The Pirate Empress (58 page)

The carp reared and slapped its tail down, sending a geyser of water into Zhu’s face. The ripples that resulted formed eight rings, and Zhu took that as his cue to enter the gate.

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The Emperor awoke from his trance at the third shout of his name. “Majesty, we must away from here,” Master Yun said.

The royal eyes blinked, turning their flattened lids toward the warlock. “Where are we? This is not my palace, and these creatures that stare at us from the wall, they are no eunuchs of mine. For that matter, what am I doing here with you? You are Master Yun, are you not?”

There were indeed faces peering at them from the wall, bull and serpent heads that were partially embedded in the stone waiting to release the next victim into the tree of knives. “You don’t remember?” Master Yun queried.

“I remember passing through my secret gardens and climbing to the top of Coal Hill, but after that, all is a blur.” The Emperor gazed, aghast, at the scene before him. One of the bull and serpent-headed slavers had opened the iron gate, and now flogged a sextuplet of naked captives into the tree of knives. “What unholy nightmare is this?” he cried, as blood rained down from their scored flesh.

“It is better that you don’t know,” Master Yun said. “Come, we must find our way to the surface.”

“To the surface?” The Emperor halted in his tracks. “Where are we? If you fail to inform me, Warlock, I refuse to move another step.”

“You wish to remain here? Fine. You wish to name this unholy horror? We are in the Court of Climbing Knives. Now, will you come?”

“But that means…”

“Indeed, it does.” Out of his peripheral vision, Master Yun noticed how the beast-headed guards with their human bodies waxed solid, then nebulous as they entered and exited the wall.
How do doors work in Hell? Why, they do the exact opposite of what you’d expect!

Master Yun approached the east wall where one
Yaoquai
had vanished, leaving the Emperor gaping at the tree. He truly did not remember, and perhaps that was good, else he would be mentally scarred for the rest of his life. A poor leader he would make if he cowered beneath his throne rather than sat proud upon horseback to rally his people. Master Yun thrust a hand into the wall where the demon was last seen. Simple. Like the Mirror of Retribution, one had only to locate the right spot. This spot had a charcoal outline of the two-headed beast. Interesting, he had not noted that before.

His Majesty’s jaw still gaped, and Master Yun returned to retrieve him. He gripped him by the wrist like he was nothing but a small child, and stepped through the charcoal outline that was quickly disappearing. Like molten metal, the door collapsed over the Emperor’s left ankle, and he was trapped with one foot embedded in stone. Master Yun kicked at the wall, but that served only to bruise his toes. His Majesty started to yowl, and Master Yun shushed him. “I will get you out of this fix, but you must stop that infernal noise or I shall have to slap you.”

The yowling stopped long enough for the Emperor to glower. “How dare you? How dare you speak to your supreme ruler, your Son of Heaven that way!”

“I will speak to you any which way I choose for you are beginning to get on my nerves. And you are the one who is stuck in a wall, not I. Do you wish to be freed or not? If so, then be silent. I must think.”

“You will pay for your insubordination, your insolence—when I am freed and sit upon my throne once more.”

‘If’, Master Yun, thought, for he wasn’t sure if ‘when’ was a certainty.

The charcoal outline of
Yaoquai
did not appear on this side of the door and if it
had
originally, it was now gone. A shadow loomed over Master Yun. He turned and saw a seven-foot man with the heads of an ox and a horse. The yowling started up again and he silenced His Majesty with a sharp glare. The messenger of death moved toward them.

“There has been a mistake,” Master Yun said. “Come no further. This man has been freed by the decree of Yan Luo himself.”

The Ox and Horse head Messenger drew nearer, reached out as though to strangle the Emperor, but instead his hand went to where His Majesty’s foot was trapped. The wall turned molten, long enough for the foot’s withdrawal, and the Emperor bolted like a frightened pig.

“It is for this yellow, liver-bellied puppet of a king that we have risked so much?”

That was no messenger of Yan Luo. Not only did the messengers of Feng Du possess no voice, but even if they
could
speak, they would be untrained in the dragon lingo.

“I grew tired of waiting,” Fucanlong said. “In this form, it was the easiest way in. It seems I have not lost my abilities to shapeshift, nor to act. And the fires retract at my appearance.”

“Can you find Tongtian?” Master Yun asked.

“He’s not far. I can smell him.”

