, cocked, aimed, and fired so quickly that I hadn’t had time to move. There weren’t any more bolts for the bow, so the puppeteer hurled it at another thug and grabbed his torch in one hand and his knife in the other. By then I’d snatched my own torch to use as a club, and then the thugs were on us.

I’m better with a club than a weapon that requires skill, and I bashed and battered quite effectively, but we were outnumbered and I would surely have been killed if it hadn’t been for Yen Shih. The puppeteer was a graceful whirlwind as he hacked a path of death through the center of the pack, and then neatly kicked over a stack of packing cases to block pursuit. A case split open and a thousand small hard cakes of fake Tribute Tea spilled across the floor, and thugs slipped and slid as the puppeteer turned and smashed back through them like the Transcendent Pig on a killing spree, and survivors who howled in fear and jumped away were jumping right into my range. I managed to hurl my torch and drop a man who was about to stab Yen Shih in the back, and his knife flashed through the air to the throat of the man who had his spear poised at my chest, and then it was all over. I couldn’t believe we’d done it, but there lay the bodies, and none of them moved.

The puppeteer regarded the mess thoughtfully. “We may be in a bit of trouble when we try to hide the bodies and clean up,” he said.

“Forget it,” a voice replied, and I turned to see Master Li shake his head rather admiringly as he surveyed the carnage. “The important thing is that I’ve found Ma’s papers. We’d raise more questions than we’d answer by hiding bodies, so we’ll leave them as is. Or almost.”

He swiftly went through pockets and purses and money belts until he had a stack of silver coins, which he poured upon the table, and a pack of cheap marked cards, which he scattered over the coins and down on the floor. My club went into the bloody hand of one corpse. Yen Shih’s lay beside another, and the crossbow was squeezed beneath the body of a third.

“A trained investigator would find ten things wrong with this pretty picture in ten minutes, but they aren’t likely to call in trained investigators,” the old man said confidently. “The relief guards showed up, found a table with wine and dog meat and decided to take advantage of it, started gambling, somebody got too cute with his cards, and for once in their lives the dolts didn’t miss when they started swinging. Nothing is missing, so why not accept the easiest explanation?”

I wasn’t about to argue with him, but we still had to get out of there. The tunnel was out of the question. Master Li was standing at the door the relief guards had used, and he obviously didn’t like it.

“This has to lead up to the basement of a mansion on Coal Hill belonging to one of the mandarins, and it would take magic to get out through the basement and the mansion without being stopped,” he said thoughtfully.

“Over here!” Yen Shih called.

The puppeteer had seen what we hadn’t. The remnants of an earthslide could still be seen on the floor beside the west wall, and a patch of light that wasn’t artificial was filtering down through a gap that led up to the ceiling. Yen Shih and I widened the gap enough to see that the earthslide had opened a chimney leading up to a patch of blue, and with Master Li on my back I was able to worm my way up to what seemed a very odd closet made from twisted old wood. Light was pouring in through a gap wide enough for Master Li, and then I pretended I was nine years old and forced my clumsy body through, and Yen Shih climbed up and joined us. We had come out on familiar terrain. It was the Lin family cemetery on top of Coal Hill, not far from the grave the vampire ghoul had inhabited, and the “closet” turned out to be the interior of a hollow tree.

“So! The ch’ih-mei happened to use this tree as a resting place during its night stalks, and the earthslide dumped it down to the cave, from which it was accidentally carted with the dirt to Hortensia Island,” Master Li said happily. He hates loose ends. “No doubt the mandarins decided not to fill in the chimney that had been formed because it could easily be turned into a rather neat emergency exit.”

That tree would never be disturbed by gardeners, and I shuddered as I looked at it: twisted, crouching, powerful, malevolent—as sick and dangerous as the dread dead trees on the Hill of Kites and Crows, and it would remain untouched until a wind finally blew it over.

As duly appointed investigator of anything concerning the death of Ma Tuan Lin, Master Li had every right to be at the cemetery where the monster had lived. He sauntered down the hill quite openly and as he did so he reached into his robe and took out a stack of papers. They were rubbings he had taken from the late mandarin’s desk in the cave, and they were so superb that Master Li was willing to bet Ma had destroyed the frieze on the tunnel wall so no one else could share his treasure. Not even Ma was so stupid he couldn’t figure out how the cages were used in communication.

Even I could see it. To begin with, we were once again looking at the same hooded figures that had been carved on the walls of the Yu, the Eight Skilled Gentlemen. These were the sharpest impressions yet, and one detail was visible that hadn’t been before. Each cage they carried contained an object like a writing brush, with the handle sticking up through a hole in the center of the junction of bars at the top, and one sequence was practically a lesson for the slow-witted. (1) One of the gentlemen lifted the brush from his cage. (2) He was shown touching the brush to symbols of the five elements depicted upon the bars. (3) His image appeared inside the cage. (4) Wavy lines symbolized crossing water and distance. (5) A second gentleman was depicted looking at a duplicate image of the first one in his own cage.

“Even Pea-head Chou in my village could understand this!” I exclaimed.

“Pay attention,” Master Li said sharply. “Ma’s discovery of cage communication led him to conclude he’d found what really mattered, and perhaps he had, but that’s as far as he went, and any scholar worthy of the name would realize he had in his hands the only known record of an event still honored in bastard form today, the Dragon Boat Race of the fifth day of the fifth moon.” He grimaced violently and shook his head as though trying to rattle meanings from molasses. “Meaning the day after tomorrow,” he said. “Supposedly the race honors the great statesman and poet Ch’u Yuan, who drowned himself as a protest against corrupt government, but in fact the race was being run a thousand years before Ch’u was born—if not two thousand. The frieze Ma found and destroyed was clearly a pictorial account of the original event that inspired the race of the dragon boats, although it would take the Celestial Master in his best days to wring the full truth from it.”