Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  “How do you know?” asked Alec, folding his arms, his voice breaking into Norah’s troubled attempts to recollect why she knew about the iron tambourine and the fact that the Rat-God’s priests wore antlers on their hats, why she knew that the sacrifice was done under the full moon in the season of dust. “Who are you?”

  “In China,” said Shang Ko, “I was called Liang Hao, the Shining Crane. I learned the arts of wizardry in the mountains of the Bayan Har Shan in the west. Afterward I traveled from the jungles of Annam to the valley of the Huang Ho to the Great Wall in the north, and beyond that into the deserts and to the great mountains of Tibet. When I was a young man, I marched with the armies of the rebels against the Manchus until it became clear to me that our leader was mad and most of the men who ruled through him more corrupt than the rulers he fought. After that I traveled only to learn.”

  He frowned, his eyes changing their focus for a moment. Norah wondered what it was in that sketch of a life that he remembered and could not or would not speak of, as she would not speak of that letter from Jim’s parents, of the years spent emptying Mrs. Pendergast’s slops, or of the last eighteen months of her brother’s life.

  “In time the princes and warlords who controlled the empress put a price on my head because I would not undertake magic for her against her enemies,” he went on after a long moment’s thought. “For that reason I had to flee. I tried to return to the mountains where I was raised, but this turned out to be not possible. The only thing that I could do was to flee across the sea to this country. Now with the fighting that is going on in my country, with the warlords and princes slaying all those they think may be a threat to their power, I do not know whether it would be possible for me to go back.”

  “So you’re a wizard?” said Alec.

  The old man’s gaze shifted from the shadowed expression of ancient memories, ancient hurts, to a bright sharpness, not fooled in the slightest by the careful neutrality of Alec’s voice. “I am, as you say, a wizard, a scholar of the Way. This is how I knew what the necklace of Da Shu Ken looked like. In the far north, beyond the Great Wall, there was a monastery which had a drawing of it, for such things no longer existed in China itself. In that same monastery I learned its history, how the emperors of the family of Nurhachu learned the secret of this forgotten cult and the uses to which they put it. There used to be many of these little animal gods, who could be summoned in their proper times by means of certain rites and certain gems. Most of those rites have been forgotten over the years, and those minor gods, those demons, sleep.

  “Had it been possible, I would have accompanied Miss Christine here from the first. As I said, the Rat-God is strong in desert country, being a demon of earth. I did not know then that the Rat-God had already manifested itself on the night of the moon’s last quarter. Da Shu Ken draws strength from the light of the moon. I thought that as the moon was waning and would reach its nadir last night, she would be safe. I placed marks of protection upon her luggage, as I had placed them upon her house, and wrought spells of aversion all about the household. These, I hoped, would keep him at bay until I could find a way to turn him aside for good. I searched the city for sign of him and found none. Then, too, I thought that her guardian dogs would be sufficient to protect her.”

  He smiled down at Buttercreme, like a pale muff on the floor at his feet, and at the two males, sitting like grave miniature lions on either side of Christine’s chair. “And so it seems they were.”

  “The dogs know about the Rat-God?” asked Norah, startled.

  “Of course.” Shang smiled again. “What do you think such dogs are? What do you think the fu-dogs are that are portrayed outside of temple doors?”

  “Well, I suppose,” Christine agreed doubtfully. “Though it would take an awful lot of them to bring down... how big is the Rat-God, anyway?”

  Shang shook his head. “He is a man; I have told you,” he said. “In ancient times he entered into the body of a butcher-priest. Sometimes, they said, he took on the form of a ghost tiger or a demon; they said also he could enter inanimate things after the sacrifice of the girl had made him strong. But as for the fu-dogs, the guardian dogs...”

  He rubbed his crippled hands, for the brick building guarded cold within it that even the afternoon sun could not warm.

  “The emperor’s palace is more than his dwelling place, you understand. It is the center of the land of China, which is in its turn the center of the world. It is—as it must be—the image in little of all the universe, even as a man’s body repeats all the world in its pattern of veins and nerves. The moats, the waterways, the gates and pavilions and walls of the Forbidden City, all these are laid out in a harmony which resonates with the universe. It must be so, for the ceremonies the emperor performs reach out over all the lands. He must be centered in harmony to radiate harmony. A wheel whose hub is skewed cannot travel straight.