They went to fetch His Royal Highness out of a tunnel where he was blabbering to himself. Not very dignified, the dragon’s snort implied, but Master Yun refused to leap to judgement. To be fair, His Majesty had endured a horrific ordeal, and an even more horrific revelation. To wake up in Hell is any man’s worst nightmare.

“This way!” The dragon’s voice coming from the Hell Master’s messenger was disconcerting, but this time, the Emperor did as he was told. The incendiary forces of Feng Du obeyed, and the hellfires retracted into low pockets of blue flame. “Quickly! As soon as I take on dragon shape the fires will burst anew. We must be well up the flue by then.”

The beast heads disappeared, to be replaced by a dragon head. “Mount! The flames have started.” He shot upward, planing his wings as Master Yun mounted, dragging the screaming Emperor in his wake. The threesome catapulted through the Hell Mouth, blue arms of fire raking the dragon’s tail.

As a thousand Ox and Horse Head Messengers followed in pursuit, Master Yun caught sight of Yan Luo, in his official death robes, perched on the lip of the Hell Mouth, laughing. “Remember,” he shouted. “The BLOODSTONE!”

The messengers of Feng Du retreated, answering the summons of their master, and Fucanlong evaporated into the watery blue sky.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

The Pagoda in Hot Lake

The number Seven corresponded with the Ghost Month, a time of year at which the Gates of Hell opened to allow phantoms and spirits to visit the living world. It was a bad number, and so He Zhu attempted to walk the seven paces in six longer strides. Turned out, however, that Six was no more lucky than Seven, for the word
lok
in the Emperor’s Chinese meant fall or drop, and not to his surprise, he found himself falling face first into the water with his feet slipping out from under him.

There was no sign of the giant carp. Zhu decided to swim beneath the trilith. As he stroked, the water refused to give. It was like swimming in a pool of tar, and yet the minnows frolicking beneath the floating stones had no problem. “Master Carp!” he shouted, thrusting his head into the air. But what was the use? The fish did not understand his language. “
Um, yee, bak
!” The numbers Five, Two, Eight brought a swell of yellow into his vision. “I’m stuck,” he called.

The giant carp bloomed larger, rose, then upended itself on its tail and began to sink, tail first. What was it trying to tell him? Zhu lifted his head, persuaded his feet to drop and his torso to straighten before he remembered what Master Yun had said about walking to the bottom of the lake. He had distinctly described the pilgrimage as ‘walking’.

Zhu moved toward the trilith. With each step he took, his body sank deeper.
What happens when my head goes under? How am I supposed to breathe?
The water came up to his chin; soon it would enter his nose.

The lake bottom sloped. He took a deep swallow of air; his head dipped beneath the surface. How much farther? Beyond, he sighted the yellow body of the carp. His breath was about to give out. Unlike Master Yun he was untrained in the art of subaquatic meditation. While his teacher could lie in an inert state completely submerged, Zhu could not.

His chest was tight, lungs straining.
What happens if I exhale?
Was there magic here to keep him from drowning? He was afraid to find out, but soon he would have no choice.

One more step. And then he would explode. Just as Zhu feared the worst, he released his breath, choking, expecting water to fill his lungs, but when he opened his eyes he saw a huge bubble spew straight at him from the carp’s thick lips. His first inclination was to shoot for the surface, but the tar-like resistance of the lake water stopped him. The bubble smashed into his face, engulfed his head and sealed him in a membrane of fishy air.
All right, so the smell isn’t the most pleasant.
But he could breathe and he was alive. He coughed to get the remaining water out of his lungs and glanced around.

The bubble was large and very light. He had no idea how long the air within would last, but it seemed the carp had no intention of letting him drown.

He reached a strange sight in the lakebed. The curled roof of a huge pagoda protruded from the sand. It sported red eaves and a hole in its roof. The carp flicked its tail five times. The fifth rib was what He Zhu sought.
Either that is a deliberate motion meaning the dragon’s deathbed is inside the pagoda, or the poor fish has an itch in its nether regions.

The carp began to swim in a wide arc around him. It returned in a figure eight, then another figure eight. Eight, eight. The number Eight meant prosperity or wealth. Double Eights meant double prosperity. It could also mean there were eighty-eight steps down that pagoda before he would find the dragon’s bones.

Zhu struggled to the hole, glanced down. Alas, Eighty-eight steps.

