The Girl with Ghost Eyes Page 24

  Father’s chanting stopped. Liu Qiang kicked him again. And again. Blood sprayed from my father’s mouth, spattering the soulstealer’s shoes.

  Father had ordained me to the Fourth. It wouldn’t be enough to stand against Liu Qiang. And I really didn’t care.

  I stood and faced the soulstealer.

  My turtle breathing was almost complete. There were moments of air remaining in my lungs. I gave up delaying the inevitable.

  I looked at Liu Qiang, the man who cut me. His shoes were wet with my father’s blood. With the dregs of my breath I spoke the Jade Text recitation again.

  He was a Daoshi of the Fifth Ordination, and I of the Fourth. But it didn’t matter. Ordination focuses the will, amplifies it. Neither Liu Qiang nor I could draw upon the eighty generations that came before us. There was his will, focused and amplified by the Fifth Ordination, and there was my will, focused and amplified by the Fourth.

  I looked at Liu Qiang and my spell snuffed his red miasma.

  He gaped. “What?” he said. “How?”

  I smiled like a demoness and began walking toward him. Stepping back, he chanted and formed his hand into a shoujue. I snapped his spell with a syllable and a flick of two fingers.

  His eyes flashed with terror and he began stumbling away. I locked both my hands together in the Heaven and Earth Net, shifting to the Copper Fence: double-handed seals, like those my father had used, shaped the magic of my willpower and my chanted spells. Liu Qiang held up his hand in the Five Darkness single-hand seal, but my father’s strategy held, and the soulstealer began to scream.

  I took another step toward him. It was time to take Liu Qiang down, once and for all. The Fifth Ordination made him more powerful than me, but using double-handed seals made it a more even battle.

  But an even battle means that no victory is decisive. And this needed decisiveness.

  I placed my left hand on my hip.

  With my right hand I fought his magic with my own, single-handed spell to single-handed spell, Fourth Ordination to Fifth. I launched a strike from a Thunder Block hand seal, which he severed with an Immortal Sword gesture, but I was already performing a Mount Tai hand gesture—lifting a weight of spirit equivalent to Mount Tai, and bringing it down to crush him. He held up Immortal Sword again in response. Our magic clashed like armies. His spell was stronger, but I gritted my teeth and didn’t release my Mount Tai gesture. Our eyes met there, on the street. He looked bewildered. We both knew his spell should be strong enough to slice through mine.

  In one rapid motion I released Mount Tai and slashed out with my own Immortal Sword, while his gesture was still fighting against a weight of spirit that was no longer there. He cried out, and it was the frightened little sound of a frightened little man. He turned his sword fingers against me.

  I smiled. He was fighting from strength. I was not. I had been fighting from weakness for fifteen years. I was used to fighting opponents who were much stronger than me. Sometimes I could even beat them. And Liu Qiang wasn’t even that much stronger than me anymore.

  He turned his sword fingers to strike at me, expecting to hit my own Immortal Sword gesture and crush it with pure power. But I released my sword fingers and dropped to the ground, letting his spell swing past over me. Then I brought the spiritual weight of Mount Tai down upon him once more. It hit him like an avalanche.

  Liu Qiang fell to the ground, and dragged himself back to his feet. I advanced toward the soulstealer, one hand still on my hip, and I was smiling.

  “You can’t do this!” he cried, backing away. “You’re only of the Fourth Ordination. You can’t do this. You can’t beat me. I heard him. He didn’t ordain you past the Fourth!”

  “You always were a weakling, Liu Qiang,” I said, advancing

  on him.

  He cringed at my approach. “Don’t kill me,” he said, raising his arm to protect his face. “Please don’t kill me.”

  I looked at the soulstealer. I wanted this man dead. I wanted to strike him down and leave his corpse to rot on the street, unburied and forgotten. Just looking at his face brought a hundred years of anger into me, and I remembered how it had felt in Bok Choy’s gambling hall, when I lost control of my anger. It took a room filled with gangsters to stop me from killing a man then.