  “For this reason no evil must be allowed to enter any palace of the emperor, lest it be magnified by the power concentrated there as light is magnified by a bowl of water. But in every place where power is exercised, as you well know, evil things are done. And as little evils accumulate in old houses, so the evils done in the Forbidden City over six centuries leave a residue—or, indeed, in any place where the emperor dwelled and his ministers and eunuchs and sons and concubines fought for power. Not precisely ghosts, but spirits without form, malevolent, like moving dust. And they in their turn could affect the emperor, his family, and through them, all the Middle Kingdom.”

  He reached down again to touch Buttercreme’s head. She looked up quickly and dabbed his fingers with her protruding pink tongue.

  “Thus it was that guardian dogs were bred whose task it was to hunt down these evils and kill them, as they hunted and killed mice and roaches and other small vermin. Centuries before the Forbidden City itself was built in Peking, when the Son of Heaven dwelled elsewhere, the greatest of the war dogs were selected and bred for loyalty, courage, and wisdom—and bred also for smallness of size, for the part of those evils which exists in this world is in most cases very small. These children—” He nodded toward Chang Ming and Black Jasmine and the little pale puffball at his feet. “—are their descendants, these tiny warriors, these demon catchers. Did you not know it, Miss Norah, the night you slept in the evil house in the hills, while Miss Christine performed in the courtyard and these children moused for devils in the darkness?”

  Norah’s breath caught as she recalled the eyes of the Pekes flashing in the reflections of the courtyard kliegs, the scurrying sensation all through the house, and the ugly dreams that never broke the surface of her memory.

  “These children heard the coming of the Rat-God in the first storm of winter. Their barking chased it from your house. But it left its mark there, as you know.”

  “Yes,” said Norah softly. “Was that what you came looking for?”

  “In part,” he said. “In truth, seeing the mark, I feared what I would find until I saw you on the porch, you who had been with her at the theater, with her three enchanted guardians. But being driven off, Da Shu Ken went elsewhere that night. He sought another who had worn the Moon of Rats, one whom he could attack safely, in solitude and in darkness. After I left you at the train station, Miss Norah, I went to the house where the blood was, the house you and Miss Christine visited when I watched you through the fire. I saw Da Shu Ken’s mark there where the young man was killed, the young man who wore the necklace in counterfeit of Miss Christine. The young man who counterfeited a woman in more ways than one.”

  Alec swore, surprised.

  “Like Miss Christine, he was pledged by the wearing of the necklace. And he was taken as the Rat-God will seek to take her.”

  “Even though he’d worn the necklace—when? Last summer?” Norah looked to Christine, then back to Alec.

  “They were doing retakes up through October, when Chris was on her way back from Europe,” said Alec. “But anybody who reads the entertainment section
of the Times or the Examiner would know that.”

  “I see that you think me mad,” said Shang Ko. “After watching the women in the white robes dancing in the road to appease spirits who do not exist and telling you tales of things they could not possibly know, I do not blame you for doing so. Indeed, I wish that I were mad, for if I were mad, the Rat-God would not exist.

  “But I am not mad,” he whispered. “The Rat-God does exist. And as the year declines to its nadir and the moon waxes to its full, believe me, Miss Christine, it will kill again.”

  “A Rat-God?” Mikos Hraldy hooted with derision. “Your Madame King Tut’s tale of reincarnate fiancé was better than that! A murderous spirit to whom our Christine is to be sacrifice?”

  “I dunno, Norah, sounds like something you should write up, maybe.” Doc grinned. “Unless Edgar Rice Burroughs got to it first.”

  “But Frank did tell me my necklace was looted from the Forbidden City.” Christine looked protestingly from face to face around the table in Frenchy’s and took a long drag from her cigarette. Reaction was setting in. Most of her blood-ruby lipstick had worn off, making her dark-painted eyes seem bruised and tired, and even under the stagy greasepaint, lines of weariness were evident around her mouth. She’d put on her yellow kimono over the silver armor and looked very young and shaky.

