A whoosh, a gasp of wind, was all the warning I had, but I was so tense and on edge that it was enough to alert me. I rolled, ducked, before I had even a moment to understand the nature of my attacker.
On wide wings, the creature represented on Xu Shengdian’s altar came swooping at me. Tiny razor-like knives gleamed in some of its miniature human hands. One hand held a coiled heavy whip, another swung an iron chain whose shackles expanded like hungry jaws, another arm did not end in a hand at all, but became a rod whose angry glowing tip could only be a branding iron. This was the monster, slavery, as envisioned by a child; the leash and the lash, the clank of chains and shackled ankles, the burning heat of midday plantation sun, the beatings.
The child’s nightmare monster was coming for me. The whip could only hurt me; the knives (so small) could hurt and scar me; the branding iron could hurt and mutilate me; but the shackles were my greatest peril. To be caught in them would mean the end.
That was the weapon I needed most to steer clear of.
The speed of the devil! It darted through the lumberyard like a yellowjacket. It dove at my father, whose Bubble of Violet Flame barely slowed the attack. Father spat out an empowered syllable that knocked it aside, but it just veered away and launched itself at me.
Weapons swung at my body, and I slashed my sword in defense, putting my effort into parrying the hungry shackles. I succeeded in that, but his other weapons struck; the whip lashed down over my shoulder, sending a shock of bright, white pain across my back, while a tiny knife slit my sleeve and scratched a furrow across my arm. I thought the branding iron missed me, until I realized the hem of my robe was on fire. I rolled down to the earth to extinguish the flame, and watched the airborne abomination turn about to come at me again.
My allies closed around me; they must have seen how outmatched I’d been at the first clash. Couldn’t Mao’er be here now? Or Shuai Hu?
The soaring monster barreled my women over and came slashing knives and cracking his whip and swinging his chain and thrusting his branding iron at me.
Block and retreat, I saw no more I could do. My attacker’s swinging arsenal was overwhelming. The flying stone-skinned freak swept away once more, but he had caught Ginny’s wrist in a shackle and was dragging her screaming across the lumberyard.
Two words blasted through my brain in that moment: the first was hostage. The second was trap.
Yet I could not allow that to stop me. I could not allow my friend and ally to be led off like a stray sheep to the maws of wolves.
Gripping my sword, bleeding from the cuts this monster had already inflicted on me, I sprinted out after the flying creature.
It shot upward, dragging Ginny along the dirt. It made a sound then, a wicked glee, and snapped down at me. I dodged to one side, allowing my twisting momentum to guide my sword into a rounded horizontal slice called Leaf Spinning in a Whirlwind, but the monster flicked a pair of daggers to parry my sword, and a third knife nicked my thigh. I shrieked and hobbled off to one side, while the creature took wing again, with an ecstatic cry.
He still had Ginny manacled, and, cut by painful cut, he was taking me apart.
Again its cry of savage joy pierced the night, and I heard its wings swoop as it dove for me once more.
“Now, Li-lin!” Ginny shouted, running hard in the opposite direction. The diving beast came soaring at me, but Ginny’s sprint yanked the chain short and twisted his body to the side.
I took the opening and lunged forward, trying to impale the monster. My sword struck his chest, but it only made a sound like steel against stone; even my peachwood did no more than chisel a chip out of it. Yet from that little cut, an ooze of blue-green blood trickled.
I still had another moment, another shot at—at what? Nicking his side again? While he spun toward me, I leaped, slashed downward, and chopped through the chains, setting Ginny free.
“Dammit, Li-lin!” she shouted. “How can I help you now?”
“Help me by getting to safety,” I said.
The monster flew upward and circled. Before my eyes, the chain grew back, sprouting another open set of manacles. Even the little cut in his side had already healed over. I scowled. This wasn’t fair, at all; not only was he difficult to harm, but he was regenerating from his injuries. The open shackles swung and clanked, hungry for another captive. For me.
The flying devil came fast, and I threw myself to my back on the dirt once more, and once more I felt small cuts and slashing knives strike my body, the whip’s lash raising pain from my calves, while my sword only managed to keep the branding iron and the shackles at bay.
