The Eleventh Tiger (2 page)

‘What about there?’ Li asked. ‘There must be a cave, or something.’

Cheng considered the hill. It wasn’t large enough to be a mountain, but it was a good enough size to have a cave or two in which they could hide. ‘All right. Li, you tie the horses under cover. We’ll look for more shelter.’

It didn’t take long for Cheng to find a low cave halfway up the hill. It was wide, but they’d have to bend almost double to get inside it. That didn’t bother Cheng too much; the ceiling would be at a comfortable enough height when he and his friends were sitting around a fire or sleeping on a dry floor.

Pang worked his magic with flint, tinder and a dry tree branch. In moments, the torch was handed to Cheng and he crawled into the cave. There was no sign of animal tracks on the dry earthen floor, and certainly no sign of people, but this didn’t mean there were no hidden dangers. Cheng thrust the torch out in front of him, pushing it into every nook and cranny to check for snakes - which were only too happy to reside in such places.

Once he was satisfied that the cave was safe he called the others inside. The horses would have to shelter under the trees, which were already beginning to sway in the wind. So long as lightning didn’t hit one that was close to a horse, the animals should be safe enough. Just to be on the safe side, Cheng brought his saddle pouch into the cave with him. The other men did likewise, none of them willing to risk losing any of the loot they had gained that morning.

Cheng watched with a smile as the lads stored their stolen goods and weapons in a natural alcove as far from the cave entrance as possible. Some of them then set to skinning rabbits, while Pang built a proper fire over which they could cook meat, and which would keep them warm while they slept.

Outside, the rain had started and the trees were thrashing around as if under the guiding hands of lion dancers. Inside, the smell of wood smoke and roasting meat and spices failed to mask the smell of dusty, unwashed clothes and bodies.

Cheng grinned to himself thinking of how he would buy fine silks with his share of the loot, and girls to wash and pamper him. He found himself a slope of earth against the cave wall and settled down to wait out the storm. The earth would be more comfortable than rock against his back.

The low murmur of his companions’ chat faded as he began to doze off. He could almost see nubile bath attendants waiting to greet him as he started to dream.

Suddenly, the earth supporting his back crumbled and he fell, his shoulder skipping painfully over stubs of rock. His companions laughed.

‘Shut your damned faces,’ Cheng snapped. He had landed on his side, and pulled himself up into a sitting position.

‘Anyone who thinks...’ He fell silent, realising that he and the earth had fallen through the wall. There was a new and irregular gap, starkly black in the fire-lit wall. ‘What the hell?’

Pang stuck a branch into the fire, then brought it over in his meaty fist and poked it into the opening. ‘It looks like a tunnel. I think there are steps.’

Cheng took the torch and threw it, carefully, as far as it would go. Then he looked in and saw that Pang was right.

Earth and rubble half-filled the rocky passageway. It sloped downwards, and below it steps were carved into the floor. The torch, still alight, was on one of them.

‘What the hell is this place?’ Pang asked.

Cheng wished he had an answer for the big man, but he had grown up the son of a farmer, not a builder. ‘Let’s take a look and see.’

Cheng and his companions looked around in awe, and tried to breathe. The air was musty and ancient, thick with dust that it was easy to believe had come from old bones. Pillars encrusted in the mineral deposits of centuries stretched either up to, or down from, the ceiling - Cheng wasn’t sure which. The encrustations were flaky, and reminded him of windblown leaves sticking to tree trunks. The entire place was a forest of stone.

The bandits, all of whom now carried torches, spread out through the cave. There were no furnishings, and no lost piles of treasure. If Cheng had to guess, he’d say it was probably a meeting place, or perhaps an exercise hall.

‘Follow the walls,’ he said quietly. The acoustics of the cave were such that his words would carry. ‘There must be other chambers somewhere in here.’

The others nodded and spread out. From the way the light of their torches seemed to shrink, Cheng could tell the space was vast.