  “Ah, my sister had a ring that used to belong to the Empress Josephine of France.” Lucky grinned, refilling the coffee cup that sat on the table before him. He paused, the blue and white enameled pot in hand. “The assistant casting director at Vitagraph gave it to her when she was trying to get a contract there.”

  “Thus proving conclusively,” Worthington-Pontchart put in wisely, “the existence of Woolworth’s in Napoleonic France.”

  Christine sniffed.

  “Chris, I’ve seen that necklace,” Fallon added kindly. “Hong Kong, early Victorian at the most. Sure it’s old, and probably pretty valuable if those opals are as real as they look. But an ancient Manchu sacrificial necklace?”

  “And when did you go to school to be an expert on ancient Chinese jewelry?” she retorted, more because Fallon had made unwanted passes at her than because she questioned his judgment. “There, Jazz thinks you’re wrong, too, don’t you, Jazz?” On the bench beside her the little dog turned his single eye malevolently on the man—still clothed in his bronzed leather armor with a huge Star of David embossed on its breast—and emitted a deep growl.

  Fallon muttered something about “nasty little brutes” and retreated to the end of the table. From the street outside the stir and noise of the extras drifted dimly into the long room. Hraldy sighed and rubbed a hand over his face.

  Norah could only sympathize. Whatever concern the Hungarian might feel for his star in the aftermath of a murderous attack, he still had a film to make, and it was obvious to Norah—who in her short association with Colossus Studios had learned a great deal about the angles of light—that no further filming was going to be done that day. That meant decisions about whether the extras would remain or catch the last train out of San Bernardino, with all the concomitant wheels within wheels: dinner for nearly nine hundred men tonight, breakfast and lunch tomorrow, rental on costumes, scanty supplies of trucked-in water...

  She found to her own horror that she was rewriting scenes in her head, scenes that would imply, rather than show, the presence of large bodies of troops. Christine had nearly been killed, and she, at least, was by no means certain that they had secured the murderer.

  “And anyway, so he’s loopy,” Christine said after a moment, stubbing out her cigarette and taking a long pull at the coffee, though her hands had begun to tremble again. “So what? My first husband’s brother believed their parents’ house was built on an old Indian grave site and ancient medicine men came into his room at night and had powwows under the bed... That is,” she amended hastily, seeing the surprise on the faces of Hraldy, Fallon, Doc, and Worthington-Pontchart, “my mother’s first husband... So Del was sort of my...” She hastily calculated on her fingers. “... step-granduncle or something.”

  Norah refrained from mentioning that according to the official studio biography, Chrysanda Flamande’s mother had been a member of the Grand Turk’s seraglio. Surely, in the face of Christine’s residual Pittsburgh drawl, nobody believed that anyway.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. He never did anybody any harm, except living miles and miles outside New York in a house completely surrounded by some kind of bush that was supposed to keep ghosts away. But he was a really sweet man.”

  She fished in her kimono pockets for another cigarette, but her hands still shook too badly to fit it into the holder. She simply stuck the paper end into her mouth and hunted around for a match. “So why can’t Mr. Shang go on cutting the shrubs and watering the grass? Since Felipe got sick and can’t do it anymore...”

  “Well, since I haven’t seen this guy, I don’t know,” Blake Fallon said slowly. “But about a year ago I had trouble with an old Chinaman who came around my place asking for work as a houseboy. I told him I already had a houseboy, and darned if my boy didn’t come down sick within days, and the old man show up again.”

  He struck a match, keeping a wary eye on Black Jasmine, and leaned across to hold it to Christine’s cigarette, though he kept his hands off her otherwise. The thick, dust-filled light that fell through the saloon’s wide windows rippled on the heavy muscles, burnished the bronze of his armor.

  “I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” he went on. “But this old man was always telling me how this was bad luck or that was bad luck, or if I did this or didn’t do that, some evil spirit would get after me. Finally I got sick of it and paid him off. He refused to leave, saying I needed to be protected and only he could do it; he only left when I said I’d call the cops. Later I found that most of my gold cuff links, cigarette cases, and about two thousand dollars had disappeared at the same time.”

