The Girl with Ghost Eyes

by M. H. Boroson

  “I have come to the monastery to speak with Shuai Hu,” I said, mustering as much authority as I could into my voice and bearing. “I am Xian Li-lin, the Daoshi’s daughter.”

  He leaned back, crossing strong arms in front of his chest. “You’re a Daoshi too, aren’t you?”

  I blinked. No one ever seemed to realize that. Long ago I had given up on reminding them. “Yes,” I admitted, “I am a Daoshi too. How did you know?”

  “I have known many dangerous females in my time. It is never wise to underestimate an enemy.”

  My eyes narrowed. I snapped a glance at Mr. Yanqiu. He understood me, and started to climb down from my shoulder. Then I turned back to the muscle-bound monk. “Are we enemies, then?”

  The bald man shrugged and then looked away. “I honestly hope not, Daonu Xian,” he said, addressing me respectfully. “I have no wish to harm you.”

  His statement irritated me. It reminded me of all the men who thought I was merely a girl, that I posed no threat. “You think you could harm me, Shuai Hu?”

  His lopsided grin grew broader, acknowledging that he was, indeed, Shuai Hu. “I try to do no harm.”

  “You haven’t answered my question. Do you think you could hurt me?”

  “You know, Daonu Xian, I expected a visit from your father, weeks ago. I thought he would come to me with flaming talismans and a goosewood staff. I would have fled and never come back. But the days went by, with no sign of the great Daoshi. Until today. Why has he sent you now?”

  My mouth opened to shoot a sharp retort, but then I stopped. Shuai Hu didn’t know why I was here. He thought Father had sent me. He didn’t know Father and I had been attacked. He wasn’t a conspirator.

  It was a relief to hear. There was something unnerving about this man, immense and strong, with his lopsided smile and his happy cheeks, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Looking right at him with my yin eyes, I saw nothing more than a human man. Yet there was also something feral about him, something dangerous and uncontrollable. He reminded me of a bird in a cage with an open door, trying to decide whether to remain on its perch or fly through the opening.

  Mr. Yanqiu finished climbing down my robe. He ran to take shelter in the shadows.

  “My father would only come to you with talismans burning if you were a monster,” I said. “You aren’t a monster, are you, Shuai Hu?”

  It was his turn for a surprised blink. “I try not to be.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Why did your father send you, Daonu Xian? Why now?”

  “No one sent me,” I said.

  This was going nowhere. The monk wasn’t going to tell me anything.

  I unstrapped the bagua mirror from my back. It was a nine-inch octagon made of bronze, with a small round mirror in the center. The eight trigrams were engraved in the bronze frame. Every possible three-line combination of yin and yang, standing for all the energies of the universe, met along the frame of my bagua mirror. Focused by the laws of nature, the mirror would unmask any illusion.

  “What are you doing?” Shuai Hu asked, but he was too slow.

  I swung the bagua mirror out to face him and gave a triumphant “Ha!” I waited for the illusion to crumble, for the true face of the monster to be revealed.

  The monk looked at the mirror, unimpressed. His face gazed from the mirror. His big jovial cheeks and expression of annoyance looked entirely human. He tapped his foot on the street.

  “Daonu Xian,” he said. “I ask with patience and respect. Why have you come here looking for me?”

  I tried to think of a clever response, but nothing occurred to me. And then everything went mad.

  Mr. Yanqiu shouted, “I’ve got him, I’ve got him!” I turned toward him. The eye-spirit had grabbed hold of a tiny blue man. I tilted my head and blinked to make sure I was seeing it right. Yes, Mr. Yanqiu was struggling to hold onto a small blue man. The blue man yelped as he struggled. Shuai Hu turned toward the sound of the two little spirits grappling. He took a half-step toward them. It was enough for me. The monk shouldn’t have been aware of the spirits at all.

  I launched a hammer-kick at his shoulder while he was turned to the side. It hit hard and square, knocking him off balance. He staggered to the side to recover his center, but by then I had drawn my rope dart. I started it spinning, building speed and momentum.

  Shuai Hu looked at me, keeping an eye on the little spirits tussling on the street. A few moments more and my rope dart would be spinning fast enough to shatter stone.

