The Pirate Empress

by Deborah Cannon

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  The sails of the pirate consortium billowed under the deft hands of the sailors, and soon, eighteen hundred pirate junks, in single file, sailed up the Grand Canal toward Beijing. A mushroom cloud, black as ink, ballooned in the direction of the Forbidden City. Li dropped anchor and ordered all hands to arm themselves with dagger, sword, halberd and musket, any weapon they could find, and gird themselves for war. They rowed to shore en masse, weapons flashing like a school of silvery dace.

  In horror, Li saw that the Imperial armies were near defeat. The strange warriors in ancient steppe rider raiment hammered the Ming forces to the western flank of the city wall. One brave commander fought two-handed with sabre and dagger when his crossbow finally failed. Li raised her halberd and charged into the battle on foot to spear a Xiongnu bowman who had his arrow aimed at the fearless swordsman.

  “Sister,” Zhu said, removing his sabre from a warrior he had just stabbed, and watching the bowman fall. “You saved my life.”

  “No time for that,” Li argued, though pleased with his manner of address. Quan had informed her that He Zhu, the warrior monk, was her brother.

  Li fought hand to hand with another steppe rider. She laid him out with one swift stroke and moved on to the next. A female warrior with purple ribbons in her braids stepped into her path. As Li was about to end the life of an attacking bowman, they clashed blades, and Zhu suddenly leaped between them. “Alai!” he said. “That is Li.”

  Alai paused for a split second. Li did also, though there was no time for dalliance or niceties. So this was Zhu’s true love, a bowmaid of the steppe.

  An arrow whistled by and struck Alai in the leg. Despite violent protests, Zhu hefted the woman into his arms and into the safety of the nooked wall, while Li fended off the attacker. “No!” Alai shouted. “Don’t kill my father.”

  In that instant of distraction, Li lost her focus and a dart found its way into her shoulder. She rose in spite of the stabbing pain, seized the bow from a corpse splayed on the ground and let fly an arrow into the fray, missing her assailant. Li protested when Zhu returned for her, and dragged her into the shelter of a nook in the wall to remove the dart. He insisted on tearing his shirt and bandaging her wound. “How is Alai?” she asked.

  “See for yourself.” He turned to look past her.

  One of the medics had bandaged Alai’s leg and she was back in the fray, slinging projectiles at her own people.

  “She would kill her own for your sake, Zhu?” Li asked.

  “She kills for the sake of the Taijitu,” he answered. “We are both victims of the broken Emblem of Balance. She knows as well as I do, that her people don’t belong here. And neither does she.”

  “Nothing makes sense anymore, does it, Zhu? We are all victims.”

  “No. It does not.” He tied the final knot to her dressing. “How does that feel? Can you fight?”

  Li stretched the injured arm to collect some arrows that had bounced off the wall and landed nearby, and placed them in a quiver Zhu passed to her. The pain was nothing compared to what she had suffered at the hands of her Manchurian husband. “How will you bear to part with her?” she asked.

  “Now is not the time. We are in the midst of battle.”

  “But if she should die?”

  Zhu stared glass-eyed at the dust and trampling hooves, the falling bodies and streams of blood. “Her people lived a thousand years ago, in the time of First Emperor’s armies. She is already dead.”

  The pain on her brother’s face broke Li’s heart. “Then you’ll let her go? She won’t allow you to kill her family. She won’t kill them herself. She would not allow me to fling my blade into her father’s heart.”

  “Don’t ask me these things, Li. I have no answer.”

  The battle scream of the Manchus jolted Li out of her thoughts, and Zhu looked to where she stared, to where Liao Dong charged on his war steed into the churning dust. “White Bone Spirits,” Li whispered, shuddering. And those snakelike demons must be the Ba She that Master Yun had warned against. The former were shapeshifters. They must beware of their abilities; they could show up as one of them. They had mimicked her pirate sister and she had no doubt they could mimic almost anyone of their choosing.

