Thirteen Orphans

by Jane Lindskold

  “True,” Nissa said, but she nibbled at the edge of one fingernail, a nervous gnawing that was really quite rabbitlike.

  The intercom hummed to life. “We are nearly at our destination, madam.”

  “Very good. Pull over wherever you can manage, then go your way. I will call if I need to be picked up.”

  “Very good, madam.”

  “And, please, Hastings, stop with the Jeeves imitations.”

  “Yes, madam,” he said, but he was chuckling.

  Hastings parked and hopped out to help Pearl from the car, handing her the long, narrow leather sword case he had taken from the trunk. As Pearl slid the broad strap over her shoulder and adjusted the weight down her back, Nissa slipped out of the car and dropped a wrapped mint into Hastings’s hand.

  “Your tip, sir.”

  He grinned, and said in a deep, sonorous voice, “Madam is too kind.”

  As the car pulled away, Nissa looked around. “Japantown doesn’t look like much. I expected, I don’t know, something other than a few restaurants.”

  “The area was more flourishing some years ago,” Pearl said, starting off down the sidewalk. “And actually there are some very nice curio shops, and, of course, our destination. However, time changes neighborhoods, and Japantown never was the tourist destination that Chinatown in San Francisco is. It was simply an area with a large immigrant population. It still is. The immigrants are what has changed.”

  Nissa sniffed appreciatively at the food smells coming from a Mexican restaurant that, although the “Closed” sign still hung in the window, was probably preparing for lunch.

  “Not all change is bad,” she said. “I just expected something else.”

  “Yes, but the very polyglot nature of this area is what made it perfect for our …” Pearl paused, then borrowed Nissa’s phrase: “ … distant relations. It is not unified either by culture or economic standing. They must have known they would be odd, so they chose to base themselves in an area where everyone would be at least a little odd.”

  Nissa chuckled. “At home in Virginia, that’s pretty much the definition of California: the state where everyone is a little odd.”

  Pearl nodded, feeling a native Californian’s pride in her home state. “That’s why it’s such a good place to be.”

  She turned the corner and took a few steps. Within a moment she heard Nissa’s soft gasp. “Who would have thought!”

  Pearl had to admit, the sight was all the more striking for its setting. There, in the middle of an otherwise perfectly ordinary semiresidential, semicommercial neighborhood, stood an elegant Buddhist temple, curving roof, sculptured pillars and all. A mediation garden, small but perfect, stood to one side, water spilling from a simple fountain.

  “It’s absolutely lovely!” Nissa gasped. “I thought that the Rosicrucians with their Egyptian statues had cured me of ever being startled, but this … It’s like someplace from another world dropped in a very ordinary city block.”

  “And doubtless,” Pearl said, “that is why our distant relatives chose to dwell nearby. An anomalous place will attract anomalous people.”

  “Is that why you live near the Rosicrucian temple?”

  Pearl gave a slow cat’s smile, narrowing her eyes. “Maybe so. Shall we go across and see if the gentlemen are here?”

  They had hardly crossed the street when Riprap and Des emerged from the shelter of some of the abundant greenery.

  “There’s a service of some sort going on in the temple,” Riprap explained. “Didn’t want to bother anyone.”

  “We’ve stayed under cover,” Des added. “And I have—with great difficulty—restrained the urge to snoop.”

  Both men were dressed in summer-weight slacks and polo shirts. The running clothes they had been wearing when they left were in the bag that dangled from Riprap’s hand. He looked at the long case Pearl braced slightly with a thumb on the strap.

  “Want me to carry that?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and was. Treaty’s weight was actually something of a comfort, familiar as they moved into the unknown.

  Des gestured with a motion of his head. “That’s the building we want. Can you see the stairway going up the back?”

  Pearl nodded. It was rickety and made of wood, probably a holdover from the days when the building had held a small factory and the owners had not wanted their workers to enter and leave through the showroom.

  “That’s our best way in,” Des went on. “The ground floor holds a shop, and the door leading into the apartment building above is locked on that side.”