  I looked in the face of the little man. He had tricked me, pushed back my clothing and cut my stomach, cost my father an eye, and killed Hong Xiaohao. He had trapped me inside a spirit that convinced me my husband was still alive. He had unleashed devastation upon Chinatown. There was nothing I would rather do than kill him. And there was no one who could stop me.

  But I remembered Shuai Hu, the Buddhist monk with a tiger’s shadow. I made a promise to the monk, but did it really matter? Shuai Hu was a monster. He had no place in the social order. I was under no obligation to respect a promise that had been made to a monster.

  But Shuai Hu treated me with respect.

  I reached out and and took Liu Qiang’s remaining thumb in my hand.

  “No!” he shouted. “Don’t! Please don’t. I need it. I need a thumb!”

  “If I break your thumb, you’ll be helpless, Liu Qiang,” I said. “Imagine being a man with one arm, and your only thumb broken. Someone like that would barely be able to feed himself.”

  Liu Qiang fell to his knees. “Daonu Xian!” he begged. “Please don’t break my thumb, please, Daonu Xian!”

  I looked over at the bone giant. It was demolishing another Xie Liang building. Three or four men were dead.

  “How do I stop the Kulou-Yuanling?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” he cried.

  “What do you mean?”

  The coward whined and said, “It’s never going to stop destroying. That’s what it does.”

  I twisted his thumb and made the soulstealer wince. “You commanded it before. I heard you giving it commands.”

  “Yes, but I commanded it to kill or shout or destroy. There’s no command that will make it stop,” he said. “It will never stop.”

  I released his finger with a sigh. I came so close. I defeated Liu Qiang, killed his spirit arm, and beat Tom Wong and his hatchetmen. And still there was no way to fight the Kulou-Yuanling. Over the skyline of wood and brick I saw the monster’s skull shining in the moonlight, and I could see the qi circulating along its meridians.

  I turned to Liu Qiang. “I’ll let you keep your thumb,” I said, “if you teach me something.”

  31

  This is how I always imagined a higher Ordination: I thought my hands would crackle with power. I thought my body’s energies would be rooted in the earth and branch up to the Seven Stars. I thought the sacred words would touch my lips reverently as I spoke them. I thought peachwood would feel like an extension of my skin. I thought ghosts would surrender at the sight of me.

  I didn’t think the Fourth Ordination would turn me into an idiot.

  And yet there I was, on the roof of one of the tallest buildings in Chinatown, getting ready to jump.

  I took a running start and leaped into the air.

  In mid-leap I brought my peachwood sword down at an angle against the Kulou-Yuanling’s collarbone, then scrambled for a handhold with my left hand. I only fell a few feet before I found a grip.

  The bone giant turned the green fires of its eyes to look at me where I dangled. It hadn’t realized yet that one of its meridians had been severed. I needed to act before it noticed.

  I swung and spun, striking at the Kulou-Yuanling’s Sun and Moon point with my peachwood sword. It was a clean cut. The channel of meridian energy sundered under the strike, giving off a stream of red and yellow sparks.

  The Kulou-Yuanling felt it now.

  Two out of five.

  Learning dian-si-shuei takes years of training, patience, and practice. One has to memorize the six hundred forty-nine position points along the body’s meridians and know how they work. The complex geometry of the energy body has to become as familiar as adding up pennies and nickels.
One needs a precision far beyond the surgical to follow the pattern of strikes, planting each in its exact location without being able to see the flows of energy.

  That was where this was different.

  I could see the pattern of the Kulou-Yuanling’s energy. Qi rose and fell around its bone frame, parallel streams of yin qi and yang qi, moving in opposite directions. The latticework of the monster’s energy body was exposed to me, and exaggerated to fifty feet high. Little precision was required.

  I jumped up and lunged at its Central Treasury point, where the energy from the back cascades into the energy moving along the front. It broke apart under the tip of my sword. The blue-green flames that roared behind the Kulou-Yuanling’s eye sockets flickered and grew a little dimmer.

  The Kulou-Yuanling opened its mouth and gonged.

  “Gong,” I echoed with a smile. With so much of its qi severed, the Kulou-Yuanling’s voice was not as loud as a churchbell. “Gong,” I said again, and clambered sidewise across its ribs.

