The Girl with Ghost Eyes (27 page)

The seagulls collapsed as one. They fell in a hush of crushed air and I fell with them.

The sound stopped. Dropping in silence, my ears ringing, I felt anger come over me. The Kulou-Yuanling wasn’t the hundred men who died. It was a violation of those men.

By some insanity, some surge of willpower, some snarling rage, I lunged forward just in time to grab hold of the Kulou-Yuanling’s lowest rib.

27

Liu Qiang’s eyes were wide as he watched me cling to the giant skeleton’s rib. The three-eyed snake spirit that had replaced his arm looked at me with the excited curiosity of boys who torture animals, and Liu Qiang began to chant an incantation.

I yanked myself up to a crouching position on the Kulou-Yuanling’s lowest rib. The ghosts I had freed were flying in and around the monster’s bones, confusing it. Liu Qiang shaped his fingers into magic shoujue. It was the single-handed seal of the Left Thunder Block, aggressive magic. He uttered a few words and launched his spell at me.

Whatever spell he cast, it didn’t matter. Fast as lightning I drew my peachwood sword and cut the spell in half. I smiled as the spell’s energies began to dissipate around me.

Liu Qiang looked frustrated. He began to chant. It would take him at least few more seconds. Holding my peachwood sword in my teeth, I jumped up and grabbed onto the next rib up. I pulled myself to crouching and made an obscene gesture in Liu Qiang’s direction. At the top of the Kulou-Yuanling’s ribs I would climb its spine into its skull, and inside there, I would try to find a way to extinguish the spirit fires behind its eyes.

Liu Qiang unleashed his next spell and I cut it down. “You’re making this too easy for me, pisspot,” I shouted. I placed my peachwood sword between my teeth and waited for him to start chanting another spell.

“Bring me over to her!” Liu Qiang shouted, and my eyes went wide. I wasn’t ready to confront him yet. His monstrous arm frightened me. It had killed Hong Xiaohao, and it seemed to hate me in a deep and ugly manner I couldn’t comprehend.

The giant skeleton brought its hand in close to me and I took the opportunity to climb another rib.

I started to take a grip on my peachwood sword but the three-eyed snake spirit whipped out and bit my wrist with its needle-teeth. The sword slipped from my fingers and fell. Rows of punctures opened on my forearm, bleeding. My peachwood sword landed on the street with a clattering sound.

The snake spirit could have killed me in that moment. Without my peachwood sword I had no way to defend myself, no way to fight back. Liu Qiang’s arm drew itself up to face me and made a sound in its throat like scraping iron. It was laughing at me, and the expression in its three eyes was grotesque.

It was somehow personal. The demonic arm wanted me to break down at my moment of defeat. It wanted to make me beg for my life.

I twisted away from it as fast as I could and jumped off the giant’s rib.

Qinggong, lightness. I started to plummet and threw my weight to the side. There was a balcony. Was it within reach? Kind of. I grabbed at the balcony, scrambling for a grip, but the blood from my wrist made my fingers slick and slippery. I couldn’t grab hold, could do no more than slow my fall a little.

I crashed into an awning and slowed some more. Then I landed rolling on the cobblestone street.

The impact left me stunned. I heard the clink of broken glass and knew my bagua mirror had shattered. One more weapon was lost to me. The combat was stripping me of my defenses, weapon by weapon, wound by wound, and now I couldn’t even gather the wherewithal to do something so simple as get up.

Thirty feet up Liu Qiang stood like an emperor in the bone giant’s hand. He was yelling at me, probably mocking. I didn’t need to hear him to feel shamed. The Kulou-Yuanling smashed another balcony and punched a brick wall, cracking it. I could smell smoke. A streetlamp had been crushed, and its remnants burned slowly. A tangle of wires lay on the street, where a telegraph pole had been knocked down.

I lay stunned on my back and knew I could have stopped this. Should have stopped this. Every bit of destruction mocked my failure louder than anything Liu Qiang could say to me.

An orange blur streaked down from a rooftop to the Kulou-Yuanling’s hand. The cat spirit tore at Liu Qiang’s face. The soulstealer screamed. Mao’er gave a caterwauling cry and slashed Liu Qiang again. “Knifed me!” the two-tailed cat screeched. “Threw a knife in my neck!”