  “But not in back?” Nissa said.

  “If it is,” Riprap said, “Des says he can get us through. If he can’t, I can.”

  “I feel funny trying something like this in broad daylight,” Nissa admitted as they left the vicinity of the Buddhist temple and walked to where an alley would give them access to the back of their target building.

  “The Snake chose our time for us,” Pearl reminded her. “Either her father is here alone, or their rooms will be empty. Whichever the situation, we have an advantage.”

  Nissa nodded, but she didn’t look convinced.

  The alley wasn’t exactly cluttered. In fact, it was relatively clean, although there were the usual cigarette butts, soda cans, and bits of paper. A long fence topped with razor wire protected the narrow back yards—although “yard” glamorized the spaces beyond what they were, areas for storing empty boxes, trash cans, and bits of broken furnishings that no one had quite gotten around to hauling to the dump.

  The back gate was latched, but Des slid his hand through and undid the simple spring fastening.

  “Fire code. During business hours they can’t leave it locked. Probably they chain it at night, and the tenants have keys to the lock. Riprap, you go over and test the stair. If it can’t hold you, the rest of us shouldn’t bother.”

  “Right.”

  Des held the gate open for them, and they made their way inside. Nissa’s eyes were very wide, and Pearl could hear her breathing fast and frightened.

  Like a rabbit, Pearl thought, and that is just fine because Rabbits find courage in curious places. I, however, am the Tiger, and fear is not for me.

  She told herself this as she had once told herself mantras, and the strangest thing of all was that her body believed her. She was tense and alert as she followed Des, who had followed Riprap, but not in the least afraid.

  At least she was not afraid until her feet touched the first landing. The old wooden staircase switchbacked in its progress up the side of the building, the changes in direction necessary both so that the stair would remain anchored to the brick wall, and so that there would be access to the stair on each level of the building.

  When Pearl first felt her breath coming fast and her heart begin pounding, she thought she had overexerted herself.

  Perhaps I should have taken the elevator, she thought. I’m too old for this. I should stop here, work my way down more slowly. This staircase isn’t safe. I shouldn’t be on it, much less with three other people. Riprap alone must weigh as much as any two of us. I’ll just pick my way back down. Level ground. That’s what I want.

  She was halfway into a turn when she caught sight of Nissa, who had been behind her, already heading down the stair.

  “Nissa!” Pearl said, her voice soft, but long practice putting the note of command in her voice. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m getting off this deathtrap!” Nissa replied, her own voice soft, as if she feared that her raised voice would cause tremors. “Lani needs her mommy. She can’t manage without me. If I end up a broken wreck in a pile of shattered timbers, she’ll see it on the news and learn she’s an orphan.”

  The words came in a rapid cascade, but otherwise Nissa’s motions were so deliberate that if she had not clearly been terrified out of her wits, the sight would have been funny.

  Pearl felt an urge to rush after Nissa, but Des’s voice, cool and analytical, caught her u
p.

  “I feel the same fear,” he said. “Except it is my own children I was—am—worrying about. What are you afraid of, Pearl?”

  “What every older person comes to fear,” Pearl said, forcing herself to hold her ground, “that my body will betray my ambitions.”

  “And I,” said Riprap, “saw myself a cripple in a wheelchair, a quadriplegic from a broken back. Pretty weird, us all getting scared like that.”

  “Weird in the old sense of the word,” Des agreed. “As in someone has been working magic here, a magic meant to intensify our natural fears.”

  As he voiced his explanation, Pearl could feel her fear ebbing. Yes, her heart was pounding fast, but from terror, not because she had gone beyond her limits. Yes, she was breathing hard, but not because she had done more than she could. She climbed the stairs in her own house many times a day, and the flights were at least this long, at least this steep.

  Nissa looked confused, but continued to edge down the stairs. Pearl wasn’t surprised. Nissa was both mother and father to her daughter, and while Des felt a father’s love and protectiveness, his children were grown and had their mother besides. It said a great deal about how deeply he loved them that fear for them had been what the enchantment had touched.

