Thirteen Orphans

by Jane Lindskold

  Riprap cleared his throat. “I agree with Brenda. We’re left with either attack or defense. Brenda has just shown us that our defense isn’t as good as we thought. Let’s attack—or rather, make them attack us directly, rather than through the others.”

  “I’m for it,” Nissa said. “If they want to manipulate at least one of us and can touch those whose memories they don’t hold, then Lani is an obvious target. I would never forgive myself if she was harmed or even frightened just to get at me.”

  Pearl’s smile held both warmth and gratitude “Thank you, my young friends. I do appreciate your support—even when my shortcomings as a tactician have been made evident.”

  Riprap straightened in his chair. “Now that we’re considering going on the attack, it occurs to me that there are options that weren’t available to us until we knew who our adversaries were. Maybe I’m all wrong, and what I’m thinking about won’t work.”

  Des said mildly, “We won’t know until you tell us.”

  “I’m thinking about a more direct attack,” Riprap said, “than drawing the Snake into our reach. Can’t we find them? Find where they’re staying? Go after them? Or is this useless? Are they commuting from their homeland to here magically?”

  “Interesting,” Des said, stroking his beard. “I doubt they are ‘commuting,’ as you put it, because passage between universes is not easy. That’s why exile was a viable punishment. That means they are staying here, and possibly somewhere close.”

  “Chinatown?” Nissa asked. “San Francisco isn’t that far away, and they could use public transport.”

  “That is one possibility,” Des said, “and I can put some feelers out in the Chinese community there. I have a lot of friends there—as does Pearl.”

  Brenda leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You sound like you doubt they’d be there, though.”

  “Well, it’s easy for us to talk about public transport,” Des said, “but judging from how Foster initially reacted to cars and television, those haven’t bled over into the Lands Born from Smoke and Sacrifice. Magic can give our enemies the ability to speak English, perhaps even some coping skills, but it’s hard for me to imagine them hopping the BART or the intercity rail.

  “Another reason,” Des went on, “that I suspect they’re staying closer to us, is that they would actually have more trouble blending into the Chinese community than elsewhere.”

  “Because,” Nissa said, “their dialect of Chinese is strange. I bet their mannerisms are, too.”

  “Their clothing certainly was,” Brenda added, “although maybe those were their working clothes, because they were doing magical stuff. They could have gone to a mall and gotten jeans or whatever.”

  Riprap barred his teeth in a smile that wasn’t at all friendly. “And that raises the really interesting question of money. Can they make it magically, like fairy gold? Would their money last any better? In just about every fairy tale I remember, magical money turns back to leaves or dust.”

  “There’s hell money,” Des said. “Paper money that’s burned at funerals, so the dead will not be poor. I wonder if what is burnt goes to the Lands?”

  “I doubt it,” Pearl said crisply. “If it did, then the people of the Lands Born from Smoke and Sacrifice would not only be hip-deep in paper currency, they would also have cars, computers, houses, stereo systems, cameras. I think you’re letting your imagination go wild.”

  Des nodded, but didn’t look in the least apologetic.

  Riprap went back to his earlier point. “Money. Unless they’re doing everything magically, the Dragon and the Snake will need some form of money. If they are doing everything magically, then isn’t there some way you two can follow the signature? The first lesson Des gave me and Brenda was to ward ourselves before we worked on making those bracelets because things would come sniffing around. If the Snake and the Dragon are using magic for shelter, food, transportation, even clothing, then they’re going to have left a magical signature—possibly a big one.”

  Pearl looked both interested and dubious. “There are ways of covering one’s trail.”

  Des shook his head. “Most of those leave a mark of their own. It’s like wiping out a physical trail with a pine branch. There’s still the trail the branch left. Or wiping away fingerprints. The absence of prints is a sign all its own.”

  “You have always been more interested in theoretical magics than I,” Pearl admitted. “I wish we had our Dragon. Shen Kung would be very useful now.”

