Five Odd Honors (42 page)

Besides,
she thought, looking at the two candle lanterns,
I don’t have any matches, and I can’t see in the dark.

Deciding to check her theory about the extent of the caverns, Brenda walked upslope to the top of the nearest hill. In the distance was something that might be the shadow of the forest, tucked down in a dell, but she couldn’t be certain.

She located the sun overhead. Mining some vague Girl Scout memory, she stuck a twig in the ground and examined the shadow it cast. There wasn’t much of one.

“Okay,” Brenda muttered to herself. “About noon. When the shadow gets longer, I’ll have an idea which direction is west. I’m not sure what good knowing the directions will do, but it’s something.”

Continuing her hike, Brenda soon discovered that she was surrounded by gently undulating hills covered in green grass and ornamented by the occasional tree or copse of trees. No nearby stand of trees seemed extensive enough to be the forest Parnell had walked her through, and there were no wide rivers.

She decided to return and check where “her” spring might lead. Once it overflowed the shallow basin into which it trickled, the spring became a narrow stream for maybe fifty feet before spreading into a pool just about as big as a bathtub. The pool had a rocky bottom, but it didn’t overflow, so Brenda guessed that the bottom must be just porous enough to leak down into the caverns below.

Brenda sat down by the pool to rest. Surreptitiously, she glanced around, hoping to see someone—even Prickles or Sluggy—whom she might ask for help.

She’d seen some animals—squirrels that dashed up the trunks of trees, rabbits that flashed cotton tails and rocketed off at her approach, a field mouse that scampered by with bulging cheeks.

There were many birds, from a hawk or eagle that was hardly more than a dark speck against the brilliant blue of the sky to hosts of songbirds who only quieted when she came right up to their perches. A couple of times Brenda startled mourning doves or some such bird from where they’d been resting on the ground.

They sprang skyward in a flurry of wings, trilling mild protest.

But, although she looked, Brenda didn’t see any of the local residents, not even Wasp. A few times she thought she heard giggling and whispers.

Of course,
Brenda thought,
I haven’t exactly asked for help, have I? And they didn’t

hide themselves when Parnell and I were walking through. They didn’t exactly come out and beg for an introduction, but I saw a lot of them. Damn!

She considered a while longer, fragments of almost forgotten fairy tales and more recently seen movies flickering through her mind.

“Goblin King . . .”

“I am Zorro!”

“Once upon a midnight dreary . . .”

“There once was a king who had three sons . . .”

“And the cat said . . .”

“With eyes as big as saucers . . .”

“Three wishes, no more . . .”

“I am Arthur, King of the Britons . . .”

One thing was certain, if nothing else was, no one in fairy tales or real life got anywhere lying around, waiting for someone to offer help. Even the stupid son in the fairy tales got on his feet and walked into the dark wood.

Besides, she was getting hungry, and those same fairy tales kept reminding her of the consequences of eating fairy food.

“Really,” Brenda said aloud, mostly because she was tired of hearing nothing other than bird song and the bright plashing of the stream. “Really, the Chinese tradition of greeting someone with the offer of a meal seems very civilized. A cheeseburger—even a bacon cheeseburger and fries—doesn’t last too long when you’ve been hiking.”

She found herself wondering about other necessities of life. So far she hadn’t needed to pee or worse, but what would she do when the need arose? Here, where people walked in and out of trees—or maybe empty air . . . She squinched her eyes shut, embarrassed at the images that arose.

“Well! I’m just going to have to figure out how to get back, that’s it.”

Brenda remembered several stories, including a movie she’d really liked, that centered around someone struggling to get something that they could have had for the asking.

“I would like,” she said to the nearest moving thing, a robin, who paused in its grubbing in the soil near the base of a tree to turn a bright eye on her, “to go home, please. I wish you would direct me to the nearest route. Please.”

The robin looked at her, then went back to grubbing for bugs.

Well,
Brenda thought.
If there was an answer there, it was “Dig up your own bugs, lady.” Or find your own door. Okay. I didn’t really think it would be that easy. Now, should I ask someone specif c to help? Wasp was here earlier, and I thought I might have seen Oak Gall. Prickles is actually pretty nice. If he’s around . . .

Brenda considered, then shook her head. No, if this was something someone else could do for her, then why would the sidhe folk need her? Why would she need to prove anything to them?

What did she know that might get her home? A little bit of the Orphans’ magic? Brenda was still wearing her usual pair of amulet bracelets, but neither Dragon’s Tail nor Dragon’s Breath seemed particularly useful in her present situation.

Still, Brenda felt heartened, as if finally she was on the right track. What else did she know?

She was the heir to the Rat. The Rat’s direction was north. Its color was black. Its element was water. She’d turned into a rat twice, but the first time had seemed more or less like a dream. The second time she’d had help—and had been in the afterlife, which didn’t quite abide by the usual rules.

But,
Brenda thought with a breath-catching flash of excitement,
this place doesn’t either. Parnell and Leaf both mentioned that the sidhe lands are more like the guardian domains—places that exist because they’re between other places that define them. What I know might work more easily here than if I were to try it back at Pearl’s.

A plan began to take shape. She went back to the spring, wondering if she felt more comfortable there because it was her only real landmark and source of refreshment or because the Rat’s element was water.

There was a border of silty sand alongside the little stream. Brenda smoothed a surface on which she could write. The twig she’d used to measure the course of the sun—now definitely westering, but still far from setting—made a good stylus.

Pulling off the Dragon’s Tail bracelet, Brenda studied the characters. The basic Dragon’s Tail called for either a pung (set of three) of dragons or a pung of winds, followed by a run of one through nine in any one suit.

