Heart and Soul (40 page)

But now they were a day out from Hong Kong, and she’d sat in her cabin thinking things over and had come to several interesting conclusions. First, however shady Corridon’s intentions might be, he did not intend to attempt against her honor. Had he thought to do so, he would have shared a cabin with her. So, on that front she was safe.

Second, Corridon might be threatening her parents—or at least trying to discover if her parents were involved in a conspiracy that might threaten their liberty and their life—but he was, if not in love with Hettie, at least attracted to her. She could not avoid noticing in his eyes the sort of soft adoring look that her mother called mooning over someone, or calf love.

And while she didn’t know how true that affection was, or how lasting, she was not above considering it useful and flattering, as well as something to be used against him if at all possible.

The carpetship he’d got them to board, called
Orient’s Pride,
was not one of the great luxury carpetships, but neither was it shabby. In fact, it looked very much like the carpetship she’d taken with Papa when they’d gone to London so many years ago. This reassuring familiarity had kept Hettie feeling secure and happy in her small cabin in first—but not luxury—class. She had a room with pale cream walls, a small but comfortable bed, a desk and a small dresser. All of it fastened to the wall or the floor, to prevent its moving about in a storm. Right then, she was sitting on the bed, with her legs folded under her, holding Mrs. Beddlington in her arms and trying to think through her next step.

She didn’t believe that Captain Corridon had any idea that she could use glamoury—at least for a limited period of time—to make people believe anything she said. It was a rare enough gift, in fact, that it rarely manifested. But she could use it…She stared unseeingly at the print of a volcano with a plume of smoke rising from it, which was hung over the desk.

After a while, she rose and set Mrs. Beddlington down in her suitcase, which she fastened. Then she walked out the door, looking among her fellow passengers for some who would meet all her criteria. They must be middle-aged, she thought. And of the sort that might have children her age. And they must be kindly.

She eavesdropped shamelessly on the conversations of strangers, until she fastened on a likely couple—a Mr. and Mrs. William Wood, who lived in Hong Kong and were just returning from leaving their children in London. They’d gone by the Cape to visit Mrs. Wood’s brother, which was how they came to be aboard this ship. Their daughter was Hettie’s age and had been left with an aunt who was supposed to launch her into British society. They sounded like they already missed her.

Hettie approached them, appearing as innocent and scared as she could, and projected her glamoury at them. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You look so kindly. If you’d listen to me…”

She hesitated, staring at the two. Her glamoury or their kindness took effect. They looked at her, and Mrs. Wood clicked her tongue. “Of course, my dear. What is the trouble?”

And Hettie, who had truly not told nearly enough lies in her life, poured into the Woods’ unsuspecting ears a story of woe and adventure to chill the blood.

PAPER AND CLAY

“We must see Judge Bao,” Third Lady said, desperately
. “Of the Office of Speedy Retribution.” She knelt and kowtowed toward the great personage whom she assumed was Yen-Lo-Wang. “That is all we want.”

No one listened to her. The paper creatures, considerably the worse for wear, grabbed at her and Wen. “They are living intruders in Feng Du,” they explained, as if this justified anything at all.

“They’re in the pay of the Monkey King,” Yen-Lo-Wang thundered. Knives clattered and tentacles waved. “I heard there’s another monkey loose in Feng Du, and who else would bring it?”

Third Lady could imagine them dragged off to the fate these creatures considered appropriate. She’d meddled in the lives of others—notably in the life of her husband—so she assumed it would be the Pool of Filth for her. And as for Wen, she thought he would end up in the Hell of Addicts. “We are not in the pay of the Monkey King,” she said, in a shrill, hysterical voice that shocked even her.

“All we want is my soul,” Wen said, “which is being unjustly held for judgment in frivolous lawsuits.”

“Which is why we want to see Judge Bao.”

The paper creatures were pulling them up. The other demons moved forward. And Third Lady, gone beyond her despair, thought of what Nu had told her. She’d told her to use her fox powers, but she didn’t think she could seduce the demons that would operate here. Or if she could, it was more than she wanted to know. No. Here, she thought, she would have to use the thing Yu had told her. That she could call the other creatures of paper that she’d sent ahead of her by flame. And that they would appear if she demanded them. “By the power of fire,” she said, “and the power of will and the power of tradition, I demand the guards and attendants, the horses and the cart, the cash and the silk that I burned before coming here!”

Instantly, out of nowhere, they were surrounded by a court of paper creatures—fifteen ladies and fifteen gentlemen, pushing the paper guards and the demons away, and ignoring the illustrious Yen-Lo-Wang, who glared at them.

They pushed to open a path between Wen and Third Lady and the waiting cart with its very good-looking horses. The cart was piled high with cash and nine-colored silk. Third Lady jumped on the seat and took the reins. Wen, looking somewhat dazed, climbed up by her side.

She looked around at their attendants, which had formed a guard on either side of them, and said, “Take us to Judge Bao, in the Office of Speedy Retribution.”

The horses started forward, quickly speeding to a canter, and the attendants followed. And though they were all paper, there was the sound of hooves, and the sound of human footsteps. Behind them followed the other paper creatures, the demons and a very outraged Yen-Lo-Wang, who kept repeating, “They are in the pay of the Monkey King.”

