“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.
The seagulls collapsed as one. They fell in a hush of crushed air and I fell with them.
The sound stopped. Dropping in silence, my ears ringing, I felt anger come over me. The Kulou-Yuanling wasn’t the hundred men who died. It was a violation of those men.
By some insanity, some surge of willpower, some snarling rage, I lunged forward just in time to grab hold of the Kulou-Yuanling’s lowest rib.
27
Liu Qiang’s eyes were wide as he watched me cling to the giant skeleton’s rib. The three-eyed snake spirit that had replaced his arm looked at me with the excited curiosity of boys who torture animals, and Liu Qiang began to chant an incantation.
I yanked myself up to a crouching position on the Kulou-Yuanling’s lowest rib. The ghosts I had freed were flying in and around the monster’s bones, confusing it. Liu Qiang shaped his fingers into magic shoujue. It was the single-handed seal of the Left Thunder Block, aggressive magic. He uttered a few words and launched his spell at me.
Whatever spell he cast, it didn’t matter. Fast as lightning I drew my peachwood sword and cut the spell in half. I smiled as the spell’s energies began to dissipate around me.
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Liu Qiang looked frustrated. He began to chant. It would take him at least few more seconds. Holding my peachwood sword in my teeth, I jumped up and grabbed onto the next rib up. I pulled myself to crouching and made an obscene gesture in Liu Qiang’s direction. At the top of the Kulou-Yuanling’s ribs I would climb its spine into its skull, and inside there, I would try to find a way to extinguish the spirit fires behind its eyes.
Liu Qiang unleashed his next spell and I cut it down. “You’re making this too easy for me, pisspot,” I shouted. I placed my peachwood sword between my teeth and waited for him to start chanting another spell.
“Bring me over to her!” Liu Qiang shouted, and my eyes went wide. I wasn’t ready to confront him yet. His monstrous arm frightened me. It had killed Hong Xiaohao, and it seemed to hate me in a deep and ugly manner I couldn’t comprehend.
The giant skeleton brought its hand in close to me and I took the opportunity to climb another rib.
I started to take a grip on my peachwood sword but the three-eyed snake spirit whipped out and bit my wrist with its needle-teeth. The sword slipped from my fingers and fell. Rows of punctures opened on my forearm, bleeding. My peachwood sword landed on the street with a clattering sound.
The snake spirit could have killed me in that moment. Without my peachwood sword I had no way to defend myself, no way to fight back. Liu Qiang’s arm drew itself up to face me and made a sound in its throat like scraping iron. It was laughing at me, and the expression in its three eyes was grotesque.
It was somehow personal. The demonic arm wanted me to break down at my moment of defeat. It wanted to make me beg for my life.
I twisted away from it as fast as I could and jumped off the giant’s rib.
Qinggong, lightness. I started to plummet and threw my weight to the side. There was a balcony. Was it within reach? Kind of. I grabbed at the balcony, scrambling for a grip, but the blood from my wrist made my fingers slick and slippery. I couldn’t grab hold, could do no more than slow my fall a little.
I crashed into an awning and slowed some more. Then I landed rolling on the cobblestone street.
The impact left me stunned. I heard the clink of broken glass and knew my bagua mirror had shattered. One more weapon was lost to me. The combat was stripping me of my defenses, weapon by weapon, wound by wound, and now I couldn’t even gather the wherewithal to do something so simple as get up.
Thirty feet up Liu Qiang stood like an emperor in the bone giant’s hand. He was yelling at me, probably mocking. I didn’t need to hear him to feel shamed. The Kulou-Yuanling smashed another balcony and punched a brick wall, cracking it. I could smell smoke. A streetlamp had been crushed, and its remnants burned slowly. A tangle of wires lay on the street, where a telegraph pole had been knocked down.
I lay stunned on my back and knew I could have stopped this. Should have stopped this. Every bit of destruction mocked my failure louder than anything Liu Qiang could say to me.
An orange blur streaked down from a rooftop to the Kulou-Yuanling’s hand. The cat spirit tore at Liu Qiang’s face. The soulstealer screamed. Mao’er gave a caterwauling cry and slashed Liu Qiang again. “Knifed me!” the two-tailed cat screeched. “Threw a knife in my neck!”
Liu Qiang cried out in pain and surprise, while his spirit arm coiled back to attack the cat spirit. Mao’er clung to Liu Qiang’s head with all his claws and bit the man’s face.
The snake spirit dug its needle-teeth into Mao’er’s back, but Mao’er had done his damage. Liu Qiang staggered backward, and the three of them—soulstealer, cat spirit, and monster arm—toppled together from the bone giant’s hand.
Liu Qiang’s snake arm snapped out, reaching its jaws to catch onto something, anything. It dug sharp teeth against the giant’s bottom rib but it couldn’t find purchase, barely slowing their plummet. The three of them landed hard, across the street from me.
They landed on the boardwalk. I scowled. Could good fortune visit me for once? The wood boards absorbed a good deal of the impact when they fell. When I fell, the cobblestones absorbed nothing.
I needed to push myself up. It took effort, but I managed to force myself up to my hands and knees.
