The cable car picked up speed while we waited in a tense silence. We were a block away, half a block away. We sped toward the monster. I caught sight of Liu Qiang standing on the street. He stared at the cable car, his mouth open in astonishment. He said something. The monster turned toward us. The fires in its empty eyesockets blazed green. The gripman started to pull the grip off the cable. His muscles strained.
The Kulou-Yuanling opened its mouth. Its jaws spread, distending in a way no human face could imitate. And then it gonged.
The voices, the screams and pain and loss of a hundred dead men rose up through its fleshless throat, amplified a thousandfold, and blasted from its mouth.
The sound was devastating. Deafening. The cable car rattled around us. My bones rattled inside me, and again the world flooded with despair. Hate and aggression and loneliness resonated through the bone giant’s clanging voice, so much loneliness, and there was hunger, a madness of hunger. The mad dead giant skeleton’s voice boomed through my brain, emptying me of thought. I wanted to weep. I wanted to bleed, to suffer, to feel something, anything, other than the horror of a hundred dead men filling my mind with their death cries.
The noise pounded inside my head, and I saw the gripman’s face. His hands were tight on the clamp. The muscles in his arms were rigid, but his eyes had gone bloodshot. His face looked somehow even paler. His hair seemed to be standing on end, and his head looked like it was ready to burst apart.
“Now!” I shouted. Over the clamor of the Kulou-Yuanling’s thunderous voices, I could barely hear the sound of my own voice. “Unhitch the cable now!”
There was no sign the gripman heard me. “Now!” I shouted. “Now!” The gripman stared blankly ahead, and his expression was one of exhaustion and misery. Then he pitched forward, with his head between his knees. Clutching his hands over his ears, he began to scream.
The Kulou-Yuanling’s death gong must have lasted seconds at most, but it felt like hours. It shredded my awareness with its agony, until I could no longer think or act.
And then the sound was done.
Somehow I found myself curled up on the floor of the cable car, my hands over my ears, with tears streaming down my face.
And the trolley was still hitched to the cable.
“Aiya,” I said, and pounded a fist against the cable car’s wall in my frustration. I had failed again.
I pulled myself to my feet. My head swam, still ringing with the Kulou-Yuanling’s mad cry of misery.
“Thank you anyway,” I said to the gripman in English, and I hopped down from the cable car to the street.
Chinatown had gone mad. There was a sound like waves on the beach, rising and falling, and I knew it for the panicked screams of men. Men were fleeing in all directions, screaming as they fled. Every few seconds there was a drumbeat, loud and hollow and slow and steady, as the Kulou-Yuanling pounded a gigantic bone fist against the brick walls of the Xie Liang building.
My body ached all over. Once again my plans had failed, and Liu Qiang’s had succeeded. My plan to ram the monster with a cable car had gone nowhere. The boom of enormous bone fists punching brick resounded down the block and across Chinatown. I looked up at the Kulou-Yuanling. It was obscenely large and shining in the moonlight, the raging skeleton of an impossible giant, orbited by a sparkling flow of qi energy along its meridians, driven insane by a hundred men’s starvation and abandonment. It was a rampage five stories tall.
The seagulls had regrouped. Hundreds of them soared between the cracked yellow bones of the Kulou-Yuanling. A swirl of ghost faces twisted in and through its skeletal form, their once-screaming voices silent now except for the hiss of their passage. This had been my army, the most capable opposition I could raise to confront Liu Qiang’s pet destroyer, and even in their multitude, they could do no more than slow the Kulou-Yuanling. I could think of no way to stop it.
I sighed. The Kulou-Yuanling had both hands free. It tore a chunk out of the brick wall, seven or eight feet of brickface, and threw it hurtling down the street. The wall crashed down at the streetcorner with a loud thud, taking down another telegraph pole as it fell.
A trickle of blood continued to dribble out of the wounds on my wrist where the spirit-arm bit me. I was so weary. I’d fought so hard, for days, to get to this point, and it was all for nothing. There was nothing I could do to change the outcome. A fifty-foot-tall human skeleton taught me just how little I could do. I saw the destruction it was bringing to the Xie Liang buildings, and I felt tiny and afraid.
