“Behold, Ye Who Are the Beginning of all Endings and the Ending of all Beginnings, he who has offended you is dead! Great White Tiger, Lord of the Universe, your triumph is now complete!” the sage cried.
The Weasel had been in delirium throughout all this, but the mind is a strange creature. Somehow something got through, and he calmed and breathed much easier, and his fever had almost vanished when we left. Nonetheless, Master Li immediately proceeded to the neighbors to make sure help was ready and waiting when the worst happened. He has great respect for faith healing, but there are limits.
When we wound back through the labyrinth and out into the Alley of Flies the sage stopped at One-Eyed Wong’s refuse mound, stinking in the heat. It was sunset. Again the Yellow Wind compensated for lack of clouds to form an incredibly gaudy sky, and rainbow colors played through the seams and wrinkles of the old man’s hand as he swatted flies away and reached down and came up with a dead rat, swinging it by the tail. He tossed the thing to me.
“Any visible cause of death?” he asked.
I looked it over. “No, sir,” I said.
He tossed a rotten squash away and swung a second dead rat over to me. “And this?”
“Not a mark on it,” I said after I examined it.
He tossed more garbage aside and produced three more dead rats, all unmarked so far as I could tell.
“Well, what do we have here?” he asked. “Five consecutive coronaries? Five simultaneous suicides? Five adverse reactions to bee stings at the same time in the same alley?”
He picked up another piece of junk from the pile and looked at it gloomily.
“How about five early victims of a disease that has the capability to spread very rapidly?” he said. “You know, Ox, we tend to sneer at the medical ignorance of our ancestors. Brilliant in other matters, perhaps, but childlike when it came to science. For example, when they finally got around to devising a written word for ‘plague’ the best they could do was to attach the radical for ‘rat’ to the character for ‘sickness.’ Childlike, wasn’t it?”
He was still looking at the piece of junk in his hands. It was the remains of a cylindrical parchment shade that fit on a revolving rim around an oil lamp. Eight views of a moving horse were drawn on it, each one having the feet in a different position, and when the heat of the wick made the shade turn round and round the effect of movement was amazing.
“Pacing Horse Lantern,” Master Li muttered. “Pacing… horse… lantern…” Whatever was trying to work up through his mind didn’t quite make it, and he shrugged and tossed the thing back to the mound. “Oh hell. I was talking about rats, and speaking of the creatures, let’s go see what’s been learned about our mandarins.”
What we learned wasn’t good. Every single one that Wong’s men had been able to trace had gone to hiding in the most unreachable place in Peking: the barracks of the Black Watch. It’s actually inside the walls of the Forbidden City, separated from the sacred confines by another interior wall, through a gate in which the soldiers can charge to the aid of the emperor—or the eunuchs. One reaches the barracks from the Imperial City through a sloping tunnel leading under the moat, and no place is more heavily guarded.
“Li the Cat is gathering his kittens around him,” Master Li muttered. “Damn it! Something big is scheduled, and soon, and I don’t know quite enough to ask the right questions. Even if I had somebody to ask questions of,” he growled. “Still, two mandarins are unaccounted for, and Wong’s men are out looking. Better get some rest, Ox. It’s going to be a long night.”
Yen Shih was dressed in black, with a great lord’s winged hat, and a scarlet sash around his waist. His black cloak billowed in the stinging Yellow Wind as he gracefully waved toward a landscape of cracked dry earth baking in heat waves.
“This puppet play, Ox, requires a proper setting,” Yen Shih said, and his voice was soft and melancholy. “A setting for shrieking phoenixes, shivering hares, toothless tigers, crying mole crickets, half-starved horses, drooling dragons, blind owls, weeping camels, and old aching turtles endlessly dying in dry wells.”
Yen Shih strode forward into the heat waves. I tried to keep up but he was melting in mirages, and I stopped short with a hard stinging pain in my heart when I saw an old cottage standing forsaken on desolate dead cracked ground. It was my cottage, and this was all that remained of my village, and tears blinded me. Something lived, however. I could hear a sound and I tried to run toward it, groping through sweat and illusions woven from hot rising air. Suddenly I stepped through miasma into clear light and green grass and moving figures.
The laughing children ran over a low hill, and I turned eagerly to Yu Lan. The lovely shamanka strummed the bars of a cage, and my eyes blinked shut when light flashed, and when I opened them she was making the ritual gesture. I touched my eyebrows and my nose, and Yu Lan opened her hand to display another of the tiny two-pronged pitchforks.
As I stepped closer I saw beads of perspiration on her forehead, and I could have sworn there was a look of desperation in her eyes. Yu Lan reached out and took my hand and turned and pulled me rapidly toward the well. Again I lowered us down in the bucket, and again something growled below, and again I smelled the stench of rotting flesh. I swung to the hole and we made it into the little tunnel, but this time Yu Lan didn’t stop.
The shamanka took my hand again and began to run. We ran through twisting passages lit by green phosphorescence, and finally we reached a stone shelf and I gazed down into a great cavern. I gasped and jumped back in fear because it was filled with immense coiled serpents, but Yu Lan tugged me forward again and started down stone steps, and then I saw they weren’t serpents but coiled pipes of some sort, connecting at junctions to smaller ones, and then smaller and smaller, and finally eight tiny pipes ran into eight small boxes in two groups, four on the left and four on the right.
Yu Lan reached down and opened the lid of one of the boxes. There was a small rack inside. Her eyes lifted to mine, and the two-pronged pitchfork lifted to her lips. She gently blew between the tines and placed the pitchfork on the rack, where it fit perfectly. She closed the lid.
Mist was swirling. Cool refreshing raindrops pattered down, and rainbows were wrapping around us, and I reached out to take the shamanka in my arms. She was smiling at me, her lips parted and her eyes half closed. Then her eyes opened wide and she gasped. Yu Lan jumped backward into the mist, and her voice was filled with pain and loss and fear.
“No! Please, no!”
Something terrible was attacking the shamanka. Mist made it indistinct, but I saw a flash of teeth like fangs in the area of her head, and claws at her waist. A great thick terrible slithering thing was at her legs, and I tried to reach her but I couldn’t. I was running blindly into clouds of mist like heat waves, and everything was twisted and distorted. Yu Lan’s voice reached me from very far away.
“Ox, the boats! Both boats must race! Both of them! One boat must not race unchallenged!”
Then the voice was gone, and the shamanka was gone, and the mist was gone, and I was lying on a pallet in the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong beside Master Li, and bright moonlight was pouring through the window, and the Yellow Wind was hissing like a great scratching cat against the roof tiles of Peking. I rolled over and shook the old man’s shoulder. He awakened in an instant.