Liu Qiang cried out in pain and surprise, while his spirit arm coiled back to attack the cat spirit. Mao’er clung to Liu Qiang’s head with all his claws and bit the man’s face.

The snake spirit dug its needle-teeth into Mao’er’s back, but Mao’er had done his damage. Liu Qiang staggered backward, and the three of them—soulstealer, cat spirit, and monster arm—toppled together from the bone giant’s hand.

Liu Qiang’s snake arm snapped out, reaching its jaws to catch onto something, anything. It dug sharp teeth against the giant’s bottom rib but it couldn’t find purchase, barely slowing their plummet. The three of them landed hard, across the street from me.

They landed on the boardwalk. I scowled. Could good fortune visit me for once? The wood boards absorbed a good deal of the impact when they fell. When I fell, the cobblestones absorbed nothing.

I needed to push myself up. It took effort, but I managed to force myself up to my hands and knees.

Mao’er was up already. Wobbling on four legs, with spirit blood flowing freely from his wounds, he looked at me. His fur was in hackles, and the blood around his mouth was sticking to his fur. For a moment he glanced at Liu Qiang and the white snake monster that substituted for an arm, as though the cat was appraising his choices—but then the moment passed, and the cat spirit slinked away.

Liu Qiang was struggling to push himself up, but his arm was alert. Its three red eyes studied me, looking for weaknesses to exploit.

I crawled toward my peachwood sword. Blood was trickling from my wounded wrist. I tried to taunt the spirit arm but the words came out between difficult breaths. “Can’t … reach … me … you stupid … snake.”

Liu Qiang had given up on standing for now. He reached into a pocket and withdrew a small yellow paper. I was five feet from my sword and he flicked his wrist, snapping the paper in the air.

It was shaped like a little man, and it flew at me. It came in low and fast, and it bit my neck. “Ow,” I said. The bite stung. The paper man kept flying. It veered in midair to attack me again.

My father had mocked these little monsters. Flimsy, he said.

I grabbed it out of the air and crumpled it in my hand.

But there were already more of them, dozens more. They swooped around me, obscuring my vision. They bit me and it hurt. There were so many of them, biting at me, and the sharp little stabs of pain kept me from thinking clearly. The pain itself wasn’t overwhelming. The bites were aches, nuisances, and they threatened to cost me my focus. But I could hear the sound of destruction. The Kulou-Yuanling finished demolishing a second wall. Broken bricks thudded to the ground.

Along with the thudding, I heard another sound.
Ding-ding-ding. Ding-ding. Ding.

I heard the sound and I knew a way I could stop the Kulou-Yuanling. At least a way to hurt it, slow it down.

I could hit it with a cable car.

The plan gave me determination. Crawling, I fought across the swarm of paper men. They swooped at me, stinging me with their bites. Grabbing my peachwood sword, I struggled to my feet amid the swirling paper figures.

But my father had told me what he’d done. He hadn’t used peachwood to kill the paper men. He had used steel. I placed the sword back at my belt, forced myself to stand up straight in the middle of the swarm, and withdrew my rope dart.

Getting it to start spinning wasn’t simple. At each rotation it struck against little paper men. Each impact slowed it down. But each impact also reduced the number of attackers. After ten or twelve rotations, my rope dart began to pick up speed. It cut through Liu Qiang’s paper men as if they were pollen.

Liu Qiang watched me with a grim look. He’d recovered from the fall and he pushed himself to his feet. His arm hissed and the sound was like a dagger scraping at bone.

I faced them. I could fight Liu Qiang with my rope dart. I could fight his spirit arm with my peachwood sword. But behind them the bone giant had caused one Xie Liang building to collapse, and it started to smash the walls of a second building.

Given time, it would reduce the southwest side of Chinatown to rubble and splinters.

I kept my rope dart spinning and ran toward the cable car line.

28

“Get out,” I said to the men in the cable car. “Now.”

They turned and looked at me for a few moments, and then the whisper caught and spread like flame through dry grass: “That’s the exorcist’s daughter.”

In moments the compartment was empty, save for the gripman. He was a burly white man in his shirtsleeves. Only the strongest of men get to be gripmen. “Oi! Whatcha think yer doin?” he asked in English.

“Look over there,” I said in English, and pointed.

“Wha?” he said. “Wha chew say?”

“Look over there,” I said again, shaping the English words as carefully as I could.

The gripman squinted at me. “Can’t unnerstandja,” he said.