Fear had been a part of my life as long as I could remember. When I was a little girl, I crouched all night in the bottom of a well, hoping the monster wouldn’t find me. I heard a village die while I was hiding. And I was never going to hide again.
A smarter person would have given up. Would have turned away. But no one had ever praised my intelligence. No one except for my husband, and he was gone.
I knew Rocket wouldn’t stand back and watch a giant monster tear down Chinatown. He would fight and die to protect people. But Rocket was a hero. And maybe it was heroism that killed my husband. Maybe Tom Wong was right; maybe there was no place for a hero in this world.
And besides, I was no nuxia, no heroic swordswoman out of the old stories.
Without even understanding why, I took a step forward. I took a step toward Liu Qiang and the evil creature that had replaced his arm. A step toward the Kulou-Yuanling.
Step by weary step I made my way down the street. My enemies stood at the corner, watching their monster demolish the Xie Liang buildings. They turned to face me as I approached.
Liu Qiang’s face was bleeding from multiple cat scratches, but his reinforcements had arrived. Tom Wong stood amid the chaos, amid the gutter fires, the disarray of splintered wood from balconies, the shards of broken brick, and heaps of downed telegraph wire, and he was beaming. Where I saw devastation, he saw rapture.
The man with short hair stood near Tom, flicking nervous glances in his direction. I almost felt sorry for him. He’d gotten out of prison and wanted to gain face, make a name for himself among the Ansheng tong. I doubt he ever thought his path was leading him here, to filthy magic and overwhelming destruction. To the Kulou-Yuanling tearing down buildings.
A police constable ran toward the giant monster. He had a desperate look on his face and a pistol in his hand. He aimed the pistol at the skeleton’s tremendous kneecap and I heard a gunshot boom through the night, then another. He fired again and again. The Kulou-Yuanling was not harmed.
“What do you think, Li-lin?” Tom asked. Behind him the Kulou-Yuanling noticed the policeman. It reached down a skeletal hand and caught him in its bone fingers. The constable fired his pistol again, and then he died in the monster’s grip, with an awful sound of bones snapped and pulped.
“It’s horrible,” I said.
Tom grinned. “Tonight the Ansheng tong is reborn. Tonight the world will learn the true meaning of power.”
“Do you really think you’re the one who has the power here, Tom?” I said. “Are you the one who controls that creature?”
Tom’s pretty face flushed. “Mr. Liu will tell it to do what I want it to do.”
I shook my head sadly. “You’re just a tool he’s using, Tom. He needed you to bring the corpses here for the ritual, and now he’ll use you to provide him with protection. But in a few weeks you’ll be doing what he tells you, not the other way around. And you don’t even know who tells him what to do, do you?”
Tom’s face was still. “Who?”
“His arm.”
He gave me a blank look.
“He’s replaced his arm with some kind of monster, Tom, and it tells him what to do.”
The spirit arm rasped, “Want to eat the baby’s hands, and eat the baby’s feet!” It snapped out at me. Its mouth opened and its sharp teeth gleamed like little knives. I stabbed at it with my peachwood sword and then the short-haired man came toward me holding a butcher’s knife. Liu Qiang shaped the finge
rs of his hand into Immortal Sword and started chanting. Tom Wong took a fighting stance.
I stepped back. I couldn’t fight them all at once. I needed the peachwood sword to fight the spirit arm and to break Liu Qiang’s spells, but it wasn’t all that useful against a steel butcher’s knife. And Tom Wong was a superb martial artist. I wasn’t sure I could take him in single combat, let alone when he was flanked by a sorcerer, a monstrous arm, and a gangster with a knife.
Tom launched a flying kick at my chest. He was too fast. I stepped back just far enough to lessen the impact but his foot still struck hard against my ribs and knocked me off my feet. Knocked the breath out of me. I landed hard on my back, my eyes wide. He was good. Maybe faster than me. Definitely stronger. He flashed a pretty smile.
I sprawled in a kind of daze, unable to move, and watched my assailants come at me.
Behind Tom, Liu Qiang was chanting. I saw his fingers twist from Immortal Sword to Purple Star to Demanding Knife. A spell shot out from his poised fingers and I knew I wouldn’t be able to bring my peachwood sword around in time to stop it.