Des Lee had taught them to tailor what tiles they chose to their own sign. Although Brenda was not yet the Rat, that was still the sign he suggested she guide herself by.

Therefore, Brenda’s bracelet had a pung of north winds, followed by a pair of red dragons. She’d suggested green dragons, since those stood for increase and therefore strength, but Des had said since the caster stood in the center of the Dragon’s Tail for protection, the red dragon tile, which bore the character for “Center,” was best. For the same reason, Brenda had made her run of one through nine in the bamboo suit, because bamboo was both strong and flexible.

Brenda drew a few experimental characters, and discovered that damp sand held the images longer and with less distortion than dry. Then she smoothed out her images. Returning the Dragon’s Tail to her wrist, Brenda pulled off the Dragon’s Breath and examined it.

The Dragon’s Breath sequence consisted of one of each dragon tile, the last of which was paired. This was followed by five pairs in any one suit.

For this spell, which sent a blast of hot fire at an opponent, Des had agreed that the green dragon was the most useful, because it increased the heat and intensity of the fire. The suit he’d suggested for the pairs was characters, because what the elaborate Chinese ideograms actually stood for were the numbers one through nine, followed by the word “wan,” or “ten thousand.”

In the Chinese tradition, ten thousand wasn’t just a specif c number; it had dual symbolic associations. The first was with scorpions, because some Chinese lore held that these always appeared in huge hosts. The other association was with the idea of vastness. In fact, some older books translated “wan” as “myriads,” rather than as a specif c number.

“Rather,” Nissa had said, “the way kids say ‘lots and lots’ or ‘billions and zillions.’ ”

Between the two bracelets, then, Brenda had samples of many of the basic mah-jong tiles. She was missing the dots suit, but that one was the easiest to remember. And she didn’t have the other three winds, but she was pretty sure she could do the west wind character without messing it up.

“Note to self,” she said aloud, feeling more cheerful, “make a bracelet that, even if it won’t do a spell, will show the range of characters. And practice more!”

She considered what sequences she had memorized and wrote them in the sand so she wouldn’t get befuddled and forget. “All Green,” which let one see magical workings, was one she’d worked hard to commit to memory. Then there was “Knitting,” which let you share ch’i with another person.

“And only with someone you trust,” Brenda reminded herself.

There were several simple wind spells, mostly good for minor defense or pushing something relatively lightweight out of the way. Still, Brenda made note of them.

Then she paused, reaching deep into herself to see if she remembered a spell that might be her way out of here, one she was afraid she wouldn’t remember because she’d only had to do it from memory once—and that time she’d only had to work part of it.

Nine Gates.

To Brenda’s relief, memory did not fail her. The sequence called for three ones and three nines in a suit, then one of each tile in a chosen suit. The fourteenth tile was chosen so that it would designate which of the nine gates was being created.

Brenda drummed fingertips against her lower lip, considering her options. She didn’t need nine gates—at least she dearly hoped she didn’t. She just needed one: one to take her back to USC. Come to think of it, she wasn’t sure she could summon sufficient ch’i to make nine gates in succession.

Okay, Brenda Morris,
she said to herself.
There’s got to be a way you can do this. Parnell’s played fair with you to this point. Trust that fair play, even though you’re pissed at him for stranding you.

Something was nibbling at the edges of her mind, something about—She had it!

When they’d made the Nine Gates, only one had been needed to take them into the first of the guardian domains. The remainder been necessary because of the odd nature of Chinese cosmography.

“And the guardian domains,” Brenda said, speaking aloud in her excitement, “and this land under the hills have something in common. Both of them are border lands, lands that owe something of their nature to other places. Because of that shared nature, I shouldn’t need more than one gate to get me home, any more than we needed more than one gate to get us into Pai Hu’s realm.”

Brenda brushed a fresh section of sand smooth and started sketching possible combinations, using arabic numbers and familiar letters rather than the Chinese because they were faster for her.

If she was going to use a variant of the Nine Gates sequence, then her first decision needed to be which suit: bamboo, characters, or dots. Automatically, Brenda shied from using characters because she hated drawing the more elaborate numbers, but something made her go back and reconsider. What was it?

The response came so instantly Brenda knew characters was the right suit to use. Characters were written words—the words for one through nine followed by the word for ten thousand. That the words and numbers were in Chinese didn’t change anything. She needed words to get back because USC was a place she went to school, a place, so to speak, of “letters.”

“Okay. I’ve got my suit. Now, what number is best?”

That was easy. One, because this would be her first and only gate.

When they’d made the first of the Nine Gates, they’d inscribed the various symbols on an unfinished pine door Des and Riprap had picked up at a hardware store. Certainly there was nothing like that here.

“But I don’t need a door,” Brenda said, mostly to encourage herself. “We were making a permanent gate. This one only needs to get me home. In fact . . .”

She considered. The last thing she wanted to do was create a permanent gate between the sidhe’s realm and USC. College students saw enough weird stuff without her help.

She was not only going to need to make a gate. She was going to need to figure out how to destroy it as she was using it.

“Fun, fun, and more fun,” Brenda muttered.

But she didn’t mind. Ideas were flowing fast and furious. For the first time, Brenda intuitively understood the appeal of the abacus the Exile Rat had created to assist him the way Thundering Heaven had created the sword Treaty, or the Rooster had made those nasty Talons Des was so good at using.

Calculation was fun, filled with a thrill that set her blood buzzing in her veins and her thoughts quite literally racing each other to see which would be articulated first.