The Girl with Ghost Eyes (30 page)

For a moment its innards were visible, pink and organic, like a living thing, but just for a moment. Then the creature withered like old leaves crumbling into dust, and its pale flesh turned to brown smoke.

The snake-arm-monster was gone, and in its place was some kind of thread. I squinted at it. It wasn’t a thread.

It was a hair.

A single strand of long white hair.

My mind bent out of shape, staring at that strand of long hair. I remembered. I remembered
her
, and all the death she brought. I remembered her long white hair. “How—?” I said out loud, and then a spell hit me.

I moaned and clutched at my thigh. A spirit arrow. Foolish, Li-lin, distracted by memories while a Daoshi of the Fifth Ordination was trying to kill me.

Liu Qiang launched another spirit arrow. I staggered to the side and the arrow flew past. I could hardly use my left leg with the spirit arrow embedded in it. I could hardly think with the pain in my thigh.

“I will kill you, girl,” Liu Qiang said, his voice shaking with rage. “And I will kill your father. And everyone will know that Liu Qiang was the strongest Daoshi of his generation.”

I tried to take a step back but my left leg didn’t cooperate. It stayed inert and I tumbled to the street. I held up my peachwood sword. It was my only remaining defense.

Liu Qiang smiled. It was a hideous thing to see, from behind the gouges and bruises and all the blood caked around his mouth. “I was saving this spell for your father,” he said, “but you’ve earned it.” Shaping magic gestures with the fingers of his remaining hand, he began to chant. The incantation and the shoujue gestures coalesced into a single magic, giving shape to the sorcerer’s will. It hung in the air, a red miasma, and I understood.

I heard his words and understood. He was calling disease into my body. And peachwood offers no defense against disease.

30

I chanted a recitation from the Jade Text of the Primordial One, which only made Liu Qiang’s gory smile grow wider and more hideous. “Quickly, quickly, for it is the Law,” I finished, and a small magic swept out from my fingers and my words. My recitation of the Jade Text wouldn’t be able to stop his spell. He knew it and I knew it. But the counterspell could hold off red miasma for a few minutes.

The disease spell pressed against me and my recitation slowed it down. Liu Qiang’s red miasma would climb into me through my nose and mouth. Then tumors would multiply inside me. In an hour I was going to be infested with a dozen different kinds of cancer. In two hours I would be dead, a corpse resembling no human shape.

And all of that would start to happen once I breathed the contaminated air. So I needed to keep the red miasma out of my lungs as long as possible.

I began my turtle breathing. My counterspell bought me a little time to inhale pure air. I started to slow down my breathing, to sharpen my mind.

I took a long slow turtle breath. Liu Qiang circled me, lurching and strutting. He wanted to watch his enemy’s daughter die.

Two minutes passed and my counterspell broke. The disease spell was all around me, a red and oppressive murk in the air. I had two-and-a-half minutes. I could exhale for two-and-a-half minutes.

And then what? Throw my wooden sword at the soulstealer?
I was nowhere near my rope dart. No one was going to save me.
Mr. Yanqiu was useless in a fight. Jiujiu and the spirit-gulls were
busy distracting the Kulou-Yuanling. My father was unconscious.

No, actually, he wasn’t, I realized. He was sprawled on his back in the street but his lips were moving. What was he doing? Liu Qiang had disrupted his qi. It would take him days to regain enough vital energy to perform any powerful spells.

And then I felt it. A tingle at the soles of my feet. It rose up through me like a shining.

Powerful spells are draining. After four strikes of dian-si-shuei, Father would barely have any qi energy remaining. But not every spell demands an investiture of energy.

The Third Ordination flowed through me like a sacred river. My body and spirit felt renewed. My nerves awoke in a kind of joy, as if all the mornings in the world took place at once, inside me, after a month of darkness.

I yanked the spirit arrow out of my thigh. It hurt, and the pain didn’t matter.

I still had no defense against the disease spell around me. In about a minute I would need to breathe again. But at least I would die with the Third Ordination. It was something to be proud of.

And then waves of power came over me. All around me the world took shape in crystalline geometries, and they were beautiful. I could almost touch the perfected choreography of the stars, guiding our moments, and feel in my hands the pattern of all things shifting, from wood to water to metal to earth to fire, and back again to wood, in the unending transformations of the phases.

