It felt good to recover my alertness and equilibrium, but I should have acted. Should have been quicker. Tom Wong grabbed the wrist of my hand that was holding the rope dart.
He held both my wrists, from behind, twisting my arms in different directions to keep me off balance. He certainly knew how to grapple. A grip like that would have immobilized someone much stronger than me.
But my wrist was still bleeding where Liu Qiang’s arm bit me. And blood is slippery.
With a quick jerk, I pulled my hand free from Tom’s grip. I spun to face him and stabbed the point of the rope dart into Tom’s other forearm. Blood spurted from the wound. Tom shouted “Aiya!” I stabbed the rope dart at his chin, but he stepped back and dropped my wrist.
His eyes strayed to his injuries, the stab wounds on his thigh and arm. I took a step back, and then another, and started my rope dart spinning.
Tom looked back to me, with a scowl on his pretty face. “Seriously, Li-lin?” he said. “You know you can’t hit me with that. All I have to do is catch the rope.”
I launched it over my head, not three or five feet, but to its full fifteen-foot length. I brought it down in a devastating arc onto the head of the man who’d been sneaking up behind my father. He didn’t even cry out, just toppled face-first to the street. His butcher knife clattered along the stones.
I snapped the weighted dart back toward me. It flew gracefully toward my hand, but Tom caught the dart. Our eyes met for a moment and then he yanked on it, tearing the other end out of my hand. The rope burned my fingers a little, and I winced.
Tom threw my rope dart to the side. I watched it sail far down the street. It hit the cobblestones with a metallic clap.
Tom’s eyes went to his fallen friend and back to me. He shrugged. “So you knocked him out. You’re still no match for me, Li-lin.”
He punctuated his statement with a kick. He was too fast for me again. His heel hit the side of my head like a cannonball and I staggered to the side, dizzy. I struggled to maintain my balance. Do not fall, Li-lin, I told myself. If I fall, I won’t be able to get back up.
Do not fall.
Do not fall.
Do not fall.
I fell.
On my back, dazed, I waited for Tom Wong to come over and finish me. It had been too much. I’d taken a punch in the face and a kick in the head. I was barely awake, caught in a half-dream. I heard a pounding, and I knew it was the sound of the Kulou-Yuanling beating its bony fists against a brick wall, but the sound of the blows melded somehow with the throbbing of my head, until it felt like my head was the building and the monster was pounding its enormous fists against my head, again and again, again and again.
Tom hadn’t come for me. Instead, he was walking down the street, in the other direction. What was he up to?
Sprawled out on my back, I tried to get up, but my head was spinning. Nearby, the spiritual battle roared. “Nine-starred King of Birds, drive away filth,” my father intoned, his words rhythmic, his syllables clipped and precise. He held his fingers in shoujue, elaborate gestures shaping the power behind his incantation. “Golden Men, draw me forward! Jade Maidens, defend me! I salute the Gate of Gold. I call upon the Jade Emperor. Filthy, strange, and foreign things, be banished. Quickly, quickly, for it is the Law!”
Magnified by the Seventh Ordination, bolstered by eighty generations of Daoshi, focused by his goosewood staff, and executed with perfect ritual, Father’s spell felt strong enough to shake the world. Against my father’s force, Liu Qiang’s magical defenses snapped like twigs. The sorcerer cringed. The three-eyed white snake monster hissed at the end of his arm. It was a warbling hiss, a demented sound, not pain but fury. The fight would be over in a matter of minutes.
But where had Tom gone?
He came walking back down the street. Limping. There was a huge bloodstain along his pants leg. I did a better job of gouging his thigh than I thought.
Tom was holding something in one of his hands, heading straight toward my father. Where had he gone? What was in his hand? A knife or a hatchet could still change the outcome of the battle.
I needed to stop Tom, but I was no match for him in a fight. Yet as long as he was fighting me, he couldn’t stab my father in the back. And that’s all that was needed. My father could save the day, but not if I stayed down. I needed to stand up and fight, even if fighting Tom Wong meant I would get beaten. Sometimes it felt like that was my purpose in life.