The spell came for me, thorny and bleak. Cold fingers of shadow reached for me across the dark street, and I knew I was going to die.
The spell rushed toward me, faster than I could scramble away. I felt the spell more than I saw it, a cluster of dark thorns closing in on me. Terror rose inside me and I wanted to scream as the spell closed in, its path jagged like broken glass. It stabbed at my face, at my eyes, and I couldn’t help it, couldn’t help watching in my final moments, and then the spell broke apart in the air.
“What?” I said. I turned to look at Liu Qiang, but his bewildered posture told me he didn’t understand what happened to his spell any more than I did.
All of us, at once, turned our heads in the same direction. A man was walking down the street. Walking toward us. The man was slender. His footsteps dragged, but he still carried himself with an arrogant bearing I would recognize anywhere.
My father was wearing his most formal robe. It was sleeveless silk the color of the evening sun, covered with elaborate embroidery of cranes and dragons, and held together by three straps. Tied at his waist was a horsehair whisk and a sheaf of paper talismans. On another strap he was carrying his goosewood staff.
I stared. My father wasn’t leaving anything to chance. He came armed with his heaviest investitures of power.
I felt my pulses slow down to normal, and a kind of elation rushed through me. My father came armed with so much magical power, as though he was intending to fight deities—and win.
“Liu Qiang,” my father said, speaking the name with contempt.
Liu Qiang gave a nervous smile, and gestured to the Kulou-Yuanling, towering above us. “You see that, Xian Zhengying?”
“I see it, you little worm,” my father said.
“You don’t understand, Xian Zhengying,” Liu Qiang said. “I made it. Right here in Chinatown, inside a building it was your duty to protect, I called forth a Kulou-Yuanling, and you couldn’t stop me. No Daoshi has accomplished such a feat in eighty generations.”
“Because we’ve all been better than that,” my father said, and spoke a syllable. There was power in the syllable, magic. Father must have spent forty-nine nights stomping the earth to cultivate so much power in a single syllable. Power came roaring from the sound and rushed into my father’s fingers. He began to shape shoujue gestures. Magical Cannon, Binding Collar, Two Dragons Pierce the Mountain. He performed the motions with a devastating flawlessness of execution, but I realized something that stunned me.
My father’s arrogance had always been his weakness. He had a tendency to underestimate his opposition, and sometimes that worked against him. But tonight there was none of that. He was not merely relying on the staggeringly great power of the Seventh Ordination, nor was he counting on his superior skill as a master of the craft, but he was also—and this astonished me—using only double-handed gestural spells.
Spells a one-armed man would be hard-pressed to defend against.
Even if Liu Qiang had been ordained to the Seventh, even if he waged a tactically brilliant magical battle, even then, with only one hand, he would stand no chance against someone of the same strength using a string of double-handed magical gestures to attack.
My father’s strategy was cruel and nasty. It was completely unfair and it filled me with glee. Liu Qiang wouldn’t stand a chance.
It took a Daoshi of profound accomplishment to execute so many double-handed gestures in sequence, but my father never let up, never relented. If I had ever doubted his mastery, he proved those doubts wrong as he rapidly executed a continuous sequence of flawless, increasingly difficult shoujue.
And yet there was fatigue in my father’s posture. A labor in his breathing. A weariness on his face. The last two days had nearly killed him, over and over. My father’s magic was potent beyond belief, his skill was legendary, and his strategy was invincible, but I doubted he could hold his own in a fistfight right now, especially against three men. A few solid punches might be enough to take him down.
It was up to me to prevent any of those solid punches from landing.
I glanced over at the Kulou-Yuanling. Seagulls—my seagulls—stormed the giant skeleton. Diving through its ribcage, the gull spirits picked at its bones, scraping it with their claws as they soared through and around the monster. Again and again, the Kulou-Yuanling grabbed at the birds, but its huge bone fingers were too slow. For now, the gulls were keeping the monster occupied.