How much longer could I last? Three more passes? Two? My strategy needed to change. I needed to get away, take cover. I stood, dropped my sword, and fled across the lumberyard, flinging loose earth up behind my heels.
Flap after weighty flap, I heard the nightmare close in for the kill. Chain links clanked, the white-hot tip of the branding iron sizzled, the heavy whip uncoiled, and the nightmare soared at me, swinging its murderous arms.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Several arms wielded daggers. One arm held a snake-whip. One arm held a chain with open shackles at the end. Only one arm did not hold a weapon; one arm was a weapon, tapering down from the monster’s shoulder into the slender metal shaft of a white-hot branding iron. I could disarm the other hands, yes, but even then, the weapons would grow back. That hand was different; the arm that was a branding iron could not be disarmed; the arm itself was the weapon. That would be its vulnerability. It gave me leverage.
I fled, running as I had never run before, not using qinggong to lighten myself at all but hardening my body slightly with Iron Shirt, fast as I could yet remaining close to the ground, while an embodiment of torture, captivity, and mutilation came flapping after me.
I reached the lumberyard’s planing table and kicked the switch, where the steam-powered, spring-loaded coils set the wood-cutting circular blade to spinning. And then I did the most foolish thing I had done in my entire life.
My enemy’s power derived from how much he was willing to suffer for his aims. He sacrificed a hand to make this monster. I needed to be willing to do the same.
So I turned around, reached up my left hand, and caught the branding iron by its tip.
The pain was so severe it was incomprehensible, but my other hand grabbed the branding-arm by its iron rod, near where an elbow would be. The pain searing my left hand blanked my mind and yet I torqued my right arm and with my body’s weight I yanked the flying devil down.
Down to the sawing table. Driven by the momentum and power of its own wings, the slavery-monster’s cruel little face was the first part of its body to meet the spinning metal sawblades.
Serrated steel blades, designed to slice through six feet of lumber in moments.
I curled up on the ground, clutching my hand. Agony made me shrivel and feel chilled on the wood chips. The sensation in my palm and fingers made me shriek like an animal in the slaughterhouse. I could not think, struggled to breathe, the fried flesh and ruined nerves scrambling my head. The lumberyard spun and it screamed with my voice. The world just wouldn’t stop screaming. I was dimly aware of the splattered chunks of the devil’s body hurling through the air and the spray of its murky green blood spattering all around the lumberyard.
Dimly, dimly aware. Hands. People. Lifted me up. My head dangled, limp as a wet rag. They carried me like a corpse over to the table where two girls were laid out. Meimei’s face was featureless once more; the flowering tendrils were nearly gone from Hua’s mouth.
The girls were resting now, and I was dimly aware of Dr. Wei cleaning and sanitizing my scorched palm, and all the little cuts on my skin. Dimly aware of my father saying, “Li-lin, the girls will be all right.”
Someone lifted my limp arm and began applying salve to my burned hand. “Let’s get you some laudanum,” Dr. Wei said, and I could hear the kindness in his smile.
“No,” I mumbled. “Not over yet.”
>
“What do you mean?” my father asked, but a stab of pain from my hand pushed me over the edge, and out of my body. I hovered there alongside myself, a step removed from the lumberyard, taking it all in, the relief and the ache, the growing sense of calm. The sound of the wind through the wood chips, the breathing of my allies, and a new sound, chuffing, revving, blowing puffs of air.
A strange, large, mechanical object puttered through the lumberyard’s open gates. The automobile’s wheels stopped rolling when a log obstructed its path. All eyes turned to the vehicle. Its door opened and a corpse staggered out.
No, not a corpse: it was Xu Shengdian, as beaten-down and bloody as I had ever seen a human being. He limped along, nearly fell, but his pace held steady.
In his hand he held a pistol.
Aiming at me.
Thunder rocked the lumberyard.
The bullet soared past, and only the breeze of its wake through the air told me how close it had been; not two feet over my head.