  “Or the Monkey,” Des said, “or the Ram. Both of those love trickery, but we lost them long ago.”

  Listening to them, Brenda was reminded of an earlier conversation.

  “Back in Santa Fe,” she said, “we talked about the possibility that our enemy could be one of us. Remember? I suspected the Dragon.”

  Everyone nodded, and Brenda went on.

  “Well, we now know more about our enemies, and we also know that they can influence those whose memories they have taken. What if they’re using their money, or their credit cards?

  Nissa grinned. “Brilliant! I hate to say this, Brenda, but your dad is an obvious choice. Is there any way you can get your mom to check his credit records? We might find charges for hotels or restaurants.”

  Brenda felt nervous about the very idea, but Nissa was right. Dad was an obvious target. He traveled so much that charges from weird places could show on his bill and the credit card companies wouldn’t ask questions.

  “I can ask about his cards,” she said, “both business and personal. I can make some sort of excuse to Mom.”

  Pearl’s expression mingled both interest and concern. “I can probably manage to get a few of the others to check their past charges and withdrawals. Given all the concern about identity theft and such, I’m sure I can come up with an excuse.”

  “We can split the list,” Des said. “I do business with several of the Twelve. The problem is, what if one or more of them is a willing ally of our enemies? We can’t overlook that.”

  “But we can’t not check,” Riprap argued. “Making them wonder if we’re onto them might work for the good. They might get nervous, slip up, say something about something they shouldn’t know anything about.”

  “I agree we need to check,” Pearl said, “but who of the Twelve would turn traitor to the rest of us? What could the Snake and the Dragon offer? It’s not like any of us think of that place as ‘home’ and want to return.”

  “Pearl, I know how you feel,” Des said. “It’s easy for Brenda and Riprap to talk about traitors in our own ranks. They don’t know the people involved. However, I also agree that we can’t overlook any means of finding out where our enemies might be based. Tracking the Snake and the Dragon to their lair must be our first priority.”

  Pearl cleared her throat. “When you put it that way, I must agree. However, I would like to keep all our options open and continue with efforts to lure the Snake.”

  No one protested, and Brenda felt her heart start racing. When Des and Pearl had presented their plan, implicit in it was that the Snake would be much more likely to come after Foster if she thought she was in danger of losing him to another woman. Brenda—who had already thwarted the Snake—was the obvious candidate for the role of romantic rival.

  “Brenda?” Pearl said, turning to her.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you ever taken Foster walking in the Rosicrucian Museum’s gardens?”

  Pearl could feel that the mood within her household had changed. Even though similar tasks were being done, the sense of waiting, of preparing, had vanished.

  In the upstairs “schoolroom,” Riprap, Nissa, and Brenda still crafted their amulet bracelets and listened to Des’s lectures, but this was no longer a theoretical exercise.

  Brenda was crafting replacements for the Dragon’s Tails and other spells that had kept her alive. Riprap was making not only pieces tailored to his personal needs, but more generic items that might be used by Foster. Nissa insisted th
at Lani needed amulets of her own. Since the mah-jong tiles the adults wore were too long to stay around Lani’s tiny arms—even if pushed up over the elbow—Nissa had made much smaller molds and was carefully etching child-sized bracelets.

  Pearl had practiced with Treaty just about every day of her life, but her fencing practice now held a new intensity. Brenda and Riprap demanded lessons, but Pearl forestalled them.

  “Right now, you are better off with what Des is teaching you. Swordplay takes years to learn. You would be more of a danger to yourself than to anyone else. Do you have skill with another weapon?”

  Riprap shrugged. “Sure. When I was in the army I learned to use firearms and fight hand-to-hand, but sword was not in the curriculum.”

  Brenda shook her head. “Nothing, unless a volleyball or soccer ball counts. But, Pearl, I didn’t want to learn to use the sword to hurt anyone. I wanted to be able to defend myself if the Snake came at me with that knife of hers.”