I received the Fourth Ordination and I couldn’t believe it.

I watched my father. He began to chant the ritual of Fifth Ordination. When he was finished, I would be strong enough to match Liu Qiang.

Then Liu Qiang kicked my father in the face.

Father’s chanting stopped. Liu Qiang kicked him again. And again. Blood sprayed from my father’s mouth, spattering the soulstealer’s shoes.

Father had ordained me to the Fourth. It wouldn’t be enough to stand against Liu Qiang. And I really didn’t care.

I stood and faced the soulstealer.

My turtle breathing was almost complete. There were moments of air remaining in my lungs. I gave up delaying the inevitable.

I looked at Liu Qiang, the man who cut me. His shoes were wet with my father’s blood. With the dregs of my breath I spoke the Jade Text recitation again.

He was a Daoshi of the Fifth Ordination, and I of the Fourth. But it didn’t matter. Ordination focuses the will, amplifies it. Neither Liu Qiang nor I could draw upon the eighty generations that came before us. There was his will, focused and amplified by the Fifth Ordination, and there was my will, focused and amplified by the Fourth.

I looked at Liu Qiang and my spell snuffed his red miasma.

He gaped. “What?” he said. “How?”

I smiled like a demoness and began walking toward him. Stepping back, he chanted and formed his hand into a shoujue. I snapped his spell with a syllable and a flick of two fingers.

His eyes flashed with terror and he began stumbling away. I locked both my hands together in the Heaven and Earth Net, shifting to the Copper Fence: double-handed seals, like those my father had used, shaped the magic of my willpower and my chanted spells. Liu Qiang held up his hand in the Five Darkness single-hand seal, but my father’s strategy held, and the soulstealer began to scream.

I took another step toward him. It was time to take Liu Qiang down, once and for all. The Fifth Ordination made him more powerful than me, but using double-handed seals made it a more even battle.

But an even battle means that no victory is decisive. And this needed decisiveness.

I placed my left hand on my hip.

With my right hand I fought his magic with my own, single-handed spell to single-handed spell, Fourth Ordination to Fifth. I launched a strike from a Thunder Block hand seal, which he severed with an Immortal Sword gesture, but I was already performing a Mount Tai hand gesture—lifting a weight of spirit equivalent to Mount Tai, and bringing it down to crush him. He held up Immortal Sword again in response. Our magic clashed like armies. His spell was stronger, but I gritted my teeth and didn’t release my Mount Tai gesture. Our eyes met there, on the street. He looked bewildered. We both knew his spell should be strong enough to slice through mine.

In one rapid motion I released Mount Tai and slashed out with my own Immortal Sword, while his gesture was still fighting against a weight of spirit that was no longer there. He cried out, and it was the frightened little sound of a frightened little man. He turned his sword fingers against me.

I smiled. He was fighting from strength. I was not. I had been fighting from weakness for fifteen years. I was used to fighting opponents who were much stronger than me. Sometimes I could even beat them. And Liu Qiang wasn’t even that much stronger than me anymore.

He turned his sword fingers to strike at me, expecting to hit my own Immortal Sword gesture and crush it with pure power. But I released my sword fingers and dropped to the ground, letting his spell swing past over me. Then I brought the spiritual weight of Mount Tai down upon him once more. It hit him like an avalanche.

Liu Qiang fell to the ground, and dragged himself back to his feet. I advanced toward the soulstealer, one hand still on my hip, and I was smiling.

“You can’t do this!” he cried, backing away. “You’re only of the Fourth Ordination. You can’t do this. You can’t beat me. I heard him. He didn’t ordain you past the Fourth!”

“You always were a weakling, Liu Qiang,” I said, advancing
on him.

He cringed at my approach. “Don’t kill me,” he said, raising his arm to protect his face. “Please don’t kill me.”

I looked at the soulstealer. I wanted this man dead. I wanted to strike him down and leave his corpse to rot on the street, unburied and forgotten. Just looking at his face brought a hundred years of anger into me, and I remembered how it had felt in Bok Choy’s gambling hall, when I lost control of my anger. It took a room filled with gangsters to stop me from killing a man then.

