by Adam Tervort
"Well, he did send a message on to the emperor about me; maybe this would be a small way that we could pay him back."
"Alright, I'll go around behind the tower and transform, and then fly around to the front. I don't want to transform for long, but I'll try to give them a good show." She left the crowd and began to sneak through the woods to the back of the tower.
Not everyone's eyes were focused on the magistrate and his talk of excitement to come. Fahai had been watching as Xu and Miss White talked, and his earlier doubts had disappeared. She may talk like a housewife, but her clothing had no seams! Why did no one else see this? She had to be a demon, and Fahai was going to not only banish her, but right here in front of the magistrate. This would do wonders for his career. Oh, he would have more wine than he could ever drink after this night!
Fahai watched as Miss White sneaked between the trees and off in the direction of the tower. The trees were so thick that he couldn't see her the whole time, but sometimes he was able to catch a glance of movement. She seemed to be going around behind the tower. For what, he didn't know, but he did know he had to be ready. He found a spot with a clear view of the tower and took out his amulets and charms, preparing himself. The ten cups of wine he'd had steeled his courage, and he could see the glory that would be his after he performed this feat in front of the magistrate.
The crowd grew more and more anxious as midnight approached. The magistrate told everyone to keep their eyes open for the amazing thing that would happen, and even though most of the people thought him anxious over nothing, his excitement was catching. At the stroke of midnight the moon came out from behind a cloud bank, its ghostly light adding to the torches illuminating the tower area. One of the magistrate's aids looked towards the base of the tower and saw a white streak rush past and around the other side.
"Look! There it is!" The whole crowd moved a step closer to see what the aid had spotted, and just then Miss White made another circuit of the tower. She was huge, the biggest snake anyone had ever seen, with glistening scales and a large, flat head. She had sprouted three sets of wings on her back, also white, which carried her around the tower to the cries of the crowd. The magistrate was so excited the nearly passed out and had to be helped to the ground by three aids so he didn't fall. Higher and higher the snake circled the tower, until near the top it hovered for a moment and seemed to gaze at the crowd.
Fahai had watched the snake in admiration. This was one amazing demon. Not only could it transform, but it could do a mashup. There hadn't been any tales of demons like this for nearly a thousand years. He and the other apprentice sorcerers had laughed when the masters had recounted the stories, but now here was one not ten spans from where he stood. He grabbed his staff and a number of his most powerful amulets and made his way to the front of the crowd. No one paid him any attention as they were transfixed by the snake, rising higher and higher around the tower.
As Miss White went into a hover just below the top of the tower, Fahai bellowed "Demon! I am the sorcerer Fahai and I am here to banish you away from the Banbudao forever!" He raised his staff and a streak of bright light shot out towards Miss White at the top of the tower. She dodged and the light struck the old bricks, making a hole. Again and again Fahai shot at the snake, and again and again it dodged just in time.
Miss White was taken totally by surprise. These were not the wings she would have picked if she had known she would have to avoid a sorcerer. Damn him! This was just a small show for the magistrate, why did a grubby sorcerer have to show up? She began to fly back around the side of the tower but was blocked by another white hot blast. Desperately, she tried to change her form into something that would let her fly higher and maneuver out of the way of the blasts, but she couldn't. Of course! This was the beginning of the Duanwu Festival; she was trapped in this form for a whole day. The only caveat to her abilities, and she had forgotten.
Fahai saw that he was getting close to hitting the snake. Its initial moves had been quick and decisive, but now it looked tired. Each of his blasts was getting closer to hitting it, and he suddenly came up with a brilliant idea. Instead of banishing the demon he would trap it. The tower wall had been blasted through by his missed shots, all he needed to do was blast the snake through the hole and seal it, then the demon would be his to command! He began to aim more carefully, sometimes missing the snake on purpose in order to enlarge the hole. The snake's movement began to be jerky and erratic, and he saw his chance. With a yell he let forth with a dazzling blast of light that caught the middle of the snake's body. It was blasted back into the wall and fell through to the inside. He quickly changed amulets and restored the rocks of the broken wall and then added an enchanted mote around the tower for good measure. The water rushed out of the ground to surround the tower and the crowd of people screamed as they tried to get out of the water's path.