  “That’s horrid.” Christine stubbed out her cigarette and turned her face away from him. “I refuse to believe that of poor old Mr. Shang. I’m a very good judge of character, and that old man wouldn’t hurt a flea. Besides, Buttercreme likes him, and she doesn’t like anybody.” She gathered Black Jasmine to her side. Buttercreme and Chang Ming lay under the bench, growling slightly, Norah noticed, every time Fallon came near or spoke.

  The actor rolled his eyes. “Well, Shang’s a pretty common name in China,” he said after a moment. “Maybe it isn’t the same guy. He claim he was a wizard?”

  Norah and Alec traded a glance over Christine’s head. Very gently Alec said, “Maybe Blake better take a look at Shang.”

  Doc added, “Maybe Chris ought to go through her jewel box when she gets back to town. I don’t want to run the poor guy down or sound like somebody out of a dime novel, but if that explosive had gone off, I don’t think anybody would have been looking to see where this antique necklace was or counting up how many diamond bracelets were there for a long time afterward.”

  “Nonsense,” Norah said. “It would be much easier for him to simply greet us on our return with some story about burglars than to blow Christine up in an ‘accident.’”

  “If the man’s sane,” Fallon said quietly.

  “I think perhaps,” the director said as Norah opened her mouth to snap back, “is best for all, do we simply call police of San Bernardino.”

  Thus it was that Deacon Barnes was sent to San Bernardino to the sheriff’s office. But when the deputies arrived, though the door of the brick assay office was still locked and no evidence was found that any board of floor or roof had been dislodged, no sign was found within of the old man.

  FOURTEEN

  EARTH OVER THUNDER

  Sign of sacrifice.

  On the road there and back again, seven days—

  it is good to travel...

  Good luck lies in returning from a short trip...

  “WHAT PUBLICITY, HUH?” Conrad Fishbein’s round blue eyes flicked avidly from Norah
to Christine, and his plump hands rubbed as if hugging each other with joy. “STAR ESCAPES DEATH! MURDER CULT OF THE EAST! MYSTERIOUS CHINAMAN SOUGHT!”

  “We still don’t know that Mr. Shang was the one who set those charges,” Norah protested, steadying her teacup as the three-ten from San Bernardino jostled over the points. A few spits of rain streaked the window as the dusty little town, nestled up against its hills, dropped behind.

  “My dear Norah,” purred Fishbein, glancing around for the waiter and then opening his small briefcase to produce a bottle of champagne, “I only said the man’s being sought. Besides, the idea of a sinister Chinaman stalking Chrysanda Flamande will make every reporter in town forget that Charlie Sandringham ever existed!” He set the bottle on the table and produced fragile-stemmed glasses, each engraved with the seated Egyptian figure that was Colossus Studios’ emblem, filled two, and handed one to Christine. “To She-Devil of Babylon.”

  “I refuse to let you say Mr. Shang had anything to do with it,” said Christine. “You can go on about how I worked yesterday surrounded by studio bodyguards, or how I received warnings and worked anyway, or anything you like, but don’t get everybody all stirred up against poor Mr. Shang.”

  As she took the champagne glass, there was a glint in her dark eyes that showed she meant it. Fishy looked crestfallen. Norah didn’t see why. The fat publicist had already sent the Times, the Mirror, the Daily News, the Herald, and the Examiner pictures of Christine mounted in the speeding chariot, with at least two doughty cowboys skylined on the rocks with rifles in hand. Since Colossus Pictures boasted neither a special stills man nor more than one cameraman per picture, Alec had taken the shots—the cameraman whose back was visible in the picture was actually Doc LaRousse—though of course when the fall had been filmed, the cowboys had been out of sight. But they had been there. LaRousse, who’d grown up in the desert, and Smoky Hill Dan had scoured the area for Mr. Shang before shooting had commenced and had patrolled several times during the day, though both agreed that such measures would be little use against someone who knew rough country.