I looked at my father. His face was intense with righteousness and glory, and I recalled all the times he had been ashamed of me. The expressions, harsh or sour, that crossed his face each time he
was reminded that he had failed to father a son, or failed to cure my spirit sight.
He needed me, I knew that. My father didn’t acknowledge it, but he needed me.
Right now what he needed me to do was stand up.
My skull was still pounding from Tom’s kick. Above me the moon seemed to be moving, loosened somehow from the sky. I never, ever wanted to get kicked like that again.
Tom’s gait was limping but steady. He strode toward my father. Father glanced at the younger man. My father’s expression grew concerned. He pursed his lips. His face seemed sallow, almost the color of the bandages covering his left eye.
He gave his eye for me. He claimed it was just to save face. That might have been true on some level, but I didn’t think it was completely true. I looked at the bandages covering his ruined eye. He gave his eye to protect me. My father raised me, devoted countless hours to teaching me, training me, trying to cure me. He refused to leave China without me. I meant more to him than he ever expressed.
I dreaded the pain. Dreaded the beating I was sure to take. But Tom Wong was walking toward my father with a weapon in his hands, and I needed to stop him. I rolled to my knees, and began to get my feet beneath me.
Father’s magic gestures became more brisk. He abandoned his strategy of double-handed shoujue spells, fighting instead with an attack from each hand. The thought of casting two spells at the same time was mind-boggling. His attacks now felt like a hurricane. Liu Qiang cringed on his knees. His arm screeched. The soulstealer and his arm were about to be crumpled up and thrown away like blotted paper.
Then thunder shook the street. Thunder? I heard it echo off the buildings and was astonished. When did my father learn to speak words of thunder? Deities and Immortals spoke thunder. Men did not.
Father staggered, his hand to his side. I realized what the
sound was.
Father didn’t speak thunder. The sound wasn’t thunder at all.
Tom Wong had shot my father.
29
“Tom!” I shouted.
He turned to face me. His expression was almost idle, but the gun was still smoking in his hand. Something ached in my chest. I could not believe that a man whose dearest friend was killed by gunfire would turn a pistol against a sworn brother.
My father’s incantations stopped. There was a stricken look on his face. He clutched his side where the bullet landed, but still he stood.
My father still stood. He began walking forward. Walking toward Liu Qiang. His steps were pained but determined.
The one-armed man scrambled up to his knees and then to his feet. The two men faced each other. Blood marked both of their faces. Long ago my father cut off Liu Qiang’s arm. Liu Qiang cost my father his eye. They were old enemies, and I knew my father wasn’t motivated by righteousness any more than Liu Qiang was motivated by a plan. The force that drove them to this, walking across the cobblestones at the intersection of Sacramento and Dupont, was hatred.
Tom Wong turned back toward my father and aimed the pistol again. Pain clouded my head but I started to run. I ran toward Tom and my father, ran hard and fast to do something, to protect my father. Whatever it would take. Whatever the cost. I ran.
Time seemed to slow down. Tom’s finger tightened on the trigger and I leaped. Not at Tom, since I knew he could swat me aside like a bu
g. I leaped in between Tom and my father, so the bullet would hit me instead of him.
The trigger clicked.
There was no clap of thunder, no burst of pain, no bullet. There was only a click. I stared at the pistol in Tom’s hand.
He and I faced each other. My exhausted bearing was a stark contrast to his calm demeanor. He almost seemed bored. He pulled the trigger again, as if curious to see what would happen. It clicked again.
“That pistol,” I said. “It’s the one the constable used, to shoot at the Kulou-Yuanling.”
Tom Wong shrugged, and tossed the empty gun aside. “Come on, Li-lin,” he said, facing me. “Even if your father kills Mr. Liu, he’s still going to die tonight. It’s too late for him. But not for you.”
I dragged myself toward the man who shot my father. Step after step. My head was ringing, whether from his last kick or the sound of the gunshot.
