The Pirate Empress

by Deborah Cannon

  Not only had the terrain altered, but the smell of the air had too. He detected iron, raw and bitter, but saw no sign of Hot Lake. Suddenly, his horse reared up in terror. Zhu gripped the reins.

  Nothing. And yet a crunching came from somewhere nearby. From his perch atop his horse, He Zhu concentrated as he sought the perpetrator of the footsteps. Was this a mirage? Did something inch toward him? The footfalls grew louder, and on the ground three paces from the gelding’s hooves, tracks appeared. But they were not of any earthly creature; they were huge, three-toed, skeletal, and not of this world. Zhu’s chest ran cold. What land of legend was this? He slanted his visor against the searing sun and spurred his horse away.

  Zhu’s breath shortened and his eyes widened as he approached an unknown region. Here the air was sweet, the wind slight. Drifts rose from the ground, easing onto flat planes of stone. The white disk of the sun dipped lower in the sky, and the red-gold sand settled. He glanced left and right, reminded of the stories of the far north and west. But no life seemed to thrive here. No rabbits that looked like lizards, or snakes resembling hares, no men confronted him with arms that grew front-to-back. A shadow flew over his eyes but this was no Mad Bird in an official’s cap, only a hawk.

  On the horizon a coppery mountain peak appeared. Scorched Mountain at last, and that mirage falling from its cliffs like a shiny ribbon must feed the waters of the Coldhot River. He urged his mount forward to seek the sparkling oasis. Yes, it led to a lake! He Zhu spurred his horse on until the sand changed to loess, and the loess between the scattered stones grew grass, green and glistening. Before his eyes, the lake spread out like a bowl of tasty soup, complete with lotus flowers. On one side was a stone trilith, a massive gateway comprised of two stone columns and a lintel. This he assumed was the Dragon’s Gate. He tethered his horse to a nearby tree. Oh, yes, there were trees here, small, young saplings with strong trunks. He stroked the gelding, whispered words of comfort into its ear and left it grazing on the tall grass sprouting between the rocks.

  As he walked nearer, he noticed that the pillars of the gate stood upon the water. What manner of lake is this that stone fails to sink in its waters? He snapped his eyes shut, for he was certainly weary, but when he opened them again he saw the same scene. The water under the trilith ran free, and small minnows swam beneath them.

  “I am flabbergasted,” Zhu said aloud. “How can this be?” He set a foot onto the mirrored surface of the lake and felt it sink. When he raised it, his black leather boot rose, dripping wet. “Doubly, am I flabbergasted.”

  He stared at the base of the two floating stones, and his eyes were drawn upward by intricate patterns. The patterns were the fossilized bones of a thousand tiny animals, forming characters that resembled numbers. The warning Master Yun left with him returned. The Carp guard only understands numbers.

  “Hello!” he called out. “Ho! Guardian of the Dragon Gate, are you there?”

  A few blue bubbles burbled out of the center of the lake. Zhu went closer and peered through the trilith to see if anything heeded his summons. His feet cut the water where it was shallow, and he made to enter the gate. As he reached out to steady himself his hand was repelled by some unseen force.

  He rubbed his wrenched arm, pain searing into his shoulder, inflaming the old scar inflicted on him by the pirate queen Madam Choi. Momentarily his thoughts flashed back to Li. Now was not the time for regrets. Nothing was as it should be. The Xiongnu—Wu’s keepers—died a thousand years ago. Their daughter, Alai, should also be nothing but bones in her grave. But the Xiongnu bowmaid was very much alive, and he trusted her with his heart. And so, if Alai could return to the living, then why shouldn’t stones float on water or a giant carp guard a dragon’s bones?

  “Guardian of the gate,” he shouted once more. “Please answer me.”

  He touched the space between the columns again and was, again, repelled to the shore. This time even his eyes were affected, a multitude of tiny lighting bolts, bright gold, flashed across his vision. He closed his eyes to relieve the sensation before opening them to the strangest experience of focusing on a dozen places at once. A huge splash, washing him thoroughly with lake water, returned his sight to normal. “Master Carp,” Zhu said, self-consciously aware that he was addressing a giant fish.