  “Stick to spells,” Pearl said. “They’ll do a better job. It’s only in the movies that a panicked novice pulls off brilliant parries against an expert.”

  “Pearl’s right,” Riprap said. “At this point, we might get mentally tangled in too many options.”

  Brenda didn’t argue, but later, as Pearl was walking through the hallway from her office toward the kitchen, Brenda’s voice came drifting from the upstairs classroom, asking Des if he could teach her a defensive spell stronger than the Dragon’s Tail.

  “The Snake’s going to be ready for that one,” Brenda said, “and probably will have something in hand to counter it. As she kept reminding me, her father’s the Dragon.”

  “Then you’re going to need spells that aren’t based on dragons,” came Des’s reply. Although Pearl couldn’t see him, she could imagine his long fingers tugging at his beard. “Perhaps we should avoid winds as well, since dragons can be winds, but that may limit our options too severely.”

  Pearl heard pages turning, Brenda’s voice. “Winds and dragons are the two honors suits. Are there any powerful spells that don’t use them?”

  “Plenty,” Des assured her. “Well, at least a few. I think you have made a good suggestion, but some of the ones I am considering cannot be worked by a beginner. I’ll need to do them myself, or put Pearl to work.”

  “Seems like our ancestors could have arrived at a system with a little more variety,” Brenda said. She sounded miffed, and Pearl didn’t blame her.

  “There is plenty of variety,” Des said. “A skilled adept can work completely outside of the system represented by the mah-jong tiles.”

  “Like those sheets of paper that keep getting thrown at us?” Brenda asked.

  “Precisely, but I don’t think you’re ready for those until your calligraphy is much better.”

  Pearl could hear the beginning of a lecture on the refinements of Chinese ideograms, and continued on toward the kitchen. In her imagination, Des’s voice turned into her father’s, lecturing her as she sat practicing her own calligraphy lessons.

  “A stray line may change the meaning, girl! You write English so prettily. Your teachers always tell your mother this when she goes to the school. In English, a line can change an O into a Q, and F into an E. Why are you so stupid that you cannot see the same would be true in Chinese—the same and more so, because an ideogram is not just a sound, but an entire word.”

  Why? Pearl answered in thought as she never would never have dared in person. Because I was already suspecting that you had little use for me, that you were training me because you had no choice.

  She distracted herself by pouring cold tea over ice. Her father had found that disgusting. Tea was meant to be drunk hot, not cold, certainly not diluted. As Pearl stood, listening to the ice cubes crack and settle, the door from outside opened. Foster came in, Lani clinging to his hand and chattering something about grapes, penguins, and very small rocks.

  Foster gave Pearl a nod that was almost a short bow, his lips curving in a smile that was more friendly than it had been. Pearl smiled in reply, knowing the expression was stiff, but unable to relax. Except for that smile, Foster looked very much like pictures she had seen of her father when he was young.

  A thought that had haunted the fringes of Pearl’s mind since she had first seen Foster returned in that instant.

  He looks like my father … . Are we kin then, perhaps close kin? My father was very young when he became the Tiger and was exiled soon thereafter, but he was not so young that he couldn’t have fathered children. Foster could be his grandson or great-grandson, perhaps only a great-nephew or cousin. Even so, that would make him my nephew, great-nephew, cousin?

  She shivered slightly, feeling the touch of a Tiger’s paw passing over her grave.

  23

  Beneath the quiet yet increasingly intense activity of Pearl’s household, Brenda was aware of another rumbling—this one within her own soul. She was beginning to suspect that she had fallen in love with Foster.

  Oh, she’d been attracted to him from the first time she’d seen him—a figure in ornate green robes, incongruous against the dull grey metal and concrete of that LoDo parking garage. This was something else, a very fragile flower growing out of a soil made from little things Foster had done, not all—not even most—having to do with how he treated her.