  Then Mr. Yanqiu shouted. “His shadow! Li-lin, there’s something wrong with his shadow!”

  I glanced at the monk’s shadow. The eye was right. It wasn’t a man’s shadow. It was the shadow of a beast, huge and inhuman. Its dark outline began to ripple and pulse. Power throbbed from the shadow into the man. The shadow began to look more and more like a man’s shadow, and the man began to look more and more like a monster.

  Shuai Hu had grown. He’d been big before, and now he was taller and broader, and somehow more solid, as though he’d been built from bricks. And there was a second shape around him, beastly and burning, a shape of spirit threatening to burst out through every inch of the man’s skin. The second shape was larger than he was, larger and longer. Shuai Hu snarled, and so did the spirit beast around him. I saw it in its primal glory. I saw its jaws, its teeth, its fur, and its wild eyes. I whispered, “That’s impossible.”

  My mind was reeling. It couldn’t be real, not here, and yet it was. Father was right to fear him.

  “Let. Him. Go,” Shuai Hu said, with both mouths—the man’s mouth and the mouth of the monster. Three tails lashed behind him.

  “Do it,” I said to my father’s eye. My mouth felt dry. My eyes were wide with disbelief.

  Mr. Yanqiu released the little blue man. I scooped up the spirit of my father’s eye. Together we backed away from the man who was born a tiger.

  10

  A few minutes later, we were on our way back to the infirmary to see if my father had woken up yet. I still couldn’t believe what I’d seen. “A tiger spirit,” I marveled.

  “With three tails,” the eyeball added.

  “How do I fight something like that?” I asked. “How do I kill it?”

  Mr. Yanqiu was slow to reply. “Why do you want to kill it, Li-lin?”

  “Because it’s a monster,” I said. “That’s what I do. I kill monsters.”

  “You used to call me a monster,” he said softly.

  I raised an eyebrow at that. “You aren’t a tiger, Mr. Yanqiu. Tigers eat people.”

  “How many people has Shuai Hu eaten?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Has he eaten any people?

  “Not as far as I know,” I admitted.

  “I think you would have heard the news, Li-lin. Tiger attack in San Francisco!”

  I ignored the jibe, and he continued. “I suggest you concentrate on Liu Qiang.”

  I nodded. My father’s eye was right. There would be time later to deal with the tiger. “It’s good to have your advice, Mr. Yanqiu. It’s like having another pair of—” I stopped and corrected myself. “It’s like having another eye.”

  *

  Father still lay in his cot at the infirmary, but he was awake now. The right side of his head was swaddled in bandages, but his left eye shone with a harsh clarity, focused on me. It hurt to see him like this. My father had always been the most powerful of men, the most fearsome exorcist. He was the man who walked alone into a house where fox spirits were flying and left them all dead. He was the spiritual warrior whose name alone would send an army of angry ghosts into disorganized retreat.

  And now he lay wounded, half-blind and suffering. Because

  of me.

  His remaining eye blazed in his face. If anything, the bandages made his gaze seem more pointed, more intense. Anger solidified the sharp features of his face, the carefully trimmed graying mustache, the severe eyebrows.

  I sat on
a wooden stool by the cot. There were so many questions I needed to ask him, but he held me with the gaze of his remaining eye. “Liu Qiang,” he thundered, his voice intense but hoarse. “Tell me how that weakling overpowered you.”

  I looked down. Apparently my father knew Liu Qiang and held him in low regard. I flushed with shame. I wanted to cry, to tear at my hair for my foolishness. Father was going to think less of me when he understood. “Liu Qiang didn’t overpower me, Father. He came to the temple with Tom Wong. They asked me to deliver a soul passport.”

  He eyed me with a shrewd look. “And you believed this?”

  “Yes, Father,” I said. “Tom Wong was with him. I thought Mr. Wong wanted me to do this.”

  Father nodded slowly and looked away. “Tom Wong would never take action against a sworn brother of the Ansheng tong,” he said. “He must have been deceived.”

  “But why didn’t he stop Liu Qiang when he started to cut into me?”

