Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  “Oh, that’s easy,” said Christine. “He wanted to have them where he could get them whenever he chose.”

  A door opened, and a stout, fair Irish-looking man in the black pajama suit of a Chinese appeared in it, brows raised. “I see you found Liang Hao,” he said to Alec, who grinned and gave him a kind of salute.

  Shang Ko bowed. “Ah Tom,” he greeted the newcomer, who bowed to him in return and said something in Chinese.

  “Ah Tom’s the unofficial mayor of Chinatown,” Alec explained as Shang and Ah Tom conducted them out through a dimly illuminated curio shop. “He’s from Shanghai and does everything from simple doctoring to running interference with the law to getting Chinese jobs as extras... which is probably how Shang ended up at Red Bluff.”

  Ah Tom opened another door and bade them good day as the little party stepped out to find themselves in an unpaved alley off Main Street.

  “So you’re telling us,” Alec said, “that what we need to trap the Rat-God is a painting?”

  “A painting properly done, yes.” Shang guided them down twisting alleys, past Mexican groceries and jewelry shops and laundries from which steam breathed into the cooling air. “If an ink is prepared using silver and certain salts and powdered tortoiseshell over which the proper words have been spoken...if power can be raised and imbued into the silk and the ink and the lines of the drawing itself...Yes, I believe that such a painting would trap and hold the Rat-God.”

  “So does this Ku K’ai-Chih work here in Chinatown?” asked Christine.

  Shang Ko’s dark gaze lightened for just one moment, and he tucked his smile away behind his long mustache. “Alas, Ku K’ai-Chih has been dead for some years,” he replied gravely. About seventeen hundred years, Norah guessed from the little she had studied of Chinese history. “But my grandson Shang Hsu Kwan is an artist, perhaps one of the finest painters I have seen. More, he is a wizard himself whose powers will one day surpass my own.”

  They walked in silence for a time, passing a temple—or what Norah assumed was a temple—whose gaudy ostentation put Christine’s Chinese bedroom to shame and turning down another alley at whose end could be glimpsed a dusty square where a few old trees shaded a decrepit adobe church, the ancient Spanish heart of the city.

  “You understand,” Shang Ko said after a time, “that not only must Da Shu Ken be summoned—with whip and drum and fire, as the old shamans summoned him—into his victim’s presence. He must be driven out of whatever body he takes to answer the summons. That in itself will not be easy, and when—if—that happens, the danger will be very great.”

  Christine stopped before a door surrounded by triangular banners of green and yellow paper and surmounted by a somewhat tattered page bearing the emblems of what looked like bats. She swallowed, wincing at the pain in her throat. “How great?”

  The old man looked down at her from his scarecrow height for a moment, then shook his head. “Very great,” he said softly, and opened the door.

  Shang Hsu Kwan turned out to be a small, round-faced, self-effacing man in his thirties, the owner of an apothecary shop whose whitewashed back room was spotlessly clean and lined floor to ceiling with pine plank shelves. Dried herbs, roots, powders, and what looked like eggshells and bones filled hundreds of glass jars; colorful tins that had once held cocoa now brimmed with crystals, salts, and variously colored earths; covered bowls of terra-cotta and porcelain alternated with the familiar paper cartons available from Chinese restaurants, tied with brightly colored string.

  Finches fluttered brainlessly in a bamboo cage. Charts and diagrams patched the walls between the shelves, some of the human body, some of the stars, one—rather startlingly—of what Norah realized was a map of the Los Angeles basin, marked in neat red lines in some kind of pattern resembling the inexplicable lines on ancient maps. Among them, drawings were tacked with long artists’ pins, clearly Chinese in tradition but heavily influenced by Western training in portraiture, still life, and perspective. There was one of Shang Ko himself, the old man with his long hair and crippled hands rendered unsentimentally in red chalk but with such accuracy that Norah felt she could almost reach into the paper and feel the crepey, silky texture of the skin on his wrists, the coarse weave of his too-large jacket, and the intricate roughness of the carved scales on the dragon that surmounted his staff.