  Li racked her brains to find a solution. All creatures had a weakness. When the White Bone Spirit, Bai Gu Jing, chased her off the Pirate King’s junk, it had turned into a two-headed shark. The only thing she could suggest was that they were not immune to blade or arrow. They were made of flesh and blood. And so were the snake demons. They must kill them. The tens of thousands of pirates that Li had brought with her were pushing the Xiongnu back from the city walls, opening a passage for the demons. But there was one other thing she recalled. She had seen the shapeshifting Bai Gu Jing become many things. In human female form it was a beautiful woman, but in male form it was an ugly toadlike man, with a broad muscular body covered in lumpy warts and slug green skin. “I don’t think it can mimic an allied warrior,” she said.

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  The Outer Circle was broken and scattered to the four winds. The Inner Circle was weakened, with many fewer troops. Master Yun drew the Scimitar from his robes, its bronze blade gleaming with an orange hue. Why didn’t the blade change him? He examined his feet and the hem of his robes and saw they remained the same. He had not become a Qin soldier.

  “Its magic wanes,” a voice said.

  Master Yun turned to see Yongfang standing beside him. “Why aren’t you leading your rebels to trap First Emperor’s ghost armies in the wall?”

  “At the moment they are busy with battle. I will return. But it occurred to me that the blade would be little use to you without its power.” Yongfang bowed his ghostly head. “It will hew off the nine tails of the Fox Queen if that is your intent, but it won’t transform you, now that the Nights Guard Army is freed.”

  “I was hoping to deceive the guardians of the Inner Circle,” Master Yun said. “If they thought I was one of First Emperor’s warriors they might provide access to their queen.”

  “Only I can perform such a ruse, if the Fox Queen isn’t on to me yet.”

  “Then you can take the Scimitar and destroy the queen yourself!”

  Yongfang shook his head. “Only someone of Imperial blood can bring success.”

  Master Yun sighed. “Wu is only a boy. He cannot wield such a heavy blade.”

  “Then you must form the Crosshairs first.”

  The device would hold the four winds at a standstill, freezing time, allowing Master Yun to walk between the soldiers forming the Fox Queen’s protective Circle. Then and only then could he slice off her tails. He stared across the plain from atop the burial mound and felt a jerk at his heart. “Yongfang, look yonder in the direction of the capital.” The sky appeared bruised by a plume of smoke as high as the ice-capped mountain of Feng Du. “I fear the battle for the Forbidden City has failed.”

  “Dust, Master Yun,” the ghost warrior said. “Not fire. The city is not burning.”

  “But such dust! What beings are these that create dust visible for thousands of miles?”

  “Demons and giants,” Yongfang answered.

  “Come then. If that is the case, we must try to reach their queen before they decide to return to her.”

  Master Yun ordered eight cannons to be mounted around the Circle, each targeting a specific regiment of the formation. But he lacked the soldiers to man them. Most of the troops had been deployed to lure away the outer legions. Dahlia would not break the Inner Circle. Those troops would not be released for attack, for their sole purpose was to contain the Power of Nine. Neither could the configuration be broken from an external strike. As soon as each two-man team approached to load and fire the cannons, Dahlia’s sharpshooters laid them out. The demons did not spook as he had hoped, and now that the disguise of a Qin warrior was out of the question, he must think of an alternative way in. An aerial assault perhaps? That meant taking Fucanlong from the side of his young charges, lea
ving Wu and Peng unguarded.

  “I see what direction your thoughts lead,” Yongfang said. “But you need not worry. The phoenix will protect the children. I, on the other hand, am required to create a diversion. We shall continue to draw their attention with the cannons.”

  Master Yun nodded. He beckoned to the blue dragon and explained his plan.

  “You wish me to drop you into the midst of the Fox Queen? That is a bad plan, Master Yun. The inner ring of soldiers will pivot to protect her. And those that are slain will rotate to the next in line. You’ll be alone; you won’t stand a chance. And I cannot follow you into the Circle. If I do, my body will shrink to the size of a kitten,” Fucanlong said.

  “Then what would you suggest? I can’t break through that ironclad demon barrier armed with a single bronze blade.”

  “Ah, if only I could breathe fire.” The dragon sighed. “I would incinerate all of them. But alas I cannot. Such is her power.”

  “Indeed, and so it is up to me. You saved me from the hellfires of Feng Du, and from the endless labyrinth of First Emperor’s tomb. I am counting on you to save me from the Fox Queen’s wrath, too—should my efforts fail.”

  “All right, Master Yun. So be it. Even if I have to pick your half-eaten body from her teeth, I will find a way to save you.”