  The fish’s head rose above the level of the lake. Its eyes were black, surrounded by a matrix of pure white. Its head and body were massive, possibly the size of an elephant. The large scales that studded its body were easily the span of his hand and overlapped like gleaming yellow armour. Next to Fenghuang this sentinel of the gate was easily the most magnificent creature He Zhu had ever seen.

  The fish made a gurgling sound with its mouth. Zhu mentally slapped himself. Fool, he thought. Numbers. The carp only understands the language of numbers.

  “Um, yee, bak,” he said. Five, two, eight. No easy fortune for me. He raised his hand, spreading his fingers in salutation. The carp bobbed in the water five times.

  Zhu stepped forward, but the carp moved to the shoreline blocking his path. It raised its head to display two translucent yellow fins.

  Two. What was it saying? Two? Two what?

  It flapped the fins. Two. Two. Two.

  Zhu lifted both of his arms. Two. Two arms. He wasn’t supposed to use one arm to touch the gate like he’d done earlier? “I’m sorry—” he started to say, but then closed his mouth as the carp had no way of comprehending his words. Then he remembered one of the Emperor’s favourite sayings: Good things come in pairs. Did that mean he shouldn’t enter alone?

  The carp reared and slapped its tail down, sending a geyser of water into Zhu’s face. The ripples that resulted formed eight rings, and Zhu took that as his cue to enter the gate.

  %%%

  The Emperor awoke from his trance at the third shout of his name. “Majesty, we must away from here,” Master Yun said.

  The royal eyes blinked, turning their flattened lids toward the warlock. “Where are we? This is not my palace, and these creatures that stare at us from the wall, they are no eunuchs of mine. For that matter, what am I doing here with you? You are Master Yun, are you not?”

  There were indeed faces peering at them from the wall, bull and serpent heads that were partially embedded in the stone waiting to release the next victim into the tree of knives. “You don’t remember?” Master Yun queried.

  “I remember passing through my secret gardens and climbing to the top of Coal Hill, but after that, all is a blur.” The Emperor gazed, aghast, at the scene before him. One of the bull and serpent-headed slavers had opened the iron gate, and now flogged a sextuplet of naked captives into the tree of knives. “What unholy nightmare is this?” he cried, as blood rained down from their scored flesh.

  “It is better that you don’t know,” Master Yun said. “Come, we must find our way to the surface.”

  “To the surface?” The Emperor halted in his tracks. “Where are we? If you fail to inform me, Warlock, I refuse to move another step.”

  “You wish to remain here? Fine. You wish to name this unholy horror? We are in the Court of Climbing Knives. Now, will you come?”

  “But that means…”

  “Indeed, it does.” Out of his peripheral vision, Master Yun noticed how the beast-headed guards with their human bodies waxed solid, then nebulous as they entered and exited the wall. How do doors work in Hell? Why, they do the exact opposite of what you’d expect!

  Master Yun approached the east wall where one Yaoquai had vanished, leaving the Emperor gaping at the tree. He truly did not remember, and perhaps that was good, else he would be mentally scarred for the rest of his life. A poor leader he would make if he cowered beneath his throne rather than sat proud upon horseback to rally his people. Master Yun thrust a hand into the wall where the demon was last seen. Simple. Like the Mirror of Retribution, one had only to locate the right spot. This spot had a charcoal outline of the two-headed beast. Interesting, he had not noted that before.

&
nbsp; His Majesty’s jaw still gaped, and Master Yun returned to retrieve him. He gripped him by the wrist like he was nothing but a small child, and stepped through the charcoal outline that was quickly disappearing. Like molten metal, the door collapsed over the Emperor’s left ankle, and he was trapped with one foot embedded in stone. Master Yun kicked at the wall, but that served only to bruise his toes. His Majesty started to yowl, and Master Yun shushed him. “I will get you out of this fix, but you must stop that infernal noise or I shall have to slap you.”

  The yowling stopped long enough for the Emperor to glower. “How dare you? How dare you speak to your supreme ruler, your Son of Heaven that way!”

  “I will speak to you any which way I choose for you are beginning to get on my nerves. And you are the one who is stuck in a wall, not I. Do you wish to be freed or not? If so, then be silent. I must think.”