  “It’s beautiful,” Norah said softly when the apothecary, after an extensive dialogue with his grandfather in Chinese, came over to her while Shang Ko disappeared into the main part of the shop.

  “I wanted to do a portrait of Grandfather since first I began to draw,” said Hsu Kwan, folding his arms and regarding the work with quiet pride. “For years it was not possible, since the agents of the empress—and later some of the warlords—were looking for him in every enclave of our people in this country. Perhaps that was just as well,” he added with a shy grin. “In those days I was not very good.”

  Norah considered the portrait for a time, seeing how the artist had captured the look of haunted gulfs of time in the dark eyes, the sense of weight and grief on the bony shoulders, the bitter lines of the mouth. Her eyes went to Christine, who was seated beneath the room’s single window, where a fairyland of tiny orchids grew in clay pots. Black Jasmine had followed Shang Ko into the shop—presumably to make sure he selected the right ingredients—and without the tiny dog to occupy her attention, Christine’s face seemed suddenly thin and desperately tired. Seeing her as if for the first time in weeks, Norah was shocked at how much weight her sister-in-law had lost.

  She turned back to Hsu Kwan. “He told you what we plan to do?”

  The apothecary nodded once.

  “Can it be done?”

  “It has been done in the past, yes. The story of the gods of good fortune is only a story, of course. It would take tremendous power to trap something like the Rat-God, particularly after he has taken one sacrifice—tremendous strength to keep from being overwhelmed and killed.”

  “Does your grandfather have that kind of power?”

  Hsu Kwan sighed and looked away for a moment. Then his eyes returned to the portrait of the old man above them. “My grandfather was at one time the greatest of the mages of China, the last of the line of sorcerers of the Bayan Har Shan. And it has been twenty-five years now since he has done more than cast horoscopes or charm caterpillars away from roses.”

  Alec turned from an inspection of the shelves, shocked. “Why?”

  Hsu Kwan shook his head. “Part of it has to do with his being driven out of China. The imperial princes who controlled the old empress had not only Manchurian shamans and the witches of the steppe around her; they had Chinese wizards as well, some of them very powerful. And the Society of Righteous Fists, with which she became involved, had a magic of their own, a strange magic born not of any single man’s power, but of their collective will, their collective rage, their collective hatred. These the wizards could—could focus, channel, as a fire hose channels water. Shortly before the Boxer uprising the old empress commanded that Grandfather join with her wizards against the fan qui—the foreigners—to destroy them.

  “But she was a Manchu, you understand. To him, she was the foreigner. And the Manchu had killed his friend many years before. When he refused and fled his home in Soochow, the Boxer wizards pursued him and drew up the magic of all their followers to corner him in the hill country of the Huang Shan. Friends betrayed his whereabouts to them and led him into the trap. He was badly hurt not only in his body, as the Rat-God had hurt him, but in his spirit. As far as I know, all the other wizards of China who opposed the Manchus were put to death.”

  “I do not think all.” The faint tick of Shang Ko’s staff sounded on the tile floor. Black Jasmine trotting at his heels, the old man limped back into the room, carrying in one hand a thick screw of paper, a small jar, and a strangely shaped root with a red thread tied around it. His bent fingers were not up to containing all those items, and he held them against his chest with one bent arm.r />
  “I think the Mud Tortoise may have escaped, though like me, she must be deep in hiding. And I have heard rumor of a wizard in Manila who sounds like Han Tse Yan.” He hunched over his grandson’s worktable to let his tools gently slide to its top. “But you see,” he said, straightening once again and turning to face Norah and Hsu Kwan, “twice I opposed those who would use magic to do great evil, and twice I was defeated. My friends were killed or else went over to evil themselves. The magic of my childhood, the magic of the sorcerers of the Bayan Har Shan, is the magic of life, of the energy of the earth and stars. But the magic of death prevailed over it... as if it was not there. Since then...”

  He sank into a wooden chair, leaning his staff against his shoulder with a sigh. “Since then it has been difficult for me to believe there is much that can be done against those powers which care nothing for life.”

  Very softly, Christine said, “But still you came to warn me.”