  Father looked back at me, with his forehead knitted into a severe expression. “There must be an explanation.”

  “Father, why did this happen? Who is Liu Qiang?”

  He adjusted his position on the cot. When he answered, his voice seethed with disgust. “Liu Qiang,” he said. “Liu Qiang is a small man. Weak and bitter.

  “He was one of Shifu Li’s apprentices, at my side. All of Shifu’s students were strong and capable young men. All except Liu Qiang. Qiang was a weakling. He was a fool. The other boys and I would trip him when he was carrying tea. Once,” he said, and a smile teased the edges of his mouth as he remembered, “the other boys held him down and I pissed in his face.”

  I could not conceal the disgusted expression on my face. The words came from my mouth before I had a chance to think. “What had he done to deserve such a cruel humiliation?”

  “He wasn’t one of us.” My father casually sipped from a wooden cup. “Even Shifu knew he was less. He refused to ordain Qiang past the Fifth.”

  Hearing this made something ache inside me. My father’s teacher had shown his contempt by giving Liu Qiang only the Fifth Ordination. Father raised me no higher than the Second. It burned to hear Father call Liu Qiang a weakling and a fool. It burned to know a fool had tricked me. A weakling had pushed my clothes aside and carved my skin.

  My father’s face had a distant look, as though he’d forgotten I was even there. “Will you tell me more, Father?” I asked.

  He turned to face me. “I didn’t see Qiang for years. Some time later, I was called upon to stop a soulstealer. A lifedrinker. He would hide behind a tree at night, and then he’d blow stupefying powder in the faces of men who passed by. The powder would numb their senses long enough for him to come up behind them and clip their queues.”

  We were quiet for a long moment. I found the notion repugnant. A queue is the symbol of a man’s place in the world, connected by obedience to the Emperor. The queue is the physical embodiment of one third of the higher soul. Without it, a man would be incomplete, and, worse, he would become yao—filthy, unwanted, outside the social order. A monster.

  I found myself grimacing. Any man who would do this, who would rob other men of a portion of their souls, was lower than an animal.

  Father continued. “The soulstealer was cutting queues to make paper figures. These paper men were no bigger than your hand. Each time he burned a man’s queue, he brought a hundred paper figures to life. The paper men had a portion of a man’s spirit, yet they were not of the spirit world. They flew through the air and everyone could see them, even in daylight. Flocks of them would scream through the village at night, terrifying everyone.”

  He coughed a few times, and I waited for him to continue. “I tracked the soulstealer to his lair and confronted him. It turned out to be Liu Qiang. Raising a hand, he led a flight of paper men to attack me.” Father’s remaining eye looked distant, as if he was reliving the events of that night right in front of him.

  “How did you stop them?” I asked.

  “The paper figures were nothing,” my father said, a sneer audible in his voice. “They were weak and flimsy, like Liu Qiang. His little paper men flew at me like a flock of birds and I cut them down with my straight steel sword. I found Liu Qiang cowering in the back of his little sorcerer’s hut, and I took my sword and cut off

  his arm.”

  I blinked. That was how it happened, then. It explained Liu Qiang’s missing arm, and it explained why a man would cross the ocean and hunt my father down after all these years. For vengeance. For face.

  There was an eerie parity to the men now; Father cut off one of Liu Qiang’s arms, and now Liu Qiang cost my father one of his eyes.

  “He was going to use me to kill you, Father,” I said. “He had an ally in the world of spirits. A ghost.”

  “The ghost was set to possess you,” he said, nodding. “It was going to ambush me in your body and murder me unprepared. I know. I deciphered the plan by reading the talisman in your skin, and then I countered his spell by cutting a stronger talisman.”

  “Father,” I said, “I brought a soul passport with me into the spirit world.”

  He went deadly still. The significance sank in. With the soul passport and my red string, the ghost would have been able to bypass Father’s spell.

  “It was a clever plan,” he said slowly. “Why didn’t it work?”

  “I fought the ghost, Father. I defeated it.”

  A smug look crossed his features. “You did well,” he said.

  I flushed and looked down. “No better than my training,” I said, and nodded. “But why did you send me the spirit of your eye?”