Fahai put up all of the protective enchantments he could think of, anything to make sure that the demon would be trapped. As he sent his final spell up in a flash of red light, he felt a hand come down on his shoulder. The magistrate looked at him with awe in his eyes.
"Master Fahai, truly you have saved us. Who would have thought that a demon would venture out on a night such as this? We are all in your debt."
Fahai swayed in place, exhausted. "Do you have any wine?" The magistrate laughed and called for a bowl of wine to be brought for the hero of the Imperial Tower, Master Sorcerer Fahai. Fahai smiled as he took the wine and swallowed it down in one gulp.
"That should keep the demon contained for now; I will return and cast further enchantments on the tower to make sure that it remains a prison to the monster."
"Master Fahai, on behalf of the people of Xi'an, let me thank you with all of our hearts. Never have I seen a more amazing display of power. I don't know how you came to our aid at just the moment we most needed it, but I thank you. As long as I am magistrate of Xi'an you will have a home here."
"Nothing could make me more pleased than to hear your kind words," said Fahai. As he spoke he searched the crowd looking for Xu, but all he saw of him was a retreating figure racked with sobs. "Truly it was my pleasure to help."
The tower stayed secure, Miss White was trapped inside. Xu was in agony each day. He tried to go to the tower as often as possible without arousing suspicion but that turned out to not be a problem. The old tower with the moat had become a great attraction for the people of the surrounding country, and they came in droves to see it. The magistrate had told the story to everyone he met, and Fahai was now known around the city as the man who saved the magistrate. (This didn't mean everyone loved him, many of the people would just as soon have had the magistrate eaten slowly by the great snake, but they forgave him for saving a fool.) Fahai made the most of his fame by inviting any young men he met to become his apprentice sorcerers, and many joined him. The newest recruits spent their time learning how to make sure Fahai's cup was always full of wine while the older recruits cleaned and cooked. Once a week Fahai would call all of them together for an afternoon of lessons, and then a few days later would call them together for beatings if they weren't able to successfully recreate the magic he had shown them. The young men were murderous at this treatment, but their parents enjoyed the prestige of having a son in Master Fahai's care and insisted they stay with him.
Xu's apothecary began to decline. Without Miss White's help, Xu had no hope of correctly diagnosing even the most general diseases and it did not take long for customers to see that the young man had lost his touch. His heart was broken as was his reputation, and Xu resigned himself to a life of sorrow.
7
A year passed in this way. Fahai became fatter and more wealthy, his stable of lads growing to well over 500. Xu became gaunt and sickly, barely making enough in his business to cover costs. The only bright spot in his life was the praise of his mother. Since Xu never left his shop except to go to the tower and try to talk to Miss White, the little money he made gave him the ability to send som
e to his mother each month. When he sent off the first letter with a small amount of money he was worried that his mother would send it back to him with contempt, but she did no such thing. She wrote him back the most flowery letter he had ever seen. After a lifetime of being a lazy son who would amount to nothing, he was suddenly the most caring son in the world. Xu couldn't believe his eyes. He decided that his mother must be sick, so he took the first chance available to make a trip back to her village. He found his mother in great health, and for the first time she paraded him in front of her friends as a son she was proud of. She spent double the amount he had sent her on a feast in his honor, and after three days sent him on his way with a kiss, the first time she had done such a thing since he was a baby. Xu made sure he sent her what money he could every month because her delighted letters were the only good thing in his life.
As the year went by, the tower sank farther and farther into the moat. Fahai had a small group of apprentices stationed around the tower at all times, and when the tower began to sink they sent a runner to him in panic. Fahai nearly stroked out in his hurry to get to the tower, but after two days of recasting spells and checking enchantments, he finally decided that the sinking wasn't any magic performed by Miss White, just a result of a stone tower sinking into soft ground. The apprentices watched the tower more closely and Fahai checked up on it as often as he remembered to, but after a few years a routine set in. His visits to the tower became less frequent, and the boys became so bored with tower duty that they sent only the dullest among them to watch the tower sink.