  Shang Ko turned to her, eyes filled with pain. “I could not keep from warning you, Miss Christine. I saw the advertisement for the film, and you with the Moon of Rats upon your throat, and I could not be silent. I only thought to tell you not to wear it again, to find out if you had worn it after the full moon of the ninth month, and to find out where it might be, that I might take it and hide it so that no woman would ever be put in that danger again.”

  “But when you saw that it was too late,” said Christine, “when you saw me wearing the necklace—you still came out to protect me, when you knew this Da Shu Ken would be showing up. Thank you for that.” She got to her feet and came to his chair, standing before the old man, looking down into his anguished face.

  She took a deep breath, then went on. “If you and your grandson were both to keep guard on me at the house—if you were both to write your magic on the walls—would that really keep me safe?” Her rough, whispery voice deepened, and she squared her shoulders and tossed her head back a little with a kind of defiant challenge. “Because now that I think about it, I’d really rather... rather not be staked out like a goat at a tiger hunt and... and place my trust in a magical picture. Even though you really are one of the best artists I’ve even seen,” she added quickly, turning to Hsu Kwan. “It isn’t that.”

  There was deep silence in the whitewashed room except for the small scratch and jingle of leash hardware as Black Jasmine scratched his ear.

  Far back in Shang Ko’s eyes a small light began to dance, dispelling the weariness and grief.

  “And you, if you forgive me for saying it, are one of the worst, Miss Christine,” he said softly. Reaching up, he took her hand in his. “A beautiful woman and brave as a tigress, but you must find some other means to earn your bread, for truly, truly, you cannot act.”

  She snatched her hand back from his indignantly. “Well, of all the—”

  “Miss Christine,” said the old wizard, his smile flickering beneath the corners of his trailing mustache, “tell me in truth. Were I and my grandson willing to create the trap, willing to summon the Rat-God in all his strength, would you be willing to put yourself in that danger in the hope of his defeat?”

  Christine’s dark eyes filled with tears. “I can’t ask that,” she whispered. Quickly she plucked a small lawn handkerchief from her skirt pocket and, with the adeptness of long practice, touched her eyes dry before a single drop had marred the paint around them. “I shouldn’t have... have gone on about it the way I did earlier. I do try not to be selfish,” she added, casting a quick glance back to Norah, who hid a smile. “When I remember.”

  She looked back to Shang Ko. “And you’re taking all the risk. You were good just to come out and write your little hoodoos all over the house, because you might have run smack into him—the Rat-God, I mean. So if you think you and Hsu Kwan can guard me until after Chinese New Year or whenever the Rat-God goes back to China or wherever it is he goes to...”

  Shang Ko shook his head. “No,” he said. “You are right. It is I who was wrong to think that he could be hidden from or turned aside from his purpose. Do you want to meet him?” he asked. “To destroy him? Would you trust in our strength?”

  Christine took another deep breath, and Norah saw the soft crepe of her skirt vibrate slightly with the trembling of her knees. She breathed, “Yes.”

  After packing a simple carpetbag, Shang Ko guided them back through a tangle of muddy alleys and tiny courtyards to the Tuey Far Low restaurant, where they collected a dozen little paper boxes of leftovers. From there they went to Alameda Street, where Alec had left his car. Climbing the steep hill of Grand Street with Shang sitting in the back of the rickety Ford, past the gray granite Bastille of the Hall of Justice on Temple, and thence up Vermont, they emerged into peaceful neighborhoods of wooden houses that all seemed to have been transported by cyclone from Kansas.

  Upon their arrival once more at Ivarene Street, Shang Ko renewed the signs he had drawn on the doors and windows of Christine’s house, with Chang Ming and Buttercreme scurrying busily around his feet. He marked the stones at the bottom of the hill with signs that he said would give him warning if the police passed by the place, then moved back into the shabby room below the garage as if he had never been gone.

  That night Norah’s dream returned with a crystalline clarity that frightened her upon awakening, for there were several minutes in which she wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t actually been outside.

