He made to offer it to Wang, but Wang shook his head. "I know what it is, Li Yuan. You have no need to show me."
Li Yuan gave a small laugh of astonishment. What was this? Was Wang admitting his treachery?
With what seemed like resignation, Wang pulled himself up out of the chair and went to the double doors, unlocking them and throwing them open. At his summons a servant approached, head bowed, bearing a large white lacquered box. Wang took it and turned, facing his fellow T'ang.
"I wondered when you would come to this," he said, approaching to within an arm's length of where Li Yuan was sitting. "Here. I was saving this for you. As for the traitor Sun, he has found peace. After telling me everything, of course." Li Yuan took the box, his heart pounding.
He opened it and stared, horrified. From within the bright red wrappings of the box Hsiang Shao-erh stared back at him, his eyes like pale-gray bloated moons in an unnaturally white face, the lids peeled back. And then, slowly, very slowly, as in a dream, the lips began to move.
"Forgive ... me ... Chieh . . . Hsia. ... I ... confess ... my ... treachery . . . and . . . ask. . . you . . . not... to ... punish... my ... kin ... for... my . . . abject. . . unworthiness. . . ." There was a tiny shudder from the severed head, and then it went on, the flat, almost gravelly whisper like the voice of stone itself. "Forgive . . . them . . . Chieh . . . Hsia. ... I ... beg . . . you. . . . Forgive . . .them____"
Li Yuan looked up, seeing his horror reflected in every face but one. Then, with a shudder of revulsion he dropped the box, watching it fall, the frozen head roll unevenly across the thick pile of the carpet until it lay still, resting on its cheek beside Wang Sau-leyan's foot. Bending down, the T'ang of Africa lifted it and held it up, offering it to Li Yuan, the smile on his face like the rictus of a corpse.
"This is yours, I believe, Cousin." Then he began to laugh, his laughter rolling from him in great waves. "Yours . . ."
"What's your name?"
"Kung Lao."
"And yours?"
"Kung Yi-lung."
"You're brothers, then?"
The nine-year-old Yi-lung shook his head. "Cousins . . ." he said quietly, still not sure of this man who, despite his air of kindness, wore the T'ang's uniform.
Chen sat back slightly, smiling. "Okay. You were friends of Ywe Hao's, weren't you? Good friends. You helped her when those men came, didn't you? You let her know they were on their way."
He saw how the younger of the two, Lao, looked to his cousin before he nodded.
"Good. You probably saved her life."
He saw how they looked down at that; how, again, they glanced at each other, still not sure what this was all about.
"She must have been a very good friend for you to do that for her, Yi-lung. Why was that? How did you come to be friends?"
Yi-lung kept his head lowered, almost stubbornly. "She was kind to us," he mumbled, the words offered reluctantly.
"Kind?" Chen gave a soft laugh, recalling what Karr had said about the guard Leyden and how she had probably spared his life. "Yes, I can imagine that. But how did you meet her?"
No answer. He tried another tack.
"That's a nice machine she's got. A MedRes Network-6. I'd like one like that, wouldn't you? A top-of-the-range machine. It was strange, though. She was using it to record news items. Things about transportation systems."
"That was our project," the younger boy, Lao, said without thinking, then fell quiet again.
"Your project? For school, you mean?"
Both boys nodded. Yi-lung spoke for them. "She was helping us with it. She always did. She took the time. Not like the rest of them. Any time we had a problem we could go to her."
Chen took a deep breath. "And that's why you liked her?"
Both boys were looking at him now, a strange earnestness in their young faces.
"She was funny," Lao said reflectively. "It wasn't all work with her. She made it fun. Turned it all into a game. We learned a lot from her, but she wasn't like the teachers."
"That's right," Yi-lung offered, warming to things. "They made everything seem dull and gray, but she brought it all alive for us. She made it all make sense."
"Sense?" Chen felt a slight tightening in his stomach. "How do you mean, Yi-lung? What kind of things did she used to say to you?"
Yi-lung looked down, as if he sensed there were some deeper purpose behind Chen's question. "Nothing," he said evasively.
"Nothing?" Chen laughed, letting go, knowing he would get nothing if he pushed. "Look, I'm just interested, that's all. Ywe Hao's gone missing and we'd like to find her. To help her. If we can find out what kind of woman she was . . ."
"Are you tracking her down?"
Chen studied the two a moment, then leaned forward, deciding to take them into his confidence. "Ywe Hao's in trouble. Those men who came tried to kill her, but she got away. So yes, Kung Lao, we have to find her. Have to track her down, if that's how you want to put it. But the more we know—the more good things we know about her—the better it will be for her. That's why you have to tell me all you can about her. To help her."
Lao looked at his cousin, then nodded. "Okay. We'll tell you. But you must promise, Captain Kao. Promise that once you find her you'll help her all you can."
He looked back at the two boys, momentarily seeing something of his own sons in them, then nodded. "I promise. All right? Now tell me. When did you first meet Ywe Hao, and how did you come to be friends?"
THE maintenance ROOM was empty, the hatch on the back wall locked, the warning light beside it glowing red in the half-light. Karr crouched down, squeezing through the low doorway, then stood there, perfectly still, listening, sniffing the air. There was the faintest scent of sweat. And something else . . . something he didn't recognize. He went across, putting his ear against the hatch. Nothing. Or almost nothing. There was a faint hum—a low, pulsing vibration— the same sound one heard throughout the City, wherever one went.
He paused a moment, studying the hatchway, realizing it would be a tight squeeze; that he would be vulnerable momentarily if she were waiting just the other side. But the odds were that she was far away by now.
He ducked into the opening backward, head first, forcing his shoulders through the narrow space diagonally, then grabbed the safety bar overhead and heaved himself up, twisting sideways. He dropped and spun around quickly, his weapon out, but even as he turned, he had to check himself, staggering, realizing suddenly that the platform was only five ch'i in width and that beyond . . .
Beyond was a drop of half a li.
He drew back, breathing slowly. The conduit was fifty ch'i across, a great diamond-shaped space, one of the six great hollowed columns that stood at the comers of the stack, holding it all up. Pipes went up into the darkness overhead, massive pipes twenty, thirty times the girth of a man, each pipe like a great tree, thick branches stretching off on every side, crisscrossing the open space. Service lights speckled the walls of the great conduit above and below, but their effect was not so much to illuminate the scene as to emphasize its essential darkness.
It was a cold, somber place, a place of shadows and silence. Or so it seemed in those first few moments. But then he heard it—the sound that underlay all others throughout the City, the sound of great engines pushing the water up the levels from the great reservoirs below and of other engines filtering what came down. There was a palpable hum, a vibration in the air itself. And a trace of that same indefinable scent he had caught a hint of in the room earlier, but stronger here. Much stronger.