A movement above him caught Cheng’s eye, and when he looked up the breath caught in his throat. A silver flash like a shooting star was fading between the stone trees, and he could see bright, clear stars.

For a moment he thought the cave must be open to the sky, until he remembered the rainstorm outside and the height of the hill above him. There were indeed stars above him, in the familiar constellations, but they were glinting with reflected light from the bandits’ torches. Hoping they were jewels, Cheng held his own torch as far aloft as he could, and squinted.

The stars were some kind of metal set into the roof of the cave. And it looked like silver. Not silver ore, either, but refined and polished silver, which must surely have been put there deliberately.

‘Pang! Li!’

The two men came running, and the rest of the group, curious, followed them. Cheng pointed upwards. ‘Have you seen this? It looks like silver.’

‘Silver? The gods must be with us tonight!’ Li said cheerfully.

Pang shivered slightly. ‘I don’t know about this.’ The other bandits looked at him. ‘This place, it’s full of ghosts. Can’t you feel them?’

‘No,’ Cheng lied. The place was spooky, but why let that get in the way of earning a living?

‘I can. This place is old, Cheng.’ Pang touched the nearest pillar gently, running his hand along the mineral bark. ‘It feels like something that was here before the rest of the world.’ He hesitated. ‘Why are there no bats in here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe because only ghosts could have lived in something so ancient.’

Nobody laughed at Pang’s tone, or at the idea of ghosts.

‘I’m going back up to keep an eye on the fire. I don’t like this.’ With that, the big man turned back towards the tunnel.

A couple of the other men looked uncertain, then followed Pang’s lead.

‘More for the rest of us,’ Cheng said. He put his hands together as a stirrup for Li. ‘Can you get one of those stars loose?’

Li nodded and put his foot in Cheng’s hands. Cheng hefted him up, and leant back against a pillar. Li lifted his other foot on to Cheng’s shoulder, and drew out a small dagger. When he touched its point to the surface of the star Cheng saw the silver ripple.

Li jerked back and fell on to the ground. He glared at the tip of his dagger. ‘Quicksilver.’ He stood up and looked at the ceiling. ‘But how? Why doesn’t it rain down?’

‘Quicksilver?’ Cheng echoed. That explained the liquid ripple, but Li was right to wonder how it came to be on the ceiling. Cheng didn’t have an explanation for him, and momentarily wondered if Pang might have been right about the ghosts. Then there was another flicker across the artificial starscape; a pale wash of quicksilver, thin enough to be all but transparent, flowed from constellation to constellation. Cheng stopped wondering: Pang was right.

‘Hell’s teeth,’ he whispered. ‘Let’s get out of this cursed -’

A cry and a solid thud from the direction of the tunnel shut him up. Had a ghost...? No, had Pang slipped or had the tunnel caved in? A fallen torch was burning on the floor and, in its light, Cheng could see Pang lying on the ground. Blood matted his hair, but he was still alive, moaning faintly.

There was no sign of the two men who had joined him in his flight. Cheng didn’t need to ask what had happened - a lean young man wearing the robes of a martial monk was already stepping into the cavern. He twirled a staff guardedly, and stepped aside to let in a muscle-bound ox of a monk who was carrying a pair of nunchuks. An older man, undoubtedly their leader, followed them. He was unarmed and Cheng found this slightly worrying. The older monk - an abbot? -

was either relying on the others to protect him, or he was a master. From the way he carried himself, with an air that said he had nothing to prove, Cheng was certain it was the latter.

The abbot stepped forward, casual but alert. ‘Bandits! Give yourselves up now, and I will see that you are not executed.’

Years breaking rocks under the sun and eating rats in a light-less dungeon didn’t seem much of an improvement over death to Cheng. His companions’ attitude was similar, and Cheng could see and hear them drawing their weapons as he pulled a sabre from his belt. ‘You’re outnumbered, monk,’ he said. ‘Leave now and I’ll let you keep the same number of limbs as you had when you came in.’