  “Let us hope it doesn’t come to that,” Master Yun said.

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  The White Bone Spirits transformed into sword-wielding toadlike men. They ran on foot and clashed with Liao Dong’s riders, unhorsing many. In hand to hand combat, they were fierce, but when Zi Shicheng’s rebels joined the assault, they fell back only to transform into lions with fearsome teeth. The leader of the Manchus and the leader of the former Chinese rebels had spent all of their adult lives in the northern frontier fighting fiercer enemies than lions. Hunger, cold and constant battle against desperate, armed warriors, inclement weather and ferocious wolves had seasoned them to killing. Their arrows and blades sliced through the feline flesh as easily as a fish knife pierced a steamed carp.

  The triumphant hooting of the allies was audible from the city walls to the Black Mountains. But when Li looked up from their victory dance, she sighted her own pirates engaged in a battle with monsters the likes of which she had never seen before. The Ba She stood now within range, hideous, frightful creatures, shaped like enormous snakes that slithered across the ground with the speed of a fox. Legend told of how their gaping jaws stretched to swallow whole elephants. Alas, the battle was one-sided. The pirates fled like swallows chased by mischievous dogs. How were they to fight these devils of myth? Flesh and blood, she reminded herself. They are creatures of flesh and blood. They can be killed.

  “Mo Kuan-fu!” she shouted, and winced as she witnessed a snake-beast gulp down a man and horse whole.

  He turned, rushed to her side. “Call me Ching,” he said. “I don’t feel like a pirate king anymore.”

  “Captain Ching,” she said. “You will always be captain to me. Help me. I need your thoughts on how to fight these creatures. You have intimate experience with the beasts of myth. How did you control the White Bone Spirit and how would you suggest we fight the Ba She?”

  “I fed her,” he said.

  “With human flesh?”

  He scowled, and then frowned. “I had no choice.”

  “There is always a choice. I will not bait them that way.”

  “Then turn them on each other,” he suggested.

  Li smiled grimly. “That is an excellent idea. They aren’t human. They do not suffer from human conscience or morality. They will not flinch at the idea of eating each other.”

  “In times of desperation,” Ching said, “neither do men. Keep them occupied and unable to feed on the corpses. Burn all the bodies including those of the slain beasts. By morning, their hunger will consume them.”

  They had nothing to lose except their own lives. The fresh troops consisting of bloodthirsty pirates were enough to hold the monsters back. With every yard of ground they gained, another casualty fell, but it was enough for He Zhu’s men to begin the burning.

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  Altan’s warriors slung arrows into the frontline of the assembled armies, taking down a bevy of demons. Even as they battled the mounted Tao Tie to the west, flocks of seven-headed, one-eyed Jian with their Kui riders sent a hail of arrows from the sky. The Tao Tie gargoyles were ugly and clumsy. And they would have been easy to obliterate had it not been for the aerial attack by the Kui mutants with their front to back arms, mounted on the evil birds that were their eyes. Altan’s purpose was to hold back Dahlia’s living troops so that Quan could lead First Emperor’s ghost soldiers, the Hell Master’s Yaoquai, and the army of hopping corpses to their prison in the Dragon Wall. He had his hundred pound C-bows, but his secret weapon was much smaller and lighter.

  Altan raised his gloved fist and eight thousand Mongol hawk masters followed suit. The swift and fierce predators of the skies launched their assault by targeting the Jians’ single eye. The hawks, tiny in comparison to the seven-headed birds of myth, showed no mercy. At their attack, bloody fluid drooled from the giant eye sockets, rendering the Jian blind.

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  Quan raced with the wind. How was this plan to work? Master Yun said to lure the dead and undead to the wall. Then what? If I turn to fight, I won’t have even one-tenth the success of Altan’s bowmen because their adversary is of flesh-kind and mine is not. There was only one way to find out. Quan checked the skies again and saw nothing to lift his spirits. He prodded his horse and rallied his men to the foothills where the wall began—and then as one, they turned to face the enemy.

