Heart and Soul (41 page)

The fingers started downward, carrying her, and she sniffled, sure that he was going to deposit her on the cold floor of the cavern and let the others capture her, but she would be cursed if she would cry or beg for mercy. She’d run as far as she could and she’d done all she could do. If she failed now, let her fail with dignity.

As soon as her feet touched the ground, and the gigantic fingers let go of her, she scurried back to the cart, to sit beside her husband. Wen held her hand in both of his. “It doesn’t matter what they do to us, so long as we are together.”

She nodded at him, and smiled with tight lips, and tried to look brave. “I am sorry, milord,” she said. “I have been a wretched wife to you.”

“No,” he said. “No, you have not. And if these lords of Feng Du are going to judge you only because of what you were born to be and not of what you are, then I must mock their purported justice and question the laws they uphold.” He said it defiantly, with an upward tilt of his jaw, and a glare upward at Judge Bao.

“Silence,” Judge Bao thundered. “Do not presume to know what my verdict is before I give it. Do not cast aspersions on the wisdom of this court before you’ve experienced it.”

He bent down again, till his face was level with their cart and he was looking at them both quite close. When he spoke, his breath was like a strong wind. “A fox-spirit who thinks only of cunning and betrayal and power is terrifying enough. But a fox-spirit who truly loves must be the most dangerous thing in all the universes. Just look at what you’ve done!” A finger the size of Wen’s thigh pointed at Third Lady. “You’ve not only broken into Feng Du, but you’ve completely disrupted the first five levels, bringing them all into contact, and causing yourself to be pursued by the most ridiculous retinue that has ever followed anyone in these regions.” He gestured scathingly toward the demons, then looked up and Third Lady could swear his lips twitched. “And you’ve upset my colleague Yen.”

“We didn’t mean to do any of these things,” Third Lady said, her voice tight with fear and fury. “We only—”

“Yes, I know. You only came to ransom your husband’s soul. And if we don’t give in to your demand that I hear your case, who knows what more havoc you’ll wreak. One thing is for sure, and that is that you will not allow peace to anyone in this realm until you’ve had your way.”

He clapped his hands. From out of nowhere a troop of attendants emerged, carrying a porcelain stool, which they set down. He sat upon it, and rested his hands on his knees.

“Speak, Third Lady of Wen, True Emperor of All Under Heaven. I am ready to hear your case.”

THE PILL OF A THOUSAND EFFICACIES

They’d gotten out of Shameen Island easily enough,
Jade thought. It had taken little more than a spell that lasted a few minutes. It had demanded her brazen lies that she was a Chinese employee of the carpetship line, and that she must go back to Guangzhou to visit her ailing father. She said her husband was coming with her, and Nigel had sat there, enveloped in a cloak, actively casting a
do not look at me
magical suggestion.

They’d taken a boat across to Guangzhou and then, early that morning, Jade had taken Nigel to a place she’d only heard about from people who’d been to Guangzhou and back. Most who visited Guangzhou used chairs carried by sweating, half-naked coolies. This was by far the cheapest form of transportation, at least if one preferred not to go about on foot. But like going about on foot, being transported in a chair by humans was not an option that Jade wanted to indulge. Because, like it or not, cloaked or not—and after a while coolies would wonder why Nigel remained cloaked—she and Nigel would need to speak to each other. And because Nigel could not speak Chinese, they would have to—perforce—speak English.

She did not need the whole scheme exposed and the foreign devil in their midst revealed suddenly in the midst of a Chinese street, when she could not change shapes, and when the natives might have been encouraged by hostile forces—she hated to say that her experiences in Hong Kong had made her fear practically everyone, but they had—to think that Nigel was among them for nefarious purposes. So she resorted to a place that she had heard described, which rented ceramic horses, attached to little ceramic carts.

On the way there, she had explained the concept to Nigel, who seemed fascinated. “It is said,” she told him, “that they were animated long ago. Warriors and horses fashioned out of clay used to be buried with emperors, you know, with a spell that said they should come alive in times of need. It could be that these horses were once part of some tomb’s treasure trove of guardians. Once animated,” she’d said, smiling at the idea, “it is possible that they simply could not be put back to sleep. And that someone found a way to convert their magics to good use. On the other hand…” She’d stopped and sighed. “My father used to say that, under our dynasty, people had more access to magic. That we…channeled it?—conducted it?—between China and the people, so more common people were born with magic, and like common people with magic in Europe now, they used spells and magic to make their lives easier.”

Nigel had sighed and given her an odd look, half-sad and half-amused. From the depths of his cloak, his odd, pale eyes shone with amusement, while his lips twisted in something like, but not quite, sadness. “The funny thing, my dear Lady Jade,” he said, “is that not many months ago, I would have believed that people wanting to use their magic to make everyday life easier were the cause of all our problems.”