  It lifted a hand to pull me off its chest but I clung long enough to drive my sword against its Tranquil Sea point. A geyser of sparks shot out from the severed yin meridian. It was the fourth strike.

  It wrapped its bone fingers around my waist and plucked me off its chest. It raised me up to face it. In the cool night air we looked in each other’s faces. The flames of its eyes were flickering like dying candles. Behind the thin cracks of its bone-yellow face plates, I saw so much pain. A hundred men. The rage and pain and hunger of a hundred men who died here, far from the gravesites of their ancestors. Some were killed when gold mines collapsed around them. Others were massacred by mobs of bigots. There was no good reason for any of it. Each of these hundred men came here with aspirations and dreams. Each of their lives ended in tragedy.

  Liu Qiang and Tom Wong had exploited their tragedies.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and threw my sword into its Elegant Mansion point.

  I had fallen earlier from about thirty feet. At that time I slowed my fall by grabbing at a balcony and smacking down on an awning, and still the impact left me battered.

  I was fifty feet in the air over a cobblestone street when the Kulou-Yuanling came apart.

  All the magic that held it together vanished at once. The light of its eyes snuffed out, and its skull and its jawbone, the teeth in its mouth and the vertebrae in its back, all the ribs in its ribcage, its arms and legs, all collapsed into ash and sand at the same moment, straight down on Sacramento Street.

  I fell with it. I experienced a moment of odd curiosity as I watched the street rush up to break me.

  Then there was a sound of wings, a feeling like my clothes had been snagged in thorns, and I stopped falling.

  The spirit gulls had caught me. I turned my head. The flapping of a thousand wings sounded like a choppy sea. Jiujiu was leading them, a look of satisfaction in all her eyes. And riding on her back—

  “You saved me again,” I said to the spirit of my father’s eye.

  Jiujiu took the lead. I floated behind them, with Mr. Yanqiu on my shoulder. Held aloft by a cloud of three-eyed gulls, we drifted over the streets of Chinatown, surveying the damage as we passed. Two buildings had been reduced to rubble. We saw the corpses of four dead men.

  “He ate them,” I said to Mr. Yanqiu. “He was so hungry. So many of the corpses that made up the Kulou-Yuanling were men who starved to death in the mines, hoping for rescue that never came.”

  “That was all the mind it had,” he said, with a brisk nod of his eye. “The Kulou-Yuanling had to obey Liu Qiang, but all it could remember was hunger.”

  “But it had no stomach to fill. It ate the men and remained hungry. It would have stayed hungry if it ate all the men in Chinatown.”

  Mr. Yanqiu shook his eye and sighed.

  We arrived at the intersection of Dupont and Sacramento, where I had last seen my father. I had left him propped up to prevent him from choking on his blood, and then I had dashed off to destroy the Kulou-Yuanling. He was sitting up now. His eye was open wide and he stared at me with a slack look.

  “Bring me down,” I said to the gull spirits.

  “Li-lin, what are you …” said my father, his voice hoarse and uncertain. “What is …”

  “Let her down,” Mr. Yanqiu told the gulls, and they lowered me to my feet.

  “Can you stand?” I asked my father. “Let’s get you to the infirmary.”

  “You are …” he said. “The seagulls … How could …”

  “They are the Haiou Shen, Father, and I am their protector. But you need to see Dr. Wei. You’ve been shot.”

  “It’s just a broken rib,” he said. “Where is the Kulou-Yuanling?”

  “It’s dead. Its bones crumbled to ash on Sacramento Street.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “I killed it, Father.”

  “Lil-lin, what did you …” he said, “how did you …”

  “I used dian-si-shuei on it.”

  My father rose unsteadily to his feet. He stood facing me as one would face a stranger. A stranger holding a very large knife. “You know dian-si-shuei?”

  “Not really. I made Liu Qiang teach me the basics. The five meridian strikes and their order. Enough to kill a very big target that’s moving slowly and has its energy meridians right out there in the open. Father, you’re bleeding.”