Gritting my teeth, I got back to my feet. Trying not to wobble, I put on a wry smile and faced the men. “The odds are even now, Tom,” I said to him. “I’ll bet you a dollar that my father kills Liu Qiang.”
Tom Wong looked at me, with a baffled expression. “Li-lin, what has happened that you’re making bets? You sound like that prancing fool Bok Choy.”
“Bok Choy is a bigger man than you are, Tom,” I said. “At least he has never been forced to his knees by a girl, with the whole town watching.”
Tom’s pretty lips shrank to a pout and he came at me, which was just what I wanted. Come at me and not my father.
Tom took the initiative, launching an array of attacks. They were swift yet subtle. I blocked his strikes, stepped out of their way, or pushed them aside. He was trying to draw me into his rhythm, train me to respond when and as he chose, and leave me no opening to strike back. Then he would change his rhythm, expecting to take me off guard. But when he changed his rhythm, I’d make
my move.
His left hand jabbed at me, jabbed again, his right foot swung a low kick, his right hand swung a full blow, and it was all I could do to keep from getting clobbered. I ducked, dodged, sidestepped, and blocked. Tom wanted to make me stick to him. It was a classic taiji strategy, drawing the opponent after you, into the void. I made no attacks. I blocked and sidestepped.
I didn’t need to see Father and Liu Qiang fighting. I could feel it, as one feels a thunderstorm from indoors. It felt like wind, my father’s magic. It was clear and certain. I heard him chanting. He invoked the Nine Heavens, summoned the Yellow Emperor’s qi to strengthen his own body, finished a spell with “Quickly quickly for it is the Law!” and launched into another without stopping for a breath. Liu Qiang withered under my father’s onslaught. The one-armed man cried out, and his monstrous arm shrieked with pain, but Father’s assault was unrelenting. Liu Qiang and his arm wouldn’t last much longer.
Tom Wong curled his fingers into Tiger Claw and jabbed at my collarbone. I bobbed to the side but he was faster than me, and his hand knocked hard against my shoulder, staggering me a few steps backward. Tom advanced on me fast and punched for my face. Too fast for me. I raised my forearm in a desperate block but he was too strong; I only managed to shove the blow a few inches off target. His punch landed on my cheek instead of my nose.
Pain was sudden and absolute. Pain was everything, for a moment. In that instant all my training vanished, all my will to fight
. I stood on the street, stunned, but Tom wasn’t finished with me. He grabbed me by my arm and spun me around like a cloth doll.
He turned me about, twisting me off my centerline, so I could not recover my balance. I knew what his maneuvers were. He was using qin na, a martial art focused on grappling. And I’d never learned any qin na.
Tom was stronger, faster, and more skilled than me. And I didn’t know how to grapple.
He curled his free arm around my neck and began to choke me with the crook of his elbow. He was going to choke me into unconsciousness. I couldn’t let that happen. Finding my resolve, I planted my feet. I reached my free hand up, grabbed his wrist, and yanked with all my strength.
Nothing happened.
I yanked again but his arm didn’t budge. I hadn’t been trained in grappling. I didn’t understand the workings of leverage. If there was a way to escape this chokehold, I didn’t know it. I pinched and scratched at his arm, but it was useless.
Darkness blurred the edges of my vision. I tried to stay alert, to stay awake, but I felt unconsciousness begin to take hold. With my muscles starting to go limp, I saw a flicker of motion that caught my interest.
It was the man with short hair. He was stalking slowly behind my father. He was five or six strides away, approaching with stealth. He inched forward, taking the small and careful steps of a burglar. His butcher knife glinted in his hand. I wanted to call out, to warn my father, but Tom Wong was choking me. I could make no sound, and weariness was overwhelming me. Everything started to grow dark. Everything around me felt hazy, insubstantial, like figures within a dream. I felt my free arm go slack. My hand dropped to my side.
It felt something.
I was barely aware of it, but my fingers brushed against something, and it was no dream. My fingers were touching something solid.
I withdrew the rope dart from my pocket and stabbed its point into Tom Wong’s thigh.
He cried out, and all at once the pressure on my throat released. I felt blood rush back into my head. For a moment everything seemed too bright. I felt as if I were waking up, and the street battle around me took shape in my eyes.