Jade had given him an appraising look. She didn’t like admitting, even to herself, that his odd eyes were looking less odd, and that she liked the way he talked about things—magic and power and what people should do with both—which no one had ever truly discussed with her. No, make that he talked to her as if she were another human being, possessed of just as good a brain as his own. Her mother had talked to her like that, and her father. Wen…Well, Wen was something else again, as he’d leaned on her—relied on her—to carry him through. So he’d not viewed her as an equal but as a superior. Or perhaps as a crutch, to help him get through his confused and maimed life.

The thought of Wen made her flinch, then look at Nigel again. He was competent. He appeared to be competent. He’d been all over the world without her. Surely he didn’t need her. And he treated her as an equal, something her mother had told her was very rare, even in England. “Why would people using their own power to—” She stopped. “Oh.”

“Oh?” he said.

“I just realized it would be like the usurpers…all the dynasties since my family. They don’t want the people to have magical power, because people with magical power can also use it against their rulers.”

Nigel smiled a little from the depths of the cowl. “I didn’t realize that,” he said. “I thought just rulers would be exempt from that temptation.”

“I hope Wen will be,” she said, and meant it. “But I would not wager on it. You see, even the best rulers sometimes feel that they know better than the farmer how to plant rice.”

“Yes, I have come to believe that,” Nigel said. “We’ll have to hope Wen is better when he gets the throne.”

Thus talking, companionably, they’d gotten into the streets of downtown Guangzhou, and there they had stopped talking. Nigel had given her the money to rent the horse that he insisted on calling the flowerpot horse.

“You see,” she’d said, “that way we can talk and the horse won’t know that we’re not speaking Chinese. And in a carriage, with the curtains half-drawn, no one will know that you’re not Chinese or find the cloak and cowl remarkable.”

And so she rented the flowerpot horse, and the tiny carriage that, truth be told, looked rather like a chaise with side curtains. Jade held the reins and controlled the horse, which she’d been told was—and seemed to be—just like flesh horses when it came to obeying commands.

It went when she shouted “Go,” and responded to the reins from then on, as she drove it through narrow streets that would be quite inadequate for a normalsized carriage, much less to those carriages she’d read about and seen engravings of in her mother’s book.

As it was, on the little hard bench of the ceramic carriage, she sat rather close to Nigel, feeling the heat of his body through their clothes. It made her wish…not so much to be closer to him as for a different life altogether. One in which she was the product of a normal English marriage, having been born to her mother, perhaps, and her mother’s long-lost fiancé.

But even if she had been the product of such a marriage, she didn’t flatter herself that her life would have had fewer restrictions than her life in China. In fact, it might very well have had more, since, due to her father’s indulgence and her brother’s incapacitation, she’d been allowed to do things in China that she suspected women weren’t allowed to do
anywhere
in the world.

But if she’d been born in England, and brought up as an English miss, then she might have married a man like Nigel Oldhall, who would understand her, and treat her as an equal.

And as a bitter voice of mockery rose within, telling her she might still find a man like Nigel Oldhall in China, once her brother’s domain was more than mystical and magical, she almost sighed, because she realized she didn’t want a man
like
Nigel Oldhall. She was very much afraid she wanted Nigel Oldhall, the man who had faced down Zhang with the saber, the man who had fought Zhang—in his dragon form—while wielding only a cane. The man who had killed a were-tiger with a yardstick. And who, despite all that, sat next to her, deferential and friendly—not attempting to impress her with his heroic status.

Modest, Jade thought, a quality that was as rare among Englishmen as Chinesemen and, in fact, might be a rarity among all men. She felt her face heat, and couldn’t go on with this line of thought. Because to go on would be to admit that she had some interest in this foreign devil. She thought of what her sister-in-law would say. And her brother.

She cleared her throat and started, in her best professorial voice, “Guangzhou is a very interesting city. You know the name means
city of rams
?”

“No,” he said. “Is it because of some old cult in this region?”

This surprised her, because she, herself, hadn’t thought of that, and she shrugged. “It is said that the city was founded by five fairies, wearing coats of many colors, who came through the air riding on five rams. That is why we call it City of Rams.”

He looked at her, suddenly curious. “Are your fairies real? Because ours might be. In fact, the appearances of fairies, and stories of them, and of battles with them, stopped about the time that Charlemagne used the ruby to concentrate and steal all the power from Europe. What that means,” he added, “I don’t know. It might be that in stealing the power, he stole the very lives of fairies and elves, who might have been creatures made of magic. But it’s also possible that, somehow, they…went elsewhere. Or always lived between the worlds. And that we simply lost our ability to see them and communicate with them.”

She nodded. “Yes. That is more likely. In China,
fairy
is used not just for beings of the spirit, but also for shape-changers. In fact, were-foxes are often called fox-fairies or fox-spirits. I’ve always wondered if these people who came and founded the city were were-goats. All the more so because the secret of the flying boats has always been a tradition of my people, and controlled by all weres through the power of the True Emperor. Because otherwise,” she frowned a little, “I don’t understand why rams should fly. Unless they were vassals of the were-emperor and could therefore fly…on boats. Nor do I understand why anyone would expect them to.”