  But Quan hadn’t bargained on the fact that Yaoquai could fly. The demons with the heads of bulls and serpents and the bodies of men charged at him from the air, dive-bombing his soldiers and setting them off balance. On the ground they were assailed by the fleet-footed Night Guards Army, and to their eastern flank, the hopping corpses tumbled along, slower than the other armies but no less menacing. Even could Quan’s troops annihilate the Hell Master’s demons and First Emperor’s ghost army, the hopping corpses were persistent and deadly, like an ominous flow of red-hot lava, slow and ponderous, but unstoppable, wiping out everything in their path. Their thirst for blood was insatiable, and as long as they scented blood, they moved as one, hobbling—drinking from the living, dying and wounded.

  Altan’s Mongols had their hands full below the western range to the south of him. And until the gargoyles and Kui were sent to flight, Quan could look for no help there. If only one of these detachments was cut off from its allies or, preferably, wiped off the face of the earth. His blade shot through the nebulous torsos of the ghost warriors. Yaoquai were equally difficult targets because they never stayed still. His soldiers fought to exhaustion. Already his troops were cut in half. Most lay dead or dying on the ground. Blood flowed forming a newborn lake, and all of it belonged to his army, the grasses on the banks spattered purple.

  There must be some vulnerability he could exploit. How did one kill a ghost? If only Master Yun were here. He was rumoured to be a Ghost Catcher. How did one acquire such a reputation? What was the weakness of the dead and undead?

  Quan batted away a Hell demon that lunged at him, sending it spinning into the sky. To his left a ghost soldier swiped at him with a sword, and he parried it with his sabre. Now came a hopping corpse, slow but deliberate and hungry, its teeth gnashing. Quan sliced it through the neck and watched the head spill off its shoulders onto the ground, jaw still working. To his horror, the head rolled into the shores of the blood lake, its black tongue lapping the purple waters.

  “Soldiers!” he shouted. “Pull in. To the center of the bloodbath!” At first his men were appalled and confused by the order, but as they saw the hopping corpses being drawn to the purple lake, where dead and dying soldiers lay filling it with their blood, they soon understood. They gathered their small force of less than a thousand men, and formed a solid circle, boots inches deep in g
ore. The hopping corpses arrived in droves. They preferred fresh blood. But when it was denied them from the armed soldiers who protected their throats with their swords, they fell to lapping it from the newly dead.

  Overhead, Yaoquai continued its aerial assault. Quan sent his eyes to the mountain range and saw a sight that nearly burst his heart with joy. A black dragon, long and lean, winged like its blue brother Fucanlong, flew over the mountain peaks, and landed on a fortress parapet by the tips of its clawed feet.

  Another sight just as quickly crushed his hope. On the crenellated wall closest to him, a golden fox grinned. Jasmine swished her white-tipped tail, her red tongue lolling from her mouth. Immediately she transformed into a beautiful black-haired woman, her golden pelt dissolving into porcelain white skin. “So, Brigade General, here we are at the edge of your world. Do you surrender?”

  “Never,” Quan said. “How did you survive that fall? Master Yun told me you fell from the skies off the back of your dragon-horse.”

  “So I did. Your warlock forgets that it is next to impossible to kill me.” She smiled a lazy, tantalizing smile, replete with white teeth and luscious red lips. “Tell me, what kind of death do you want to die? For you will die, Master of the Horses.”

  Quan tipped his head at the black dragon whose shadow fell over them. “I think not.”

  “You think I’m afraid of that oversized lizard?” Her eyes sought Yaoquai that had retreated at the dragon’s arrival and the ghost warriors who studied it uneasily. Only the hopping corpses were oblivious of its presence and continued to feed from the blood lake. “My armies only pause in battle because I willed it—so that we may have this last parley before I send you to your death. What do you say? If you surrender now, no more of your men need die.”

  Quan glanced around at the few men who maintained the solid ring in the pool of corpses. He had not sacrificed so many only to surrender to a fox.

  “Do your best,” he said, flashing his blade. “I will stand fighting or I will die.”

  Jasmine snarled, turned into the golden fox and lunged at his throat. He was ready for her with his sabre but she was too fast, and bounced off his chest to attack him from behind. The ghost warriors reanimated, as did Yaoquai, and flew at Quan’s meagre numbers with full force, while the hopping corpses gnawed at their heels. “Fly,” Quan shouted to his soldiers, shaking the fox off his back. “Take refuge at the wall!”