“Look at you,” he said, as I continued to close the distance between us. “You’re unarmed. You’re a mess. You can’t face me, and you know it. My kung fu is almost as good as Rocket’s was.”
I stepped forward and shot a powerful kick at his shin. He saw it coming, but he was experienced enough to know a fake when he saw it. He saw me faking the hard kick and lifted his other leg to kick at my head again.
Except I didn’t fake my kick.
I only made it look like I was faking it. I kicked his shin, hard, and he’d placed all his weight and the force of a swift high kick on that leg. The sound from his ankle was sickening—tendon tearing from bone. His kicking leg flopped in midair and in that instant I made my decision. Tom had shot my father. There was no going back, not for him.
I grabbed his foot in the air and yanked it toward me, hard as I could. His entire body weight twisted against the ankle that supported it. The noise it made was enough to make me want to vomit.
Then I drove my elbow into his eye and dropped him on the ground.
I looked at him. His foot was facing backward. His ankle was ruined. He would need crutches to walk, as long as he lived.
In instants I’d reduced Tom Wong. He splayed out moaning on the street where I beat him. “No, Tom,” I said, “your kung fu wasn’t even close to Rocket’s.”
I turned from him and saw my father and Liu Qiang. The two men were standing face to face. Father was barely able to stand. A large bloodstain was spreading across the side of his sunset-yellow silk robe, and blood was trickling from many small wounds on his arms. I snarled. I knew what the small wounds were. They were bite-marks, the needle-sharp teeth of Liu Qiang’s serpent arm.
Liu Qiang’s face was torn where Mao’er had bitten and scratched him, but the eyes in his shredded face gleamed with triumph.
Father stood in a daze and Liu Qiang struck him in the chest with his human arm.
I recognized the strike.
Liu Qiang drove his fingers into Father’s chest again and the strike disrupted the flow of my father’s qi at a second point, then he drove them into another point of my father’s chest and disrupted the qi at that point as well.
Liu Qiang was performing dian-si-shuei on my father. It was called the death touch for a reason. A sequence of five precise strikes to break a body’s energy, followed by instant death. I’d never seen dian-si-shuei performed past the first strike. Father considered it yao shu, filthy magic. And Liu Qiang had just completed the first three of five strikes.
I sprinted at a breakneck pace. Liu Qiang struck my father again. One more strike in the proper sequence and my father would die.
I kicked my father in the back, as hard as I could. His head snapped backward and he toppled forward, colliding with Liu Qiang. The soulstealer’s fifth strike landed in the wrong spot, brushing my father on the shoulder. Still running hard, I drove the heel of my palm into Liu Qiang’s chin.
He staggered a few steps back, and I pulled my father away from him. There was no time to let my father fall gently. He dropped onto the street with a thud.
Liu Qiang’s face was torn, his mouth bleeding from my hand. He laughed, sending bubbles of blood down his lips.
“You think you saved him, Li-lin?” the soulstealer crowed. “Four strikes, girl! What kind of power do you think he has left now?”
I took a calm step toward him. In one smooth motion I drew the peachwood sword from my belt and sliced it down at Liu Qiang’s spirit arm.
It was a clean cut. Liu Qiang and his snake arm screamed, their voices human and monstrous. The sword severed their bond.
The snake arm dropped to the ground. It writhed, then reared back like a cobra. It looked at me with hatred in its three alien eyes. It opened its mouth and bared three rows of needle teeth. An unnatural stench rose from the thing, burning where it had been connected to Liu Qiang. It snapped at me, a surge of jaws and sharp teeth.
My peachwood sword split it down the middle of its head.
For a moment its innards were visible, pink and organic, like a living thing, but just for a moment. Then the creature withered like old leaves crumbling into dust, and its pale flesh turned to brown smoke.
The snake-arm-monster was gone, and in its place was some kind of thread. I squinted at it. It wasn’t a thread.
It was a hair.
A single strand of long white hair.
My mind bent out of shape, staring at that strand of long hair. I remembered. I remembered her, and all the death she brought. I remembered her long white hair. “How—?” I said out loud, and then a spell hit me.