  “Nissa,” Pearl said soothingly, “Lani is safe. This staircase is solid. If you turn back now, all you achieve is making yourself more vulnerable. How will that help Lani?”

  “I know,” Nissa whispered, “but my soul doesn’t know. I want to run and hide.”

  Pearl took a step or two closer, feeling her own inclination to flee growing with each step downward. Some small corner of her brain admired whoever—the Dragon, surely—had crafted this element of the spell. She looked for the marks of the spell. At least some of them should be here, for both the fear and the urge to flee had begun at the first landing.

  Pearl glanced down toward Nissa and saw that Nissa was holding her place a few steps away, up and saw Riprap forcing himself to climb one step at a time. Des, his wide forehead beaded with sweat, was holding on to the railing with one hand, but his eyes were alive, darting back and forth as if he, too, had reached the conclusion that the marks of the spell must be here.

  “Found them!” he said, the words coming on an exhalation, as if he had been holding his breath. He reached into his pocket and came out with a clasp knife. With great care, as if the simple action was suddenly complex, he pushed out the blade and leaned over to scrape at one of the balustrades. Whatever he had seen was written on the up-slope side, so Pearl couldn’t read what characters had been used to shape their compulsions, but she did not doubt they were there. Even as some small part of her brain continued to worry that she had triggered an impending heart attack, her intellect and training reminded her what she had learned about the art of such inscriptions.

  Nissa had minimal training to balance her fear. She shrieked and turned to run. Pearl reached out and laid a firm hand on the trailing edge of her sleeve.

  “He’s cutting through the staircase!” Nissa whimpered, fear making her immune to the sheer impossibility that a wooden staircase, no matter how old and apparently rickety, could be cut down with a pocketknife.

  “He is not!” Pearl snapped, praying that Nissa’s shriek had been lost in the general babble of city traffic noises. Otherwise, they were going to need to come up with some fast explanations. “You’re going to feel better in a moment.”

  Nissa stared at her, but even as Pearl felt a release in the pressure in her chest, a slowing in her breathing, sense returned to Nissa’s gaze and the turquoise eyes lost their wildness. From above, Pearl heard a whoosh of relief from Riprap and a sharp, satisfied snap as Des closed his knife.

  “Spelled to repel intruders,” Des said. “Actually a fairly routine enchantment. Those who have a right to be in the building would have no reaction at all, but anyone else, whether conventional burglar or unconventional ‘guest,’ would feel some fear, probably centered around those admittedly untrustworthy stairs.”

  “Was there a ward to alert the occupants against intruders?” Pearl asked.

  “Not within the characters I cut away,” Des replied, “at least I didn’t see anything. However, if the one who set the spell there is attuned to his casting, he’s going to know it has been effaced.”

  “So we may have rung the doorbell,” Riprap said. “We’d better get moving in case whoever answers the door doesn’t do so politely.”

  But no one came to the door at the first landing, nor to any of the doors on the other lower landings. As Pearl climbed the stairs to the final landing, she realized that this lack of acknowledgment was making her more tense and edgy than any overt attack possibly could have done. She imagined eyes watching from behind the curtained windows although the curtains hung still and limp.

  “Open the door,” she said to Riprap, her own voice giving her confidence, “and let us in.”

  25

  The park was empty except for a voluptuous yet slender figure seated on one of three swings that were the centerpiece of a playground, and a robin busy questing among the damp grasses under the trees.

  The park’s sole human occupant was dressed neither as exotically as the first time Brenda had seen her, nor as erotically as the second, but even in faded jeans and a crew-neck T-shirt that would have been nondescript but for the Chinese character painted splashily across the breast, Brenda had no difficulty in recognizing Honey Dream, the Snake. She even recognized the character written on the shirt. Unsurprisingly, it read “Snake.”

  Foster recognized Honey Dream at once as well.