  “You will pay for your insubordination, your insolence—when I am freed and sit upon my throne once more.”

  ‘If’, Master Yun, thought, for he wasn’t sure if ‘when’ was a certainty.

  The charcoal outline of Yaoquai did not appear on this side of the door and if it had originally, it was now gone. A shadow loomed over Master Yun. He turned and saw a seven-foot man with the heads of an ox and a horse. The yowling started up again and he silenced His Majesty with a sharp glare. The messenger of death moved toward them.

  “There has been a mistake,” Master Yun said. “Come no further. This man has been freed by the decree of Yan Luo himself.”

  The Ox and Horse head Messenger drew nearer, reached out as though to strangle the Emperor, but instead his hand went to where His Majesty’s foot was trapped. The wall turned molten, long enough for the foot’s withdrawal, and the Emperor bolted like a frightened pig.

  “It is for this yellow, liver-bellied puppet of a king that we have risked so much?”

  That was no messenger of Yan Luo. Not only did the messengers of Feng Du possess no voice, but even if they could speak, they would be untrained in the dragon lingo.

  “I grew tired of waiting,” Fucanlong said. “In this form, it was the easiest way in. It seems I have not lost my abilities to shapeshift, nor to act. And the fires retract at my appearance.”

  “Can you find Tongtian?” Master Yun asked.

  “He’s not far. I can smell him.”

  They went to fetch His Royal Highness out of a tunnel where he was blabbering to himself. Not very dignified, the dragon’s snort implied, but Master Yun refused to leap to judgement. To be fair, His Majesty had endured a horrific ordeal, and an even more horrific revelation. To wake up in Hell is any man’s worst nightmare.

  “This way!” The dragon’s voice coming from the Hell Master’s messenger was disconcerting, but this time, the Emperor did as he was told. The incendiary forces of Feng Du obeyed, and the hellfires retracted into low pockets of blue flame. “Quickly! As soon as I take on dragon shape the fires will burst anew. We must be well up the flue by then.”

  The beast heads disappeared, to be replaced by a dragon head. “Mount! The flames have started.” He shot upward, planing his wings as Master Yun mounted, dragging the screaming Emperor in his wake. The threesome catapulted through the Hell Mouth, blue arms of fire raking the dragon’s tail.

  As a thousand Ox and Horse Head Messengers followed in pursuit, Master Yun caught sight of Yan Luo, in his official death robes, perched on the lip of the Hell Mouth, laughing. “Remember,” he shouted. “The BLOODSTONE!”

  The messengers of Feng Du retreated, answering the summons of their master, and Fucanlong evaporated into the watery blue sky.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The Pagoda in Hot Lake

  The number Seven corresponded with the Ghost Month, a time of year at which the Gates of Hell opened to allow phantoms and spirits to visit the living world. It was a bad number, and so He Zhu attempted to walk the seven paces in six longer strides. Turned out, however, that Six was no more lucky than Seven, for the word lok in the Emperor’s Chinese meant fall or drop, and not to his surprise, he found himself falling face first into the water with his feet slipping out from under him.

  There was no sign of the giant carp. Zhu decided to swim beneath the trilith. As he stroked, the water refused to give. It was like swimming in a pool of tar, and yet the minnows frolicking beneath the floating stones had no problem. “Master Carp!” he shouted, thrusting his head into the air. But what was the use? The fish did not understand his language. “Um, yee, bak!” The numbers Five, Two, Eight brought a swell of yellow into his vision. “I’m stuck,” he called.

  The giant carp bloomed larger, rose, then upended itself on its tail and began to sink, tail first. What was it trying to tell him? Zhu lifted his head, persuaded his feet to drop and his torso to straighten before he remembered what Master Yun had said about walking to the bottom of the lake. He had distinctly described the pilgrimage as ‘walking’.

  Zhu moved toward the trilith. With each step he took, his body sank deeper. What happens when my head goes under? How am I supposed to breathe? The water came up to his chin; soon it would enter his nose.

  The lake bottom sloped. He took a deep swallow of air; his head dipped beneath the surface. How much farther? Beyond, he sighted the yellow body of the carp. His breath was about to give out. Unlike Master Yun he was untrained in the art of subaquatic meditation. While his teacher could lie in an inert state completely submerged, Zhu could not.

