The Girl with Ghost Eyes (26 page)

“Sons or daughters, it doesn’t matter to me, Li-lin,” Rocket said.

My father rolled his eyes. “Idiot,” he said affectionately.

I stared at my father’s face. I felt like I was forgetting something. His eyes sparkled. He seemed happier than I could remember. I smiled, content.

Shuai Hu started coming to our house to play fantan with Father and Rocket. The Buddhist sat at our dinner table eating with his hands. A mess of vegetables sprawled across the table and spattered his jolly face. “Daonu Xian, I’m not a tiger anymore!” he said. “Your father cured me.”

“I’m not a Daonu anymore, Brother Hu,” I told him, smiling. “You were the only one who ever seemed to realize that I was.”

“I want your babies to call me Uncle Tiger,” he said in a booming voice. I laughed with delight.

A voice said, “There are three treasures.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked the monk.

“Hear what?” He and Rocket looked at me with concern. My father locked his eyes on my face, his gaze intense.

I swallowed. “I thought I heard someone say that there are three treasures.”

“Be careful, Rocket,” Shuai Hu said to him with a lopsided grin, “I think your wife is hearing things.”

I touched my stomach. It was swollen with child. The cuts had almost healed by now. There were Liu Qiang’s cuts, Father’s cuts, and there were mine. Months ago I had tried to cut three characters into my skin. The characters were supposed to be a kind of ladder for me to climb, so I could return to myself and escape from a spirit that had me trapped.

Months had gone by but I could still trace those three cuts on my skin. There was Jing, and Qi, and I had started to carve a third character, Shen. Together they were known as the Three Treasures.

“What are you doing, Li-lin?” my father asked, his voice solemn and disapproving.

I turned to face him. “That night on the roof, Father,” I asked, “how did I escape from the scream spirit?”

He shrugged. “That was months ago,” he said. “You awoke your mind.”

I gave a slow shake of my head. “That wouldn’t have been enough. There were three rungs on the ladder. I needed to climb three rungs to get out. And I only managed to carve two of them into my skin.”

My father, my husband, and Shuai Hu pressed close around me. All three of them wore the same concerned expression. Their expressions were
exactly the same.
I looked at my father’s eyes. I stepped back from the men and faced my husband. Tears welled in my eyes, but I would not let them fall.

“It’s hard to believe that even a scream spirit could be this cruel,” I said.

“What do you mean?” the thing with my husband’s face asked.

“You are not Rocket,” I said, “though I hate the fact with rage and passion, though I wish, how I wish, it were otherwise. My husband is dead, and he is buried. You are not my husband.” I drove a fingernail into my stomach and finished the third character.

Shen, or spirit.

I watched my husband’s face melt. I kept my eyes on his face while the whole world melted around us.

My spirit woke. The scream monster’s spirit-flesh held me like a cocoon, its substance cold but so soft it was nearly liquid. I punched through its skin. The monster burst apart. Its spirit-matter splashed outward, convulsing. I fell from its torn body, dropping a few feet to land on my hands and knees on the roof, while the scream spirit erupted over the roof, spattering the surfaces with smoky fluid.

I wiped my face clean. I took a long, slow breath. My time of screaming was done, and now I shouted with rage.

There were fires burning everywhere I could see. And over the buildings, eclipsing the moon, I saw something tremendous and terrible, gleaming, undead, and fifty feet high.

The Kulou-Yuanling had risen.

26

In the moonlight, its head and shoulders loomed over the buildings of Chinatown. The Kulou-Yuanling was a human skeleton on an enormous scale, ten feet higher than Chinatown’s tallest buildings. It had a skull for a head—a giant, human skull. A sick greenish glow shone from its empty eye sockets, and blood dribbled from its teeth and its jaws. In the spirit world, I could see lines of qi circulating around its yellow bones. Streams of energy flowed in two directions, glimmering around the monstrous skeleton.

The sheer size of the monster was terrifying. Looking at it strained my neck and made me feel dizzy. I stood gaping. Yes, it must have taken armies to bring this kind of monster down. There could be no reasoning with a creature born from so much misery.

Sympathy would only hinder me. I needed to cut off this line of thinking, or my emotions would cripple my tactics. No matter its origins, it was a tool in the hand of a man I despised. An automaton under his control. I watched its shoulderblades pivot with the swinging of its arms. The movement was slow and mechanical. Life-energy circulated outside its body in glowing ribbons of yin and yang.