I tried to roll off the table, but my soul had been torn from my body; helpless, I watched myself on the table, seeing how tiny I was, paralyzed by pain and exhaustion.
A shadow fell over me; a man, interposing his body between me and the gunman. My father stood between me and the attacker. A moment later, Dr. Wei joined him, followed by Mrs. Wei. All of them, putting their bodies on the line to protect me. Willing to take a bullet for me.
Everyone except Ginny and Bok Choy. My boss had his guns out. Peacemakers, he called them. They were powerful weapons, blasting big bullets, but my boss’s aim was notorious. He never hit his target.
Bok Choy’s guns boomed in the lumberyard, each blast echoing. One after another, the bullets zoomed past Xu Shengdian, who just continued shambling forward, gun in hand, until my boss’s guns were empty.
Then someone else walked up to the half-dead man who had once been a gambling god. A big, showy knife dazzled from her hand.
Out-of-body, my voice could not be heard. I tried to cry out, tried to tell Ginny to flee; she couldn’t fight a gunman with some flashy knife-tricks.
But flash she did. She spun that clumsy knife in ungainly patterns that served no purpose, the motions so large, decorative, and predictable they held no value at all in a fight. Her knife routine was closer to baton-twirling than martial arts, yet as she performed the moves she looked utterly, imperturbably confident.
Xu Shengdian, through his battered face, dragging a dead leg and a limp and useless ruined hand, stepped closer to Ginny. Somehow, even through the scabbing and bruises, his expression still conveyed a sense of pride. She took an aggressive step toward him, and her clumsy knife-hand continued weaving through frivolous maneuvers that were only ever intended to look pretty.
He placed his pistol in the belt of his trousers. Effortlessly, contemptuously, the gambler caught her wrist. It didn’t take much effort for his one good hand to pull her into his embrace. He held her against his body, the gruesome waltz of enemies in the lumberyard. “Ah, Ginny,” he said, his smirk transformed by cuts and bruises into something ghoulish, “you wanted to be this close to me, did you?”
“I did,” she said. Her free hand pressed something small and dark against his throat, and in that moment I finally understood what she meant when she boasted that she was good at making showy motions with her knife.
She pulled the tiny pistol’s trigger and a moment froze in time. The dying man punched out one final panicked blow; he whipped his fist square in Ginny’s face, but through the harsh clap of impact, she was laughing, and only one of them fell.
Lying on the ground, eyes incredulous, Xu Shengdian’s remaining hand reached up and into what remained of his throat.
“You won’t hurt any more girls, Xu Shengdian,” Ginny said. And though Ginny’s kick was clumsy, it was ferocious, and it broke the murderer’s nose before he died.
The ghost that rose in the lumberyard resembled Xu Shengdian as I’d always known him, dapper and radiating charm, except, where he usually sucked on candies, a flower was growing from his phantom mouth, stem and all.
Seeing me, he smiled. “Ah, you’re here, Li-lin. That’s good.”
I said nothing. Ginny and Mrs. Wei were kicking his corpse. The two girls rested peacefully side by side on the medical table. Bok Choy hovered over his daughter, giving her reassurances.
All while I, in spirit, faced the grinning ghost of the man who’d caused so much harm.
“Do you think you’ve beaten me, Li-lin?”
“You have not won today, Xu Shengdian,” I said.
“Today, tomorrow,” he said, “what does it matter? The tree will resurrect me, you’ll see. I am not some ordinary human being. I do not play by human rules.”
“You will not cheat death, Xu Shengdian. Your tree is vanquished,” I said. “You were its servant among the living, and you are dead; it failed to take root in our soil, so it has no connection to this region. You are done, Mr. Xu; your tree won’t resurrect you, because it can’t.”
“Is that what you think? You need to understand something, Li-lin: I always win.”
I stayed quiet, waiting for the ghost to explain himself. But instead of words, blue flowers blossomed from his mouth, and a terrible, wintry cold pressed against my spirit.
“You swallowed its seeds before you died,” I said.