  His chest was tight, lungs straining. What happens if I exhale? Was there magic here to keep him from drowning? He was afraid to find out, but soon he would have no choice.

  One more step. And then he would explode. Just as Zhu feared the worst, he released his breath, choking, expecting water to fill his lungs, but when he opened his eyes he saw a huge bubble spew straight at him from the carp’s thick lips. His first inclination was to shoot for the surface, but the tar-like resistance of the lake water stopped him. The bubble smashed into his face, engulfed his head and sealed him in a membrane of fishy air. All right, so the smell isn’t the most pleasant. But he could breathe and he was alive. He coughed to get the remaining water out of his lungs and glanced around.

  The bubble was large and very light. He had no idea how long the air within would last, but it seemed the carp had no intention of letting him drown.

  He reached a strange sight in the lakebed. The curled roof of a huge pagoda protruded from the sand. It sported red eaves and a hole in its roof. The carp flicked its tail five times. The fifth rib was what He Zhu sought. Either that is a deliberate motion meaning the dragon’s deathbed is inside the pagoda, or the poor fish has an itch in its nether regions.

  The carp began to swim in a wide arc around him. It returned in a figure eight, then another figure eight. Eight, eight. The number Eight meant prosperity or wealth. Double Eights meant double prosperity. It could also mean there were eighty-eight steps down that pagoda before he would find the dragon’s bones.

  Zhu struggled to the hole, glanced down. Alas, Eighty-eight steps.

  %%%

  Those who inhabited the darkness of Feng Du reputedly lied. Hell was a place of judgement and punishment, not a place of honesty and truth. Those virtues lay across the Golden Bridge, in the domain of Heaven. If the Hell Master spoke the truth, and the Bloodstone did exist with such powers as he described, then all the Middle Kingdom was in jeopardy.

  During Master Yun’s apprenticeship as a young warlock, he had studied the mythical Bloodstone. It was thought to be merely a fable, meant to frighten young sorcerers into moderating their power. Great power easily led to temptation, and temptation to abuse. The lesson of the Bloodstone was to curtail abuse. For what greater warning did one need than the possibility of total annihilation of one’s known world?

  The Bloodstone controlled the Balance: the forces of life, nature and the universe. That there were no clear ideas of good and evil in the world, right or wrong, was the first lesson Master Yun learned. Without good, there wa
s no evil, and without evil, there could be no good. What was right for one people was wrong for another.

  The universe constantly struggled for balance between opposites. But they were not truly in opposition to each other. For rain was needed as well as sun, men as well as women, darkness as well as light, night as well as day. Even weakness to balance strength.

  Master Yun clenched his fist and glanced down at the golden rooftops of the Forbidden City as the wind lashed his face. The Emperor yowled unceasingly, and gripped Master Yun’s robes to keep from falling off the dragon’s back. All around was blue and even the lands below had a bluish tinge. The Moonstone refused to stir at Master Yun’s bidding. It remained inert, stark and opaque. How was he to divine the future? How was he to learn the truth of this latest gemstone of power?

  It all made sense now, He Zhu’s tender manner toward Alai, Li’s destiny…and Quan’s. A Chinese prince falls in love with a Mongol bowmaid, a princess becomes a pirate, and an Imperial soldier becomes an outlaw.

  “Fucanlong!” Master Yun shouted over the hissing of the wind. “Change course. We must make a detour. We must find a pathway into the Etherworld!”

  Fucanlong stopped mid flight. Master Yun felt a distinct sinking sensation and the Emperor screeched in terror as they plummeted, before the dragon’s wings rose again, and sent them cruising on an even keel. “Are you crazy, Master Yun? We just came from the hellfires of Feng Du. The Etherworld is not a place anyone can choose to visit on a whim. Such journeys are granted by greater forces than yours or mine.”

  “It is the home of the true Taijitu, and is the path that can tell me the truth concerning the Hell Master’s fable of the Bloodstone.”

  “He jests with you,” the dragon said over his shoulder. “No such gemstone could possibly exist. And if it did, why is it in the keeping of the Hell Master?”