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Those who inhabited the darkness of Feng Du reputedly lied. Hell was a place of judgement and punishment, not a place of honesty and truth. Those virtues lay across the Golden Bridge, in the domain of Heaven. If the Hell Master spoke the truth, and the Bloodstone did exist with such powers as he described, then all the Middle Kingdom was in jeopardy.

During Master Yun’s apprenticeship as a young warlock, he had studied the mythical Bloodstone. It was thought to be merely a fable, meant to frighten young sorcerers into moderating their power. Great power easily led to temptation, and temptation to abuse. The lesson of the Bloodstone was to curtail abuse. For what greater warning did one need than the possibility of total annihilation of one’s known world?

The Bloodstone controlled the Balance: the forces of life, nature and the universe. That there were no clear ideas of good and evil in the world, right or wrong, was the first lesson Master Yun learned. Without good, there was no evil, and without evil, there could be no good. What was right for one people was wrong for another.

The universe constantly struggled for balance between opposites. But they were not truly in opposition to each other. For rain was needed as well as sun, men as well as women, darkness as well as light, night as well as day. Even weakness to balance strength.

Master Yun clenched his fist and glanced down at the golden rooftops of the Forbidden City as the wind lashed his face. The Emperor yowled unceasingly, and gripped Master Yun’s robes to keep from falling off the dragon’s back. All around was blue and even the lands below had a bluish tinge. The Moonstone refused to stir at Master Yun’s bidding. It remained inert, stark and opaque. How was he to divine the future? How was he to learn the truth of this latest gemstone of power?

It all made sense now, He Zhu’s tender manner toward Alai, Li’s destiny…and Quan’s.
A Chinese prince falls in love with a Mongol bowmaid, a princess becomes a pirate, and an Imperial soldier becomes an outlaw.

“Fucanlong!” Master Yun shouted over the hissing of the wind. “Change course. We must make a detour. We must find a pathway into the Etherworld!”

Fucanlong stopped mid flight. Master Yun felt a distinct sinking sensation and the Emperor screeched in terror as they plummeted, before the dragon’s wings rose again, and sent them cruising on an even keel. “Are you crazy, Master Yun? We just came from the hellfires of Feng Du. The Etherworld is not a place anyone can choose to visit on a whim. Such journeys are granted by greater forces than yours or mine.”

“It is the home of the true Taijitu, and is the path that can tell me the truth concerning the Hell Master’s fable of the Bloodstone.”

“He jests with you,” the dragon said over his shoulder. “No such gemstone could possibly exist. And if it did, why is it in the keeping of the Hell Master?”

“Because only
he
would fail to benefit from its power. He already has say over our retribution when we’re dead. He has no time to fool with the living. Whereas the gods, if there
be
gods”—Master Yun rolled cynical eyes toward the heavens—“they would love to amuse themselves at our cost.”

“There
are
gods,” Fucanlong said. “You know that as well as I.”

“Yes, but they have long been lax, and have not shown themselves on this earth in many, many generations.”

The dragon’s massive shoulders shrugged. “I wouldn’t be too sure of that, and I still say, we cannot enter uninvited.”

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He Zhu glanced through the evenly spaced windows of the pagoda. The yellow mass of the giant carp gleamed outside. How odd. That sight was only possible if the pagoda was rising while he descended.

He reached the bottom of the spiral staircase still breathing. This bubble of carp’s air might yet see him through his task. Zhu pushed himself off the last step, and went to a nest of sand.
Is this the deathbed of Dilong?
Nothing resembling a dragon’s skeleton was visible. Then a current washed away the sand, and a coil of bones greater than a rhinoceros appeared. Half were in shadow, and the other half pale, as though in sunlight. The skull was tucked downward, the spine perfectly intact, twisting back on itself, cutting the coil in half with an S-shape, while the tail curled to complete the circle. On the dark side was a single white bone, on the pale side a single black bone. It reminded Zhu of the tattoo that Tao used to sport on his hand.

He Zhu could count to the fifth rib. But which should he take, the dark one or the light one? Left or right? He could take both, but they were massive bones and it would be a huge task to simply carry one. The water began to surge around him. The current increased and became a whirlpool. He grabbed onto the fifth rib—the white bone—and felt himself hurled forth by the swelling water. As his eyes left the floor, he glimpsed the image of the Taijitu scattered into fragments, the bones of Dilong no longer neatly ordered.