In the streets people were fleeing in a panic, shouting and screaming. A man, or half a man, dangled from the giant’s skeletal right hand; it looked like the Kulou-Yuanling had bitten off his upper body. In the monster’s left hand, another man was sitting, serene and composed.

It was Liu Qiang. The spirit in place of his right arm coiled like white smoke, and its three eyes lit an angry red. I didn’t know what manner of creature the arm was, but it was clear that the spirit was enjoying the destruction as much as Liu Qiang was. It was the arm’s triumph as much as the man’s.

I had failed to stop the ritual. All of Chinatown was going to suffer the effects of my failure, and I had no idea how I could stop the Kulou-Yuanling now.

In the street below me, the monstrous skeleton lowered a tremendous bone foot onto a carriage. The buggy crunched to boards and splinters under the monster’s weight. The horse panicked and fled down the street, dragging its trace and neighing wildly.

Slow and shaky, I rose, first to my knees, and then to my feet. Around me on the rooftop were scattered globules of gray-white slime. It was all that remained of the scream spirit after I burst out of it.

Mr. Yanqiu stood near me. I looked at the spirit of my father’s eye and knew the truth. I had exorcised him, exiled him to the world of spirits. But when I was losing myself to the scream spirit, the authority of my spells had begun to fade. Feeling the exorcism weaken, Mr. Yanqiu had crossed into the world of men. I was in trouble, so he climbed inside the scream spirit to rescue me. It was his voice I heard, over and over, reminding me that I needed to finish scratching the third character into my stomach.

“You saved me, Mr. Yanqiu,” I said. “You saved me again.”

He beamed at me. “You’re all right, Li-lin?”

I hesitated. I had thought I’d been reunited with my husband, but it was all a lie, and the loss of that dream would torment me for a long time. “No,” I said. “I’m not all right. But I have to find a way to stop the Kulou-Yuanling anyway.”

Mr. Yanqiu started to speak, but a babyish voice interrupted him. The voice came from one of the blobs of slime that were splashed across the roof. “I hate you, Xian Li-lin!” it said.

My eyes widened. The scream spirit was still alive. It was in pieces, but alive. And drifting along the rooftop there were faces, dozens of ghost-faces. They floated, looking lonely and confused.

“The screaming faces,” I said to Mr. Yanqiu. “They’re the ghosts that were trapped inside the scream spirit.” I turned to the blob of slime that had spoken. “You. You did this to them.”

“I hate you so much! I hate you!” it blubbered.

“Good,” I said. The eyes of dozens of ghosts were upon me. I strode across the rooftop and picked up my peachwood sword.

A fire was raging in my mind. It had begun when Liu Qiang betrayed me, trapping me in the spirit world and carving my flesh like I was no more than food. The fire started when that man opened my body so an assassin could ride me. But the wood had been dry for a long time; years, decades of rage came together in a pure white heat. Enough heat to cleanse the wounds of the world.

My anger was calm and deep. The White-Haired Demoness slaughtered my village. Men killed my husband. Liu Qiang cut me like paper. And this infantile, cruel spirit caught me in its body and tried to strip me of my memories. Tried to reduce me to an ache and a scream.

It made me think I was reunited with the only man I ever loved.

“Hate you, hate you so much, I hate you, hate you, hate you,” it was whimpering. It had lost its power and with its power went its courage. Four eyes and a vicious mouth formed in the glob of spirit-slime, spitting childish insults at me.

I held my peachwood sword in a reverse grip, and with a calm fire of certainty I executed the scream spirit.

The ghost faces made no sound. After years or centuries of screaming, their throats must have been raw. But they looked to me, and their eyes showed me awe and gratitude.

I nodded to them, to acknowledge their suffering. It had ended now.

I glanced over Chinatown, surveying the chaos. The Kulou-Yuanling strode through Sacramento Street. That was Bok Choy’s part of town. Tom Wong’s message would be made clear. It would be writ in the crushed edifices and broken bodies of the Xie Liang tong. And anyone who happened to be nearby.

I wasn’t going to let that happen. Father told me that Liu Qiang was a weakling and a coward. It burned me that a man like that had undone my robes, seen my skin, and touched me. He signed his name in my flesh with a knife. And now he’d made something of himself. By raising the Kulou-Yuanling, he made himself the most powerful man in Chinatown. Maybe even the most powerful man in the world.