I sighed, extending my arm once more, pointing at the Kulou-Yuanling.

The man’s gaze followed my extended finger out into Chinatown. His face went slack. In the moonlight he saw the monster. Ten feet taller than the tallest of Chinatown’s buildings. The tremendous skeleton gleamed yellow and white under the moon.

“Egad,” he breathed. “Wha?”

“Listen to me and pay attention,” I said in my clearest English. “That thing will destroy Chinatown and then it will destroy the rest of San Francisco. It will kill everyone you love. I can only think of one way to stop it. We need to ram it with this cable car.”

I don’t know how many of my words the gripman understood, but he understood some. He gave me a blank look, and then understanding showed on his face. A moment later, determination overtook his eyes. He bit his lip and nodded, then turned to the cable car’s grip. The grip looked like a huge pair of pliers. His muscles strained as he closed the clamp back onto the moving cable.

With a lurching start, the cable car began to move forward.
Ding
, it went, picking up speed.
Ding-ding. Ding-ding-ding.

I breathed a sigh of relief. This man was going to help me, and he knew what he was doing.

When a gripman wants to stop a cable car, he opens the grip and triggers the brakes. But tonight, there would be no brakes. The cable car moved along the line, heavy as boulders and moving as fast as a man can run. He was going to wait until the line was as close to the monster as it was going to get. Then he would release the cable car without engaging its brakes. If he did it correctly, the cable car would jump the slot and drive into the Kulou-Yuanling. It needed to be done with perfect timing.

Even if it was perfectly timed, it could kill us both. The gripman knew it too, and yet he continued driving toward the monster. His courage, his willingness to risk his life, impressed me. I’d grown used to thinking of these as Chinese qualities.

The cable car picked up speed while we waited in a tense silence. We were a block away, half a block away. We sped toward the monster. I caught sight of Liu Qiang standing on the street. He stared at the cable car, his mouth open in astonishment. He said something. The monster turned toward us. The fires in its empty eyesockets blazed green. The gripman started to pull the grip off the cable. His muscles strained.

The Kulou-Yuanling opened its mouth. Its jaws spread, distending in a way no human face could imitate. And then it gonged.

The voices, the screams and pain and loss of a hundred dead men rose up through its fleshless throat, amplified a thousandfold, and blasted from its mouth.

The sound was devastating. Deafening. The cable car rattled around us. My bones rattled inside me, and again the world flooded with despair. Hate and aggression and loneliness resonated through the bone giant’s clanging voice, so much loneliness, and there was hunger, a madness of hunger. The mad dead giant skeleton’s voice boomed through my brain, emptying me of thought. I wanted to weep. I wanted to bleed, to suffer, to feel something, anything, other than the horror of a hundred dead men filling my mind with their death cries.

The noise pounded inside my head, and I saw the gripman’s face. His hands were tight on the clamp. The muscles in his arms were rigid, but his eyes had gone bloodshot. His face looked somehow even paler. His hair seemed to be standing on end, and his head looked like it was ready to burst apart.

“Now!” I shouted. Over the clamor of the Kulou-Yuanling’s thunderous voices, I could barely hear the sound of my own voice. “Unhitch the cable now!”

There was no sign the gripman heard me. “Now!” I shouted. “Now!” The gripman stared blankly ahead, and his expression was one of exhaustion and misery. Then he pitched forward, with his head between his knees. Clutching his hands over his ears, he began to scream.

The Kulou-Yuanling’s death gong must have lasted seconds at most, but it felt like hours. It shredded my awareness with its agony, until I could no longer think or act.

And then the sound was done.

Somehow I found myself curled up on the floor of the cable car, my hands over my ears, with tears streaming down my face.

And the trolley was still hitched to the cable.

“Aiya,” I said, and pounded a fist against the cable car’s wall in my frustration. I had failed again.

I pulled myself to my feet. My head swam, still ringing with the Kulou-Yuanling’s mad cry of misery.

“Thank you anyway,” I said to the gripman in English, and I hopped down from the cable car to the street.

Chinatown had gone mad. There was a sound like waves on the beach, rising and falling, and I knew it for the panicked screams of men. Men were fleeing in all directions, screaming as they fled. Every few seconds there was a drumbeat, loud and hollow and slow and steady, as the Kulou-Yuanling pounded a gigantic bone fist against the brick walls of the Xie Liang building.