Mao’er was up already. Wobbling on four legs, with spirit blood flowing freely from his wounds, he looked at me. His fur was in hackles, and the blood around his mouth was sticking to his fur. For a moment he glanced at Liu Qiang and the white snake monster that substituted for an arm, as though the cat was appraising his choices—but then the moment passed, and the cat spirit slinked away.
Liu Qiang was struggling to push himself up, but his arm was alert. Its three red eyes studied me, looking for weaknesses to exploit.
I crawled toward my peachwood sword. Blood was trickling from my wounded wrist. I tried to taunt the spirit arm but the words came out between difficult breaths. “Can’t … reach … me … you stupid … snake.”
Liu Qiang had given up on standing for now. He reached into a pocket and withdrew a small yellow paper. I was five feet from my sword and he flicked his wrist, snapping the paper in the air.
It was shaped like a little man, and it flew at me. It came in low and fast, and it bit my neck. “Ow,” I said. The bite stung. The paper man kept flying. It veered in midair to attack me again.
My father had mocked these little monsters. Flimsy, he said.
I grabbed it out of the air and crumpled it in my hand.
But there were already more of them, dozens more. They swooped around me, obscuring my vision. They bit me and it hurt. There were so many of them, biting at me, and the sharp little stabs of pain kept me from thinking clearly. The pain itself wasn’t overwhelming. The bites were aches, nuisances, and they threatened to cost me my focus. But I could hear the sound of destruction. The Kulou-Yuanling finished demolishing a second wall. Broken bricks thudded to the ground.
Along with the thudding, I heard another sound. Ding-ding-ding. Ding-ding. Ding.
I heard the sound and I knew a way I could stop the Kulou-Yuanling. At least a way to hurt it, slow it down.
I could hit it with a cable car.
The plan gave me determination. Crawling, I fought across the swarm of paper men. They swooped at me, stinging me with their bites. Grabbing my peachwood sword, I struggled to my feet amid the swirling paper figures.
But my father had told me what he’d done. He hadn’t used peachwood to kill the paper men. He had used steel. I placed the sword back at my belt, forced myself to stand up straight in the middle of the swarm, and withdrew my rope dart.
Getting it to start spinning wasn’t simple. At each rotation it struck against little paper men. Each impact slowed it down. But each impact also reduced the number of attackers. After ten or twelve rotations, my rope dart began to pick up speed. It cut through Liu Qiang’s paper men as if they were pollen.
Liu Qiang watched me with a grim look. He’d recovered from the fall and he pushed himself to his feet. His arm hissed and the sound was like a dagger scraping at bone.
I faced them. I could fight Liu Qiang with my rope dart. I could fight his spirit arm with my peachwood sword. But behind them the bone giant had caused one Xie Liang building to collapse, and it started to smash the walls of a second building.
Given time, it would reduce the southwest side of Chinatown to rubble and splinters.
I kept my rope dart spinning and ran toward the cable car line.
28
“Get out,” I said to the men in the cable car. “Now.”
They turned and looked at me for a few moments, and then the whisper caught and spread like flame through dry grass: “That’s the exorcist’s daughter.”
In moments the compartment was empty, save for the gripman. He was a burly white man in his shirtsleeves. Only the strongest of men get to be gripmen. “Oi! Whatcha think yer doin?” he asked in English.
“Look over there,” I said in English, and pointed.
“Wha?” he said. “Wha chew say?”
“Loo
k over there,” I said again, shaping the English words as carefully as I could.
The gripman squinted at me. “Can’t unnerstandja,” he said.
I sighed, extending my arm once more, pointing at the Kulou-Yuanling.
The man’s gaze followed my extended finger out into Chinatown. His face went slack. In the moonlight he saw the monster. Ten feet taller than the tallest of Chinatown’s buildings. The tremendous skeleton gleamed yellow and white under the moon.
“Egad,” he breathed. “Wha?”
“Listen to me and pay attention,” I said in my clearest English. “That thing will destroy Chinatown and then it will destroy the rest of San Francisco. It will kill everyone you love. I can only think of one way to stop it. We need to ram it with this cable car.”
I don’t know how many of my words the gripman understood, but he understood some. He gave me a blank look, and then understanding showed on his face. A moment later, determination overtook his eyes. He bit his lip and nodded, then turned to the cable car’s grip. The grip looked like a huge pair of pliers. His muscles strained as he closed the clamp back onto the moving cable.
With a lurching start, the cable car began to move forward. Ding, it went, picking up speed. Ding-ding. Ding-ding-ding.
I breathed a sigh of relief. This man was going to help me, and he knew what he was doing.
When a gripman wants to stop a cable car, he opens the grip and triggers the brakes. But tonight, there would be no brakes. The cable car moved along the line, heavy as boulders and moving as fast as a man can run. He was going to wait until the line was as close to the monster as it was going to get. Then he would release the cable car without engaging its brakes. If he did it correctly, the cable car would jump the slot and drive into the Kulou-Yuanling. It needed to be done with perfect timing.
Even if it was perfectly timed, it could kill us both. The gripman knew it too, and yet he continued driving toward the monster. His courage, his willingness to risk his life, impressed me. I’d grown used to thinking of these as Chinese qualities.