  My father grimaced. “I had no choice. How would it look if Liu Qiang came into my own temple, trapped my daughter in the world of spirits, and I failed to retrieve her? A Daoshi of the Seventh bested by a Daoshi of the Fifth, and a weakling at that. I could not lose so much face.”

  Face. I should have known. For some men, face mattered more than friendship, more than money, more than love. More than an eye, and certainly more than a daughter.

  The irony of maiming his face to save face probably hadn’t occurred to him.

  “You will destroy it, of course,” he said.

  I froze in place. I stared at him. My mind spun, and I felt sick. “What did you say?” I asked.

  “The monster. I can’t have the spirit of my eye running free around Chinatown. It would bring shame upon my ancestors. You will destroy it.”

  I stared at my father, saying nothing. He wanted me to exorcise Mr. Yanqiu, who rescued me when I was trapped in the world of spirits. The little monster was a friend, and the thought of killing him made me feel ill. Old wounds, old losses, came to mind, my mother’s death and my husband’s. I had already known too much grief, and the thought of killing Mr. Yanqiu made me want to stop living.

  And yet Father was right. My feelings of friendship toward the spirit of his eye gave me no right to afflict Chinatown with one more freak of spirit, especially when the spirit was so intimately connected to Father.

  Father had given his eye for me. If I left that eye alive, a walking, talking abomination, it would violate everything my father stood for.

  “You will destroy it,” he repeated.

  I felt flimsy, as though made of paper burning slowly to ashes and smoke. There was a hollow space inside of me, and I felt distant, a ghost of myself, as I said the words. “Yes, Father. I will.”

  “Come,” he said, and rose to a sitting position on his cot. “Let us walk to my temple.”

  “Father,” I said. I wanted to urge him to lie back down, to rest, but I had no authority over him, and it would be disrespectful even to suggest he might be making a mistake.

  He barreled down the stairs, clucking at Dr. Wei’s admonitions to go back to the cot and rest. Mrs. Wei merely glared at us. I shrugged.

  We left Dr. Wei’s infirmary. Father had regained his customary stride, agile and proud. “It was a clever plan,” he said again. “Too clever to be the work
of Liu Qiang alone. He’s a fool, Li-lin. Someone else must be advising him.”

  I nodded agreement. If what Father said about Liu Qiang was true, then someone else must have devised the plan.

  Father was in charge now, as he should be, making the decisions, and yet I was worried. I needed to confront Liu Qiang and avenge myself for what he’d done. But Father was in charge. This was his battle, and he might not need my help. If he wouldn’t let me help him against Liu Qiang, if he shut me out, I would never have an opportunity to avenge myself. I couldn’t bear the thought of that.

  Mr. Yanqiu was sitting on a step in front of a grocer’s shop. “Li-lin!” he called, but I ignored him. I was going to destroy him, but I had no wish to cause him pain. It would take time to find a way to do that.

  “Li-lin!” he called out. “Watch out for the dog!”

  I turned to see what he was talking about. I heard a snarl before I saw it. A huge black dog was running down the brick street. Smoke rose from its nostrils, and its lips had curled back to show teeth made for ripping meat to shreds. A jaundice-yellow foam on its tongue indicated madness. It had no eyes. Behind its empty eye sockets, a white fire roared.

  Raging, enormous, and on fire from within, hundreds of pounds of insane spirit dog came charging at us.

  11

  I yelled, “Look out!” but it was too late. The dog struck my father’s back like a giant fist. The impact knocked him toppling into me and we fell together to the bricks. My elbow hit the ground hard, and it felt like a hundred icy needles jabbed into my arm. Then Father cried out, and I heard the sound of teeth rending flesh.

  Pinned under their weight, I couldn’t reach my weapons. I was winded, and my elbow was bleeding from the place where it hit the bricks. Then my father’s weight was lifted off of me all at once.

  The hound yanked Father backward, and he half-dangled from its mouth. It shook him back and forth. It was trying to break Father’s neck.

  Panic shot through me. I pushed myself up from the ground and drew my peachwood sword. Father was unarmed. He flailed his arms behind him uselessly.