The fire in me burned so hot I could no longer control it. But I didn’t want to control it. I wanted to dance with it. I addressed the ghost faces and let the fire fill my voice. “Souls,” I said. “Men. Women. You were trapped inside a monster, and that monster is dead. You are free now, and you will never be bound again. You were captured. Used. A monster burned you as its fuel. Tonight another monster walks the earth,” I gestured at the Kulou-Yuanling, towering over Chinatown. “It is made from the corpses and rage and sorrow of a hundred men who died badly. I want to bring the monster down, bring justice to the men responsible, and bring peace to the dead men.”

There was motion among the ghosts, and mumbling.

”I will make a compact with you,” I continued. “Follow me into battle tonight and tonight alone, and I will protect you and burn paper offerings for you, for all my years.”

The ghosts stirred on the rooftop. They shimmered like smoke in the moonlight. At last one spoke. “We are only little things now, and we have no memory of ourselves,” he said. “We are so vulnerable. You offer us protection, but how can you protect us? You are just a girl.”

I drew myself up and filled my words with flame. “I am Xian Li-lin, Daoshi of the Second Ordination, bearer of the Maoshan lineage, protector of the Haiou Shen, slayer of the scream spirit. I am Xian Li-lin, the girl with yin eyes, and I will protect you from harm. Follow me and have a purpose, or stay and be nothing,” I said. I turned my back and strode across the rooftop, wielding my peachwood sword.

The dome of the Kulou-Yuanling’s skull canceled the moon. Beneath the gigantic monster, in its long shadow, men were fleeing. It stepped on a vegetable cart and the cart crushed to pulp and splinters under the bones of its foot.

The monster was huge. Looking up at it made me feel tiny, like a mouse. Even Shuai Hu, the three-tailed tiger, would be no threat to it. The thought of Shuai Hu facing this was like the thought of a kitten fighting a man. And the Kulou-Yuanling was on its way southwest, to kill Bok Choy and the men of the Xie Liang tong. Anyone caught nearby would die as well.

It smashed its right arm into a balcony. The boards splintered upward, and bits of wood scattered all along Sacramento Street.

Perhaps it was the cry of gulls that made the monster turn its head.

Dark green fires roared in the sockets of its eyes. It stopped in its tracks and looked at us. All it knew was rage, but never, I would wager, never in the lives of the men whose corpses made the Kulou-Yuanling, never had any of them seen a young woman dangling in midair, carried aloft by a cloud of gulls. The Kulou-Yuanling stood still.

Then ghosts flew at it. They soared up the Kulou-Yuanling’s leg bones. Dozens of them, pale faces trailing vapors, surged up through the giant skeleton’s ribs. It took its eyes off the crowd of gulls that held me aloft, and looked down into its own ribcage. The ghost faces flitted through its body like fireflies in a hollow tree.

Liu Qiang rose to his feet on the Kulou-Yuanling’s fleshless hand. He stared at the infestation of ghosts, then turned and looked at me. He looked shocked to see me alive. And maybe a little afraid.

The snakelike arm faced me, its three red eyes alert. Its malice and its strange intelligence stood in sharp contrast to the bewildered expression on Liu Qiang’s face. Whatever nightmare spawned that creature, the arm was clearly Liu Qiang’s master.

The shock and fear on the soulstealer’s face gave way to anger. “Kill her, Kulou-Yuanling!” he shouted. “I command it!”

At his command the giant monster reached out a huge, skeletal hand and swatted at the seagulls that held me up. Each of its bony fingers was the size of my whole body. Where it struck, birds lost their grip on the rope. One swat knocked dozens of the gulls away, and I felt my weight begin to drag them down.

“Bring me on to it!” I shouted to the seagulls.

Liu Qiang heard me. The gulls brought me close to alight on the monster, and the soulstealer gave a command I could not hear. But the Kulou-Yuanling heard it, and understood.

I was ten feet from its collarbone and the monster skeleton opened its jaws. It looked like it was going to shout, but the voice that came from its mouth was like no human sound. It was the clanging of enormous cymbals by my ears, a noise so thunderous and awful that I thought my head would burst if the sound continued for another second.

The Kulou-Yuanling’s gong was the mournful cry of a hundred dead men, amplified by death and awful power. Hearing that cry, I felt a touch of what the men felt as they died. There was hunger so great I wanted to gnaw at the flesh of my own arm. There was darkness all around me. Alone, isolated, unloved, and empty, I felt like I lived through each man’s private sorrow, each man’s brutal death.