The one on Arthur’s left reached behind him and produced a lumpy iron ball attached to a crude wooden handle, and the whole bound in boiled leather. In the same moment, the thug on the right drew a knife and gave Arthur a violent shove, sending him sprawling to the ground. He rolled onto his knees and made to rise, but the cudgel came whistling through the air toward his head.
He jerked away.
The blow was haphazardly aimed and struck him a glancing blow on top of his shoulder. He gave a yelp and tried to pull free.
The cudgel whistled again and thudded into the back of his neck. A scarlet bloom erupted in his brain, and Arthur’s knees gave way and he slumped to the ground, writhing.
Burleigh moved to stand over him. “I tried reasoning with you, Arthur,” he said quietly. “We might have been friends.” He held out his hand, and the bully with the knife placed the blade in Burleigh’s palm.
“Please!” moaned Arthur through the roar of blood in his ears. He thrust out his hands to fend off the knife, but one of the brutes seized his wrists and yanked his arms over his head. “What are you going to do?”
Burleigh grabbed his shirt and slipped the tip of the knife through the fine fabric and gave a sharp upward stroke, narrowly missing his captive’s jaw. Two more rough slices and the shirtfront was cut away, baring Sir Arthur’s torso and revealing the swarm of curious tattoos inscribed there. Burleigh’s eyes narrowed with approval at the sight of his prize: dozens of small, finely etched glyphs of the most fantastic and cunning design, intricately picked out in indigo ink.
Arthur saw the look and instantly realized what it meant. “No!” he yelled. “No! You can’t.”
“I assure you, sir, that I can,” countered Burleigh. “I’m the man with the knife.”
“Release me!” shouted Arthur, squirming in the grasp of his tormentors, who were now holding his limbs, stretching him out, and pinning him to the ground. Burleigh sketched a line along Arthur’s ribs with the tip of the knife. Blood began to trickle down his side. “You’re insane!”
“Not insane,” objected Burleigh calmly, drawing the knife up across the top of Sir Arthur’s chest along the collarbone. “Determined.”
“Agh!” screamed Arthur, trying to squirm free. “Help!”
“You will have to be quiet,” Burleigh told him. “And be still; I won’t have the map damaged.”
He gave a nod to the man at Arthur’s head, and the cudgel came down once more, with a thick and sickening crack. Arthur felt his slender hold on consciousness begin to slip. “It won’t do you any good,” Arthur murmured, black clouds of oblivion gathering before his eyes. “… You don’t know how to read it…”
“I know a great deal more than you think,” replied Burleigh, with malice cold as the grave. The blade bit deep. “And I will simply learn the rest.”
Arthur screamed again and felt the icy sting of the blade slicing into his flesh.
His vision grew hazy and ethereal.
As if in a dream he saw the deadly club hover in the air above his head as Burleigh’s man took aim for the killing blow. It seemed to hang there for the longest moment…
And then… Arthur could not be certain, for his mental acuity was occupied wholly with clinging to the last shreds of consciousness. But it seemed to him as if, inexplicably, the crude weapon jerked in the attacker’s hand and struck its wielder in the face with a force strong enough to shatter bone. The cudgel, which appeared to have taken on a life of its own, then whirled in the air, striking the second thug a wallop across the nose and continuing on its arc, narrowly missing Burleigh, who dodged aside just in time to avoid a blow that, had it connected with his temple, would have cracked his skull.
The knife blade flashed in the dingy light-a cruel and cutting arc. Then, curiously, it halted in midflight, hovered, and spun, spent to the ground as an agonized cry split the warm evening air.
Arthur sensed, rather than saw, a rush of movement. Something-a hand perhaps or, more strangely, a foot-swinging lazily through the air to catch a forward-hurtling thug in the throat, crushing his windpipe; Burleigh’s man dropped heavily to the ground, clawing at his neck and gasping for air.
There was an incoherent shout.
The sound seemed to Arthur to come from a very great distance above, or possibly from somewhere deep inside him. Someone seemed to be calling on someone to stand and fight. Dutifully, Arthur struggled to rise, his head throbbing, his eyes bulging with the effort. The sound of his own blood surged in his ears with the roar of wild ocean surf.
Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he fell back… but not before he saw an angel.
The heavenly figure was swathed in glowing white silk and took the form of a young Chinese woman, tall and lithe, with long hair black as jet, braided to her slender waist. Her face was a smooth oval of absolute beauty and composure, and Arthur knew he had never seen anything so lovely in all his life. The angelic creature’s movements were performed with a calm, unhurried grace as, with an exquisite kick to the forehead of a charging attacker, she snapped the fellow’s neck, sending him crashing to the dust in a quivering heap of twisted limbs. Pirouetting with a dancer’s poise, she lightly turned to address pale-faced Burleigh, who was now backing away, stumbling, cursing, and cradling a loose and strengthless arm that appeared to have adopted a wholly unnatural bend.
Arthur, overcome at last by pain and shock, allowed himself to lie back and close his eyes. When he opened them again, the white-clad angel was bending over him, cradling his head in her lap. “Peace, my friend,” she breathed, and her voice was the soothing music of paradise.
“Thank you,” he murmured, and tried to lift his hand to her face. The effort brought pain in shimmering silver cascades that stole the breath from his lungs.
Laying a fingertip to his lips, she hushed him and smoothed back the hair from his forehead. “Rest now,” she said. “Help is coming.”
In that moment, the pain of his wounds receded, ebbing away on the dulcet notes of her low, whispered voice. Bliss enfolded him, and he lay gazing up into the most beautiful dark almond-shaped eyes he could conceive-and would happily have spent an eternity in such delightful repose. Then, wrapped in the warmth of the knowledge that he would live and not die, he felt himself lifted up and carried on light wings from the derelict yard that was to have been his pitiful grave.
He was roused again some while later to the sensation of being laid upon a bed of fragrant linen in a room aglow with candlelight. There were other figures floating around him now-more angels, perhaps?-and one of these was dabbing at his seeping wounds with a warm, damp cloth that smelled of camphor and stung him however gently applied. The pain caused him to cry out, whereupon another angel applied a folded cloth to his nose. He breathed in heavy, sick-sweet vapours, and the room with its heavenly beings grew dim and vanished into a realm of white and silence.
It was pain that brought him to his senses once more, to find himself in a dim room, covered by a thin sheet and shaking uncontrollably. The smell of burning spices and oil in a pan, mingled with the barking of a dog, made him heave violently, but his stomach was empty and nothing came up.
Arthur lay back, panting and sweating, his head and chest and side burning as if live coals had been placed beneath his skin. When he could open his eyes again, he looked around. The room was small and neat-bare wooden floors, grass matting on unadorned walls, a low three-legged stool, and a bed-the bed a simple straw-stuffed pallet; a roll of woven bamboo strips covered a wide door half open to a tiny garden. Through the slits of bamboo, he could see a plum tree and, beneath it, a large copper basin of water. In the shade of the tree sat his old friend, the master tattooist, Wu Chen Hu, his expressionless gaze fixed in meditation upon the surface of the water in the basin, where a plum leaf floated.