  This was Foster, sipping his first cup of black coffee, his face twisting in lines of dismay that started Lani hooting with laughter. This was Foster, features serene as he read one of the Chinese-language books from Pearl’s library. This was Foster, washing dishes with a soapy rag, something in his motions saying that although he’d had to be shown how the liquid soap dispenser worked, these were far from the first dishes he had washed.

  This was Foster, stretched out on his stomach on the bricks of the back patio, watching the ants carry off crumbs from his sandwich. This was Foster, playing Yahtzee with Riprap, pounding the table in triumph as he rolled the double sixes he needed to complete five of a kind.

  This was Foster, walking with her through the Rosicrucian gardens, enchanted equally by the statues of pharaohs and hybrid tea roses. This was Foster, taking her hand to help her jump a puddle after a sudden rain shower. This was Foster, walking away politely, unquestioningly every time Pearl or Des made clear that something must be discussed that he should not hear. There was honor in every line of that straight back, honor and loneliness, loneliness that shadowed his dark eyes, even when they filled with laughter.

  Foster loved hearing stories of Brenda’s life before this insane summer. The way he prompted her for anecdotes about her mother and brothers, Brenda knew that Foster was looking for some echo in his own soul that there was someone, somewhere to whom he belonged. In the Rosicrucian Museum they had looked at some terra-cotta statuettes, apparently solid, but one or two broken ones showing that they were actually hollow. Foster stared at one for a long time, and Brenda had heard him mutter in Chinese—a language he still occasionally forgot she understood—“I am like them, the shape of a man without, empty within.”

  So Brenda treasured Foster’s smiles, the times she could make him laugh, the patience that echoed in his every motion as he learned new tasks. She hoped that the smiles, the shared laughter, the little triumphs might serve to fill his hollowness with new memories.

  Their outings two, three, more times a day, alone or accompanied, were the rain that nourished the flower of Brenda’s love for Foster. Mostly those outings were aimless walks where they looked at things, or practiced his English, or her Chinese. Brenda had found she could separate her brain from the spell, and commit words and phrases to her true memory. Foster enjoyed teaching her—or Nissa or Riprap. His command of the language was one of the few things that had not been taken from him by the spell that had robbed him of his memory.

  I wonder how young Foster was when he became the Tiger—or began the training that would make him the Tiger. He must have been a child.

  They went other places together. Sometimes Br
enda borrowed a car and drove them to the grocery store or to one of the shopping malls. Contrary to common depictions of the amnesiac or the transported yokel, Foster did not gape at the strangeness of modern American life. To him everything was equally strange, and television had prepared him to accept the world outside the walls of Pearl’s house as brightly colored, noisy, and always a little artificial.

  Brenda felt safer when they were shopping than when they were on one of their walks. No one expected the Snake to make her play for Foster when there were other people around. Brenda had accepted this, without question, but Riprap, who was always asking questions, asked Des during one of their lessons if they weren’t putting what Riprap had termed “civilians” at risk by letting Foster go out in public.

  Des laughed, not mockingly, just as one does who realizes he’s forgotten to pass on some basic piece of information.

  “I think I’ve mentioned that the Thirteen Orphans are not the only people in the world who can do magic?”

  Riprap shrugged. “You have, but I haven’t much thought about it. Until I met you folks, I didn’t know that anyone really could work magic.”

  Des turned serious. “Almost every culture has its traditions, but some are stronger than others. These days there is one constant in each tradition, however. You might call it a rule. ‘Don’t get caught.’”

  “Why?” Brenda and Nissa asked simultaneously, then giggled.

  “Think about it,” Des said. “Think about the response most people would give to magic. It’s not that long ago that people burned witches in this country. There’s a veneer of tolerance now, but the fact is the only reason that psychics and fortune tellers and New Age witches are permitted to live and let live is no one really believes they can do anything. That dam of disbelief is all of our best protection. If someone starts acting wild, enforcers, I guess you’d call them, start by warning and finish by, well, finishing.”