  As she had the previous night, she shared the lace-and-cupids wonderland of Christine’s bed with the frightened woman whose persona of flapper insouciance could not survive the turning out of the light. In her dream she rose and for a moment looked down at the pale, pointy face in its sea of dark hair, the two bundles of soft fur like muffs of sable and ivory sleeping in the hollow of her side. Norah put on her robe, bent down to gather up the sleeping dogs into her arms, and clucked softly to wake Chang Ming at the bed’s foot. He trotted after her across the room, and Buttercreme sleepily licked her hand as she deposited the three of them in the bathroom and closed the door.

  Dreaming still, she descended the stair to the living room, where Alec was little more than a tangle of rusty curls above his borrowed blanket on the divan, his glasses resting on the lacquered Chinese chest nearby. The gramophone he’d brought up from Venice was a solid square of oak on the table beside the chinoiserie bowl of nuts, and the dreaming Norah remembered listening to Mozart, Ellington, Berlin earlier in the evening.

  She opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. It was colder than it had been the previous night, the grass along the edge of the pavement white and stiff with frost. A day past full, the moon was sinking toward the hills that concealed the Hollywood Bowl in Daisy Dell.

  Jim was definitely waiting for her in the shadows of the eucalyptus at the turn of the drive.

  She drew the robe around her, the cold sharp on her wrists and feet. It had been five years since they’d met. She wondered if he’d notice that she still wore the wedding-ring he’d placed on her finger.

  It was the first thing he noticed, taking her hand in his. His grip was stronger than she remembered, his fingers less smooth and soft. He pressed his lips to the thick band of gold. The shadows beneath the trees were so deep, she could not see his face at all.

  “This is going to sound strange, Norah,” he said softly, “but you have to trust me. Do you trust me?”

  “With my life! Jim...”

  He touched her lips with the side of one curved finger and smiled in the darkness, a glint of teeth. “I know,” he said. “I’ve always known. This is hard for me to say, Norah, and it’ll be harder yet for you to hear, but they’ve lied to you. Mr. Shang and his grandson, they’ve told you backward. It’s Chavaleh who’s been taken by the Rat-God, Chavaleh whose body he’s taken over now, Chavaleh who’s a prisoner in her own flesh.”

  “What?” Norah stared at him, appalled, her eyes trying to pierce the shadows. It was so strange to hear him speaking his sister’s childhood nickname, which she had forb
idden anyone to use from the age of five. Even the smell of him was the same, the smoky wool smell of his uniform, imbued like everything else with the cigarette smoke of trenches and waiting rooms and trains, and beneath that the dim, clean freshness of his flesh.

  “Norah, we have to save her. I can’t do it because I’m dead; it has to be you. If you love her, take a knife from the kitchen... It’s in her blood, Norah. The demon’s in her blood. If you cut her throat, cut it deep so the blood runs out, it won’t be able to stay in her.”

  Norah stepped back in horror. “No...”

  “Norah, it’ll be all right,” insisted Jim’s voice. He reached out to her, his hand white where the moonlight fell. “I’ll stop the bleeding once the Rat-God leaves her. I have that power now, because I’m dead. She won’t die; she’ll be fine.”

  “No!”

  “Norah, it’ll be all right. It won’t be any worse than helping with those operations at London Hospital. We have to do it, Norah. If we save her—if you save her—they’ve told me I can come back.”

  Norah stepped back still farther, straining her eyes to pierce the gloom, trying to see something besides the very faint metallic shine of Jim’s uniform buttons. From the corner of her eye she was peripherally aware of something glowing on the doors of the house, signs written in Chinese that seemed to conjure other images, the shapes of two armed men, like ghosts in strange helmets, axes in their hands.

  “Norah, I can come back,” he pleaded. “I can be with you again. They’ve told me if you do this they’ll let me come back! Norah, please...”

  “NO!”

  She woke with a gasp, sitting up sharply in the dimly lighted room. On the bed beside her Buttercreme and Black Jasmine raised their heads and regarded her with solemn eyes.

  Beside her, Christine slept still.

  Soundlessly, Norah got to her feet, crossed unwillingly to the front window, and drew aside the dragon-brocaded curtains, though part of her shrank in fear that she would see a man’s shape in the shadows of the trees beside the drive.