The story would end here if it wasn't for Miss Green.
Of course when they separated, Miss Green had been sad. Miss White had been her friend for thousands of years, and particularly in the last few hundred they had been very close. It had been Miss White that had saved Miss Green from life as a jackalope, and Miss White who had helped her find the cure to her poison frog gas. She had been there for Miss White when one of her boys threw himself in the river, or died in a duel of honor over her, or, worst of all, broke her heart by marrying another woman. It these times Miss Green would try to comfort Miss White and eventually was able to bring her around even if it took decades.
But when Miss White and Xu moved to Xi'an together, Miss Green was really bummed. Miss White was a demon, she wasn't supposed to get so crazy-stupid over mortal men. On some levels it was understandable, Miss Green had her frogs that she loved so she could empathize, but she would never dream of becoming a frog just because a particularly nice specimen of frogginess hopped along, but that was in essence what Miss White had done. She had become a frog. Xu was no better than some of her nicer bullfrogs; in her opinion, but in spite of it all she still loved Miss White and worried about her.
At the yearly demon councils all demons were supposed to show up and make an accounting of their activities for the year. Miss White had never showed up, but the council didn't seem worried. After five years of no-shows at the council Miss Green started to worry, but the council told her that Miss White had probably just gotten herself stuck as some animal and forgot how to turn herself back, not to worry. Miss Green didn't buy it. She decided she would go and check on Miss White and Xu and see what had happened in the years since she had last seen White.
She arrived on a gloomy November Monday. It was cold, wet, and miserable, and she was nearly ready to turn around and come back in the spring but she decided to pop into Xu's apothecary and say hello then go back to the Banbudao.
As she wound her way through the city streets, she took in the changes. There were signs all over the city with a fat old man's picture on them advertising "Sorcery School." The guy in the pictures had a horrible, rancid beard and bright orange robes, and the orange almost threw her off, but the beard struck a chord in her memory. "It's that horrible old sorcerer from Xu's village," she thought. "He's come a long way if he has his own school now." She turned the corner onto the street where Xu's shop was, but she seemed to be in the wrong place. When they had first opened Xu's apothecary it had been nicely furnished with an attractive sign out front and a classy display. Now it looked dilapidated. The sign was gone, and the display looked like it hadn't been cleaned since the shop opened. Rather than the Xu she remembered, the man behind the counter was gaunt and graying with no energy in his eyes. She watched him from outside the shop as he struggled to help a customer. The woman in the shop had asked for an infusion of wormwood, but try as he might Xu just couldn't get it right. (Probably because he had picked up the wrong herb. It's hard to infuse wormwood using ox grass.) The woman became angry and left the shop in a huff, and Xu let his chin drop to his chest in defeat. After a moment he began to clear up the top of the counter, but his head stayed down the whole time.
"Poor Xu, something awful must have happened to you." Miss Green steeled herself for a moment then went into the store. Xu waved his hand in a vague gesture of "go away," but he did not turn or look at Miss Green. "Xu, my friend, what has happened to you?" she said.
Xu slowly turned to look at Miss Green, his eyes widening as he looked at her face and down at her clothes which shone softly in the light. "You still have no seems on your robe, Miss Green." A small smile broke across his haggard face and a minuscule spark puffed to life in his eyes. "Did you bring your friend the bullfrog? I have some dried bugs he might like."
"Oh Xu, we need to talk." Miss Green helped Xu close the shutters and the shop for the day, and then he led her up the narrow stairs in the back to the second floor where he lived. At first Xu seemed to believe he was dreaming, that the appearance of Miss Green could not be real, but after a few hours of conversation and some wine he recovered at least the semblance of his old self. He told her of the successes in the first year after she left and of the party the magistrate had invited them to. He told her of Fahai coming into the shop and how he had not recognized him and unwittingly invited him to the party. As he told her about the party and the battle between Miss White and Fahai he began to weep, and it took all of Miss Green's patience to comfort him and then lead him through the story a number of additional times. Finally Miss Green told Xu that she understood what had happened, and told him to go to sleep and rest. She left as soon as he lay down, burning with fury at the mangy sorcerer that had captured her friend and drunken with her desire for revenge.