Xu Shengdian grinned wide. Bright blue flowers were starting to blossom all over his spirit body. “I did, Li-lin. And in my pocket, over there, there’s a little bag full of ashes. The ashes belong to a burnt paper effigy of me. Another effigy of me is on my altar. Now that I’m dead, the tree will be able to cross over to the spiritual realm and take root here. You’re finished, Li-lin, all of you. Your father is ruined, your friends, everything; a power unlike anything you’ve ever witnessed is coming here. But you didn’t think of that, did you? You were too busy worrying over some girls. Now my demon-tree will be planted here, all because you cared too much for the little people.”
I gazed at him; I was an out-of-body projection staring at a malevolent ghost. A single, spiritual tendril reached from the pocket of Xu Shengdian’s corpse and delved down into the lumberyard soil.
“That’s it, Li-lin,” the gambler’s ghost was saying. “That was your end. The ancient tree I serve has propagated its spiritual roots in California’s soil. You have lost.”
I turned away from the ghost and woke up in my body.
Across the lumberyard, one seed had been planted; one seed of our annihilation had taken root. Mere moments had passed and I could sense it, starting already to branch out into the spirit world. Overwhelming, powerful, and intent on doing harm, the stem would grow bigger than houses, and eventually it was sure to encompass all of San Francisco, spreading its corrupt, malevolent energy.
THIRTY-NINE
My hand felt numb as stone, an insensate, ruined thing. Bok Choy and Ginny were carrying Hua away from the lumberyard. Dr. Wei fidgeted with his eyeglasses, blinked a few times in the smoky air, and said, “Rest now, Li-lin, it’s done.”
“No,” I said, “the hardest part is still ahead.”
The climb to get my legs under me felt like torture. I dragged my feet across the lumberyard to retrieve my sword. The moment the fingers of my good hand clasped around the peachwood hilt, I felt stronger, more capable.
But would I be capable enough? The ancient tree’s power emanated from the tiny stem, a forest fire of spirit, blazing hot and destructive enough to burn my world.
I advanced on the sprouting ten thousand year tree. Holding my sword aloft, I channeled all the energies of the heavens into it and all the earth’s energies through me, and I slashed down at the growing plant.
It was still small, didn’t reach to my knee, but the slender stalk was bright with hard little buds. I sliced through its stem, driving it to the ground, but the plant continued growing, and it began to engage its natural defenses.
Each of those tight little buds burst instantly into a blossom. And each pe
tal on those blossoms began to flutter like leaves in the wind, to flap like wings.
And then they lifted off and flew, and the lumberyard lit up, beautiful, fluttering with bright, luminous colors, a flood of butterflies.
The myriad wings, all of them iridescent, all shimmering, clustered together, circling and hovering in stillness. They formed a familiar shape; all together, the flapping butterflies resembled a being that stood on two legs, a torso, two arms, and a head. A humanoid shape formed of butterflies, bright colors gleaming open and closed along its insubstantial limbs.
“The Butterfly Man,” I murmured.
His head was made of pulsing, luminous butterflies, and among the numerous tiny flickering wings, a gap opened: a dark concavity, like a mouth.
The entity’s beauty dazzled me. It raised an arm (made of butterflies), and from the flitting, flashing area where a man’s hand would be, butterflies wove outwards on dazzling wings. They fluttered, blood-bright, onyx-black, emerald green, glimmering sea-blue, a dazzling array.
Too many of them, moving too fast, in all directions.
I tried to back away from the bright rainbowing of their wings. I slashed my peachwood sword to and fro, swatting at the swarm. The ones I struck burst into fists of knotty smoke, but more of them fluttered all around. The air was alive with the motions of orange and black monarchs, blue morphos aglow with cobalt radiance, and black wings spotted with glassy green. They were everywhere, all around us, in the silence.
A butterfly’s touch is light as eyelashes, barely noticeable; yet when the first one landed on the back of my good hand, it felt like a weight of stone had been dropped on me, had become me; I became like stone. Petrification spread first from my hand and then from everywhere else the butterflies landed. My eyes and skin may as well have been a cage, for all I could do, and the butterflies spread across the lumberyard.
The Girl with No Face Page 30