I looked in the face of the little man. He had tricked me, pushed back my clothing and cut my stomach, cost my father an eye, and killed Hong Xiaohao. He had trapped me inside a spirit that convinced me my husband was still alive. He had unleashed devastation upon Chinatown. There was nothing I would rather do than kill him. And there was no one who could stop me.

But I remembered Shuai Hu, the Buddhist monk with a tiger’s shadow. I made a promise to the monk, but did it really matter? Shuai Hu was a monster. He had no place in the social order. I was under no obligation to respect a promise that had been made to a monster.

But Shuai Hu treated me with respect.

I reached out and and took Liu Qiang’s remaining thumb in my hand.

“No!” he shouted. “Don’t! Please don’t. I need it. I need a thumb!”

“If I break your thumb, you’ll be helpless, Liu Qiang,” I said. “Imagine being a man with one arm, and your only thumb broken. Someone like that would barely be able to feed himself.”

Liu Qiang fell to his knees. “Daonu Xian!” he begged. “Please don’t break my thumb, please, Daonu Xian!”

I looked over at the bone giant. It was demolishing another Xie Liang building. Three or four men were dead.

“How do I stop the Kulou-Yuanling?” I asked.

“I don’t know!” he cried.

“What do you mean?”

The coward whined and said, “It’s never going to stop destroying. That’s what it does.”

I twisted his thumb and made the soulstealer wince. “You commanded it before. I heard you giving it commands.”

“Yes, but I commanded it to kill or shout or destroy. There’s no command that will make it stop,” he said. “It will never stop.”

I released his finger with a sigh. I came so close. I defeated Liu Qiang, killed his spirit arm, and beat Tom Wong and his hatchetmen. And still there was no way to fight the Kulou-Yuanling. Over the skyline of wood and brick I saw the monster’s skull shining in the moonlight, and I could see the qi circulating along its meridians.

I turned to Liu Qiang. “I’ll let you keep your thumb,” I said, “if you teach me something.”

31

This is how I always imagined a higher Ordination: I thought my hands would crackle with power. I thought my body’s energies would be rooted in the earth and branch up to the Seven Stars. I thought the sacred words would touch my lips reverently as I spoke them. I thought peachwood would feel like an extension of my skin. I thought ghosts would surrender at the sight of me.

I didn’t think the Fourth Ordination would turn me into an idiot.

And yet there I was, on the roof of one of the tallest buildings in Chinatown, getting ready to jump.

I took a running start and leaped into the air.

In mid-leap I brought my peachwood sword down at an angle against the Kulou-Yuanling’s collarbone, then scrambled for a handhold with my left hand. I only fell a few feet before I found a grip.

The bone giant turned the green fires of its eyes to look at me where I dangled. It hadn’t realized yet that one of its meridians had been severed. I needed to act before it noticed.

I swung and spun, striking at the Kulou-Yuanling’s Sun and Moon point with my peachwood sword. It was a clean cut. The channel of meridian energy sundered under the strike, giving off a stream of red and yellow sparks.

The Kulou-Yuanling felt it now.

Two out of five.

Learning dian-si-shuei takes years of training, patience, and practice. One has to memorize the six hundred forty-nine position points along the body’s meridians and know how they work. The complex geometry of the energy body has to become as familiar as adding up pennies and nickels. One needs a precision far beyond the surgical to follow the pattern of strikes, planting each in its exact location without being able to see the flows of energy.

That was where this was different.

I could see the pattern of the Kulou-Yuanling’s energy. Qi rose and fell around its bone frame, parallel streams of yin qi and yang qi, moving in opposite directions. The latticework of the monster’s energy body was exposed to me, and exaggerated to fifty feet high. Little precision was required.

I jumped up and lunged at its Central Treasury point, where the energy from the back cascades into the energy moving along the front. It broke apart under the tip of my sword. The blue-green flames that roared behind the Kulou-Yuanling’s eye sockets flickered and grew a little dimmer.

The Kulou-Yuanling opened its mouth and gonged.

“Gong,” I echoed with a smile. With so much of its qi severed, the Kulou-Yuanling’s voice was not as loud as a churchbell. “Gong,” I said again, and clambered sidewise across its ribs.

It lifted a hand to pull me off its chest but I clung long enough to drive my sword against its Tranquil Sea point. A geyser of sparks shot out from the severed yin meridian. It was the fourth strike.