The abbot didn’t reply. Instead, a flick of his foot sent Pang’s fallen torch spinning towards Cheng’s face. Cheng cut it aside with his sword, but the moving flame had wrecked his night vision and he found himself momentarily blind in the darkness of the cave.

He moved instinctively, dodging behind a pillar he knew was on his left. The cave erupted with the sounds of running feet, steel on steel and wood on flesh. This last sound, he knew, was from that damned staff carried by the lean monk, who could take on several people at once with it - striking with one end to the front then the other behind in the blink of an eye, and then immediately swinging it like a club.

As his eyes readjusted, Cheng thought he’d been tipped into one of the hells. Firelight waved and spun, causing shadows and darkness to tumble, as a couple of the bandits used their torches as weapons and swung them at the monks. He ignored them, and headed for the lean monk with the staff.

As Cheng had feared, he already had two fallen bandits at his feet. Cheng darted forward, but the monk still managed to crack a bandit on the forehead and in the groin with opposite ends of the staff, and swing it up in time to block Cheng’s sabre. The wood was old and hard, and almost as dense as iron. The sabre bit into it a little, but the damned staff didn’t break.

The monk twisted, and Cheng had to let go of his sabre and twist away to avoid being jabbed in the face with the tip of the wood. Then Li appeared between him and the monk, catching the staff in crossed butterfly swords. ‘Thanks,’

Cheng whispered, not wanting to distract Li.

The big monk, who was broader across the shoulders than even the bear-like Pang, was duelling with his nunchuks against those wielded by young Ho-Wei. There was no sign of the abbot, and Cheng hoped against hope that one of his men had put the old bastard down.

He bent to scoop up his sabre, thinking he would help Li to teach the staff-wielder a lesson. As he straightened he saw a blur out of the corner of his eye. Pain exploded through his mind, overloading all his senses before his brain could finish telling him that the blur was an incoming roundhouse kick.

His friends and enemies momentarily danced horizontally out from a wall. Cheng blinked, and realised he was lying on the floor, not leaning against the wall.

He pulled himself to the wall of the cave, dodging instinctively without waiting to see whether or not the monk was lashing out at him again. His vision cleared, and the throbbing in his head became the stirrings of rage.

It was the abbot, of course. Cheng twisted and rolled to his feet, lashing out with his fists. He had no idea where his sabre had landed. The abbot slid aside without any visible effort, letting all Cheng’s punches and kicks connect only with thin air. Then a flick of his wrist tapped Cheng’s ear with what felt like the impact of a horse’s hoof.

This time Cheng stayed down, his arms and legs refusing his aching brain’s order to lift him up. From where he lay he could see Li finally take a blow to the back of his knees and crumple. He couldn’t see Ho-Wei or anyone else, but he didn’t hear any more sounds of fighting. One way or the other, the fight was over.

A tremendous weight sank into the small of Cheng’s back, and the abbot grabbed his hands and pulled them behind him. ‘You should have listened,’ he told him. Cheng felt taut rope against his wrists. He tried to struggle free, but only succeeded in scraping his skin painfully against the rough bindings the abbot was putting on him.

He could see the lean monk tying Li’s wrists. Cheng raged inwardly - he and Li were being made ready to be taken, like pigs to the butcher - but he was held too tightly to break free and give the abbot the kicking he deserved. ‘These men are good companions, not animals to be slaughtered,’ he snarled into the floor. ‘If you think differently, then it’s you who deserve to be executed.’ The abbot didn’t bother to reply.

Maybe it was the blows he’d taken to his head, but Cheng thought he saw the false stars in the ceiling glow brighter for a moment, and the strange ripple of light pass more strongly overhead. The monk binding Li’s wrists must have noticed this because he froze in the middle of his knot-tying.

Hoping that his own captor was similarly distracted, Cheng twisted against his grip and was suddenly free of it. His hands were solidly tied behind his back, but his legs were still unbound and he used them to roll aside. The abbot didn’t seem to notice but, after a moment, he straightened and started to turn away.