"I'll have to think of a really special punishment for him, something that involves never-ending torment, sharp things that poke and pinch, and darkness. Oh, that sorcerer won't know what hit him when I finish him off." She made her way to the tower and spent some time trying to hear Miss White inside. Even when she transformed into a fish and swam to the very base of the tower under the moat, she couldn't hear anything from inside. Finally she changed back into her human form and passing the two sleeping apprentices on the edge of the woods she popped back into the Banbudao.
For the next six months Miss Green trained herself in the Banbudao, spied on Fahai in his monastery, and visited Xu in his sad little shop. Each time she visited him she would ask him to describe the battle between Fahai and Miss White in detail trying to get a better idea of the magic she would be up against. She reported to the council of demons what she had learned and asked for their help and advice. She watched Fahai beat his boys and drink and eat until he passed out each night. But most of all she trained.
Miss Green knew that in a head-to-head fight she would have no chance of defeating Fahai, when sorcerers and demons fight directly the sorcerer always wins. If the demon could drag the sorcerer back to the Banbudao it would be a different story, but even the most clueless sorcerers have simple amulets to protect them from that. The only way that she could hope to defeat Fahai was through the help of another sorcerer and some of her friends. For a time she contemplated summoning cockroaches or mice to sneak into Fahai's monastery and steal all of his magical implements, but he would just use some that belonged to his students. It wouldn't work and had a great chance of failing anyways. She considered trying to just steal his
amulet that kept him out of the Banbudao and then pulling him through, but how would she know which amulet to steal? These days Fahai had so many amulets and bling that he looked like a badly dressed rapper from the early 90's, minus the gold teeth. (My comparison, not Miss Green's.) She decided she needed the help of a sorcerer so that she could both surprise Fahai and then break the seal on the tower and summon Miss White out of it. It would be tricky, but she trained hard and hoped that she could defeat him.
She began by calling frogs from all over China to her. This was no easy task because Xi'an was still a desert and the frogs weren't very interested in coming, but she had learned some great tricks from her amphibious friends over the years. Three days after she sent out her summons they began arriving, and she led them all to the moat around Miss White's tower. The apprentices stationed outside the tower should have been suspicious, but they had been bored out of their minds for so long that an influx of thousands of frogs to the moat was great excitement for them. When the frogs kept coming and coming, day after day, they began to be a bit worried, but then they started to cook some of the bigger ones and decided that the frogs were really manna from heaven. Fahai didn't need to know. (If he did he'd just forbid them from eating the frogs anyways, so they enjoyed themselves immensely with full bellies and knowing that they were hiding something from their master.)
Next she began to train Xu. His task was to seek out any of Fahai's students that were dissatisfied and try to bring them back to his shop for drinks. This turned out to be easy. Each day the boys were sent out into the city to beg for alms, and Xu waited on the corner until he saw two large young men with particularly foul looks on their faces. He gave them a few coins for alms and then asked if they were hungry. Both of the boys said they were but were under orders to fast for two days. Xu joked with them and commiserated as best he could. He did a terrible acting job, but the boys were really hungry and didn't take much convincing. Xu led them to his shop and up the stairs to the second floor where Miss Green waited with a small feast. The boys ate and drank until their bellies were full to bursting and then both fell into a contented sleep on the floor. When they awoke a few hours later Xu told them they were welcome to return the next day, and they promised they would. Day after day the two apprentices came back to eat together with Xu and Miss Green. Xu asked them questions about their life in the monastery and about their training. They had both been sent to Fahai by parents who had more children than they could comfortably feed and so had no real hope of going home. They shared their complaints about Fahai and the told about the beatings they received for all kinds of minor infractions. Xu and Miss Green told them that it was very unfair, the life that they had to live, and asked if there were any way that they could help. The older boy laughed bitterly and said "The only way anything will change is if old 'Fahtty' is driven off and we can run the monastery by ourselves. Otherwise we're stuck with him until he dies."