They were almost wholly through the sixth hell, when a voice sounded, echoing from every recess of the cavernous depths. “Who disrupts the sixth hell?” it said. “What is the meaning of this?”

In front of them, larger and more ominous than Yen-Lo-Wang, there materialized a creature that took up all the space between cave ceiling and floor. He was a well, if somberly dressed gentleman, with severe, almost ascetic features. He stood in front of them, arms crossed, each of his massive legs as large as all of their bodies put together, each of his feet the size of the cart. “Well?” he said. “I asked a question. What is the meaning of this? And what do you want of me? And why do you disrupt the calm functioning of my sixth hell?”

Terrified, feeling as though her blood had turned to ice in her veins, Third Lady jumped down from the cart. She knelt so that she was very close to the giant foot of the giant creature, and she kowtowed repeatedly. “Judge Bao. We’ve come in search of you.”

The judge stooped. It took a lot of stooping to get from his height to where Third Lady knelt. Then, with an infinitely delicate touch, he put thumb and finger on either side of her waist, and slowly lifted her up.

From behind her, she heard Wen say, “No!” and she said, “It’s fine, milord, it’s fine,” in desperate accents, even as she felt the terror of being raised past the being’s jacket, with all its shiny ribbons, and up to the face, which looked unnaturally large. This close, every pore was exaggerated, each of the nostrils a cavern—and the huge, black, rolling eyes were like two deep pools.

She tried to hold very still and not show her fear. She didn’t know if Judge Bao would act like mortal judges and assume that nervousness meant guilt, but neither did she want to trust that he wouldn’t. She looked him in the face and, constrained by his fingers around her waist—the only thing keeping her from a precipitous fall to the hard floor below—she bowed. “Judge Bao, my husband’s soul has been held in hell for many years, tethered to his body and his spirit by only the slightest of bonds. Because of his lack of a soul, he has fallen a victim to opium addiction. Because of his lack of a soul, he’s been fading more and more from life and into the sort of half death that happens in such situations. I know you are the functionary who remedies administrative errors and who repairs gross injustice, and I beg you to correct this injustice and give his soul back to my husband, Wen, the True Dragon Emperor, Ruler of All Under Heaven.”

The huge black eye nearest her, so close she could touch it if she extended her hand, surveyed her dispassionately. Then the judge snorted, which she presumed wasn’t a hopeful sign.

“You are a fox-spirit,” he said. “What is your trick? What deception are you running?”

Third Lady almost rolled her eyes, but she remembered she was in the presence of a supernatural creature who, in fact, had power over her and Wen. It was bad enough to endure this sort of nonsense from humans on Earth, but must she also find it from judges and rulers in the afterworld?

She crossed her arms on her chest and tried to glare back, something made only slightly more difficult by the fact that, this close, she couldn’t see both of the judge’s eyes at the same time, much less glare at him properly. “I might be a fox-spirit,” she said, “but I am running no deception. I am the Third Lady of Wen, True Dragon Emperor, Real Ruler of All Under Heaven. I was chosen for him because my heart was knit with his. I wouldn’t be here were it not for my hope of rescuing him.”

“It is not the first time,” Yen-Lo-Wang said, “that the fox-spirits have tried to attain the throne. We all remember the legend of Queen Eterna, do we not?”

“I don’t care if Wen repudiates me when he reaches the throne,” Third Lady said. “Do you wish me to promise that I’ll be sent back to my father’s house, as soon as we return to the world of the living?”

Wen shouted, “No,” from below, but no one seemed to listen to him.

The black eye closest to Third Lady blinked. “Do you know what we do to fox-spirits down here?”

“No,” Third Lady said. She gritted her teeth and expected at any minute to be tossed into the Pool of Filth or worse. She’d come so far and worked so hard. She’d wanted to see Judge Bao. She’d been so sure that he would be just and understand that Wen’s soul must be returned to him.

At the very least, she’d hoped to be given a hearing, able to present her case, to make everyone understand the great injustice that had been done to her husband and how it must be corrected. Instead, she met with this suspicion and conviction that no feeling a were-fox ever had could be authentic.

“We send them back,” Judge Bao said. “We don’t examine them, we don’t sentence them, we don’t do anything at all but send them back into the world. So cunning is your kind, and so disruptive to the normal laws of conduct—and so unable to judge its own sins—that you defeat Feng Du itself, and we must send you back, or suffer the same fate that my colleague Yen suffered at the hands of the Monkey King.”

Third Lady felt tears prickle behind her eyes. “I’m not disruptive, and I’m not immoral, and I’m not trying to be cunning. All I want is a hearing for my husband. All I want is the chance to prove that his soul is wrongly held in a frivolous lawsuit. Surely you can’t tell me that is an immoral purpose, for a wife to fight for her husband’s life and health.”

The eye regarded her steadily and, goaded beyond endurance, she added, “I didn’t want to come to Feng Du either, and you don’t need to think that I wished to. I only came because Wen needed help and because no one else cared, and I wasn’t willing to let things go the way they had been until he died of it. I came because I am Wen’s wife, and it is my duty.”