I moaned and clutched at my thigh. A spirit arrow. Foolish, Li-lin, distracted by memories while a Daoshi of the Fifth Ordination was trying to kill me.
Liu Qiang launched another spirit arrow. I staggered to the side and the arrow flew past. I could hardly use my left leg with the spirit arrow embedded in it. I could hardly think with the pain in my thigh.
“I will kill you, girl,” Liu Qiang said, his voice shaking with rage. “And I will kill your father. And everyone will know that Liu Qiang was the strongest Daoshi of his generation.”
I tried to take a step back but my left leg didn’t cooperate. It stayed inert and I tumbled to the street. I held up my peachwood sword. It was my only remaining defense.
Liu Qiang smiled. It was a hideous thing to see, from behind the gouges and bruises and all the blood caked around his mouth. “I was saving this spell for your father,” he said, “but you’ve earned it.” Shaping magic gestures with the fingers of his remaining hand, he began to chant. The incantation and the shoujue gestures coalesced into a single magic, giving shape to the sorcerer’s will. It hung in the air, a red miasma, and I understood.
I heard his words and understood. He was calling disease into my body. And peachwood offers no defense against disease.
30
I chanted a recitation from the Jade Text of the Primordial One, which only made Liu Qiang’s gory smile grow wider and more hideous. “Quickly, quickly, for it is the Law,” I finished, and a small magic swept out from my fingers and my words. My recitation of the Jade Text wouldn’t be able to stop his spell. He knew it and I knew it. But the counterspell could hold off red miasma for a few minutes.
The disease spell pressed against me and my recitation slowed it down. Liu Qiang’s red miasma would climb into me through my nose and mouth. Then tumors would multiply inside me. In an hour I was going to be infested with a dozen different kinds of cancer. In two hours I would be dead, a corpse resembling no human shape.
And all of that would start to happen once I breathed the contaminated air. So I needed to keep the red miasma out of my lungs as long as possible.
I began my turtle breathing. My counterspell bought me a little time to inhale pure air. I started to slow down my breathing, to sharpen my mind.
I took a long slow turtle breath. Liu Qiang circled me, lurching and strutting. He wanted to watch his enemy’s daughter die.
Two minutes passed and my counterspell broke. The disease spell was all around me, a red and oppressive murk in
the air. I had two-and-a-half minutes. I could exhale for two-and-a-half minutes.
And then what? Throw my wooden sword at the soulstealer?
I was nowhere near my rope dart. No one was going to save me.
Mr. Yanqiu was useless in a fight. Jiujiu and the spirit-gulls were
busy distracting the Kulou-Yuanling. My father was unconscious.
No, actually, he wasn’t, I realized. He was sprawled on his back in the street but his lips were moving. What was he doing? Liu Qiang had disrupted his qi. It would take him days to regain enough vital energy to perform any powerful spells.
And then I felt it. A tingle at the soles of my feet. It rose up through me like a shining.
Powerful spells are draining. After four strikes of dian-si-shuei, Father would barely have any qi energy remaining. But not every spell demands an investiture of energy.
The Third Ordination flowed through me like a sacred river. My body and spirit felt renewed. My nerves awoke in a kind of joy, as if all the mornings in the world took place at once, inside me, after a month of darkness.
I yanked the spirit arrow out of my thigh. It hurt, and the pain didn’t matter.
I still had no defense against the disease spell around me. In about a minute I would need to breathe again. But at least I would die with the Third Ordination. It was something to be proud of.
And then waves of power came over me. All around me the world took shape in crystalline geometries, and they were beautiful. I could almost touch the perfected choreography of the stars, guiding our moments, and feel in my hands the pattern of all things shifting, from wood to water to metal to earth to fire, and back again to wood, in the unending transformations of the phases.
I received the Fourth Ordination and I couldn’t believe it.
I watched my father. He began to chant the ritual of Fifth Ordination. When he was finished, I would be strong enough to match Liu Qiang.
Then Liu Qiang kicked my father in the face.