  “Liu Qiang.” My father spat on the ground. “Where is he?”

  “He’s beaten. His demonic arm is dead. I’ll tell you all about it at the infirmary, Father.”

  “I’ll go when I’m ready,” he said. “Do not tell me how I should act.”

  I sighed. He needed to get to the infirmary, but if I insisted on it, he’d only refuse more strenuously.

  “Father,” I began, “when I killed Liu Qiang’s arm …” I was having a hard time saying the words. “Something strange happened.”

  “What happened?” he asked me.

  “It changed into a strand of long white hair.”

  A significant look passed between us. “No,” he said, looking away. “It isn’t her.”

  “Father,” I asked slowly, “is the Bai Fa Monu alive?”

  “No,” he said, blinking too fast. “The White-Haired Demoness is dead.”

  “Why did we come to America?”

  He looked down. “Our village was gone,” he said.

  “Is that all there was to it?”

  He would not meet my eyes. “Our village was gone,” he said, “so we came to America.”

  “Mr. Wong said you refused to leave me behind.”

  “What of it?”

  “Why did you insist on bringing me with you?”

  He raised his gaze to mine. “You’re really asking me that?”

  “All my life, I was a disappointment to you. You wanted a son.”

  “Of course I wanted a son, Li-lin.”

  “Instead, you had me.”

  “I wish I had my pipe right now,” he said, “or a cup of tea.”

  “And I would be happy to bring your pipe or prepare your tea, Father. But why did you bring me to Gold Mountain? You could have left me behind.”

  “Could I?” he said. “Yes, I suppose I could. But I had lost so much …” His voice trailed off.

  “Your wife was dead.”

  His gaze searched my face. The silence that fell between us was deep and painful. “You don’t remember,” he said.

  I stared at him for a long time. “What don’t I remember?”

  “You don’t remember any of it,” he said. “I should be glad of that. No one alive can remember my shame.”

  We stood quietly, facing each other. A breeze blew down the street, carrying brick dust and ashes, the smell of burning, destroyed things.

  “Please tell me why you brought me to America, Father.”

  “You want to know why?” he said. “Your mother was dead. And so many others. My apprentices, my mother, my cousins and friends, they were all dead. My temple, my home, everything was
gone. Not a stone remained of the village it was my duty to protect. Do you understand, Ah Li?”

  “I was the only one you had left.”

  He looked at me for what felt like a long time. Eventually he looked away with a laugh, a raw, bitter laugh. “Is that what you think? You think I saw you as some kind of trinket, a souvenir?”

  “I … I …”

  “I brought you with me because you were the only one I managed to save. I failed everyone else. Out of everyone I was sworn to protect, you were the only one who made it out of the massacre with me.

  “You were the only reason I did not loathe myself utterly, Li-lin. The one life I managed to save, other than my own. Our village was a charnel-house when I found you in the well. I found you alive. No one but you. My daughter. My redeemer.”

  There were tears in my eyes. I waited for him to continue.

  “You clung to me, Li-lin, do you remember that? I carried you out of the ruins of our village. You clung to me.”

  “You called me Little Monkey,” I said.

  He gave a short laugh. “You wouldn’t let go.”

  I wasn’t used to seeing the expression on his face. It took me a moment to recognize it. It was affection.

  Father’s eyebrows made him look severe, but he also looked pale and sallow. He’d taken such a beating in the last few days. He could barely stand. His beautiful silk robe was now stiff with drying blood. He wiped sweat from his face and said, “What did you do with Liu Qiang?”

  I took a breath before I answered. “I broke his index finger and let him go, Father. With the broken finger he won’t be able to write any talismans or shape any shoujue gestures. He won’t be performing any more harmful magic. And besides,” I began, “I told him—”

  “Why did you let him live?”

  I sighed. “Because I made a promise to someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Shuai Hu,” I said. His look was blank, so I said, “He follows the Buddhist path. He’s a tiger with three tails.”

  Father’s eye went wide. He took a step back. “What are you saying? You have been consorting with monsters?”

  “I needed his help, Father,” I said. “He follows the Buddhist path.”