He was pounded up the steps, the rib in his arms smashing against the walls of the pagoda. Outside the windows he could see the yellow carp swimming madly as though possessed by a demon.
Do I have the right bone?
There was no way to know. Returning wasn’t an option. The whirlpool wouldn’t let him. Instead of sucking him inward, it was spitting him up.

Zhu’s head shot through the roof of the pagoda, expelled as though he tasted bad. The carp disappeared. When the boiling waters receded, he collapsed onto the sand. The air bubble over his head burst, and he breathed fresh air.

Only a few moments of rest were allotted him before his horse began to whinny. He Zhu raised his head from where he clutched the dragon’s rib, and saw a huge shadow on the flat rocks surrounding him. Directly in his line of sight were the hooves of an ox. Rolling up his eyes, he beheld a most frightening spectacle. A creature the height of a tree with a metal ox’s head and four eyes scowled at him. In one of its six arms it waved a sword, in another, it held a halberd. When it opened its mouth to speak, Zhu saw that its teeth were made of stone.

“So,
you
are the mortal warrior who has offended me.”

Zhu had no tongue with which to respond to this accusation.

“Do you know who I am?”

Chi Yu was an ancient god of war, worshipped by First Emperor Qin’s Night Guards Army. He Zhu knew of this deity, but until recently had thought all deities to be machinations of rulers and supreme officers. His own belief in Lei Shen, his father’s thunder god, had come late. Chi Yu was reputed to have encased the souls of Qin’s army in pottery because of a woman. She had betrayed him with First Emperor, hence his retaliation. But Zhu had dismissed the stories as myth, fable.
And now I am supposed to have offended the war god? How?

Chi Yu brandished his sword. “You must die.”

He Zhu went for his sabre but instead, raised the giant dragon’s rib like a staff. To his surprise when the deity swung his sword, the blow glanced off the bone as though it were made of metal.

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“You are right, of course.” Master Yun agreed. “Only the dead are sent to the Etherworld before they are directed to Heaven or Hell. “I have already been to the fire labyrinths of Feng Du. I have no desire to revisit the realms of the dead. Besides, it is said that those who visit the Etherworld cannot return to an earthly existence.”

And yet there was one who had. Li had told He Zhu of her strange visions while under the influence of the black poppy, and the place she described sounded exactly like the Etherworld. Li, Lotus Lily, had survived her sojourn to that place where one is dead, but is not. She was the only one who had seen the true, the one pure
Taiji
, the Taijitu, carved out of the heavenly marbles of the Golden Bridge.

His talk with the Hell Master had left him troubled. If the Moonstone was inactivated, then by implication, the Tiger’s Eye and the Fire Opal had lost their powers as well. And if all of the Gemstones of Seeing were disabled, was this due to the theft of the Bloodstone? Only sight of the Taijitu, whole and unbroken, would assure him that Yan Luo spoke false.

Is there a way into the Etherworld?
If he called upon the Transcendent Pig, would he permit entry? Perhaps not, for the pig was neither guardian nor gatekeeper.

“Chao!” Master Yun shouted to the heavens.

Fucanlong shot skyward, switchbacking this way and that, accelerating to the point at which when seen from the ground, the warlock and the Emperor were nothing but two passengers seated upon a fast current of watery, blue air. Master Yun looked out across the scattered clouds, before sending his eyes down to see a very plump, cute, smiling pink pig riding a pillow of cloud below them.

“Greetings, Master Yun.” The Transcendent Pig bowed his head as Fucanlong descended to bring Master Yun level. Behind him, His Majesty whimpered like he was going mad. Master Yun ignored the Emperor’s struggle with sanity. It was a lot to take, being released from climbing a tree of knives, rescued by a shapeshifting dragon, then to encounter a pig on a cloud while in mid-flight aboard an invisible steed. Yes, it was all quite unbelievable and incredible and terrifying—and it was natural to think one was losing one’s mind. Hopefully, before this adventure was played out, His Highness would have toughened up.

Master Yun bowed in turn. “It’s been a long time, Chao. I wish our meeting was under happier circumstances.”

“These are not happy times,” Chao said. “Neither are they sad. It all depends upon which side you favour.”

“Agreed,” Master Yun said. “But it seems my side is in dire need of your help. It concerns the true Taijitu.”