  “That’s the woman who called me that name—Fei Chao—as if it was my name,” he said. He was unbuckling his seat belt and moving to get out of the car even before Brenda had turned off the engine.

  Brenda felt bittersweet pleasure that Foster was apparently attracted to the Snake solely because she held information he wanted. He was moving away so quickly. She’d wanted to say …

  What could you say? Brenda chided herself, reaching into the backseat and lifting the duffel bag out. I think I love you, but not for who you are, because you don’t know who that is, but because of who you have chosen to be? Better shut up, Brenda. Foster is gone. Flying Claw, the Tiger, is all who remains.

  The Snake had risen when Foster got out of the car, her expression hungry. In one hand she held a small brocade bag, the bottom rounded by something small and heavy. Brenda thought she knew what that had to be, but she didn’t rush forward to claim it. Instead, while the Snake was completely absorbed in watching Foster rush toward her, Brenda dropped an amulet bracelet to the pavement, and broke it under her heel with a stomp that owed more to her desire to wipe that greedy, longing look from the Snake’s face than to the need to activate the stored spell.

  The spell was called All Green. Des had crafted it so that Brenda would be able to confirm whether the crystal the Snake had brought to trade for Foster was counterfeit or not. It would also permit her to see the aura of magical workings for the next few hours—an ability that should give Brenda warning if the Snake tried anything less than kind.

  As All Green took effect, Brenda felt her vision momentarily blur. When it cleared, the brocade bag dangling from the Snake’s hand glowed with a faint black aura. That was good. Black was the Rat’s color, a hue not nearly as ominous in its associations within Chinese culture as within Western society. Brenda had to remind herself of that as she followed Foster across the park to where Honey Dream waited.

  Tense as a coiled snake, Brenda thought wryly. Or is that a cliché? Is it a cliché to think an image that’s true, even if sort of trite?

  Brenda forced herself to focus, remembering what Des had said about emotional upheaval being something that could be used against her, but it was almost impossible to keep calm. The rattle of her thoughts—inane as some of them might be—was preferable to the misery slowly seeping into her soul, a despair that grew almost palpably heavier as she advanced to where Foster
now stood face-to-face with the Snake.

  “Why did you call me that name?” Foster was saying. Brenda knew the tension in his shoulders. She’d seen it when they were playing Yahtzee or cards, and he had given up playing the conservative game and was going to put all his faith on one throw, one draw.

  “Why shouldn’t I call you by your name, beloved Flying Claw?” the Snake said. “You’re all worked up, but don’t worry. In just a moment, I will have given you everything you desire.”

  Her tone implied that his desire included a lot more than answers to a few questions. Brenda wanted to punch Honey Dream solidly in that smiling mouth, but she kept her attention focused on that black glow.

  Think about Dad. Think about the time you’re winning for the rest. Think, Brenda.

  Foster was angry now. “What do you mean? What …”

  “I mean,” Honey Dream said, “I have the means of restoring your memory, unless Brenda there is going to try something clever. You’re not going to try something clever, are you, Miss Morris?”

  Brenda looked at her. “You talk a lot, you know that? My mom always said that when a person talks a lot that person is really nervous. I’m here to do business. What about you?”

  Foster looked at Brenda, his brow furrowing. “Business?”

  “This … lady,” Brenda said, facing him, “tells me she can get your memory back.”

  “She can? How? What?”

  Brenda reached out and put a hand on Foster’s arm. “Foster, explaining would take longer than you want—especially since if this lady can do what she claims, you’re going to understand everything much faster than I can talk.”

  “So you’re doing it all for ‘Foster’?” Honey Dream said with a sneer. “Not one bit for Daddy?”

  Brenda let her hand drop from Foster’s arm. The warmth of his skin lingered on her fingertips. She faced the Snake squarely.

  “Believe it or not, I’m doing it for them both—and for me. You’ve put me through hell, Miss Honey Dream. I’ll admit that, since I know that’s what you’re longing to hear. I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights lately, and I’m going to have more. But I’m doing the right thing. Now, will you keep your side of the deal?”