Barry Hughart - Eight Skilled Gentlemen

“It’s the cages, Ox,” Master Li said quietly. “Now our only hope is to reach those cages before Envy gets to them. If I’m right he only needs one more, and that must not be allowed to happen.”

Apparently we had arrived at a pause in some sort of ritual. I hadn’t realized how abnormally silent the crowd had been until a vast collective sigh greeted the chief figure of the ceremony, who stepped from behind a screen decorated with sacred symbols. It was the Celestial Master. His cape was decorated with skulls, and behind him came a high priest carrying an ancient stone club on a gold-embossed pillow. They slowly mounted the steps to the platform around the old well. There was a long ritual prayer I couldn’t hear and probably wouldn’t have understood anyway, and then the ranks of soldiers parted to make way for two lesser priests leading a line of chained prisoners. The first prisoner was released from the lead chain. Still manacled, he was hauled up the steps and kicked down on his knees before the Celestial Master.

The high priest raised his arms and voice to Heaven, chanting something or other, and the Celestial Master raised the stone club above his head. I gaped in disbelief as the club swung viciously down and smashed the skull of the prisoner, and then with a powerful contemptuous kick the ancient saint shoved the corpse to the edge of the well, and it toppled down into darkness. A great cheer rang out from the crowd, and the mandarins applauded. I stared at the sage.

“They’ve been praying to get the attention of Heaven, and the emperor of Heaven is not likely to be pleased,” he said in a hard tight voice. “If the August Personage of Jade has a fault it’s his hot temper, and we’d better do something fast before the Doctrine of Disaster gets an unfortunate workout.” He punched my arm with short rapid strokes. “The cages, Ox. We must get those cages and we can’t worry about risk. Let’s go.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

A second human sacrifice was being hauled to the Celestial Master’s ax, which meant nobody was watching the cliff as I carried Master Li down it. I heard the cheer as again the stone ax crushed a human skull, and I began praying for help. Fervently, but not blindly. I had a very clear image in mind. Where was the puppeteer? If Yen Shih would only appear with that dancing daring light in his eyes, swords in each hand flashing faster than the wings of hawkmoths…

We reached the shallow pool behind the platform and started slogging forward, and then Master Li let out a tiny yelp and stared up and to the left. I gasped as I saw a figure climbing down the wall of the Palace of Southern Fragrance. It was not the figure I’d been praying for, but it was just as powerful, and it was headed straight toward that platform and those cages. Blue cheeks and crimson nose and yellow chin and silver forehead seemed appropriate to the scene that framed them: whirlwinds tossing dark clouds of debris into the air, hissing Yellow Wind, a swollen blood-red sun, gusts howling around palaces.

“Hurry, Ox! He can’t get another cage!” Master Li yelled.

I did my best, leaping forward with the old man on my back, vaulting to the platform. I was still on my knees on the platform’s edge, preparing to stand and leap, when the great ape man landed light as a leaf between the thrones. He snapped a mandarin’s neck with an easy chop of one hand and scooped up his cage, and for a moment the creature’s eyes looked directly at me, and at Master Li, and I almost thought I saw amusement in them. Then with two more leaps Envy was off the platform and racing to the wall. One alert soldier managed to hurl a spear that fell five feet short as the ape man began to climb. I could scarcely run as fast as Envy could scale a wall, and in a few seconds he was gone, carrying the cage.

Unfortunately we were still there. The mandarins were shrieking and pointing at us, and squads of soldiers were racing forward, and we were saved from being turned into pincushions by massed arrows because they would have hit mandarins and eunuchs as well, but it was only a brief reprieve. Li the Cat was howling for blood, and the Black Watch was closing around us, and at that instant something happened that caused every head to turn. I thought I had heard the most horrible screams possible when Hosteler Tu had practiced his art down in the dungeon, but I was wrong. These screams were even worse, and they were coming from the Black Watch’s basilica, and my eyes jerked that way along with everyone else’s.

Just above the level of the intervening wall was a long balcony in front of apartments on one of the upper floors, and Hyena and Jackal were staggering along it. They were stark naked, and they screamed in unimaginable agony as they tore their hair and rent their flesh. Hog followed, also naked, with a naked girl riding on his back. It was Yu Lan. Hog howled as horribly as the others as he tried to pluck his eyes out, and I realized that the three men were mad. Hopelessly, horribly insane, and the heat waves that rose around them were causing illusions like dreams, and as in a dream I thought I saw glittering fangs in the blurred area of Yu Lan’s lovely head, and terrible claws at her waist, and something scaly and coiling near her legs. The mirage made the beautiful shamanka appear to be laughing with delight as she rode a madman’s back—but Master Li was pounding me, jerking at my arm, and I felt him jump from my back.

He was diving for the cages. Li the Cat and the soldiers stood transfixed, staring at the balcony while Master Li snatched a cage from beneath a throne and jerked the brush from it. He squinted at the symbols engraved upon the bars, and then touched the figure of a man at an oar with the tip of the brush, twice.

“Goat, goat, jump the wall,” he chanted, and the brush touched the symbol of a drum, “grab some grass to feed your mother”—the brush touched a scarf and a head—“if she’s not in field or stall”—the brush moved to the blue dragon of the east and the white tiger of the west—“feed it to your hungry brothers”—the brush moved rapidly over a sequence of rowers—“one… two… three… four… five… six… seven… eight!”

A bright flash blinded me, and when my eyes cleared I was gaping at Tuan hu, a great toadlike creature squatting in the center of the platform. Terrible eyes glared at me, the immense mouth opened.

“Ox!”

Master Li was touching the tip of his right forefinger to his left eyebrow, right eyebrow, and the tip of his nose, and I hastened to repeat the sequence I had dreamed of, and the horrible eyes moved away from us. The mouth gaped, a huge tongue flicked out, and streams of burning acid shot over soldiers and mandarins, scorching through flesh and clothing alike.

“Ox, this is what the cages carry! This is what we need!” Master Li yelled.

A small compartment had opened in the bottom of the cage, and Master Li slid his fingers between the bars and pulled out something else I knew from dreams: a tiny object shaped like a pitchfork, but with only two prongs. He swiftly stuck it in his money belt and dove for another cage, and at that point we were overcome by a rapid sequence of startling events.

Mandarins and soldiers shrieked, acid sprayed the platform, and a roaring, howling, furious saint leaped up between writhing bodies. The Celestial Master was quite out of his mind with fury. He ignored the great demon-deity as he charged Master Li with his stone club, smashing to jelly the head of a mandarin that got in the way. I dove for the Celestial Master’s legs just as he tried to decapitate Master Li, and the three of us tumbled over the back edge of the platform and toppled down into the pool beneath the splashing waterfall.

Fortunately my fall had been slowed by water when my head hit a rock beneath the surface. I wasn’t quite knocked unconscious, but I had no control of my body until the numbness went away, and I could only watch helplessly as the Celestial Master attacked Master Li. The saint had lost his ax in the fall, but immensely powerful hands had closed around the sage’s throat and I knew that Master Li had no chance at all. Incessantly lifting water wheels kept pouring the contents of great buckets into the Golden River, and the water kept pouring and foaming down around us, and something bumped against my legs. It was the body of an officer with a broken back. Then a pair of hands emerged from the spray, reaching around me to grab the hands of the Celestial Master and slowly pry them from Master Li’s neck.